Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 7th, 2025
"Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era."--Will Durant
Palmer is an American gem. Wide ranging conversation on geopolitics, tech and defense. Building the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCKdPLMmXkE
2. "As incumbents move upmarket, they leave the bottom of the market ripe for disruption. Small funds, disciplined early stage investors, and emerging managers are the ones filling the gap. Because of our fund sizes, fees are tiny—this sector of the market makes money off the carry, not the fee, in perfect alignment with our LPs, which our LPs also love. The best of these disruptive managers are hungrier, more aligned, and structurally motivated to find alpha-rich founders and ideas—exactly what LPs want.
Over time, more and more LPs will realize this, and will add a pocket for “new VC” to their portfolios. These upstart funds will thrive—historically, smaller and emerging funds return way more to their investors. And eventually, this emerging layer of investors will become the true, new venture capital industry.
The megafunds will continue to make money, right up until the opportunity to deploy it profitably in gigantic pre-IPO megarounds disappears."
https://www.fastcompany.com/91413783/andreessen-horowitz-leaked-decks
3. "There’s a corollary here too. The companies that will win aren’t necessarily the ones training the best models. They’re the ones that make it easiest to use AI effectively. That might be through better APIs, better workflow tools, better evaluation frameworks, or better ways to combine multiple models for different tasks.
The future isn’t about picking the winning model. It’s about building systems that can flexibly use whichever model is best for each specific task at any given moment.
So if you’ve been paralyzed trying to decide which model to build on, stop waiting. Pick one that’s good enough for your needs today and start building. When something better comes along—and it will—you’ll be able to switch. The model doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you build with it."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-model-doesnt-matter
4. "What looks like a coincidence is in fact a design.
China’s economic planners have built a system that uses foreign innovators as catalysts — importing technology, competition, and expertise, then converting them into domestic advantage.
The state opens the door just wide enough for learning to occur, then quietly closes it once local players have mastered the game.
The result is a generation of Chinese champions — Baidu, WeChat, Didi, BYD, Alibaba — each forged in the friction of foreign competition.
The catfish were invited in to stir the tank; the cod that survived now rule the sea."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/chinas-secret-strategy-for-beating
5. "How Takaichi Sanae deals with these two issues will determine whether she’ll be a success or failure. The fact that - unlike her two technocrat-led-consensus-first-and-foremost predecessors - she’s been a fighter all her life makes me hopeful she’ll serve for more than just one three-year term. Like in “Shogun”, there’ll be plenty of drama, intrigue and unexpected plot twists: to succeed, Takaichi will have to create both an asset bubble and Yen appreciation."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/takaichi-bubble-banzai
6. Glad to see this conversation. Building hard stuff in San Francisco.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FddjP_zNkyc
7. The Future of war: AI & Autonomy. Worth watching. America is very behind in all these areas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmRRolaIGZA&t=28s
8. AI will be eating the labor market. This is the promise for VC & businesses and peril for society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhyhR4Bzc0I&t=7s
9. David Senra: How Extreme Winners Think and Win. Talk about intense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mesjY6l2T8c
10. "The dollar has long been among America’s most powerful strategic assets. Preserving the dollar’s centrality helps sustain US oversight of global transactions and Washington’s ability to enforce rules against drug cartels, terrorist organizations, and other transnational threats. It is also a key diplomatic tool in the current great power rivalry.
BRICS threatens to chip away at the dollar’s dominance by creating opaque, unregulated channels for trade and finance. Unless Washington acts decisively to defend SWIFT, regulate stablecoins, apply diplomatic pressure, and reinforce the legitimacy of US global financial oversight, BRICS will continue to construct an anti-US financial order while presenting itself as the champion of neutral nonalignment and multipolarity."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/break-the-brics
11. Alot of my concerns as well on America's direction in the long run.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWFJH__wxlY
12. "Latin America is not what we think. It isn’t local, and it isn’t peripheral. It’s the new epicenter of superpower rivalries and global organized crime. Today, drug routes, crypto flows, and geopolitics intersect more directly in Latin America than anywhere else on Earth. When President Trump threatened Hamas over the hostages, they sent an armada to Venezuela. His message wasn’t just meant for Hamas in Gaza — it was aimed squarely at Hamas operations in Latin America.
Hamas’s survival doesn’t depend solely on its presence in the Middle East anymore because it’s gone global. Hamas depends on its cash flows out of Latin America, and so does Syria, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and even Iran’s Quds Force. They all operate from the Tri-Border Area, where Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil meet, as well as in Venezuela. The geopolitics of Latin America are no longer regional — they’re globalizing too, like everything else, with logistics and finance operations run with the same efficiency as those of multinational firms.
Latin America has an abundance of resources — and just as many vulnerabilities. Trump sees it for what it is: a geopolitical RISK meets Monopoly board. Every move is about property — staking territory, tracking the opposition’s bets, seizing assets that matter. But this isn’t just a contest for land or ports. It’s a battle for narratives and neural space — who controls the story, and who controls belief. In the 21st century, the front lines of power run not only through pipelines and ports but through perceptions.
Forget the old clichés of coups and cartels. This is about battleships, bitcoin and bananas - not bullets. At least so far. Latin America is no longer a distant theater. It’s where the world’s next balance of power is being written — in cash flows, code, and cognition. It’s not just a contest for physical land, raw materials, and critical infrastructure but a fight for narrative and cognitive control."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/bananas-battleships-and-bitcoin-how
13. An important discussion on how we got into the mess we are in right now in the West. The failure of NeoLiberalism and the consequences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pmb2VZ0Jg8Q
14. "The self-help aisle promised transformation through commitment. AI promises transformation through experimentation."
https://tomtunguz.com/ai-enables-instant-workflow-adoption/
15. "Investing is very good at enforcing a sensitivity to reality". A philosopher hedge funder. Fascinating convo on the art of investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xkWJq4Qcps&t=3s
16. "The unusually prosperous boomer decades produced more elite aspirants than legacy prestige tracks could absorb and the imbalance has been further exacerbated by globalization and immigration.
The result is a civilizational oversupply of strivers and a bottleneck of prestige. Status is inherently positional, and not everyone can be at the top. Coupled with stagnant living standards, this social scarcity amplifies anxiety and mimetic rivalry across the striver class and creates the cultural phenomenon we see today.
Strivers typically come from home environments that set high expectations for achievement, emphasize hard work, and normalize competition. Mimetic rivalry is the motivational engine of the striver. Most strivers are routed into prestige tracks like finance, tech, law, consulting, and medicine. It has gotten harder over the last generation to strive and prestige tracks have grown crowded, drawing more strivers further out the frontier of risk.
Strivers are overrepresented in the Crypto and AI industries, where much of the outsized opportunity of this decade has emerged. These industries offer the best chance of breaking into the modern landed gentry class: accumulating enough wealth to live entirely off of capital gains."
https://www.scimitar.capital/p/self-reflections-of-a-striver
17. I always learn from Raoul Pal. Lots of global macro, AI & Crypto and investing. Worth listening to. The great reset.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JcuRhCKZdA&t=3785s
18. "While governments are powerful, the people always find ways to retain their sovereignty. In many cultures that experienced endemic inflation over centuries of successive governments or dynasties, cultures created gifting rituals marking major life milestones (birth, marriage, and death) that involve the exchange of hard money. In this way, the people save through cultural rituals. No politician dares subvert these rituals lest they lose their mandate to lead and find themselves headless.
In the modern era, when the power of centralized governments — whether a democracy, socialist republic, communist state, etc. are all powerful because of the advances of thinking machines and the internet, how can we the people preserve our rights to sound money? The gift that Satoshi gave to humanity via their Bitcoin whitepaper is a technological miracle that was launched at a very important time in history.
Bitcoin in the current state of human civilization is the best form of money ever created. Like all money, it has a relative value. Given that Pax Americana quasi-empire rules via the US dollar, we value Bitcoin relative to the dollar. Assuming the technology works, Bitcoin’s price will ebb and flow because of the price and supply of dollars.
The Pax Americana quasi-empire is but a nostalgic dream. What comes next? This is the question with which global leaders wrestle. Change is not good nor bad, but change creates economic winners and losers. Sometimes the losers are politically and economically powerful, which creates issues for ruling parties. In order to shield the negative effects of change from the populace, politicians print money."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/long-live-the-king
19. "It’s only 2025 (not even 2035) and we’re entering a phase where active income is no longer a viable path to making it. Making it means you are personally free from future obligations to outside entities (defined as a boss and anyone who can take away the most valuable asset in the world - Time)
“You can sell a business. You can sell land. You can sell stocks. You can sell assets. You can’t sell your job.” - BowTiedBull Philosophy
If that saying doesn’t stab you in the heart, you’re not paying attention. Likely stuck in the world of NPCs and NGMIs
The next decade you’ll witness a tectonic/earthquake level change in how freedom, power, and survival are distributed.
Life’s winners (You): people who own durable, productive assets.
Life’s losers (NPCs): people who rent out their time, allowing someone else to compound their equity.
This is the new reality. Based on compounding math + policy + technology. Here we’ll walk through what you need to own, why it works and why asymmetry is the only way to operate. Daily life is going to change. The vast majority won’t even start the smallest scalable niche item: WiFi Money/managed-internet biz that makes money while you sleep."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/you-cant-sell-a-job-the-final-decade
20. Lots of juicy discussion on the latest Silicon Valley news. AI is dominating the news, investing and business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1bmrugU_6E
21. Overall, a pretty important discussion for America.
"Manufacturing's Future, The Electric Tech Stack, and Automation"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOv2EqojRkw&t=200s
22. "For entrepreneurs thinking about an exit strategy, remember this: the best exits happen when you first build a great business and the market comes knocking. Once you’ve built something truly great, potential acquirers will notice and opportunities will emerge. Focus on greatness, not on the exit."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/10/11/focus-on-building-a-great-business-not-an-exit/
23. "I was most struck, though, by the similarities with today’s links between industrial capacity and national power. In Beijing and Washington, policymakers look nervously at a “war of the factories.” Xi’s statements about the geopolitical implications of industrial capacity would not have sounded out of place in the 1930s.
The tech transfer and localization requirements imposed on Ford in the 1930s look like those imposed by China on Western firms in recent decades—and those that Washington has tested recently on chip and battery firms to push them to move to the U.S. I read a lot about the ‘end of globalization’ today, but what I see in practice is remarkably similar to what Link sees in the 1930s: a “furious” effort to remake it."
https://chrismillersnewsletter.substack.com/p/the-war-of-the-factories
24. "Most people think small. Most people live small. They don’t care to step outside the ordinary, and that’s why so few ever get the extraordinary. I often use the “walk sign” theory as a reference: most people will follow once someone takes the first step, but they rarely make the first move.
Thinking big takes no more energy than thinking small. In fact, it often takes less. And when you think big, you’re competing against fewer people. The kind of people you want on your side. Few understand this."
https://brittanyhugoboom.substack.com/p/you-need-to-start-approaching-beautiful
25. Japan is treating their defense very seriously. Offensive power is the best defense as they say.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/01/asia/japan-warship-tomahawk-missiles-intl-hnk-ml
26. "According to Liherko, the actual situation on the battlefield looks different from maps that show Russia surging forward. He drew an alternative diagram with several small blobs representing enemy troops. “It’s more dynamic. We stay in our position. They try and go forward,” he explained."
27. Some of the best commentary on Silicon Valley news from some top tier investors around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72htG-AOykI&t=336s
28. Wow this was one of the best interviews on how to scale a growth stage venture firm. Insight Partners, one of the biggest and best investors out of NYC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4zzkuFyI18
29. "You’re essentially trying to build discipline during the least disciplined time of year.
The Alternative? Start in Q4 (October).
Starting your 2026 goals in October 2025 gives you a three-month head start. By the time January arrives, others are just beginning their doomed resolutions, you’ve already stacked habits, built colossal momentum & began rewiring your identity."
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/why-91-of-new-years-resolutions-will
30. AI Chip Wars. Learning some new things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvlE8-MzxyA
31. "That’s why the new export controls don’t target NdPr. They target the aforementioned heavy rare earths - because those are the ones with real geological scarcity. And now that Myanmar’s supply line has proven how fragile it is, the timing starts to look intentional.
With this in mind, China’s latest export controls begin to make a lot more sense. As seen previously with antimony and other metals, dual-use regulation is the official framing, but this also appears to be a calculated move to ensure that domestic downstream industries - magnet producers, EV manufacturers, defense contractors - aren’t left short in a market where heavy rare earth supply is both limited and under pressure. In that light, the move is as much about industrial policy as it is about playing tit for tat with the Trump administration.
And here lies the uncomfortable truth for the rest of the world: if you want to build a rare earth industry that can actually compete, it’s not enough to copy what China did with NdPr. You need to go where the heavies live - and for a part, that means developing ionic clays. It means dealing with messy permitting, environmental risks, and all the local politics that come with it."
https://sustainabledude.substack.com/p/why-china-banned-rare-earths-but
32. "While crypto is having a moment, refining is too - in the opposite way. It’s rising in value.
In March, President Trump ordered all U.S. military bases to build refining facilities and begin stockpiling critical refined metals. It sounded obscure at the time, but it’s central to what’s coming: a world where the 3D printing of metals and materials becomes the backbone of military power. Modern battlefields are turning into print-on-demand environments. As I said in recent Substacks, the 3D printer is the equivalent of the metal stirrup the Mongolians used to create the largest empire on Earth. See my piece, War in an Era of Intelligent Machines: Stirrups, Conoidal Bullets, 3D Printers, Lunar Nukes, and Special Ops Forces.
And, as Elon Musk has said, we need to keep people off the battlefield because drones - 3D printed drones like the “Widowmakers” - combined with AI will be immediately lethal to all humans. In a robot-to-robot world, refined rare earths and Helium-3 become the decisive variables. Wars won’t be won by territory or troop counts. Wars will be won — or lost — by who runs out of critical materials first."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/no-laughing-matter-the-race-for-helium
33. Probably one of the most critical and important companies in America right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgRo82sSPCU
34. "AI will not distribute prosperity evenly. Its impact depends on whether firms can retain the surplus it generates—a function of market structure, capital intensity, and institutional context. The key divide lies not between manufacturing and services but between businesses able to escape the market economy’s competitive pressures and those that remain trapped within them.
Manufacturers with scale, process knowledge, and high capital barriers will likely capture surplus and reinvest it, compounding returns. Client-facing service providers will see most gains flow to clients or upstream AI vendors. Proximity services remain the crucial variable: if AI can unlock productivity gains there, and workers organise to claim their share, it could trigger the first meaningful realignment of the social contract since the post-war boom.
America will extend its dominance in platforms and professional services, deepening existing advantages while leaving most workers behind. China will tighten its grip on manufacturing, converting scale into market power as AI amplifies control and efficiency. Finally, Europe will pursue scale without mass, using AI to enhance precision manufacturing and perhaps pioneer a new balance between capital and labour."
https://www.driftsignal.com/p/capitalism-in-the-ai-powered-economy