Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 20th, 2025
"In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer"--Albert Camus
"The terminology comes from Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for cloud computing platforms. It describes their uptime. Three 9s is .999% uptime. Five nines is .99999 % uptime. You get the picture. The less downtime your application can tolerate, the more 9s you need in your SLA.
Where it applies to agents is different - we are looking at the performance of the underlying AI models that run the agent processes. If you have an AI agent that is 92% accurate, that sounds great right? But if that agent must perform 5 steps to get a task done, and the model is 92% accurate at each task, you have to multiply .92 five times to get the overall accuracy of the workflow. That number is 65%.
The first is - agentic companies will be successful in direct proportion to the three 9s issue. Use cases that don’t require three 9s, and aren’t frustrating at that level, will be the first to be seriously adopted. This is why things like generating images as part of a marketing workflow is a good use case. If the combined performance of a marketing campaign AI agent is 65%, that’s still fine, and productive, and not frustrating. As an investor, you want to think through these use cases. Where can a relatively poorly performing agent still be useful? Invest there first."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/three-9s-thesis-of-ai-investing-why
2. "As the war in Ukraine has demonstrated, while feasible, this form of missile defense is costly. Pursuing it will become even more challenging if already constrained resources are funneled into an extremely costly space-based missile defense architecture. For example, for the cost of a single space-based interceptor (estimated at $100 to $300 million), the United States could procure between 25 and 75 PAC-3 MSE interceptors — systems that offer credible and proven defense against a broad spectrum of Chinese conventional missile threats.
The opportunity cost attached to Trump’s vision is therefore extremely high, and any serious pursuit would likely prove strategically disadvantageous to the United States."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/missile-defense-at-any-cost
3. This seems like a problem, demographic fraud in China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK8eLfbS3c4
4. Pretty solid interview here. Investing in great Deep-tech companies. And also how to leverage your newsletter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ7FcwxaIMs
5. "All these powerful pieces—the groundbreaking sensors, the self-directing swarms, the AI—are being employed in modern combat in Ukraine. But right now, they’re mostly operating in stove pipes, each sequestered from the other, operating in technological silos. The vital nervous system needed to fuse their individual brilliance into a cohesive, battlefield-dominating whole, that will enable commanders to truly understand and synchronize the fight, is often absent.
War remains the most ferocious engine of innovation any of us have ever witnessed. What the Ukrainian armed forces have accomplished in over three years of brutal, relentless attacks is, by any measure, astounding. They have demonstrated incredible tech acumen, staring down a Goliath—a vastly better-resourced, larger, and supposedly more advanced enemy—and not just holding, but often punching back with stunning ingenuity. The Ukrainians’ ability to adapt and innovate under fire is a powerful testament to what’s possible.
Understanding these current limitations and burgeoning capabilities brings Goff’s observation into focus, especially regarding the future interplay of Ukrainian innovation and Western military potential."
6. "What kind of elites will we have? Generous ones or rapacious ones? Everything is riding on the answer. The efforts of men like Bruce Wayne and Bishop Myriel are not simply quaint gestures—they hold everything together. Those with power and influence set the tone, and their conduct determines whether we are building a civilization, or whether everyone is at war with all others, as Gates and Bloomberg and company seem to wish.
The point is not to rail against oligarchs and technocrats but to suggest that their absurdly bad examples should compel us to do better. Even if we will never come into possession of wealth like Gates or Bloomberg, anyone with open eyes can find opportunities to act more nobly than our effetely ruthless elites. Prove worthy in the little opportunities and you may be given larger ones. You also have to suspect that the turbulent times ahead will call for men of real quality to step forward."
https://thechivalryguild.substack.com/p/noblesse-oblige
7. "Digital products are a shortcut.
Social media is a shortcut.
AI is a shortcut.
Technology as a whole is a shortcut.
If you don't like the word "shortcut," exchange it with "leverage."
You don't have to send physical letters through the mail anymore when you can post an Instagram reel of you expressing your thoughts in your car that reaches 500,000 people. (And 500,000 is insane. You don't even need 10,000. You can also DM anyone, crazy.)
You don't need to find a book at the library to find a hyper-specific piece of information when you can get unstuck from a simple conversation with AI.
You don't need to waste $10,000+ testing whether or not a physical product will work when you can launch a digital product on the same topic in 2 weeks, see if it works, generate cash flow, and then pour that money and validated idea into another business model.
Here's the bad news:
You still need to learn how to take the shortcut.
And shortcuts are not synonymous with guaranteed success.
Humans get distracted from the shorter path all the time because they can't sit down and focus.
Even with the all-powerful AI we have access to, many people will fail for the simple reason that they will try for 2 weeks and quit because they weren't serious in the first place."
https://thedankoe.substack.com/p/how-average-people-will-get-rich
8. Some alt-geopolitics here. Very contrary to mass media narratives, so important to listen to these tinfoil characters.
But bear in mind these folks dislike Pax Americana so they have an axe to grind. We will see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIRIApJlpj8
9. Investing in a tripolar world. Solid and important conversation on investing in Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvHnRxKdg2M
10. "Bull had mentioned a few times that big corporations view you as nothing other than an item on a spreadsheet but it was only in that moment that I truly understood how accurate that statement really was. All those overtime hours, weekends sacrificed, time missed with the family, all of it meant nothing.
The most important thing is to just start building your own path to Wifi $. You’ll wish you started sooner. It doesn’t really matter what you do because your first few attempts will likely fail and that’s okay. You just need to put one foot in front of the other and the path will become clear over time."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/faang-to-wifi-with-bowtiedbills
11. This is why Sequoia is still tops for so many decades. Good interview with Pat Grady.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBvjcIqNvow
12. "The thing I hate the most about AI and it's ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul... Brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots.
The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs. It’s that it will entice people who never wanted the job to begin with. People who don't care for quality. It'll remove the already tiny barrier to entry that at-least required people to try and comprehend control flow. Vampires with SaaS dreams and Web3 in their LinkedIn bio. Empty husks who see the terminal not as a frontier, but as a shovel for digging up VC money. They’ll drool over their GitHub Copilot like it’s the holy spirit of productivity, pumping out React CRUD like it’s oxygen. They'll fork VS Code yet again, just to sell the same dream to a similarly deluded kid.
There was once magic here. There was once madness.
Because you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the cruel joke. We’ll fill this industry with people who think they’re good, because their bot passed CI. They'll float through, confident, while the real ones - the hungry ones - get chewed up by a system that doesn’t value understanding anymore. Just output. Just tokens per second.
And what’s worse, we’ll normalize this mediocrity. Cement it in tooling. Turn it into a best practice. We'll enshrine this current bloated, sluggish, over-abstracted hellscape as the pinnacle of software. The idea that building something lean and wild and precise, or even squeezing every last drop of performance out of a system, will sound like folklore."
https://deplet.ing/the-copilot-delusion/
13. Summary of the DOGE experience. Good people meeting a bad system, the bad system usually wins.
https://sahillavingia.com/doge
14. How sales leaders are leveraging AI to win in 2025/2026. Very instructive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oLxWRF9Uys
15. Diabolical cyber hacking and mind hack attack that led to the Assad regime. Mind blowing and S-tier if this is true. Also highlighting the importance of Opsec.
"The snippet of information was this: A mobile application, distributed quietly among Syrian officers via a Telegram channel, had spread rapidly in their ranks. In truth, the app was a carefully planted trap, the opening salvo of a hidden cyberwar — perhaps one of the first of its kind against a modern army. Militias had weaponized smartphones, turning them into lethal instruments against a regular military force.
Beyond revealing the contours of a cyberattack against the Syrian army, this investigation seeks to understand the application itself, its technology and reach, and to uncover the nature of the information it siphoned from within military ranks. This, in turn, leads directly to the potential impact on Syria’s military operations."
https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/how-a-spyware-app-compromised-assads-army/
16. This week's inside venture capital and Silicon Valley, this show has lots of great insights & perspectives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqyElN1iKs0
17. The future rise of piracy & privateering. It's gonna be ugly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCeQg_GuAAc
18. Legit fascinating conversation on F1 & going into venture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAYJ-9N1wM8
19. Founder investor lessons. This was fun & helpful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-JBj7eWUDE&t=4s
20. "At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, this time does feel different. Two of the most significant platform shifts I’ve seen in my career, the move to the cloud and then the move to mobile, created a lot more labor demand. With all of this cloud and mobile software, we needed people to manage data centers, focus on uptime, work in security centers to keep an eye on intruders, and perform various other essential tasks that arose as software penetrated new industries and parts of life. And, because there weren’t technologies that could do most of that work, the only solution was to hire and train people to do new(ish) jobs like site reliability, developer operations, and the like.
From everything I’ve seen, the rise of AI is replacing labor with machines and agents because they can do most, but not yet all of the work. As is the case with any innovation, the optimist in me wants to believe that this new tech wave will create new job categories and titles that didn’t exist before, but this wave feels different because I think the companies that would otherwise create those jobs for people are going to push much harder to have software do more of the work."
https://chudson.substack.com/p/uncomfortable-and-unanswered-questions
21. Always a fun conversation on the latest tech news here. NIA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxlJDsNHlZA&t=229s
22. China (infrastructure) vs. USA (weapons), exploring the influence strategy of the two great powers in the world right now. All around getting resource control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih_jj8MeyDg
23. Always realpolitik and clear eyed view on global macro, energy and geopolitics. Doomberg with objective analysis of present day events.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_AN2fWZiVI
24. What America is missing in the reindustrialization movement. Material processing refineries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DG2vS6DcOM
25. How do we turn around America in the face of the massive threats against us, China, Russia, Iran, Extreme Islamicists & internal incompetence/suicidal empathy. An Important conversation here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gYvX6s9gqY
26. "The budget’s fastest-growing line item isn’t defense, or healthcare, but the interest on our debt. Even if this $3.7 trillion middle finger to future generations doesn’t pass, net interest payments on the debt will total $13.8 trillion over the next decade. We’re basically cosigning a subprime mortgage for our grandchildren while giving the wealthy a trust fund top-off.
As interest payments increase, they crowd out any discretionary spending critical for growth (e.g., the internet, medical research, education), and curb our ability to respond to future crises. Nations typically aren’t conquered but go broke. According to historian Niall Ferguson, there’s a redline where debt service exceeds defense spending. In fiscal year 2024, we hit it. The federal budget earmarked $877 billion for defense and $878 billion to pay the interest on our debt.
As Ferguson wrote, “America’s fiscal position is far more constrained today than ever before,” adding that the U.S. faces a debt crisis similar to the ones that contributed to the downfalls of the Spanish, French, and British empires. We’re now spending more to service rich people’s tax cuts than to defend the country. So, raise taxes or cut spending? The answer is yes. Note: Both parties engage in this consensual hallucination — taxes went down during the Biden administration and spending (YTD) has gone up under Trump."
https://www.profgalloway.com/rich-kids/
27. What an excellent discussion on important tech news this week: OF, Privacy & Identity. More or Less.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0_J88ZHLt0
28. What does the world of 2028 look like from Doug Casey, global adventurer & investor extraordinaire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGeFj8zd3-Y
29. "Why is this important? It’s important for two reasons: 1) the emotional reason to not blame your parents for being behind the times. Back when they were growing up it *did* make sense to get that prestigious degree and go build all this infrastructure and 2) you have to predict where the money is going to go. A common saying amongst the wealthy families is “go where the money is flowing”. This has deep meaning. If you know that more people will be using Product A, figure out what they can buy using Product A.
In 2025 product A is pretty clear: smartphone, laptops, desktops and in the future virtual headsets. If your income is *not* tied to people using those products, you will be swimming up stream. It is not easy to fight 3-5% declines in customers no matter what industry you’re in.
Look at the mega trends. That is the first sales filter. Then get your initial starting capital and start the ad research. With software tools you can quite literally test demand on any product and even find the ads that are doing well. Under 30 mins.
After that? You will be using VAs, Software and 1099 forms to scale up. The Sovereign individual is already here and before you know it a one man shop will be running 8-9 figure businesses.
Make sure you’re on the right side of history on that one. Otherwise, AI will be eating your value add."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/why-your-parents-have-it-wrong-despite
30. Always good stuff from top VC investor Josh Wolfe. That dude is smart. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpyYqY1cWXM
31. "Entrepreneurs would benefit from reflecting on these three questions about product value, innovation, and market timing to guide their ventures toward success."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/05/31/three-quick-questions-after-hearing-a-founders-story/
32. "When people initially come to NYC they’re a bit sheepish, you know? And then, within a few months, you see them out at the club, and they are totally being their authentic selves. Everybody embraces it. There’s somebody stranger than you doing something stranger than you right next door. NYC is a place where you can just breathe and be yourself.
There’s a lot of passion in NYC; people are on the move and they work hard. You are spent (in a good way) when you go home at the end of the day and put your head on the pillow. But you're also fulI. You don't experience that in any other place."
https://thejamesbrand.com/blogs/stories/from-snow-to-dirt-an-interview-with-josh-rosen
33. "My strong, unwavering belief is that Pax Americana is a damn good deal for the United States AND the world, especially as American leadership in AI opens up an entirely new realm of intangible things that the United States can trade for tangible things. Is it a perfect deal for the United States? No. Do other countries free ride on our provision of security and an end-market of the American consumer? Absolutely. Has the system been internally captured by oligarchs and professional politicians, so that the distribution of this great wealth flowing to the United States goes less and less to ‘average’ Americans? 100%. Should we aggressively prune and reform the Pax Americana system? Should we root out its foreign free riders and domestic leeches? Yes, please!
But that’s not what this Administration believes. Neither Donald Trump nor his key advisors believe that Pax Americana is a good deal at all, much less a damn good deal like I believe. They believe the United States is being cheated and taken advantage of without end, both internationally and domestically. They don’t want to fix the Pax Americana regime of coordination through multilateral rule-setting. They want to blow up the entire deal and replace it with an America First regime of competition through bilateral engagement.
I appreciate their frustration. I share a lot of it. But I am desperately opposed to crashing the Pax Americana car, Annie Hall style, because the America First system that this Administration wants to have as a replacement is not a stable system that is possible to have as a replacement. The end result of blowing up Pax Americana and its – yes – globalist system of rules and institutions and alliances that coordinates the flow of capital, labor, goods, services and culture without ‘winning’ any head-to-head relationship will be a system that is both worse for the United States AND the world."
https://www.epsilontheory.com/crashing-the-car-of-pax-americana/
34. Semiconductors and AI: one of the most important competitions in the world right now between China & USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7p6U53DxrE
35. Irregular War: The enemies of the West are really good at this.