Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 27th, 2025
"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."--John Lubbock
"Abe's journey teaches us that political defeat—even when compounded by personal health challenges—need not be definitive. His strategic use of time away from power allowed for genuine renewal: physically, intellectually, and politically.
Rather than rushing back prematurely, he ensured his return was supported by a renewed power base, with strengthened policy ideas, political alliances, and improved personal and physical capacity.
Abe's comeback shows that how we respond to setbacks often determines our legacy more than our initial success. By treating his defeat as an opportunity for personal transformation rather than dragging himself down, Abe transformed what could have been a footnote in Japanese political history into a launching pad for one of its most important administrations in decades.
Abe's story reminds us that true resilience is not merely about mere survival, but about strategically extracting lessons from our failures and having the patience to prepare thoroughly for a historic second act."
https://www.businessofpower.com/p/the-art-of-losing-well-shinzo-abes
2. Panel on Alt-Geopolitics. Non Mainstream views here. (Don't agree with these but interesting takes).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldliw4G_vM0
3. A masterclass on what to look for in GPs for early stage VC funds. Cendana has an incredible dataset. This is worth watching a few times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AqIrMSvya4
4. "Ukraine has long-struggled to target the Russian bombers used to launch mass missile targets against Ukrainian cities, as Moscow has kept them out of range of weapons Kyiv has developed itself as well as those supplied by its Western allies.
The use of FPV drones in such a way would mark just the latest stage in the ever-evolving and still relatively fledgling world on drone warfare.
The attack was also likely highly cost effective — FPV drones can be bought for a just a few hundred dollars each but the cost of 41 heavy bombers runs into the billions."
5. "Venture ≠ Asset Management – The game has drifted from backing outlier founders to chasing AUM. A painful reset might be needed before things get healthy again.
Build a firm you enjoy – Not one optimized for market cycles. Sovereign wealth and busted endowments will keep distorting VC until liquidity dries up. Best to play your own game."
https://feld.com/archives/2025/05/beware-the-grinfuckers/
6. "Mechanization really did take jobs from farm workers. Automation took jobs from manual laborers. The PC took jobs from clerical and communication workers. But, all of these resulted in greater productivity, employment, and more optionality for workers. It’s both anti-historic and anti-evidence that AI will somehow prove to be the exception.
Could AI, along with thousands of other impactful technological, political, social, demographic, and black-swan-event changes permanently alter the employment landscape in our lifetimes? Absolutely. In fact, one of my favorite stats from this overly-ambitious weekend of research was MIT’s estimation that 60% of employment in 2018 was in types of jobs that didn’t exist before 1940.
By the time I’m in my 80s, y’all better have destroyed more than half of all the existing jobs, and that’s just to keep up with the 20th Century’s pace of change. But, don’t expect AI to do it for you in the next decade; that’s just marketing."
https://sparktoro.com/blog/ai-will-replace-all-the-jobs-is-just-tech-execs-doing-marketing/
7. This was a long podcast but this was pretty interesting and helpful to understand why America has lost pretty much every single war in the last three decades. Big military bureaucracy and weak leadership. America is run by unserious people. (most of West is actually)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o5tlrYEmpQ
8. Some good takes here on the brilliant Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian strategic air fleet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SGSx-PBHEY
9. A must listen to on why the US is behind industrially (bad outdated free market ideology), China's industrial model and what we can learn from them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFVYeocZiSk
10. "UK’s unveiling of its new 20-40-40 Military Doctrine. This is one of the first times a Western military has so explicitly embraced a future where humans step back and autonomy steps forward: 80% unmanned. The message is clear.
It marks a shift away from conventional mass toward autonomy.
20%: Tanks and armoured platforms—held back, used precisely, not prolifically
40%: Expendable strike drones—cheap, fast, effective
40%: Reusable ISR and loitering munitions"
https://louiseboucher.substack.com/p/the-defense-brief-may-2025
11. "It also demonstrates real wartime defence innovation. Innovation in defence is not just about engineering, it is about innovating how you do things. A former British officer recently observed to me that in World War Two, the great British innovations like Operation Mincemeat and Operation Chastise (the DamBuster raid) were all the work of ‘civilians in uniform.’ These were what Churchill called his ‘corkscrew thinkers’ – people who could think in loops around an enemy that thought mainly in straight lines.
Reports indicate that Ukraine deployed 150 drones, of which 116 struck their targets. Some of the video circulating shows Russians examining a damaged shipping container, which then explodes when one of them walks in through the door, suggesting either that the containers were booby trapped, or that drones continued to explode after they failed to deploy. The drones that did deploy flew straight into the fuel tanks of the planes - another example of a very cheap bit of tech taking out a very expensive bit of hardware. They used a mixture of satellite imagery and automated targeting to cause catastrophic damage to the Russian airforce.
Artem Moroz, Head of Partnerships, Brave1 wrote over the weekend, “if you think drones are just tactical tools, think again. Ukraine is rewriting military doctrine in real time. This is next-gen asymmetric warfare in action. Cheap, smart, unstoppable.”
https://www.resiliencemedia.co/p/ukraines-attack-on-russian-airfields
12. "Even if the export of Ukrainian defence industries remains under discussion, the import of European talent is very real. For Sebastian, it was a life-changing experience. “In these three days I have accomplished more than throughout my professional career,” he said, noting that his current employment has nothing to do with defence innovation. Originally he was worried about going to Ukraine, but he did not panic during the air raid alerts and now wants to come back for more engagement with the Ukrainian ecosystem."
https://www.resiliencemedia.co/p/dispatches-from-kyiv-and-lviv-ukraines
13. It comes across as tinfoil hat at first but this is pretty important to understand our financialist system. It's a helpful framework on how the world works. Economic Hitmen 2.0.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRRPYYfiz_o
14. Critically important for Europe, the emerging defense-tech generation. Long overdue awakening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6en9RziOH0I
15. One of the most interesting individuals in America: Palmer Luckey. Defending America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVXPERyRjOA
16. "Rapid equipping may be one of the Pentagon’s stated goals, but “I think the reality is we see zero evidence of that happening,” Emeneker said. Even so-called “rushed efforts often take years to make it through the requirements writing process. ““Then they’ll need to get budgetary approval. That'll be another two to three years,” he said. “And that's the definition of fast within DoD today: five years to even start prototyping—not delivery, but prototype.”
Adversaries large and small—and increasingly aligned with one another—don’t face the same hurdles. Ukraine shows how modern warfare has become a contest to deploy attack drones adapted to fast-evolving enemy countermeasures."
17. "The goal of working with LLMs isn't to automate thinking; it's to clear space for deeper thinking. When I match my workflow to the shape of the problem, I move faster—in increments of hours rather than days—get unstuck more easily, and ship better work. The only real blockers now are fatigue, distraction, or lack of inspiration—all human factors we can address.
These workflows let me leverage my years of engineering experience while offloading the mechanical aspects of development. I bring the wisdom to know what needs researching, and the AI brings the capacity to explore options simultaneously and implement solutions efficiently.
We're only at the beginning. These three workflows represent my current best practices, but I expect to discover new patterns next week. The landscape is evolving rapidly, and the best approach is to keep experimenting, adapting, and refining how we collaborate with these powerful tools."
https://every.to/source-code/the-three-ways-i-work-with-llms
18. New super cycle of defense and space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P5qJmax0ic
19. How to think about N of 1 companies in this day and age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44iztpsfbFg
20. Micro-Saas & Vibe coding. A fun conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghYihdvkwrE&t=462s
21. What an inspiring interview. The energy and attitude: you can just do things. Ended up building NGP Energy Capital Management. Godfather of Energy PE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g_Cb2wUn3M
22. Lots of very useful nuggets of insight in hiring, building and investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbVZDp6s9xU&t=14s
23. "Yerba mate has more caffeine than most other teas (roughly the same amount that’s in coffee) and it won’t lead to a crash when it wears off, the way coffee can. “Yerba mate is notorious for having a smoother downtick of a caffeine ‘high,’ which is likely because of the slower release of caffeine or the other bioactive components, like theobromine,” says registered dietitian Paul Jaeckel, RD."
https://www.gq.com/story/yerba-mate-tea-benefits
24. "Overall, the Ukrainians achieved the impossible, carrying out the war’s first air assault operation in over three years, allowing them to strike deep into Russian-held territory, inflict serious losses, and gather critical intelligence.
Notably, it is highly likely that not all Ukrainian operators exfiltrated from behind Russian lines.
According to special forces doctrine, these operators will be able to gather intelligence, set up and train further resistance networks, and conduct a deadly guerrilla warfare with sabotage and liquidations of top Russian commanders."
25. "Third, we need to understand that everything is now about information dominance, the counterbalance of which is psychological defense. We must be comfortable operating in both of these spaces as modern democracies.
Finally, we need to break free from this 30 year old box of smoke and mirrors. We must end the idea of Russian sanctuary — the idea that we cannot touch Russia — which absolutely poisons our analytical abilities. We need to define strategies for 21st century war termination that also confront hybrid wars.
And this also, of course, begins with how we end Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine.
Our only chance comes from Ukraine — from how we win in Ukraine, and what can be born from the revitalization of order that comes after Ukraine.
Otherwise, it’s just gonna be chaos monkeys all the way down."
https://www.greatpower.us/p/why-do-democracies-pretend-to-be
26. "But now, America has signaled it’s done. It’s still trying to meddle in a set of negotiations that also are not real in order to try to get a slice of Ukraine when it survives, but there’s been no talk about additional military support for Ukraine or working with the coalition to drum up more support. Thankfully the non-American parts of this coalition, including our NATO allies and other American treaty allies in Asia, have continued to put out new support packages. But America stamping around Europe asking “can’t someone else do it?” has had this outcome.
Ukraine has different choices, harder choices, freer choices maybe — and it will take them. Because it has no other choice but continuing to make its tactical possibilities achieve strategic success.
Russia has been a bogeyman for such a long time. But once the bogeyman is in the house, you can hide under the bed and imagine how much worse it might be, or you can smash a vase into its head and see if it bleeds like the rest of us.
Turns out Russia bleeds.
Young Ukrainians seek inspiration in this fantasy of a lone manga warrior fighting armies and the “godhand” for survival against the odds — but the inverse of this is grit in the gears of strategic thinking for big military powers like Russia and China and the United States. You start to think your out-sized capabilities are determinative in any conflict, and then some kids on dirt-bikes or a handful of Ukrainians with toy drones show you up.
Ukrainians are amazing in every definition of that word — and every damn day we should consider ourselves lucky that this brave, innovative, persistent, dedicated nation is fighting this war to cripple one of the world’s nominal great military powers to be a free, democratic nation that’s on our team (well, if America decides to stay on the team).
A nation absolutely outmatched on every spreadsheet can design a theory of victory that defies every big army conception of how this stuff works. Ukraine used 117 drones — which themselves cost about $58,500 — to blow up or at least damage billions of dollars of irreplaceable strategic assets across a swath of territory that spans almost 4000 miles"
https://www.greatpower.us/p/operational-art-and-the-salvation
27. People around the world overlook the amazing feat that Saudi Arabia does every single year as they host ~3 million pilgrims from all around the world the week of June 4th. It's really crazy impressive.
28. "The Ukrainian attack on Russia’s nuclear bombers shows how insane and self-defeating the GOP’s attack on the battery industry is. Batteries were what powered the Ukrainian drones that destroyed the pride of Russia’s air fleet; if the U.S. refuses to make batteries, it will be unable to make similar drones in case of a war against China. Bereft of battery-powered FPV drones, America would be at a severe disadvantage in the new kind of war that Ukraine and Russia have pioneered.
Unfortunately, Trump and the GOP have decided to think of batteries as a culture-war issue instead of one of national security. They think they’re attacking hippie-dippy green energy, sticking it to the socialist environmentalist kids and standing up for good old red-blooded American oil and gas. Instead, what they’re actually doing is unilaterally disarming America’s future drone force and ceding the key weapon of the modern battlefield to China.
In any case, unless America’s leaders wake up very quickly to the military importance of batteries, magnets, injection molding, and drones themselves, the U.S. may end up looking like the British Navy in 1941 — or the Italian Navy in 1940. A revolution in military affairs is in process, and America is willfully missing the boat."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-chinese-drones-could-defeat-america
29. More on Turkey, the real power in the Middle East and Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfKoTHwE72E
30. "The idea is to identify opportunities to buy mature, people-intensive outfits like law firms and other professional services firms, help them scale through AI, then use the improved margins to acquire other such enterprises and repeat the process. He has been at it for three years.
“It just seems so obvious,” said Gil over a Zoom call earlier this week. “This type of generative AI is very good at understanding language, manipulating language, manipulating text, producing text. And that’s audio, that’s video, that includes coding, sales outreach, and different back-office processes.”
If you can “effectively transform some of those repetitive tasks into software,” he said, “you can increase the margins dramatically and create very different types of businesses.” The math is particularly compelling if one owns the business outright, he added.
“If you own the asset, you can [transform it] much more rapidly than if you’re just selling software as a vendor,” Gil said. “And because you take the gross margin of a company from, say, 10% to 40%, that’s a huge lift. Suddenly you can buy other companies at a higher price than anyone else because you have that increased cash flow per business; you have enormous leverage on the business on a relative basis, so you can do roll-ups in ways that others can’t.”
31. "The thought process is: “If I’m busy, it means that my time is valuable because I have so little of it, therefore I’ll seem important.”
Yet if you pay attention you’ll see that the guy who is actually The Man isn’t the one who’s working the hardest. It’s the one who pays everyone to work hard on his behalf so he doesn’t have to.
That’s literally what a business is. Employees sell their time/labor to an employer so he can use them as a collective resource that can do more work than any one person could on his own (and make a ton of money for himself in the process).
Your value-add as a business owner doesn’t come from your labor. You’re just one person. The amount of hours you can work in a day isn’t enough to move the needle (no matter how talented you are). That’s why solopreneurship is nothing more than a wannabe sigma male LARPing fantasy.
Your higher-level thinking and ability to effectively manage the people who work under you is what really makes the difference."
https://www.tetramarketing.io/p/real-signs-of-low-social-status
32. One of the best & educational conversations on the business of venture capital.