Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 22nd, 2025
“Rise above the storm and you will find the sunshine”--Mario Fernandez
"While we acknowledge that low-margin business models and limited scope for technological innovation make commodity markets incredibly difficult to disrupt, we believe the knee-jerk tendency to dismiss them entirely is misguided.
Macro trends like global trade rebalancing and national resilience imperatives are creating a strategic need to reshore production of critical resources, alleviating the pressure of competing with low-cost foreign suppliers. For ambitious founders undeterred by the complexity of these industries, we think there is a generational opportunity to build venture-scale businesses in markets that have not seen meaningful transformation for decades."
https://balachandrasekaran.substack.com/p/the-case-for-commodity-markets
2. "Ark recently raised to scale operations and expand across Europe. Their goal is not just to sell software and hardware, but to push governments to rethink how they approach defense autonomy. Takanawa is blunt about the stakes: “If the West doesn’t move fast, it will be outpaced. You can have 1,000 drones in a warehouse, but without the systems and doctrine to operate them, they’re just dead weight.”
The threat isn’t theoretical. Russia is reportedly manufacturing tens of thousands of drones per month. Without scalable command and control, even a well-armed country will struggle to respond effectively to mass drone strikes—particularly those targeting infrastructure deep in the rear.
Ark’s warning is clear: the war of the future won’t be won by matching drone-for-drone. It will be won by building systems that can manage mass with intelligence and control. Collaborative autonomy, they argue, is the only way forward."
https://www.resiliencemedia.co/p/ark-robotics-and-the-future-of-scalable
3. Moving from a world of idealism to realism. Grand Geopolitical strategy. Globalization fracturing & rising mercantilism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odQ53D8Z4yk
4. Part 2. Michael Every of RaboBank describing the emerging world order.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7EwfjK0FP0
5. What is your GDP for? Economic Statecraft in the rise of geopolitics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X43ghHJYY5o
6. "While the motivations of the martial men of the Crusades and the Princes and Kings who backed them, at great expense to the Venetian banks, were motivated by the desire to push back against Islam’s aggressions. The Crusades were not merely a noble quest for the Holy Land but a sophisticated power play by Venetian bankers and the Roman Catholic Church. Using Europe’s princes and kings and their martial forces, unwittingly, Venice amassed wealth through war and trade, while the Church enriched itself and systematically attacked the Orthodox Church to assert its supremacy.
The historical record—most starkly in the sack of Constantinople—reveals a campaign driven by greed and ambition, with religion as a convenient mask. The legacy of this venture is a fractured Christian world, shaped not by faith but by the pursuit of money and power. A world for more than a thousand years following the very same Financialist Kill Chain model, bound up in centuries of religious warfare with and against the Roman Catholic Church."
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/the-crusades
7. Great rundown of Silicon Valley news and events this week. Always a good discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyKWveWh3y8
8. "An Urgent Buyer is, in essence, a customer with an existential need that existing solutions cannot satisfy. These buyers emerge during periods of crisis and strategic realignment when the status quo fails and incremental progress is insufficient. They are willing to pay premium prices, accept technical risk, and commit to large-scale deployment of new technologies.
For Fairchild, Cold War imperatives created a new pool of Urgent Buyer demand. Today, we are witnessing an Urgent Buyer moment of a similar historic scale. Decades of underinvestment in critical industrial capacity have led to systemic failures in energy infrastructure, critical mineral supply chains, and defense readiness. To make up for lost time, Western governments have mobilized a dramatic fiscal and policy response.
For capital allocators, the fundamental realignment creating Urgent Buyers across energy, minerals, and defense represents more than a series of discrete market opportunities. If past cycles, like the Cold War, are any indication, we can expect entirely new asset classes, pioneered by entrepreneurial financiers, to emerge quickly."
https://venturedesktop.substack.com/p/the-urgent-buyer-era
9. "What it means is that in all likelihood Trump will ink some key weapons and security deals in the Saudi capital next week after which he will visit the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. It also means that Nethanyahu and Israel have lost out on a rare and unique opportunity to establish closer relations with Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis, under crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (‘MBS’) have now given second thoughts to cozying up to Israel at the very moment that the latter has announced to ramp up the war in and occupation of Gaza (for which Trump admittedly had given the green light earlier)."
https://pieterdorsman.substack.com/p/trump-goes-saudi
10. "My advice to anyone who’s thinking about taking the leap and starting a company is to just start.
Take a beat if you have to.
Build financial reserves or side hustle before you’re comfortable with nothaving a full-time job.
Listen to podcasts and do your research (about everything: marketplace health insurance, for one).
Join community discussions and meetups.
Bootstrap if you don’t understand fundraising or don’t feel the need to raise money, which introduces a whole slew of complexity.
But at some point, the mixing and mingling and absorbing of knowledge needs to be expressed in action and execution."
https://shindy.substack.com/p/entrepreneur
11. "The greatest power of regimes lies not in their control of nature, but in their ability to make societies believe in that control. To dismantle the illusion, populations must recognize the diversion of wealth and language away from substance and toward myth.
History shows that regimes thrive on manufactured inevitability—but they falter when the curtain is pulled back, revealing the emptiness behind the spectacle. The path to genuine empowerment begins not in overthrowing gods or technocrats, but in reclaiming the narrative. In getting back to nature and base reality."
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/the-great-deception
12. "If you truly want to stop giving a f-ck, you gotta think like a dying man… because you are a dying man. You gotta think “will I care about this in 10 years”, and let it go if you will not.
This is how you become mentally and emotionally free to pursue what YOU want (not what society wants of you) without letting anything get in the way."
13. Good takes here on Hill & Valley Conference + Josh Wolfe's discussion on Geopolitics: watch the Sahel + Monroe Doctrine 2.0.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1W5EpYtakw
14. "So now, in an unstable, multipolar world where will bright, ambitious people turn next? Now that Facebook and Google are uncool, interest rates are high, software competition is going infinite, and institutions feel unreliable, what is the next high status path that will dictate our economy?
They’re going all in on cashflow and independence because they’ve learned that institutions won’t take care of them and can’t monopolize opportunity.
Free cash flow and independence (two sides of the same coin) are hedges against uncertainty, institutional decrepitude, and burnout.
Becoming a creator, buying SMBs/ETA, investing in real estate, drop shipping, building microsaas, forming personal holding companies, etc. are all trendy because they’re opportunities for ambitious (young) people to work for themselves and generate FCF as owners and operators instead of employees.
The next great migration is coming and talent will start flowing out of tech if it isn’t already. It might be harder to recruit for tech but there will be new companies to build for the new epoch.
Today, a sole proprietorship or very small business can scale and succeed in ways previously unthinkable. And for small employers, these tools in the aggregate are a game-changer, bringing sophistication that normally only comes with size and consolidation."
https://99d.substack.com/p/my-thesis-driven-guest-post
15. "Here's the secret: No first draft is good. Not Stephen King's. Not yours.
The ones who make it are the ones who keep going despite the gap.
So next time you create something and that voice in your head says "this sucks" - remember the janitor from Maine who almost threw away Carrie."
https://shaan.beehiiv.com/p/one-minute-blog-the-taste-gap
16. "By tackling the biggest-uncertainty type work first, you buy yourself the luxury of having plenty of time to adapt if the uncertainty turns out to contain nasty surprises – or if the uncertainty turns out to contain an even better idea than you started with."
https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/how-to-bend-the-curve-of-luck
17. "America’s innovation supremacy wasn’t an accident or birthright — it was earned through deliberate investment and intense collaboration among the world’s most exceptional minds. Now we risk throwing it all away. We’ve spent 80 years building a nearly unassailable lead, only to suddenly decide the race is optional. Our universities still dominate global rankings and our tech firms command unprecedented market power, but we’re actively dismantling the foundation that made it all possible.
I believe America is being run by a mob family. That’s bad. What’s worse is that Michael Corleone is running the grift, and Fredo is running the government. America has become the textbook definition of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I was in Hamburg last week presenting at the OMR Festival (Online Marketing Rockstars), and the general vibe is bewilderment: How could a superpower be this stupid?"
https://www.profgalloway.com/brain-drain/
18. I always learn stuff from Josh Wolfe. This was a great deep dive conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHT57nhzgUI
19. “The character of war is changing fast. So how do you keep up or even get ahead?” Johnson said. “You have to be able to quickly go, ‘Hey, that sensor, it might be working today in a certain [area of responsibility] under certain conditions.’ But if the threat changes, you need to make sure that either you can make the changes within that sensor, or put a different sensor on there without the system being down for a year and costing X millions of dollars.”
SOCOM is also more and more in favor of tech built from components not made in China, said David Breede, SOCOM’s program manager for special reconnaissance systems. He urged industry to “make sure that your own infrastructure is also cyber secure, not only what you're delivering to us but then the supply chain, too, the security, right? We've seen several things over the past year. So that will tell you that supply chain is pretty important. You want to know where your pagers are getting built,” he said, to knowing laughter."
20. Overall, good episode this week. All Silicon Valley and tech news, not bad takes on politics. Why most of us were watching this show in the beginning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6HSFCQQ6O0
21. Doomberg & Michael Every discussing the end of the Liberal World Order. Question on what the West is for?
It will be a chaotic transition to a harsher and more competitive multipolar world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4650S8nkWk0
22. One of the best operators in Silicon Valley on how AI is reinventing software business models.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlQB_0Nzoog
23. "The World Wars ultimately dethroned Britain as the global naval superpower, setting it on a path to becoming the geopolitical also-ran it is today. The hegemonic baton was passed to its former colonial possession, the United States, whose Big Blue Fleet proved decisive in the Pacific Theater of World War II and served as the foundation of American power projection in the decades that followed.
The US appears to have learned little from Britain’s fall, continuing the tradition of escalatory meddling in infrastructure projects that threaten to redirect critical commodities away from American control. As the signs of an impending conflict with Iran grow increasingly apparent, examining this historical pattern provides valuable insight into predicting the modern flashpoints that could trigger a full-scale war."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/limes-disease
24. If you are a startup trying to sell to the US Military this is pretty informative & helpful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVgfuNgEfe0
25. Learning from history of tech for web 3 & web 4.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=xLX9PNmKfL4
26. Great explanation for why the American Liberal or Rules based Order is ending (or ended).
Another take on Peter Zeihan's thesis of the end of globalization due to the American retreat & declining military power. Worth watching. Idealism moving to realism as the system moves to chaos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf_HU5P_nHI
27. "History isn’t a clean ledger of facts—it’s a story, reshaped by those who want to look like its authors. Powerful players don’t just crave wealth or titles; they want us to believe they’ve always been the invisible force steering humanity. They rewrite events and relationships, planting tales of their influence where none existed. With the help of trusted figures, these lies don’t take centuries to stick—sometimes they’re accepted overnight, all because of who’s telling them.
This isn’t just old news—it’s power today, yesterday and throughout all of humanity's shared history. If we swallow these lies, we crown the liars. They define our past, our relationships, our reality. But once you see how they use credible voices to sell it, how they invest vast sums in spinning illusion, you can fight back.
Question the cop, the professor, the spy, the very information and your want for it to be true. Demand the receipts, from many different sources with competing articulations. The real power’s yours—if you don’t let them steal it. They've no power but that which we give them with our imaginations, the very same imaginations they spend vast fortunes tricking."
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/the-great-deception-601
28. "These connectors are extraordinarily talented at building relationships and are critical for pollinating new opportunities through introductions. Entrepreneurs would benefit greatly from identifying the community super connector in their city or region. A simple way to find them is to ask a friend, “Who’s the most connected person in the startup community?” Because of their natural inclination to engage, super connectors are eager to meet new people.
Every startup community has a super connector, and their role is vital in sparking new relationships that drive innovation and growth."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/05/10/find-the-community-super-connector/
29. "Even if India and Pakistan manage to climb down from the brink and avoid a protracted conflict, we should all still be unsettled. Russia and Israel are fighting non-nuclear enemies, which suggests that nuclear weapons can stabilize regions. But the fact that India and Pakistan, which are both armed with nukes, can fight each other to the degree they have — instead of climbing down like they did in 2019 — should worry us deeply.
This episode only reinforces what has been apparent for several years now — war is returning to our world. We’re slowly exiting a world of guerrillas and gangs and petty border skirmishes, and returning to the days when great powers clashed with each other regularly.
Ultimately, the reason for this is the end of Pax Americana. The power vacuum created by the decline of the global hegemon is prompting a scramble for power.
For countries not embroiled in domestic conflicts over race and identity, high-skilled immigrants will become a highly sought-after group; I expect companies to compete more for the best and the brightest, especially now that America is essentially ceding the field.
Regarding global public goods like freedom of the seas, here I’m not super optimistic. China’s leaders show little inclination to embrace the role of oceanic protector. Attacks like those of the Houthis will probably become more widespread, with the tacit support of national governments — basically, the modern equivalent of the 18th-century privateers that we now remember as “pirates”. As for global cooperation on climate, pandemics, and so on, this will sadly be less likely, given the coordination problems and the suspicions involved.
The global financial system will also see significant disruptions from multipolarity. The dollar’s dominance is already looking shaky, but it’s not clear what an alternative reserve currency would be. China could do it, but it would require them to open their capital account, which would reduce the government’s control over the macroeconomy — something they’ve so far showed no inclination to do.
In any case, even under the best-case scenarios, a multipolar world is a world of much higher uncertainty. We’re stumbling into the crisis of the 21st century, and there’s no map to navigate by. Nor do we have the same caliber of leadership going into this crisis that we had a century ago. Ultimately that last fact is probably what worries me the most."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-crisis-of-the-21st-century-is
30. A new reality: Energy, geopolitics and statecraft. Back to a zero sum world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuRs0YzDkp4&t=264s
31. The future of defense tech investing with Jackson Moses of Silent Ventures, one of the top VCs in defense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ivt8_177JA
32. "You can’t change the past. However, you can position yourself to benefit from what is coming on the horizon. The good times are going to roll again. We may party like it is 2021 again.
Just make sure you apply whatever lessons you learned last time, so you don’t make any mistake twice. That is what learning is about. That is why most of us are drawn to the intellectual challenge of investing. And we should thank the market gods for giving us another chance at such an attractive setup."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-good-times-are-coming-again
33. "AI becomes the ultimate influencer, more than a social media magnate, or an engineering luminary, or a starry open-source repo - an outsourced procurement team acting on behalf of the coder.
This example makes clear how developer tools will be selected by AI. But in a future where sales development reps are assembling data pipelines with data enrichment or email providers or website builders for account-based marketing, passive AI procurement will move up the stack.
Product-led growth companies have a new & important channel to master : AI as the Chief Procurement Officer."
https://tomtunguz.com/a-new-distribution-channel/
34. "Fourth, the air-to-air engagement casts Chinese aerospace technology in a favorable light. The Chinese-origin air-to-air missile, along with the platforms used to deliver it, appear to have performed effectively. This adds to the growing body of evidence that Chinese weapon systems must be taken seriously. While Russian technology has consistently underperformed in recent conflicts, there is no compelling reason to assume Chinese systems would fare similarly in a Taiwan contingency."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/operation-sindoor-indian-air-strikes
35. Bannon is Trump's brain, so it's important to understand what he is thinking and his views. I don't like the guy but he is pretty smart & well read.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElSybTYvXGs
36. Lots of crazy stuff here. The history of US Black Ops in Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bo04u9c5Js
37. This is a not so good person, sociopath even: Alexander Soros.
"When Soros insiders try to explain the family dynamic, they draw on the standard texts of empire and heredity. “Roman is Alex,” says a former OSF senior official, referring to Roman Roy, the sardonic failson in Succession.“Smart but fucking impossible and not particularly interested in the details.” Another Soros insider cites not HBO but the Gospel of Luke, casting Alex in the role of the Prodigal Son, who is rewarded with his father’s love despite his wayward years.
Anxiety around Alex’s selection is tied to his aptitude for leadership. Locked inside his thoughts, he comes off as a kind of Hamlet. One former Soros official says George’s decision was a “cruel kind of love to impose on Alex.” He imagined an easier future for Alex in which he had instead followed his passion for sports or philosophy. Others argue that Alex’s temperament worked in his favor. “George would say that Alex shares his willingness to take big bets, his willingness to fail,” says a different ex-OSF figure.
When I ask Alex to explain the ways he is making the foundation his own, he resists, painting the transition as a continuum. “When he would introduce me, he would say, ‘I’m the failed philosopher, and Alex is the successful one,’” he says. “I don’t think that my father would have been comfortable in any way if he didn’t see similarities, right? We’re both not the most patient people. We both don’t do very well with boredom. We’re both result-driven — we like to win.”