Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Oct 12th, 2025
"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower"-- Albert Camus
One of the most important new companies around. Sophisticated manufacturing for rare earths magnets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2K-g3UpaOE
2. "Cradled between the Tien Shan and Alay mountain ranges, the Fergana Valley stretches across eastern Uzbekistan, southern Kyrgyzstan and northern Tajikistan. It is one of Central Asia's most fertile regions; this lush intermountain basin, irrigated by the Naryn and Kara Darya rivers, has nurtured both crops and culture for centuries. It is also the birthplace of Uzbekistan's celebrated silk, ceramic and fruit production – a veritable holy trinity that forms the backbone of Uzbek culture.
Like much of modern-day Uzbekistan, the Fergana Valley lay along the fabled Silk Road, serving as a conduit for trade, ideas and artistry between China, Persia and the Mediterranean for centuries. In recent years, Uzbekistan has been leaning into its Silk Road roots with an ambitious new tourism drive that is seeing its historical trading hubs of Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva developing at breakneck speeds."
3. "For years we incorrectly framed some of these categories as “ESG” or “climate risk.” That was wrong. Instead of investing in Environmental, Social, and Governance, we should be investing in Global Competition and Innovation (GCI). Meeting those other goals is a pyrrhic victory if we don’t maintain our ability to operate in a contested and unstable world where rivals like China are outpacing us in critical domains.
A recent CGCI (Council on Global Competition and Innovation) report makes the stakes crystal clear. While the United States led in 60 of 64 critical technologies in the early 2000s, we now lead in just seven. China leads in 57. From AI and biotech to critical minerals and advanced manufacturing, Beijing has surged ahead — not just in R&D, but in the ability to commercialize, scale, and control global supply chains. The United States, meanwhile, remains dangerously dependent on adversaries for essential goods and technologies."
https://a16z.com/investing-capital-to-defend-the-nation/
4. Continually one of the best conversations to understand what's happening in the B2B Software space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTaf9sBqZwM
5. “The vehicle-mounted missile system is designed for asymmetric warfare,” a member of the 209th Arsenal, identified only as Colonel Su, says in the video, according to a machine translation. “In wartime, we may face enemy air threats in anti-armor missions. We’ve integrated the air-based Hellfire missile into a land-based Hellfire system.”
For Taiwan, the truck-based Hellfire system reflects a larger ongoing debate about the correct mix of traditional high-end military capabilities and more asymmetric ones to challenge the much larger and increasingly advanced PLA. For some time now, U.S. officials have been pressuring Taiwanese authorities to focus more on things like kamikaze drones, which can be acquired in large quantities relatively quickly and cost-effectively, rather than more exquisite assets like main battle tanks and attack helicopters. This has most recently taken the form of a concept commonly referred to as Hellscape, which envisions filling the airspace and waters around the island with huge numbers of uncrewed systems to try to overwhelm invading Chinese forces."
6. Military tech sectors that sound very promising for the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv3arzsorCc
7. Another good episode if you want to learn about the latest Silicon Valley news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKMFlUaICXs
8. "Most people associate crypto with speculative gamblers who are trading internet money for drugs.
In reality, major publicly traded financial companies are embracing crypto and crushing their earnings reports."
https://codyshirk.com/banking-with-miss-piggy/
9. What a great conversation. Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss' Random Show. Biohacking, tech venture investing, home and self defense, so many timely topics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lxGXwqZTEA&t=3884s
10. "Anton Verkhovodov, a partner at the Dare to Defend Democracy (D3) fund, noted that Ukraine has product know-how: what is created in our country works dozens of times better in real combat conditions than Western developments. Moreover, Ukrainian solutions cost less, and getting feedback and releasing an improved version is much easier and faster.
Developers in Ukraine, Verkhovodov said, often create new doctrines for the use of defense technologies. This all applies to "applied" technologies—drones in various fields of application, electronic warfare (EW), electronic reconnaissance (ER), communications, demining, drone autonomy (swarms, navigation, targeting), software, and combat systems. However, Ukraine lags in more fundamental developments—radars, lasers, new communication tools, and architectures for drones."
11. "Aspirational Ignorance" is the energy policy of most Western countries. Doomberg is always illuminating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxNgK4vNV1g
12. "Earlier this month, President Donald Trump issued
an executive order that encourages employer retirement funds to invest a portion of employee contributions in alternative assets like hedge funds, real estate, crypto, and, notably, private equity.
What is private equity, exactly? It’s basically when finance firms swoop in and buy companies or assets — from nursing homes to soccer clubs — and allow others to invest for a piece of the action. The industry is often criticized for extracting profit while running companies into the ground and creating an opaque, less-regulated alternative to public markets.
Nonetheless, it’s grown into a $5.3T behemoth."
https://thehustle.co/originals/how-private-equity-may-affect-your-401k
13. "As always, history provides crucial context to understand where this is going. During electrification from 1880 to 1930, industrial output rose significantly only after grids, generators, and industrial wiring were widely deployed. The invention of the dynamo alone delivered limited economic benefit. AI may follow the same pattern: infrastructure determines value capture, not algorithms or models.
My view is that few people understand this. Today's AI leaders behave like software evangelists when they should study infrastructure masters. As I'll discuss later in this essay, the real models for AI dominance are not Silicon Valley's startup wizards, but the infrastructure builders who created the monopolies and networks that defined earlier technological eras. These masters—from telecommunications to utilities to cable to e-commerce—understood what today's AI leaders miss: in capital-intensive networked businesses, infrastructure dominance beats technical superiority.
History offers a warning. When Google began building its own data centres in 2005, it assumed software excellence would automatically translate into infrastructure mastery. It didn’t. Cooling systems, power distribution, and physical security posed entirely different challenges. Google had to hire experts from traditional industries—power generation, real estate, industrial cooling—to make the centres work. Today’s AI race faces a similar discovery: excellence in one layer does not guarantee control over the stack."
https://www.driftsignal.com/p/ai-depends-on-more-than-software
14. A top episode on some very important recent topics, AI, Nvidia & Bitcoin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2Vc-NabSb8&t=2382s
15. "Taiwan is on everyone's lips and always at the center of global conflicts. A handful of factories in Hsinchu, Tainan, and Taichung decide whether data centers roll out new AI models, whether defense electronics work, and whether the global hunger for data can still be satisfied. In these clean rooms, the world's most advanced logic chips are manufactured, packaged, and installed in servers—a nervous system that thrives on designs from American companies, depends on Dutch tools, and ultimately converges in Taiwan. Without this chain, there would be no “Blackwell” era at Nvidia, no mass inference, no next wave of generative industrial software.
The political-economic punchline: both major powers—the US and China—are simultaneously dependent on Taiwan and eager to reduce that dependence. The question that arises is: will the battle for semiconductors, packaging capacity, and standards escalate into a heated conflict, or will it remain—for now—a war of tariffs, embargoes, and naval exercises?"
https://getsuperintel.com/p/ai-geopolitics-36c076f3d9dd7887
16. "I see neither a collapse of Ukrainian forces nor a loss of Russian offensive capability before year-end. Ukraine's best case is maintaining current defensive lines while building up reserves. The supply lines now function mainly through air and ground drones. The question is who will win this struggle for dominance in drone warfare in the low altitudes of airspace. Whoever wins this contest could have a major advantage in the war's further course. I wouldn't recommend counterattacks or offensives—Ukraine should focus on inflicting maximum losses on Russia while minimizing their own."
https://thehundred.substack.com/p/interview-why-ukraine-is-struggling
17. This is one of the best personal finance and personal development interviews I've listened to in a while. Recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz35xiX0SYE&t=2430s
18. "Once you accept that this is the future, you need to be careful about who you associated with. Over the long-term the world gets divided into life’s winners and life’s losers. Sounds harsh because it is.
Doesn’t matter if you’re a nerd, a jock, a combo of the two, a real estate developer, a software developer etc. The world eventually just gets shaken down into two people: 1) improving over time and 2) falling further behind. The nuances are hard to spot but we’ll try to do exactly that in this post.
Once you’ve trained your 6th sense of finding winners/losers in life? It’s time to ruthlessly cut the fat and aggressively hang out more with the winners. The cliche saying is true. You are the average of the 5 people you speak to most."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/winners-vs-losers-the-only-filter
19. "Afterall after 3.5 years Ukrainians have proven able to fight to a standstill a much superior military power, Russia, that on paper at least is multiples more powerful in terms of manpower and kit. And the fact has been that Ukraine has survived this long after being only drip fed only 3rd and fourth generation Western military kit. So the idea is if Ukraine, like Israel, was assured of the top of the range Western military kit - think of F35s et al - it would be more than able to deter Russia from future attack. It also adds the advantage of providing a front line defence for the rest of Europe.
Now combining the State of Israel defence with support from the COW (Coalition of the Willing), the idea I think is that the COW provides a backstop in terms of training and support services, but not front line boots on the ground, in the event of attack by Russia. COW provides training, intelligence and equipment for Ukraine, but Ukraine would do the fighting. The COW in effect provides a multiplier effect for Ukraine’s own arms forces. And particularly for European members of the COW the big advantage in that in investing in making the Ukrainian armed forces more effective, i.e. and more able to stand up and against Russia, they actually are investing in their own defence as obviously Ukraine is the front line for them against Russia."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/a-state-of-israel-type-security-guarantee
20. Great book recommendation for B2B Marketers.
21. I don't always agree or like the assessments here but reality is reality. Good to have your narratives challenged.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOM68g0f3_M
22. The battle for Global Domination. Geopolitics and world building.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWdDFglK20g
23. This is a smart guy. Neros: Building America's military drone industry for the warfighter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9OcRUMxAiY
24. "The United States faces a shortage of high-IQ workers, yet instead of treating international talent as resource, every immigrant is cast as a threat. Today, it can take months to years just to get an interview to visit the US. At the same time, we are deporting international students, making them feel unwelcome, cutting research funding, and, as a result, losing ground in the competition for academic talent.
Attracting global talent is not China’s strength—the world’s best would rather join the United States. But if America abandons the openness that has long underpinned its exceptionalism, it will squander one of its biggest advantages and decline into a second-rate power."
25. An insightful discussion on China and its economy and innovation. This is an important interview. Every American should listen to this. We are behind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3yAVZk3tyA
26. The clock is ticking. 36 months to make it. Time to get locked in.
This is a must watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve1L21l1GW4
27. The art of doing preseed and seed deals as a small fund. It's really an art. Learned a bunch. Recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM_HiQavFdA&t=8s
28. Some recent topics: SChamath's SPAC is back, Intel & South Park Billionaires. This was good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykx4yBevzdk
29. "On February 3, just a few days into his second term, President Trump issued an executive order calling for the creation of a U.S. sovereign wealth fund. The usual rationale for a sovereign wealth fund—investing foreign currency surpluses generated from exports—does not apply in a country with large, chronic trade deficits and more than $30 trillion of debt. But if used to finance scale production across a broad portfolio of strategic sectors, the fund could be an essential vehicle for promoting reindustrialization and economic growth.
As I wrote in the Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook, private sector investment hurdle rates (the minimum returns sought in an investment) are often well in excess of both firms’ cost of capital and the expected returns in capital-intensive strategic sectors—particularly those sectors subsidized by other countries’ industrial policies. Government interventions are therefore necessary to “crowd in” private capital, either through providing extra leverage for private investments or de-risking projects to make lower returns attractive to investors."
https://www.commonplace.org/p/how-a-sovereign-wealth-fund-could
30. The best weekly show on B2B VC and business topics. Catches the zeitgeist very well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ5AZ6bt_r8
31. "T.X. Hammes, an autonomous weapons expert and Atlantic Council fellow, said the Navy is in uncharted waters, trying to overhaul decades of tradition at high speed.
"You’ve got a system that’s used to building big things, taking years to make a decision, and now suddenly you’re asking them to move fast," he said."
32. One of the most important new companies to be established in America. General Matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2y5Lem4tI
33. A major supporter of Ukraine but Dark Star is one of the first purely defense focused VC fund in Europe.
He is right, are you truly a defense tech investor if you aren't in Ukraine?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6HZzuo8acE&t=6s
34. A must watch to understand what is happening on global macro side. Basically stocks, Bitcoin and gold will be what save your portfolio. Makes sense to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOPc2itEXbQ&t=1115s
35. Learning from history. Implications of the end of this debt cycle. Global macro at its finest.A flight to hard assets.