Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Oct 5th, 2025
"Be moderate in order to taste the joys of life in abundance." —Epicurus
The K-shaped economy. Another great interview on the art of investing. This time from a distressed asset perspective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7E9euLwWtE
2. A timely discussion on China's military threat to Taiwan, real or not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cY9UeyxStQ
3. Battery wars, electric tech stack is critical for the future. China is kicking our ass right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B9bh29wAb4
4. Know thy enemy. The CCP's PLA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tz7zEaz4Olg
5. "The fact that the Russians probably have no territorial designs on Western Europe actually makes things more difficult, not less. If a conventional military confrontation were likely, then states like Poland and Rumania could build up their forces a little, and have limited contingents from other countries on their soil. But even then, it’s clear from the Ukraine experience that the Russians would simply use their superiority in missiles and drones to destroy western forces, together with their headquarters, logistic and repair depots, transport systems and government structures, without any risk of reprisal.
But that’s not the problem: a weak and divided collection of countries with very different strategic situations and priorities, sitting at varying distances from a major military power, is going to have to find some way of preserving as much of their freedom of political manoeuvre as possible. Yet this is almost certainly going to be on a national, or at least multilateral, basis, simply because the situations are so different. In this context, we’re not talking about war, but the use of military forces as cards on the table in any political bargaining, and every state will have a different collection of cards. Some may have none.
So for countries bordering Russia, or near it, building up ground forces somewhat, and preparing defensive fortifications could make sense as a gesture supporting political independence. It’s hard to see, though, why Belgium or Portugal should do the same. Countries further away will want to invest in assets to patrol their air and maritime borders: again, not to fight, but to provide visible indications of sovereignty. The British and French nuclear systems—perhaps the only genuinely powerful political factors in European defence—are going to have to play a rather different kind of role in the future, but at the moment we can’t say what that will be.
It’s hard to see any of this being centrally organised, or indeed organised at all. Some small countries will drift towards an accommodation with Russia because they see it as in their best interests. Others will try to preserve more independence, perhaps through ad hoc alliances. NATO, and to an extent the EU, will become ghost organisations, increasingly cut off from the real security questions that will be increasingly re-nationalised.
Such a transition will be enormously difficult and dangerous, and there will be furious resistance to it by those unwilling to leave fantasy land. The conviction that if you only make the money available everything can be bought will take a long time to disappear, as will parallel fantasies of re-industrialisation and rearmament. The fact that the US and European armaments industries simply can’t produce what might be needed, though obvious enough, will still come as a terrible shock."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/it-gets-worse
6. "If you’ve been struggling to raise for a CapEx-heavy startup — you’re not crazy. The structure is broken, not your vision (most of the time).
There’s over $100B in non-dilutive capital sitting on the sidelines — ready to fund the next generation of industrial startups.
But most of it never reaches the builders who need it most.
Why?
Because we’re still asking capital-intensive startups to fund infrastructure, equipment, and factory buildouts with high-cost venture equity — even when they have real, financeable assets."
https://adastracapital.substack.com/p/stop-using-equity-to-buy-steel-unlocking
7. "Bryan urged the DoD to shift its mindset from being an industrial provider that designs, builds, and operates major systems to acting as a customer leveraging services from multiple sources. This transition would enable the DoD to operate its enterprise more effectively by integrating diverse, industry-provided capabilities."
https://defenseacquisition.substack.com/p/military-capabilities-as-a-service
8. A fun and really interesting episode of NIA this week. Lots of topical subjects discussed in cultural & creative businesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk8wExXONWw
9. Lots of topical subjects this week in Silicon Valley. Excellent takes and educational views here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chulY4futpI
10. 100 Year Pivot. Geopolitics, the end of trust & the rise of Gold and BRICs. Direction of travel is moving away from the USD system in the long run by most central banks in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abGgk1Je7bI
11. "On the front line things have stabilised. Ukraine’s manpower shortages are being fillled to an extent by the use of drones. But both sides are now engaged in a longer term battle for military industrial/tech domination. Who can outproduce the other in drones and long range missiles - tanks, and men count less.
Russia is using longer range missile and drone attacks to degrade Ukraine’s military industrial complex. Both sides are awaiting the invent of a war defining technology that can deliver the knock out blow to the other. Neither has this yet, but one could, and we are seeing really rapid technological advance.
Europe could step up and outgun/out-tech Russia, but it is still making progress at a glacial pace. Given the long term threat from Russia they should be working overtime to dovetail their military industrial production and military tech innovation with Ukraine, but they are not doing enough. That’s a lack of leadership and strategic perspective.
The two sides are miles apart in terms of their perspectives: Putin wants the end of
Ukraine as an independent entity, and that’s obviously existential for Zelensky and Ukraine. Hard to see where the compromise is."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/ukraine-dont-hold-your-breath-on
12. "As technology erodes the value of human labor, whole industries have begun treating us more like livestock. We are fattened on processed calories, churned through the parasitic healthcare system, and our attention is stripmined by addictive dopamine loops that sell us to advertisers. Financial desperation funnels us into the digital casinos of stocks, options, crypto, and sports books, while the epidemic of loneliness is monetized by algorithmic brothels flooding us with onlyfans and pornography.
Like the surplus horses after the rise of the automobile, today’s surplus humans are being recycled by the capitalist system in a form of livestock economics. We are metaphorically being ground into meat, boiled into glue, and canned into dog food.
Yarvin is right in that the calculus of power is shifting from that of egalitarianism to that of hierarchy. As technocapital sidelines human labor, the incentive to give ordinary people political power disappears. The open question now is how a system handles a growing class of humans it no longer needs. Rising surveillance, algorithmic bread and circuses, and universal basic income all point to a likely strategy of pacification, not empowerment. When liberty aligned with increased labor, freedom made economic sense. Now that human labor is increasingly redundant, system may begin to seek cheaper tools for controlling a surplus class whose labor and, by extension, political voice, is no longer necessary for the technocapital machine. And so a power struggle looms on the horizon…"
https://www.scimitar.capital/p/state-of-the-machine
13. Catching up on NIA but this is always good. Wide ranging view from the edge of the internet and the creative world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDDHoS-MNQ0
14. Crazy times on the edge of the internet. Crypto news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvUkHcB6jF0&t=485s
15. "To achieve that standard, supply and demand must be precisely balanced—too much electricity can be just as problematic as too little. A baseload power source is one that operates 24/7 at a steady, predictable output. A dispatchable source, by contrast, can be ramped up or down quickly to match fluctuations in demand.
Coal and nuclear are classic examples of baseload power, but they are not ideal for dispatchable use due to their slow ramp rates. Natural gas and impoundment hydroelectric plants, however, are typically both baseload and highly dispatchable, capable of adjusting output within minutes. Battery backup systems are dispatchable but not baseload, as they can respond quickly but cannot sustain output for extended periods without recharging. Intermittent renewables like wind and solar, both dependent on weather conditions rather than demand, are neither baseload nor reliably dispatchable.
Once these fundamental truths are understood, two things become clear. First, the ideal grid is built on a solid foundation of cheap baseload power, supplemented by highly dispatchable sources to manage fluctuations in demand. Second, a grid composed solely of solar, wind, and batteries is preposterous on its face—the volume of batteries required to provide baseload power for days or weeks at a time borders on the absurd. This is why no such system has ever been piloted at a reasonable scale: the moment it is, the flaws would become immediately and fatally obvious.
Which brings us to Australia. Over the past two decades, the country has systematically been replacing its baseload capacity with intermittent solar and wind, without meaningfully increasing its dispatchable capacity. Indeed, natural gas-based generation has been steadily declining in share. When intermittency overwhelms dispatchability, things begin to break. Armed with just this chart, an analyst with no more training than what’s been presented in this article can clearly see that a dangerous threshold has been crossed."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/the-exception-that-proves-the-rule-7fb
16. "The modern breach is compounded by pervasive and cheap ISR techniques from roadside cameras connected to Wi-Fi for early warning to overhead satellite constellations. And while these systems can be spoofed, degraded, and deceived, it’s a constant battle to poke out the enemy’s eyes while protecting yours. So you have to add even more planning and additional enabling elements to your breach. More subtasks in your operation means more things that can go wrong or threaten the operation by giving away the target.
Let’s not forget about the proliferation of precision fires from one-way attack drones armed with collection mechanisms and warheads so they can pass back intelligence to the second and third waves of strikes before they identify and strike their priority targets. This all makes breaching that much more costly and the breach site even more deadly, demanding more and more resources from the attacking force.
This is why both Ukraine and NATO nations (including the US) are researching and testing autonomous systems specifically for the combined arms breach. If we can perfect the equation for cost x mass x efficiency for autonomous systems in the breach then we can successfully restore the attacking force advantage. And as an expeditionary force, the US Army favors the attack and maneuver, rather than planning for heavy, slow attrition in the offense (defense is a different story and for another article.)"
https://www.breakingbeijing.com/p/into-the-breach
17. "If you have a world in which everyone is encouraged to be a total individualist, they tend to get trapped in that mindset. It’s wonderful when things are going well, because you, your own desires and thoughts are the centre of the world. But the moment things go wrong, you retreat into yourself. And the only thing you can trust is your own ideas. You come to believe in them intensely, because that’s the only thing that makes you feel safe. And I think that’s where we are now."
18. “European companies bring strengths in manufacturing and scaling; Ukrainian companies bring battlefield innovation and speed,” says Fedorov. “Together, we can deliver game-changing capabilities.”
For Kyiv, the program is a strategic breakthrough—a bridge between Ukraine’s frontline ingenuity and Europe’s defense procurement systems. Ukrainian tech will be integrated into the European market, co-developed, co-funded, and co-owned.
“Ukraine is definitely the new Silicon Valley for defense tech,” says Romaniukov. “We have a truly unique experience, and it would be a crime not to use this advantage and develop it.
Whether Ukraine becomes the “next Silicon Valley” for defence technology is still an open question, but the pieces are falling into place. The war has forged an ecosystem where necessity drives invention, investors are engaged, and the output is tested in the most demanding environment on Earth. Given the trajectory, it may be less a question of if than when.”
https://united24media.com/business/is-ukraine-becoming-the-silicon-valley-of-defense-tech-10494
19. "This is something we have written about before on our Substack, when we looked at the consumer market size in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan. For this letter, we wanted to take a top-down perspective on some of the sectors in Central Asia that we believe have the capacity to support multiple venture scale startups.
In a region where the majority of the economy is still early in its digitalisation and inefficiencies continue to plague the day-to-day lives of businesses and consumers, we hope that this letter will serve both to demonstrate the scale of the opportunities for prospective investors as well as to serve as a call for founders who are building or plan to build in these sectors to speak with Sturgeon.
Specifically, we are going to look at the following sectors: financial services; natural resources; logistics; agriculture; and SMEs. Others we considered were auto, real estate, healthcare and education."
https://sturgeoncapital.substack.com/p/key-sectors-on-the-silk-road
20. "In any realm of endeavor where you think short term and focus on immediate returns at the cost of long term returns, you will end up being mediocre. To get ahead you have to think about the future now and steer your ship with that in mind."
https://lifemathmoney.com/always-think-5-10-years-ahead/
21. "These conditions create a situation that resembles Nassim Taleb’s Barbell Strategy.
We increasingly have a world split between young people 1) forgoing college to pursue the trades or 2) gambling everything on digital moon shots.
Taleb writes that the barbell strategy is a “method that consists of taking both a defensive attitude and an excessively aggressive one at the same time.” Here, we see people doing maybe one or the other. The barbell economy creates its own culture:
Safety seekers: Those skipping college debt to pursue trades, finding identity in stability amid chaos. The toolbelt generation is choosing steady work over uncertain professional paths.
Digital gamblers: Those embracing the creator economy, crypto speculation, and AI startup moon shots. Finding identity in potential rather than stability.
Young people aren’t broken. They’re adapting to a world that’s fundamentally different from the one their parents knew. But their parents aren’t wrong either for feeling like the ground has shifted beneath their feet. The attention economy has created new forms of value and new pathways to wealth. The old ways of understanding ourselves and one another are straining to keep up.
The attention economy isn’t going anywhere. It’s too powerful, too integrated into how value gets created now. It’s a system, though, and systems can be changed."
https://www.profgalloway.com/the-attention-economy-and-young-people/
22. A fun discussion here. Wide ranging takes on Silicon Valley news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5Y-WZqsAlE
23. If you want to understand how banks work, how the economy works and thus why the world is the way it is. I hate Tucker but this was a great interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StTKHskg5Tg
24. "It was a stark warning from a man whose journey from besuited grain trader to bearded talisman of Ukraine’s defense is a powerful symbol of the way Kyiv has harnessed ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit to hold off a relentless onslaught from one of the biggest armies in the world. NATO is woefully unprepared for similar attacks, he said.
“We’ve already crossed the threshold of 400 drones [attacking Ukraine] per day,” he told the LANDEURO conference. “I don’t know of a single NATO country capable of defending its cities if faced with 200-300 Shaheds every day, seven days a week. Your national security urgently requires a strategic reassessment.”
Brovdi, who started as a conscript, was appointed as commander of the Unmanned Systems Forces in June, capping a remarkable rise. Swashbuckling, plain-spoken and with a controversial past, he is emblematic of a new generation of social media-savvy, nonconformist commanders rising to senior positions as Ukraine’s military attempts to rid itself of the stultifying habits of the Soviet era.
Ukraine’s drone units make up 2% of personnel but account for one-third of enemy casualties, Brovdi told his audience at the conference in Wiesbaden. His units now focus on hitting the drone operators who have made life so hard for Ukrainians on the frontline.
More broadly, he says drones must aim to kill or wound as many Russian troops as are deployed in Ukraine each month — a number estimated at 35,000. This can be achieved by creating a deep “kill zone” between the frontline and traditionally safer rear areas."
https://cepa.org/article/ukraines-new-drone-boss-and-the-kill-zone/
25. Always frank, I disagree with his take on Ukraine but agree with everything he says about America, about the useless oil sanctions, braindead European energy policy, Western arrogance and China's dominance in key industries seems spot on.
Recognizing reality is needed for smart geopolitical moves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YncOunP4GSQ&t=29s
26. "Andy Grove, the first employee at Intel and its third CEO, disagreed with this belief. In 2010, Grove explained in hindsight the damage this type of offshoring did: “We broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution… Abandoning today’s ‘commodity’ manufacturing can lock [us] out of tomorrow’s emerging industry.”
For the first two decades of the 21st century, most American companies didn’t see dependence on TSMC for the majority of semiconductor fabrication as a problem. But chip shortages from COVID-19-related supply chain disruptions in 2021 and the frenzy for AI chips after 2022 have changed the prevailing opinion. Suddenly, everyone realized it was a problem important enough to be considered a national priority.
The history of the semiconductor is the history of the United States. From inventor, to manufacturer, to consumer, to hostage. The US has had a complex relationship with the semiconductor industry historically. Going forward, it will remain the single most important building block upon which American technological independence will live or die. The only solution to dig ourselves out of our current vulnerabilities is by building an American Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ASMC) from the existing Intel Foundry business."
https://research.contrary.com/deep-dive/building-an-american-tsmc
27. "Riding the flows of the frontiers requires being flow with the leading researchers and practitioners. Getting flow from as many legit people as possible is the grind it takes to distill your own perspective on what is real and what is not. Getting flow from other VCs (particularly the bottom 75%) is akin to the childhood telephone game where any signal is quickly muddied by incoherent noise of people badly regurgitating what they heard and pumping their own bag.
Being ubiquitous across the correct information flow is a 24/7 game. Those who get a bit too rich and a bit too lazy are very quickly left behind. I won’t name names, but many of the top GPs who gained notoriety 5-10 years ago are out; they can't keep up on the technicals, are no longer relevant, and just aren't tapped in. I’ll give you a hint: today’s best are tapped into the AI research community.
So your job is to ride with the right people pursuing the right trends at the right time. And knowing who the right people, right trends, and right time is all about how smart you are, how fast you can learn, and developing intellectual taste. The best VCs will help put you on trend (but you as a founder should already be there).
If we aggregate the five variable attributes as defined above, the formula for vc goodness can be defined as follows:
VC goodness == game x insight x speed x vibe x aura
Founders: measure your VC against my formula. VCs: work on your stats against my five attributes."
https://www.geoffreywoo.com/what-is-a-good-vc/
28. The world through data and the cold eyes of energy and industry. Doomberg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmnQleZgnzc&t=306s
29. This seems like a holdover from Soviet military times. I hope AFU command is learning from this, hence the drone wall initiative.
"Ukrainian defenders will hold on to a location as Russian forces flank them like a pincer. You'd expect the pincer to close, or for the Ukraininan defenders to retreat before that can happen. But something more curious happens. The Russians forces appear to have no great appetite for taking the territory. Instead, the pincers extend, leaving the Ukrainian defenders in what is now called an "impossible salient." But as Defense Politics Asia says..."Impossible salient is impossible." At some point, you realize the guys in there are dead. Or as good as dead.
This happened again and again. Bakhmut. Adiivka. Chasiv Yar. I think Pokrovsk soon. It takes the Russians absolutely AGES to take each town. Ukrainians boast "yeah, we've turned them into killboxes...meatgrinders for the Russians." Excuse me. If you are the ones INSIDE the impossible salient, you are the one that's being killboxed. If you're the one who don't get the command to retreat before retreat becomes impossible, you are the meat inside the meatgrinder."
https://taipology.substack.com/p/war-in-our-time
30. “It has become high status to invest in manufacturing,” Christian Garrett, a partner on the investment team at 137 Ventures, noted at a fried-chicken-filled after-party downtown. Mr. Garrett said the factories that deals coming out of the conference would build would also create high-tech, “high status” jobs for blue-collar workers.
Speaker after speaker emphasized that military power flows from industrial power, which they said had been eroded by the offshoring of factories and an overemphasis on software, apps and financial products.
From the welcome by Chris Power, chief executive of Hadrian, a defense manufacturing start-up, to remarks by senior administration officials, the speeches drove home a single theme: Maintaining the country’s superpower status requires regaining the ability to produce physical goods at scale."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/us/manufacturing-tech-trump-reindustrialize.html?smid=li-share#
31. The critical importance of rare earths and the dangerous dependence on China for these.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qlz4ITakkM
32. Glad to see the US military is finally learning from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is job one. Big doctrine change is needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clvzFWa9VSE
33. "Now we operate exclusively with one gun from hidden positions. This happened for two reasons.
The first is thanks to our reconnaissance drones, which allow pinpoint targeting.
The second is that enemy FPVs and Lancet drones are constantly on the hunt for our equipment and responding to clusters of forces.
Who's winning artillery duels these days?
I'd say we are, because our counter-battery operations rely on high-precision weapons, like American HIMARS. It's also about good intelligence, especially satellite-based. On top of that, we've got lots of other tools, like various types of surveillance cameras, acoustic sensors and American counter-battery radars.
Often it's enough to detect a muzzle flash, then you can roughly locate the enemy's firing position, gather more intelligence and strike it with precision-guided weapons.
In contrast, the backbone of Russian counter-battery efforts is the Lancet drone. But a Lancet hit doesn't necessarily mean the artillery system is destroyed. Many howitzers are repaired and eventually return to the battlefield."
34. "There's something annoying about the obstinate that's not simply due to being mistaken. They won't listen. And that's not true of all determined people. I can't think of anyone more determined than the Collison brothers, and when you point out a problem to them, they not only listen, but listen with an almost predatory intensity. Is there a hole in the bottom of their boat? Probably not, but if there is, they want to know about it.
It's the same with most successful people. They're never more engaged than when you disagree with them. Whereas the obstinate don't want to hear you. When you point out problems, their eyes glaze over, and their replies sound like ideologues talking about matters of doctrine.
The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it."
https://paulgraham.com/persistence.html
35. "All of this made me wonder about competition in AI and where exception handling comes into play. If AI automates more and more tasks, most of that capability should be available to everyone in the industry. A thesis of mine for a long time has been that AI will commoditize all sorts of things as it makes expertise, automation, and assistance more widely available. What if the differentiator becomes - how do you handle the exceptions to AI?"
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/can-ai-exception-handling-be-the
36. "If you are storing the majority of your wealth in Fiat, you will lose long-term. While everyone needs money to spend, the goal is to be an asset accumulator. This means: stocks, real estate, crypto, wifi businesses, etc. Anything that goes up in value of the long-term. Assets, assets, assets!
The second step is the *most* important and the hardest to get through mentally. You must become a business owner or at least an equity builder. If you try to make it with a W-2… those days are long-gone. $400,000 for a doctor in 2000 was real money, in 2025… it is not real money in major cities with a family. Times have changed. Things don’t go back to the past.
The winners front-run money printing by owning scarce assets before the next wave of liquidity hits. This is why ultra-wealthy families don’t keep cash for the long-term. They keep productive assets (businesses, real estate, commodities, equities). They also teach their kids to do the same. Build or die."