Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Sept 28th, 2025
"It is not the hours you put in, but what you put into the hours." - Unknown
"But for the rest of the world, Xi’s blunders and his increasingly inward focus might provide a temporary reprieve. China’s economic and technological power at this moment in history is truly spectacular; if its leaders wanted to turn that power toward conquest and domination, they could. In fact, every other great power did try to use their power to dominate weaker nations to some extent.
But if Xi Jinping spends the next one or two decades suppressing internal challengers and committing economic blunders, it could save the rest of the world from the threat of Chinese hegemony. An inward-looking, mildly sclerotic China would be a bit of a tragedy, but it would also allow countries like Japan, India, Vietnam, and Korea — and of course the United States — to breathe a sigh of relief.
Right now, with Donald Trump busy smashing everything that made the free world such an effective bloc in the first Cold War, Xi Jinping and his personal shortcomings might be our best hope to avoid domination by the most powerful autocracy the modern world has ever seen."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/xi-jinping-is-the-main-thing-holding
2. "This efficiency gain will accelerate with AI. As productivity tools enable founders to build more with less, we’ll see teams generate more ARR per employee while valuations continue to climb. The best founders are already achieving with five engineers what previously required twenty.
We’re witnessing a shift in startup financing. The small, disciplined seed round that launched thousands of companies in the past decade has been replaced by bigger rounds, higher valuations, compressed timelines, & loftier expansion expectations."
https://tomtunguz.com/death-of-small-seed-round/
3. This is truly a master class on the art of venture capital. Learned a lot listening to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-5IsqFgrZM&t=3760s
4. "The old American Dream is dead: It has been like this for a while. It will be difficult/impossible to work a single W-2 with a stay at home mom + 2 kids and white picket fence. The new reality is that you’ll be buying that house, however, you’ll be working online in some sort of internet based business (E-com, SaaS etc.).
Instead of hiring a bunch of people in Bangladesh, you’ll be hiring AI software to do the vast majority of the work. We went from hiring people to 1099/free lance to straight up “no need for anyone except AI/software unless a sales person”
If we were to leave you with anything in 2025 niche business world? The winners of the next decade are not scared of AI. They are not scared of crypto. They are not scared of new technology. They absolutely love all of it.
They are using it to scale their business. They are using it to get better returns. They are using it to survive and thrive.
Darwin was right and will always be right. It isn’t the strongest that survives, it is the most adaptable.
If you want proof that no politician is going to come along and save you? Just look at the latest schedule for money printing. Another $1 Trillion in borrowing to come in Q3."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/why-most-are-still-poor-and-what
5. "For centuries, a shadowy consortium of private bankers – the "Financialists" – have woven a global web of debt and legal chicanery, designed for one ultimate purpose: to own the world. Rooted in treaties like the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and the power shifts of England's 1688 Glorious Revolution, their system methodically stripped princes and nobility of their lands through wars, economic upheaval, and punitive laws. The prize was always the land itself, acquired not through conquest with armies, but through the silent conquest of debt."
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/the-great-reset
6. "It's incredibly difficult to be a long term successful investor.
Other than the extreme mental focus and patience it takes, you also have to be very comfortable with feeling wrong.
I don't mean feeling wrong about your personal thinking and research. I mean feeling wrong relative to the narratives that are being projected all around you."
https://mailchi.mp/d597ee5adebd/stretching-the-value-spectrum
7. A sober assessment on rare earths, energy and geopolitics here. But reality is hard, China is the one who has escalation dominance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CErnoEgiPp0
8. Interesting take. Alt-Geopolitics.
"The modern tools are sharper. Cleaner. Stealing from man and State alike. It's only a matter of scale and structure.
A man owns a building. He thinks he owns it. He holds the title. Good paper. Thick paper. But he borrowed money. Big money. The loan has covenants. Buried deep. Like traps in the jungle. His other business fails? A small thing. Unrelated. It triggers the cross-default. The big loan dies. A vulture fund buys the dead debt cheap. They take the building. They evict the man. The title was his. The debt was theirs. The debt won. Because it was enforced by guns. The State's guns. Violent property managers, are States.
These are but some of the ways how they took it. Financialists in Venice. Amsterdam. London. Wall Street. Dubai. A thousand years. Patient. Relentless. The nation-state was their shield. Their manager. Westphalia, the Glorious Revolution, made it all legal. The US model worked for some. The French model for others. And where these failed, the good ol'British Empire model would do.
Now they finish it. Tokenization. Crypto. Digital chains. They lock the debt into code. Forever. No nation-state needed anymore. The theft is permanent."
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/the-great-reset-c2
9. Always fun to listen to this alt-geopolitics from Tom Luongo. Don't agree with everything but it's an entertaining take on world affairs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ckq4NuVFls
10. "First and foremost, I would say that the speed of iteration of everything is just extraordinary. I know people think of Ukraine and drones. That tends to mean aerial drones, but Ukrainians have been innovating tremendously, also in ground vehicles and sea vehicles. And it’s not just the drone bodies themselves, it’s all of the components. It’s navigation systems. It’s resistance to electronic warfare. It’s the ability to fly in GPS-denied environments. It’s all of these pieces, in terms of the technology. The Ukrainians have really had this incredible focus on homegrown drones that they are building, the long-range drones striking deep inside of Russia.
I have to tell you, the fact that the West is not paying a lot of attention to what’s going on here is deeply alarming. The speed at which this technology is evolving, and that the U.S., Europe and NATO are all really slow. And the thing that people really have to understand is that this is how Russia and China are going to fight. It is going to be just vast numbers of relatively low-price-point things that are extremely destructive …
But in the context of the damage, just even the psychological initial damage that Russia could do in Europe, or if the Chinese send something over the mainland United States – just thousands of drones that there’s no good way to take down- as a preliminary start to some kind of a ground war. There are a lot of very scary scenarios that are out there that I am not seeing a lot of response to yet."
11. One of the best weekly discussions on Silicon Valley news with a B2B view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRJMlvxOJ9o&t=3063s
12. This is a harsh splash of reality. It's hard to listen to but reality usually is. Lots of food for thought but I have given up on America and the West yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSVOQl-vFKk
13. This is another splash of cold water on America's geopolitical & economic position. The Unipolar moment has clearly passed but our elites and politicians refuse to act accordingly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUaEUCNAIcM
14. "With Azure and Google Cloud Platform growing faster than AWS, the once-strong incumbent’s market position may lead to three equal players. The next trillion dollars in cloud revenue will flow to the platforms that best integrate AI into every layer of their stack."
https://tomtunguz.com/cloud-market-share-shift-2025/
15. "While it would be prudent to acknowledge the complexity of the US-China tech competition – not simply the story of the rise of one and the fall of the other – it is also I think necessary to look beyond it. The global tech race is often framed as a two-way contest with everyone else a mere also ran. And while it is true that there is unlikely to be a third competitor who can become relevant across the entire spectrum of new technologies, we do have hard to ignore countries and centers of excellence in specific domains coming up in various parts of the world.
Asia’s dominance of the battery industry would be a case in point. All ten of the largest battery manufacturers are now Asian: six Chinese, three Korean, and one Japanese. In the time it took me to write my new book Northvolt went from promising upstart to Europe’s best funded startup ever to a collapsed has been. When I interviewed its founder Paolo Cerruti in 2020 he was upbeat that the company could own 25% of the continent’s market for batteries which would ensure that Europe “takes a strategic part of the value of the future car in its own hands.”
The ambition struck me as realistic, even modest, given it was regional and not global in scope – which in my mind set it apart from companies in the Valley which sell far more fantastical visions. But the fact that it couldn’t deliver on what seemed to me to be circumscribed ambition shows the stranglehold that Asian players have on this corner of the tech industry."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/the-global-contest-for-breakthrough
16. "Socially engaged men face the decision of whether to cap the number of their friendships or not. My advice: Never shut down possibility. Get in the way of chance. I’m always on the lookout for new friends. As we’re the average of our five closest friends, wouldn’t it make sense that I’d want to keep expanding and upgrading that friend group?
The goal isn’t to surround myself with doppelgangers, it’s more about me learning, getting better, thinking differently. I find friends by pushing the limits. By not being afraid to put myself out there. By going beyond my comfort zone, e.g., staying home and watching Netflix. By assuming other people are on the lookout for friends, too.
Example: George Hahn reads the audio version of my weekly newsletter. During Covid, he came out with a bunch of very funny viral videos. One day I sent him a Tweet: Can we be friends? Sure, he wrote back. What are you doing now? Nothing, I said. Okay, said George, let’s grab coffee. An hour later, we were having brunch in Soho. Recently, the CIO of an investment firm texted me out of nowhere: I think we’d be great friends. Think of it as friendship cold-calling. It takes courage and resilience. If others aren’t interested, they’re not interested. If they bite, you might find yourself having breakfast or lunch with someone great."
https://www.profgalloway.com/friending/
17. "On one side, we’re witnessing the rapid emergence of exquisite systems—sensitive, advanced, and highly capable technologies. These include space-based platforms, hypersonic weapons, and proliferated sensors that stretch the boundaries of what’s technologically possible.
On the other, there's a growing demand for inexpensive, expendable materiel—drones, loitering munitions, and mass-manufactured components. Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb, Israel’s recent FPV drone swarms, and the Replicator initiative all highlight this trend toward scalable, attritable systems enabled by advanced and even federated manufacturing."
https://buildingourfuture.substack.com/p/the-split-in-the-spear
18. "We've seen this before.
When the internet exploded into everyday life in the 1990s and early 2000s, my parents’ generation had to adapt to a world that suddenly expected email addresses, online forms, and digital literacy. Many did. Some learned more quickly than others, often with the patient help of their children or coworkers. Some never fully caught up, though, instead finding themselves excluded from opportunities that assumed technological competency, like being able to send a cold email or file taxes online.
The difference now is that AI moves even faster, and its work is often invisible—it outputs a seemingly palatable information soup through a complex transformation of its inputs that we can’t precisely trace. Even if you can comfortably prompt ChatGPT, you need to parse its outputs. Unlike traditional web search, which presents multiple sources to compare and weigh against each other, AI gives you a single answer—confident, coherent, and low-friction. That ease is part of what makes it so powerful, but it also makes it easy to stop questioning.
My parents have professional-level English, yet reading through a dense AI-generated response can feel overwhelming, like trying to drink from a firehose. The simple-looking interface expects you to bring not only language and prompting skills, but a whole set of unspoken literacies: how to skim and scan quickly, how to spot what’s boilerplate AI-speak, how to steer the tool with a firm yet flexible hand."
https://every.to/p/how-i-m-preparing-my-parents-and-myself-to-be-fluent-in-ai
19. "The July 31 U.S. trade deadline has passed, and the United States has delivered its harshest blow yet—a staggering 35% tariff on Canadian goods, justified under the dubious pretext of combating illegal fentanyl imports. With the door slammed shut on negotiations, Canada faces a stark new economic reality. But from crisis springs opportunity, and Canada must seize this critical moment to redefine its economic sovereignty.
Washington's decision is not merely protectionism—it is economic coercion, weaponizing trade policy to subordinate Canadian sovereignty to American corporate interests. This is no ordinary trade dispute; it is economic warfare disguised as trade policy.
Canada has—rightly—refused to capitulate to Washington's latest trade ultimatum. But as Canadians consider this moment of backbone, we must confront an uncomfortable truth: this is not the end of American economic coercion. This is the beginning of a new phase."
https://barryappleton.substack.com/p/trade-by-threat
20. China and Open Source AI, really valuable discussion on the tech wars going on right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTqINzeudJ4&t=147s
21. I enjoy these takes on Silicon Valley news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEOpqKGHIA0&t=1398s
22. "What deals get him excited? “I've always been on the deeptech side, it’s far more interesting than the fucking commoditised software plays.”
Is European tech in a good or bad place? “I'm very bullish on European entrepreneurs. I'm not very bullish on European markets,” he says.
“The quality of entrepreneurs is going up just because there's so many more — whatever you want to call them — mafias or clusters who are able to pass on their knowledge. Silicon Valley is a state of mind , it's not necessarily geographic today.
“But boy does Europe love to navel-gaze,” he adds. “Europe has to realise that it's not gonna be the US, it's not gonna be China, and that's okay, yeah?"
https://sifted.eu/articles/michael-jackson-interview-brunch
23. "The graphic below, from the presentation, is one of the most important insights. I’ve seen in a presentation. AI capabilities grow exponentially, but companies absorb the capabilities linearly. The companies that can change their workflows to adopt AI at the pace it improves, will win."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/ai-needs-clinical-trials
24. "Today, that geographic link between energy and power—central since civilisation began—faces its deepest disruption. Solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries are maturing at the same time, allowing energy generation anywhere with basic industrial capacity. Small modular nuclear reactors, an almost mature technology, promise factory-built units that ship like heavy machinery. The constraint now shifts from controlling land to building and deploying technology.
As I’ve argued in my late-cycle investment theory, today we're generally seeing dynamics much like the 1970s. That decade saw oil markets fragment when producer nations seized control of reserves from Western oil majors. Libya nationalised in 1970, followed by Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and others. By 1973, these newly empowered producers could restrict supply through OPEC, quadrupling prices. The smooth, integrated system that had delivered cheap energy for decades shattered overnight into volatile spot markets needing new intermediaries.
Today's fragmentation follows a different path but causes similar market disruption. Instead of producers limiting supply, consuming nations are building domestic generation to escape import dependence—all while energy demand rises fast, notably due to AI. China's fossil fuel imports peaked in 2019 as renewables scaled. Europe aims for energy independence through vast wind and solar projects. Like in the 1970s, today’s transition creates profitable complexity for those able to navigate fragmented markets, volatile pricing, and shifting trade flows."
https://www.driftsignal.com/p/from-petrostates-to-electrostates
25. "Critics raise three key objections to American reindustrialization: We don’t have the time, the workforce, or the money.
They argue that fixing our defense manufacturing challenges alone will take years, require hundreds of thousands of workers, and cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
But that view looks at the problem from the wrong end. By revitalizing the sector most vital to our national security, the defense industrial base, we can spark positive ripple effects across the broader economy.
Before World War II, the US held 40 percent of global industrial capacity. Today, that number is just 17 percent, and China is the one with the dominant position.
To catch up, we must deploy advanced technologies and bold policies to reinvent manufacturing, starting with defense."
26. "Chapman’s bizarre story – which culminated in an eight-year prison sentence – is a curious mix of geopolitics, international crime and one woman’s tragic tale of isolation and working from home in a gig-dominated economy where increasingly everything happens through a computer screen and it is harder to tell fact from fiction.
The secret North Korean workers, according to the federal government and cybersecurity experts, not only help the US’s adversary – a dictatorship which has been hobbled by international sanctions over its weapons program – but also harm US citizens by stealing their identities and potentially hurt domestic companies by “enabling malicious cyber intrusions” into their networks.
“Once Covid hit and everybody really went virtual, a lot of the tech jobs never went back to the office,” said Benjamin Racenberg, a senior intelligence manager at Nisos, a cybersecurity firm."
27. "So the next time you think about startups and innovation, I hope one of the first words that comes to mind is permissionless. No permission required to invent the future. No permission required to start a business. Build a permissionless mindset—and create something from nothing."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/08/02/entrepreneurship-as-permissionless/
28. "There is widespread ignorance on the current state of American industry and manufacturing technology relative to China. Industry in the United States is hollowed out and backward. Why is this? It’s not so easy to put it under one word or concept. Environmental regulations aren’t bad: in fact the words of these regulations are quite reasonable. But they’re enforced by fanatical, stupid or malicious bureaucrats who interpret them in a way that makes building of new factories basically illegal or too costly in most of the United States, especially in places like California where the human capital and other conditions exist for very modern factories to be built. This is why it would be less costly to build factories in China or Vietnam even if you raised tariffs 300%…aside from these regulations, the introduction of advanced manufacturing technology and automation is prohibited by union regulations in most of America.
You can put all up all the tariffs you want, but until you change these kinds of things, you won’t actually have any kind of reindustrialization that matters. The extension and corruption of environmentalist norms, with which I fundamentally otherwise agree, but which now in warped form tyrannize over the American economy is a subspecies of a bigger problem, the moral fanaticism and purity tests that go a long way to explain the rot at the core of America’s functions. It’s been obvious for a while for example that oil and coal are “icky” in an aesthetic, sociological and maybe moral sense to a large section of American polite society, so during Democrat administrations the United States cuts off its own knees in those fields.
But it’s not just Democrat things: manufacturing as such violates America’s new moral sense regarding labor fairness and environmentalism, so it gets shipped off to China; energy in general as well, so off to China; America had the world’s leading rare earths mining, and it got closed and shipped off to China, with the public justification being environmental. Ditto, drones, which the FAA regulates and puts on hold to study for 15 years for noise & such, while China ends up owning the industry. America had a great vapes industry, & was on its way to high-quality vapes free of toxic substances, but it got legislated out of existence so now it imports sketchy vapes from China. And so on. What is all this? It has little to do with tariffs or trade. It’s unclear what “these things” are. “These kinds of things” consist in part of an atmosphere of moral purity tests and taboos, in part of a selection of “elite” classes that are susceptible to such: but it has to do with human decision, mindset, and culture.
In all this debate, the poor quality of America’s “elite” or managerial class, which is unserious & self-righteous, is maybe the biggest weakness, & it’s again hard to decide if this is a cultural, social, economic or political problem."
https://www.bronzeagepervert.yoga/p/american-industrialization-and-china
29. Balaji is frigging smart. He has a very dark view of America's future and culture, but he is not wrong. He has a hard take on China's future too. He is a reality shill as he says.
This was hard to listen to, just like reality is. Listen and judge for yourself. We have so much work to do to turn things around in America, Canada and the EU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-CjidoeMaE&t=6146s
30. "With smaller models, the model has less capacity to recover from mistakes, so the tools must be more robust & the selection logic more precise. This might seem like a limitation, but it’s actually a feature.
This constraint eliminates the compounding error rate of LLM chained tools. When large models make sequential tool calls, errors accumulate exponentially.
Small action models force better system design, keeping the best of LLMs and combining it with specialized models.
This architecture is more efficient, faster, & more predictable."
https://tomtunguz.com/local-instructions/
31. Elite Slovak NATO soldier and officer to joining the AFU and fighting in Ukraine. It is a good frontline view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo3TZXrRwms
32. Some really interesting global macro discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlzyDwZDYfo&t=887s
33. What a fun and educational conversation with the online legend Tim Ferriss. Recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D_AGAb_A-4&t=2728s
34. "Emotional discipline is built through investing, personal life and even as a boss/employer. There is a reason why CEOs are pretty good investors. They are good at reading emotions.
You earn all of this by surviving volatility and by getting burned a few times.
Most people simply say “I coulda shoulda woulda”. The smart ones reflect back with self awareness and say “how did i feel at that time”. If you’re being honest with yourself, you’ll recognize the emotional state you were in (either high or low) that caused you to make the bad decision.
When It Comes to Investing Be Cold and Robotic
Sound terrible? Great. Welcome to the big leagues.
Your employer would love to fire you. Instantly. You’re just a cost and impact him negatively. The only way you are valuable is if he is paying you *less* than you are making the firm. Otherwise the firm would go out of business.
Now apply this to investing. If you have no emotions, you’ll become a significantly better investor. Instead of investing based on how you feel or how the population feels, you’ll invest based on *who* is involved. If Warren Buffet just bought the stock, probably a good sign. If the guy who sold marijuana at your high school is pitching you the stock… not great."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/emotions-reading-is-more-important
35. "Warfare has always been performative — the means of actions carry significance beyond their explicit destructive effects. What distinguishes the June operations is not their performative nature, but their post-operation communications methodology. Like the “shock and awe” of the 2003 Iraq War or CNN’s coverage of the first Gulf War, the June operations captured global attention using novel tools — social media, real-time distribution, and comprehensive disclosure.
However, the strategic communication gains likely justify the costs in information. While it is challenging to fully understand the perceptions internal to the Kremlin or the highest rungs of the Chinese Communist Party, the adjacent impacts demonstrate a magnitude that would make the meaning hard to ignore. Ukraine’s revelation of coordinating 117 drones across five time zones and 4,300 kilometers of Russian territory sent an unmistakable message about Russian vulnerabilities, while simultaneously boosting Ukrainian morale and international credibility. The extent of Mossad’s infiltration into Iran likely serves to reinforce regional deterrence, rather than limit future operations.
For the United States, the complexity and distance of Operation Midnight Hammer — involving over 125 aircraft, seven B-2 stealth bombers, submarine-launched Tomahawks, and true global coordination — served to reinforce a message of unambiguous American technological superiority and global reach, with a more consequential target audience in the Indo-Pacific rather than exclusively in the Middle East."
https://warontherocks.com/2025/08/is-warfare-becoming-more-performative/