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.”
The 3Cs of Venture Capital
Ed Sims of Boldstart VC, based out of NYC, has a great track record. I had the chance to listen to a recent podcast interview with him on “the Peel.”
Known for working with startup founders at the Inception phase aka pre-seed/ seed stage.
He mentioned how he works with startup founders. Yes, we know about the 3 key parts of finding, picking and helping. This framework is on the helping side and I found it to be really good. He calls it the 3Cs:
Cheer: when they are down & things aren’t working
Challenge: when they feel invincible
Chill: know when to leave them alone
I love it. As a trusted advisor and investor, it’s your job to be as helpful to your founders as possible. But not in the asinine “founder friendly” practice that developed in the last decade of pandering to whatever a founder wants & just being a “YES” man.
In theory, you as an investor should have other experience and pattern matching that would be helpful for the founder.
If you disagree with the direction of the startup, you owe it to the founder to speak up. Your role is to help the founders get to the best decision possible by asking the hard questions and helping them look around corners.
At minimum, it’s to do no harm and only speak on things you have experience or expertise in. If you don’t know, say so and don’t waste a founder’s valuable time.
Early in my career, I was too much on the “challenge” side, maybe a bit more brutal than challenging. But as I learned, you need different tools for different situations & different founders. This 3Cs is an excellent guide to know when and how to help as an investor.
Life Reminder: Don’t Forget That Everybody Has Problems
“Notting Hill” is one of my regular “go to” movies when I fly. It’s a classical 90s Rom Com movie starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant in the now incredibly popular Notting Hill neighborhood in London. How a hapless British bookstore owner runs into America’s leading lady and their budding romance. Funny, touching, sweet and reflective of a happier and more optimistic time in the world.
One of my favorite scenes is when the famous actress Anna Scott is invited over to the bookseller’s sister's birthday party where she meets his close friend and family: they have a lovely dinner. I wrote of this scene before in October 2024. But it’s so good and illustrative of my point..
At the end of dinner, they play a game where they describe in typically British irony of who has the worst life. Ranging from being divorced, to lack of success in work, to being disabled and unable to have kids. The friends are surprised when the actress also wants to play the game. In their minds, how bad could the life of a famous, beautiful multimillionaire actress be?
Well what she says is eye-opening:
“I’ve been on a diet everyday since I was 19, which basically means I’ve been hungry for a decade. I’ve had a series of not nice boyfriends, one of whom hit me. And every time I get my heart broken, the newspapers splash it about as it’s entertainment.
And it’s taken two rather painful operations to get me looking like this. And one day not long from now, my looks will go, they will discover I can’t act and I will become some sad middle aged woman who looked like someone famous for a while.”
Everyone around the table is taken aback and quiet. It’s so illuminating. Everyone has problems, even the richest, smartest and most successful around us. Heck, if you read Marcus Aurelius’ classic stoic book, it’s very clear. He was a Roman Emperor and arguably the most powerful man in the world and he still has many similar issues that we all face in our day to day lives.
Yet we forget this. And in this day and age where we have widespread social media and plenty of examples of great success, it seems everyone is crushing it. I feel this way all the time.
I also know from experience just like in the movie the surface is deceptive. Even in my own life, I live this seemingly glamorous life jet setting around the world, investing and conference going. Yet my home life is a mess and I regularly get hit with these dark and depressing moods.
Since my late forties, I often feel greatly disappointed in where I am in life. Despite all the money I make, I keep having massive liquidity issues every few years. I keep thinking what the heck is wrong with me that I haven’t figured everything out yet. Or how I completely messed up my family.
Then I remind myself of that scene in the movie. The life we see online and on TV is a facade. We are in the age of narrative and grifters. The reality is everyone has problems. Everyone is facing deep and dark challenges in their lives. Everyone is hustling. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.
So this is a reminder for you to ignore all the noise. Keep hustling and believe in yourself. Believe that God has a plan. And if you don’t believe in God, then believe there is such a thing as manifest destiny. Great things are accomplished and appreciated only through great struggle. So keep going.
Ichi Go Ichi E: Being Present
I had a chance to watch an interesting Japanese movie called “One Second Ahead, One Second Behind” told through the perspective of a 30 year old man and a young lady. It’s hard to describe the movie as it’s not a classical Rom-Com or Drama. But basically it’s a movie about time and our relationship to it.
The young man Sumeragai is always in a hurry, trying to beat the clock and rushing to get to the next thing. The young lady Reika is always late and takes her time. One too fast, one too slow. Both seem out of sync with the world. And really out of sync with their peers and life in general.
These modes are where many of us get stuck. We get stuck in the past and ponder situations and relationships that never worked out. We also end up spending much of our time thinking about the future. Anticipating. These are both important modes, we have to learn from the past. We also need to look forward to future events. But what matters is the present. This is where the calm and joy is. Yet I keep rushing forward and miss so much in my life. And sadly I only recognize this looking back.
It reminds me of that Japanese saying “Ichi Go Ichi E”: In this moment in time, an unrepeatable moment, once in a lifetime. There is something to this. So this is a kind reminder to breathe. To step back and be present. And more importantly, to try and enjoy the present.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 15th, 2025
"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."--Carl Jung
"When you next hear a panelist describe the “death of venture capital,” or the “exit window being shut,” think to yourself about time dislocations in venture capital, and how indexing into this set of cohorts affords the best discounts for future wins. For those investing today with a heavy illiquidity discount, all the better for tomorrow. For those considering building a company, today is the best possible time to create the future you want to exist in 5-7 years, and venture capitalists will agree.
The definitions of venture capital have not changed, but the parade of wannabes has expanded, and the death of returns greatly exaggerated. Exits still exist for those investors boldly backing zero-to-one, risk taking companies, and if the market is tight today, that only means the illiquidity discount gives you an advantage for tomorrow."
https://ideas.everywhere.vc/p/scott-hartley-time-dislocations-in-venture-capital
2. I always learn something from listening to the legendary Silicon Valley investor and founder. VK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=noY7hulblrM
3. The case for mega funds. Market and outcomes are so very much bigger. I guess we will see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkdU58cfUI0
4. "Most entrepreneurs have a viable product to sell to the defense market but are unaware of the problems their products could solve. A common mistake entrepreneurs make when entering the defense market is focusing on the product without identifying the problem it solves or the value it creates: “You should buy our product because it is the best. It is the best because it outperforms products currently being used by the government and is better than the competition.”
But decision makers and buyers in the DoD don’t buy technology just because it’s innovative–-they buy solutions that help them achieve mission priorities. So, the first “quest” is to find out which priorities and/or problems align to your product.
Reading strategic guidance like the National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, Science and Technology Guidance (Army, Navy, and Air Force) will give you broad insight into what the department cares about – for instance, “prioritizing the challenges posed by China in the Indo-Pacific region and Russia in Europe.” Broad insights are foundational for two reasons. First, it tells you what the DoD cares about and helps you begin to identify the specific organizations and people that are potential customers.
Although guidance is too vague to inform a product pitch it is a starting point for discovering who might be responsible for achieving these priorities and are potential customers you should begin having conversations with."
https://stanfordh4d.substack.com/p/selling-to-defense-levels-of-the
5. "For many quarters the dominant theme at crypto events has been “when application?” When will the first killer applications on Web3 be built? If venture capital behavior is a credible predictor of the future, they are already here.
They may not all be trumpeting the fact that a Web3 database is powering them under the hood. But that’s the point. The underlying technology is an enabler to a superior end user experience. No asterisk needed."
https://tomtunguz.com/web3-post-investment-election/
6. "Larry Summers’ quip that Europe was a museum and Japan was a nursing home was conventional wisdom just a few months back. But between accelerating European defense and infrastructure spending and Japanese corporate governance reform, these two markets are finally generating strong returns on investment and attracting capital as a result.
Diversifying equity allocations outside of the United States seems like a prudent move in this macroeconomic environment, and, given valuations, international outperformance is a trend that could continue for years to come.
But in a highly volatile environment where macroeconomic uncertainty and the risk of stagflation might challenge a reliance on equity beta alone, we also believe there are opportunities outside of equity markets."
https://mailchi.mp/verdadcap/got-diversification-1352646?e=7d2d38e1b3
7. Some simple but easy steps. Build a personal brand, get paid for things that you would do anyways, get 1000 loyal customers. (1000 raving fans).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gGFFqFFeEo
8. "As a founder, you’re paid to make decisions under uncertainty. Mastering the explore/exploit tradeoff isn’t just a clever mental model — it’s a survival skill. Know what you're optimizing for, follow the recipe below to explore intelligently, and then commit with confidence.
Here’s a concise guide on navigating this balance:
Decide on the metrics you’re optimizing for.
Allocate some amount of time to explore your options. If a decision is more important, less reversible, or involves wildly different options, commit to spending more time exploring.
Prioritize options and explore — in parallel if possible — until time runs out or you’re happy with the best option.
Double down on the best option."
https://www.codingvc.com/p/explore-exploit
9. "The big lesson here, I think, is that our intuition from previous decades is still correct: Tech people simply aren’t that good at politics. Their expertise lies in managing cold hard symbols rather than the passions of the masses, and they’re used to relating to genius engineers instead of working-class voters. They live in a world where functionality, rather than popularity, wins the day. And that world isn’t Washington, D.C.
It’s too early to tell, of course, but my sense is that the Tech Right gambit isn’t looking like a great idea. The attitude of political quietism that tech businesses adopted in the past — and which many still adopt — was probably a better strategy overall."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-tech-right-is-not-succeeding
10. Important conversation on Designing for the DoD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7ZAn9SHqLQ
11. America: the biggest self own in history. Chaos & regulatory uncertainty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaiILtkgFqA
12. This man might know what he is talking about. Ken Griffin, one of the most important men on Wall Street.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuF14oKon8A
13. Mapping the future driven by AI. This is a must listen to conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkhrEnuZi20
14. "In turbulent and troubling times, people instinctively grasp for some sort of future to believe in — some positive vision to hold on to. The U.S. and Europe right now don’t have much of a futuristic vision to offer; America continues to inflict wound after wound on itself due to its intractable cultural and partisan divides, while Europe is mired in economic stagnation and is struggling to defend itself against a much smaller, poorer Russia. Sinofuturism might not have been Western intellectuals’ first choice for an alternative, but if it’s a choice between Sinofuturism and bleak nihilism/pessimism, some will choose the former.
But what will this Chinese future actually look like, two decades or four decades from now? Here, I think there’s less than meets the eye.
This, ultimately, is what Sinofuturism is lacking — the promise of ennoblement. People now make fun of the American suburbs of the 1950s, or use them as an object of misplaced nostalgia. But if you were to look at that lifestyle — the house, the car, the TV, the telephone — you could see the seed of a way of life so appealing and so free that it would eventually become the global standard. Right now, China is a beautiful place to visit, but the Sinofuturists who gush about its neon cities and its magnificent technology demonstrate a notable reluctance to move there."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/thoughts-on-sinofuturism
15. Modernizing Warfare and Beyond from the A16Z Summit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdxGI__WRjE
16. "The Kill Chain." Still worth reading the book. Relevant in 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWgtPdmlZ4o
17. Lessons from the OG of SaaS in the emerging world of AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwQzpwZDhjQ
18. One of the most important founders in the startup world right now. Palmer Luckey of Anduril. Wide ranging conversation on the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21I_3VEs0iI
19. Grand Geopolitics. Important framework to understand where the global economy is going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrVQT6YSiTM
20. "As the world transitions once again into a multipolar landscape, the English-speaking peoples must draw upon their shared history and civilization to craft a geostrategic plan rooted in the historic Imperial Rings. This strategic approach is essential to securing a long and prosperous future for the English civilization.
By leveraging their common heritage—anchored in a shared language, culture, and historical ties—these nations can align their geopolitical, economic, and military efforts with the concentric framework of their imperial past. Though now with the United States as the core and lead of the English-Speaking Peoples. Such unity and coordination will empower us all to navigate the challenges of a fragmented global order, maintain our collective influence, and ensure enduring prosperity in a world of the restored global powers of Russia and China."
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/imperial-ring-theory
21. "The Financialists, from their Venetian origins to their Wall Street apex, have thrived by embedding the Financialist Kill Chain into empires, always moving to a new host when resistance or collapse loomed. Now, with China and Russia barring their path and no new empire in sight, they’ve turned to the Spider's Web and non-state actors to sustain their power.
Their preparation for a global Step #7 signals a structured and intended, destructive finale. Awareness of this trajectory—rooted in centuries of financial predation—is the first step to resisting their endgame and reclaiming sovereignty from a malevolent elite with nowhere left to run."
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/the-endgame-of-the-financialist-kill
22. An Alt-Geopolitics forecast. Who knows.
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/prediction
23. I was tired today so needed something so bizarre to wake me up. Some Alt-Geopolitics for inflame my brain. Some food for thought as always.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whaMYQeMHh0
24. Minerals for weapons. Blueprint for the future and goes beyond Ukraine. Not a value judgement, just a clear eyed view in a future where hard assets really matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qwHHubGEKY
25. As always a coldly sober view of geopolitics right now. Fragmentation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQd6JBbqWiA
26. Solid NIA episode this week, was pretty educational. Learned a new term too "glazed."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xytiMpZ0Gho&t=7s
27. "Illicit financial networks are like a hidden web, woven into the fabric of everyday life increasingly over the past five hundred years. Not by criminal organizations but the banks, financial institutions and governments which have devised immensely complex and sophisticated Markovian ways to launder vast sums of illicit money.
By understanding concepts like Markov Processes, Blankets, Chains, and Kernels, we can start to see how these networks operate and why they’re so hard to detect. It’s a complex problem, but with better tools, cooperation, and knowledge, we can begin to unravel the mystery and fight back against the corruption finance has become."
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/unraveling-hidden-financial-networks
28. My favorite new Global Macro guy, Michael Every. He describes a possible new world as globalization changes. "Grand Macro Strategy"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Na8cGLxK3FM
29. "These are the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints. If your users can’t leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit.
That’s why we got Jack Welch and his acolytes when we did. There were always evil fuckers just like them hanging around, but they didn’t get to run GM until Ronald Reagan took away the constraints that would have punished them for turning GE into a giant pile of shit. Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don’t get to burrowinto the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through.
In other words, the profit motive itself is not sufficient to cause enshittification — not even when a for-profit firm has to answer to VCs who would shut down the company or fire its leadership in the face of unsatisfactory returns."
30. "The personalization of the model within an application & workflow will be the ultimate moat. OpenAI’s recent leadership hire makes plain how large the opportunity is."
https://tomtunguz.com/era-of-ai-lockin/
31. "Suddenly, the cost curve has shifted dramatically down. Over time as stablecoins are the norm, I imagine some of these intermediary steps will disappear entirely. To make the market even more prepared for stablecoins, many small transactions usually have flat fees, plus a percentage fee, so if you try to sell things for low prices online, you end up losing large parts of your margin.
Consumers benefit too—increased margin makes room to drive down prices. And for users in economies with currency subject to wild valuation fluctuations, being able to access digital dollars is enormously valuable.
Because Stripe is taking on all of the compliance complexity, there is an opportunity for founders to build newly profitable companies and startups have a chance to go international faster than ever before. Tens of billions of dollars are on the table, just waiting for entrepreneurs to grab them."
https://www.gettheleverage.com/p/what-happens-when-money-becomes-technology
32. "Many assume AI’s economic upside will be captured by a handful of tech giants.
But if you’ve worked inside a place like Google, you know how innovation gets buried—under legacy code, bloated org charts, and teams too far from the frontier.
As Tom said: “AI will be the Chief Procurement Officer.”
Software won’t be sold over drinks. It’ll be selected, evaluated, and integrated by agents.
Most incumbents won’t adapt fast enough.
That’s the opportunity for founders and investors who see what’s coming.
If you’ve got product instincts, this is the most exciting moment in startup history to build."
https://www.newinternet.tech/p/when-software-buys-software
33. Inside baseball of Venture capital. Lots of great insights on the art & science of winning in VC in 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDEaCwWRal8&t=588s
34. So doing these hikes when I go to Japan.
https://www.afar.com/magazine/5-breathtaking-places-to-hike-in-japan
35. "Matt and Alex’s experience buying, operating, and growing Burger King restaurants established the playbook for everything to come. To date, GSP has raised $1.9 billion across four funds and bought 27 companies. The firm has sold nine businesses at a weighted average Net IRR of nearly 40% and is now recognized as a premier investor in the franchise and consumer services world.
They have built GSP into a sizable firm, in not only assets and businesses, but also people. They have 25 investment professionals alongside a bench of 12 operating partners, but the investment committee is small. It’s Matt and Alex. Any decision must be unanimous, whether they’re doing a deal, hiring, or traveling. They don’t do anything unless they’re both in agreement.
“Our partnership is really special. We value it as much as anything in the world, and it’s become part of our firm’s culture. We fight all the time but we always end up on the same page, and we always have fun. Even in the hard days, at least we’re going through it together,” Alex said. Jordan Garay, their first hire, explained the impact of their relationship on the firm’s culture.
“It’s very GSP for everyone to have an opposite view. We discuss, debate, then commit. Everyone commits. That comes from Matt and Alex. You’re never going to one person and asking their opinion. The fact there’s two of them creates a natural discussion, which leads to better outcomes."
“They combine two skills rarely found together in private equity. They are great fun to be around. They draw people in by being affable, engaging, and curious; we can call that great salesmanship in the field. And they have superb finance IQ—I mean, top quality. Usually, you find one or the other. Rarely do you find them together.”
Hope Versus Hopelessness: Fighting Through Depression
I am continually surprised when I hear or see that someone, usually young and successful, ends their life. This seems chronic in Hollywood, and I am seeing much more of this in sports and the business world as well. Not sure if this was the case before but we did not have social media and the Internet. Or if it was always around, we just never noticed. It strikes me as a new epidemic.
And these cases seem extra tragic because from the outside it seems like they have everything. But I guess we never truly know the pain people suffer inside. To feel so much pain in your life that it seems easier and better to just end it. What a tragedy.
“The Japanese say you have three faces. The first face, you show to the world. The second face, you show to your close friends and your family. The third face, you never show anyone. It is the truest reflection of who you are!” (Source: https://x.com/hvgoenka/status/1551101818545254400?lang=en#)
This is my situation. I show a face of optimism and energy. I highlight at conferences & do keynotes. But I’m a deeply private and introverted person, filled with rage and deep sadness like many type A individuals.
I think we are so trained by society to think that once we reach our goals and dreams, once we hit that target, that everything will be okay. That you will be happy. But like many people, I’ve learned that this is just not true.
And maybe even worse, that all the crushing sacrifices in time, family relationships and health you made to get there was not worth it.
This has been my 2020-2024. All exacerbated by deep isolation I felt due to pandemic lock downs and just losing touch with so many people.
I tried the escapism of travel and conferences. I tried deep immersion into my businesses, pushing them to levels of risk and redlines of cash flow limits. I tried materialism in buying books. I went down the therapy route as well as exercise route by getting personal trainers and joining fight training camps. I tried going to church more often. These all helped to keep the dark thoughts at bay but they kept returning.
In the darkest moments of night, when I think of the mess that my life had become I fantasize of jumping in front of traffic or taking sleeping pills and not waking up.
But then I think of my amazing daughter and the hope that we can reconcile. Watching her grow and be happy. I think of the many books I want to read. And of the ideas to explore to indulge my curiosity. I think about my beloved Japan, Taiwan and Ukraine. I think of the places in the world I’ve never been to yet like Mongolia, Bhutan, Vietnam, Nepal, Colombia, Zanzibar or Peru.
On the darker side, I tap into my deep hate and anger for my enemies. They win if I go away. One way or the other, I will see them get Rekt. There is a Chinese saying: “Wait by the river long enough and you will see the corpses of your enemies floating by.”
I think of the people reliant on me in my family and businesses. I think about this blog, my writing and the lessons I want to share. And I think of my mission and the impact I can still have on people and in the world at large. That quitting life is the worst thing you can do.
I think about hope. There is always hope. And that taking hard action can make things better. That you can eventually and always fix things if you put in the time and effort. I think about how lucky I am to have what I have: my health, my resources and family and friends all over the world. How grateful I should be. And thus, how I need to stop moping and get back to work & get back to real living. Moving forward.
If you are feeling these dark thoughts. Talk to someone. Think about happy moments in your life. Visualize a better tomorrow. Don’t give in.
As Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings says: “There is always hope.”
Insomniacs After School: Living is Impact
I watched a lovely Japanese movie based on a comic book about two teenage insomniacs Isaki & Nakami whose illness brings them together. It was fun and surprisingly life affirming.
They start an astronomy club at their high school on a lark but end up really committing to it with gusto. Setting up a night watching event and even going to the mountains to take special pictures of the night sky.
On one of their adventures, they meet an older man who tells them:
“Human existence doesn’t disappear that easily. Proof that they were here doesn’t disappear. That’s what I believe.
For instance, You say something and you forget. Even if you forget, the other person remembers. It happens to me all the time.
Every time it does, I realize I exist everywhere. In the earth. In the scenery. In the night sky. We’re etched in their memory.”
What I get from this is that everything we do matters. Every person we meet. Every little thing we do. How we live. And how to live with inspiration.
A word of advice given to the aspiring photographer was “Press the shutter when your heart flutters.” It’s not the simple, trite advice of following your passion but it’s doing things that speak to you. Chase your curiosity. Do more things that spark you and give you joy. Live life to your fullest because life is fleeting. We should all remember this.
The Lord of the Rings: A Timely Reminder and Tale of War
I think we all have watched the movie series or even read the books by Tolkien. It’s a story of men, dwarves, elves & hobbits standing against rising immense evil in the world. It’s a story about sacrifice, honor, adventure and friendship. It’s about ordinary people doing heroic things despite their fears. I still rewatch this series. It's so evocative of the times we live in.
“There is no time. War is upon us.” I can’t help but feel this is true right now in the world. Wars run across the world, the enemies of the West are united against us. Yet our governing elites and most people have no clue about the threat we face and how unprepared we are.
But I still have hope. That if we wake up in time we can face this threat.
There is a scene when one of the characters Faramir is sent on a suicide mission by his lord and father. The townspeople throw flowers on the ground in front of them as the soldiers grimly ride out of the gates. knowing none of them will be coming back. His friend implores him. “your fathers will has turned to madness. Do not throw away your life so rashly.”
Faramir answers: “where does my allegiance lie if not here.” It’s such a powerful scene. Loyalty, honor even if it means your death.
There is another scene when the mounted warriors of Rohan ride to fight orcs who are coming to attack their women and children. They fight them off at great cost. On their return, the king’s niece says: “So few. So few of you have returned.”
The king responds: “Our people are safe. We have paid for it with many lives.”
I think this is why I admire soldiers and warriors so much. They put themselves in harm's way to protect us. Sadly we seem to be coming to this time soon. Maybe Lord of the Rings holds some lessons for us that evil wins in the world when we do nothing.
Which is why so much of my focus now is on geopolitics, investing in Defensetech, helping ramp up our industrial and manufacturing base, personally learning fighting and tactical skills. Anything to help America and our allies in Asia and Europe build deterrence & protect our way of life. We have to protect the shire. “If you want peace, prepare for war.”
I leave this with a quote from King Theoden: “If this is to be our end, then I will have them make such an end to be worthy of remembrance.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 8th, 2025
"Chaos is the law of nature; order is the dream of man"--Henry Adams
"I was personally hands-on with a half-dozen founders in my portfolio who were fundraising in Q1 and many more through mentorship programs like Creative Destruction Lab. Almost all of these companies successfully closed their funding rounds — and they should have, because they all had strong, high-potential businesses.
But not all of them got the valuation they wanted.
The biggest difference? Whether or not the founders ran a tight fundraising process.
In my experience, there’s a direct correlation between how easy it was for a founder to raise their initial round of capital (whether it be friends-and-family, angel or Pre-Seed) and an over-confidence going into their Seed or Series A round. Founders who raised their first round quickly and with minimal effort often underestimate the effort required to raise true institutional capital."
2. I hope everyone hears about the Imaguru story in Belarus. These are good people and hope we can help them.
3. The Manufacturing renaissance in America (despite the Tariff wars).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgo0jTdN8Eg
4. "What happened in the 1970s that seemed to rob the future from the Boomer generation? Energy. With the end of cheap oil in 1973, and the failure of nuclear power to get cheaper as volumes scaled up, the dreams of the sci-fi authors of the mid-20th century failed to materialize. Those dreams had partially been based on fantasy physics (faster-than-light travel, gravity control, time travel), but partly they were based on the expectation that energy would keep getting more plentiful and engines would keep getting more powerful and compact. But in the 1970s, humanity suddenly stopped being able to harness more and more energy per person.
Limited by energy scarcity, humanity’s innovative efforts switched from atoms to bits; “
technology” in 1970-2010 was defined by computers, software, and the internet. In 2011, Paul Krugman and Tyler Cowen were writing that the appliances in their kitchen hadn’t changed since they were children.
Science fiction writers anticipated this shift quite early on. The “cyberpunk” writers of the 1980s and 1990s — William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Masamune Shirow, Bruce Sterling, Mike Pondsmith, Kojima Hideo, Konaka Chiaki, Vernor Vinge, and many others — didn’t envision a future entirely devoid of hardware innovations, but most of what they envisioned for the 21st century centered around advances in the internet, AI, robotics, and biotech.
That was the future I grew up expecting — a neon-drenched, mostly earthbound world where humans would mingle with robots, escape into digital fantasies, and modify their bodies. Instead of bold space explorers firing ray guns at alien conquerors, the heroic figures of my fantasies were hackers and street samurai, battling the nefarious plots of shadowy corporations, insane billionaires, and dystopian surveillance states."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/welcome-to-the-future
5. This was insightful, educational and just plain fun as a conversation on the state of VC and startups. Worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ncnpYtJCNQ&t=391s
6. Winning the war for the future. Wide ranging and interesting conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMgPTMM2Gzs&t=1850s
7. The what's up in Silicon Valley this week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkEI3csOHGQ
8. "Eleven months into the pandemic, Warren Buffett wrote in his annual shareholder letter, “Despite some severe interruptions, our country’s economic progress has been breathtaking. Our unwavering conclusion: Never bet against America.” This statement was based on a set of assumptions that our checks and balances protected the U.S. engines of growth (risk aggressiveness, rule of law, IP, university research, attracting premier human capital). Over the past 100 days it appears we’ve taken these things for granted, and I now believe it makes sense to bet on other regions.
Over the long run, I’m bullish on America, as there’s no better platform for unleashing human potential. The question isn’t whether to bet against America, however, but at what valuation? BTW, if a human was engineered to be the polar opposite of Warren Buffett, they’d look strikingly similar to Peter Navarro.
The Great Rotation isn’t as much a bet against U.S. equities, but simply the recognition that U.S. equities are overvalued relative to those of Europe and China.
As Brand America shifts from prosperity and rights to oligarchy and corruption, I distract myself with a great American pastime: wondering how I make money here. The greatest own-goal since Brexit/Iraq/Vietnam is underway, and, as in any disruption, there is an explosion in Alpha. It’s fun and (again) helps distract me from watching the pillars that provided me with a life my immigrant parents couldn’t imagine crumble. It helps. Sort of."
https://www.profgalloway.com/the-great-rotation
9. This was a crazy yet also fun conversation. Net net: drones on the battlefield are scary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRe_8k9Lah8
10. This should keep most Americans up at night.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtLsyH-2xg0
11. This is a must watch for VCs and LPs. Definitely a master class in how venture capital works and what's happening now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VCSi7F1j0o
12. Actually this really makes sense. Buying a farm as a city entrepreneur.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x54ojJ9ttxI
13. As a history guy, this was a great run down on the growth of Silicon Valley, changes in Venture capital and A16Z themselves. The rise of a monster sized VC & the insights they had in building the firm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpBDB2NjaWY
14. "Sales has always been a critical role for entrepreneurs. Nothing happens until someone, somewhere, is sold. However, we’ve all encountered a founder who failed to convince us of a product’s value or worth. They couldn’t transfer their belief.
As an entrepreneur, I recommend reframing the concept of selling as transferring belief in your solution and vision. Belief comes from a deeper, more meaningful place, carrying greater conviction. A sale can feel superficial or transactional. Moving forward, focus on transferring belief rather than just closing a deal."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/05/03/the-power-of-transferring-belief/
15. Your regular tinfoil hat Alt-geopolitics review. Don't agree with most of this but it's important to listen to non mainstream narratives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcPuq3iiyiM
16. This is depressing but facts are facts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW6k9z8OCEQ&t=3s
17. "This gets to the part that really interested me: how financial and technological leverage determine which wars break out in the coming decades. In a multipolar world, wars occur at the seams between larger blocs. Yet so far in the 21st century, it is comparatively rare that the two sides in a war are supported by opposing geopolitical blocs—wars such as Ukraine, and to a lesser extent Syria, are the exception, not the rule. More common are wars like Libya or Nagorno-Karabakh, which did not directly touch on core US interests and where both sides are friendly to America; or Iraq, where a US-aligned coalition attacked a diplomatically-isolated country.
Even if the world remains fundamentally unipolar, then, supply-chain diplomacy may create smaller de facto blocs. Access to weaponry remains one of the fundamental prerequisites for a state’s war-making capability, and increasingly complex weapons supply chains will continue to stretch across multiple countries. It is obvious how this creates potential chokepoints for the end user; less obvious is how those chokepoints incentivize broad alignments—such as Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Israel in the Nagorno-Karabakh War—that have both the industrial capacity to fight a war and the collective diplomatic clout to prevent outside interference. And, given the outsized advantage that a secure supply of outside weaponry can generate, a world with more chokepoints may paradoxically incentivize more wars."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/book-discussion-on-chokepoints-american
18. Lessons from history from Sarah Paine, one of the best historians around. Lots of implications for geopolitics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcVSgYz5SJ8
19. "Unfortunately, the US has focused its global efforts on actively managing, militarily and through economic sanctions, its version of the ‘global order.’ It has been at the expense of growing its trade relationships. This global order is falling apart as US interests diverge from the standards it developed during the Cold War, leading to expensive military adventures and dismantling the international organizations it painstakingly built to manage this sprawling network.
The other nations that are involved in this multipolar conflict;
All are self-interested. Since this war isn’t a systemic conflict primarily focused on network influence, coercion of these nations will be resisted.
China’s focus on ‘trading with all’ in contrast to America’s ‘we are in charge’ has levelled the playing field regarding influence.
Some, like the EU, see themselves as contestants on par with the US and China despite their dependence on US security and Chinese-manufactured goods."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/framing-a-conflict-with-china
20. I like Mike Thurston, creator extraordinaire. He discusses living in Dubai, it's NOT my favorite place but lots of people seem to like it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftv9Td2TSKA
21. "The U.S. isn’t just helping Ukraine. It’s creating a blueprint.
I would not be surprised if every country that benefits from the US military, especially resource-rich nations, will see a version of this deal coming their way.
Aid, in exchange for access. Weapons, in exchange for minerals.
Let’s not pretend. The United States has the biggest military and economy in the world. But real power—the kind that lasts—comes from controlling resources.
Right now, China holds a very strong hand. With 90% of the global rare earth supply, they have leverage over the entire world. If the U.S. wants to break that grip, it needs alternative sources.
That means locking down friendly governments with untapped mineral wealth, like Ukraine.
Because under the surface, it’s never been about politics or speeches. It’s never really been about democracy or peace.
It’s always been about control.
Resources are the game board. Everything else is just the packaging."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/ill-give-you-the-sticks-you-give
22. "The irony of it all is that Japanese entertainment represents one of the few things a fractured America can agree on. “The primary uniting force in this country is anime,” posted the pop star Grimes, Elon Musk’s ex, in February. “It's the only media through line that I can reliably observe regardless of political alignment.”
In other words, Japanese fantasies are helping to hold American society together at the moment. Those fantasies naturally encode different values, different ways of looking at the world. They’re much-needed escapes, but also quiet beacons for diverse ways of thinking. Their continued popularity amidst the chaos of it all gives me hope that years from now, when America gets through this crazy time, we’ll be talking less about the manosphere that divided us than the Japanosphere that united us."
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/boys-vs-girls-japan-vs-america
23. "By limiting cash, government significantly increase the control they can exert on people by forcing us to live within the digital ecosystem of banks they control. And by being forced to transact in this system only, governments can also wield the power to cut us off from our only way to exchanging money in the modern world.
It’s a power they are increasingly using to de-bank people who are critical of our rulers.
But without cash or when its use is restricted like what’s happening now in Europe, removing someone from the banking system or freezing their assets in this manner would be simply devastating.
In other words, it’s the perfect threat to ensure we comply. It’s a device of ultimate control. Because if we’re forced to live in a society where our use of cash is trampled upon, the government controls our very ability to survive in the modern world."
https://anticitizen.com/p/are-you-paying-attention
24. "In the end, Europe’s key problem in rearming is that, while its demographic, economic, and industrial outlook is clearly better than Russia’s over the medium to long term, the short-term prospects currently favor Russia. And if Europe fails to act, it is the short term that may ultimately matter."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/forward-presence-or-forward-defense
25. "As with many early stage tech bets, perhaps we are wrong. But what if we are right? What if, 6 months after its invention, everyone everywhere has access to superintelligence and the ASI itself is not an advantage? Where do you want to be invested, and what assets to do you want to have?
That is the main question we have been asking ourselves."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/our-most-controversial-thesis-open
26. "McCarthy’s partnership with Sheridan has made Paramount+ a real competitor to streaming services from larger companies such as Amazon, Apple, Disney and Comcast—of course, it doesn’t hurt that the service carries CBS’s livestream of the NFL. Paramount+ has been the fastest-growing streamer in the US for the past couple of years, and over the last six months it’s had more top 10 streaming shows than any service but Netflix and Amazon. (Sheridan is responsible for them all.) Which is why it’s a weird moment for McCarthy’s time at Paramount to possibly be coming to an end. Barring a Trumpian twist, Ellison will take control of Paramount before the end of the year. While he plans to keep McCarthy’s co-CEO and friend, George Cheeks, McCarthy and fellow co-CEO Brian Robbins are expected to depart.
Sheridan, who says McCarthy’s handling of the franchise was “extremely shrewd,” tells Bloomberg Businessweek, “I sure hope that if this merger takes place, they have the foresight to keep him. I don’t know of another executive that I could do this with.”
McCarthy, though, says he hasn’t given his future much thought. “I’m tired of reading about us,” he says, referring to 18 months of merger speculation. Later, he adds, “Weirdly, I’m the most comfortable with uncertainty.”
McCarthy is an unlikely architect of one of the biggest franchises in Hollywood."
https://archive.ph/2dfza#selection-1605.0-1643.80
27. So much to love about Japan. I'm doing the Nakasendo hike either later this year or in spring 2026. Business and work is great but sometimes you need to get out to nature to reset.
https://www.afar.com/magazine/visit-japans-post-towns-on-the-nakasendo-trail
28. Learning from Sequoia Capital. 50 years of success.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oYXDK9xhb4&t=121s
29. Geographic Alpha.
"And while we have come down from the 2021 ZIRP infused madness, to today’s more sober reality, our focus remains the same. We back simple businesses, offering products real customers value and pay for, and who do not blitzscale. Yes, “camel startups.”
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/introducing-fluent-ventures-and-geographic
30. "Mr. Buffett's parting gift to a conflicted and over-extended investment industry could be the gift of simplicity. As we enter what my friend Grant Willams calls the 100-year pivot, perhaps we might consider returning to the plain-old investing that Mr. Buffett has practiced for sixty years.
Perhaps the image of a solitary Warren Buffett, turning pages in a book of thousands of public equities to find a few qualifying investments, will remind us that the key attributes of successful investing are patience, wisdom and ethics, not the size of your team or your access to influential members of the Chinese Communist Party.
A return to plain-old investing alongside partnership with our closest ally could cure what ails many of our most elite institutions. What a boon this would be from a great American."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/warren-buffett-and-japan-turning
31. Not a fan of this guy Cyrus who is CCP shill but he is definitely spot on re: what a mess this Tariff war has caused in US & around the world. The trust and brand of America has been severely tarnished.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxOBXW1ghqI
32. "Between 1927 and 1938 over one-hundred German military officers assisted the Chinese Kuomintang under five different directors. The last of these, Alexander von Falkenhausen, had trained alongside Kurt as a cadet and became his supporter.
Their mission was to professionalize the Chinese military, establishing military schools modeled after the Kriegsakademie, and Kurt, an expert in military engineering and munitions, was assigned to Nanking after arriving in Shanghai with his family.
Kurt’s plan, if you can call it that, wasn’t unique. Some of the other officers sent to China were what the Germans classified as "Mischlinge"—individuals of mixed Jewish heritage—making the mission an escape route for Jewish military members fleeing an increasingly Nazified Germany."
https://walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/a-german-officer-and-jew-in-1930s
33. "AI won’t transform defense unless we bridge the gap between capability and application. These Seven Patterns offer a blueprint—for commanders, acquisition leads, and technologists—to map real operational needs to proven AI strategies."
https://buildingourfuture.substack.com/p/the-dod-doesnt-know-how-to-apply
34. Pretty instructive discussion on what is going on in a hyper competitive VC market and how to adopt as a VC.
The Age of Austerity: Getting Lean & Mean
I read a very interesting article by Eric Newcomer on Silicon Valley bad boy Chamath Palihapitiya.
“Forbes doesn’t seem to have called him a billionaire since the SPAC frenzy in 2021. It seems highly unlikely that he is one. (To be sure, Palihapitiya is almost still certainly very wealthy by any normal standard. And his challenges may mostly amount to liquidity problems given that much of his wealth is tied up in private investments.)
Palihapitiya has openly discussed his belt-tightening on the All-In Podcast.
In January 2023, he talked about looking at his household spending. “I haven’t really looked at my household budget in 2 or 3 years — didn’t even bother. Then when I looked at it, I was like wow this is really inflated to a level I didn’t even expect. It makes a lot of sense to live in a more heads down, austere way.”
In June, he said on the podcast that he “flew public” by taking Southwest Airlines.
I’ve learned that last year Palihapitiya quietly sold his expensive private jet.
His public letter to investors last year called this an “age of austerity.” (Source: https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-dictator-chamath-palihapitiyas)
Why?
In his latest investor letter published this week, Palihapitiya wrote, “While 2023 was full of challenges, we are near the end of the hard reset from zero interest rates. After a decade of low rates and rising valuations, many of the tailwinds that benefited us as technologists are now gone. Instead, disruptive change via advancements in AI and reshoring of critical industries are reshaping how companies are built.”
The net net: the world has completely changed. In technology, geopolitically, economically. ZIRP is over and cheap money is gone for a while at least.
But we all got fat and lazy during the decade of 2012-2022. What a nutty time. Maybe not as nutty in tech as the dotcom bubble in the 90s, but nutty in every sector to the point that historians will call it the “everything bubble.” Add in the chaos from the Liberation Day tariffs implementations, it’s hard to predict where the world or economy is going. Now it’s payback time for regular folks like you and me, the billionaire class, cities, states and even countries who got used to fat tax income and big budgets.
We are entering an age of austerity. We need to be cutting back budgets and reprioritizing everything we are doing. At all levels of the government, at companies and businesses and in our own lives.
I’ve done this myself. Starting to classify what is critical and what is a luxury and thus unnecessary. Cutting back on unnecessary travel in 2025, like to Europe for example, cutting out conferences that I normally would have gone to. I’m using the hard filter of ROI, if it’s not paid or fully covered, nor in a strategic mission that is core to my business, it's out. If it’s not part of my personal goals and contributes to my health or wellness, it’s eliminated from my schedule. Only travel kept is for Canada, Taiwan and Japan because these are strategic or deeply personal due to family stuff. Otherwise, I am completely focused on the core. Anything Non-essential is gone.
I fully expect that we will be entering tough times financially, physically and mentally, so these actions will be a big part in shepherding my resources to weather the storm. And so I can come out the other side stronger. Kind of like a UFC fighter going into quarantine, training hard for an important fight that is coming up soon. Word to the wise.
Being Off Your Game: Coping & Recovery
You ever have a feeling that you are out of synch and feeling slightly off. I believe the term is discombobulated. I’ve felt this repeatedly since 2020. But especially from June 2023 through to most of 2024. A feeling of going through the motions but barely awake. A fugue state. Basically I was operating like all the zombies I see around me.
Why? I think the setbacks in my family life compounded with frustrations in my business led me to do what I criticize others of doing. Hiding. Not behind drugs or alcohol but keeping super busy with conference speakers' life, random consulting projects and such. Activities that look like you are doing stuff but things that make zero difference to fix the core business or your family. Confusing activity with achieving results. It’s a dangerous form of escapism so you don’t have to face the truth.
That as smart as I hoped I was, I still ended up making many decisions that were suboptimal and taking actions that were just 5-10% off. This adds up overtime. I’ve realized I’ve lost a lot of momentum in all aspects of my life.
But life kicks you hard and wakes you up eventually. It’s like a cold painful blast of the Baltic ocean after a hot sauna to jar you to reality. It was not until I faced up to reality that I was able to start taking small actions to fix things. Bit by bit.
So I finally cut most of my non essential trips and conferences outside of one's I previously committed to. Limited to the top events and just a few a year for 2025.
I focused on the small 20% of things that matter in my life and business. Really doing more exercising and training. More reading and writing. Trying to spend more time with the family. Taking care of my portfolio companies as well as my present and future fund & hold co investors/LPs. Anything not additive to these activities, I cut out of my life. Essentialism. Back to basics. Focusing on the core. Focusing on what is important.
This was how I got my life back on track. Or at least in the right direction it seems. That’s a good start at least.
The New Chivalry: Being a Modern Knight
I think every young male is entranced by medieval knights and chivalry: the western version of Bushido. I grew up reading about medieval knights and their adventures. Who did not enjoy the stories of King Arthur and the knights of the round table. Riding around saving damsels in distress or tilting after imaginary dragons.
The reality is that knights were brutal, killers who traveled, fought and feuded with their fellow knights. They lived and died brutally. Usually young too. Remember this was in a day where medicine, nutrition and cleanliness was not well known. But with time, like with everything, we end up glamorizing their lives.
No one did a better job of this than Geoffrey de Charny who codified chivalry in a book called The Book of Chivalry.
He was one of the few who lived the ideals. The was the knight of knights. One who every noble looked up to. And no surprise, not only was he a true gentleman, honorable, cultured & educated, he was an incredible warrior.
Charny was a literal one man wrecking & killing machine. I wonder if the word “charnel” did not come from him, that is how good he was. He was eventually killed in the battle of Poitiers holding up the flag of the French King. But it took 20+ top English knights, men at arms and squires to take him down. And he ended up injuring and killing many of them as he fell. Honestly, what a way to go. A true warrior's death.
De Charny wrote: “He who does the most is worth the most.” I love this. He/She who contributes the most and adds the most value should get the most value back. This is why capitalism works.
Yet somewhere along the way in modern life and organizations this has been lost. Yes we should protect the weak and less advantaged but we shouldn’t venerate them. It’s like when people misunderstand the biblical saying that “the meek shall inherit the earth.” Meek does not mean weak. Meek means someone who is strong but chooses to hold back and control themselves.
Chivalry Guild writes about this: https://twitter.com/ChivalryGuild/status/1789733767747092919
“Good manners are good and fine. They're an important aspect of the larger vision, and I'm all for them. But you can’t take the aspirational parts out of a code and then expect it to still speak to hearts of spirited men. Holding doors open is easy. Becoming a man of serious vigor is not. Chivalry is a code for men willing to fight, willing to risk themselves for a worthy cause. This is the vision that moves a young man. A knight who can't or won't fight is not much of a knight, no matter how refined his manners. “
We need to bring chivalry back. Where there is a code of honor. Where martial skills are venerated. Where effort and action is rewarded and the lazy and weak are disdained. Where leaders actually lead from the front and stand for something. What a world that would be. And in a world that is breaking down fast, this may be needed soon.
I’ll let Chivalry Guild finish:
“What was true of Charny's country in the 14th century is just as true of our country in the 21st. Flabby men are unequal to the challenges ahead. We’ve slowly forgotten that a man’s purpose begins with his ability to confront the dangers of life, to protect his own, and to fight for what matters—and that the failure to cultivate this ability invites all sorts of troubles.
So a revival of chivalry, it starts with rediscovering prowess. Those who would be chivalrous must commit themselves to becoming physical specimens, like the heroes whose muscle protected Christendom in times of great danger and gave Christian civilization a chance to flourish.”
Amen to this.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 1st, 2025
“There is no sin except stupidity”--Oscar Wilde
What an interesting idea. A Militarized REIT.
"The problem for our dying towns and cities, therefore, isn’t that recovery is impossible. Rather, it’s that they often can't afford the investment levels and police presence necessary for a Greek Town-style rebuilding, and because of that have trouble attracting new residents that would spark a revival of sorts by providing the resources necessary for it. It only works in a sliver of Detroit because a few wealthy company owners bought up real estate and demanded employees move back to town, which generally isn't replicable.
That gets to the militarized REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust, or a company focused on developing and running a specific sort of real estate) idea: what if you had an East India Company-style, well-capitalized company that provides security and government services in the Western manner, in exchange for rents and limited liability for its owners.
Such a company could take advantage of situations like that in Baltimore, where the city government is willing to sell abandoned homes for a nominal fee if buyers will move in. Right now, buyers won't, because of the danger; if you could provide safety for the purchased area, and subsidize the cost of living in such a situation, people could move back. So, the problem is not finding opportunity, but how to provide security, and make it desirable and profitable?
Providing that opportunity and security is what a militarized REIT could do."
https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/what-about-a-militarized-reit-that
2. "In other words, neither investors nor manufacturers themselves believes in the long-term reindustrialized future that Oren simply assumes will come about. Instead, it appears that tariffs are dramatically accelerating America’s deindustrialization.
And if that’s true, Cass’ other arguments all go up in smoke. Who cares if people like working factory jobs when there are fewer factory jobs to work in? And so on. Every defense of the tariffs is based on this assumption of reindustrialization; if, as looks very likely, that turns out to be a fantasy, the whole edifice collapses.
Oren Cass and other tariff-defending pundits have thus hitched their wagons to a stagecoach that is driving straight off a cliff. They have managed to remain inside the favored circle of the MAGA movement, but this required them to make a terrible sacrifice — they lost their freedom to look out the window and see the calamity unfolding."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-pundits-dilemma
3. "The new normal is a market environment where every unit of inventory carries an opportunity cost. The winners will be those who can squeeze even just one more dollar from their inventory. The operators who can maximize the value of inventory to accrue as much cash as possible are best positioned to weather the storm."
https://newsletter.equal.vc/p/inventory-apocalypse-20
4. "When it comes to worshipping mammon (money), I suspect that investors will stay true to their religion. They will buy yield. US Treasuries may temporarily sell off while all this restructuring of cash flows, assets, and liabilities, and overall rules of the game are going on.
But America is a master of restructuring a deal that has gone wrong. Americans are masters at reinventing themselves and launching new businesses. Everywhere I go, I hear of new ventures being launched as people seek to take control of their future in the US. Notice what The WSJ points out: Trump is a disaster in the headlines everywhere, but not in the data.
The moral of the story is to know your schisms, be surer of your chosen catechisms, and hold onto some gold."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/schisms-and-gold
5. "Ignorance of the macro is not a virtue." Macro helps your micro. Bridging the gap between science fiction and science fact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us58WjbknsI&t=2031s
6. Billionaire Defense Builders. Don't say Dual Use. The story of Anduril. It's a really insightful convo here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPOjD0RxX_k
7. "The next time Trump presses the tariff button – which he will do, to ensure nations respect his authority – he will be able to ask for additional concessions, and Bitcoin won’t get crushed alongside certain equities. Bitcoin knows that the deflationary policies cannot be sustained for long, given the insane levels of current and future debt the filthy financial system requires to operate.
The ski cut of Mt. Sharpe World, produced a category 2 financial markets’ avalanche that could have quickly escalated to category 5, the highest level. But team Trump reacted, changed course, and put the Empire on a different aspect. The slope’s base was solidified upon using the driest dankest pow pow made of crystalline dollar bills provided by treasury buybacks. It’s time to transition from the slog up the mountain carrying a backpack filled with uncertainty, to jumping off powdery pillows, yelping with delight at how high Bitcoin shall levitate.
As you can tell, I’m very bullish. At Maelstrom, we have maxed out our crypto exposure. Now it’s all about buying and selling different cryptos to stack sats. The coin purchased in the largest quantity was Bitcoin during the dip from $110,000 to $74,500. Bitcoin will continue to lead the way as it is the direct beneficiary of more fiat dollars sloshing about due to future monetary liquidity injections provided to soften the impact of a Chi-Merica divorce. Now that the global community believes Trump is a madman crudely and savagely wielding the tariff weapon, any investor with US stocks and bonds is looking for something whose value is anti-establishment. Physically, that’s gold. Digitally, that’s Bitcoin.
Gold never held the narrative as a high-beta version of US tech stocks; therefore, as the general market collapsed, it performed well as the longest-standing anti-establishment financial hedge. Bitcoin will shed its association with said tech stocks and will rejoin gold in the ‘Up Only’ cuddle puddle."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/ski-cut
8. "Japan’s corporate governance reforms, which began with Abenomics about a decade ago, have made notable strides. But the TSE’s recent directive signals a meaningful shift—from procedural compliance to outcomes-driven accountability—and the momentum is clearly taking hold. The durability of this corporate renaissance now hinges on whether more companies are willing to break from outdated norms and adopt a capital allocation mindset aligned with shareholder value.
Ultimately, the TSE’s initiative isn’t about valuation multiples for their own sake. It’s about prompting a reckoning in Japanese boardrooms—about what it truly means to be a public company, the responsibilities that come with access to investor capital, and the role listed firms play in the broader allocation of financial resources across the economy. The P/B ratio may be a blunt instrument, but it remains a telling one. And the market has made clear: it stands ready to reward those who rise to the challenge."
https://mailchi.mp/verdadcap/diverging-destinies-in-corporate-japan
9. "I suspect that Trump’s ultimate agenda could be aimed at returning the United States to Alexander Hamilton’s American System of political economy and away from the British free trade system. The difference is that the American System allocates credit for industrialization and productive ends while the British free trade system credits nonproductive uses aimed at inflating, then bursting asset bubbles. Abraham Lincoln's chief economic advisor Henry C. Carey contrasted the two systems in his 1851 work, "The Harmony of Interests"
https://alexkrainer.substack.com/p/is-trump-actually-taking-on-the-bankers
10. How Great powers self destruct.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT3hoxOwtgQ
11. "It is right and proper to revere and venerate our ancestors — not because they were wiser than us, or because they ruled over great empires, but because they struggled up out of the animal muck into which they were born. They put their shoulder to the wheel and kept going, day after day, through all the sorrow and hardship, and they never quit.
Our ancestors were not wise kings and majestic emperors. They were filthy apes who dared to look up at the stars. That struggle is your blood and your heritage, and it is greater than any empire that has ever existed.
The proper way to honor that legacy is to emulate it — to build more, to keep struggling upward in the present day. To believe that we live in a fallen world is to disgrace every one of our forebears who worked to give us a better future. Instead, we should stay on the path they set out for us, looking forward instead of back.
Squabbling over whose people “built America”, and trying to keep out anyone who doesn’t spring from that stock, is a fool’s errand; instead, we should be welcoming and encouraging the people who will keep building America tomorrow, no matter what part of the globe they hail from. Fighting over whose ancestors were greater is useless; instead, we should resolve to create a great line of descendants. Rather than restoring our societies to the (real or imagined) glories of the past, we should expect to build our societies to peaks never imagined.
That task is what we should take pride in. That is what we owe to the future, and to those who came before."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/you-are-the-heir-to-something-greater
12. "The database that records your financial transactions might seem like an invisible technical detail, but as assets move to blockchain databases, the implications for investors, startups, & the entire financial system will be profound & hugely positive."
https://tomtunguz.com/tokenization-ipo/
13. Lessons from building Mischief VC, a true founder driven VC fund.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Ym_n9fhSk
14. George Friedman has been right more than wrong on geopolitics. Worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmmyLzlELz0
15. "The autocrats have a simple plan: tear everything down and give them control. Let them use technology and artificial intelligence to optimize our lives, realizing efficiencies through the consolidation of power. They decide who's a terrorist and who goes to globally centralized prisons and concentration camps. Indeed, are we not already here?
While it is possible that we may, through some combination of luck and leadership, throw off the convergence infection for a short time, we are unlikely to vanquish it permanently. The only solution is to outflank it with a new vision for global democracy. This is so far outside the Overton window as to be unthinkable crazy talk — for now. But will that still be true in a month, a year, a decade?
Convergence starts slow, and then gains speed as the poles begin to meet. Things are moving so rapidly now, it's likely we will face a series of destabilizing events such that won't know what has happened until after it's occurred.
Consider this a warning, and a call to action: we must start thinking about what comes after the United States in its current configuration — indeed, we must start to design America 2.0, and be ready to counter authoritarians with a truly better vision of a democratic global future."
https://america2.news/convergence-is-here-and-were-not-prepared/
16. A wide ranging conversation on the state of venture capital and startups. It's rough out there. Environment really matters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgcrazZ3YmU
17. Grim view of the stalled Re-industrialization process in America. Trump Admin has fallen down here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3UxkOG-wzQ
18. A very sober conversation on tariffs & free trade. USA is shooting itself in its foot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPfE5SS7fc0&t=8s
19. Trump trade deals. What trade deals? What a mess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v25aMhjKqQ
20. Ian Bremmer: Decline of rule of law, Chaos and uncertainty under Trump. Not good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLtb9HVNY0I
21. Fascinating conversation. How to understand how people and the world works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3cdPis--kU&t=11s
22. Be the mountain, not the storm. The what's up in Silicon Valley news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYoEmqM24b4
23. Surviving the DoD Meat Grinder for defense focused Investors and startup founders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tlGWpzOxbU&t=1s
24. Always direct and sometimes controversial but always smart takes on venture and startup land.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXDrl_yyWJo
25. A very educational conversation on how CCP won China and implications for today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l3Sa8ImGFQ
26. Always sober conversation on geopolitics from one of the best historians of our generation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yot-L8X8XC8
27. "Similar to a mob boss, the president has created an incentive system to keep everyone in line. Donating $1 million to his inauguration fund, nodding politely, publishing a (bullshit) press release about a “massive” investment in domestic manufacturing, and staying quiet is the way to go … if you know what’s best for you and your economic interests. I’ve heard firsthand that CEOs at the biggest companies agree — in private — that Trump’s policies are dangerous and stupid. In public, they cower. They keep their heads down and their knees bent, fearing retribution or hoping to profit.
The fastest-growing, and possibly most dangerous, class in America is what I’d label the Transnational Oligarchs (“Togarchs”). The Togarch has no use for the government once Uncle Sam’s check has been cashed. The charging stations are built, and the government-sponsored technology is already stitched into their offering. The rule of law, regulation, tax system, and public infrastructure that paved the way for their billions is now a liability for their “genius” — an obstacle to paying no taxes or worrying about the damage their product(s) levy on others.
They have little vested interest in the things the government does or why it requires their tax dollars. Their wealth, comparable to that of a nation state, yields its own sub-infrastructure: private schools, health care, security, and rights. Overturning Roe v. Wade or rounding people up poses no threat to them. If shit gets real, and someone in their life becomes pregnant or people show up with pitchforks, no bother. The Togarch will always have access to mifepristone or residency in Dubai, London, or Milan. In sum, they’re no longer Americans. The Togarch class is growing and slowly co-opting Fortune 500 CEOs to join their ranks."
https://www.profgalloway.com/breaking-the-silence/
28. "Everything compounds—from money to relationships to knowledge and beyond. The key is to start investing time and energy now. Build a process through consistent inputs and habits, and after many years, you’ll reap the rewards. The best time to start is today."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/04/26/everything-compounds/
29. Sarah Paine is one of the most erudite historians from the Naval War College. This was a very informative conversation. Learning how to operate geopolitically from history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbkO84MsmyM&t=3800s
30. Solid overview on what it takes to be at the top.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zBa_qEZZe0
31. "Our numbers look about right. If you’re getting punched in the face right now, so is everyone else. We’ve got a rough estimate of 15% for the average decline in demand. There is always some crazy trend (Pistachio chocolate for example) but the general rule is about 15% plus or minus 5%. This means if you’re down about 10% you’re probably gaining market share. If you’re down 5% you’re *definitely* gaining market share.
Vast majority of people are not built to sustain pain and get greedy (as we’ve seen time and time again). This is great news for you as the female buying patterns have already shifted. We already mentioned press on nails, mainstream finally caught up to mushrooms (source) and you already know the step by step on how to test demand.
As usual, people give up at the first sign of weakness. Similar to how they get greedy when things are going up. Do the opposite.
Right now if you can find a product in any of the following that makes money, we’re near certain you’ll be a deca-millionaire. While crypto/tech all have bright futures, thinking that a meaningless $200K in any of those assets will make you rich is comical (at best). Using $25-50K to build into one of these niches could net 8-figures."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/selling-to-gen-z-women-wtaf
32. "Most prefer to doom post. They won’t even bother trying anything. 90% of businesses fail blah blah. Reality is that $1M is attainable by simply putting in effort. Anyone who disagrees, just do yourself a favor and delete their contact info.
You don’t even need good timing.
People *choose* to be millionaires. Or they choose not to. It’s lack of priorities that set them back. Go into Tech sales, Tech or worst case scenario Wall St (secular decline). Immediately (not later) start a boring side biz that can be a product or consulting. The second you get your first $1 we promise you will already see it.
At this stage, you are no longer shipping all your money back into the business. We’d wager majority end up making $150-200K online. This has been the rough average in the jungle from our glance in the background.
Everyone has a different belief system but the same concept is this, ship into appreciating assets: 1) other e-com/biz flips, 2) Real estate, 3) SaaS or 4) the aforementioned secular trends.
Create that Money Making Machine = Put in $1 get more than $1 back. Keep spending until it is no longer green."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/how-the-rich-avoid-massive-taxes
33. Short but important discussion. Why we need to utilize AI in our defense industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooMXEwl7N8Y
34. Mercenaries, the world's oldest profession. Expect a major resurgence of their use now.
The Long Sword: The Middle Ages of Wisdom
I am an amateur historian and I truly believe one of the best and most enjoyable ways is reading historical fiction. Christian Cameron is one of the best because he does extensive research on the time periods and regions he writes about whether it is about Alexander the Great, or the time period of war on the steppes in the post Alexander periods.
He is an incredible writer and comes into his own when it comes to the Middle Ages in his series of the medieval knight Sir William Gold as he fights his way around France, Italy, Greece, Germany, Prague and the Holy Lands during the Middle Ages.
Through his 6 book series we see Sir William Gold turn from a young boy, bandit/routier, mercenary, squire, then decorated knight and war hero. It’s a grand adventure filled with interesting characters found during those tumultuous times. It’s a fine story not just because of the fighting and descriptions of the amazing cities and culture of the times but watching William Gold evolve, grow and mature.
One of my favorite passages of one of his great moments of growth:
“There are moments in life that are as definite as battle. As stark. There are moments when you see things as if they are outlined in scarlet, when truth is illuminated, when a man’s character changes because he understands something heretofore hidden, for good or for ill.
We remember with pleasure the achievements of some goal: the wife, the treasure, the golden spur, the Emperor’s sword. But in our secret mind we know that some of the red letters that mark our days were not achievements but discoveries.”
Every moment of joy and happiness in my life was a learning experience. But the most impactful thing was when everything went to crap. Going through hell in 2001 during the dotcom bust. Getting Rekt financial and emotionally in 2020 and the scars of the pandemic lockdown which ruined my family. Horrific times that still stay with me.
A rough 2022 with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Family issues, challenges in the business. But these challenging moments were also moments of tremendous growth and insight. I learned about myself, I learned about people and friends, I learned about how the world works. And I think I retained my optimism and enthusiasm for life, trying to squeeze in as many moments of joy. Just like William Gold, I am trying to get better and live better. And like William Gold, I never gave up and never will.
The Zen Diary
This excellent movie is about an older Japanese widower living in the mountains who writes and cooks seasonal vegetarian foods based on old monk recipes and his experience growing up in a zen monastery.
Surrounded by gorgeous mountains and natural landscapes, he eats what the season and the earth provides at the time. Nothing is wasted. Learning from his dad and his old monk masters he says: “food was more delicious, it was from the resourcefulness of a poor man.”
He lives in zen. “Life becomes complicated when you anticipate the upcoming days. I should be content to live each day.”
“Living in the hills, working in the fields and cleaning the house, I learned through my body that movement is life. With the changing season there’s more to do in the field. Daily life involves physical labor and that makes you hungry. Hunger improves the taste of food.”
This movie is another example of beautiful Japanese food porn. “The food we eat comes from the soul of the earth and over time, the earth and tastes intertwine.” The exquisite food shown. Wow.
Japanese food is the absolute best and I think this is the case because of the care put into them. It’s not just the technique and freshness of the ingredients, even though these are amazing. The difference is the love, intensity and care of the cook. He prepares the food according to the old traditional ways.
“As zen master Dogen instructed in his writings, the monk in charge of cooking should rinse rice and prepare vegetables with his own hands at all times. Give your full attention to the ingredients and treat them carefully. Not neglecting them for a moment.
Be consistent and Immerse yourself in every process. Don’t see the preparation as an ordinary function.
Changing your heart or words depending on the situation won’t lead to enlightenment.”
The attention to detail, the care, this is why most people I know love Japanese food and why it’s so hard to replicate in other places. That unique mix of fresh unique ingredients, the technique of masters and the deep attention to detail in making the food that only really exists in Japan.
This mentality also carries to almost everything else the Japanese dominate in: crafts, service & hospitality and of course manufacturing. If you have never experienced Japan, I highly recommend it.
Takano Tofu: A Family Business
I’m Taiwanese-Canadian/American with a deep love of Japan so of course I love tofu. I grew up with it. So of course, when I saw the description of “Takano Tofu” movie on the plane I had to watch it. It’s a story about an aging father and daughter who run an exquisite tofu making business in a small port town of Onomichi. A literal tofu craftsman, making perfect tofu with pure ingredients in the traditional Japanese way.
It’s a great and classical tale. The traditionalist, idiosyncratic father who doesn’t want to change anything and the younger daughter who wants to try some new innovative takes on the product or new sales channels like selling their tofu in Tokyo.
There was a time in the movie where he ends up fighting with his daughter and she leaves the home. An old man’s stubbornness and pride gets in the way of happiness. I recognize that in myself. I recognize that in my daughter as well. He realizes he is wrong and he apologizes. It was touching.
The story goes deep into the art of making delicious tofu. Watching the process makes you want to eat it and also drink the soy bean milk they make. It’s what we used to drink for breakfast in Taiwan. So much better than milk.
“The tofu you make, it’s got a fine texture yet it’s soft…..a little sweet. It melts in your mouth as the bean flavor spreads….leaving just a hint of the beans essential astringency. Only you can make it. It’s the flavor of who you are.”
And the joy on the faces of those who eat the tofu. It reminds me of the look I see on people’s faces when he in all the various Japanese food movies: steak, cake, ramen, sushi. Joy and happiness. That is what great food does, it brings joy and happiness. Maybe that is why I love going to food paradises like Japan, Taiwan and Italy, as well as great food cities like Montreal, Vancouver, New York, LA and others.
I’d love to run a business with my daughter. I spend so little time with her and seeing her grow up to be this fine young brilliant lady is one of the greatest joys of my life. How great it would be to work on the business together. One day perhaps.
There is a great quote in the movie when the father is talking about surviving the war, “that was certainly a terrible thing but it’s not an excuse to be unhappy. We live on so we can look back and laugh. That was a great time and I was damn happy.”
The point of the movie is that you are never too old to try to find happiness. It’s good to have someone to live for. It’s good to have something to live for. Having someone who cares for you. We should all realize how fortunate we are to have family & friends.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 25th, 2025
“Chaos, when left alone, tends to multiply”--Stephen Hawking
End of the age of debt and death of the global trading system we all know and love. Massive uncertainty and Global macro changes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c31cSvX_UG0
2. "Slightly more behind the scenes, another fundamental force is reshaping how technology scales in this new economic paradigm, putting pressure on the traditional venture capital model: debt.
From transport fleets (Zenobē) to digital infrastructure (CoreWeave) to energy storage (Base) to manufacturing (Hadrian) to clean fuels (Twelve) to aerospace (ISAR) – debt is playing an increasingly key role in the capital stacks of the most promising emerging companies. For companies deploying valuable hard assets – batteries, modular robotics, CNC machines – asset-based lending is emerging as the wedge to unlock scalable project and equipment-level finance, allowing these companies to grow at venture speed while consuming far less equity capital.
These hard asset businesses are increasingly built and valued on bundles of cash flows rather than revenue multiples, requiring an entirely different approach to capital formation across the company lifecycle. And while several early movers have begun to break through, the holistic financing models best suited to systematically support and scale this model remain fragmented and underdeveloped.
The even greater challenge comes in bridging these two worlds under one roof – the venture market dreamers and the credit market pragmatists – to create not just unique positioning but an integrated capacity to transform how emerging industrial technology scales.
The answer to Larry Fink's question of "who will own" the $68 trillion infrastructure boom will increasingly include Production Capitalists and the companies they finance and shape.
By removing transaction costs, unlocking information asymmetries, and reducing friction from the capital formation process, these firms will accelerate the deployment of critical technologies at precisely the moment when speed of implementation matters most, and where existing financiers will prove unable to cope in the face of increasing complexity.
The firms that successfully embrace this capital orchestration role will not only generate superior returns by manufacturing their own alpha, but they will also become critical enablers of the infrastructure revolution essential for driving the next era of economic growth and competitiveness in Western economies."
https://venturedesktop.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-production-capital
3. "Ghosts are popping up everywhere. The long-suffering workers of China who make those beautiful luxury handbags have been like ghostly apparitions, silently toiling away on perhaps not much more than slave wages. Now, thanks to Trump’s tariffs, we hear these ghosts rattling those heavy handbag chains on Tik Tok, crying out from their graveyard shifts for customers to know their true role value creation. We see the ghostly reminders of the World Wars as Germany and Japan re-arm, and the youth of Europe on Instagram telling us how excited they are about conscription and national military service.
We see mysterious spectres buzzing in our skies and over our most important military facilities and know, deep down, that everything is not fine. AI-driven stealth ghost ships without human pilots now silently ply the world’s waters, skies and airways.
Even the nation state’s spooky dark side, which usually lurks in the shadows, is increasingly visible, a living phantom that continues to practice its dark arts in the open, even though the President is revoking their security clearances as fast as he can (even revoking those of entire law firms). But, the corpses are piling up anyway."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/american-ghost-stories
4. Instructive conversation from a GP at Benchmark. Very interesting convo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHuAsfyHHD0&t=1666s
5. "How bad is this debt crisis? It’s too early to tell. But as former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers explained, what has people most scared is the real-time erosion of the American-led economic order. Our reputation as a bastion of strength and stability, with our dollar and Treasuries representing safety, is in jeopardy. Increasingly, we resemble an emerging economy, where a crisis in confidence sends stocks, bonds, and currencies down and spikes interest rates.
“If the United States isn’t credible, that makes the whole financial system less stable,” Summers said, adding, “we are more vulnerable to bad surprises from here than to good surprises.” One potential bad outcome? A stagflation cocktail of high interest rates, low growth, and high unemployment. This week, Fed Chair Jerome Powell warned that Trump’s trade policy and the resulting uncertainty may put us in a “challenging scenario” in which the Fed’s dual-mandate goals of maximum employment and stable prices are “in tension.” That’s Fed-speak for: This could be a clusterfuck.
With 4% of the world’s population and 25% of global GDP, we have a debt to our allies, who’ve engaged in relationships that provide roughly 6x the prosperity relative to the rest of the world. However, that hasn’t been enough, and we’ve accrued unsustainable debt. From George Washington through George W. Bush, we borrowed $10t. During the first Trump administration, we borrowed $8t (Biden was $4t). We find ourselves ignorant of our debts and in a prison of our own making — a giant with feet of clay, ignorant to our vulnerabilities. In sum, we (America) are acting like assholes."
https://www.profgalloway.com/united-states-of-debt/
6. "Instead of expensive centralized systems, Europe should prioritize decentralization. Small, networked autonomous systems that can be quickly deployed and adapted to new threats should be the focus.
Cost asymmetry is one of the biggest issues in modern warfare. Drones are cheap to build but expensive to stop. Many air defence systems still use high-cost missiles to destroy low-cost targets. A Shahed-136 loitering munition—used by Russia and Iran—costs around $150K–$200K. A single Patriot missile to intercept it can cost $3–4 million. Meanwhile, Ukraine deploys thousands of FPV drones, often costing just a few hundred dollars, to disable multi-million-dollar systems.
This is where Europe has an opening. While the U.S. can afford high-cost tools, European countries must be more resourceful. We can skip over legacy systems and focus on cheaper, more relevant tech. Europe could spend $800 billion on traditional weapons or a fraction of that on modern systems and still achieve similar results.
Countries like Poland, Finland, and the Baltics are preparing for asymmetric warfare by investing in drones and mobile strike capabilities instead of relying only on heavy armor. Smart spending on drone interceptors, precision-guided munitions, and AI targeting can level the playing field without overspending."
https://www.resiliencemedia.co/p/europes-defense-needs-a-reboot-to
7. Best show in town on Silicon Valley news and trends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esDwl-PRVgI
8. "Meanwhile, it is hard to see how anyone preoccupied with enhancing American global power — particularly, relative to China — could be pleased with Trump’s first three months. By violating the terms of America’s existing trade agreements — including some he personally negotiated — Trump undermined our nation’s diplomatic credibility. And by imposing across-the-board tariffs on core US allies, he led European and Asian powers to consider the possibility that China is the more stable and reliable global superpower.
In recent days, the Trump administration sought to rally America’s allies into a united front against Chinese trade abuses. But it is struggling to mount such an alliance, according to the Wall Street Journal, because “many European and Asian partners aren’t sure to what extent they are still allied with Washington.” Rather than becoming more adversarial to Beijing, some in the EU are calling for the bloc to end its cooperation with American efforts to starve China of cutting-edge technology.
Finally, the Trump administration is jeopardizing America’s access to the most fundamental economic resource: skilled labor.
Among the list of pro-growth policies that Andreessen and Horowitz endorsed in their “Little Tech Agenda” last year was an “Expansion of high-skilled immigration to encourage foreign graduates of American universities and others to build new companies and industries here.”
But Trump has done the very opposite, exiling foreign students and recent graduates from the United States, thereby discouraging others from immigrating to the country."
https://www.vox.com/technology/409256/trump-tariffs-student-visas-andreessen-horowitz
9. What a masterclass in venture investing. Neil Mehta of Greenoaks Capital. Legendary returns and approach. Learned a lot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=502sB_IbjpQ&t=3661s
10. "The 10X Operator will be someone who treats AI tools as extensions of their own capabilities. They’ll habitually use AI copilots and agents to enhance productivity, creativity, and decision-making, and their first instinct for any challenge will be to leverage AI.
Being “full stack” will no longer imply you know how to code, but that you know how to command an army of AI workflows.
As AI agents take over more executional work, the role of the human shifts.
You’re no longer the individual contributor, but instead the orchestrator, managing hundreds (or even thousands) of AI agents to bring ideas to life.
Taste → Knowing what great looks like.
Judgment → Evaluating AI outputs with nuance.
Decision-making → Choosing the right tools, workflows, and strategies to execute effectively.
But AI doesn’t understand cultural context, intuitive design, or the small emotional cues that build trust. That’s where humans come in.
In a world that will inevitably be overflowing with content, products, and data, the ability to curate and sift through the noise will be invaluable."
https://www.andrew.today/p/the-10x-operator-era
11. "By 2025, the situation has changed fundamentally. Ukraine now fields hundreds and even thousands of indigenous long-range strike capabilities. These systems are less sophisticated and less lethal that Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG and Taurus — particularly against hardened targets — but they are far cheaper. This changes the calculus. If Taurus is delivered, Ukraine would be able to reserve it for those targets where pinpoint precision and lethality truly matter, while saturating less complex targets with existing domestic systems.
As noted above, the precise impact of Taurus remains difficult to predict. Still, there is a strong case that the cumulative effects of delivering Taurus in 2025 could be greater than if deliveries had taken place in earlier years.
Overall, the conclusion remains unchanged: Taurus should be delivered to Ukraine as quickly as possible. The case for delivery is arguably even stronger now than it was in 2023 — both militarily and politically. Moreover, if the delivery serves as the final trigger to restart cruise missile production in Germany to replenish transferred stocks, it would bring additional long-term benefits for European defense."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/taurus-redux-the-return-of-the-zombie
12. "If one AI can develop an integration into another AI, well, then those two systems can talk together seamlessly irrespective of changes within API specification, network communication challenges, state management issues, historical problems that have plagued integration.
This sets the startups up well for the next generation of protocols, including model context protocol and agent2agent. AI generation of those interfaces further separates startups from incumbents.
With fast integrations, startups can shorten sales cycles and be among the first to build and deploy a complete AI architecture."
https://tomtunguz.com/integrations-as-advantage/
13. "My recommendation to entrepreneurs is to identify a vertical they or a colleague know intimately and consider building a comprehensive application that replaces multiple existing tools for that target customer. By leveraging AI, cloud infrastructure, and open-source technologies, they can deliver a fully integrated solution at a fraction of the cost."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/04/19/the-rise-of-ai-powered-vertical-saas/
14. "When we think about the worst-case scenario for Trump’s economy,1 we shouldn’t just think about the worst possible effects of his current policies; we need to think about how much damage he could plausibly do with additional bad moves. We need to skate to where the proverbial puck is headed.
Don’t get me wrong — Trump’s tariffs are already very bad, and will cause grinding deindustrialization, a macroeconomic slowdown, and possibly higher inflation. They may even cause continued capital flight, which would raise U.S. borrowing costs, hurt the economy even more, and make the national debt less sustainable. We’re already on the path to some bad economic outcomes, and it’s not clear how bad they’ll get, even if we don’t make any big additional mistakes.
But that’s a very big “if”. In my post about capital flight, I outlined two nightmare scenarios for the endgame of Trumpian economics: a sovereign default and spiraling inflation."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/worst-case-scenarios-and-endgames
15. What an insightful and incisive conversation on YC with Garry Tan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4KcYTMC1lM&t=141s
16. Very important to understand the bond market and implications for America and the global economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVk5Xpd9cvg
17. These two have long been part of the "America Bad" school of thought (I dislike them).
But they are not wrong this time about the end of American leadership in the world due to the badly thought out Tariff strategy and general capriciousness. American self own here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWvKs_XWZQs&list=PLgfli1PY64h3bpPsycG1E1PquoujN9wII
18. Some tinfoil hat Alt-Geopolitics here. But this definitely breaks the common narrative in the media. Helpful to understand the world we are in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjiZUkayyCY
19. How to build a long arc of an interesting career. How to be relevant for a long time. "Lifelong Doing." So many different paths to the top.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkwBD3ueOt4&t=362s
20. How to be "high agency". This is a must watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVl5FLRuGXI
21. There is no financial risk, there is only ego risk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXMTbeCM-9Y&t=1s
22. Lots of great investing wisdom from my friend Sven. Happy 50th!
"It's worth repeating this point over and over again, because it's so easy to speak about this yet so difficult to actually do it.
If placing a buy order doesn't make you break out in cold sweat, it's probably not a real contrarian investment.
Following, analysing, and capturing the zeitgeist, or "spirit of the age", should be one of the most important priorities for investors.
Once the zeitgeist changes, so do investment fads and valuations.
The combination of an investment theme getting back in fashion and its valuation multiples expanding can have a powerful double-effect on your investments (and the other way around). It's these major turning points in dominant narratives that can make for the biggest investment opportunities."
23. "One of Jordan Peterson's best ideas is that the human brain is not adapted for specific environments but for Order and Chaos. No matter where you are, there is stuff you understand (therefore control)—and stuff you don't. Climate changes, eras flip over, Order and Chaos remain.
This explains why all ancient cultures told stories around chaos: dragons, floods, supernatural beings intent on mischief. And similarly, all ancient cultures venerated heroes who would restore order in a troubled world."
https://oldbooksguy.substack.com/p/jordan-petersons-best-idea
24. "For example, a sci-fi magazine that accepts submissions is overwhelmed by AI generated stories. And some community colleges are overwhelmed by bot based submissions for admission.
My question today is - when this happens to every corner of the internet, and every type of content, what does it mean for investing in AI?"
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/investing-against-ai-multi-modal
25. "the truly proactive crawl all the internal info about the company and find ways to make it better. they manage their boss -- their boss never manages them.
they push initiatives forward without waiting for permission and own problems as if they were the CEO.
they think beyond their role and contribute to long-term company success.
they spot patterns in company operations and prevent issues before they arise.
they take responsibility for results, not just effort"
https://auren.substack.com/p/ultimate-employee-the-one-that-is
26. "There is a teaching here that transcends history. When faced with a task of enormous cost or a decision clouded by uncertainty, the best path forward may be to eliminate the possibility of turning back. Only then can one summon the clarity, resolve, and ferocity to see it through.
If we leave the door open—even slightly—to giving up, we risk sabotaging ourselves. This holds true for life’s most consequential choices, whether by nations, companies, or individuals. Even for something as trivial as a New Year’s resolution.
When we take a bold gamble, sometimes the best way to follow through is to create conditions where retreat is no longer an option. In that moment, the will to power thrives, and so does victory."
https://www.businessofpower.com/p/burn-the-ships
27. "The Internet has recently been flooded with content of a de-dollarisation of the world economy. Combined with the subject comes the usual plethora of reporting about the end of the US as a superpower, its coming bankruptcy on the back of spiralling debt, and similar predictions.
It reached a point where I asked myself: "Is being short the US dollar such a widely held view that it's worth heading the other way?"
If you have been around for a bit, you'll understand why despite all the well-deserved criticism and the need to be vigilant about a potential change to long-term trends, it's also worth spending a bit more time looking at the counter-arguments."
https://www.undervalued-shares.com/weekly-dispatches/usa-the-unstoppable-juggernaut/
28. "Given the fiscal and political mess that Trudeau has left behind and the resulting broad discontent in Canada one would expect that, like in any functioning democracy, the opposition would clean out the election and comfortably cruise to a win. Not so in Canada where fear mongering and obfuscating the truth is a time tested campaign tactic that has historically serviced the Liberals best. This was about to come to an end with an easy Conservative win - as per the polls - until Donald Trump unleashed his torrent of tariffs and accompanying rhetoric of making Canada the 51st state.
It was all the Liberal Party needed to scare the living daylights out of Canadians. And by putting forward the indeed seasoned Carney as the economic genius who would guide Canada to ride out the storm, it turned all polling data and electoral logic upside down. With one week to go to election day the race is now too close to call and the Liberals may eke out yet another win.
The fear apparently is so deep that, and I just have to scroll my social media pages, that the most hardcore left wingers are now arguing the merits of Carney’s bond trading strategies and economic smarts. This is a guy who made his bones at Goldman Sachs. It is unreal to see how to public mood has shifted from confidence to one of fear and that also tells us that a lot of Canadians are overreacting and looking away from what is really going on."
https://pieterdorsman.substack.com/p/canadas-choice
29. "The reality is that Taiwanese have been living with the threat for 75 years. The only difference now is that 1) the CCP has dramatically ramped up military spending, and 2) the United States has deserted its past ally, Ukraine. That has led some to question whether it would desert Taiwan in a time of crisis, too.
I came away from the trip thinking that I’ve probably overestimated the risk of a full-blown annexation of the island. Practically nobody in Taiwan is in favor of communist control. Taiwanese will certainly fight to avoid letting the island “becoming another Xinjiang”, in one person’s own words. I also believe that the Japanese are serious about intervening in any conflict, as it has a history with Taiwan being a former Japanese colony for 50 years. A slow takeover from the inside seems much more likely than an all-out war."
https://www.asiancenturystocks.com/p/travel-notes-taipei
30. "In Europe and beyond, many golden visa buyers have used their citizenship to escape tax burdens or move into countries with a lower cost of living. The countries have benefitted from injections of cold hard cash into moribund economies.
Locals, however, have also noticed the unfortunate side effects: rising prices and property values.
In Athens, fears of displacement and gentrification echo those seen in other global cities that embraced luxury developments and foreign investment programs.
While a flourishing golden visa program and developments like the Ellinikon promise jobs, tourism, and revitalization, Athenians are left wondering whether their country is reviving for average residents — or just for rich investors.
Golden visa programs, also known as immigrant investor programs, first gained traction in the 1980s when tax havens like St. Kitts and Nevis introduced them to attract wealthy individuals. Around the same time, Canada began offering visas to those who invested $150k in an investment fund.
Even the United States launched the EB-5 visa in 1990, granting green cards for people who invested in a business that employed at least 10 workers. These days, that investment must reach at least $800k.
But it wasn’t until the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis that golden visas became a widespread tool for economic recovery, particularly in European countries like Cyprus, Italy, Ireland, and Spain that used them to rebuild."
https://thehustle.co/originals/the-economics-of-golden-visas
31. Quite interesting. From vet to founder. How to transition to entrepreneurship in defense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqf20n6q2vI
32. This was an incredible interview: Was both insightful, inspiring and eye-opening. Both on personal growth & how corrupt the American food system is at present. Much watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAQhh7zyUuo
33. "Guess what. With the internet you can now join the “CEO” trajectory. All you have to do is build equity in your own ventures. While you’ll *Smile and Nod* at work to keep the prison guards happy, in reality you will stop playing the corporate game: LinkedIn gone. Happy Hour meet ups, gone. Never the #1 employee.
What are they actually doing? They are taking all their savings and they are: 1) building a basic online business targeting women, 2) they are taking calculated risks with real estate projects, 3) they are investing in asymmetric assets - crypto, tech stocks, bio tech and 4) they are eventually leaving to tax havens when they are truly “untouchable” rich.
Another good tell-tale sign is that they *don’t* complain about the compensation difference of CEOs. Instead they know that they are slowly becoming the CEO of their own smaller enterprise. Most just see a chart like the above and quit/complain about the system (good luck because AI doesn’t complain).
Typically, the guy who escapes will be in contact for a short period. Next thing you know they are in full disappear mode: tax haven (Dubai, Singapore, PR - Act 60, Panama etc.), spinning up another biz line and generally changing their entire rolodex.
Usually takes about 3 years (odd that everything comes in threes) and then *poof* never heard from again. The spread between the old working life and the life as an entrepreneur is just too big. Life paths fork when someone quits and they begin running 100mph in the opposite direction. After 3 years of that, no one can relate.
The General Premise: Here, the goal is self reliance to the best of your ability. Everyone starts somewhere. The goal is to build a life that no one can take from you and control your time (time rich = no boss).
Despite the near-term pain caused by politicians today? The future is still the same.
We’re of the belief that quite literally anyone can get into the low-mid 7-figures. This is significantly more than any career will get you (outside the rare exceptions to the rule). AI is taking over and companies are going through flattening/wage compression.
People who say “anyone can get to $10M+” are just full of it. To get to those numbers? Requires luck, insane talent or both. Even Elon Musk was miraculously saved from bankruptcy several times.
Therefore we can outline what you’ll need to do based on quality of life expectations. The vast majority are not going to be flying private or driving lambos. Instead we’d look at it in terms of quality of life benchmarks"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/escaping-the-cube-the-smartest-people
Lisan Al Gaib: Believing In a Something Greater Than Yourself
I believe everyone has seen the Denis Villaneuve made Dune 1 & Dune 2 movies. Absolutely majestic and grand movie remakes of the classic sci-fi book by Frank Herbert. It’s moving. But there are several parts that jump out to me.
There is the scene when Paul Atreides speaks in front of the grand gathering of Southern fremen tribes. The power when they come to realize and believe he is the messiah, the Lisan Al Gaib, messenger from the outside. You see looks of pure rapture and joy. Even more so when he unleashes them on the universe.
I believe this is what happens when one discovers religion. To subsume their wants and needs in the effort of the greater good. To be part of a movement and community. Everyone wants to believe in something bigger than themselves. It used to be religion, then your country aka Nation-state. But with modern times, people find this in their sports team or the company they work for. It’s a pale semblance but it’s still something.
Ever since I became independent, it’s hard sometimes to keep going when the goal is just to enrich yourself. It was only when I thought of the bigger mission that keeps one focused and driven. My family’s security and happiness, ensuring that all the people in my various businesses are taken care of. That my investees are meeting their potential. That my investments are a net positive for the West and the world at large. That I serve the bigger mission.
Don’t underestimate the importance of having a big massive mission and goal. We all want to believe in something. Something amazing. Hopefully something positive. And if you are leader, give your team a massive goal and something to believe in.
As Paul Atreides says near the end when he starts the Holy War.
“Lead them to paradise.”
Baragaki: Unbroken Samurai
The Shinsengumi were a feared and elite samurai unit that fought on the side of the Shogun against the revolutionaries during the chaos of the fall of the shogunate. Baragaki is a fictionalized story of the start and rise of this unit through its founders and the bonds of brotherhood they found. Otherwise nicknamed the Mitu Wolves for their daring raids.
Especially Hijikata Toshizo who came from the countryside and vowed to obey the Shogun to the end. It’s filled with bloody fights and battles, it was a war after all. Spoiler alert, like all samurai movies, everyone dies violent deaths. But they are samurai so they die fighting.
Fighting to uphold their honor and code of Bushido. A rather strict version too: failure to cut down an enemy after showing a blade, Seppuku, ritual suicide where one cuts open their stomach with a blade. Fleeing a battle: seppuku. Leaving the unit: seppuku. Basically seppuku for everything. Why? “The shinsengumi is a motley crew, it falls apart if we relax the rules even a little.”
Hijitaka is told: “You are writing your only poem with your life.” And that is exemplified by their banner “True Heart.” So few of us live this way of giving your all in life and in a cause. I suspect that is why so many people feel so empty inside. The only places I see this contentment is in religious communities.
I think this is why so many of us love these old samurai movies. Yes, these men lived violent and chaotic lives. But they were governed by a code of conduct and honor. Bonded in brotherhood in a fight for a larger cause. They may have lived short lives but they lived full ones. I take this as a reminder to try to live a full and honorable life.
The Observer Affects the Observed: Power of the Beholder
Babylon 5 is one of the most underrated sci-fi series ever made. Great characters, interesting alien cultures, with action, drama and comedy with cutting edge effects for the time. It captured what good sci fi is, illuminating human struggles and courage. I was thrilled when I saw they had an animated version called Babylon 5: Way Home.
The main character John Sheridan gets caught in a time loop that pushes him through many different times in his history and through alternative universes.
One of them is when he makes it home and sees his father on Earth. He reminisces with him. Especially the time he gets lost in the corn fields, which discusses with his father.
“I started to panic. Which only made the situation worse. And then I thought, if panic doesn’t help, maybe being calm will do something. For a long while after that, I’d go in once a week to get lost on purpose. Just to prove to myself I could always find my way home.”
His dad asks: “why’d you stop?”
John answers: “I got tall enough to see past the corn.”
His dad responds: “Perspective changes everything, I guess.”
Perspective is important, you get it with age, experience throughout time. He slowly learns to find his way home with the right mindset and understanding. He jumps around aimlessly due to fear and anxiety. It is only once he discovers the right frame of mind.
He is guided by an old friend:
“In all realities, all universes, the everything of everything. There is no greater force than love.
Tearing apart is easy. Destruction and hate are easy. Which is why they do not endure. What love knits together can never be torn asunder. The universe itself and all things within it bend to that power. As you say “the observer affects the observed.”
When that eye sees through love anything is possible.”
How true. The love you have for your child, your spouse, your parents, your siblings and cousins, your friends, your community and your country. It’s so motivating and powerful. It’s also a much more positive way to look at the world.
I’ve long been driven by hate, anger, fear and love. Hate and anger tends to be my default. Fear embedded in my heart due to my scarcity-driven immigrant upbringing. But when I look at what I treasure and what has been most impactful, long lasting and sustainable, love has usually been the reason. My wonderful daughter, my marriage (at least the first 18 years of it), my friendships, my travel and my books.
In one of the final jumps: Sheridan says to his guide: “I have so many questions.”
The response: “And that is the glory and beauty of mortality.”
Knowing we only have so many years of life, we need to make sure we are living it to our full potential and filling it with as much experience, purpose, joy, and love. That’s what I am reminded of again by Babylon 5.