Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Aug 10th, 2025
"To travel is to live." - Hans Christian Andersen
"But drones are different: representing are a step towards detaching humanity from the kinetic fight. War is no longer only about mobilising soldiers, but rather about sending autonomous machines to survey, target and even strike the enemy. This transforms war for would-be attackers: even if Spider Web’s drones had all been discovered or destroyed, the pilots operating them remotely from inside Ukraine would still have been safe.
There are broader implications here, especially given the way organised violence shapes society. Whoever deploys violence most effectively is best positioned to secure territories and resources, the foundation of political authority. The Gunpowder Revolution helped drag the West into civic modernity: by increasing the scale and scope of war, it increased the money needed to fund it. That, in turn, sparked the need for more sophisticated revenue-gathering systems, requiring greater centralisation, a trend that persisted until the end of the last century.
Drones, then, have reversed this dynamic, decentralising power and putting it into the hands of groups and individuals — or indeed war weary states facing a continent-sized enemy. Only governments have access to fighter jets and similar: an F-16 costs around $30 million and requires years of training to fly. Spider Web used drones that cost just thousands dollars, and which you can learn to pilot in days, even as they eliminated $7 billion of sophisticated military hardware in mere minutes. How’s that for power dispersal?
The result is inevitable: greater independence for smaller, poorer, or less militarily capable states. The Ukrainians remain reliant on US hardware, especially for air defence systems. As Russia daily pounds Ukrainian cities, they represent a lifeline for Kyiv. But the Americans are refusing to supply any more.
So Ukraine flipped the script: rather than beg for more systems to ward off Russian attacks at the last moment, Zelensky’s generals used drones to disable them at source. This sends a clear message to Washington: while we need your support, we can execute high-level operations on our own."
https://unherd.com/2025/06/the-kings-of-the-drone-age/
2. "Here along the Sumy border, Ukrainian forces lured Russian units into counterattacks and then traced their movements back to hidden staging grounds across Kursk. With their positions exposed, HIMARS batteries struck hard, delivering devastating blows to troop concentrations, command posts, and infrastructure critical to Russia’s planned offensive."
3. Sober conversations, things are bad in the USA but they are just as bad in China too. Rest of the world too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2S1TR6-F8U
4. "The last streaming war was Netflix vs. Hollywood. Spoiler alert: Netflix won. It reduced production costs by globalizing production, leveraging broadband and cheap capital to make Amazon-like investments that nobody could compete with. The result was a transfer of value from Hollywood studios and talent to Netflix shareholders and subscribers.
The next streaming war? A: YouTube takes on the world. This year, more people in the U.S. watched YouTube on TVs than on mobile devices — a first. YouTube is now the No. 1 distributor of TV content, according to Nielsen. And for the past three months, YouTube registered the largest share of TV viewing (12%) among media companies; Netflix accounted for 7.5%. As one anonymous streaming executive told Vulture, “[YouTube] already has the crown. Most networks have essentially thrown up their hands in response.”
Last month, I asked the Prof G research team to calculate YouTube’s valuation independent of Google. They estimated YouTube’s market cap would be approximately $550 billion. Netflix, the most valuable streamer, currently has a market cap of $520 billion.
When I look at YouTube, I see public access television (Google it) at internet scale with exponentially better production values. According to my Markets co-host Ed Elson, Gen Z views YouTube as an algorithm-driven “pendulum swinging power away from brands and toward individuals.” The individual who’s levied the greatest damage on Hollywood is not Reed Hastings, but YouTuber MrBeast, who mastered the art of the parasocial relationships. In 2023 he racked up 1 billion-plus hours of viewing time, more than any of the top shows on Netflix.
But just as individual content creators disrupted Hollywood, AI may disrupt content creators. Netflix will spend an estimated $18 billion on content this year. YouTube’s content budget is effectively zero, and it therefore splits revenue with creators. According to MrBeast, a typical video costs him $2.5 million to produce. This month, an AI muzak channel overtook him, becoming the fastest-growing channel on YouTube."
https://www.profgalloway.com/stream-on-25/
5. Good weekly discussion of Silicon Valley news. ROI on talent is so high now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApUUsUYRUTY
6. "Thus, the first Software Technology Park of India opened in Bangalore in 1991. For an entire year, it would be the only such facility in the country, with the second one coming in Pune in 1992.
But that one-year head start was enough to change everything.
The STPI became a gravity well for software talent. Entrepreneurs, engineers, and service firms from all over the country flocked to Bangalore to stake their claim in the Information Age gold rush.
And the growth never stopped.
Today, India’s software industry employs over 5 million people, generates more than $250 billion in annual revenue, and contributes ~25% of India’s total exports. The heart of this industry is still very much in Bangalore, not far from where that initial software park was built back in 1991.
So when the first big wave of Indian tech startup founders emerged in the early 2000s and started looking for engineers, there was only one logical place to go. Things just kept snowballing after that.
And that, dear reader, is how a boob-calculator-making company helped kickstart the chain of events that turned Bangalore into the tech and startup capital of India."
https://www.tigerfeathers.in/p/how-bangalore-came-to-be-indias-tech
7. "Having lived in Japan for 20+ years, I can tell you that nobody scores points for popping off in public here. When Japanese get angry, they tend to get quiet. Sometimes they even disappear. In the 1996 book Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End, psychologist Tamaki Saito goes to great pains to explain that the phenomenon is by no means limited to Japanese.
(In fact, the word hikikomori is nothing more than Saito’s translation of the English word “withdrawal.”) In England or America, he theorizes, these same sorts might run away, go homeless. It’s the Japanese socio-cultural system, Saito says, that makes it easier to channel anger inward, retreating from society, rather than casting it outward, and attacking it.
Will Japan’s aversion to disruption isolate it from the revolutions that have eroded democracies in the West? Or is it simply a matter of time? Looking out the window at a society that is far more placid than what I’m reading about in American headlines, I’d like to believe the former.
But only time will tell. For the moment, I’m glad that Japan’s biggest problems center on the price of rice and the attitudes of anime voice actors."
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/america-is-burning-why-isnt-japan
8. "Nominal stages (seed, A, B etc.) don’t really matter. Instead, the only important distinction is between risk and scale. Everything else is nomenclature and posturing along a gradient. So the typical distinctions of a seed fund are basically meaningless.
What you really need to do is commit to being a risk-on early stage fund finding good risk/supralinear bets (where if you’re right, you’re right) no matter the named stage. Use your money to flipillegible bets into undeniable stories."
https://99d.substack.com/p/six-themes-for-2025
9. "Today, the most interesting operators at the fastest growing software companies are not writing code or selling to customers. They’re heads-down conducting research, publishing industry-leading white papers, and using their own methodologies and AI tools to conduct the equivalent of a decade or more of research in a matter of weeks.
For many repeat founders and even the most highly regarded venture capitalists, you’ll notice a shift where going deep and taking a more research-intensive approach is leading to more robust product building and thinking. There’s a reason why some of the most highly respected voices in the Valley have hit pause on any short-term ideas or opportunities to thoroughly understand what’s being built today and how AI will change every aspect of our lives in the future."
https://brianne.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-industry-academics-in
10. Trying to understand what's going on in China under the CCP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1TeeIG6Uaw
11. This is a neat format for discussions. Enjoyed this show on founders and venture capital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbY-Pszis0M
12. "Acquihires, acquisitions typically under $20m for talent, may become de rigeur as incumbents seek to bolster their teams with AI talent & update existing products with new capabilities."
https://tomtunguz.com/the-coming-wave-of-acquihires/
13. How to get customers in the DoD. It's a different beast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoNJEx9MGGY
14. This was interesting. If you care about increasing your healthspan and living well, this is a great conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4vmeo_tfOs
15. "SaaS isn’t software. It’s just an interface charging you rent.
And if you stop paying? They lock you out. Your own data, held hostage behind a monthly subscription. SaaS isn’t software. It’s just an interface charging you rent.
And here’s the part SaaS doesn’t want you to know: this isn’t magic.
Execution-First AI works because all software is just data. Every SaaS tool — whether it’s Notion, Trello, Airtable, or Asana — is just a UI that lets you Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) data.
That’s it. That’s all.
SaaS convinced you that managing a UI was necessary. But if AI can directly interact with data, why do you need the UI at all? You don’t.
For decades, businesses assumed they needed software to track projects, document ideas, and manage workflows. But SaaS never solved those problems — it just created new interfaces for them.
Execution-First AI removes the interface. It eliminates the friction. It executes."
16. Always learning from these conversations. Rabois is at the top of the investing and building game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbtuPP1f_Go
17. "Sometimes there are very good reasons to avoid certain places. There really are some dangerous places in the world, where you can get in a lot of trouble.
Fortunately, most of the world is perfectly safe to explore. Of course, that’s if you keep your head on a swivel, don’t look for trouble, and practice basic street smarts. I’ve personally been to dozens of “dangerous” countries and have never had a serious problem. (Well maybe a couple times I’ve had some sketchy situations, like this one.)
Despite the fact that most places are safe to travel to, there is a basic human instinct that tells you to avoid unknown lands. And that’s what keeps crowds away from some of the greatest places to explore right now."
https://codyshirk.com/going-where-others-wont/
18. "My recommendation to aspiring entrepreneurs interested in B2B software is to work with various companies, assisting them with AI-related change management. This approach mirrors my efforts decades ago, helping organizations derive value from the Internet. While the future is uncertain, I firmly believe AI is the next major technological wave.
A tremendous amount of technology implementation and change management will be required, particularly in helping businesses unlock AI’s potential. This work will uncover countless opportunities for new software products, paving the way for thousands of new startups."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/06/14/starting-over-as-an-entrepreneur/
19. "What changed is AI. The underlying anima of LLMs is jagged and rugged. These systems are probabilistic and the output is different every time. Missionaries, while committed, often chase inelastic goals—space or bust. This works in some industries. It doesn’t work when AI becomes the core technology of everything.
Now is the time to hire the misfit: the polar opposite of the mission-driven persona. Their career is weird and illegible. Their personality may be prickly. But if you can figure out how to work with them, they’ll accelerate your growth past anything you can imagine.
They take a first-principles look at the world and question the structure of it. Why can’t they just sell it all and start over? Why shouldn’t they major in English? Books are awesome. Their life is oriented around figuring out what is right (for them) regardless of what school counselors will say.
Misfits are exactly right for AI because they don’t try and get a degree before they do a task—they just figure out how to do it with what they have. Similarly, LLMs allow people to tackle anything. A person can write code, create marketing copy, and design graphics without needing a professional degree."
https://www.gettheleverage.com/p/hire-misfits-not-missionaries
20. "In practice, however, counter-leadership targeting has rarely delivered decisive results. Political and military leaders often prove too elusive, avoiding elimination, while command-and-control structures remain resilient and adaptable. Even when leadership is neutralized, disruption tends to be limited, with replacements stepping in quickly and effects failing to cascade rapidly enough to produce meaningful tactical or operational-level effects.
While the full impact of Israel’s counter-leadership strikes remains to be seen, early reporting indicates that the removal of key figures across military, political, and scientific sectors may have left the Iranian leadership unprepared to respond decisively, and effectively disrupted its immediate military reaction.
If this reporting is confirmed, Israel may have executed one of the most effective state-to-state counter-leadership campaigns in history, and, in fact, one of the rare cases where such targeting may have delivered strategically decisive results."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/operation-rising-lion-initial-assessment
21. This was a surprisingly deep conversation on the art of venture capital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opUf3bS9tuM
22. Learning the new concept of antimemetics: why some ideas don't spread.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkRJfqus2aw
23. An invigorating and inspiring conversation with Jocko Willink. One of the toughest men in America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gz6aEjSxZM
24. This was a fun and solid discussion on how to be your best self. Especially if you are a young man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_QDanOH67c
25. "In response, British leaders took action. Saltpeter exports to France were cut off.
Supplies from India—once traded openly across Europe—were redirected exclusively for British use. This wasn’t just a matter of economics or diplomatic friction. It was a deliberate act of war by other means. Britain understood that saltpeter wasn’t simply a commodity—it was a dependency. And when your enemy depends on a resource you control, you don’t need to storm the gates.
You just shut the valve. By tightening its grip on the Indian supply lines, Britain weaponized trade itself—proving that the hand on the supply chain often holds more power than the hand on the trigger.
What followed wasn’t an immediate collapse—but a slow throttling of France’s war machine.
French chemists scrambled to produce saltpeter domestically using animal waste, manure pits, and nitrification beds. The results were inconsistent and slow. Where British cannons fired clean and hot, French weapons often misfired or underperformed.
Napoleon’s armies still marched—but with powder that was weaker, less reliable, and in short supply.
This material disadvantage compounded over time. By the time Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, his army was stretched thin—logistically and chemically. When his Grand Armée began to collapse during the brutal retreat, the problem wasn’t just cold and distance. It was also the absence of the critical materials that had once fueled his conquests.
Britain didn’t beat Napoleon in a single battle. It bled his empire over years—by weaponizing trade and closing the spigot on the raw material he couldn’t replace."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/the-supply-chain-that-crushed-an
26. "As venture investors, we often talk about exporting U.S. models globally. But geo-arbitrage works in reverse too. Sometimes the best way to understand an opportunity at home is to see what’s already been proven abroad.
Chime looked like a bold bet. But to anyone watching the neobank revolution unfold from São Paulo to Seoul, it felt inevitable.
Critically, geo arbitrage is not copy-paste. But it provides mental scaffolding to believe Chime could work—uniquely adapted to the U.S. market. It is also what led my investment in other neobanks globally, including Neon (a unicorn in Brazil)."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/what-the-world-taught-me-about-chime
27. "The Noucentists understood that a people's capacity to take the reins of its own destiny must be demonstrated through their ability to create lasting beauty.
All of this comes down to the fundamental question: if your politics cannot create beauty, then why should we follow you?
However, not all of those who today claim to oppose the managed decay of the West truly understand the political importance of aesthetics, even if they do realize the importance of defending beauty.
Without an aesthetic dimension, human communities lose their capacity to inspire loyalty, to transmit values across generations, and to justify the sacrifices that meaningful collective projects require.
In the present moment, to reclaim beauty is not to frivolously escape from political reality, but to reclaim the foundation of politics itself."
https://www.businessofpower.com/p/aesthetics-as-the-politics-of-vitality
28. "Moreover, being the top earner in your peer group in your 20s is, in absolute terms, insignificant. The difference between $110k and $80k might mean a bigger TV. The difference between millions in disposable income and a typical professional salary is the ability to completely redesign your life. The hedonic treadmill is no match for high agency.
I know wealthy people who used excess money to construct fundamentally lower-stress, higher-joy lives. They spend time on meaningful projects rather than projects that pay bills. The utility jump from "comfortable" to "wealthy" is probably enormous. If you see my writing a post every day and spending more time on Substack, you won’t have to wonder why.
What does all this point to?
1. Money is good. It’s utility doesn’t diminish nearly as fast as pop psychology will have you believe. And it probably gets better with age. It’s worth thinking really hard before making career decisions that will foreclose on the possibility of higher incomes or picking career paths that have a hard ceiling.
2.Compounding is real. It’s spending that needs justification, not saving."
https://www.optimaloutliers.com/p/money-gets-better-with-age
29. This is a super impressive young human being. Ethan Thornton of Mach Industries: The Future of Warfare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INXw8QVnQwc
30. "Two successful operations in two weeks demonstrated the validity of this concept to the world. Here’s what we can expect;
This type of warfare scales, particularly if these drones are used to disrupt critical infrastructure. For example, a dozen drone containers in the US, located near major metropolitan areas or critical infrastructure, would be sufficient to take out the entire US electrical grid and shut down US commercial aviation for months. The collapse of the US border during the last administration was the perfect opportunity to do this.
We don’t have any defenses against this type of attack. Our entire defense industry is focused on the wrong threats. For example, the recent attempt to fund Golden Dome (Star Wars redux) is focused on strategic missiles, not drones. If this is supported, 90% of the funding should be focused on detecting and protecting against drones and associated threats.
This threat, or as a method of warfare against a foe, becomes decisive once (air/sea/land) drones become fully autonomous using AI. With sufficient intelligence and the ability to tap into the Internet for updates (targets, triggers, or revisions to its neural network), these drones could remain in place for years, undetected until activation."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/brief-1-zero-day-warfare-is-here
31. "There are three business models responsible for creating crypto wealth outside of just hodling Bitcoin and other shitcoins. They are mining, operating an exchange, and issuing a stablecoin. Taking myself as an example, my wealth comes from my ownership of BitMEX (a derivatives exchange), and Maelstrom’s (my family office) biggest position and largest generator of absolute return is Ethena, the stablecoin issuer of USDE. Ethena went from nothing to the third largest stablecoin in under a year during 2024.
The stablecoin narrative is unique in that it has the largest most obvious TAM for a TradFi muppet. Tether has already proven that an onchain bank that just holds people’s money and allows them to transfer it to and fro can become the most profitable financial institution per employee ever. Tether succeeded in the face of lawfare perpetrated by all levels of the American government. What would happen if the US authorities were at a minimum just not antagonistic towards stablecoins and allowed them some modicum of operational freedom to compete for deposits against legacy banks? The profit potential is insane.
Now let’s consider the current setup where the US Treasury staff believes stablecoin AUC could grow to $2 trillion. They also believe that USD stablecoins could be the tip of the spear to both advance/maintain USD hegemony and act as price insensitive buyers of treasury debt. Whoa, this is a serious macro tailwind. As a delicious bonus, remember that Trump has a simmering hatred of the large banks because they de-platformed him and his family after his first presidential term. He is in no mood to hold back the free market from offering a better, faster, and safer way to hold and transfer digital dollars. Even his sons jumped into the stablecoin game."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/assume-the-position
32. A very eye opening and frightening conversation on the extreme threat that the CCP is to America and the West. It's not a comforting discussion here but facts are facts, we are very behind here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oghBVS0QvOM
33. How AI will help America bring back manufacturing. Makes me optimistic. Reindustrialize.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIzRsLgxfQc
34. Learning from a VC legend. Jay Hoag of TCV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15dCw7lxqRk
35. This is a must watch. What is GDP for? The new mercantilism and end of globalization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yycgQGx2peg
36. Garry is a G, even OG. What a fun conversation. I would hate to be competing against YC now.
18x2 Beyond Youthful Days: First Love
A Taiwanese & Japanese movie (2 places that I LOVE deeply), it’s a beautiful, touching yet ultimately very sad love story but one that everyone should watch. A Taiwanese man, Jimmy, has just been fired by the gaming company he started 18 years ago. His cofounder asked him to go on a business trip to Japan one last time.
On a whim, he takes this opportunity and many detours around Japan like Kamakura, Matsumoto, Nagaoka & Niigata to finally visit his old girlfriend there in Tadami in Fukushima. He tells his friend: “Traveling is fun because you never know what will happen.”
He reflects on his youth 18 years ago in Tainan city where he meets a Japanese girl named Ami backpacking around Taiwan. He is asked to show her around by his Japanese boss of the karaoke place he works at.
“My life, If I had told her how I felt about her back then, would the future have been different? Could I have spent more time with her.” Ami is a kind, carefree, spirited and talented artist and brings new spirit to the place. Jimmy shows her around Tainan that summer. They grow close of course. They experience first love, which is always the most powerful & affecting. Growing up. Dealing with the loss.
Now in his adulthood, during his travels through Japan he reflects on the wonderful times he had that summer. Small things remind him of those moments, a smell of the perfume “Flow of Time”, pictures, a song from Taiwanese rock band “Mayday” that was so popular back then. The Japanese movie “Love Letter.” The beautiful mural Ami paints. Going to the lantern festival.
“Tell me your dream when you find it” she says. “Let’s meet again after we have fulfilled our dreams.” But maybe being together was the ultimate dream.
It made me think back to all the fun times, especially during my summers in Vancouver, goofing around with my friends, summer studies in Cambridge University, backpacking around through Europe, eager to get to the next place or the next milestone. Living in Taiwan during my early twenties, making mistakes and growing up. Meeting a young beautiful Taiwanese girl, (who became my wife), exploring the island and making new friends. Seeing the world and experiencing the kindness of strangers. To be that young again.
It felt like it would never end. I wish I was more present then. I still wish I was more present even now. My head is always still stuck in the future, focused on pursuing what I think are my dreams, missing important things along the way.
But you never completely forget. As Jimmy writes: “Friends we never see again. Scenery we’ll never revisit. But I will never forget the time we spent together. The people we meet on our travels leave something in our heart.”
It’s also really true what his dad tells him after he loses his business. “Rest paves the long road ahead.” Especially when you are questioning your life choices. Go on a trip far away. You will meet interesting people. You will see beautiful sights. “Taking a breather gives us a chance to see what is important in your life.”
So what do I take from all this, besides going to spend more time in Japan and Taiwan? Go travel & rest after bad moments in life, be more present the rest of the time, and tell people how you feel. You never know when you will see them again.
As Jimmy’s father wisely advised him: “These encounters do not often happen in life. You only live once, don’t leave with any regrets.”
You Need Courage to Truly Live
I always get pulled back to watch the classic movie “You’ve got Mail”, a dedication and homage to New York as well as an internet world long gone by. “Enchanting” is the word. I love that movie.
There is a scene where one of the main characters played by Meg Ryan, said something I didn’t catch before:
“Sometimes I wonder about my life, I live a small life—well, valuable but small. Sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it or because I am not brave. So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when, shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
So many of us should be pondering this question. So many of us do. So many of us aren’t living our lives. Not meeting our true potential. All because we can’t imagine something different. Because we are trying to meet others' expectations of us. Or worse, due to lack of courage on our own part.
Something worth thinking about: Are we living the life we truly want? If not, figure out what it looks like and then take action. Go do something about it. “I know you worry about being brave. Don’t. Fight. Fight to the death.” This is literally your life.
Going to the Mattresses: Sometimes You Have to Go to War
I think many people notice a theme in my writing. Self improvement and preparing for conflict and war. Whether it’s with an external enemy or usually an internal one. Yourself.
Now don’t get me wrong, I dread war and conflict but sometimes you have no choice. People pleasing ends badly for yourself. Peace at all costs on geopolitical issues only leads to surrender and terror as many people are learning the hard way. You have to fight back against bullies.
The Godfather is a classic movie and I wrote about it earlier on how it seeps into popular culture. The deca-billionaire character Bobby Axelrod ends up confronting and going to war with a fellow powerful deca-billionaire. His description is brilliant:
“You know why they called it going to the mattresses when mob families went to war? It’s mentioned once but never explained. It’s because you had to move out of your home and hole up some place where no one could find you, with all your men.
But you had to do it quick, so you get the jump on the rival family before they got the jump on you. So you had places stashed around the city with the mattresses on the floor.
And that is where you would make your stand until you nailed the boss of the rival family. And once you got him, and all his soldiers fell into line, that is when you go home to your comfy bed and your wife and kids.”
This is another way of going to monk mode. This is what I did for most of 2024. A complete rethink and rebuild of myself, my budget/finances, and cutting back on some of my investing. I worked out and trained physically. I read many books and listened to lots of podcasts. I worked on my home life and family relationships. I went to a different kind of war mode. War with my own bad habits, painful family history and outdated mindsets for this emerging new world order.
A new reset. It’s good to do this every few years if you care about being relevant for the next decade.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Aug 3rd, 2025
"In summer, the song sings itself." –William Carlos Williams
We are in the AI world: adopt AI or die. The velocity of business is only increasing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53ADYulqo8w
2. Always worth listening to Zeihan, his blindspot is tech but otherwise really interesting takes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UltVl2Qlf6A
3. Great episode this week, BG2 covered some important topics like China, AI & talent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qG_f2DY_3M
4. The case for China's rise to becoming a weapons exporting giant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycgNBGdRa3Q
5. One of the best conversations about Silicon Valley news. Lots of good topics covered on Snap spectacles, media & Build-a-bear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIyppACODqg
6. Fascinating discussion on AI for the defense industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPwWOIdam10&t=34s
7. "What’s exciting now is that we can accurately forecast heart disease as well as the other major diseases of aging in high-risk individuals many decades earlier and achieve primary prevention, or, at the very least, a marked delay in their appearance. Doctors can’t promise to reverse or halt aging itself, but we can promise that the second half of our lives can be much healthier than that of our forebears.
This is the type of health span extension that we will be seeing far more commonly in the future owing to the phenomenal advances in lifestyle, cells, genomics, artificial intelligence, drugs, and vaccines. These dimensions all interact with one another: Our lifestyle factors influence our microbiome and cells. Our response to drugs and vaccines is modulated by our genomics and cells, and discovery of new drugs has been enhanced by gene variants and by AI.
There are still formidable obstacles—including profound health inequity across the U.S.—but as we move forward, we will inevitably see suppression of age-related diseases that for many is unimaginable right now. It will take years to accomplish the far bolder objective of slowing the aging process itself."
https://time.com/7283740/health-aging-eric-topol/
8. Lots of good topics: Dyson, PSG & Mary Meeker trends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSb2wvO_it4&t=10s
9. Lots of implications from the Ukrainian surprise drone attacks on Russian airfields.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKdLYuOorE0
10. Tinfoil hat alt-geopolitics. Really alt & don't totally agree. I hesitate to post these but it's an interesting frame to look at the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85k5Jjna0EA
11. "More importantly, in a world facing broad disruption of incumbent systems, this focus on building solid, independent networks and institutions will allow us to survive the shocks of system-level disruption and to position ourselves for digital age leadership. Rather than fighting to sway decaying institutions largely stacked against us, we can invest that energy into building the types of institutions that will survive the transition period and ultimately replace legacy incumbents.
We have particular advantages here. Legacy models of trust are collapsing, and people will look for alternatives upon which they can rebuild. The smaller, trusted communities and networks (e.g., local churches, fraternal organizations, and even group chats) that exist in many conservative spaces will be strong contenders. If we embrace a more independent and inward-focused strategy today, we can position these institutions to offer something scarce and widely valued in the future.
Our inward focus is not a retreat but a strategic focus on efforts that will offer outsized long-term success. This reflects the “exit to disrupt” strategy that is popular in Silicon Valley. We are exiting legacy institutions with the clear intent not just to build small parallel alternatives, but to create disruptive alternatives that can challenge legacy institutions for supremacy."
https://www.newfounding.com/post/strategy
12. Neo-mercantilism or National Capitalism is coming back. This was a worthwhile and interesting conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPfTINePB5E
13. "This mix—speed of iteration, cost discipline, and increasing in-house manufacturing—has allowed Ukraine to quietly take the lead in key domains like electronic warfare, radio communication, and autonomous navigation. Most of the companies I met remain under-capitalized, often bootstrapped, but they’re on the radar now. U.S. and European defense primes are watching closely. Some are already working with local players via partnerships and joint ventures. Others are positioning themselves for future acquisitions—founders told me they get inbound regularly.
I expect this integration of Ukrainian companies into the global defense market will get even stronger this year. Governments and companies from the West have realized that being battlefield tested beats everything."
https://louiseboucher.substack.com/p/notes-from-kyiv-inside-the-worlds
14. Eye opening discussion on China's rise in important industries and how we are able to compete. Is it too late?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRS0q0zGg0k
15. "The reason that upper middle class areas have a vibe of pins and needles is for this exact reason. Everyone is one slip up from disaster. A layoff, divorce or job loss could crumble the empire.
One year of not earning money is equivalent to losing multiple years of savings. It mathematically makes sense as most save around 20-25% of their income (if lucky). If spending is flat but income is zero or near zero (unemployment is meaningless), that would be at least a 3 year burn (75/25 = 3)
Guess what that means? If someone gets cut for a year or two, they will lose all of their savings from the high-earning years.
Put that into excel and now you know why practically no one is wealthy after a long career (even on Wall Street)
If you want to break free from this W-2 treadmill, the playbook is simple (but not easy):
--Cap your lifestyle. The fastest way to do this is eliminating housing cost. Buy the smallest asset you can reasonably live in. If you have no mortgage and no rent, the numbers get much better.
--Build cash flow. Use your income to build other assets. That $10K a year boring business selling stuffed animals online? Keep it. Get another one. If you have five of those, you’ve got enough money to cover practically all your living costs.
--Buy time, not stuff: Anything you put your money into? Think about how much time you will get from it. Measure your savings in terms of time not percentages. --If you save $$$ calculate how much *run-way* that gets you. This explains why tech investors obsesses so much about the topic. Cash runway.
--Own equity or build it. A job is just something they give you to fund your exit. It’s the rockhammer in your book at shawshank. If you don’t use it to build equity you don’t have a plan. You have hopes and dreams."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/high-income-w-2-trap-how-to-go-broke
16. A masterclass on the state of venture capital and implications for GPs, LPs and founders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3rrGzTDH4k
17. The most important proxy war in Africa that no one talks about: Sudan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHhc-48JT3U
18. "It’s kinda similar to the enriched uranium problem. There Russia was the low-cost source but they got sanctioned. Industry knows exactly what to do, the source material of yellowcake uranium is cheap and abundant, but nobody wants to invest! This is because they know all that low-cost Russian capacity for uranium enrichment is still waiting in the wings. There’s zero guarantee that their investment won’t be instantly rendered worthless if geopolitical situation changes.
Same with rare earths. The problem is it’s a high capex low margin business the way the Chinese do it. As Blas pointed out, the US buys $160 million a year of this processed rock dust. It’s not enough profit there to get your nose out of joint about as a producer. And while you can command a pretty penny now the Chinese can literally kill your business at any time by flooding the market again.
(It’s instrumental to recall that the Japanese, who were initially menaced with the REE ban in 2010, did some exploration of potential rare earth deposits and then completely forgot about the threat. It’s not finding the rock that’s hard, it’s grinding and refining the rocks.)"
https://taipology.substack.com/p/is-rare-earth-chinas-trump-card
19. "Think about this - NVIDIA built one of the most valuable companies in the world by ignoring all the things we tell people to do in business.
CUDA did not “solve a hair on fire problem.”
CUDA didn’t help customers with a “job to be done.”
Customer development on CUDA would have told you there was no market, and no need.
NVIDIA invested in it despite knowing there was currently no demand and it was a zero dollar market.
I point this out because I think investors in most market stages have moved away from backing big visions, in favor of efficient iteration. But I remember meeting a very senior CEO at one of First Round Capital’s entrepreneur days in 2010, when lean startup thinking was getting really hot. He told me “great companies are built on bold vision, not iterating your way to product market fit.”
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-cuda-backstory-lessons-for-investors
20. "Why? Because the forces that started that generational up-cycle several years ago have not changed—and won’t in the foreseeable future. Japan has evolved from high-growth powerhouse in the 1960s to 1980s to deflationary stagnation and restructuring in the 1990s and early 2000s towards a new phase now firmly entrenched since at least 2020: competitive resilience. For today’s Japan, global uncertainty is a feature, domestic resilience is the operating system.
To be sure, the net result of these certain Japan trends is poised to result in significant industrial restructuring. The gap between winners and losers will grow. In five to 10 years, Japan is bound to have true national champions, more de facto oligopolies, and far fewer zombie companies. If so, the net result should be higher pricing power for the winners, which in turn means inflation will become much more entrenched than perhaps currently anticipated.
For US companies, the high likelihood of “macro pragmatism” and “micro optimism” should offer steadfast growth in Japan opportunities. The metabolism and liquidity of both human and corporate capital is rising, so actual access to the Japanese market will keep getting better.
Focus on what will stay the same: global uncertainty is a feature, domestic resilience is the operating system. Japan is open for business."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/macro-pragmatism-micro-optimism
21. "Right now, we are entering a period of monumental technological change. Virtually every industry is going to be impacted by AI. At the same time, consequential technologies are on the verge of disrupting countless industries from energy to transportation to manufacturing to defense. Founders building in those spaces or who are able to convincingly argue why their company will benefit from the changing landscape are having more success fundraising than ever before.
But for founders of nice, incremental businesses. The type that solve a real problem and that very likely would have been able to raise VC funding 2 years ago, it’s a different story.
Not because they aren’t good businesses. But because they no longer capture the imagination. Which in the mind of an investor translates to a lower potential return (and always remember, the job of a VC is first and foremost to generate a return for their LPs). Moreover, in many cases, it’s not clear if the problem they’re solving will even be around in 5 years.
That e-commerce company you’re building? Is it relevant if AI changes how we shop?
That vertical B2B SaaS company you’re building? What happens if someone can vibe code a competitor next year?
These may sound like facetious questions, but I promise they’re not. We really don’t have any precedent for the adoption of AI. Which is why investors are piling into the relatively small number of companies whose founders can clearly articulate why they will be relevant in a post-AI world. And saying no to virtually everyone else.
It might not seem fair, but I think this is going to be the fundraising reality for the immediate future — at least until we have some more clarity around the rate at which AI and AI-driven technologies will permeate the broader market.
So if your company started out before the AI wave, you’re not building in deep tech, and/or you don’t have a convincing answer to the question, “why will this be relevant in 5 years?” then I’m afraid that VC (probably) isn’t right for you."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/whats-going-on-with-early-stage-investing
22. "Why? Because Western producers can’t compete.
Indonesia—backed by Chinese capital and tech—has lower labor costs, looser regulations, and lightning-fast permitting. While a Western smelter can take five yearsto build, in Indonesia, it takes less than one.
Indonesia didn’t just grow its share. It crushed the competition, cornered the market, and created a near-monopoly—not by pricing nickel high, but by pricing everyone else out.
Once the competition is gone, what do you expect they will do to the price? My guess would be precisely what OPEC did in 1973 - halt supply and charge whatever it wants.
And to be clear, although the product comes from Indonesia, 74% of the infrastructure was built with Chinese money. So the leverage is shared.
So if Trump wants to reshore American steel production, I think he should.
But he might need to call President Xi first."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/pittsburgh-meets-beijing-the-real
23. "Hokkaido however is different, at least initially in appearance, and that shouldn't be too surprising, given it’s a far northern island with a distinct history, having only been colonized and settled and built late (1900s), with inspiration and assistance from Americans.
It also has more space, and consequently feels far more American than the rest of Japan, almost as if you are in a warped Wisconsin. That's especially true outside of the larger cities, where you find yourself in windy flat fields of potatoes and corn, as well as smaller towns with neighborhoods of sloped roof homes with garages, constructed to deal with the heaps of snow each gets.
While Hokkaido might look slightly different from the rest of Japan, it is still very much Japanese. There is still a shared building code, and a respected notion of the public good, and that means it is safe, clean, and efficient, and each night, no matter where you are, there are plenty of options on where to eat that are not simply franchises of national chains.
These small businesses, which are often run out of someone's home, owned by a family who are also the only employees, are what distinguishes Japan from all other developed nations, making life in it a notch above the rest. While the most obvious of these are restaurants (izakayas, monjayaki-yas, soba-yas, etc.), others are focused on specialized crafts, or small services."
https://walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-japanese-small-hokkaido
24. "This atomization of combat power is not quite the same as attrition, with which it often gets conflated. It is instead incrementalism. By biting off one trench, one treeline at a time, a series of small-scale attacks can eventually accomplish more than the sum of their individual effects: cut lines of communication, dislocate defensive positions, and force costly withdrawals. Even at the speed of molasses, maneuver is maneuver."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/organizing-for-victory-force-structure
25. Fascinating conversation on Apollo's wide ranging finance and investing businesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17bGyLB00s0
26. A billionaire I didn't know much about but what an interesting guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YdOjoaQTOQ
27. A fun and enlightening episode this week of NIA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25VPUq2UM7k
28. Arguably the most important company in America right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztvCmler6no
29. "Spider’s Web offers a window into how AGI could supercharge similar attacks in the future.
AGI could analyse transportation routes to find the safest, fastest, and least conspicuous way to move cargo. It could plan truck routes that avoid busy checkpoints, choose transit times when border guards are understaffed, and even account for satellite overpasses or drone surveillance.
Such a system could coordinate multimodal logistics (think planes, trains and automobiles) with timing that no human team could match. Not to mention it could crunch traffic patterns, rail schedules, and weather data to find the perfect moment for an attack.
This hypothetical warfighting AGI could automatically generate corporate entities complete with registration documents, tax records, and websites to serve as cover. It could forge driver’s licenses, passports, and employee IDs that pass automated verification—much faster than humans today could.
Aside from paperwork, an AGI could manage a whole suite of deception technologies. For example, AGI could emit fake GPS signals to confuse satellite tracking or hacking into a facility’s CCTV feed to loop old footage while operatives move equipment. When it’s time to strike, AGI could guide each drone to its target as part of a single unified swarm, optimised to prevent collisions and spaced to maximize coverage.
As soon as the destination is in range, AGI could help drones autonomously recognise target types and aim for the most damaging impact points (say by guiding a drone to the exact location of an aircraft’s fuel tank)."
https://time.com/7291455/ukraine-demonstrated-agi-war/
30. "Here's my tell for founders: term sheet too fast plus close dragging equals trouble brewing. That gap between eager signing and delayed execution is where trust dies and gets replaced by leverage games.
The venture business is built on trust borrowed against future performance. Break that covenant once, and you're marked. The ecosystem has a long memory.
Founders remember."
https://www.airsugar.com/p/the-paper-tigers-of-venture-capital
31. "Maduro’s hybrid warfare strategy mimics many of the techniques used by Russia and China in low-intensity conflict. However, his main objective is clear – to distract his own population from his own illegitimacy by provoking conflict with his neighbor.
He is not only walking a dangerous line between war and peace and testing the patience of U.S. officials, but he is collaborating with U.S. adversaries a short distance from American shores. Meanwhile, the U.S. Government reward for the capture of Maduro stands at $25M. Florida Senator Rick Scott has proposed an increase to $100M."
https://robertburrell.substack.com/p/venezuela-launches-hybrid-warfare
32. "Our current definition of air dominance does not translate into control over the air littoral. Yet, if the ultimate goal of air power is to enable and empower ground forces to defeat the enemy, then we must also dominate the air littoral. This is how we must re-conceptualize air power in the unmanned age.
And let’s be clear, manned fighters and stealth bombers still matter — probably more so than ever when you imagine what a war against China would look like. Yet, we must also accept that these advanced aircraft are designed to win a different kind of air war than the one being waged at treetop levels in Ukraine.
Air superiority, supremacy, dominance — these terms mean something different today than in 1992, when air power theorists were after-actioning the Persian Gulf War to theorize how American air power would shape wars in the post-Cold War era.
Fighter jets and stealth bombers still matter but they aren’t enough to achieve our air power objectives in this new era of low-altitude, unmanned combat. We must pair our traditional air power assets with a dominant air littoral force established through the massed use of small, unmanned platforms. That’s how we enable and empower our ground forces to win, and that’s how we save American lives when the next war comes."
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/06/09/toward-a-new-understanding-of-air-dominance/
33. One of the best conversations on B2B Venture investing right now. It's such an insight rich discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peVPH8gBWts
34. Lots to process here. A great discussion on venture capital, building startups and the new environment in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53FImKtf2i0&t=5s
35. "Changing your mind is one of the most difficult things to do. It can also be a career risk.
My good friend, who is a former US Congressman, used to tell me how angry his constituents would get when he’d flip-flop on a controversial topic. Ordinarily, when you’re presented with new information it’s very rational to change your opinion. But the outside perception can make you look indecisive or even unprincipled.
Similar to sailing, investing is a discipline where you should change your mind constantly."
Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Based on the best selling military history book of the same title by Damien Lewis, the movie is a stylish, fun, violent romp in typical Guy Ritchie fashion. Based on a true WW2 mission called Operation Postmaster, where one of the first British special forces operations took place. One that is to disrupt German U-boat attacks in the North Atlantic at a critical moment in the war.
The individuals on the team are wild, eccentric, disobedient, borderline psychotic but skilled and well trained. Unconventional and absolutely “mad.” When the hero asked why he was chosen as “we both know I am not very popular with the administration.”
The officer responds: “the reason they find you unattractive is why I find you attractive.”
An even better description of this team is stated by Churchill himself:
“You were not chosen for your conspicuous honor, or your high ideals. You were chosen because you’re the last resort. The mission you have been given has never been undertaken before.
It demands …..ruthless men who will not hesitate to stoop beneath the conventions of war. Men who do not keep clean hands. Men like you. And yet who still conspire in their dischordant harmony who do not care they may not return.
And who press onwards not for glory or for duty, or for me but because you are men who will not stop until it is done.”
Sometimes you need crazy nutters to do the impossible. Kind of reminds me of startup entrepreneurs. Unconventional people who never give up.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Planet of the apes is an old movie. But I actually really like the new remake and canon of this sci-fi series. Not the one in the 90s but the series done over the last few years that shows the rise of the first elder ape Caesar. It’s a bit darker but does a good job of explaining how humanity devolves and how the Apes began their rise to be the dominant species. A human-made virus. Scary relevant in the post Covid world.
The recent movies are spectacular visual epics and long abandoned landscapes and human made structures like malls, apartment buildings, massive ships, airplanes and skyscrapers abandoned and reclaimed by nature. But what is also great are the character-driven plots.
We see much of ourselves in these characters, these apes are almost human and reflect the wide range of emotions: love, hate, anger, ambition and curiosity. And how a society is built to survive. How new kingdoms, hierarchy and ideology are rebuilt under the apes.
How they came up with rules like “Ape together strong” or “Ape shall not kill ape”. All started by the brilliant Caesar. And I love how Caesar the term is used as a universal term for leader just like in Roman Empire times.
Ape scholar Rama said: “Caesar was the first elder. He led with decency, morality, strength and compassion.” He is brave and everything he does is for the betterment of his people, his apes. He is brave, clever and due to his kind upbringing by humans when he grew up, he gained a healthy respect and even love for humans.
Humans in this new world cannot speak and have devolved substantially to pre-technology tribes. Treated like scavengers and seen as lower than the low. Some apes kill them on sight or hunt them for sport. Others tolerate them, others treat them with kindness.
This series is an incredibly good mirror to reflect our wide range of human civilization. It’s also a deeper criticism when you look deeper. What do you do when you have all the power? Do you try to make things better or do you conquer and dominate your lessers? How do you continue living when things change or are going bad?
“You gotta stop thinking about the way things were and start thinking about the way they are. You must accept.”
Ultimately it’s a hopeful movie to me. That we can evolve and rise up. And do it in harmony with other species but only with courage, strength and tolerance. As the Bible says “the meek shall inherit the earth.” The Meek are those who are strong and able to do tremendous harm but choose not to, who choose restraint in all except in the most extreme moments. That is the lesson I take from this series. “Ape together strong.” After all, us humans at the end of the day are barely evolved apes.
Moral Injury: When the Mind & Soul Suffers, The Body Cries Out
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about this video put out on YouTube by this young brilliant MIT trained Neurosurgeon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25LUF8GmbFU
He is walking in the mountains and just talking about his life and learnings. I had to watch it twice. There is incredible advice about the power of good habits in health and recovery. About what the commonality is in patients of his who recover or even those who recover right before the planned surgery. Things like:
Sleep at least 8 hours a day, have a good diet of low salt and mainly plant-based foods, don’t smoke or drink much, have a good social network, exercise regularly & sweat regularly by going to sauna, and manage stress well.
But what really stuck in my mind was the idea of moral injury. Despite the prestige, the money and status, when his work started to feel meaningless, he was literally dying inside.
I’ve felt like this many times in my life, especially during my career. The time in Vancouver right before I moved to San Francisco in 1998. Even though everything was fine, and I was fed and got to just chill out at home, I felt stuck. I felt like I was rotting mentally and physically.
The next most significant time was the final year of my time at 500 Startups. I felt like I wasn’t learning anything new, working with folks I either didn’t like or stopped respecting and just going through the motions. I felt like I was a trapped animal. Every work day was a hell of continual indignity. Living with dread every Sunday and looking forward to the weekend. This is, sadly, the life of most working people.
We see the results of this everywhere around us. When you are unhappy, your body acts out. You get sick more frequently. And when this happens, we tend to mis-adapt, instead of facing the core issue, we end up doing self destructive things: drugs, alcohol, over-eating, gambling and for me, over traveling and over-shopping books. This is the way we distract ourselves from dealing with the problem. A form of cowardice, a form of hiding but you can’t hide forever.
Good morale is important in countries, in armies, in companies and in each individual. You can feel the morale and mood the minute you walk into any office.
How do you get good morale and fight off moral injury? Work on things that have meaning to you. Do interesting work and work with awesome people. Have a bigger mission. Do things that we feel matters in our lives and those of my families and our greater communities. If you don’t, well your body will tell you. You will suffer in both mind and body.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 27th, 2025
"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."--John Lubbock
"Abe's journey teaches us that political defeat—even when compounded by personal health challenges—need not be definitive. His strategic use of time away from power allowed for genuine renewal: physically, intellectually, and politically.
Rather than rushing back prematurely, he ensured his return was supported by a renewed power base, with strengthened policy ideas, political alliances, and improved personal and physical capacity.
Abe's comeback shows that how we respond to setbacks often determines our legacy more than our initial success. By treating his defeat as an opportunity for personal transformation rather than dragging himself down, Abe transformed what could have been a footnote in Japanese political history into a launching pad for one of its most important administrations in decades.
Abe's story reminds us that true resilience is not merely about mere survival, but about strategically extracting lessons from our failures and having the patience to prepare thoroughly for a historic second act."
https://www.businessofpower.com/p/the-art-of-losing-well-shinzo-abes
2. Panel on Alt-Geopolitics. Non Mainstream views here. (Don't agree with these but interesting takes).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldliw4G_vM0
3. A masterclass on what to look for in GPs for early stage VC funds. Cendana has an incredible dataset. This is worth watching a few times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AqIrMSvya4
4. "Ukraine has long-struggled to target the Russian bombers used to launch mass missile targets against Ukrainian cities, as Moscow has kept them out of range of weapons Kyiv has developed itself as well as those supplied by its Western allies.
The use of FPV drones in such a way would mark just the latest stage in the ever-evolving and still relatively fledgling world on drone warfare.
The attack was also likely highly cost effective — FPV drones can be bought for a just a few hundred dollars each but the cost of 41 heavy bombers runs into the billions."
5. "Venture ≠ Asset Management – The game has drifted from backing outlier founders to chasing AUM. A painful reset might be needed before things get healthy again.
Build a firm you enjoy – Not one optimized for market cycles. Sovereign wealth and busted endowments will keep distorting VC until liquidity dries up. Best to play your own game."
https://feld.com/archives/2025/05/beware-the-grinfuckers/
6. "Mechanization really did take jobs from farm workers. Automation took jobs from manual laborers. The PC took jobs from clerical and communication workers. But, all of these resulted in greater productivity, employment, and more optionality for workers. It’s both anti-historic and anti-evidence that AI will somehow prove to be the exception.
Could AI, along with thousands of other impactful technological, political, social, demographic, and black-swan-event changes permanently alter the employment landscape in our lifetimes? Absolutely. In fact, one of my favorite stats from this overly-ambitious weekend of research was MIT’s estimation that 60% of employment in 2018 was in types of jobs that didn’t exist before 1940.
By the time I’m in my 80s, y’all better have destroyed more than half of all the existing jobs, and that’s just to keep up with the 20th Century’s pace of change. But, don’t expect AI to do it for you in the next decade; that’s just marketing."
https://sparktoro.com/blog/ai-will-replace-all-the-jobs-is-just-tech-execs-doing-marketing/
7. This was a long podcast but this was pretty interesting and helpful to understand why America has lost pretty much every single war in the last three decades. Big military bureaucracy and weak leadership. America is run by unserious people. (most of West is actually)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o5tlrYEmpQ
8. Some good takes here on the brilliant Ukrainian drone attack on the Russian strategic air fleet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SGSx-PBHEY
9. A must listen to on why the US is behind industrially (bad outdated free market ideology), China's industrial model and what we can learn from them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFVYeocZiSk
10. "UK’s unveiling of its new 20-40-40 Military Doctrine. This is one of the first times a Western military has so explicitly embraced a future where humans step back and autonomy steps forward: 80% unmanned. The message is clear.
It marks a shift away from conventional mass toward autonomy.
20%: Tanks and armoured platforms—held back, used precisely, not prolifically
40%: Expendable strike drones—cheap, fast, effective
40%: Reusable ISR and loitering munitions"
https://louiseboucher.substack.com/p/the-defense-brief-may-2025
11. "It also demonstrates real wartime defence innovation. Innovation in defence is not just about engineering, it is about innovating how you do things. A former British officer recently observed to me that in World War Two, the great British innovations like Operation Mincemeat and Operation Chastise (the DamBuster raid) were all the work of ‘civilians in uniform.’ These were what Churchill called his ‘corkscrew thinkers’ – people who could think in loops around an enemy that thought mainly in straight lines.
Reports indicate that Ukraine deployed 150 drones, of which 116 struck their targets. Some of the video circulating shows Russians examining a damaged shipping container, which then explodes when one of them walks in through the door, suggesting either that the containers were booby trapped, or that drones continued to explode after they failed to deploy. The drones that did deploy flew straight into the fuel tanks of the planes - another example of a very cheap bit of tech taking out a very expensive bit of hardware. They used a mixture of satellite imagery and automated targeting to cause catastrophic damage to the Russian airforce.
Artem Moroz, Head of Partnerships, Brave1 wrote over the weekend, “if you think drones are just tactical tools, think again. Ukraine is rewriting military doctrine in real time. This is next-gen asymmetric warfare in action. Cheap, smart, unstoppable.”
https://www.resiliencemedia.co/p/ukraines-attack-on-russian-airfields
12. "Even if the export of Ukrainian defence industries remains under discussion, the import of European talent is very real. For Sebastian, it was a life-changing experience. “In these three days I have accomplished more than throughout my professional career,” he said, noting that his current employment has nothing to do with defence innovation. Originally he was worried about going to Ukraine, but he did not panic during the air raid alerts and now wants to come back for more engagement with the Ukrainian ecosystem."
https://www.resiliencemedia.co/p/dispatches-from-kyiv-and-lviv-ukraines
13. It comes across as tinfoil hat at first but this is pretty important to understand our financialist system. It's a helpful framework on how the world works. Economic Hitmen 2.0.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRRPYYfiz_o
14. Critically important for Europe, the emerging defense-tech generation. Long overdue awakening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6en9RziOH0I
15. One of the most interesting individuals in America: Palmer Luckey. Defending America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVXPERyRjOA
16. "Rapid equipping may be one of the Pentagon’s stated goals, but “I think the reality is we see zero evidence of that happening,” Emeneker said. Even so-called “rushed efforts often take years to make it through the requirements writing process. ““Then they’ll need to get budgetary approval. That'll be another two to three years,” he said. “And that's the definition of fast within DoD today: five years to even start prototyping—not delivery, but prototype.”
Adversaries large and small—and increasingly aligned with one another—don’t face the same hurdles. Ukraine shows how modern warfare has become a contest to deploy attack drones adapted to fast-evolving enemy countermeasures."
17. "The goal of working with LLMs isn't to automate thinking; it's to clear space for deeper thinking. When I match my workflow to the shape of the problem, I move faster—in increments of hours rather than days—get unstuck more easily, and ship better work. The only real blockers now are fatigue, distraction, or lack of inspiration—all human factors we can address.
These workflows let me leverage my years of engineering experience while offloading the mechanical aspects of development. I bring the wisdom to know what needs researching, and the AI brings the capacity to explore options simultaneously and implement solutions efficiently.
We're only at the beginning. These three workflows represent my current best practices, but I expect to discover new patterns next week. The landscape is evolving rapidly, and the best approach is to keep experimenting, adapting, and refining how we collaborate with these powerful tools."
https://every.to/source-code/the-three-ways-i-work-with-llms
18. New super cycle of defense and space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P5qJmax0ic
19. How to think about N of 1 companies in this day and age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44iztpsfbFg
20. Micro-Saas & Vibe coding. A fun conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghYihdvkwrE&t=462s
21. What an inspiring interview. The energy and attitude: you can just do things. Ended up building NGP Energy Capital Management. Godfather of Energy PE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g_Cb2wUn3M
22. Lots of very useful nuggets of insight in hiring, building and investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbVZDp6s9xU&t=14s
23. "Yerba mate has more caffeine than most other teas (roughly the same amount that’s in coffee) and it won’t lead to a crash when it wears off, the way coffee can. “Yerba mate is notorious for having a smoother downtick of a caffeine ‘high,’ which is likely because of the slower release of caffeine or the other bioactive components, like theobromine,” says registered dietitian Paul Jaeckel, RD."
https://www.gq.com/story/yerba-mate-tea-benefits
24. "Overall, the Ukrainians achieved the impossible, carrying out the war’s first air assault operation in over three years, allowing them to strike deep into Russian-held territory, inflict serious losses, and gather critical intelligence.
Notably, it is highly likely that not all Ukrainian operators exfiltrated from behind Russian lines.
According to special forces doctrine, these operators will be able to gather intelligence, set up and train further resistance networks, and conduct a deadly guerrilla warfare with sabotage and liquidations of top Russian commanders."
25. "Third, we need to understand that everything is now about information dominance, the counterbalance of which is psychological defense. We must be comfortable operating in both of these spaces as modern democracies.
Finally, we need to break free from this 30 year old box of smoke and mirrors. We must end the idea of Russian sanctuary — the idea that we cannot touch Russia — which absolutely poisons our analytical abilities. We need to define strategies for 21st century war termination that also confront hybrid wars.
And this also, of course, begins with how we end Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine.
Our only chance comes from Ukraine — from how we win in Ukraine, and what can be born from the revitalization of order that comes after Ukraine.
Otherwise, it’s just gonna be chaos monkeys all the way down."
https://www.greatpower.us/p/why-do-democracies-pretend-to-be
26. "But now, America has signaled it’s done. It’s still trying to meddle in a set of negotiations that also are not real in order to try to get a slice of Ukraine when it survives, but there’s been no talk about additional military support for Ukraine or working with the coalition to drum up more support. Thankfully the non-American parts of this coalition, including our NATO allies and other American treaty allies in Asia, have continued to put out new support packages. But America stamping around Europe asking “can’t someone else do it?” has had this outcome.
Ukraine has different choices, harder choices, freer choices maybe — and it will take them. Because it has no other choice but continuing to make its tactical possibilities achieve strategic success.
Russia has been a bogeyman for such a long time. But once the bogeyman is in the house, you can hide under the bed and imagine how much worse it might be, or you can smash a vase into its head and see if it bleeds like the rest of us.
Turns out Russia bleeds.
Young Ukrainians seek inspiration in this fantasy of a lone manga warrior fighting armies and the “godhand” for survival against the odds — but the inverse of this is grit in the gears of strategic thinking for big military powers like Russia and China and the United States. You start to think your out-sized capabilities are determinative in any conflict, and then some kids on dirt-bikes or a handful of Ukrainians with toy drones show you up.
Ukrainians are amazing in every definition of that word — and every damn day we should consider ourselves lucky that this brave, innovative, persistent, dedicated nation is fighting this war to cripple one of the world’s nominal great military powers to be a free, democratic nation that’s on our team (well, if America decides to stay on the team).
A nation absolutely outmatched on every spreadsheet can design a theory of victory that defies every big army conception of how this stuff works. Ukraine used 117 drones — which themselves cost about $58,500 — to blow up or at least damage billions of dollars of irreplaceable strategic assets across a swath of territory that spans almost 4000 miles"
https://www.greatpower.us/p/operational-art-and-the-salvation
27. People around the world overlook the amazing feat that Saudi Arabia does every single year as they host ~3 million pilgrims from all around the world the week of June 4th. It's really crazy impressive.
28. "The Ukrainian attack on Russia’s nuclear bombers shows how insane and self-defeating the GOP’s attack on the battery industry is. Batteries were what powered the Ukrainian drones that destroyed the pride of Russia’s air fleet; if the U.S. refuses to make batteries, it will be unable to make similar drones in case of a war against China. Bereft of battery-powered FPV drones, America would be at a severe disadvantage in the new kind of war that Ukraine and Russia have pioneered.
Unfortunately, Trump and the GOP have decided to think of batteries as a culture-war issue instead of one of national security. They think they’re attacking hippie-dippy green energy, sticking it to the socialist environmentalist kids and standing up for good old red-blooded American oil and gas. Instead, what they’re actually doing is unilaterally disarming America’s future drone force and ceding the key weapon of the modern battlefield to China.
In any case, unless America’s leaders wake up very quickly to the military importance of batteries, magnets, injection molding, and drones themselves, the U.S. may end up looking like the British Navy in 1941 — or the Italian Navy in 1940. A revolution in military affairs is in process, and America is willfully missing the boat."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-chinese-drones-could-defeat-america
29. More on Turkey, the real power in the Middle East and Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfKoTHwE72E
30. "The idea is to identify opportunities to buy mature, people-intensive outfits like law firms and other professional services firms, help them scale through AI, then use the improved margins to acquire other such enterprises and repeat the process. He has been at it for three years.
“It just seems so obvious,” said Gil over a Zoom call earlier this week. “This type of generative AI is very good at understanding language, manipulating language, manipulating text, producing text. And that’s audio, that’s video, that includes coding, sales outreach, and different back-office processes.”
If you can “effectively transform some of those repetitive tasks into software,” he said, “you can increase the margins dramatically and create very different types of businesses.” The math is particularly compelling if one owns the business outright, he added.
“If you own the asset, you can [transform it] much more rapidly than if you’re just selling software as a vendor,” Gil said. “And because you take the gross margin of a company from, say, 10% to 40%, that’s a huge lift. Suddenly you can buy other companies at a higher price than anyone else because you have that increased cash flow per business; you have enormous leverage on the business on a relative basis, so you can do roll-ups in ways that others can’t.”
31. "The thought process is: “If I’m busy, it means that my time is valuable because I have so little of it, therefore I’ll seem important.”
Yet if you pay attention you’ll see that the guy who is actually The Man isn’t the one who’s working the hardest. It’s the one who pays everyone to work hard on his behalf so he doesn’t have to.
That’s literally what a business is. Employees sell their time/labor to an employer so he can use them as a collective resource that can do more work than any one person could on his own (and make a ton of money for himself in the process).
Your value-add as a business owner doesn’t come from your labor. You’re just one person. The amount of hours you can work in a day isn’t enough to move the needle (no matter how talented you are). That’s why solopreneurship is nothing more than a wannabe sigma male LARPing fantasy.
Your higher-level thinking and ability to effectively manage the people who work under you is what really makes the difference."
https://www.tetramarketing.io/p/real-signs-of-low-social-status
32. One of the best & educational conversations on the business of venture capital.
Mountain Ranges Versus Pyramids
I’ve long been a fan of Star Wars. Not the woke-garbage movies and shows that have been put out in the last couple years by Disney but the classics and the actual comic books that have followed the traditional lore. In a somewhat obscure series called Crimson Dawn, crime lord Qi’ra of Solo movie fame plots to bring down the evil Sith Lords at the top of the Galactic Empire.
In a speech to her followers, she says:
“This should be the structure of power in the galaxy. An endless mountain range—many peaks, none dramatically higher than the others. The people who live on them, free to climb as high as they can, and all those centers of power contending with and compromising with the others.”
On the other hand there “is a pyramid. Everyone is climbing to the same place, pushing others down so they can ascend. And at its peak someone awaits, ready to destroy anyone who would dare approach. The only truly free person in the entire galaxy.”
While most of us don’t have ambitions to rule the galaxy, these are pretty good analogies of entrepreneurial life, self employment versus working for someone else. Entrepreneurial life is a mountain range, you go as high as you can and compete with others but the upside is almost unlimited as is the downside.
Working at a corporate or anyone else’s company you are working in a pyramid where your upside is capped and your only way to advance is up the hierarchy where there will always be someone in your way. Literally. A red ocean.
With this in mind, it makes me wish I started my entrepreneurial journey earlier in my life. Engaging my time and energy where the upside was not bounded. But alas due to my own risk aversion (aka cowardice), my ignorance and lack of consciousness I might have reached my personal goals faster.
So for anyone paying attention, the earlier you take action on your dreams, the sooner you will reach them. And the best way is to focus on mountain peaks aka entrepreneurial life.
A Love Letter to New York: The City for Inspiration & Rejuvenation
I visited New York City after an almost 6 year hiatus. I had a chance to attend the OOO (Owner Operator Outlier) Summit in August of 2024. And as expected it was incredibly enlightening and inspiring. I learned so much from speakers like Sam Parr, Ankur Nagpal, Andrew Yeung, Steph Smith, Shahed Khan, Guillermo Rauch & Kyla Scanlon. It was an interesting mix of creators and techies. A very different scene than the one in Silicon Valley where it’s literally just tech folks.
It reminded me of when I left Yahoo! back in 2012. I spent the year going to various conferences and taking lots of classes. One of the best conferences I went to was the PSFK Conference in NYC which was a creative and innovation conference run by that agency. I learned so much. The speakers gave me unique insights into where the business world was going. It made me look at the world in a different way and set me on my path.
I loved NYC growing up and spent quite a lot of time there during my Yahoo! Days. And it was where I made so many friends and is just an incredibly fun city. For a big city guy like me this place is unbelievable. But I saw the place had started gentrifying and homogenizing in the 2010s. It became less fun and I just wrote the place off. Incorrectly, I should add.
This city, especially after so many folks left during the 2020 Pandemic disaster, still attracts the best and brightest young people from around the world. On a regular basis too I might add. The people watching on the street is truly incredible. So many different walks of life, ages and socioeconomic stratas.
And due to this regular influx of people, it is one the few places in the world that has an amazing ability to regenerate itself. It is definitely back in 2024, having experienced it first hand. So many new restaurants, cafes, bars, shops, sporting events, theaters, art and entertainment. It’s so dynamic.
I would also add for me it seems to have an ability to regenerate your energy and life. There is no other city that is as big, as diverse demographic and industry-wise. There is no place on the planet that has the culture cachet and soft power as New York City. San Francisco is my home but I will be spending more time in New York for sure. It’s the place for inspiration and aspiration.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 20th, 2025
"In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer"--Albert Camus
"The terminology comes from Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for cloud computing platforms. It describes their uptime. Three 9s is .999% uptime. Five nines is .99999 % uptime. You get the picture. The less downtime your application can tolerate, the more 9s you need in your SLA.
Where it applies to agents is different - we are looking at the performance of the underlying AI models that run the agent processes. If you have an AI agent that is 92% accurate, that sounds great right? But if that agent must perform 5 steps to get a task done, and the model is 92% accurate at each task, you have to multiply .92 five times to get the overall accuracy of the workflow. That number is 65%.
The first is - agentic companies will be successful in direct proportion to the three 9s issue. Use cases that don’t require three 9s, and aren’t frustrating at that level, will be the first to be seriously adopted. This is why things like generating images as part of a marketing workflow is a good use case. If the combined performance of a marketing campaign AI agent is 65%, that’s still fine, and productive, and not frustrating. As an investor, you want to think through these use cases. Where can a relatively poorly performing agent still be useful? Invest there first."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/three-9s-thesis-of-ai-investing-why
2. "As the war in Ukraine has demonstrated, while feasible, this form of missile defense is costly. Pursuing it will become even more challenging if already constrained resources are funneled into an extremely costly space-based missile defense architecture. For example, for the cost of a single space-based interceptor (estimated at $100 to $300 million), the United States could procure between 25 and 75 PAC-3 MSE interceptors — systems that offer credible and proven defense against a broad spectrum of Chinese conventional missile threats.
The opportunity cost attached to Trump’s vision is therefore extremely high, and any serious pursuit would likely prove strategically disadvantageous to the United States."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/missile-defense-at-any-cost
3. This seems like a problem, demographic fraud in China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK8eLfbS3c4
4. Pretty solid interview here. Investing in great Deep-tech companies. And also how to leverage your newsletter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ7FcwxaIMs
5. "All these powerful pieces—the groundbreaking sensors, the self-directing swarms, the AI—are being employed in modern combat in Ukraine. But right now, they’re mostly operating in stove pipes, each sequestered from the other, operating in technological silos. The vital nervous system needed to fuse their individual brilliance into a cohesive, battlefield-dominating whole, that will enable commanders to truly understand and synchronize the fight, is often absent.
War remains the most ferocious engine of innovation any of us have ever witnessed. What the Ukrainian armed forces have accomplished in over three years of brutal, relentless attacks is, by any measure, astounding. They have demonstrated incredible tech acumen, staring down a Goliath—a vastly better-resourced, larger, and supposedly more advanced enemy—and not just holding, but often punching back with stunning ingenuity. The Ukrainians’ ability to adapt and innovate under fire is a powerful testament to what’s possible.
Understanding these current limitations and burgeoning capabilities brings Goff’s observation into focus, especially regarding the future interplay of Ukrainian innovation and Western military potential."
6. "What kind of elites will we have? Generous ones or rapacious ones? Everything is riding on the answer. The efforts of men like Bruce Wayne and Bishop Myriel are not simply quaint gestures—they hold everything together. Those with power and influence set the tone, and their conduct determines whether we are building a civilization, or whether everyone is at war with all others, as Gates and Bloomberg and company seem to wish.
The point is not to rail against oligarchs and technocrats but to suggest that their absurdly bad examples should compel us to do better. Even if we will never come into possession of wealth like Gates or Bloomberg, anyone with open eyes can find opportunities to act more nobly than our effetely ruthless elites. Prove worthy in the little opportunities and you may be given larger ones. You also have to suspect that the turbulent times ahead will call for men of real quality to step forward."
https://thechivalryguild.substack.com/p/noblesse-oblige
7. "Digital products are a shortcut.
Social media is a shortcut.
AI is a shortcut.
Technology as a whole is a shortcut.
If you don't like the word "shortcut," exchange it with "leverage."
You don't have to send physical letters through the mail anymore when you can post an Instagram reel of you expressing your thoughts in your car that reaches 500,000 people. (And 500,000 is insane. You don't even need 10,000. You can also DM anyone, crazy.)
You don't need to find a book at the library to find a hyper-specific piece of information when you can get unstuck from a simple conversation with AI.
You don't need to waste $10,000+ testing whether or not a physical product will work when you can launch a digital product on the same topic in 2 weeks, see if it works, generate cash flow, and then pour that money and validated idea into another business model.
Here's the bad news:
You still need to learn how to take the shortcut.
And shortcuts are not synonymous with guaranteed success.
Humans get distracted from the shorter path all the time because they can't sit down and focus.
Even with the all-powerful AI we have access to, many people will fail for the simple reason that they will try for 2 weeks and quit because they weren't serious in the first place."
https://thedankoe.substack.com/p/how-average-people-will-get-rich
8. Some alt-geopolitics here. Very contrary to mass media narratives, so important to listen to these tinfoil characters.
But bear in mind these folks dislike Pax Americana so they have an axe to grind. We will see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIRIApJlpj8
9. Investing in a tripolar world. Solid and important conversation on investing in Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvHnRxKdg2M
10. "Bull had mentioned a few times that big corporations view you as nothing other than an item on a spreadsheet but it was only in that moment that I truly understood how accurate that statement really was. All those overtime hours, weekends sacrificed, time missed with the family, all of it meant nothing.
The most important thing is to just start building your own path to Wifi $. You’ll wish you started sooner. It doesn’t really matter what you do because your first few attempts will likely fail and that’s okay. You just need to put one foot in front of the other and the path will become clear over time."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/faang-to-wifi-with-bowtiedbills
11. This is why Sequoia is still tops for so many decades. Good interview with Pat Grady.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBvjcIqNvow
12. "The thing I hate the most about AI and it's ease of access; the slow, painful death of the hacker soul... Brought not by war or scarcity, but by convenience. By buttons. By bots.
The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs. It’s that it will entice people who never wanted the job to begin with. People who don't care for quality. It'll remove the already tiny barrier to entry that at-least required people to try and comprehend control flow. Vampires with SaaS dreams and Web3 in their LinkedIn bio. Empty husks who see the terminal not as a frontier, but as a shovel for digging up VC money. They’ll drool over their GitHub Copilot like it’s the holy spirit of productivity, pumping out React CRUD like it’s oxygen. They'll fork VS Code yet again, just to sell the same dream to a similarly deluded kid.
There was once magic here. There was once madness.
Because you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the cruel joke. We’ll fill this industry with people who think they’re good, because their bot passed CI. They'll float through, confident, while the real ones - the hungry ones - get chewed up by a system that doesn’t value understanding anymore. Just output. Just tokens per second.
And what’s worse, we’ll normalize this mediocrity. Cement it in tooling. Turn it into a best practice. We'll enshrine this current bloated, sluggish, over-abstracted hellscape as the pinnacle of software. The idea that building something lean and wild and precise, or even squeezing every last drop of performance out of a system, will sound like folklore."
https://deplet.ing/the-copilot-delusion/
13. Summary of the DOGE experience. Good people meeting a bad system, the bad system usually wins.
https://sahillavingia.com/doge
14. How sales leaders are leveraging AI to win in 2025/2026. Very instructive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oLxWRF9Uys
15. Diabolical cyber hacking and mind hack attack that led to the Assad regime. Mind blowing and S-tier if this is true. Also highlighting the importance of Opsec.
"The snippet of information was this: A mobile application, distributed quietly among Syrian officers via a Telegram channel, had spread rapidly in their ranks. In truth, the app was a carefully planted trap, the opening salvo of a hidden cyberwar — perhaps one of the first of its kind against a modern army. Militias had weaponized smartphones, turning them into lethal instruments against a regular military force.
Beyond revealing the contours of a cyberattack against the Syrian army, this investigation seeks to understand the application itself, its technology and reach, and to uncover the nature of the information it siphoned from within military ranks. This, in turn, leads directly to the potential impact on Syria’s military operations."
https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/how-a-spyware-app-compromised-assads-army/
16. This week's inside venture capital and Silicon Valley, this show has lots of great insights & perspectives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqyElN1iKs0
17. The future rise of piracy & privateering. It's gonna be ugly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCeQg_GuAAc
18. Legit fascinating conversation on F1 & going into venture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAYJ-9N1wM8
19. Founder investor lessons. This was fun & helpful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-JBj7eWUDE&t=4s
20. "At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, this time does feel different. Two of the most significant platform shifts I’ve seen in my career, the move to the cloud and then the move to mobile, created a lot more labor demand. With all of this cloud and mobile software, we needed people to manage data centers, focus on uptime, work in security centers to keep an eye on intruders, and perform various other essential tasks that arose as software penetrated new industries and parts of life. And, because there weren’t technologies that could do most of that work, the only solution was to hire and train people to do new(ish) jobs like site reliability, developer operations, and the like.
From everything I’ve seen, the rise of AI is replacing labor with machines and agents because they can do most, but not yet all of the work. As is the case with any innovation, the optimist in me wants to believe that this new tech wave will create new job categories and titles that didn’t exist before, but this wave feels different because I think the companies that would otherwise create those jobs for people are going to push much harder to have software do more of the work."
https://chudson.substack.com/p/uncomfortable-and-unanswered-questions
21. Always a fun conversation on the latest tech news here. NIA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxlJDsNHlZA&t=229s
22. China (infrastructure) vs. USA (weapons), exploring the influence strategy of the two great powers in the world right now. All around getting resource control.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih_jj8MeyDg
23. Always realpolitik and clear eyed view on global macro, energy and geopolitics. Doomberg with objective analysis of present day events.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_AN2fWZiVI
24. What America is missing in the reindustrialization movement. Material processing refineries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DG2vS6DcOM
25. How do we turn around America in the face of the massive threats against us, China, Russia, Iran, Extreme Islamicists & internal incompetence/suicidal empathy. An Important conversation here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gYvX6s9gqY
26. "The budget’s fastest-growing line item isn’t defense, or healthcare, but the interest on our debt. Even if this $3.7 trillion middle finger to future generations doesn’t pass, net interest payments on the debt will total $13.8 trillion over the next decade. We’re basically cosigning a subprime mortgage for our grandchildren while giving the wealthy a trust fund top-off.
As interest payments increase, they crowd out any discretionary spending critical for growth (e.g., the internet, medical research, education), and curb our ability to respond to future crises. Nations typically aren’t conquered but go broke. According to historian Niall Ferguson, there’s a redline where debt service exceeds defense spending. In fiscal year 2024, we hit it. The federal budget earmarked $877 billion for defense and $878 billion to pay the interest on our debt.
As Ferguson wrote, “America’s fiscal position is far more constrained today than ever before,” adding that the U.S. faces a debt crisis similar to the ones that contributed to the downfalls of the Spanish, French, and British empires. We’re now spending more to service rich people’s tax cuts than to defend the country. So, raise taxes or cut spending? The answer is yes. Note: Both parties engage in this consensual hallucination — taxes went down during the Biden administration and spending (YTD) has gone up under Trump."
https://www.profgalloway.com/rich-kids/
27. What an excellent discussion on important tech news this week: OF, Privacy & Identity. More or Less.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0_J88ZHLt0
28. What does the world of 2028 look like from Doug Casey, global adventurer & investor extraordinaire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGeFj8zd3-Y
29. "Why is this important? It’s important for two reasons: 1) the emotional reason to not blame your parents for being behind the times. Back when they were growing up it *did* make sense to get that prestigious degree and go build all this infrastructure and 2) you have to predict where the money is going to go. A common saying amongst the wealthy families is “go where the money is flowing”. This has deep meaning. If you know that more people will be using Product A, figure out what they can buy using Product A.
In 2025 product A is pretty clear: smartphone, laptops, desktops and in the future virtual headsets. If your income is *not* tied to people using those products, you will be swimming up stream. It is not easy to fight 3-5% declines in customers no matter what industry you’re in.
Look at the mega trends. That is the first sales filter. Then get your initial starting capital and start the ad research. With software tools you can quite literally test demand on any product and even find the ads that are doing well. Under 30 mins.
After that? You will be using VAs, Software and 1099 forms to scale up. The Sovereign individual is already here and before you know it a one man shop will be running 8-9 figure businesses.
Make sure you’re on the right side of history on that one. Otherwise, AI will be eating your value add."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/why-your-parents-have-it-wrong-despite
30. Always good stuff from top VC investor Josh Wolfe. That dude is smart. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpyYqY1cWXM
31. "Entrepreneurs would benefit from reflecting on these three questions about product value, innovation, and market timing to guide their ventures toward success."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/05/31/three-quick-questions-after-hearing-a-founders-story/
32. "When people initially come to NYC they’re a bit sheepish, you know? And then, within a few months, you see them out at the club, and they are totally being their authentic selves. Everybody embraces it. There’s somebody stranger than you doing something stranger than you right next door. NYC is a place where you can just breathe and be yourself.
There’s a lot of passion in NYC; people are on the move and they work hard. You are spent (in a good way) when you go home at the end of the day and put your head on the pillow. But you're also fulI. You don't experience that in any other place."
https://thejamesbrand.com/blogs/stories/from-snow-to-dirt-an-interview-with-josh-rosen
33. "My strong, unwavering belief is that Pax Americana is a damn good deal for the United States AND the world, especially as American leadership in AI opens up an entirely new realm of intangible things that the United States can trade for tangible things. Is it a perfect deal for the United States? No. Do other countries free ride on our provision of security and an end-market of the American consumer? Absolutely. Has the system been internally captured by oligarchs and professional politicians, so that the distribution of this great wealth flowing to the United States goes less and less to ‘average’ Americans? 100%. Should we aggressively prune and reform the Pax Americana system? Should we root out its foreign free riders and domestic leeches? Yes, please!
But that’s not what this Administration believes. Neither Donald Trump nor his key advisors believe that Pax Americana is a good deal at all, much less a damn good deal like I believe. They believe the United States is being cheated and taken advantage of without end, both internationally and domestically. They don’t want to fix the Pax Americana regime of coordination through multilateral rule-setting. They want to blow up the entire deal and replace it with an America First regime of competition through bilateral engagement.
I appreciate their frustration. I share a lot of it. But I am desperately opposed to crashing the Pax Americana car, Annie Hall style, because the America First system that this Administration wants to have as a replacement is not a stable system that is possible to have as a replacement. The end result of blowing up Pax Americana and its – yes – globalist system of rules and institutions and alliances that coordinates the flow of capital, labor, goods, services and culture without ‘winning’ any head-to-head relationship will be a system that is both worse for the United States AND the world."
https://www.epsilontheory.com/crashing-the-car-of-pax-americana/
34. Semiconductors and AI: one of the most important competitions in the world right now between China & USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7p6U53DxrE
35. Irregular War: The enemies of the West are really good at this.
The Law of Large Numbers: A Curse or Blessing
One of the big goals of 2024 was growing my X aka Twitter follower count after taking the excellent Art of Purpose’s “Masterclass 24/7”. I was lamenting how my follower count was stagnant for years. But I started learning the reasons why and was able to fix this slowly. My follower count did grow steadily. Just not as fast as I wanted. I was really jealous of friends of mine, like Anthony Pompliano, Sheel Mohnot or Nick Huber or others who were crushing it on X with follower counts of hundreds of thousands, and in some cases multiple millions.
Then I went to reread Tim Ferriss’ “11 Reasons Not To Become Famous”: https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/. This quote from there does a good job explaining the Law of Large Numbers that work for and against you: “the bigger the population, the more opportunities and problems you will have. A small, self-contained town in Idaho might not have a Pulitzer Prize winner among its residents, but it probably doesn’t need a SWAT team either.
But let’s assume you only have 100 or 1,000 followers. You should still wonder: At any given time, how many of these people might go off of their meds? And how many of the remaining folks will simply wake up on the wrong side of the bed today, feeling the need to lash out at someone? The answer will never be zero.”
This is the law of large numbers. Yes, there are crazy good benefits and upside. But like all forms of leverage, also a heck of alot of downside. The more employees you have, the more likely some of them will suck or cause issues or will be lazy or will steal from you or sue you. The more people you date, the more likely someone is bound to be a psycho. It’s just plain statistics and odds.
I know for every 100 customers in a business. 10 will at least love you to death. However, at least 10 will hate you no matter what you do. It’s the same with social media and your audience. So multiply this percentage to your social media following. If you have 5000 followers, anything you post, there is a good chance at least 500 folks will hate it. It is what it is. Think of how insane the DMs and hate would be for someone with a million followers. Not sure we humans are well wired for dealing with that. But we are adapting slowly.
I also started listening to Canadian billionaire Andrew Wilkinson on several podcasts, as well as read his excellent book “Never Enough” and it was instructive. You think once you hit a number (in this case money), then all your problems would be solved. But as we all learn the hard way, this is never the case. As the song goes “Mo money, mo problems.” We are anxiety machines, whatever you get or have, you will still be stressed and still be unhappy for other reasons. It’s just a number at the end of the day.
Putting this all together, my point to all this: Be happy with where you are and what you have. God has a plan and you are where you are supposed to be. So try to enjoy your ride up. And be aware of the downsides when you get to where you want to get to.
And to my starting point: You absolutely do need to grow your audience count as this is key to personal branding and distribution. Having a direct line to potential customers or partners. This will be one of the critical factors of longevity in this new world of business and entrepreneurship.
Hell is Other People: An Introvert in an Extrovert World
Yes, I definitely started with a strange title. People are heaven and hell at the same time. But for introverts like me, in most cases, interacting with people is incredibly draining. So we’d rather be by ourselves, reading, watching YouTube or surfing the Internet. Alone time with our own thoughts. This is how we gain energy.
This is the exact opposite case with extroverts who get their energy from being around and interacting with other people. There is definitely a spectrum on the range of introvert to extrovert.
But if you are to have any kind of career or growth you need to be around people. Talking with them, selling to them, teaching or learning. There is literally no way around interacting with people if you want to get anything done.
And especially in my line of work of venture capital, investing and international business it’s absolutely critical, if not just plain table stakes of the game. Now don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy interacting with people, talking with smart friends, awesome founders and fellow investors is a joy, dream and privilege!
But the role requires an excess amount of time that can be personally taxing for my introvert leanings at times. I do so many meetings & calls and plenty of public speaking, where I am literally surrounded with countless people, hour after hour, day after day. Sometimes for weeks on end.
So you have to figure out how to cope. You learn to take small breaks and walks. You learn to be great at extricating yourself from conversations politely. Or in the absolute worst case, just plain “French Goodbye-ing” them. Otherwise known in modern parlance, “ghosting” them. It’s an important survival mechanism for an introvert to maintain their sanity and health.
So for anyone who finds I’ve disappeared all of a sudden, don’t take it personally. I just need to step away to recharge my energy so I can back to you to engage again at full capacity!
Runner Runner: Lessons in Ambition, Fear & Greed
There was an obscure Hollywood movie called “Runner Runner” that came out in 2013 that starred Justin Timberlake as a naive Princeton mathematical genius named Richie and Ben Affleck as an online gambling tycoon hiding away from the USA with his massive fortune. Having lost his tuition money gambling, he confronts Ivan Block (played by Affleck) and gets recruited to his massive gambling operations in Costa Rica.
And the adventure begins as the FBI and local politicians and criminals get involved. It was good fun as you can see from this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFPqyNvNzvU. But there were so many great quotes from the movie especially by Ben Affleck who does such a great job as the bad guy, intensely clever, witty and charming. Think of his character in “Boiler Room” and his motivational speeches times 10. So very good.
One of his lines: “This is your job. You want a clear conscience, go start a charity.”
If you want your own island and your boss says you gotta go out there and take a beating, you go out there, take it and come back to work and say, "do you need me to do it again?".
Or this:“That's the problem with your generation. You guys sat around with your vintage T-shirts and your participation medal, and you never did anything.”
Or even this one: “You know at the casino when they give you chips at the casino and say ‘Good luck sir’? What they don’t tell you is that ‘sir’ means dummy and ‘good luck’ means ‘F–k you!”
So many great bangers here. Loved Affleck in the movie. But the one quote that really stuck with me.
“That little voice in the back of your head right now, it's not your conscience, it's fear.”
It really hits. I think back on all the lost opportunities in my last decades. Personal, professional, money and relationships.
Fear and self limiting beliefs held me back. It holds all of us back. Whenever good things happened in my life, I overcame the fear or more often the case, acted in spite of the fear. So all I can say is: next time, you want to start a new job or business, move to a new place, or want to ask that girl out. Ignore your fear and JUST DO IT. Better to have the regret of trying and failing than the regret of not trying, and never knowing. Always wondering what could have been.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 13th, 2025
"Summer means happy times and good sunshine. It means going to the beach, going to Disneyland, having fun." - Brian Wilson
"Finance, as a religion, has mastered the alchemy of words, turning human labor into gold for the elite while leaving the masses in a state of perpetual servitude. The high priests—bankers, financiers, and economists—wield the secret spells of financial jargon, ensuring that the wealth generated by humanity’s efforts flows upward. But as I’ve revealed through my threads and articles, this system is built on a foundation of lies, from the myth of scarcity to the false promise of financial salvation.
By recognizing finance for what it is—a belief system, not an inevitability, not reality—we can begin to dismantle its power, reclaiming our labor and our humanity from the altar of Wealth. The magic of words may have built this religion, but it’s through new words—words of reality, community, and humanity—that we can tear down this religion has so enslaved us across the last four hundred years."
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/the-religion-of-finance
2. "Security guarantees by Europe or the US, meanwhile, need to be backed up with real force to be credible, and they need to be a believably long-term commitment to make a difference.
Mujtaba Rahman, the managing director for Europe at the analysts Eurasia Group, said: “The key question for Ukraine is this: will there be a credible security guarantee which will enable private capital to flow back into the country?"
3. The most fun and educational show you watch. Two smart guys sharing health tips this episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eql0VFUc4Dc
4. "Like the show’s audience, the guests are attracted to “TBPN” as a safe refuge from the mainstream media, one that projects an unabashed, unapologetic enthusiasm for tech. “We genuinely love the private markets, the venture capital industry—the startup industrial complex,” Hays said.
Since “TBPN” debuted last October, Hays and Coogan have warmly welcomed investors from pretty much every major venture firm in existence, a marker of the podcast’s widening appeal. (Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners—I could go on.)
A week or so ago, they dispatched one of their four producers to Las Vegas to set up a ministudio at Andreessen Horowitz’s annual investor day summit, where the firm’s executives could chat about tech, the news and, putatively, what they were presenting to their investors—a level of access no one in the regular media would ever get. The headliner, naturally, was billionaire Marc Andreessen, who stopped by “TBPN” for a 26-minute conversation about AI, open-source software and the parallels between the AI boom and the browser wars of the 1990s.
Together, Coogan and Hays, who met through a mutual friend, saw an opportunity for a tech-focused podcast that could analyze industry news with a light irreverance and wasn’t tied to a single company or venture firm. Last fall, they had enough free time on their hands to record a couple test episodes. When they attended Peter Thiel’s Hereticon at the Faena Hotel in Miami, they sought out feedback from David Senra, host of the popular “Founders” podcast, who had previously advised Coogan on his YouTube channel. He thought the two shared a natural chemistry and encouraged them to go all-in on the concept."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/technology-brothers-seized-silicon-valley
5. This is all Netanyahu's fault.
"Despite growing isolation at the state level and ongoing losses across social networks, it’s unlikely that Israel will relent. Ending the war quickly would likely result in a flood of empathy triggers that *might"* generate a spontaneous swarm of outrage targeting Israel and its supporters worldwide. If they continue with the pacification effort, the push by states to sanction, ban, and isolate Israel will accelerate as horror stories leak out."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/meltdown
6. "Ukraine understands completely what Putin’s ambitions are with respect to Ukraine - its total capitulation. And Ukrainians understand what a Russian victory means - the end of Ukraine as a sovereign state, and likely mass genocide against Ukrainians. They hence understand that they have no choice but to fight and hold out either for a victory in the war or a peace which leaves the country standing as an independent and sovereign nation able to defend itself against the inevitable future Russian aggression.
The nightmare for Europe is that the U.S. pulls military support for Ukraine and then Russia quickly wins the war against Ukraine, capturing its now substantial military industrial complex which the leaves an enfeebled Europe facing the two largest military industrial complexes in Europe - Russia plus Ukraine. That’s an extinction style event for Europe, the EU, European values, et al.
So whatever Trump does, Europe has no choice but to still support Ukraine, and keep sanctions in place as long as possible to keep the Russian economy weak and unable to regenerate its conventional military capability which will inevitably be used in the future against Europe if it is not beaten. Europe is hence desperate to keep Ukraine in the war, as a front line defence for Europe, and if any peace is concluded it needs to ensure Ukraine is sustainable, and remains as that front line defence for Europe."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/ukraine-what-everyone-wants
7. "The difference between the guys who get results (success OR failure) and the guys who are perpetually “trying” is MINDSET.
Mindset is the most important thing. More important than any other resource or ability."
https://lifemathmoney.com/the-mindset-you-need-to-succeed/
8. "Did you see Jony Ive is teaming up with OpenAI to create new consumer hardware and go after Apple?
Those guys love the game. They’re competitive athletes.
They’re wondering if they still have the skills to win in this new AI world. And they can’t know without building things. So they’re trying.
The coolest part about this moment is that one great product idea can make you relevant again."
https://www.newinternet.tech/p/the-scoreboard-just-reset
9. "So, for this YouTube course, the creator builds it out with their own mind, model, and methods.
Then, when they turn each of the bullet points above into a prompt (like idea generation, outline, scripting, etc), something magical happens.
Not only do you have education, you have execution!
Do you realize how insane that is?
A YouTube course is no longer a course. It's a piece of the creators mind that can act on its own.
You, as an individual, can purchase this piece of their mind, study the "operating manual," give it your own context, and then it does the work for you.
It gives you ideas, you choose one, it guides you through the outline, you edit it, it spits out a script according to your own voice, and hell, at some point it AI will be able to create the entire video while sounding like you and looking like your style.
It's still you creating the video, you're just doing less work.
This isn't AI slop because it has context."
https://thedankoe.substack.com/p/how-smart-creators-will-make-money
10. "The defense sector itself has been incredibly slow to adjust to this new world. Some one-third of all defense contracts and nearly three-quarters of major weapons systems come from the five major defense contractors. This concentration has reduced innovation and entrenched inefficient cost-plus manufacturing models. There is a golden opportunity for nimble AI startups to begin making inroads.
But startups developing cutting-edge AI applications face prohibitive compliance costs and Byzantine government procurement processes. Many simply avoid defense applications entirely, focusing on commercial markets despite potential national security benefits.
The result is delayed adoption of breakthrough technologies and inflated costs. Upgrading defense requires both a simplified buying system and a mindset shift among tech firms. Companies that align with this transformation—whether startups or reinvented incumbents—will gain significant value while also making the nation safer.
Another sector that needs national resilience is healthcare. Administrators are constantly trading off speed, quality, cost and innovation. In the U.S., over a quarter of federal budget outlays go toward healthcare, and nearly 1% of tax expenditures are paid for dialysis alone. These commitments to healthcare spending are incredibly limiting to the government’s agility to respond to crises and rapidly evolving trends, as we see in each successive budget battle among Washington legislators.
In the private sector, we have witnessed unique models where health systems have begun investing in health tech companies themselves and being part of building solutions from the ground up. The health systems also should transition fees to a value-based care model, aligning incentives to be rewarded for outcomes, not procedures.
As the largest purchaser of healthcare services, the government needs to enforce stricter transparency on pricing and reimbursements. It should reward patients and healthcare providers for taking steps to catch diseases early, such as screening and preventative measures in the early stages of diabetes."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/blueprint-strengthen-u-s-resilience-amid-new-world-order
11. The drone wars have just started. Dronesec is a super interesting DB to understand what is happening in the emerging drone world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2utl1hG9Fc
12. Trying to make sense of chaos (aka narrative collapse) we seem to be living in right now with one of the best thinkers & political economists around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcax5aGMC48
13. “Drones are now considered an important protective measure for soldiers,” Wilk said. “When combined, they allow to create complex aerial systems.”
In the fighting between Ukraine against Russian invaders, sections of the front line have almost become devoid of human soldiers, with drones patrolling large swathes of land, ready to pounce on anything that moves."
14. What will the new global order look like. Political and economic statecraft will come to the fore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLIacfhNvRA
15. A global macro masterclass. Net net: gold and bitcoin should be in everyone’s portfolio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX08wP9c5GY&t=9s
16. This was a great deep dive in how Anduril wins deals from the DoD and scales production.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huy6il-n8KI
17. Sauna is a must for aiding your health. Some great data points on the benefits.
https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.com/blogs/news/is-sauna-worth-the-hype
18. Go GenX.
"But here we are, at the ass-end of our 40s and 50s, scars like roadmaps, livers like punching bags. The world’s on fire—our communities invaded, so the banks can get their rents, suits in boardrooms carving up what’s left. Human demons and freaks carving up kids, malevolent judges ruling against sanity, selling us all out. And somehow, it’s on us to fix it.
Us, the ones who’d rather burn the house down than clean it. Lady Liberty’s looking rough, her torch flickering, her eyes tired as ours. She’s been through too many bad dates, too many betrayals. But she’s ours. Always was. We’re her last champions, not because we want to be, but because nobody else showed up."
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/burning-gen-x-at-the-stake-by-em
19. Tinfoil hat geopolitics. Ignore some of the numbers (like Russia-Ukraine kill ratios are exaggerated) but the direction of what he describes seems correct. Unlike what you hear from the mainstream media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNEw3qq0Sok
20. "NATO’s best course of action is to arm Ukraine now to defeat Russia on home turf, rather than prepare for a broader Russian invasion. The EU’s €850 billion, four-year Readiness 2030 program may be too late.
Europe needs a plan – then the intestinal fortitude to execute it. In the words of Morgan Freeman’s character, Ellis Boyd ‘Red’ Redding, in “The Shawshank Redemption,” Europe needs to “Get busy living, or get busy dying.”
https://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/53283
21. Thought-provoking conversation with Alex Carp of Palantir.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvLxM6kQK7Y
22. "Contrast this to Japanese media platforms, manga in particular. The major magazines are run by giant corporations, and use survey to drive decisions… And yet still manage to discover new talents, to create new franchises. The magazines fiercely cull anything that fails to find an audience. But when one does, the manga artist — tellingly called a “sensei,” in a show of respect for those who create — is given free rein to fly their freak flag. And that freedom results in unexpected new things.
They’re data-driven, but the info comes from readers and is “crunched” by editors, who are given wide latitude to use the data or downplay it. It is an algorithm of a sort, but a human-centric one. And it creates human-centric art. (There’s a much bigger article in this — stay tuned.)
This is why Japanese creators, and manga creators in particular, putting themselves first has worked so well for Japan from a pop-cultural standpoint. Even the stuff that isn’t particularly visionary feels like it has a vision. In other words, the “economists and psychologists” aren’t driving, the creators are.
Consuming products from Japan, whether manga or games or whatever, feels more like a conversation, whereas consuming content in the States, particularly online, feels like being trapped in some psychology lab’s Skinner box. And that’s the reason why you won’t see articles with titles like “Is this the Worst-Ever Era for Japanese Pop Culture?” anytime soon."
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/japan-doesnt-give-a-about-you
23. "Many say that all this is just a grift. I’d rather know where the money is coming from and who is providing it than what the Deep State did before under previous Presidents, which was to create wars on manufactured events, which allowed for huge amounts of money to be invisibly laundered back to domestic American bank accounts. Julian Assange always said that the purpose of the various wars was never to win but to provide cover for the business of laundering funds out of the government.
This is why there will be an audit of the American largess that was meant for Ukraine but might have ended up elsewhere. Notice that Assange, too was at the Pope’s funeral. That’s no accident. The President is going even further. He is giving the UAE and Saudi effective permission to develop new technologies in the region, namely AI, crypto-related, medical, and more. Elon Musk’s Neuralink is being made available for the first clinical trials at the UAE-based Cleveland Clinic. The US will let this region take the lead on innovation because it moves control over these technologies away from the Deep State.
The Middle East was the source of the world’s most advanced mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, and science from the 9th to the 15th centuries, well before the West began the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. A Jesuit priest called Athanasius Kircher translated Islamic texts and gave Westerners access to great pre-Dark Age Greek thinkers like Plato and Pythagoras. Today, something parallel is underway. The US is blessing the Middle East to restore itself as a center of innovation and innovative ideas, especially in mathematics (AI/AGI and crypto/Bitcoin/tokenization).
If the wars subside, the question will be: Can innovation be locally generated? The answer is yes. Trump said that in his speech. The region is self-made. They don’t need Deep State experts in Washington telling them what to do. This will lift not just the Middle East but also Africa, India, and Central Asia. Cheap oil helps. But now, the Middle East is transitioning into data, the new black gold, and the cornerstone of modern diplomacy. The key is understanding that Trump is swapping America’s allegiances. The old Warlords of the Middle East are now peaceniks - savvy and stability-oriented. Like the Tech Bros in Washington, they want peace enough to make money.
The disruptive and problematic Warlords are no longer in the Middle East. They are in Washington, DC. They now face a President who is surrounded by Holy figures and the Warlords of the Middle East, who are now committed to peace. The knife fight is no longer in the Middle East. It’s in the US."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/warlord-swap-and-the-peace-dividend
24. "AI-native startups are running on a new operating system for scale.
In 2020, reaching $30M ARR meant building a 250-person company. In 2025, AI-native businesses are hitting the same milestone with just 3 operators. This isn't just about doing more with less—it's about a fundamental shift in how companies scale.
This transformation isn't just possible—it's becoming necessary for survival.
As competitors leverage AI to reduce operational costs and increase speed, traditional organizational structures are turning into liabilities. The companies winning in 2025 aren't just adding AI tools to old processes. They're building entirely new operating systems that turn every team member into a force multiplier, capable of managing entire departments through strategic orchestration of AI agents.
The pattern becomes clear when you look at the companies leading this shift. Bolt and Lovable went from zero to $15M ARR in 2 months with just 15 employees. Cursor AI hit $100M ARR faster than Figma, Zoom, or Wiz—all while maintaining a team under 50 people. These aren't outliers, they're pioneers of a new operating system where scale comes from intelligence, not headcount.
We call them “autonomous businesses”.
https://www.neweconomies.co/p/the-new-operating-system
25. "Venture capital today isn't a single, neatly defined asset class—and it shouldn't be viewed through the narrow lens that's dominated for the last 50–60 years: high-risk, early-stage investing aimed at generating outlier returns. That model still exists, but it's only part of the picture. The modern venture landscape looks more like a barbell.
On one end, smaller, early-stage managers are playing the classic power-law game. Conversely, multi-billion-dollar platforms operate more like private equity firms. Both live under the "VC" moniker but are dissimilar in almost every critical way.
This isn't a bug. It's a feature of a maturing asset class. But if LPs don't recalibrate —and how they benchmark and allocate, they risk being misaligned on both ends of the barbell."
https://ventureunlocked.substack.com/p/the-time-to-is-now-to-retire-the
26. "The bad company problem likely originates in VC math. Too many founders are trained to look at market size or profit margin first. They see an opportunity that is large, or a company that could be highly profitable, and think “good enough.” This is because the early stages of any endeavor are risky. There has to be a large return to invest in something that early. It should create a 100x exit scenario. But that math isn’t the same as founder math. Founders, in my experience, tend to mistake “investing in” for “worth doing.”
Being outcome-oriented is a mental disease. A plague. A pestilence. It strips the minute, daily beauties from around us and forces us to postpone happiness for “some day.” “I’ll enjoy the company once I fix growth.” “I’ll enjoy work once I’m post-money.” Maybe, just maybe, this is deeply unhealthy. I think part of the reason so many founders burn out, go through divorce, and have health problems is that there is a soul-deep misalignment between their tasks and their desires.
The answer is so simple—the way to enjoy work is to do work you enjoy. The way to like your company is to make one you desperately want to exist. I don’t know why it has to be more complicated than that."
https://www.gettheleverage.com/p/in-defense-of-starting-a-bad-business
27. It's good to listen to folks who are knee deep and active investing and building in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9jj3fyEi2w
28. The latest trend: the Methaphone to fight phone addiction.
29. A maniac on a mission. Greatness requires obsession.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak7oLVMlhfM
30. "But here’s the catch: China can continue rolling out the BRI without the U.S. — they don’t need America’s permission or participation.
The U.S., however, cannot continue making advanced weapons without China’s rare earth processing capacity.
This is a critical and underappreciated point. More than 78 percent of the U.S. military’s weapons rely on Chinese materials. A bit of a pickle.
You may not have heard of minerals like samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium - but the simple math is this: each F-35 Jet requires 900 pounds of these rare earth minerals. A navy warship like the Destroyer requires 5,200 pounds, and a Virginia-class submarine requires 9,200 pounds.
No minerals, no military.
So, if America wants to compete, it needs a shortcut.
And this, is what I was watching when the American President made his trip to Saudi Arabia for the US-Saudi Investment Summit last week.
Saudi Arabia has three things the U.S. desperately needs in this race:
1. Political will (no elections, no shifting public sentiment, no “NIMBYism” to slow projects down)
2. Capital (deep pockets to fund big, ambitious projects)
3. And, increasingly, resource control — Saudi Arabia is pushing hard to develop its own mining and rare earth production industries as part of its Vision 2030 plan to diversify beyond oil.
And conveniently, Saudi Arabia wants American weapons."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/lend-me-a-royal-hand-americas-secret
31. "As we can see from the diagram above — the typical life cycle has four stages.
Early Stage
Growth Stage
Maturity
Decline
Each stage can be described by a general set of characteristics — let’s look at them."
https://www.philoinvestor.com/p/life-cycles-are-life
32. I don't agree with this view for the record but it's an interesting framework to understand the world
"The Financialist Kill Chain reveals a grim truth: the downfall of nations is a calculated act of plunder, not a twist of fate. Step #7, Collapse and Abandonment, is the culmination of this ruthless strategy, triggered when citizens, stripped of hope, turn to violence—allowing the orchestrators to profit from war and later claim the wreckage for next to nothing. Russia’s fate, unfolding over 80 years from the Bolshevik takeover to the 1990s collapse, stands as a haunting example.
But the Financialists were robbed of their capacity to passive-aggressively take all and abandon Russia, because strong men, testosterone laden, stood up once more and said no, and have proven willing to kill and die in great numbers to prevent just such. As we survey the world today, seeing we're next upon the Step #7 block, recognizing these patterns and the only way in which they can be defeated, is our only chance against becoming the next hollowed out victim in this predatory cycle."
https://emburlingame.substack.com/p/orchestrating-collapse-and-profiting
33. "The truth is that the world will always exist not as a finished sculpture but as perpetual work in progress, shaped by our decisions. Great artists keep working until they die, often leaving unfinished works behind. This isn't tragedy but testament to their strength. Their refusal to be "completed" becomes their power to leave a legacy others must continue. That is the example we should follow."
https://www.businessofpower.com/p/renewal-in-an-age-of-managed-decline
34. "Since the beginning of WWI , the role that the state has played in our lives has not stopped growing. This has been especially so in the case of Glasgow. The state has spent more and more, provided more and more services, more subsidy, more education, more health care, more infrastructure, more accommodation, more benefits, more regulations, more laws, more protection. The more it has provided, the worse Glasgow has fared. Is this correlation a coincidence? I don’t think so.
The story of the rise and fall of Glasgow is a distilled version of the story of the rise and fall of industrial Britain – indeed the entire industrial West. In the next chapter I’m going to show you a simple mistake that goes on being made; a dynamic by which the state, whose very aim was to help Glasgow, has actually been its ‘pathway to breakdown’ . . ."
Analog: A Japanese Love Story
Analog was another beautiful movie I discovered on a Swiss Air flight home.
“Satoru Mizushima meets a mysterious woman, Miyuki, at a coffee shop. They promise to meet every Thursday at the cafe, but one day she doesn’t show up.”
With a description like that, I had to check it out. It started off as a typical Japanese movie but it was wonderful. Also lots of sliding door moments. About loneliness and human connection. How two odd people meet each other yet they cannot keep in touch except for meeting at the cafe every thursday. Both people who pay very close attention to the details around them. A very Japanese trait. Every scene is soaked in the craft mentality.
Satoro: “Time. It may seem like a wasted effort. Cooking and design. But I think people appreciate the time and thought that goes into things.”
Miyuki: “And that time and thought give them the “human touch”
The whole movie was whimsical. Satoro is an architect & designer who uses paper models and pencil drawings to make his beautiful designs. Miyuki is a traditionalist who doesn’t have a mobile phone and walks around discovering new places. No wonder they get along so well.
Miyuki is a violinist. “When I hold a violin, it becomes a part of me. We become one. I draw the bow, and the moment a sound is created feels like a miracle. The tone changes depending on the place, the weather, my mood.”
They are both artists in their own way. And it is a joy watching the two of them develop their relationship as they explore Tokyo together and all its myriad places like the beach, the forest, making soba or listening to an orchestra.
“If you open your eyes, you’ll see the world is a kind place, I realized that recently.” Especially in times of sorrow and tragedy. This movie makes you understand how thin the threads of life are, so you better enjoy it.
If you love Japan and appreciate a good movie, I do recommend watching this one. A beautiful and touching story.
Sliding Door Moments in Life
I remember a night back in 1996 when I was backpacking in Europe on a Train to Krakow from Prague. I ended up standing near a window in the hallway of the train enjoying the air.
I ended up meeting and talking with this beautiful young Australian girl who was also doing the trip to Krakow. We spent hours just talking until the conductor came by and asked to check the ticket. He told me I was in a first class not 2nd class train, so we agreed that we would meet in Krakow at the train station stop.
Well, next morning I waited at the train station stop and she wasn’t there. Found out that the 2nd class train cabins were disconnected and then taken by another train. I never saw her again as this was in the 90s before cell phones and social media. What could have been.
Definitely what you call a sliding door moment. A small turn left or right. 5 minutes too early or too late and your life is never the same. Random events that you never could have foreseen. Life is strange and exciting this way.
Well, I had a major sliding door moment when I lived in Taiwan in 1997. The newspaper job I wanted to get didn’t happen so I ended up going to teach English. I saw a job ad in the newspaper and went over to apply. I found out the job had been filled but also that there was an opening at the head office. They sent me to ELSI 1. That is where I met my wife who was a fellow teacher there. My beautiful daughter is the result.
As the author of the excellent book “Fluke” Brian Paul Klaas wrote and says: “You can’t control anything but you can influence them.”
That means you need to actively take action and get out there. Take way more risks in life. Smart risks. You never know when you will have these sliding door moments that completely change your life.
Repositioning for the Future: Reindustrialize aka Back to the Future for America
It’s 2025 and the world has changed a lot. No Sh-t you would say. We have been bracketed by historical levels of change on the political level, technology level, economic level and social level. We’re deglobalizing as we split into regional blocks and geopolitics have heated up into a new Cold War between the Global West and the Global East.
I’ve been in Silicon Valley for over 26 years and I’ve had to reinvent myself at least 4 times. Startup guy, big tech executive, Venture Capitalist, Holding Co Operator, then back to VC & Investing.
I realized in 2024, it’s time to rethink everything and reinvent myself again. In the midst of personal & family issues, as well as just plain dissatisfaction with startup investing. I was just plain tired & worn out.
I wasn’t as excited about venture investing in the next SaaS, Developer tool, marketplace or whatever startup as I used to. I love my portfolio cos and am proud of what they are trying to do. The world has changed and you have to change with it. But sometimes you also just want to take a break. This is exactly what we did for the 2nd half of 2024 and basically stopped investing for almost a year.
I spent more time exercising, fight training and spent more time with my aging parents. I went into austerity mode as well, cutting my personal budget in preparation for future opportunities and challenges.
I also took the time to retool like I did in 2012-2013 by reading & writing a lot. Deep learning mode. I also attended conferences like IMTS (International Manufacturing Technology Summit) & Re-industrialize and Deeptech Weeks in various cities. I took random classes like how to get good at Twitter aka X. All in the search for something that piqued my curiosity.
What I discovered during this time and in the prior years terrified me. Our reliance on enemies like China for so much of our supply chain. Our wrecked and hollowed out Industrial base. That our previous “Freedom’s Forge” of industrial power that saved civilization in World War 2 doesn’t exist anymore. We outsourced most of this to China and Asia in general.
China for example has 240X the shipbuilding capacity than we do. China has become the automotive manufacturing king in the world. Why is this an issue: automotive manufacturing is dual use, if you can make a car or truck, you can easily retool to make a plane, gun or tank.
As we found, the EU & USA can’t even produce enough artillery shells for Ukraine. In fact, South Korea produces over 20% of the shells being supplied. Russia & North Korea are outproducing the West just in artillery shells. China has 97% of market share in drones, what is widely acknowledged is critical in the new face of war.
But we have finally woken up to the threat of the CCP in China and Russia (as well as the rest of the axis of North Korea and Iran). And the costs of potential failure and weakness in the West are incredibly high. It should be frightening to everyone and a threat to our way of life. These are not nice people.
In this lies America’s biggest opportunity to rejuvenate itself. We’re still the world’s biggest consumer market, with plenty of land, lots of food and cheap energy supplies + lots of talented people. Friend-shoring industry to places like Japan, South Korea or Vietnam is one key step as key production is leaving China.
But frankly, we need to at least 2x our industrial base in America over the next decade. We have cheap natural gas that will enable cheap production. Taking a blank slate approach, tapping the manufacturing expertise that still exists in the various clusters and combining this with growing AI/ Robotics capabilities, we can spin up more new factories and bring back good jobs as well. The American Midwest aka Rust Belt, Texas and South are well positioned for the future.
This is what I am going to focus my energy and money on for the rest of the decade of the roaring 2020s. Investing in Defensetech (Defense is ESG), Aerospace, Manufacturing tech, Robotics, Supply Chain-tech and anything related to re-industrializing America and our allies. And doing this not just through the mechanisms of venture capital but also through private equity and credit/debt facilities aka Production Capital. Consequently, I will be spending less time in Europe (outside of Ukraine & Italy/Albania personally), and more in America and Asia.
This re-industrialization of America is mission critical for the West (which includes Europe, Canada, AUSNZ, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan) and it’s become mission critical for me. Let the new chapter begin.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 6th, 2025
"Summer means happy times and good sunshine"--Brian Wilson
"Something very interesting is happening at the edge of the startup world.
Founders are shipping faster, skipping steps, and building companies without ever pitching a VC. What used to take teams of ten and six-figure burn rates now gets done by one or two people with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, a Stripe account, and a weekend.
They’re not building like we used to.
This time, the shift isn’t just in the tools — it’s in the tempo. Founders are starting to build with a rhythm that feels more like freestyling than planning. They’re coding with intuition. Iterating without meetings. Launching without pitch decks.
It’s fast.
It’s fluid.
And it’s what I’d call:
vibe startup building"
https://medium.com/@clarencewooten/introducing-the-vibe-startup-41e12e4d0dd5
2. "Despite FPV drones’ clear importance on the modern battlefield, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is not on track to procure and field FPV or other drones at scale, and our current industrial policy shows no intention of changing that. The DoD has yet to fully recognize drones as strategic combat assets, failing to align budget priorities, industrial base planning, and Concepts of Operations (CONOPS) with their growing importance on the modern battlefield.
The challenges outlined in this piece are symptoms of this strategic oversight, an approach starkly contrasted by Ukraine and Russia, which have both rapidly adapted to integrate drones at every level of warfare, each procuring millions of drones a year. China, the world’s largest producer of low-cost drones, undoubtedly recognizes the strategic importance of attritable systems as well.
While progress has been made to field more FPV drones within the DoD, it is clear that much more needs to be done in order to prepare for future conflicts and ensure credible deterrence. Fundamentally, the DoD still treats FPV drones like aircraft when they should be treated more like ammunition.
With Russia’s recent combat experience and China’s drone manufacturing prowess, our adversaries have the upper hand in producing and deploying drones at scale. The U.S. military will be at a severe disadvantage if forced to fight against mass quantities of low-cost drones, just as the Navy has been at a disadvantage in defending its ships against low-cost Houthi drones. Now, the United States must translate those battlefield lessons into institutional reform, before the next fight arrives."
https://maggiegray.us/p/field-or-fail-building-the-attritable
3. Solid conversation on defense tech and what is happening geopolitically.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr6VgyMF7nc
4. "But playing hormonal games isn’t just for actors and athletes any more. Executives do it, too.
What’s interesting about these characters is that they aren’t just staying physically youthful. They’re also maintaining a young person’s monomaniacal zest for world domination.
Bezos, Musk, and Brin don’t just look young. They act young.
I suspect that it’s because, hormonally, they are young. They may have the same level of rambunctious combativeness they did when they were quitting jobs and risking it all in their twenties because, in physiological terms, they’re still in their twenties.
The power of artificial hormonal supplementation is creating a new generation of corporate leaders who will remain Young Men In A Hurry well into their seventies. We should expect more bold ventures, more oceans of tactically spilled red ink, epic financial feuds, and, of course, a staggering rise in inequality."
https://letter.palladiummag.com/p/competitive-hormone-supplementation
5. "In twenty years, TSMC went from one of 26, to one of two. It was the perfect combination of growing pie and TSMC’s slice getting bigger.
To summarize TSMC’s journey:
They introduced the foundry business model to the industry.
That unlocked a wave of fabless chip companies.
Three tailwinds led to TSMC’s meteoric rise: a growing semiconductor industry, increasing importance of fabless chip companies, and increasing market share of TSMC."
https://www.generativevalue.com/p/tsmc-the-index-on-technology
6. "If each nation’s current trajectory holds, China will likely end up completely dominating high-end manufacturing, from cars and chips to M.R.I. machines and commercial jets. The battle for A.I. supremacy will be fought not between the United States and China but between high-tech Chinese cities like Shenzhen and Hangzhou. Chinese factories around the world will reconfigure supply chains with China at the center, as the world’s pre-eminent technological and economic superpower.
America, by contrast, may end up as a profoundly diminished nation. Sheltered behind tariff walls, its companies will sell almost exclusively to domestic consumers. The loss of international sales will degrade corporate earnings, leaving companies with less money to invest in their businesses.
American consumers will be stuck with U.S.-made goods that are of middling quality but more expensive than global products, owing to higher U.S. manufacturing costs. Working families will face rising inflation and stagnant incomes. Traditional high-value industries such as car manufacturing and pharmaceuticals are already being lost to China; the important industries of the future will follow. Imagine Detroit or Cleveland on a national scale.
Whether this century will be Chinese or American is up to us. But the time to change course is quickly running out."
7. "Based on evidence from 51 major innovations from 1825 to 2000, the authors argue that bubbles are a necessary component of innovation because they provide a window for innovators to raise cheap equity capital, enabling them to commercialize their products and drive growth for their firms. Of course, the cheap equity capital doesn’t always earn high returns, often funding duds and also-rans in addition to innovative firms, but we believe no true progress happens without trial and error."
https://mailchi.mp/verdadcap/innovation-and-stock-market-bubbles
8. "Mega funds aren’t betting that companies will IPO at $1B. They’re betting that a new class of private giants will emerge—and that those giants will need massive amounts of capital.
The best venture firms of the next decade, regardless of model, will do three things better than venture has ever done them before:
Follow their winners
Believe in, and bet on, bigger outcomes
Innovate how they deploy capital
Mega funds aren’t broken. They’re built for this new frontier.
What looks bloated from the outside might actually be a scaled-up machine, built to ride the next generation of power laws."
https://mondaymorning.substack.com/p/what-if-the-mega-funds-are-right
9. "What Borislav demonstrates so clearly is that becoming AI-native isn't about layering AI features onto existing processes. It requires a fundamental restructuring of how we think about work, capability, and organizational design. This is the "metamorphosis" he references.
1. The democratization of technical capability is real and imminent. When everyone can code, the traditional bottlenecks between technical and non-technical teams dissolve. Rekki transformed from an engineering backlog to hundreds of automation workflows built by the people who understand the problems best."
https://www.sarahtavel.com/p/an-ai-metamorphosis-transforming
10. "China also dominates the manufacturing of batteries, drones, and electric motors.
So while America is remaining competitive (for now) in software, and still has a lead in the old combustion technologies of the 20th century, China is absolutely trouncing us in the race for the new electrical technologies that will define physical power this century.
Given this dire situation, you’d think America would be racing to catch up. Instead, we’re intentionally forfeiting the race, destroying our nascent electrical capabilities as fast as we can.
This is intentionally forfeiting the technological future to China. The auto industry is lucrative and important, but even that pales in comparison to the importance of drones. If you can’t build batteries and electric motors in the U.S., you can’t build drones here, either. And if you can’t build drones, you can’t win a modern war.
You simply cannot will a technological shift out of existence, or make the world go back to the way it used to be, no matter how big and powerful your country is. In 1793, a British mission to China (which was then ruled by the Qing dynasty) offered the emperor various technological marvels from the West. The emperor was unimpressed, and expressed utter disinterest in the wonders he was being shown, uttering the famous line: “As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”
Fast forward a couple of centuries, and the shoe is on the other foot. It’s America — the leading civilization of the West — that is turning up its nose at new inventions that are remaking the map of global power. We really are becoming a technophobic civilization, looking inward to our petty domestic conflicts and looking backward to our great historical achievements, even as a rival civilization embraces the future. My Ming dynasty analogy was more appropriate than I realized at the time."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/is-the-us-in-a-high-level-equilibrium
11. "We look for businesses in the “Goldilocks Zone” – neither too cold (not growing fast enough to be interesting) nor too hot (growing so fast they consume substantive capital or introduce other existential risk into their business model).
When we find “just right” companies, we work closely with their founders to help them stay in this temperate zone as long as possible. In doing so, we believe that these businesses have the greatest potential to create value for stakeholders – compounding for long periods without the risks associated with extreme growth or the dilution that comes from raising many rounds of equity capital.
If the herd suddenly becomes enamored with the category that one of our companies happens to be in, then we are well-positioned to accept capital at advantageous valuations and terms. But we do not need to do so and are just as happy – often happier – for the herd to be off chasing whatever it is chasing."
https://deciens.com/press-and-insights/epistula-11-unpopular-and-unspoken-truths
12. Disturbing forecast if the simmering India vs Pakistan conflict escalates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F88o0y9n-LQ
13. "Launched ahead of the Future Artillery conference in London, Sceptre is the company’s answer to modern battlefield demands for low-cost, long-range precision fires that can survive in contested environments. The system reportedly achieves speeds of Mach 3.5, altitudes over 65,000 feet, and a strike radius within 5 metres—even in GPS-denied conditions.
With a range up to 150km depending on payload, Sceptre dramatically outpaces traditional artillery, offering a potential 10x improvement in cost-effectiveness and precision."
https://www.resiliencemedia.co/p/tiberius-aerospace-unveils-sceptre
14. What startups need to survive and thrive in the accelerating AI world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHjxEzoUFxM
15. Grand geoeconomics and short break in the economic war between China and America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGFK0j_RAQg
16. "And yet, for all the power of innovation, it’s never enough. Themistocles wasn’t a shipwright. Urban didn’t storm the walls. Shaka didn’t forge every spear. In each case, the decisive edge came not from solo genius, but from the ability to turn innovation into doctrine, and doctrine into collective action.
Today’s battlefield is no different. A brilliant engineer can design the perfect drone, the ideal sensor, the next-generation networked weapon, but if there’s no shared concept of how it’s used, if there’s no buy-in from commanders, trainers, logisticians, and warfighters, it’s just another prototype gathering dust.
We cannot beat the enemy solo. Not as inventors. Not as units. Not as nations. We need to build consensus, not just around resources, but around doctrine. We need shared playbooks, not just better hardware. Winning doesn’t come from building the best tool, it comes from adapting the way we fight around what that tool makes possible.
Innovation is potential. Doctrine is power. Integration is victory.
Victory demands more than invention, it demands integration. And that takes all of us."
https://www.resiliencemedia.co/p/from-triremes-to-drones-why-innovation
17. "Special operations are also becoming more of a model for the way the Pentagon can acquire technology: buying things, trying them out, and then deploying them—all in a fraction of the time it takes the Army or Navy to create a program of record.
Like the services, U.S. Special Operations Command has purchasing authority under Title 10 of federal law. But it generally buys items in relatively small quantities. “With these smaller efforts, the statutory and regulatory requirements are considerably less, allowing greater flexibility and speed of execution,” former SOCOM acquisition executive James Geurts said in 2016.
They buy things off-the-shelf, “to hasten delivery and mitigate risk” Geurts wrote. As GAO reported in February 2023, other services are struggling to use the same authorities to purchase what are often called “mature” and “proven” technologies. Proven technologies also pass more easily through the hurdles of foreign military sales, as SOCOM plays a role in outfitting other, partner SOF forces as well.
SOF also makes much broader use of alternative contract vehicles like OTAs, thanks largely to the smaller number of units they purchase.
Sometimes SOCOM simply modifies existing gear, like transforming C-130 airlifters into close-air-support gunships.
But the real strength of SOF acquisition is that it relies on a small, close team of program office executives who work together much more closely than do the services’ offices, said Melissa Johnson, SOCOM’s acquisition executive.
In his SOF Week address, Hegseth said SOCOM’s approach is better suited to today’s era of rapidly evolving weaponry."
18. This seems apt, Top VCs investing in ownership of the SF 49ers Football team.
https://www.49erswebzone.com/articles/191284-officially-announce-new-ownership-partners/
19. Every investor needs to watch this. Imagining unimaginable outcomes. And preparing & positioning for those scenarios. Chaos and massive change (not necessarily in a good way).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lbPdZfGayc
20. I LOVE Fruitist Blueberries. So good.
"To sell more berries of higher consistent quality, the company grows its fruit in microclimates, with its own farms in Oregon, Morocco, Egypt and Mexico. It also uses machine learning models to predict the best time to pick the fruit. Fruitist invested heavily in infrastructure, like on-site cold storage to keep the berries fresh before they ship.
The company’s vertically integrated supply chain means that its berries should last longer than the competition.
“I’ve intentionally let them sit in my refrigerator for three weeks, and they’re still great after three weeks,” Magami said.
Larger berries, like the company’s non-genetically modified jumbo blueberries that are two to three times the size of a regular blueberry, also have a longer shelf life."
21. "This magnitude of this deployment age is captured by BlackRock’s estimate of the impending $68 trillion global infrastructure investment boom, unfolding in an era increasingly defined by what Russell Napier calls “National Capitalism”, where state priorities reshape capital allocation toward energy security, industrial capacity, and technological sovereignty.
With that (still broad) framing in place, I thought it would be helpful to sketch out a mosaic of the types of firms and companies I’ve seen focused on this. The use of the term “mosaic” is intentional. This isn’t a comprehensive market map or a clean framing of the so-called “capital stack”.
The Production Capital Mosaic I've sketched here represents the early architecture of models being built up to deploy trillions in capital toward industrial transformation. Whether structured as investment firms or operating companies, they share a common thread of deploying critical technologies at scale. As the multi-decade hardware and infra supercycle unfolds, we'll see further refinement (and more convergence) of these approaches, with a handful breaking through to become the Morgans, Transdigms, Drexels, Constellations, Danahers, and Berkshires of the new industrial deployment age."
https://venturedesktop.substack.com/p/the-production-capital-mosaic
22. JP Morgan opens up a Geopolitical arm. Geopolitics/ Geonomics are critical factors for all businesses and investors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMkPcNNkS3Q
23. This was a fun conversation on recent business news. As an old guy, this helps me understand what is happening with young generation biz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D8_wwOcA7w&t=1892s
24. "The playbook today is simple: slap a UI on GPT, call it specialized, and hope the user doesn’t look behind the curtain. But that’s not infrastructure. That’s camouflage.
The real builders? They’re not just enabling users — they’re making themselves impossible to leave. They’re not chasing the wave. They’re laying rails under it.
Would anyone rebuild your product if it disappeared? Would anything break if it went away? Does anyone depend on it, or is it just riding the moment?
If the answer is no, you’re not infrastructure. You’re noise.
The gold rush always ends.
The wrappers always fall.
The story shifts.
But the pattern never does.
The survivors are the ones the system can’t delete."
https://medium.com/@skooloflife/99-of-ai-startups-will-be-dead-by-2026-heres-why-bfc974edd968
25. Detailed conversation about Anduril and our very challenged defense industry. Must watch if you care about the West.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKK0ArqGLF0
26. "Overall U.S. counter-drone technologies span a spectrum of defense modalities – detection, electronic/RF defeat, directed energy, and kinetic interceptors – each with unique principles and leading industry players. Companies like Epirus and Anduril have risen to prominence by innovating in their respective domains (HPM “counter-swarm” and autonomous interceptors) and emphasizing open, AI-enabled architectures that allow their systems to integrate and scale.
Epirus’s solid-state microwave arrays and Anduril’s agile interceptor drones exemplify how a modular design and software-centric approach can rapidly adapt to emerging threats (like swarms or higher-end UAVs). The field performance of these systems – from Epirus frying drone swarms in Army tests to Anduril’s Roadrunners proving effective in real-world combat evaluations – is directly influencing how the Pentagon allocates resources for C-UAS. Military procurement is visibly shifting toward these next-generation solutions that offer speed, scalability, and multi-target engagement at lower cost.
As the drone threat continues to evolve, the U.S. strategy is clearly to deploy a layered defense that uses every modality in concert: find the drones, jam or hack them if possible, zap them with microwaves or lasers when advantageous, and blast or capture them if necessary."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dynamics-drone-defense-andrew-c%C3%B4t%C3%A9-3mzaf/
27. Gold is a critical part of everyone and every country’s portfolio. It will help buffer us to the massive changes coming to the present system of trade & globalization. The future is buying more gold and making more factories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxWZO0FEQ1g
28. A bit of tough love for B2B founders. Jason knows what he is talking about. Get faster, reskill and get tougher, as it's ugly out there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IV9luOb-Xs
29. “You have a European company investing a lot in America…and we're looking to potentially invest more,” Michael Brasseur, Saab’s vice president and chief strategy officer for its U.S. business, said in an interview.
Saab and other European companies are navigating sudden turmoil in their countries’ relationships with the United States, which has imposed higher tariffs and cast doubt on its fidelity to its NATO allies. Vice President JD Vance’s scolding of European governments at February’s Munich Security Council rattled many—but not Brasseur.
“We're actually investing a lot more in the U.S., not as a result of Munich, but just the way we do business. And so, I think we have a really interesting niche that we fit in based on our long heritage of building really good hardware and then this pivot that leverages the amazing, emerging, disruptive technologies out there. The power is in the convergence of these capabilities,” he said.
But Saab isn’t the only European company eyeing more U.S. defense business."
30. The most fun you will have learning about how VC investing works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH_oInuNlk8
31. The Hedge Fund king Steve Cohen. Trust your investing process & challenge yourself to take it to the next level.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6WeRpuYiyA
32. "One way to think of it: your first customers are your first hires as marketers. You want them to be as good at their job as possible.
Imagine all your customers as you did before (in terms of how valuable they’ll find you, and how easy they’ll be to attract). Then, consider that some of them have influence on others. You’ll find pockets where one kind of customer influences another, and some customer classes who are widely influential, or influential to several important adjacent customer classes."
https://also.roybahat.com/picking-your-first-customers-the-gradient-of-influence-47858b90adfd
33. Mission matters and building talent density to go big.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIMKUkazx_Y
34. I love BG2, economically/technology savvy but they seem geopolitically naive.
But this is one of the best shows to understand what is happening with big trends and developments in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2cpSUpdIOs
35. This was pretty disturbing but the truth hurts. America needs to re-industrialize asap.