Lessons from the Everyday Spy Part 4: Focus on the Right Things

It’s timely that I release this on Christmas Day. The last of my write up on Everyday Spy’s interview with Steve Bartlett’s “Diary of a CEO”

He asks Andy and Jihi: 

What advice would you give to the average person in general, just generally in their life, you know, about how to live a good life based on what you've seen, what you know now, and how you look at the world?

Andrew says: “For me, a good life is a life spent doing the things you want to do, the things that bring you joy when you have the age and the energy to do them. It makes me super sad whenever I meet people who wait until their 60s and they retire to be free to try and travel and that's when they focus on learning the guitar and that's when they focus on art and their body just can't keep up with them. Their body can't travel like it used to travel. They have a shake in their hand. They can't paint anymore but they believed for 30 years that it would be better when they retire instead of acting on it right now. 

And for me, it's all about finding joy in the moment today. My son is 12. He plays chess now. He wants to play video games with me now. He wants to go deep into details about his favorite manga comics right now. All of that could be different in 5 days. My daughter is seven, doing handstands and doing cartwheels and all she wants is for daddy to give her a shoulder massage at night and tell embarrassing stories about my childhood to her while she falls asleep. That's what she wants now. 

All that could be gone and never come back in 6 months. I have to do it now. If I don't do it now, it'll never happen. I won't be able to wait until I'm wealthy. I won't be able to wait until I sell a company. I won't be able to wait until I retire and then try to get these moments back now. 

So, what can I do? I ask myself every day, what can I do right now to maximize the joy that I get right now? Because it's not just my joy that's happening. It's also the joy that I'm giving to the people who want my time and space. My wife, my kids, my peers, my clients. What can I do to bring joy to myself will bring joy to others? 

Why does that matter so much? My life is filled with people who failed to figure that out. My life is filled with a mother who kept waiting to do the things that she wanted to do and now she still doesn't get to do it. And grandparents who retired poor and family members who retired poor and people who died early and people who got hurt and can't walk.”

Jihi adds: “you know, I realize that Andy has been right all along. It really is. You never

know what the next moment is going to bring. And so, you have to enjoy every moment that you have right now. You know, don't put off that trip until next year. Do it as soon as you can. Don't you know, like those dishes don't need to get washed right now. If your kid wants to read a book with you, you can just put that off for a little bit. So it's taken me a long time, but Andy and I are now aligned on how to live every moment with as much joy as you can and to my other point, like you you never know when shit's going to hit the fan. 

So enjoy it now because you never know when you might have to, you know, flee your house cuz you're, you know, it catches fire or flees the country because a war breaks out or, you know, getting arrested in a foreign country.”

Learn from this before it’s too late. This is incredible wisdom. It’s also hard to absorb personally because I spent so much of my 30s and 40s on my career at the expense of my family life. I missed so many important moments in my daughter’s childhood and it’s a good reason my home life is a mess. I deeply regret it. So on this Christmas Day, put down that phone, touch grass and spend it with those important in your life. Breathe, take everything in and savor this moment with them. Merry Christmas everyone!

Lessons from the Everyday Spy Part 3: Focus on the Basics

So assuming we are not going to meet an apocalypse anytime soon. There is much to mine from Everyday Spy on how to thrive. 

Steve Bartlett asks them: “Are there any particular skills that people who are trying to be successful in their average life, because this is called the Diary of a CEO, that you learned through your time at the CIA that you think are most useful for people to be successful, however you define that, in their day-to-day lives?”

Andrew says: “The first thing I want to say is that our book Shadow Cell talks not

necessarily about awesome spies. It talks about how we went back to the basics. We went back to foundational espionage, what we call at CIA, sticks and bricks. We gave up all the technology. We gave up all the fancy satellites. We gave up all the drones.

And we went back to build off of strong foundations. And we didn't do that because we're smart. We did that because the terrorist groups that won the global war on terror were using bricks and stones and sticks. And they were winning over an American Department of Defense that had a $900 billion budget every year. We spent $8 trillion in the global war on terror only to evacuate Afghanistan. All of that happened because they were using foundational tools that we couldn't crack. And in the shadow cell, that's all we did. We used foundational tools that proved to dominate time after time.

And there's so much in everyday life. And there's so much in business from marketing to sales to budgeting to hiring practices to, you know, annual and semiannual reviews. There's so much that businesses can take from this basic idea of never letting  go of the foundations. Never let go of your sticks and bricks.” 

This is what I try to instill in my founders. This is what I try to focus on myself. It’s always the basics. They never get old and it works most of the time. You get into trouble when you try to be too clever. Innovation is great but there is a reason the basics are called the basics. They are the foundation. They are “Lindy” and have withstood the test of time. 

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 21st, 2025

"The color of springtime is in the flowers, the color of winter is in the imagination."--Unknown

1. Genuinely interested in checking out Paraguay. On the list along with checking out Colombia, Ecuador & Peru.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OndEgodGLnU

2. Oren Cass is an economist very popular with Trump admin 2.0. Listening to this helps you understand what policy will be for the next 4 years at least.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMFw6kPiGUs

3. "For thousands of years, Europe was the cradle of civilization, wealth, and innovation.

Its geography made it inevitable: mild climate, fertile soil, abundant freshwater, navigable rivers, dense biodiversity across tight borders.

Today, in the AI age, geography is optional. You can create wealth from anywhere and live wherever you want.

But when people are free to choose, a pattern is emerging: many are choosing Europe again. Not just tourists or remote workers, but founders, families, creatives, and capital.

Because while you can replicate Singapore, you can't replicate Florence. You can automate scale. You can't fake civilizational density.

And you certainly can’t fake history.

The macro forces are converging:

-Remote work permanence. High earners can relocate without losing income.

-EU infrastructure investment. Within 2 hours from larger cities there are thousands of incredible villages with culture, services, history.

-Property price gaps. Portugal priced in global demand; Italy hasn't (yet).

-AI proof. People will prioritize quality of life. Non-machine-replicable places, services and experiences will appreciate.

-Anti-gentrification sentiment. Nobody wants to live stacked in a 20-floor impersonal building where an apartment costs 30 years of mortgage.

If you can earn in USD and spend in EUR, you've already won. Build in USD and Bitcoin, spend EUR.

You don't need to relocate full-time. But you do need a foothold."

https://palombo.substack.com/p/why-italian-villages-are-europes

4. "Stack your passports like you stack Bitcoin.

Both represent insurance against single points of failure. Both require long-term thinking. Both seem unnecessary until they become essential.

Concentration risk doesn't just apply to portfolios. The same logic holds for citizenship."

https://palombo.substack.com/p/stack-your-passports-like-you-stack

5. This is why Sequoia are the best and have been forever. For anyone who wants to understand how to build a long lasting Venture capital firm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8njhsYUNNk

6. Enlightening conversation on what's up with internet culture. Good stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iug0dyIlpsA

7. "Most founders can’t handle ambiguity. They need confirmation their burn has purpose. That someone walked this path before.

Nobody has. That’s why it’s worth building.

Every great company looks inevitable in retrospect. We forget they were built by people stumbling through chaos, finding patterns nobody else saw because nobody else stayed uncomfortable long enough.

Your competitors are following frameworks right now, perfectly. That should scare you way more than chaos."

https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/surrender-to-chaos

8. "You can’t predict when/if a bubble will burst, but Azeem Azhar, founder of Exponential View, and researcher Nathan Warren, created a framework that compares historic bubbles with AI today. In their estimation, AI is a boom, but “booms can sour quickly and there are several pressure points worth watching.” If AI capex exceeds 2% of GDP, that’s cause for concern; it’s currently estimated at around 1.3%. A sustained fall in enterprise or consumer spending levels is another pressure point.

A flawed, though perhaps directionally correct MIT study, rattled the AI ecosystem claiming that 95% of firms have yet to see measurable ROI from their AI pilot programs. We’re approaching a valuation redline if/when P/E ratios reach the 50x to 60x range. Finally, if internal cash covers less than 25% of capex, Azhar and Warren believe investments in data centers will come under pressure."

https://www.profgalloway.com/how-does-the-end-begin/

9. "These five capability areas—long-range precision fires, decision dominance, cross-domain integration, reduced sustainment demands, and all-domain protection—are mutually reinforcing. Together they form the foundation for how the U.S. and its allies can fight and win in an era of advanced tech-enabled warfare.

As we cautioned at the start, there are other required capabilities, but these present some areas where the U.S. (and allies) can invest to achieve asymmetric advantage over the antagonistic Axis of Autocracy."

https://buildingourfuture.substack.com/p/five-frontiers-of-future-warfare

10. Some tinfoil alt-geopolitics, some of it kind of makes sense. Questioning the popular narrative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK5gj_Zyl7c

11. Pretty interesting company in the defense space.

https://www.generalcatalyst.com/stories/seeding-the-future-with-valinor

12. "Without urgency, Europe risks dependence abroad and disillusionment at home. With urgency, Europe could transform defence into a driver of technological sovereignty and public services into engines of human flourishing. 

Avoidance was the founding logic of Europe. But in this new age of shocks, avoidance will only guarantee decline. The choice is not whether Europe will act, but whether it will build the machinery to act in time—one grounded not in chainsaw disruption but in a more profound renewal of the state’s foundations."

https://rainerkattel.substack.com/p/europe-needs-a-machinery-of-urgency

13. "On October 14, both the U.S. and China rolled out parallel port fee regimes. The structure was nearly identical: any ship linked to the other country — by flag, build, operator, or ownership — would be hit with special port fees, capped at five voyages per year. China’s version started at RMB 400 per net ton, with a stepped escalation to RMB 1,120 by 2028. The U.S. version began at $50/NT, also rising annually.

The symmetry wasn’t accidental. It was a controlled escalation. But what got lost in the headlines is how fundamentally these fees shift the unit of control.

The tariff is no longer the frontline instrument.

The ship is now the gate.

And the question isn’t “what are you carrying?”

It’s “who built you, who owns you, and who flies your flag?”

https://tanviratna.substack.com/p/flags-fees-and-the-future-of-trade

14. Selling and working with the DoW is brutal. This is a must watch if you are in defensetech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLhzOSWbsTw

15. This is an old one from 2008. Wonder where these entrepreneurs are.

"A small but growing number of what might be called adventure capitalists are going to Baghdad. The American entrepreneurs are defying ongoing insurgent attacks, the country's dysfunctional government ministries and the skeptics."

https://www.npr.org/2008/05/01/90090656/security-progress-in-baghdad-draws-entrepreneurs

16. Palmer Luckey is a true American industrial hero. Glad people like him exist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owEpy_Fr_Mo

17. A reminder that America still needs our allies. Not just militarily but especially industrial base-wise if we want to be able to deter China.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSRHTWP1f2w

18. Learning from the best. Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKtIoF4yLos

19. "The agreement to create a Palestinian State is influencing many other geopolitical negotiations including Ukraine, Venezuela, and other seemingly unlikely places. Make no mistake. We are witnessing a modern day Yalta. Just as Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin carved the world up so that WWII could end, today Trump, Putin are engaging in a Grand Bargain which involves carving up the world today. China is involved too but that’s for another article.

As my subscribers know, the Arctic is also the key to the abundance of space. Whoever controls Arctic-Space Communications controls the space economy. Svalbard is currently the prime location for this new hotly contested geopolitical space between Earth’s North Pole and the Moon’s South Pole which, to remind, is home to a vast supply of Helium 3 and water (I’m calling this hotly contested geopolitical zone the Terra Luna Space until somebody comes up with a better name).

This Terra Luna Space is the beachhead to the abundance of energy, resources and internet connectivity in space. Notice that the Tunnel of Love Bridge would connect to a much larger North South Supply Route into Russia and China as well. This makes me think the deal is not just over control over Donetsk. The superpowers are aiming for a deal regarding the distribution of resources from space. That would be so far above Q clearance that most people in superpower militaries will not be in on the discussion.

Trump has not trusted his military and just hauled in the whole top ranks to a highly unusual, very short notice meeting on September 30th. The Secretary of War emphasized, “the need for a nonpartisan military and noted the oath of allegiance to the Constitution.” Hmnn. Also, the President made it clear. If you don’t like the strategy, get out. Interesting timing."

https://drpippa.substack.com/p/wars-and-peace-modern-day-yalta-and

20. "The bottom line here is that peace deals in the Middle East and Ukraine depend on the continuation of certain wars elsewhere - places that we don’t usually consider - like Latam, space, and the Arctic. These are property swaps. Russia takes more of Ukraine, or gets better terms in Ukraine, and the US gets arrests in Venezuela and gets to successfully ringfence Finland, the Nordics and Scandinavia while clearing organized crime out of Sweden.

Russia supplies the US with real dossiers on the people who created imaginary dossiers that were designed to undermine The President. This reveals who is aligned with the drug cartels. Trump gets to cut off Deep State cash flows while the Deep State finds it harder and harder to argue that there is no Deep State as their top leaders face legal discovery and their cartel buddies sing."

https://drpippa.substack.com/p/wars-and-peace-modern-day-yalta-and-3fb

21. "Israel’s long-term existential security requires three things. 

--A Global System that is at worst neutral on balance, and an international system that the US controls. 

--Strong US Support to provide the economic and military aid it needs to survive.

--An ability to routinely win Moral Wars due to a deep appreciation for the horror of the Holocaust and the strength of the term “anti-semitism.”

The loss of these components puts Israel and its Diaspora at existential risk. In contrast, Israel isn’t existentially threatened by terrorism or attacks by Hezbollah or Hamas."

https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/pyrrhic-victories

22. Flow software will drive how hardware products will be built. Pretty interesting conversation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=989_qK5dVTU

23. Maximum bullish on Ukraine. This place is gonna boom after the war ends.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCxbN2xhwRE

24. "China’s new strategy isn’t to dodge trade barriers. It’s to absorb them. To move the chemistry, the capital, and the industrial base offshore—then sell back into protected markets under someone else’s flag.

Morocco is the new test case. And this time, China isn’t just relabeling goods. It’s rewiring supply chains from the mine up: phosphate rock becomes battery packs. What started as raw material leverage is now a full-stack industrial inversion."

https://tanviratna.substack.com/p/ev-tariffs-were-supposed-to-isolate

25. A more detailed conversation with Dan Wang of Breakneck. Trying to understand where China and America are going.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVOfP5fy_kQ

26. "Everyone knows Samsung and Hyundai. But behind these global giants, a new wave of Korean companies is quietly reshaping fintech, travel, and biotech. Their stories carry lessons for entrepreneurs everywhere."

https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/three-korean-companies-youve-never

27. "Statistically, the most reliable way (based on probabilities no “guarantee”) is building and owning a business. Not a side hustle that funnels a few extra thousand per month into your brokerage/crypto exchange account. A real asset that pays you, goes up in value if P/E multiples expand, compounds in value based on intelligent operations and gives you pricing power (hint: businesses all pass inflation costs back to the customer assuming their product is not a disaster)

This isn’t a platitude. It is statistics. 

Go through Wealth Management companies. Their clients? All small business owners and small real estate entrepreneurs (which is just another business anyway). This trend is structural. 

Own the pipeline. Earn money while you’re sleeping. Suddenly inflation works for you… for the first time in your life.

Entrepreneurship is messy.

It will test your relationships, patience and ego. But it rewards agency. Owners decide strategy, culture, pricing and who keeps what piece of the upside. Psychological freedom is real and matters for long-term decision-making. Owners live with consequence and with optionality; employees live with perceived safety and ceilings. If you want uncapped upside and a hedge vs. wage-squeezing inflation, ownership is the structural route

Business Can Be Boring, Even Markets Get Boring: For long-term readers you already know how this goes. There are periods even in *stock markets* that are painful. In fact, we’ve lived through this the past couple months. Nothing particularly interesting has happened since the rate cut in September. The difference? The people who stick around and keep paying attention are always the ones who make it. First to know about new trends and not playing catch up when the tides shift.

Business is no different. The people who bet on themselves and grind when it seems like nothing is happening = get the payout. Takes about 3 years. It sucks. It isn’t exciting. You won’t be on national television. In fact, you’ll see your digits on a screen net worth pass that $1M mark and go “uhh that’s it?”. That’s how it actually works."

https://bowtiedbull.io/p/start-a-business-the-only-real-way

28. The age of American unreliability. Geopolitics is so unstable these days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POyGjSWHde4

29. "When I asked whether there was anything China still hoped to learn from the United States, our interlocutors were polite but basically out of ideas. The subtext was unmistakable: China has absorbed what it needed and is now writing its own playbook.

This attitude was unlike any other I have encountered in ten years observing the U.S.-China relationship. After a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers, the Chinese Communist Party seems incapable of resisting the temptation to twist the knife — to savor the sensation of its newfound power after so long being denied the same. The reflex is human, and it is not something that can be negotiated with. The danger is what happens when it collides with an American political culture constitutionally incapable of humility.

For all its dysfunction, the United States remains a superpower. It is not merely a prideful country, but an arrogant one — with no memory of life before primacy. Beijing’s self-assurance may be well-earned. But if this month’s trade escalation is any indication, future flexing at American expense will trigger a reaction in both capitals that is more emotional than strategic. And as markets saw last week, the collision of two egos masquerading as nations is not a contest of systems but a test of impulse control."

https://www.choosingvictory.com/p/a-proud-superpower-answers-to-no

30. "Monocle has established a template that marries well-designed, high-quality print products with a multifaceted brand that makes money in many ways far beyond the core product. Monocle’s business lines include cafes and shops, a digital radio station/podcast network, books, events and plenty of brand activations. That’s the key these days. Being a magazine business is a losing proposition in 2025; being a brand is not."

https://www.therebooting.com/p/the-monocle-playbook

31. "The red canon and Silicon Valley canon never contradict — they coexist seamlessly within the same enterprise. Huawei, as one of the world’s most successfully globalized companies, appears intensely patriotic precisely because of this effortless code-switching between intellectual frameworks.

Internally, Huawei has nearly replicated IBM's Integrated Product Development process wholesale, adopting thoroughly Western management practices. Yet from the outside, you would never detect the company’s profound absorption of Silicon Valley orthodoxy. This dual fluency — speaking the language of revolutionary struggle for internal mobilization while implementing McKinsey-grade operational excellence — represents a uniquely Chinese form of corporate bilingualism. The company’s public patriotism masks its private cosmopolitanism.

Simultaneously, there exists what I call the “grey canon” — a collection of texts that are opaque, ancient, yet foundational. The corpus of classical Chinese texts rarely appear on glossy startup booklists, yet they silently scaffold how entrepreneurs think about power, time, and their place in the world.

The Chinese entrepreneurs grew up seeing the jianghu as a model for navigating opaque power structures, forging alliances, and cultivating individual mastery in a world without fixed rules. To read Jin Yong was to learn that survival depended as much on soft power — guanxi, renqing — as on hard power. And in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem, they encountered metaphors of cosmic precariousness that resonated with their own competitive landscape. Together, Jin Yong and Liu Cixin gave Chinese technologists an imaginative toolkit as rich as Tolkien and Asimov had given Silicon Valley: one rooted in jianghu ethics and cosmic existentialism, the other in systems of magic and spacefaring empires.

Where Silicon Valley imagines itself through Middle-earth, Mars, and cyberspace, China’s tech world thinks simultaneously in terms of the jianghu. Both are literary infrastructures, invisible yet omnipresent. They don’t dictate policy or product, but they shape theimaginative baseline — what a hero looks like, what failure means, how a society might collapse or endure."

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/12-books/the-china-tech-canon

32. "Reserves, the portion of a fund held back for follow-on investments, are less a strategy and more a story. A narrative that helps VCs feel in control in an industry built entirely on uncertainty. And like most good stories, it hides a more uncomfortable truth.

Although Benchmark have been doing a no reserve strategy for a long time, it is rare. Some emerging managers I’ve met are quietly breaking the reserve rule. They buy more upfront. They price uncertainty. They design portfolios that don’t depend on getting allocation later, because they know they probably won’t. They’re not waiting for clarity from others that a company is their outlier, they’re betting on conviction from the beginning. Because in venture, you don’t get paid for knowing, you get paid for believing before everyone else does."

https://jamesheathvc.substack.com/p/reserves-are-a-scam

33. "To be clear, this amount of travel is not for everyone. And the opportunity cost calculations very much change depending on the stage of your company and your stage of life.

But if you can mentally get over the hump of “travel is hard”. If you can switch your mindset from “this is intimidating” to “this is easy”. If you can transcend the stress that typically comes with travel, you’ll find yourself with a superpower that few can match."

https://chrisneumann.com/archives/traveling-is-an-underrated-superpower

34. "We must always remember that elegance is not reserved for the ballroom or the opera. Rather, it lives in our everyday lives. It is the soft-spoken thank-you, the kind word, the easy manners at the dinner table, and stepping up the way we dress when we go out of the house. While we cannot control what the rest of the world does, we can be more mindful of our actions. When we do, we can bring the world a little more elegance and make it a brighter place."

https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/restoring-elegance-to-everyday-life

35. Good topical discussion on AI and the Crypto world. NIA. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUuDXBAniJM&list=PLIBc05HkMJHFpVxxZTD-_MbTAYtwAOEg_

36. "At present there are 2 policies on the table.

The F-35 policy. The creation of a Democratic Supply Chain (that is how they call it). The Pentagon is already in close cooperation with defense industries of Europe, Japan and South Korea by layout the ground work of a totally separate military supply chain from China which is doing its embargo. Thus far, the ratio is 60% US supplied and 40% EU supplied. EU is pushing for 50/50. Every single Nato ally is being asked to supply as much as they can and expand capacity as much as they can to supply Ukraine.

The Nationalist Policy. U.S. would withdraw from Europe and Japan and would focus only on its own hemisphere. Hence, the invasion of Canada, Panama Canal, Greenland and the entire Latin America and its SELF SUFFICIENT supply chain. That is why the Nationalists are squarely against the F-35 program."

https://ektrit.substack.com/p/us-global-hegemony-is-dead-free-to?r=2r2y

37. Incredibly insight dense conversation on the state of venture capital and AI. Learned a lot today here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJpFFKXMNQ4

Lessons from Everyday Spy Part 2: Predictions for the Future America

So as continuation of the previous write up on the Everyday Spy interview with Steve Barrett. I found some really insightful and good takes on where America is right now. And more importantly the implications of the changes. As an old saying I heard growing up in Canada: “When America sneezes, the world catches a cold.” You may not like it but it’s true. An aging hegemony that still rides astride the world. I warn you, this is a long transcription but it’s really spot on. 

“So the writing on the wall for Americans is that we are transitioning into something new. We will never go back to what we were. And so you either need to be a part of creating the new America or you need to start thinking about where else you're going to go because the America we knew before no longer exists and it will never come back. This is new America now. So you either take part in it or you leave.

 Everything keeps going. So, you know, I don't know that America is heading for a future that I want to be a part of. I think that's for me. I think that's a true statement. But I think there's a lot of Americans out there who this is the path that they want to take. 

Andy goes on to say: “So when Ji says that we're in a transition and she doesn't know where it's going, she is accurate. We don't know what the future holds. Except we know the future holds more pain for sure because we will either come out of this through a painful transition that makes us better or we will come out of this through a less painful transition that leaves us in a position that none of us want to be in and then we're going to have to put in more pain to fix it all again. 

I think that we have a solid 60/40 right now. I think there's a 60% chance that we don't like where the transition ends and then we spend 15 to 25 years fixing it again. Fixing our economy, fixing our superpower status, fixing our foreign relations, fixing our trust of our own government. I think there's a 40% chance that the the decisive action Donald Trump is taking right now is adopted widescale and we actually stimulate our economy, get people back on the same page and and move forward in a way that keeps us one step ahead of our of the threats that we see from China, the disaster that we see continuing to unfold in the Middle East, the precipice that we have come up against in terms of geopolitics. 

There's a chance that we come out of that, but I think the dominant chance is that we don't. And I  would say that that's not just my opinion. That's the opinion of economists. That's the opinion of  foreign relation experts. There are multiple people out there who are all saying that our budgetary decisions, our foreign policy decisions, our military infrastructure decisions, our economic decisions are risky. Risky means there's a chance they'll work, but it's a low probability chance, not a high probability chance.

In such a scenario, then the economy would be hurt and then there'd be more wars presumably because if we're if the society becomes more individualistic and focused on themselves and nationalistic, then they become more of an island. People get more paranoid. They start building, I know Trump said he's building like he's calling it the Golden Dome over the United States so that he can fire any rockets out of the air if anyone attacks. And then you kind of have to unravel that and try and go the other way potentially. 

I try to do as much reading as I can. I'm sure you're the same way. And one of my gifts to myself is when I read fiction and I'm reading a book called “The Left Hand of Darkness” by a sci-fi legend named Ursala K. Le Guin. And it's a book from the 70s. And I'm reading this book and in it she has this quote where she talks about nationalism inside the world of the science fiction planet that she's on, right? And the quote is something like nationalism is not a product of pride. It's a product of fear. 

People aren't nationalistic because they're proud of what they have. They're nationalistic because they're afraid that something might take away what they have. And anytime you are driven by fear, you don't have the chance for true happiness. And what I found in that that passage from the sci-fi book was really very insightful to what I see happening across the United States. We're all nationalistic, left and right, gay and straight. Whether you are old or young, we're all nationalistic. We all love our country. 

But the things that's driving so much of our nationalism is this fear of the other side. Not a fear of the collapse of our society, not the fear of some rising power across the ocean. But for some reason, we're more afraid of our neighbor than we are afraid of the real threats that are out there. Because at the end of the day, people in California and Mississippi have much more in common than the United States and China. But for whatever reason, we get so distracted and so confused with our own infighting, that we don't realize that infighting is exactly what all of our adversaries from Russia to North Korea to Cuba to even Bulgaria, which is a NATO country that's pro-Russia, our infighting just helps them.”

The chaos in America only helps our enemies or competitors if you choose to call them that. The world is going back to the zero sum world it was before Pax America where there was relative stability.

Andrew goes on: “And what's the potential worst case scenario of that infighting? Because people think, okay, it just means people are going to pop off each other on on X and Twitter and social media and they're going to scream at each other and then

gridlock is the biggest challenge. I don't believe that we're going to be going into any kind of civil war in the United States. We're not going to shoot each other. We're not going to go machete our neighbors. Not now. 

But gridlock is going to lead to economic collapse. Economic collapse is going to lead to very real individuals having very real problems. Which is going to lead to an increase in criminal activity. People will steal from each other. People steal from stores. People will you know lie and hurt each other to try to take care of their own.

And as that society starts to collapse and we become more and more tribal again. All very predictable in all case studies that we've seen all over the world. As we become more and more tribal, then we will become fed upon by our adversaries who don't have the same problem.” 

The interviewer asks: “When you said gridlock is the first sort of domino that falls there. What is

gridlock? 

They answer: “I see gridlock is policy gridlock. We don't know how to move forward with Israel. We don't know how to move forward with the budget. We don't know how to move forward with whether or not we ratify these election results. Right? And in the passing of the time that we don't know how to move forward, it creates an opportunity for somebody else to bypass the democratic process and just dictate the outcome. And that series of dictations makes it so that the outcome is less collaborative, less well thought out, less well defined, less palatable for more people. And then that distrust kind of continues on. We do live in a moment now where the distrust for government is higher than it's been in a long time. We see the largest decline in American currency that we've seen in decades and in this century. 

We see a lack of public trust. We see consistent presidential approval ratings below 50 for every president that comes through. We are in a place where the people just don't trust their own government. And I would say that that's not such a big deal except that we are the wealthiest country in the world. We are the largest military in the world. We are the largest producer of financial tools and the largest producer of weapons. We are a big F–ing deal to not have our Sh-t together.” 

This is immensely terrifying. And as they say, the impact will be global and not just restricted to America. This is where your mindset really matters. An ability to stay calm and see through the noise. To begin preparing for all scenarios. Get fighting fit. Get skills. Stack cash. Make lots of friends. Remember 3 passports are the new 1 passport. 

 You owe yourself, your family and your community on this. And remember, if you are going to panic,  panic early! :)

Lessons from Everyday Spy Part 1: The World is A Scary Place

I highly recommend this excellent interview with a real literal spy family who worked for the CIA, Andrew and Jihi Bustamante. It can be found here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu6bYPTp_kE&t=15s.

 The key sentence that stuck out to me: 

“I don’t know if America is heading toward a future that I want to be part of”

I kind of understand the feeling. The world is a scary place. 

Jihi: “But when I worked with refugees, I realized that humans can be horrible. And know I worked with Bosnians and I worked with refugees from Rwanda where you know their neighbors literally turned on them. People who they had grown up with literally the next day came over with a machete or came over with a gun and killed their family members and chased them through forests or through whatever. And that can happen anywhere. 

That was the first time that I realized that anytime somebody says that can't happen here, that's a lie. That can happen anywhere. None of those people ever thought, "Oh, yeah, that could happen here." None of those people ever thought that. People always think that can't happen here. My neighbor would never do that to me. And that's not true. And then when I worked for CIA, that compounded the sense of the world behind the scenes is a dangerous place and you can't fully trust. I sound horrible saying these things. You can't fully trust anybody.

That's why. So, you know, you really have to understand that people are a combination of good and bad. And while I would like to think that people would always try to adhere to the good, I always have to keep in mind that people have a bad side to them and there's any set of circumstances that could trigger that.”

Steve Bartlett asks them: “Do you think we're in one such moment?”

They respond: “I think we're always in a moment. I think some part of the world are always in that moment.

And I'm a big believer of seeing  the writing on the wall. I don't think that, you know, my advice to people is don't be complacent. Just like Andy said, you know, don't be complacent in your business, but don't be complacent in your life either. Like when  before World War II kicked off, there was tons of writing on the wall of what was coming and people just kept thinking to themselves that can't happen here. It can't get that bad, can it? 

Forewarned is forearmed. When it comes to your health, wealth, security and family, I go back to the great Silicon Valley saying: "It's better to be a year early, than a day late.”

Ganbatte: The Japanese Way of Finding Luck & Happiness

I had a really rough long Labor Day weekend. After a pretty awesome summer with the family where there seemed to be progress, everything just broke again. WTF. I was so enraged. Literally enraged. Cursing the world and my luck. Rage is the first place I go to. Old habits die hard. I don’t deal well with setbacks and messed up plans, even though they happen all the time. I ended up at Kinokuniya Bookstore. There is just something about a bookstore that calms me. 

I stumbled upon an interesting book called “Maneki Neko: The Japanese Secret to Good Luck & Happiness” by Nobuo Suzuki. I found some passages that really helped me. Acted as a valuable reminder in fact. 

“Ganbatte.” “This Japanese expression translates as “Do your best” and is used to encourage someone who is carrying out a complicated task, or to raise the spirits of someone who is going through a tough time. It is an exhortation to keep on making an effort instead of trusting everything to chance. Far from leaving the result in the hands of fate, as other languages do when wishing “Good Luck!” this expression is an invitation to put our all into what we’re doing so it turns out as well as possible.”

It’s exactly as Thomas Jefferson was reported to have said in a more pithy way: "I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."

So assuming we all believe this, I return back to the book and what the book says are the 3 essentials of Japanese culture.

“1. Effort: Coming back to someone who is carrying out a greater fortune through an effort than we are — the famous Japanese kaizen, making continuous improvement the basic tune that we do put into our results — the progressing effort for achieving good results. 

2. Wisdom: Knowing what makes success — what the Japanese second keys to success are — is included in knowing what luck is. To help you with that, I have included a list of good books and authors that we believe help you lose sight of the second key, the Japanese keystone — the rapid recovery — and what you believe that creates a clear picture of fortune. 

3. Confidence: If you have the third ingredient — the conviction that you can achieve it, saving goes as a popular pick — the third that we believe is nothing more than aspiration. There is nothing feasible in this world that we haven’t first visualized mentally and that we achieve it. You also have to aspire to create fortune.

With these three ingredients, we are all set to influence our luck and shape the universe to a small part of its possibility.”

That weekend showed me I have plenty of work on myself that I need to do. But the universe eventually delivers, if you actually do the work. It starts with a strong and good mindset. So go fix your mindset.  

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 14th, 2025

“In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.”--William Blake

1. Two of the smartest individuals in the world, sharing their knowledge. Naval & Balaji. Worth listening to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiN1orWlZvw

2. Arthur Hayes is a one of best observers of global macro & crypto. Short but good conversation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uSEqggMvNw

3. "Ukraine has shown how quickly a major war can escalate and how asymmetric it can be. Europe spent decades in “peacetime mode” — shrinking forces, aging equipment, under-invested innovation. Scaling back up takes time: training recruits, reopening barracks, refitting vehicle fleets, rebuilding supply chains.

Security is not just the military’s job; civilians contribute to it as well. Founders, investors, media, everyone. Most tech waves come with a moral story—social networks “connecting the world,” crypto “democratizing finance,” AI “advancing science.”

Defense is different. It’s not optional lifestyle tech; it’s about protecting our societies."

https://new-defense.com/investing-in-defense-tech-startups-matt-kuppers/

4. Lots of good takes here on latest tech & AI news. NIA. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeb53UD4_dk

5. "Every major success story is a case study in pain tolerance and conviction. Compounding only works for the few who stay solvent long enough to experience it. It’s the price of admission to the 1%. 

Most people can’t tolerate being underestimated or delayed. They need recognition and attention. So they cash out to scratch the ego.

They need comfort, so they give up options. They mistake motion for progress and validation for security. They exit the game voluntarily, right before it turns unfair in their favor.

The irony is that singular focus on survival/adaptability creates inevitability. 

If you stay in the arena long enough, the odds eventually tilt toward you. The longer you can withstand pain, boredom and obscurity, the more tail events you’re exposed to. Life runs out of ways to stop the man who refuses to leave.

If you’re in that grinding phase where nothing seems to click, that is entirely mental., If you’re making the right choices the momentum piles up silently. You’re not supposed to feel rewarded. You’re supposed to survive. 

Every month you stay solvent, every year you hold your ground, your probability of breakthrough rises. That’s the math of attrition.

People Hate Cockroaches and Yet They Teach a Valuable Lesson, Find a Way to survive"

https://bowtiedbull.io/p/getting-rich-is-a-game-of-attrition

6. What an interesting concept: The Network State. Good to have a plan B these days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfsaiGWv7oU

7. Pieter Levels at the Network State Conference. Illuminating conversation with the OG Digital nomad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw2EKZNI5p4

8. Lots of nuggets of insights for anyone working or investing in defense-tech.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGgPwKDJBrc

9. Frexit coming? An interesting take on global macro right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRmgw52426g

10. "By the fall of 2023, Thrive Capital, the New York-based investment firm Kushner started 13 years earlier, had become a kind of overnight sensation. In 2010, Thrive’s first fund was $5 million, and included companies like Kickstarter and GroupMe; by 2023, its eighth fund was $3.3 billion, including a maniacally concentrated $2 billion investment in Stripe at a $50 billion valuation, and a $150 million check to OpenAI at a $29 billion valuation. (The companies are now valued at $107 billion and $500 billion, respectively).

Along the way, Thrive’s bets on Instagram, Spotify, Warby Parker, Skims, GitHub, Slack, Robinhood and other companies had become conspicuous for being prescient, aesthetic, and exquisitely timed (among its mostly vindicated admirers), or for being absurdly priced, momentum-chasing, and too highly concentrated in dysfunctional businesses with unproven returns (among increasingly sheepish critics).

In 2010, moreover, the unknown Kushner brother’s unknown little firm was making a bunch of large but weird-sounding claims for itself, like that it was a stage-, geography-, and sector-agnostic venture firm that would concentrate all its investments in a very small number of companies; that it was not only an investment firm but also itself a company; that it incubated its own companies as well as invested in others; and that it didn’t just invest and incubate but functioned as a service provider, product creator, and embedded operational commando unit for founders.

By 2023, every self-respecting investor on Sand Hill Road was also saying such things about themselves, even as they wondered how a New York firm made up of a handful of kids in their 20s and 30s—many of them with zero experience in venture capital and from the technology Bermuda Triangle of New Jersey—had become some of the most desired investors in tech, and the ones most closely associated with the otherwise distinctly West Coast boom in artificial intelligence."

https://joincolossus.com/article/joshua-kushner-thrive-new-world/

11. "Given the fact that the Russian finances are largely dependent on the money brought in by oil and gas sales, that missing 20% is creating an uncomfortably looking hole in the state budget. This missing revenue is an objective problem for the budget and the economy, especially since the Russian state is - once again - spending more this year than the year before. And as a result, 2025 is probably the first year when the Russian economic luck has started to run out - and the economic and fiscal effect of the war is increasingly seen and felt. 

Unlike in previous years, economic growth has slowed to just about 0.6% GDP, inflation is still relatively high, and Moscow has been forced into some uncharacteristic admissions of trouble. The 2025–26 budget is still heavy on defense spending but lighter everywhere else and as officials are having to rethink what can they actually afford and what will need to be cut. Taxes are going up, debt is inching higher, and the government is searching for more and more places to cut spending without triggering public backlash."

https://substack.com/home/post/p-176215638

12. "Perhaps this particular point is here because I’m writing this piece after 3 years of non-stop recession/stagnation/stagflation (whatever) and many years of COVID, but there was a TON more optimism in 2015 than in 2025.

The general public (not guys making money online) are seeing their costs rise, their real incomes decline, and they are worried they are going to lose their job to AI and global turmoil. 

Just a decade ago, people were far more optimistic and more willing to spend money. Having luxury products and big brands was considered aspirational. 

Now people are cutting spending where they can (which is a mistake, they need to build online businesses and find ways to increase their income) and consider big brands to be “flaunting” i.e. instead of aspiration, it’s seen as social ineptness."

https://lifemathmoney.com/the-state-of-the-world-part-1-what-changed-in-the-last-10-15-years/

13. Some learnings from a top PE firm, in this case Orlando Bravo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1q4wcV-ImY

14. This was eye-opening. How to be an elite operator in the military and the costs of it. How to recover from serious injuries both mental and physical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwRc2SEo-VI&t=257s

15. "As venture capital moves deeper into Hard Tech and reindustrialization, investors who understand how commodity risk flows through a business will underwrite smarter and help founders scale faster. Out-engineering competitors isn’t enough. Founders will need to manage pricing risk, backlog, and capital intensity with the same precision they apply to their technology.

Revenue quality matters just as much as revenue growth. Know the shape of it early and keep learning how it moves."

https://www.alsoblogposts.com/p/commodity-futures-and-hard-tech

16. "But one of the most threatened business models of the pre-AI, human knowledge worker era is seat-based pricing. Seat-based pricing is entirely predicated on the fact that a single human can only accomplish so much, causing the need to hire more humans and pay for more seats as a business scales. In such an era, sales incentives were aligned with the industry – companies added more employees and salespeople sold incremental seats.

Now, as individual employees can spin up countless agents to scale, salespeople pitching more seats is sounding increasingly tone-deaf. Modern companies will increasingly aspire for talent density in the form of a smaller group of more productive and more capable people, as opposed to “growing seats” as they scale.

AI-native startups are taking advantage of this new world with outcome-based pricing (e.g. pay per new lead, per new project, per item sold, etc) with a simple “let us reduce your seats of X” sales pitch. I anticipate smart incumbents will eventually cannibalize themselves by splitting their sales teams, having one team sell seats and the other team sell against seats to those customers who are ready. Won’t be fun, but will be necessary."

https://www.implications.com/p/the-next-frontier-of-data-moats-verticals

17. One of the best shows in tech. "AI Bubble, Stablecoin Boom, and Runnin' Down a Dream."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX6q6lvoYtM

18. "I believe the best part about the Japanese stock market, IMO is that you can really find investment opportunities across the spectrum of value to growth - and there are specific ways in which you can try and find an idea that fits a certain style. Sure, maybe a traditional screen may work but some might be less obvious or immediate. Whether it’s to look for a massive value unlock from a cash-rich balance sheet, a potential take-private or simply just a great business that’s growing but is overlooked."

https://madeinjapan.substack.com/p/how-to-find-interesting-investment

19. "New technologies tend to advance rapidly and often in unexpected directions. Mature technologies advance much more slowly, much more expensively and with much more difficulty. The West’s problem is that it has an enormous financial and doctrinal investment in systems of mature technologies, which are increasingly unlikely to ever be asked to perform the missions they were designed for.

And it’s not, once more, just a hardware problem: indeed, the majority of the confusion in the West at the moment results from the fact that no-one really knows yet how to make use of the new technologies of drones and their various different capabilities, in a networked war. As we can see in Ukraine, the Russians are still in the process of working this out themselves, and it’s anyway not clear that lessons learned will be applicable everywhere: the Israeli use of drones against Hezbollah was quite different. 

I mentioned the Battle of France in 1940 earlier, and I’ll close with a comment by the famous historian and Resistance martyr Marc Bloch in his posthumously published work L’Étrange défaite. “Our leaders,” he wrote “in the midst of many contradictions, strove, above all to recreate, in 1940, the war of 1915-1918. The Germans fought the war of 1940.” Our leaders today are trying to recreate a war that was never fought, but that was widely anticipated, and until recently was the model for military planning.

The Russians learned the hard way that the nature of war has changed and is still changing. But for the reasons I’ve discussed I’m not at all sure that the West can adapt in the way that the Russians are trying to. Going back to the start and trying again is never easy."

https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/learning-from-the-defeat

20. Understanding Nvidia and the future of AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE6sw_E9Gh0

21. "So, contrary to common belief, the promotion of multipolarity reflects subversion rather than realism. It serves the interests of powers that want to weaken the United States by convincing it to limit itself."

https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/the-multipolarity-farce

22. "What sets the world’s best accelerators apart is the strength of the teams working with founders. The quality of the mentorship, as well as the introductions that mentors can potentially make.

This starts with the employees of the accelerator. The best accelerators employ partners, entrepreneurs-in-residence and even operational staff who have firsthand experience working in some of the world’s fastest-growing tech companies."

https://chrisneumann.com/archives/why-do-99-percent-of-startup-accelerators-fail

23. "This concludes our coverage of politics as a field in the Decline of the West. Beyond this, I refer you to Caesarism, but this is the point where apathy for politics begins and systems decay into private operations. We are living in the height of this control-matrix and the younger among us will see everyone they know give up with the notion of change over their lifetime, paving the way for imperial politics and great men to do as they wish with no one in their way."

https://spenglarianperspective.substack.com/p/how-money-controls-democracies

24. Luke Gromen is one of the best global macro observers in the world. AI will wreck the debt market we live in right now. Lots of brutal implications of the trend line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeTzV0kP2S4

25. A grim take on declining neoliberal order. The importance of energy & commodities coming to the fore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkHusA154Ng

26. NIA with usual good takes on the latest tech and crypto news on mid October.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JGJ4c3CBk8&list=PLIBc05HkMJHFpVxxZTD-_MbTAYtwAOEg_

27. Fascinating discussion on the new 1929 book, need to check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQcveYRfZgs&t=2s

28. Learning the art of venture capital in the latter half of the conversation. But lots of good takes on the latest tech & AI news.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZAstljD60c

29. "Italian towns on the Ligurian coast. But here’s what makes them different from every other Italian coastal option:

France is 15 minutes across the border. Monaco is 40 minutes away.

Timur’s point was simple: you get similar elegance to the Côte d’Azur at a fraction of the price. A sea view villa in Sanremo runs around €600k. The same thing in Cannes costs... well, significantly more.

But what really caught my attention was the three-system access.

You live in Italy, so you get Italian tax residency. The 50-60% impatriate exemption I wrote about before applies here – effective tax rate of 9-15% if you qualify for it.

You shop in France. Fifteen minutes and you’re at a Carrefour where grocery prices make more sense than Italian supermarkets (some will say they’re better…I would need more convincing…).

You network in Monaco. Forty minutes and you’re in a zero-tax jurisdiction where serious European money lives and does business.

Portugal gives you Portugal. Spain gives you Spain. Even Switzerland, you’re fundamentally operating in one system despite the borders.

But this? You’re actually moving between three different jurisdictions depending on what you need.

Three tax systems. Three cost structures. Three business cultures.

I’d completely overlooked this possibility."

https://palombo.substack.com/p/the-three-country-arbitrage-nobodys

30. "But for those who get in early, they could lock in a wonderful Italian chapter.

In my view, America is the greatest country on earth to build, to create, and generate value.

It's easily the best country in the world to "build."

But this does not necessarily mean it is the greatest country for enjoying what you have built.

Italy's tax regimes could allow you to have both – career optimization through location arbitrage and lifestyle maximization through cultural depth.

Personally, I'd love to spend more time in Italy.

Build in USD. Save in Bitcoin. Spend in euros.

Live longer!"

https://palombo.substack.com/p/the-new-italian-renaissance-is-here

31. "We're not just talking about a lifestyle hack. We're witnessing the emergence of parallel systems that operate independently of traditional infrastructure. 

Starlink and Bitcoin essentially allow these systems to run everywhere – money and communication decoupled from local governments and banks.

Think about it: in 100 years, how strange will we look to our descendants for needing paper passports to travel and physical banks to access value?

Right now, we're in the early stages of this transition. You can build your base wherever brings you joy – a small town in southern Italy, a village in Portugal – and still participate fully in the global economy.

Do you want to optimize for the world as it was, or as it's becoming?

The old model: tie yourself to expensive hubs, compete locally, accept whatever tax and lifestyle trade-offs come with that choice.

The new model: generate value globally, optimize costs strategically, design life intentionally. Optimize for lifespan, not just income.

We're in the early stages of the biggest reorganization of how value gets created. Individual sovereignty – the ability to optimize across multiple jurisdictions while maintaining parallel systems for money and communication – becomes the competitive advantage.

It won't be easy or super smooth. But what fascinates me is that we're living in a much more "possibilistic" era. You have choices previous generations never had.

The question isn't whether this shift will happen. It's whether you'll be positioned to benefit from it.

The infrastructure exists. The opportunities are real. The arbitrage is measurable.

But windows like this don't stay open forever.

My take: 

Earn US Dollar. Spend Euro. Live Longer."

https://palombo.substack.com/p/earn-us-dollar-spend-euro-live-longer

32. A much deeper interview with Dan Wang on China vs. America. It’s really quite insightful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSY68wBQ97I

33. "Industrial competitiveness is a moving target. As China supports the diffusion of capability across the Global South, the entire global cost curve shifts downward. Nickel refining in Indonesia, lithium processing in Chile, and phosphate-based battery production in Morocco all draw on Chinese technology and finance capital. Each new project adds scale, deepens experience and lowers the marginal cost of production globally. Each project can impact global pricing, thereby creating risks for new aspirant projects, as has been seen in the case of Indonesia’s nickel project, which has effectively delivered such low global prices that other projects are no longer viable.

For the U.S. and its firms, this means entering a marketplace where the baseline for efficiency has already dropped. Even if localised production is achieved, its cost base will sit above the new global norm. What begins as strategic autonomy ends as cost isolation. The US runs the real risk of becoming an industrial island in an ocean of lower cost, Chinese-enabled capacity. Put another way, the US can make the transition it aspires to, towards greater industrial autonomy, but it will end up as a higher cost, lower standard of living social settlement and political economy.

Industrial time is not linear. For China, it compounds but for the U.S., it compresses. Beijing’s model is iterative. Every project informs the next. Washington’s is restorative. Each project seeks to rebuild a lost ecosystem. The longer the lag, the more subsidy required, and the higher the relative cost base becomes. Tesla’s experience encapsulates this trap. The more it invests to localise battery supply chains, the faster China’s ecosystem grows globally, eroding Tesla’s cost advantage. Even if Tesla achieves full vertical integration in the U.S., it will do so in a world where Chinese-supported production elsewhere has already redefined global efficiency standards.

Time, in this sense, is not neutral. It is the medium through which advantage accumulates. While the U.S. struggles to rebuild the factories of yesterday, China is building the industrial geography of tomorrow. And by the time America’s vertical integration is complete, the world will already be horizontally integrated through Chinese-supported industrial ecosystems that define the next global cost frontier."

https://warwickpowell.substack.com/p/tick-tock-time-matters-and-pax-americana

34. "A self-sufficient semiconductor industry may be out of Europe’s reach, but a more vibrant one is not. Europe has a meaningful edge in certain steps of the semiconductor supply chain, and it can cooperate with allies—including the United States—for the supply chain segments it lacks.

The billions of euros being poured into the continent’s rearmament can also be an opportunity for its chip makers, given how critical artificial intelligence has become to defense. To take full advantage of these trends, European leaders need to build on the chip industry’s strengths with deeper partnerships, not a futile drive for self-sufficiency…"

https://chrismillersnewsletter.substack.com/p/why-strategic-autonomy-is-the-wrong

35. What an excellent interview. Enjoyed watching this. Lots of stuff around career, life, Christianity, Anduril & Defensetech, AI + the Future of War.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyT2OZpFDog

You’re Too Online: Touching Grass & The Unmooring of the Real Life World

For Succession fans, that term “You’re too online” would be recognizable. But the reality is that many of us are way too online. I’m certainly guilty of this. I spend hours everyday online, email, Youtube, messenger and X aka Twitter. Way too much X. 

I get lots of insights and inspiration but also lots of rage. It has also led to a marked decline in sociability in real life and dramatic decline in my ability to focus and concentrate. The quick dopamine hits are really damaging. And I’m generation X where I had to adapt to this in my twenties and thirties, not teens. No wonder the kids these days are so whacked out. Their brains are fried. 

I think this is why there has been a backlash against mobile phones in some schools and households. We see the rise of digital sabbath where 1-2 days of the week are spent away from phones and computers. I see the rise of experiences and more hardcore athletic endeavors whether mountain climbing or martial arts where you have to be present. Or you literally will fall off a cliff or get punched in the face. We see the popularization of meditation. These are all signs of the counter-reaction to the digital trend. A way to retake our lives back.  

As the ever wise Tai Lopez said: “Never stay fully connected to the (digital) world. Leave the phone in the house and go outside for at least an hour a day.”

Go take walks in nature. Grab a coffee or long lunch with some friends. Go rock climbing. Learn  martial arts or how to shoot a gun. Travel to obscure places off the beaten path.  #LiveExperienceMaxxing is a thing. If you do this, you may have a chance to recover from the digital dopamine hits wrecking all of us. Besides, IRL experiences are always better than virtual ones.

Complete and Total Personal Ownership Is the Only Path to Success

Every day I learn something new. I find an interesting podcast or Youtube video or have a great conversation with a friend or new friend. Or whenever I read a newsletter. It’s no different today. I am a fan of Justin Waller, the blue collar baller and he wrote something that stood out to me. 

“If it’s not your fault, you can’t fix it.

I learned that in the steel business.

You think guys show up on time?

They don’t.

You think projects run smoothly?

They don’t.

Men drink too much, make mistakes, fight in hotel rooms, and cost you contracts.

And here’s the truth,

If I let myself believe that was their fault… I was done.

Because the moment you put the blame on someone else, you hand them all the power.

But if I say, “It’s on me”?

Now I can do something about it.

I can fix the hiring process.

I can change the training.

I can track back and find where I failed.

That’s how you win.

Not by crying about circumstances.

Not by blaming other people.

But by making everything your fault.

See, accountability isn’t a burden.

It’s the only way to keep control.

And control is how you survive in business.

So the next time something falls apart, I want you to stop yourself from pointing the finger.

Instead say, “This one’s on me.”

And then fix it.

That’s the difference between conquerors and victims”

I think my lack of success was not due to a bad work ethic but a bad attitude to life. Avoiding hard problems, avoiding problems and conflict. That is the way of the weak man. But I think the biggest piece is really taking personal responsibility. It’s so much easier to blame your parents, society, your boss or whoever instead of where the finger should actually be pointed. To yourself. It’s always on you. No excuses. 

I learned this the hard way. But once I started taking responsibility for everything, I was able to tackle the problems I was dealt. Life got better in general. You earn your way to the next level of problems. To new levels of personal growth. Almost like in a video game. So for all the men out there, don’t complain, this is a privilege. You will always have problems. It’s up to you on how big a problem and how to deal with them. The world rewards the problem solvers.

Taking Losses and The Humbled Investor: Ego is the Enemy

I finally had the courage to go check my old crypto and stock trading accounts, to review  the investments I made in 2020 and 2021. Yikes. A massive sea of red. Most of my crypto investments were 90-98% down. 

I went into Q4 of 2020 with arrogance and euphoria. After some very good startup exits & exits in general in the year, lots of markups, I thought I was smarter and better than I was. Plus with the craziness of the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon) era, it seemed like everything was going up. I admit I got caught up at the top of the cycle. Nothing like a bunch of money in your pocket to make you get cocky and stupid. I went big into investing in startups, VC funds, crypto and stocks. Well, no surprise, post-2022 many of these investments are not doing well. Especially my crypto and startup investments. 

Nothing like big losses to humble you.. Reality smacks you in the face and you are forced to learn and rethink your investment thesis. I learned I clearly did not do enough research. I learned I needed to concentrate my investments, or else I might as well just invest in Index Funds. I learned DCA aka Dollar Cost Averaging is your friend, as slow and steady is better for my personality. 

I learned that investing at the top of the cycle for startups is bad for your portfolio. My 2021-2022 vintage portfolios are pretty god awful. Not like investing in Chamath SPACs awful but pretty close. Yet at the same time Power Law is truly amazing, in Venture Capital and stocks. That winners sometimes can more than make up for all the losses. 

And I learned that no matter what, no matter the preparation, you will inevitably have losses. You will always have losses & bad investments. That’s the game. No risk, no reward. So take your losses, learn the hard lessons and keep on going. Stay in the game and use the power of compounding both in capital and knowledge to your benefit. 

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 7th, 2025

"Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era."--Will Durant

1. Palmer is an American gem. Wide ranging conversation on geopolitics, tech and defense. Building the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCKdPLMmXkE

2. "As incumbents move upmarket, they leave the bottom of the market ripe for disruption. Small funds, disciplined early stage investors, and emerging managers are the ones filling the gap. Because of our fund sizes, fees are tiny—this sector of the market makes money off the carry, not the fee, in perfect alignment with our LPs, which our LPs also love. The best of these disruptive managers are hungrier, more aligned, and structurally motivated to find alpha-rich founders and ideas—exactly what LPs want.

Over time, more and more LPs will realize this, and will add a pocket for “new VC” to their portfolios. These upstart funds will thrive—historically, smaller and emerging funds return way more to their investors. And eventually, this emerging layer of investors will become the true, new venture capital industry. 

The megafunds will continue to make money, right up until the opportunity to deploy it profitably in gigantic pre-IPO megarounds disappears."

https://www.fastcompany.com/91413783/andreessen-horowitz-leaked-decks

3. "There’s a corollary here too. The companies that will win aren’t necessarily the ones training the best models. They’re the ones that make it easiest to use AI effectively. That might be through better APIs, better workflow tools, better evaluation frameworks, or better ways to combine multiple models for different tasks.

The future isn’t about picking the winning model. It’s about building systems that can flexibly use whichever model is best for each specific task at any given moment. 

So if you’ve been paralyzed trying to decide which model to build on, stop waiting. Pick one that’s good enough for your needs today and start building. When something better comes along—and it will—you’ll be able to switch. The model doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you build with it."

https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-model-doesnt-matter

4. "What looks like a coincidence is in fact a design.

China’s economic planners have built a system that uses foreign innovators as catalysts — importing technology, competition, and expertise, then converting them into domestic advantage.

The state opens the door just wide enough for learning to occur, then quietly closes it once local players have mastered the game.

The result is a generation of Chinese champions — Baidu, WeChat, Didi, BYD, Alibaba — each forged in the friction of foreign competition.

The catfish were invited in to stir the tank; the cod that survived now rule the sea."

https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/chinas-secret-strategy-for-beating

5. "How Takaichi Sanae deals with these two issues will determine whether she’ll be a success or failure. The fact that - unlike her two technocrat-led-consensus-first-and-foremost predecessors - she’s been a fighter all her life makes me hopeful she’ll serve for more than just one three-year term. Like in “Shogun”, there’ll be plenty of drama, intrigue and unexpected plot twists: to succeed, Takaichi will have to create both an asset bubble and Yen appreciation."

https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/takaichi-bubble-banzai

6. Glad to see this conversation. Building hard stuff in San Francisco.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FddjP_zNkyc

7. The Future of war: AI & Autonomy. Worth watching. America is very behind in all these areas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmRRolaIGZA&t=28s

8. AI will be eating the labor market. This is the promise for VC & businesses and peril for society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhyhR4Bzc0I&t=7s

9. David Senra: How Extreme Winners Think and Win. Talk about intense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mesjY6l2T8c

10. "The dollar has long been among America’s most powerful strategic assets. Preserving the dollar’s centrality helps sustain US oversight of global transactions and Washington’s ability to enforce rules against drug cartels, terrorist organizations, and other transnational threats. It is also a key diplomatic tool in the current great power rivalry.

BRICS threatens to chip away at the dollar’s dominance by creating opaque, unregulated channels for trade and finance. Unless Washington acts decisively to defend SWIFT, regulate stablecoins, apply diplomatic pressure, and reinforce the legitimacy of US global financial oversight, BRICS will continue to construct an anti-US financial order while presenting itself as the champion of neutral nonalignment and multipolarity."

https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/break-the-brics

11. Alot of my concerns as well on America's direction in the long run.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWFJH__wxlY

12. "Latin America is not what we think. It isn’t local, and it isn’t peripheral. It’s the new epicenter of superpower rivalries and global organized crime. Today, drug routes, crypto flows, and geopolitics intersect more directly in Latin America than anywhere else on Earth. When President Trump threatened Hamas over the hostages, they sent an armada to Venezuela. His message wasn’t just meant for Hamas in Gaza — it was aimed squarely at Hamas operations in Latin America.

Hamas’s survival doesn’t depend solely on its presence in the Middle East anymore because it’s gone global. Hamas depends on its cash flows out of Latin America, and so does Syria, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and even Iran’s Quds Force. They all operate from the Tri-Border Area, where Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil meet, as well as in Venezuela. The geopolitics of Latin America are no longer regional — they’re globalizing too, like everything else, with logistics and finance operations run with the same efficiency as those of multinational firms.

Latin America has an abundance of resources — and just as many vulnerabilities. Trump sees it for what it is: a geopolitical RISK meets Monopoly board. Every move is about property — staking territory, tracking the opposition’s bets, seizing assets that matter. But this isn’t just a contest for land or ports. It’s a battle for narratives and neural space — who controls the story, and who controls belief. In the 21st century, the front lines of power run not only through pipelines and ports but through perceptions.

Forget the old clichés of coups and cartels. This is about battleships, bitcoin and bananas - not bullets. At least so far. Latin America is no longer a distant theater. It’s where the world’s next balance of power is being written — in cash flows, code, and cognition. It’s not just a contest for physical land, raw materials, and critical infrastructure but a fight for narrative and cognitive control."

https://drpippa.substack.com/p/bananas-battleships-and-bitcoin-how

13. An important discussion on how we got into the mess we are in right now in the West. The failure of NeoLiberalism and the consequences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pmb2VZ0Jg8Q

14. "The self-help aisle promised transformation through commitment. AI promises transformation through experimentation."

https://tomtunguz.com/ai-enables-instant-workflow-adoption/

15. "Investing is very good at enforcing a sensitivity to reality". A philosopher hedge funder. Fascinating convo on the art of investing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xkWJq4Qcps&t=3s

16. "The unusually prosperous boomer decades produced more elite aspirants than legacy prestige tracks could absorb and the imbalance has been further exacerbated by globalization and immigration. 

The result is a civilizational oversupply of strivers and a bottleneck of prestige. Status is inherently positional, and not everyone can be at the top. Coupled with stagnant living standards, this social scarcity amplifies anxiety and mimetic rivalry across the striver class and creates the cultural phenomenon we see today.

Strivers typically come from home environments that set high expectations for achievement, emphasize hard work, and normalize competition. Mimetic rivalry is the motivational engine of the striver. Most strivers are routed into prestige tracks like finance, tech, law, consulting, and medicine. It has gotten harder over the last generation to strive and prestige tracks have grown crowded, drawing more strivers further out the frontier of risk. 

Strivers are overrepresented in the Crypto and AI industries, where much of the outsized opportunity of this decade has emerged. These industries offer the best chance of breaking into the modern landed gentry class: accumulating enough wealth to live entirely off of capital gains."

https://www.scimitar.capital/p/self-reflections-of-a-striver

17. I always learn from Raoul Pal. Lots of global macro, AI & Crypto and investing. Worth listening to. The great reset.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JcuRhCKZdA&t=3785s

18. "While governments are powerful, the people always find ways to retain their sovereignty. In many cultures that experienced endemic inflation over centuries of successive governments or dynasties, cultures created gifting rituals marking major life milestones (birth, marriage, and death) that involve the exchange of hard money. In this way, the people save through cultural rituals. No politician dares subvert these rituals lest they lose their mandate to lead and find themselves headless.

In the modern era, when the power of centralized governments — whether a democracy, socialist republic, communist state, etc. are all powerful because of the advances of thinking machines and the internet, how can we the people preserve our rights to sound money? The gift that Satoshi gave to humanity via their Bitcoin whitepaper is a technological miracle that was launched at a very important time in history.

Bitcoin in the current state of human civilization is the best form of money ever created. Like all money, it has a relative value. Given that Pax Americana quasi-empire rules via the US dollar, we value Bitcoin relative to the dollar. Assuming the technology works, Bitcoin’s price will ebb and flow ‌because of the price and supply of dollars.

The Pax Americana quasi-empire is but a nostalgic dream. What comes next? This is the question with which global leaders wrestle. Change is not good nor bad, but change creates economic winners and losers. Sometimes the losers are politically and economically powerful, which creates issues for ruling parties. In order to shield the negative effects of change from the populace, politicians print money."

https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/long-live-the-king

19. "It’s only 2025 (not even 2035) and we’re entering a phase where active income is no longer a viable path to making it. Making it means you are personally free from future obligations to outside entities (defined as a boss and anyone who can take away the most valuable asset in the world - Time)

“You can sell a business. You can sell land. You can sell stocks. You can sell assets. You can’t sell your job.” - BowTiedBull Philosophy

If that saying doesn’t stab you in the heart, you’re not paying attention. Likely stuck in the world of NPCs and NGMIs

The next decade you’ll witness a tectonic/earthquake level change in how freedom, power, and survival are distributed. 

Life’s winners (You): people who own durable, productive assets. 

Life’s losers (NPCs): people who rent out their time, allowing someone else to compound their equity.

This is the new reality. Based on compounding math + policy + technology. Here we’ll walk through what you need to own, why it works and why asymmetry is the only way to operate. Daily life is going to change. The vast majority won’t even start the smallest scalable niche item: WiFi Money/managed-internet biz that makes money while you sleep."

https://bowtiedbull.io/p/you-cant-sell-a-job-the-final-decade

20. Lots of juicy discussion on the latest Silicon Valley news. AI is dominating the news, investing and business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1bmrugU_6E

21. Overall, a pretty important discussion for America.

"Manufacturing's Future, The Electric Tech Stack, and Automation"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOv2EqojRkw&t=200s

22. "For entrepreneurs thinking about an exit strategy, remember this: the best exits happen when you first build a great business and the market comes knocking. Once you’ve built something truly great, potential acquirers will notice and opportunities will emerge. Focus on greatness, not on the exit."

https://davidcummings.org/2025/10/11/focus-on-building-a-great-business-not-an-exit/

23. "I was most struck, though, by the similarities with today’s links between industrial capacity and national power. In Beijing and Washington, policymakers look nervously at a “war of the factories.” Xi’s statements about the geopolitical implications of industrial capacity would not have sounded out of place in the 1930s.

The tech transfer and localization requirements imposed on Ford in the 1930s look like those imposed by China on Western firms in recent decades—and those that Washington has tested recently on chip and battery firms to push them to move to the U.S. I read a lot about the ‘end of globalization’ today, but what I see in practice is remarkably similar to what Link sees in the 1930s: a “furious” effort to remake it."

https://chrismillersnewsletter.substack.com/p/the-war-of-the-factories

24. "Most people think small. Most people live small. They don’t care to step outside the ordinary, and that’s why so few ever get the extraordinary. I often use the “walk sign” theory as a reference: most people will follow once someone takes the first step, but they rarely make the first move.

Thinking big takes no more energy than thinking small. In fact, it often takes less. And when you think big, you’re competing against fewer people. The kind of people you want on your side. Few understand this."

https://brittanyhugoboom.substack.com/p/you-need-to-start-approaching-beautiful

25. Japan is treating their defense very seriously. Offensive power is the best defense as they say.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/01/asia/japan-warship-tomahawk-missiles-intl-hnk-ml

26. "According to Liherko, the actual situation on the battlefield looks different from maps that show Russia surging forward. He drew an alternative diagram with several small blobs representing enemy troops. “It’s more dynamic. We stay in our position. They try and go forward,” he explained."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/11/how-ukraine-forces-attempt-claw-back-russian-advances-donetsk

27. Some of the best commentary on Silicon Valley news from some top tier investors around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72htG-AOykI&t=336s

28. Wow this was one of the best interviews on how to scale a growth stage venture firm. Insight Partners, one of the biggest and best investors out of NYC. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4zzkuFyI18

29. "You’re essentially trying to build discipline during the least disciplined time of year.

The Alternative? Start in Q4 (October). 

Starting your 2026 goals in October 2025 gives you a three-month head start. By the time January arrives, others are just beginning their doomed resolutions, you’ve already stacked habits, built colossal momentum & began rewiring your identity."

https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/why-91-of-new-years-resolutions-will

30. AI Chip Wars. Learning some new things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvlE8-MzxyA

31. "That’s why the new export controls don’t target NdPr. They target the aforementioned heavy rare earths - because those are the ones with real geological scarcity. And now that Myanmar’s supply line has proven how fragile it is, the timing starts to look intentional.

With this in mind, China’s latest export controls begin to make a lot more sense. As seen previously with antimony and other metals, dual-use regulation is the official framing, but this also appears to be a calculated move to ensure that domestic downstream industries - magnet producers, EV manufacturers, defense contractors - aren’t left short in a market where heavy rare earth supply is both limited and under pressure. In that light, the move is as much about industrial policy as it is about playing tit for tat with the Trump administration. 

And here lies the uncomfortable truth for the rest of the world: if you want to build a rare earth industry that can actually compete, it’s not enough to copy what China did with NdPr. You need to go where the heavies live - and for a part, that means developing ionic clays. It means dealing with messy permitting, environmental risks, and all the local politics that come with it."

https://sustainabledude.substack.com/p/why-china-banned-rare-earths-but

32. "While crypto is having a moment, refining is too - in the opposite way. It’s rising in value.

In March, President Trump ordered all U.S. military bases to build refining facilities and begin stockpiling critical refined metals. It sounded obscure at the time, but it’s central to what’s coming: a world where the 3D printing of metals and materials becomes the backbone of military power. Modern battlefields are turning into print-on-demand environments. As I said in recent Substacks, the 3D printer is the equivalent of the metal stirrup the Mongolians used to create the largest empire on Earth. See my piece, War in an Era of Intelligent Machines: Stirrups, Conoidal Bullets, 3D Printers, Lunar Nukes, and Special Ops Forces.

And, as Elon Musk has said, we need to keep people off the battlefield because drones - 3D printed drones like the “Widowmakers” - combined with AI will be immediately lethal to all humans. In a robot-to-robot world, refined rare earths and Helium-3 become the decisive variables. Wars won’t be won by territory or troop counts. Wars will be won — or lost — by who runs out of critical materials first."

https://drpippa.substack.com/p/no-laughing-matter-the-race-for-helium

33. Probably one of the most critical and important companies in America right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgRo82sSPCU

34. "AI will not distribute prosperity evenly. Its impact depends on whether firms can retain the surplus it generates—a function of market structure, capital intensity, and institutional context. The key divide lies not between manufacturing and services but between businesses able to escape the market economy’s competitive pressures and those that remain trapped within them.

Manufacturers with scale, process knowledge, and high capital barriers will likely capture surplus and reinvest it, compounding returns. Client-facing service providers will see most gains flow to clients or upstream AI vendors. Proximity services remain the crucial variable: if AI can unlock productivity gains there, and workers organise to claim their share, it could trigger the first meaningful realignment of the social contract since the post-war boom.

America will extend its dominance in platforms and professional services, deepening existing advantages while leaving most workers behind. China will tighten its grip on manufacturing, converting scale into market power as AI amplifies control and efficiency. Finally, Europe will pursue scale without mass, using AI to enhance precision manufacturing and perhaps pioneer a new balance between capital and labour."

https://www.driftsignal.com/p/capitalism-in-the-ai-powered-economy

Interregnum: Stuck in Limbo

Interregnum is an interesting word. It’s defined as a period during which a leadership role is vacant or a lapse or pause between world orders. Seems apt as we move away from the world of Pax Americana we have grown so accustomed to. 

I’ve alluded and written many times about the strange state of the world we are in right now. Everyone’s deeply anxious because we know the world we used to live in is disappearing. But we still can’t make out the shape of what the new world will look like. It’s been hard to articulate or even grasp. Trust me, I feel like I’ve spent much of my time & resources these last few years trying to do so. 

Thankfully I follow “Train Everything”, a true world philosopher and brilliant thinker on X and in his private Telegram groups. He wrote something that was really helpful to me. 

“It feels as if the world has been holding its breath this year. There’s motion, but no momentum. Many events have caused a ripple across the surface, but nothing has pushed us forward in a definitive direction. I think this is the nature of us being at the quarter century mark. Every hundred years or so there are inflection points where the past is exhausted and the future has not yet declared itself.

It reminds me of the 1920s. The world had just emerged from the ruins of a physical global war. The old order was shattered but not yet replaced. Today we are coming out of a global cultural war. The greatest ideological war the world has ever seen. A prolonged conflict over values, identity, and the meaning and purpose of civilization and life itself.

If history rhymes then the next quarter century will determine the trajectory of our age. 

The 1920s birthed not only globalism and modernity, but it also gave birth to radical movements in Italy and Germany. Movements that did not simply ride the tide of change, but attempted to seize it, shape it, and propel the world towards a new future.

I predict we are on the cusp of something similar. The old liberal order is visibly dissipating. The promises of globalization and digital utopia have been found to be fraudulent. People are atomized, hopeless, distrustful, numb, and nostalgic. Everyone is searching for something that feels promising and real. These are the perfect conditions for a radical movement to emerge. It will not be moderate or polite. Just like a century ago, it will be born from disillusionment, stress, and the hunger for higher ideals with more meaning. 

We are still in the waiting room of history. But the door is about to open, and when it does, the world will not walk through, it will be forced through.”

It really feels like we are in a momentous time, for better or worse. It’s as Lenin was reported to have stated: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” We are getting close to this time I think. Looking back on this time, we may even be experiencing this in real time right now. 

The Mindset to Thrive in the Chaos: Bet on Yourself

It’s hard not to be confused or scared right now. Everything is changing. Literally everything. Jobs and industries that we thought were secure are gone. Institutions in the West are crumbling. Technology is ripping through barriers and everything is under threat. But sticking your head in a hole is the wrong move. Flaying about without a plan is just as stupid. 

Surprisingly, the man who has provided me with some insight for how to thrive in times like this is the controversial and hated Andrew Tate. Listening to an interview he gave a few months ago (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ-UED-LOUw), it really helped me sort out my mindset and plan properly. 

He said: “What allows me to compete and predict the future, because everything is so chaotic. The only thing I can predict is I’m going to work harder than anyone else. I’m going to get up earlier than anyone else. I’m going to pay more attention than anyone else. I’m going to research harder than anyone else. I’m not going to feel sorry for myself. I’m going to dedicate myself. I’m going to find some F–ing money. That is what I’m going to do. 

Right now, it’s almost like go “100 hundred percent in on yourself” season. Going all in on Bitcoin might backfire. Going all in on property might backfire. Going all in on yourself will never backfire.” 

He goes on to say: “So my mentality currently is I just need to make sure I am my absolute best self all of the time. And that I am permanently motivated to do whatever it takes to win. And I am the most adaptable. Darwin said: its the most adaptable of the species that survive. Its not the biggest, its not the strongest. It’s the one that identifies the forest is on fire and grows some fins and jumps in the water. It’s adaptability season now.”

Even the smartest folks out there don’t know what’s coming, big company CEOs, successful entrepreneurs, VC, PE and hedge fund investors. Trust me, I’ve read their books & articles, listened to the podcast and even met and conversed with many of them. No one knows. But you can prepare yourself to recognize trends, to jump on them fast. Fix your mentality and take total ownership of your life. And execute ruthlessly. 

This is how you win in all this chaos and change. Adapt or die.

36 Months to Make it: Time is Running Out

I think if you spend as much time online as well as just talking to many entrepreneurs and investors around the world like I do, you get the sense that something major is changing in the world. A bizarre unease. Everyone is trying to “get their bag” aka get their money. Severely short term greedy. For a while I was not sure why. But the reason it only crystallized in my brain when I heard a talk by Dan Koe. 

“You have about 36 months to make it. And it makes sense because AI will continue to replace jobs no matter how much people fight against it. Money as we know it will change or even cease to exist because millions of ASI’s or artificial super intelligences will rapidly execute tasks beyond human comprehension, dictating humanity’s future. And beside the point, if you are interested in crypto, this is probably the last time you’re going to see incredible gains because they are being regulated, they are being adopted, and after this, they are going to become more like stocks” (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve1L21l1GW4) 

A bit extreme but when considering all the technological and geopolitical changes right now plus the cultural and demographic trends in this Fourth Turning event, the world will have changed beyond recognition for all of us. Growing inequality and the continuing K-Shaped economy where the winners really win and losers really lose. It’s gonna get really ugly. 

So assuming you all agree with me on this take and trend. What can you do about this? 

Dan Koe gets very tactical and says “you have three super powers at your disposal right now to take control of your future. And those are one: learning-the ability to adapt and figure out what actions you must take to get a specific result. Two: persuasion-the ability to build trust and attract people to a mutually beneficial vision or narrative. We’re talking persuasion and mutual benefit and not manipulation. And three: execution-So the ability to turn ideas into reality through automation, creation and delegation.” 

He goes on to say:

So this creates a clear distinction between who will thrive and who won’t. Doers versus directors. Employees versus entrepreneurs. Low agency versus high agency. Those who assign work rather than being assigned work. So you assigning the work either to yourself, self direction, directing your own career or to an AI prompt, or an automation tool or something of that nature that allows you to do more and pursue your personal goals that bring more fulfillment and meaning to your life.”

If this does not make you have a sense of urgency, and take some action, not sure what will. Get locked in! 

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Nov 30th, 2025

"No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn." — Hal Borland 

1. Palmer Luckey is a true patriot and working on one of the most important companies in America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-nCPZW1o50

2. "Every generation mistakes its turbulence for the end. History proves it is often the beginning. Nations in turmoil see only shadows. History decides which were omens and which were illusions

All I am saying is that you must hope. You must have purpose for the future. Times of lead do define countries. But they also define how you build in the aftermath."

https://pplsartofwar.substack.com/p/how-do-nations-survive-years-of-lead

3. "The mistake most people make is believing stability is the norm. It isn’t. Chaos is the default state of the world. Your ability to survive and thrive - depends on how well you move through it.

You don’t need to know what comes next, only that you have the ability to handle it when it arrives. That’s confidence and determination to use chaotic times to your advantage. Even to your benefit.

Confidence is not knowing the future - it is knowing that no future will arrive without you adapting to meet it.

Survival in a chaotic time is not about avoiding hardship—it’s about being the kind of person who outlasts it. You do not need to predict the storm. You need to know where to stand when it arrives."

https://gatelessbarrier.substack.com/p/how-to-survive-in-a-time-of-chaos

4. "Why does this old-world virtue still matter? Because sprezzatura represents the antidote to today’s fast paced and self-centered culture.

In a time when people chase constant validation, the man who quietly excels without self-promotion is magnetic to others. He reminds us that true confidence comes from within. That kind of elegance is not something one flaunts to gain the attention of others. It is part of a natural mastery of skills and confidence in every aspect of life.

Sprezzatura is about presence, not performance. It’s about elegance without effort.

To live with sprezzatura is to live with grace under pressure and humility in success.

A gentleman should never be too rigid or frantic. And he must never appear desperate to be noticed. Instead, he should be known for his cool presence, his ease, and the quiet mastery that speaks even when he says nothing at all."

https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/sprezzatura-the-gentlemans-art-of-61c

5. "The bear case on Google usually centers on innovator’s dilemma – they’re too wedded to search revenue to fully embrace AI. But that misreads what’s happening. Google isn’t trying to protect search; they’re using search to bootstrap into AI dominance. The search business generates $200+ billion annually to fund AI development. That’s a war chest that dwarfs any competitor.

In the end, AI competition isn’t about who has the best demo or the most hype. It’s about who can train the biggest models, deploy them most efficiently, and improve them fastest based on real-world feedback. On all three dimensions, Google’s structural advantages compound over time. They might not win every news cycle, but they’re positioned to win the war."

https://investinginai.substack.com/p/why-google-will-win-the-ai-race

6. "When strategists sit down to move pieces on the global chessboard, they aren’t just moving tanks or ships — they’re answering that first, deceptively simple question: What kind of world are we living in?

If you believe in liberalism, you’ll bet on trade, democracy, and institutions to keep the peace. If you believe in realism, you’ll assume every rival is out to maximize power — and you’ll plan accordingly.

The tragedy, as John Mearsheimer reminds us, is that leaders may wish for peace, but the system rarely lets them choose it. The world isn’t a seminar room or a family dinner table — it’s closer to a cage match with no referee.

And that’s why, whether in the Pentagon or Zhongnanhai, the answer to that opening question still determines everything."

https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/from-the-pentagon-to-beijing-one

7. Living large in Shanghai. Also some insight on how China is winning the EV war and are just able to build stuff.

We need to be paying attention and stop with the Western Cope and arrogance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4yBZ4QJYNY

8. "The model for making money on the internet these days is straightforward, if difficult to execute: build an audience and charge subscribers for content.

This is how OnlyFans influencers like Mia Khalifa have made millions. It’s how Substack writers like Heather Cox Richardson have become more influential and profitable than traditional media outlets. It’s not that different from “as a service” business models, which rely on marketing to build a customer base and then charge customers for a recurring online service.

Who popularized this style of business? Who should numerous people and companies credit for determining how to make money online?

All roads lead to an unlikely source: a stripper and softcore porn star who went by the name Danni Ashe.

Ashe, who’s been lauded as the only person in history to be featured on the cover of both the Wall Street Journal and Juggs is the original internet subscription entrepreneur. But even as her pioneering business ideas have become the surest way for creators to make money online, she’s largely been forgotten."

https://thehustle.co/originals/the-stripper-who-ushered-in-the-modern-subscription-based-internet

9. 7-15 years out. Humanoid robots, the biggest opportunity in tech. Driven by AI. "Infinite Labor machines."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdHLZt_B51U

10. "The counter-intuitive truth is this: to build manufacturing strength, invest where it already exists. Spreading jobs evenly across regions may seem fair from a regional development perspective, but it dilutes expertise, limits knowledge spillovers, and undermines competitiveness. Manufacturing excellence depends on dense ecosystems where process know-how circulates naturally between suppliers, producers, and supporting industries. Networks of specialised suppliers, technical education institutions, and related sectors cannot be recreated through isolated factories.

Accordingly, European industrial strategy should concentrate resources in existing geographic clusters rather than dispersing them for political reasons. Some regions must become centres of excellence, while others focus on complementary economic strengths. In addition, modern clusters need more than factory space. They require housing for technicians and engineers, proximity to urban centres that attract skilled professionals, and a critical mass of related industries to generate career progression, innovation, and knowledge spillovers.

Concentrating industrial investment in clusters may feel counter to traditional notions of fairness, but it creates the density and dynamism that underpin long-term industrial competitiveness.

Now, clusters provide the physical and human foundation, but without the right financial tools, investment cannot scale effectively—Europe must also develop production capital."

https://www.driftsignal.com/p/europes-new-industrial-challenge

11. Stephen Kotkin on how Europe can defend themselves against Russian hybrid war & general aggression.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gymefXjpn5A&t=75s

12. Another good episode from the NIA guys, teardown of latest tech news.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt7llzftWF8&list=PLIBc05HkMJHFpVxxZTD-_MbTAYtwAOEg_

13. It's hard to listen to this. So much admiration for the Ukrainian armed forces and people. Incredible spirit and endurance. We owe them support.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7mCuNQiE6w

14. "I see this constantly. Founders with ten users claiming they’ll have millions next year. No business model, no go-to-market strategy, just slides full of dreams. They’re so busy pretending to be crushing it, they forget to actually build something."

https://newsletter.startupistanbul.com/p/the-next-unicorn

15. I guess we will see if this comes to pass.

"It looks like Russia is also being pulled into China’s priorities, namely helping them with Taiwan. Meanwhile, Trump remains on track with China, especially with the Communist Party, to reach some kind of a deal. The ramping up on the American side is no doubt related to the meeting the two sides have now agreed to. I remain convinced that, in the end, the US and China will set the terms of the Grand Bargain. Russia, Europe and Ukraine will have to accept whatever deal the US and China announce.  Trump will meet his Chinese counterparts next months in south Korea and both sides have agreed to a state visit in Beijing in early 2026."

https://drpippa.substack.com/p/the-hot-war-in-cold-places-continues

16. Pretty important discussion on how to reindustrialize America and build scale. Creating Freedom's Forge 2.0.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShkxpBoObCQ

17. "Smart local capital tells us that something is seriously amiss. That is why France has the largest TARGET deficit of any country in the euro. If the second-largest economy in the euro with the largest debt load is experiencing a bank walk, it doesn’t bode well for the future of the common currency. The problem is that France is too big to fail, but too big to bail out as well. And this is where it becomes interesting for Satoshi’s faithful. What will the policy response be from the French politicians, the ECB, and foreign monetary authorities to the quickly deteriorating French finances?

This essay will focus on why France is fucked. Why a change in US monetary and foreign policy means German and Japanese capital can no longer finance the generous French welfare state. The variety of ways France can steal capital from domestic and foreign savers. And finally, what the policy options are for the ECB. The TLDR is that many folks will wake up one morning and understand that money in the bank is not yours and then fully comprehend why Bitcoin is so necessary. The ECB will valiantly print money to forestall the loss of its raison d’être. It shall be a glorious day for the faithful as printed euros will combine with printed dollars, yuan, yen, etc to bid up the price of Bitcoin.

If you are not a denizen of Europe™ do not buy European financial assets under any circumstances. Instead, buy some Bitcoin, sit back and watch your sick gainz as printed euros contribute to the bull market in growth of the fiat money supply. If you want to know when the cracks in the euro will emerge, watch the trajectory of France’s TARGET deficit."

https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/bastille-day

18. "Socialism-lite turns out to be a very delicate balancing act. The oligarchs need to constrict the economy sufficiently to mute the rise and influence of rivals, but not so much that they cause economic collapse or specific catastrophes that would result in them being discredited and thrown out. They were managing this balance fairly well until the Ukraine war messed it up for them, and now their backs are against the wall.

At the same time, they have turned their gaze towards the Atlantic with trepidation. They see in Trump’s election a vision of the dark future that awaits them if they let New Men like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and whoever else get out of hand. They’ve also noticed that key actors in the American tech sector played some role in Trump’s victory, and this is yet another reason for them to hate the whole world of technological innovation, from the internet in general to social media and large language models and everything in between. It is a very worrying source of New Men.

Please don’t misunderstand me: I don’t think our oligarchs sat down at a table somewhere and hashed out climatism to mess up the economy. The oligarchy is very large and diffuse, but like everybody else they are inclined to believe things that redound to their practical benefit. Climatism emerged via a confluence of interests, but the oligarchs’ enthusiasm was decisive."

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/climatism-as-an-oligarchic-strategy

19. Supply chains are the key to victory in war. Logistics in Ukraine & Russia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4EOL_Nn3Xk

20. The best B2B investing show right now. Worth listening to every week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4uXoaRVoCQ

21. Critical Minerals Crisis. This is a bit depressing but solving a problem requires acknowledging we have one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUZbLsNrOoM

22. "Truly great companies don’t just talk about what they make possible. They bear witness to what’s at stake. What could be lost; what could be gained; and why it matters — in human terms. That’s how American Dynamism companies earn trust, build momentum, and convince the brightest people who could probably work anywhere to take on challenging, dirty problems for (often) lower salary. Because it’s worth it.

The most important work can’t be reduced to an abstraction. American Dynamism sectors are too consequential and too complex for platitudes to carry the weight. Tim O’Brien’s lesson is that the most powerful storytelling makes the message vivid in concrete detail, in the contradictions customers actually live with, and in the people whose lives are shaped by it."

https://ryanomics.com/p/storytelling-in-american-dynamism

23. Wide ranging but valuable discussion on building tech & great startups in Silicon Valley with Marc Andreessen, Charlie Songhurst and John Collison. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_1cTlLpNMg&t=2721s

24. "Notable here I think that Europe is now moving full pelt in using immobilised CBR assets - the underlying assets, all $330 billion in Western juridications, to support Ukraine. German chancellor Merz has announced his support for a €140 billion reparations loan to use these assets to secure Ukraine’s financing for the next few years - the European Commission is in agreement. I understand the UK, US and other G7 countries will follow suit.

That will secure Ukraine well over $200 billion in financing, more than enough to cover its financing needs for several years to come. And how better than to get the Russian taxpayer to pay for the costs of its aggression against Ukraine and for the defence of Europe. I expect some of these monies will be used to fund joint ventures to take Ukrainian defence innovation and put these into mass production in Europe and to ensure Europe’s defence. Likely some will be used as seed capital for Ukrainian - European defence innovation funds to again fast track Europe, and Ukraine’s defence capabilities against Russia.

Europe’s defence, and survival, now depends on Ukraine. Ukraine can win this war for itself, and for Europe."

https://timothyash.substack.com/p/ukraine-is-the-key-to-europes-defence

25. We are nowhere close to a coherent strategy right now.

"While Trump’s first administration was famous for assembling a “team of rivals,” Trump 2.0 takes the dynamic to new heights — featuring a bureaucratic civil war (and occasionally literal fist fights) between economic nationalists seeking to rebuild American industrial capacity, hard-power competitors determined to maintain technological and military superiority, and transactional restrainers pursuing concrete deals that reduce the cost of foreign entanglement.

The tragedy of Trump’s China policy is that each camp has legitimate goals and credible policy ideas to achieve them — but pursuing all three at once creates a strategic schizophrenia that leaves America weaker than committing fully to any single path.

The past nine months have delivered contradictory lurches on trade, technology, Taiwan, and American alliances in Asia. A coherent National Security Strategy — one that finally clarifies what the United States wants from China — is the administration’s best path out of this morass."

https://www.choosingvictory.com/p/the-war-for-americas-china-policy

26. Understanding stablecoins and why it's a big deal in America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgFvKjVmbRI

27. Reality is brutal. A big self-own by America. End of US dollar dominance & geopolitics. Gold, Bitcoin and Land (and bullets) probably not a bad idea to have as part of your portfolio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZNS1zjBthU

28. This was a great episode, back to business like it started.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddAwgZ6ietc&t=394s

29. "Entrepreneurs would do well to remember this: control your controllables. What’s within your power? What’s outside of it? How can you keep your team focused on what they can control—and not distracted by what they can’t?

At the end of the day, entrepreneurs must control their controllables."

https://davidcummings.org/2025/10/04/control-your-controllables/

30. "If anyone could claim the title of the most interesting man in the world, it would probably be Sir Richard Francis Burton. The Victorian Era adventurer spoke 29 languages, translated the Kama Sutra into English, and completed the sacred Islamic Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca while in disguise. While these feats alone are impressive, they merely scratch the surface of this gentleman’s incredible life."

https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/sir-richard-francis-burton-the-most-257

31. "This is what the 996 crowd doesn’t understand. They post their suffering like medals. Screenshot their commits. Count their hours. They’re performing intensity to avoid asking if they even care.

Mercenaries do performance theater about 996. Missionaries don’t even look at the clock.

You can’t beat someone who thinks they’re playing.

When you genuinely love the problem, the hours disappear. You’re not counting. You’re playing."

https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/996-is-not-your-competition

32. Back to the future. PMCs aka Mercenaries will thrive in this new global disorder. Especially in the global south.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuuANWNrOtA

33. "This is balance through multiplicity. The Saudis are creating overlapping deterrent links that prevent any single regional power, Israel included, from claiming a monopoly over Gulf security.

It’s mostly signaling, rather than a broader military policy shift. Riyadh is showing it has options. 

Saudi Arabia aligns without binding itself, diversifies without replacing its core patrons. Then exploits the contradictions between powers to create room for its own diplomacy. Others must now calculate with that fact in mind."

https://pplsartofwar.substack.com/p/whats-behind-the-saudi-pakistan-mutual

34. As always, an eye opening take on China's grand ambitions and capabilities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MLdey44mA0

Living in and Surviving Boomtowns: San Francisco in the 21st Century

I was rewatching Landman and they got around to talking about the oil boomtown of Midland, Texas. 

“Boomtowns. It ain’t different than Tombstone. Dodge City. San Francisco. First come the dreamers. Then the bankers. Then the salesmen. Then the sharks. Then the desperate. And then the thieves.”

This is definitely the cycle I’ve seen now 4 times in Silicon Valley. We are in the midst of the AI boom and my take as of 2025, we are in the banker & salesman phase right now. The sharks & the desperate have not shown up yet, although I am seeing a few emerging these last few months. I guess that means we are still early in this cycle. 

Longevity in this town is hard. Irrelevance is just around the corner. Paraphrasing Tommy, the main character said: “You can be a dreamer but you gotta have a plan.” 

Besides location, location, location. My career plan was always to follow my curiosity. Even if it was not cool or on trend. And if it doesn’t work out and most of the time it doesn’t, I meet some new people, pick up new skills and learn something new. It becomes a latticework of knowledge that surprisingly almost always turns out to be useful in future. 

I take as many swings as possible, big or small. This increases the possibility of something going right and hitting big. This is why you have to stay in the game. Take the hits and survive. That means being liquid and being able to take the inevitable losses or downturn. So you can then reposition. Catch the next cycle on the way up. 

An apt quote from the show: “My dad told me something a long time ago. You got two choices. You gotta get really good at balancing a check book or you make enough money you don’t have to…..When the money comes, it comes fast.”

The rule is to make sure you don’t cut corners along the way. Quoting Tommy again: “Short cut is always the longest road.” That is why I am always “long term greedy”. Build relationships and never trade your reputation for money. Don’t over-optimize. 

If you do this wherever you are, whatever industry or career you pursue, you will be fine. 

It Won’t Be Free

I spend far too much time on geopolitics and global macro. And I try to avoid the filter bubble which is why I listen to or read everything, whether right or left. From whatever country. And it is damn uncomfortable. But in discomfort comes truth. Or from truth you don’t want to accept. 

One of the guys I listen to is Balaji Srinavasan who I’ve written about before. Watch this interview he does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-CjidoeMaE&t=1s. 

He is damn smart. And he is damn negative on America and makes a damn persuasive case of why. It’s a hammer blow of fact after fact. And then a litany of facts about why China is winning. They make almost everything from PPE to robots to solar panels to electrical transfers to refining rare earths to pharma to steel to batteries to drones. All things needed to dominate the 21st century economy and war. As he says “China is strong, Zeihan is wrong”, which as an aside, Zeihan is a well known geopolitical analyst famous for predicting China’s end.

I think any American who has been paying attention would concur. We have a divided political elite and populace. Our elites in America are venal and clueless. Most Americans still think we are stronger than we really are. 

Yet we literally cannot make anything anymore due to over-financialization and outsourcing to China including our critical industrial base and defense base.  We have massive bureaucracy that gets in the way of everything. We are losing because of political cowardice, arrogance and decades of bad decisions. One big self-own after another. I get depressed writing this. And it’s far worse in Canada and Europe. 

But I will never doom. I still think about what an ex-US Marine friend told me when he used to get into fights in his younger years. His mantra was “It won’t be free”. The point was that even if he got his ass kicked, he would fight so hard and make it so painful that it would feel close to a loss for his opponent, or opponents in some cases. Basically he went down fighting. I try to channel this energy. The odds might be stacked against us but from what I saw from the community of the Reindustrialize Summit, there are people who feel the same way as I do. 

It’s going to be a hard road but I saw a passage from Ernst Junger that may be helpful for all of us in this challenging decade. 

"Today only the person who no longer believes in a happy ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live. A happy century does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and there is freedom in the moment."

NEVER EVER Underestimate Your Enemy: Western Arrogance and Ignorance Kills

I stumbled on this scene from the Pacific tv series on the US Marines fighting in World War 2 against the Japanese. The scene is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbUJLqQ3HWU.

A young inexperienced Marine makes a derogatory statement about the Japanese soldier. 

The Gunnery Sergeant quickly disabuses him very quickly. “That’s what the enemy is to you huh? A F–king bucktoothed cartoon dreamed up by some asshole on Madison Avenue to sell soap. Well, let me tell you something. The Jap I know—the Japanese soldier—he’s been in war since you were in diapers! He’s a combat veteran, an expert with his weapon. He can live off maggoty rice and muddy water for weeks and endure misery you couldn't dream of in your worst nightmare. The Japanese soldier doesn’t care if he gets hurt or killed—as long as he kills you. Call ’em whatever you want—but never ever fail to respect their desire to put you and your buddies into an early grave! Is that clear?”

Yet here we are in the West, in the US military, in NATO, by geopolitical pundits, in DC Think-tanks, in Washington and in western media deriding both the Chinese and Russian militaries. Saying the Chinese are not a warlike people or the Chinese have not fought in a war since 1979 and lost to the Vietnamese. Or the derision of the barbarian Russian army, being barely held off by the Ukrainian military. Both the Chinese & Russian militaries massively impacted by corruption and a top down hierarchy and missing non-commissioned officer corps ie. sergeants who act like centurions to hold the unit together. 

But this is the wrong way to look at the situation. It’s all Western cope. Both enemy countries have the massive industrial base to back a long extended war. They own the natural resources and supply chains that are critical for a functioning war economy. In a drone and production-driven fight we will lose. Additionally, they don’t care about casualties. Let's be frank, the people in China and Russia are just way more used to deprivation and pain than we are in the West. They are naturally tough. We are in deep trouble. And Russia particularly has a battle hardened corp of soldiers now. Plus they are leading in integrating drones into war doctrine and they have the manufacturing mass of China to back it up. 

If our NATO militaries go up against them, they will get rekt. We are in deep trouble if we don’t leverage the hard earned knowledge the Ukrainian military has gained. Yet I see very little learning from most Western militaries right now, even in 2025 still. 

Whether in war, fight or in business, it never pays to underestimate the enemy. This is how you get destroyed. But it seems it’s a lesson that we keep learning, the HARD way. Pay attention to and respect your enemy. Being paranoid in this situation and acting accordingly to prepare can only do you good. 

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Nov 23rd, 2025

“The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.”– Harry Golden

1. A candidate for the world's most interesting man: Erik Prince.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yImmJth6vKE

2. George Friedman has been one of the keenest geopolitical observers forever. He can be a bit too optimistic from an American lens, but he has been right more than wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hya3dMD_eOE

3. Always an enlightening conversation. The OG Tai Lopez.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixf-6eHJbz8

4. A discussion: Are we in Cold War 2?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhv9PhJT_QE

5. Glide bombs coming to the world. Scary stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7puZUPjOoOI

6. "Japan's ability to deliver the goods, from frigates and aircraft to Hello Kitty and Super Mario, has put Japan in the pole position in Asia as an alternative to both the US and China. This is a relief for American policy makers and a major problem for China. 

The PRC prefers to paint the conflict in Asia as one between a resurgent China reasserting its rightful place and a decadent, overbearing America in decline. The centrality of Japan rests in its delicate combination of soft and hard power and in Asia's history of resisting the ascendant hegemon, whether it be Japan in the 40s, the US in the 60s or China in the 2020s. As I write this, a record 19 nations have joined the Talisman Sabre exercises in Australia. While the headlines focus on the role of America, it is Japan who has forged this alliance by mending fences with old foes and steadfastly focusing on a free and open Indo-Pacific.

For investors, very little of this "hard power" opportunity is in the price of Japanese equities when compared to peer companies in other countries who supposedly will be invited to the same party. Based on head-to-head comparisons, Japan has the most to gain and the least to lose from a successful deterrence effort: its systems are optimized for modern conflict and its exports can only go up."

https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/lets-talk-about-japan-hard-power

7. A grim view of the AI future. Still helpful to understand the dystopian world we are entering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziLmtuLm-LU

8. A pretty interesting discussion by Google billionaire Eric Schmidt on the future of warfare: AI, robots & drones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkuVqdj8O6E

9. "For businesses currently on the T3D2 plan, the fundraising market may be a bit more challenging because of the comparison to AI growth rates. Also the expectations around size at IPO have increased.

$100m in trailing revenue growing 50% used to be the target. But now the expectation is closer to $300m growing at 50%. Attaining those numbers requires sustaining high growth rates for longer."

https://tomtunguz.com/t3d2-ai-era/

10. Some crazy stories about the early days of PayPal, Clarium Capital & Palantir.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dUSYgGYT0Y

11. "What began with the abandonment of the gold standard, continued through the era of fiat currencies, and accelerated during successive financial crises, now reaches its logical conclusion: money that can be created, allocated, and controlled according to the whims of technocratic authorities.

The eurozone's structural problems, including unsustainable debt levels, political fragmentation, economic stagnation, cannot be solved through monetary gimmicks or enhanced surveillance. They require fundamental reforms to fiscal policy, regulatory frameworks, and institutional structures. CBDCs represent an attempt to avoid these necessary reforms by implementing technological solutions to political problems.

European citizens face a choice that will define the next century of economic development. Accept the digital euro and surrender financial autonomy to unelected technocrats, or demand preservation of monetary alternatives that maintain some degree of individual choice and privacy.

The stakes couldn't be higher. Once implemented, CBDCs create a one-way ratchet toward greater control. The infrastructure built today will be used tomorrow for purposes not yet imagined by today's policymakers. History demonstrates that powers granted during emergencies are rarely relinquished during periods of stability.

As Rahm Emanuel said, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

https://dollarendgame.substack.com/p/the-plan-to-enslave-europe

12. An interview with a living entertainment, media and internet business legend: Barry Diller. A must watch. "You have to be stupid before you are smart."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAKINNEVs-M

13. “Ukraine needs two sorts of funding: investment capital and customer capital. It needs revenues derived from non-Ukrainian buyers because that’s what will improve the macro environment. But nothing will happen without free exports and free repatriation of capital,” Boyle said."

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/60553

14. Arthur Hayes on Global Macro and the implications of the global debt doom loop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLcafgSuXew

15. This is an old one. But it's a damn good ad. Classy, stylish and smart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTUKMhw4hr4

16. Lots to think about from this conversation.

The world of tech and investing from the perch of one of the big Venture Banks dominating the VC landscape: General Catalyst.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWvYbRzC-g0

17. Jared Kushner is a frigging smart dude. A combo of global macro, PE & tech investing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MOsEtyKqXw&t=4s

18. This is troubling, data points on future war. Still worth watching. Forewarned is forearmed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dh0USZT950

19. "While both paths steady compounding & hypergrowth can lead to the same destination, the latter creates more value because of the time value of money. The sooner a startup reaches $1b revenue, the more valuable it is.

Of course, a hypergrowth company with significant churn isn’t worth very much at all. The CAP theorem equivalent in business is some combination of growth, margin, & retention. Most businesses can’t optimize for all three."

https://tomtunguz.com/hypergrowth-vs-steady-compounding/

20. "To a man who has spent the past 60 years automating as much of his business as feasible—to the point where Interactive Brokers has higher profit margins (71%) than Visa, a so-called perfect business—my journey to meet him was an absurd misallocation of resources. 

Peterffy is the 23rd richest person in the world. He pioneered automated trading before the millennium and built Timber Hill, once the largest options market maker on earth. He’s the reason you can trade stocks in your pajamas. His second act, Interactive Brokers, is worth over $100 billion. I was surprised he was surprised that anyone would travel to hear his story."

https://joincolossus.com/article/thomas-peterffy-market-maker/

21. "What I do know is this: if we keep doing one-off deals like MP Materials or Intel—as amazing and critical as they are—we will never mobilize capital fast enough to fund the thousands of industrial startups and small businesses we need to win the AI and energy race, preserve our way of life, and avoid a fiscal crisis.

We need system-level solutions that scale shops and startups together, not piecemeal. We need a closed-loop credit ecosystem that lends at scale and cycles revenue back toward paying down the national debt.

We need to inject trillions into rebuilding America’s industrial base—efficiently and urgently.

When the government is the buyer, loans can be simple and fully guaranteed. When the buyer is commercial, layered protections make deals bankable.

With Industrial Base Treasuries and private credit, capital can flow into the industrial base—funding innovation, expanding capacity, and offering more competitive compensation for American factory workers. This is how we start to close the loop on America’s next industrial revival."

https://adastracapital.substack.com/p/americas-financial-system-is-brokenbut

22. Another great episode this week and what's up in B2B AI & enterprise software investing. So much to learn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ7eeLU-G-Y

23. Good short take on semiconductor landscape.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWloFh_hLyA

24. This conversation is very clear headed and a good take on truce between USA & China. And what happens to Taiwan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngOfkDgLzBo&t=34s

25. Controlling the metaphorical "trade routes" in a fragmenting de-globalizing world. Solid conversation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWntiqnjXYc

26. This short video helps you understand how Japan, South Korea and China ended up dominating ship building.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gk61ginOqo

27. This is a great overview on the importance of Ukrainian defense-tech for the West.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90p0AnTjRcs

28. "History is clear. Technological breakthroughs create short-term disruption and painful job losses but also unleash lower production costs, creative ideas, bold new businesses, and, over the long term, a net increase in employment. In the car industry, automation destroyed jobs on the factory floor. But we didn’t envision the new jobs that building heated seats and car stereos would create down the road.

In 1999 the average cost of developing and launching an e-commerce site was $1 million. Today you can set up a decent website for around $5,000. Your investment is 99.5% less, and you’re entering a market that’s more than 40 times bigger. Hollywood will follow a similar path as AI opens the door to independent filmmakers. You won’t need tens of millions of dollars and Hollywood connections to produce a movie of theatrical quality. Ben Affleck is right: AI will make it easier for outsiders with compelling scripts to produce the next Good Will Hunting.

AI has become the Ozempic of the corporate world. While GLP-1 medicines switch off the signal in your brain that you need to eat more, AI suppresses the appetite to hire more, reducing companies’ cravings for the protein of human capital. Hollywood is no different. AI will create new roles and elevate the careers of those who learn to leverage it successfully, but jobs will vanish. The collision between Hollywood and Silicon Valley signals the end of the blockbuster and the industry as we know it. Disney’s Bob Iger and Warner’s David Zaslav will be out within 12 to 24 months, as their affinity for, and relationship with, the creative community is quaint and outdated. They grew up in an era when talent held the power. Their job was to not piss off people. The Ellisons, like the honey badger, don’t give a shit.  

The younger Ellison wants to bring the best of Southern and Northern California together. In this case, the “togetherness” is Northern California invading the city of Angels. Like most wars, the battle is over before it starts, based on which side has more brute force."

https://www.profgalloway.com/the-end-of-the-blockbuster/

29. “Thinking twice” becomes the permanent condition. The cost is estrangement. Our first impulses — where thought actually begins — are smothered before they can be tested. We no longer recognize them as thought at all. The mind, trained in this way, does not grow sharper but duller, endlessly rehearsing conclusions while losing touch with the raw material of thinking itself."

https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/thinking-twice

30. "For today’s defense technologists and acquisition leaders, the lesson is pointed. In times of disruption, processes and committees can become fatal luxuries. Sometimes survival depends on heresy—on giving one frenetic outsider the power to cut through the system and deliver what the moment demands.

More tactically, political leaders building their executive teams need strong, empowered lieutenants—men and women who can bring outside perspective and credibility to government institutions, but still operate with speed and precision inside the complex reality of government.

 These leaders must step away from rewarding careers, and, along with their families, endure the costs of entering the political arena. Changemakers like Lord Beaverbrook must be ready to make enemies and face vicious attacks in the press. And in a hyper-political era, they must wield the press, feeding their wins into the national discourse to fuel their own political power.

Today, as in 1940, critical military production is stalling. China’s fleet of warships grows while the U.S. fleet shrinks. U.S. missile and artillery stocks are dwindling, with production rates creeping up too slowly. With such trends, People’s Liberation Army commanders may gamble that their American counterparts won’t risk a force they can’t regenerate.

Might deterrence in the Pacific be saved by a 21st century Beaverbrook?"

https://www.firstbreakfast.com/p/lord-beaverbrooks-production-magic

31. "Knudsen's core principle holds true: industry cannot build at scale without reliable, long-term, financeable demand signals. However, the financial ecosystem has undergone a fundamental change. Where Knudsen coordinated with major banks and corporate leaders, today's defense industrial base must attract capital from stock and bond markets, derivatives traders, institutional investors, private equity firms, family offices, foundations, credit funds, and venture capitalists.

This presents both challenge and opportunity. The challenge: traditional defense procurement – with annual appropriations, continuing resolutions, and termination-for-convenience clauses – doesn't align with how modern capital flows. The opportunity: America's capital markets, properly engaged, represent resources that could transform our defense industrial capacity.

The principles Knudsen championed – bankable commitments, clear demand signals, partnership between government and industry – remain our superpower and north star. But the implementation must reflect today's financial reality. When we align defense needs with how private capital actually flows, we'll build the modern Arsenal of Democracy."

https://bens.org/freedoms-forge-2-0/

32. "AI is reshaping both soft power and hard power around the globe. The United States, to its credit, has an early lead with the former. The leading LLMs are trained on Western text, global training and inference are still dominated by American companies, and we are ahead in the global race for market share of total tokens generated.

But as it stands, China is running away with the hard power part of AI – robotics. As the incredible progress in AI continues, we start seeing intelligence embedded in the physical world – culminating in generalist robots that perform a wide variety of tasks across applications, from manufacturing to services to defense. This will redefine every aspect of our society and reshape daily life. The country betting on that future is China, not the US.

In the 10 years since the CCP released its “Made in China 2025” strategy, Chinese companies have leapfrogged the rest of the world’s density of robots per capita. They passed the United States in 2021, then the famously automated economics of Japan and Germany in 2024, and will soon eclipse Singapore and South Korea, their last remaining contenders. In short order China has become the world’s central robotics power. Entirely autonomous “dark factories,” like those of smartphone and automobile manufacturer Xiaomi, operate in complete darkness with no humans present.

China has successfully executed what we once thought impossible. Only ten years ago we scoffed that “China can copy, but they can’t innovate,” which we then revised to, “They can innovate, but they can’t make the upstream high-precision tooling.” Maybe we shouldn’t have been so comfortable, given how Chinese companies had outcompeted the rest of the world in industry after industry – from solar photovoltaics, where competition outside of China has been practically decimated, to 5G, whose global deployment was a massive success for China’s national champion Huawei. The same pattern is playing out now with robotics. China has built a playbook to dominate strategic industries, and has used that playbook to become the robot superpower."

https://a16z.substack.com/p/america-cannot-lose-the-robotics

33. This is an important conversation and interview with the US Secretary of the Army. Very unapologetic and direct. I appreciated this and where the US military is going.

Shawn Ryan asks lots of hard and good questions as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TdYR9sfRIw

34. What a fascinating conversation on the future of anti-drone and anti-missile technology. Aurelius Systems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZQ0RLvcHTA

35. "For entrepreneurs pitching investors who don’t buy into the market opportunity, it can be incredibly difficult. The best approach is to find an analogous market or a complementary product and make the case that what happened “over there” is going to happen “over here.” Even if investors aren’t convinced, the one thing within your control is to provide tremendous value to your customers and grow at least as fast as the market itself so that when the opportunity arises, you’re in the best position to raise capital and scale even faster."

https://davidcummings.org/2025/09/27/when-potential-investors-dont-like-the-market/

Inside Out 2: Raging Emotions

I remember watching the excellent Pixar Inside Out, in 2023 as part of a family therapy assignment. It’s an animated movie about the raging emotions of a young girl named Riley. Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust & Sadness. Emotions that drive every person, some more than others and ones we all need. It was cute and somewhat instructive even for an adult like me. No surprise I figured out quickly that my predominant emotions seem to be anger and fear. Usually anger, that is driven by fear. 

But I had the chance to watch Inside Out 2 where the original cast of staple emotions is joined by new emotions especially as Riley becomes a 13 year old teen going through puberty. Anxiety, Envy, Ennui and Embarrassment. These new emotions take charge and kick out the old emotions. Or dominate them at least, ruining her growing sense of self. For anyone going through their teen years, this seems absolutely true. Myself included. Such a confusing time in your life. 

Especially the feeling of anxiety, which is driven by fear about the future. It literally plays out all the worst possible scenarios so you can prepare for them. Scenarios of being alone, being seen as stupid, failing in whatever you are about, losing friends or whatever. Anxiety makes you act out in different ways due to the uncertainty of life. You are always planning. I realize this has always been a big driver of my life. 

Epigenetically, I get this from my dad. He can be tense in tough situations. But I think I’ve taken this to a whole new level. This attention to detail was very useful in my career. I’ve channeled my anxiety into work. I’ve been accused of being a workaholic. I think it’s certainly true.  I don’t stop until I get the work done. I literally cannot relax unless everything is finished. 

I pay attention to details and wired myself to be super responsive. This is always probably why I am usually a stress basket that erupts into rage when things don’t go my way. Or my plans get wrecked. And especially angry when others don’t follow this example of reliability either. I find most people I meet disappoint me in this way. 

I’ve had to learn to manage my emotions better through a disciplined regime I’ve mentioned many times. A proper sleep regime, ie. Getting 7-8 hours of sleep every night is helpful. As is a regular meditation and exercise regime, Church mass, and a good diet. I control my coffee intake and don’t drink it past 3 pm. It also helps to make sure my schedule is not overly packed, so I end up with lots of time to unwind, read books and listen to podcasts.  

The point is that it’s really important to understand yourself and the dominant emotions that drive you. Human beings are complex creatures because of our emotions. We react very differently to every situation. Knowing ourselves is key to this so we can thrive better.  Regulating our emotions and maybe finding some joy just like in the movie. :)