Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Jan 18th, 2026
"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity." - Melody Beattie
"Bitcoin is the free-market weathervane of global fiat liquidity. It trades on the expectation of future fiat supply. Sometimes reality matches expectations, and other times it does not. Money is politics. And political rhetoric, which changes rapidly, influences the market’s expectations of future filthy fiat supply. One day our imperfect leaders call for cheaper money in larger quantities to pump the bags of their favorite constituents, other days they call for the opposite to fight inflation that destroys the plebes and their chances of re-election or a continuation of their autocratic rule. As with science, in trading it pays to have strong convictions loosely held.
For those of you with a multiyear outlook, these short-term lulls in the pace of fiat money creation don’t matter. If the Team Red Republicans cannot print enough money, the stock and bond market will crash, and that will give the holdouts from both parties’ religion to return to the satanic cult of money printing.
Trump is an astute politician and, similar to former US President Biden, who faced a similar revolt amongst the plebes over the COVID-stimulus induced inflation, will publicly change course and lambast the Fed for causing the inflation that afflicts the median voter. But don’t worry, Trump won’t forget the wealthy asset holders who fill the campaign coffers. Buffalo Bill Bessent will be under strict orders to print money in creative ways the plebes won’t understand."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/snow-forecast
2. "Hard sport builds the discipline to joyfully embrace hardship and pain. The child who masters his body against sloth, gluttony, and cowardice is well disposed to later master his spirit against lust, avarice, and corruption.
Children’s inheritance should be illiquid, and should take the form of land, enterprises, and art — objects with value other than abstract financial worth and which bring duties as well as privileges. The present owner knows he is merely a steward for the generations who follow, to whom he has a duty."
https://www.theculturist.io/p/why-did-wealth-stop-building-beautiful
3. "The Western alliance stands at a critical inflection point. For decades, America and Europe have held unmatched economic, industrial, and military resources, yet these capabilities are increasingly misaligned. Allied scale—the ability to convert collective mass into coordinated, actionable power—was the foundation of Western strength after World War II. It enabled NATO and the European project to transform a continent fractured by war into a US-sponsored platform for sustained leverage.
Today, however, that capacity is under strain. Rising global competition, internal dysfunction in Europe, and strategic missteps under Trump threaten to leave the West unable to act cohesively, even as China consolidates its own industrial and technological advantages.
Finally, it’s important to look to the future. Despite the challenges, Europe possesses latent industrial capacity and strategic potential that could restore allied scale if mobilised effectively. Defence buildouts, advanced manufacturing, and digital finance offer catalysts for revitalising transatlantic coordination, while selective American engagement could transform Europe’s structural weaknesses into opportunities for partnership.
Allied scale is less a measure of size or resources than a discipline of coordination, investment, and shared, long-term strategic vision. For Europe and America, mastering that discipline once again will determine whether the West can sustain its global influence and collective security in the decades ahead."
https://www.driftsignal.com/p/allied-scale-and-the-future-of-the
4. Lots to digest. Don't always agree with Balaji but he always makes me think, especially about where the world is going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFFXekSxe3U
5. Insights on the next era of entertainment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG_nHmHUZLw
6. Investing in AI and what is happening with the AI arms race at company and global level.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9pZmpkw5EE
7. Some good takes on what is happening on the frontlines of AI from someone who has been on the cutting edge for a long time. Andrew Ng was in AI long before it was cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT74mF6_NhQ
8. Wide ranging and deeply insightful. Balaji is a very smart man with some great takes on the future, backed by lots of data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu8vthORgOo
9. A great discussion on the latest business news this week. NIA. Long term bullish on BTC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnlSPjzxVQU&t=15s
10. Latest state of the AI & VC market right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWkpLLH_8jQ&t=1s
11. A masterclass on finding talent and building product in the age of AI. Gokul is a legend in SV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8GsB65WnGE
12. How do you survive and thrive in the Age of AI. This is worthwhile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwPNJLGWHEA
13. Global macro, US & USD is well positioned. The Office of Strategic Capital & reshoring supply chains and American reindustrialization makes one optimistic for this country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjL3jFHRgUU
14. The American Dynamism Fund, they got a pretty damn good portfolio. This was a great interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7SrvpieY7c
15. Latest and greatest news in Silicon Valley. Always good takes from these folks. (in many ways, way better than the All in Guys who do NOT represent the real Silicon Valley)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahZTkLfJTyk
16. "This is the Great Game of Risk in Category Creation & aggression wins.
But this era of fluidity won’t last forever. The rate of improvement in AI models will eventually attenuate. When the performance gap between the best model & the second-best model shrinks, the incentive to switch evaporates.
Switching costs will start to matter more than marginal performance gains. The custom tools I’ve built, the muscle memory I’ve developed, the integrations my company has deployed, the enterprise contracts signed, all inertia.
At that point, the fat begins to congeal.
The winners will be those who use the sizzling phase to build fat worth congealing around."
https://tomtunguz.com/the-bacon-and-the-skillet-when-ai-market-share-congeals/
17. Everyone in the roll up space should learn from Bending Spoon. Quiet giant from Europe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbwrpKbY5P0
18. "Prediction marketplaces say they aren’t on the other side of the trade — users are trading with their peers, not against the “house.” As traders buy and sell, prices fluctuate to reflect the “collective sentiment and knowledge of market participants.”
But whether you’re putting money on the Mets or Mamdani, this is gambling, and whatever you want to call it, users can develop an addiction. I am not immune. I find these markets fascinating — I tried to bet on the presidential race but couldn’t, as I’m an American citizen living in the U.K. My documented worker status saved me from myself: I was convinced Kamala Harris had a greater-than-37% likelihood of capturing the White House. And there is a solid argument we shouldn’t infantilize grown-ups — and we should let them spend their hard-earned money as they see fit.
In the U.S. we’ve monetized healthcare, the White House, and the pardon process. However, these are dwarfed by the opportunity to monetize the less developed prefrontal cortex of a young man. Once Polymarket starts expanding in the U.S., more Americans will be swept up by the wave. Not because everyone will be in Vegas, but because Vegas will be in everyone. If policymakers aren’t motivated by the threat to Americans’ finances and mental health, they should worry about the risk of foreign governments using the platforms to influence elections and public perception."
https://www.profgalloway.com/the-next-opioid-crisis/
19. "Japan is a nation steeped in ambiguity. There’s an old kotowaza proverb that goes, the clever hawk hides its talons. This is a country whose leaders were so famed for never clearly articulating what they really wanted that someone felt the need to write a book called The Japan That Can Say No.
Ambiguity is soft. It’s key to kawaii products: squishy, in-between, neither baby nor grown up, neither masculine nor feminine, an aesthetic that Japanese designers have mastered. Ambiguity in politics makes Japan seem safe and approachable. It is why so many Westerners see Japan as an oasis and want to visit. It’s also why anime fans can somehow see the same medium — and sometimes even the same series — as “woke” and “a safe haven from political correctness” at the very same time.
Ambiguity provides a blank slate upon which fans of different cultures and creeds can project their own values. You might see Japan’s traditional reluctance to take a public stand on divisive issues as deliberate or wishy-washy, but it is also the secret sauce of its soft power."
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/boys-and-girls-be-ambiguous
20. Lots of learnings on startup leadership, a culture of learning and growth aka velocity. Really useful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy2Uvm7_ky8&t=38s
21. We need more of the Harry Stebbings energy in Europe. Make Europe great again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltyWFh2cNXg
22. A cold look at geopolitics around the world right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W50lce_aOyw
23. "The anger isn’t about the goods. It’s about the breach of contract. The American Deal was that Effort ~ Security. Effort brought your Hope strike closer. But because the real poverty line is $140,000, effort no longer yields security or progress; it brings risk, exhaustion, and debt.
When you are drowning, and you see the lifeguard throw a life vest to the person treading water next to you—a person who isn’t swimming as hard as you are—you don’t feel happiness for them. You feel a homicidal rage at the lifeguard.
We have created a system where the only way to survive is to be destitute enough to qualify for aid, or rich enough to ignore the cost. Everyone in the middle is being cannibalized. The rich know this… and they are increasingly opting out of the shared spaces."
https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie
24. "Bringing this to AI right now: I think we are somewhere close to the peak of inflated expectations. It’s impossible to time markets, and the ascent could go on longer than anyone expects. But sooner or later, I think we will encounter the inevitable trough of disillusionment.
The specific flaws this time, that I think will precipitate the trough, are 1) the thin margins, and 2) the minimal moats.
Regarding point 1) most are valuing AI as “software,” which is known for its high margins (usually 90%+) and because of those high margins software companies are valued at a higher multiple of revenue than most other businesses. It’s easier to generate profits from them, or recycle a large amount of that revenue to propel future growth.
But AI is low margin — at both the LLM and application layers — if not negative margin in many cases today. If you listen closely to the mainstream commentary about AI these days, there is almost zero discussion about profitability, now or in the future. People just assume it will be like other tech, where you burn a lot in the beginning and the profits will arrive later."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/what-investors-should-know-about
25. "The AI investment landscape is experiencing a fundamental shift. While large language models (LLMs) have captured headlines and billions in funding, a quieter revolution is underway—one that promises superior unit economics, deployability, and enterprise adoption. Small Language Models (SLMs) represent not just a technical evolution, but an inflection point for AI investors seeking sustainable, scalable returns.
The investment thesis is clear: SLMs represent a shift from capital-intensive infrastructure plays to capital-efficient software businesses with superior unit economics, expanding addressable markets, and defensible enterprise moats. The future of AI investing isn’t about bigger models—it’s about smarter deployment.
Building task specific SLMs is currently a challenge but those challenges are being resolved quickly by new tools and tactics (including our work at Neurometric.). SLMs can be cheaper, faster, and more accurate - a great combination if you are architecting an AI system. Investors should brush up on this new area as I suspect you will see lots of SLM opportunities in 2026."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/what-investors-should-know-about
26. "We don’t all know our lineage or our ancestors, but for those of us that do, we must honor those who came before us. We don’t have to do this for their status or wealth, but for their courage to persevere. John Howland began as an indentured servant but he rose to shape a new world.
So today, we salute this humble pilgrim, whose courage reminds us that every choice we make can carry forward through centuries. May we also live in such a way that when our descendants look back at our lives, they are inspired by our actions."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/the-man-who-fell-from-the-mayflower
27. Learning from the great conquerors, artists and businessmen of history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFmYF-20jbY
28. Demographics is destiny. Watch Japan, Germany and Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NuH3D4SN-c
29. Important global macro conversation on the risks of the Index investing & political grift and instability in America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIHrlAasIMk&t=1429s
30. "Saudi Arabia follows a different logic. It treats modernity not as a danger to be contained but as a strategic resource to be mastered. Scientific progress and technological adoption are viewed as national assets. This shift creates space for modern institutions to gain legitimacy and places religious identity within a broader civic framework. In Saudi history, that alone is a revolution.
I do not know MBS, I have never met him, and I cannot pretend to know what is in his mind. But it seems to me that he is betting on a specific direction. The course he sets on technology, investment, and cooperation with Western partners, combined with the kingdom’s position as guardian of Islam’s holiest sites, is meant to redefine the region’s political and religious landscape. He is positioning Saudi Arabia to determine what a modern Sunni Muslim power can be, and that choice will shape the region for decades.
MBS’ futurism, therefore, serves a real and significantly underestimated political function. The country’s wealth gives the state room to pursue large-scale transformation, the monarchical structure allows decisions to be imposed without the paralysis of coalition politics, and this very combination enables futurism to operate as a genuine strategy for reshaping institutions and national identity rather than merely as a slogan. Few leaders have stated this purpose as openly as MBS."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/mbs-the-saudi-revolution-and-saudi
31. "This is why I have become increasingly suspicious of the advice so often given to ambitious young professionals: “Be the smartest person in the room.”
It is not enough. In some cases, it can even be dangerous.
The more accurate and far more enduring aspiration is this: be the wisest person in the room.
Intelligence manipulates information; wisdom governs it. Intelligence can master complexity; wisdom discerns which complexity is worth mastering. Intelligence opens doors; wisdom knows which doors should not be opened at all.
And this distinction has only grown in urgency with recent technological developments. The blunt truth is this:
With the current trends in tech, knowledge by itself is a depreciating asset."
https://rondodson.substack.com/p/managerialism-wisdom-and-the-deep
32. "That wasn’t “the good old days.” That was yesterday.
The window is closing, and the systems deciding your mobility are getting stricter, not looser.
If you are an entrepreneur, a global citizen, or someone building a virtual company, you need to understand that the game has changed completely.
Same applies for anyone getting a second residency, a long-term visa, or a second passport, this is the new game: before you impress a government, you have to impress its algorithm.
You can’t outplay, out-charm, or outsmart an algorithm.
When you will be entering a new country soon, the question at the border will not be
“Do you have enough money, what is the purpose of your travel or if you have a return flight back?”
but “Is your money, your work, your travel plans and your digital footprint are good enough to let you enter the country?”
https://freedomceo.substack.com/p/why-future-of-travel-is-about-to
33. 2 Maniacs on a mission. Michael Ovitz & David Senra. Loyalty, energy and learning. Really inspiring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhh-J0zVsik
34. The basics of personal finance but stuff most of us never learned until much later in life to our detriment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoE1GBC_u34
35. "my goal with today’s essay is to tackle how busyness isn’t merely a social condition but an intellectual and spiritual one. Busyness is a disease which joyfully and stealthily feasts upon the marrow of your vision, sipping your creative juices; then exploiting them to extinguish your inner fire, thus canceling your imagination."
https://vizi.substack.com/p/busy-people-lack-a-noble-mission
36. "None of those vignettes capture the full story of the person I believe will come to be seen as one of the most exceptional entrepreneurs of this generation, a gringo who started what has become the third largest telco in Medellín and decided, while growing that business, both within existing markets and to new ones, to start a second business building data centers attached to hydroelectric power plants (Colombia’s mountains produce incredibly cheap power; it’s transmission that’s the problem), and convinced two of America’s best venture firms to back them both, though, if it’s even possible to capture. I will certainly try my best.
And the best place to start, I think, is the first time I met Forrest Heath, III, for a thirty minute coffee that became a three-and-a-half hour whirlwind at Public Records in Brooklyn, at the end of which I agreed to commit the first slug of what I hope to be many tens of millions of American Dollars to the Cable Caballero with a master plan to build a vertically integrated infrastructure empire.
Somos is a vertically-integrated infrastructure company whose first product is internet in Medellín, Colombia.
It is not a traditional challenger Internet Service Provider (ISP). Most challenger ISPs are just wrappers on someone else’s infrastructure, basically marketing companies. They’re low CapEx, because they don’t build much, but low margin, because they have to pay to their infra providers and equipment suppliers. Crucially, they don’t make the internet fundamentally better or cheaper, because to do that, you have to rebuild the whole stack."
https://www.notboring.co/p/cable-caballero
37. A cold but realpolitik perspective on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the recent peace plan. Worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0qvJfstDNw
38. The saga of the Duttons continues. Can't wait for this series.
Real Change Only Comes from “the Fear” & Harsh Circumstances
There is a funny “Friends” sitcom episode where Joey/ Chandler talk Rachel into quitting her waitressing job to pursue her career in Fashion.
RACHEL: I'm training to be better at a job that I hate. My life officially sucks.
CHANDLER: But wasn't this supposed to be temporary? I thought you wanted to do fashion stuff.
RACHEL: Well, yeah, I'm still pursuing that.
CHANDLER: How, exactly, are you pursuing that? You know, other than sending out résumés, like, what, two years ago?
RACHEL: Well, I'm also sending out... good thoughts.
JOEY: If you ask me, as long as you got this job... you got nothing pushing you to get another one. You need The Fear.
RACHEL: The Fear?
CHANDLER: He's right. If you quit this job, you then have motivation... to go after a job you really want.
RACHEL: How come you're still at a job you hate? Why don't you quit and get The Fear?
(Chandler and Joey both laugh.)
CHANDLER: Because I'm too afraid.
RACHEL: (sighing) God. I don't know. I mean, I would give anything to work for a designer, you know, or a buyer. Ugh. I just don't wanna be 30 and still work here.
CHANDLER: Yeah, that'd be much worse than being 28 and still working here.
So what? Besides being a really funny scene. It also holds a lot of wisdom here. Too many of us are far too comfortable in our lives. Hating the circumstances you are in, yet unwilling to do anything about it. I’ve been here many times myself.
The magic happens when you are backed against the wall. When you are most uncomfortable.
We are too comfortable most of the time and thus we do things on autopilot. If you really want to get anything done, you need to feel “the fear.” And no surprise this only happens when bad and unexpected things happen. We all know about the successful entrepreneurs who were forced into doing their business because they lost their job and couldn’t find another one. You have to make a living so you are forced to do it. God has a plan sometimes.
Change only comes from “being so sick and tired of being sick and tired.” I heard this 30 years ago and only really understand it now. Sometimes you have to hit bottom or be close to bottom to finally do something about it. It’s also what happened to me several times. Magical things happened after but only after I grinded through it and took uncomfortable action. Which is a reminder for me to be more proactive in doing this.
We all overestimate the risks and underestimate our own capabilities to deal with the risk and challenges. We literally are our own worst enemies. So however you do it, “get the fear” and take some action. Get uncomfortable. Don’t fall back into your old bad habits. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
The Dormy Inn Experience: The Simplest Things are Best
I had some business in Japan recently. I rediscovered the Dormy Inn. A local hotel chain favored by Japanese salarymen who travel to various cities for business. It’s clean, affordable and usually conveniently located.
But the biggest reason was for their Onsen, which is Japanese hot baths. It was what caught my attention when I booked it. Every single property has one. That as well as a Sauna and a cold plunge tub. Almost nothing feels as good as spending time there.
And not only from a health perspective but it’s all the little details at the hotel. Comfortable slippers and Onsen-wear. The water and peach jelly treats in the fridge. The fruit popsicles and Yakult probiotic drinks for after your time at Onsen. Late night ramen made to order with their special dashi sauce. All free of charge.
It’s all in the details and small touches. Coupled with the great service the Japanese are known for, I was greatly impressed. I will stay here again next time I am back.
My point though is that I realized you don’t need very much to be happy. Which is a weird realization for someone so intensely materialistic. But maybe I’m getting wiser as I age. It’s the simple things in life that really matter. May you realize this sooner than I did.
Slowing Time Down: Tea Time in Japan
I ended up in Japan in October of 2025. Some business meetings and attending the Hololife Summit, formerly known as the Biohackers Summit. My first 3 days were a blur of meetings, dinners and talks at the conference. And plenty of delicious food. Tokyo, like life in general, can be a frenzy of activity.
But by Sunday I was pretty tired. So I ended up sleeping in and relaxing. I spent the afternoon at one of my favorite Japanese tea places in the heart of Ginza called Jugetsudo. Enjoyed some delicious Hochi tea.
What made it special was the preparation. I was instructed to pour hot water into a special cup and let it sit for 2 minutes. Then you pour the water into a small tea pot and let it sit for a minute. You open to cover for 20 seconds and then you pour the tea into your cup to drink. A slow process. Took me a few tries to get it right.
Not only was it delicious but calming. The process allows you to slow down which goes against all my instincts, training and attitude living in tech land America. I feel like I need to be doing stuff all the time, keeping busy, meeting up with people. Exploring more of the city. Doing something for the sake of doing something. Lots of FOMO.
Yet a quiet tea is exactly what I needed to relax. To calm my monkey mind. Sitting there. Enjoying the tea and with nowhere to go and nothing to do except read. What a lovely afternoon.
This is a reminder to slow down every once in a while. To rest & reset. You slow down to move faster after.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Jan 11th, 2026
"If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: If we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome." — Anne Bradstreet
Discussion on the craft of venture capital, this was incredibly instructive. Well worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs7bhb3NEFc&t=3014s
2. "When you ask the question about the ROI on AI, it depends what you are doing with it. Some tasks are about 100% replaceable, others are 100% replaceable but with some human supervision, others are 60% replaceable, others 20% replaceable, and so on. For a long time coming, AI’s path through the economy will be “jagged.”
To answer the question about a bubble - on the tasks where AI is 100% ready or, will be 100% automated in the next 2-3 years, there is no bubble. On the tasks where it will take longer, yes there is a bubble as the near term and mid-term ROI isn’t there. As you look lower down the stack, this is why many investors are so excited about the component layers like chip manufacturing and networking.
Even if the current version of AI is slowing down as LLM progress seems to stall, there are technologies coming behind it. Some of them will provide new capabilities. Some will lower the costs of the existing capabilities to expand their use cases and TAM. And edge AI is coming and will suck up much of the capacity of the chip industry if data center slows."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/why-ai-is-and-also-isnt-a-bubble
3. "Looking back on the conference, I sensed energy and big opportunities for the future in a few places in particular:
-AI is reinventing financial services, in some cases from first principles.
-Stablecoins are becoming the Internet’s native settlement layer.
-Regulation and technology are fusing into programmable trust."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/the-next-fintech-wave-ai-stablecoins
4. Lots of scary thoughts: We are not ready for war in America yet. Plenty of work to be done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai50lRs-5bQ
5. This was a deep and thought provoking interview. Not just about investing, although there is a lot on this. Much of it is on finding your authentic self and doing what honors your authenticity in work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acwhhgGGdX8&t=4971s
6. "The divide between asset owners and everyone else is getting wider. Here we’ll highlight new data proving this out (opinions are worthless without data), explain why betting on ourself is the only logical conclusion in 2025 and how inflation is no longer becomes a concern as a business owner.
If you feel like the life path you were sold doesn’t work anymore… you’re right. It is a relic of the past. Much like headcount being a flex during the industrial revolution. The real flex is different in 2025. It is profit/person, ownership percent of a niche business and how much of your time is in your control.
If we know that compensation is increasing slower than productivity, who is getting the spread? The answer is owners, share holders, equity, insert any word for “asset holders”. As companies become more productive and labor becomes cheaper due to AI, robots etc. It means the owners of the assets (capital allocators) are the winners. Capital is beating labor by a wide margin."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/rich-and-poor-divide-acceleration
7. "The combination of rapid technological change with heavily-entrenched tactical systems makes modern warfare more uncertain than ever before. It is impossible to tell whether an existing comparative advantage will simply disappear: 2022 showed that masses of armor could no longer simply punch through a capable defense. Although Russia has had enough of a resource advantage to keep the war going, it has been unable to restructure its forces mid-war to effect a breakthrough—pushing the conflict into the realm of strategic attrition.
In general, the more entrenched a country’s tactics are—whether because of legacy equipment, limited industrial capacity, or cultural reasons—the harder it is to adapt. The natural response, then, is to look straight to those other levels and domains from the outset."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/entrenched-tactics-and-comparative
8. Global Macro and crypto. I find these conversations to be helpful to understand the future for your personal finance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMqLAaNaug4
9. Are we ready? It's about how quickly our military will adopt technology to new effective doctrine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5F6LWqkr-o&t=75s
10. "So I spent 30 days on the road to see what prosperity looks like up close. DC, Berkeley, Baltimore, New Hampshire, New York, two cities in Florida, then Prague and Kilkenny, Ireland. The same theme surfaced: people don’t feel the prosperity that’s supposedly surrounding them. They feel the physical friction.
What became clear almost immediately is that the prosperity is real, it’s just not showing up in the places people actually live. It exists in balance sheets, in stock portfolios, in data centers behind chain-link fences. But in daily life like in commutes, in childcare costs, in housing, in safety, in community, people are feeling decay. I kept running into the same contradiction: a wealthy country where everything visible seems to be slowly breaking while everything invisible keeps getting richer."
https://kyla.substack.com/p/30-days-9-cities-1-question-where
11. "In the end, this transformation redefined what society meant by “growth.” The prosperity of the industrialist had once rested on his capacity to make and sell useful goods; the prosperity of the financier now depended on movement within the realm of symbols—interest rates, valuations, derivatives, and expectations. The appearance of wealth became a substitute for wealth itself.
The change also altered the time horizon of enterprise. A factory demanded years of patient investment, but a financial product could be invented and sold within weeks. The long view of the builder yielded to the short view of the trader. Markets rewarded agility, not durability. The capacity to arbitrage, restructure, or re-package assets came to be regarded as a higher skill than the slow work of design and manufacture.
In this environment, the language of production gave way to that of returns. Efficiency was redefined as the reduction of costs rather than the creation of value. Whole industries were re-engineered for balance-sheet optimization rather than technological advance. A company could shrink its workforce, outsource its factories, and still be celebrated for “unlocking shareholder value.” The metric of success was no longer what was built or improved, but what the market capitalization reflected."
https://forumgeopolitica.com/article/the-illusion-of-progress
12. A great discussion on recent news for Vertical AI, Rare earths and China's economic challenges.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1pZWfvwU08
13. Lessons from 1929 and the AI-boom or bubble.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwY6F-oU2vc
14. The American chess game against Russia, I enjoyed this :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pZ3WAT-Pxs
15. "Much like other down days, we’ll still be around and crypto is not going to go anywhere. All our haters are stuck with us for another decade at minimum. The next generation needs a new system for wealth creation and outside of Crypto and Tech there isn’t much. You’re either utilizing both or you’re saving 5-10% a year in a seat where the CEO is trying to replace you with AI/software."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/surviving-the-next-12-months-in-the
16. The case for why stablecoins will enable US dollar hegemony. Very thought provoking. A must watch for those who want to understand how the world works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUPF2SH8bNk
17. Global macro in the age of AI, Stablecoins and energy. The digital economy is here, growing in parallel with the real material economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gK-TQoZqfQ
18. "From YC to bulge-bracket venture firms, the pursuit of scale has made slaves to incentives out of a broad swath of participants in tech. The fear of failure has further exacerbated that slavery. We allow our incentives to shape us because of fear. Fear of being poor, being stupid, or of simply being left behind. Fear of Missing Out.
That fear leads us down the path of normativity. We assimilate. We seek alikedness. We shave off the rough edges of our individuality until we are smoothed to the grooves of the path of least resistance. But the path of least resistance has no place for contrarian conviction. In fact, it has no place for beliefs of any kind, for fear that your beliefs will take you down paths that the consensus prefers not to go.
But there is a better way. In a world of normativity-seeking systems, anchor yourself in beliefs. Find things worth believing in. Even when they’re hard. Even when they’re unpopular. Find beliefs worth dying for. Or better yet, find beliefs worth living for.
Technology is a tool. Venture capital is a tool. YC is a tool. a16z is a tool. Attention is a tool. Anger is a tool. The good news is tools abound. But only you can be the craftsman."
https://investing101.substack.com/p/build-whats-fundable
19. "It’s a different category from those newly arrived Chinese immigrants here. The Chinese don’t do part-time jobs and so on. I would say it’s different categories. A lot of these newcomers choose Japan because Tokyo offers the best cost-effective quality of life. Inflation is mild here, and there’s this effect of the weakening Japanese yen. For them, many things are quite cheap.
Another key reason Japan is attractive to Chinese immigrants is that Japan has been relaxing its long-term visa over the past decade or so. Many recent Chinese immigrants had been to Japan as tourists in the 2010s, and then the Japanese government had been relaxing even long-term, residential-type visas. That’s why they could apply for those long-term visas and they could easily get one of those. It really makes a sharp contrast with many Western countries."
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/why-chinese-elite-run-to-japan
20. What a great book list on China, especially if you want to understand why modern China is the way it is.
https://cartographer.substack.com/p/five-books-on-china
21. Very timely discussion on AI Capex Boom and how to think about investing in it. You have to tie design to manufacturing ie. vertical integration, we are learning this the hard way in America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDeyjGfzwQ8
22. Global macro: basically the case for why money printer is going to go brrrr......BTC, ZCash and ETH.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBXNsww78PM
23. The man is controversial but he is damn smart. This interview was incredibly insightful to understanding Elon, the talent machine he built, how to measure talent and learning from investing mistakes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62X1vm3QBuE
24. American sanctions finally being somewhat serious on Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auGBL3hhLCw
25. These men are true heroes. Foreign legion in Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIg77WIkV8Q
26. What are you doing to increase your chances of luck every day? How do you increase your pain tolerance?
A great deep dive in the art and science of investing and building. This is a masterclass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_FilvFylNY&t=2429s
27. Capital controls coming to Western countries (my guess is it will be in Canada and European countries first). Word to the wise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTTcu57g_vU
28. "The goal is to maximize whatever potential you have. No one reading this is Elon. No one reading this should be below the median either. You’re looking to: 1) regain control of your time, 2) get there without giving up your entire young adult experiences, frugality fails this hurdle and 3) get to each decade with minimal to no regrets. No matter what you will miss opportunities and make mistakes but the regret part is the real tell (better or worse).
The people who end up in the top 1%? They are a combination of both the smartest and the most consistent (decent but not world class talent): 1) continuing to grind as people quit, 2) sticking to the same process in the mind numbing boring or painful times and 3) recognizing which stage in life they are in.
If you do a quick inventory of the people around you, its easy to see all the common pitfalls and how they drop out. Typically lifestyle creep, physical burnout and the most common: despair/weak mentally.
Knowing this, step 1 is optimizing your life for minimal attrition. Create a system that you’re *certain* will work over the long term. Don’t veer from it. Compounding is heavily overestimated in a single year, and drastically underestimated over 10 years."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/talent-isnt-your-problem-attrition
29. Talk about a revenge arc. Pretty amazing founder comeback story with Parker Conrad. Plenty of insights in building and running a high growth business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yztV-sR4cU
30. Good takes here on geopolitics by old hand George Friedman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2baXVUppFw
31. "New York is uniquely suited for “tech-related” companies.
This city thrives on being an industry town. While DC is politics and LA is entertainment and SF is tech, NYC is…a dozen different industries. Being at the epicenter of your industry—where the best talent and customers are—is a huge advantage when building in applied AI."
https://www.digitalnative.tech/p/new-york-is-an-industry-town
32. The backstory of A16Z's American Dynamism Fund. Very timely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy8c30fdBQ8
33. "Inheritance does matter in that context, Kurtz argues, as there is no debate over whether there will be an economic elite—such is a fact of life—but rather over whether the elite is virtuous and focused on stewardship and higher ideals, or working some job that supports the lifestyle they grew up with, which primarily means banking or consulting.
All that is to say: a real upper class is a hugely pro-social force. A rapacious oligarchy is not. A miserly plutocracy is not. And a “professional” elite that’s always thinking about the next scheme or round of golf, rather than the next generation and a continued sense of tradition, certainly is not."
https://www.theamericantribune.news/p/how-to-build-a-dynasty-that-last
34. A wide ranging conversation and the case for American Dynamism and innovation. Also the stupidity of the 5 year plan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqYUH7r96i4
35. "There is Never a “Right Time”
You will NEVER have a clear period of weeks and months where you have no responsibilities and obligations and nothing else going on so you can “finally” dial in to the thing you want to do.
If you ask anyone who succeeds at getting what they want, they do it despite not having the right circumstances or go out of their way to create those circumstances for themselves."
https://lifemathmoney.com/the-time-is-never-right-you-have-to-make-your-own-opportunities/
36. "I’ll close with this thought: as countries continue to shift away from globalization, there is opportunity in building deeper, more consequential relationships between tech ecosystems. Founder-to-founder. Investor-to-investor. Ecosystem-to-ecosystem. The ecosystems that capitalize on these opportunities will be the ones that embrace the idea that economic prosperity >> egos.
And that magic happens at the intersection of humility and hubris."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/humility-vs-hubris
37. Some Alt-geopolitics. Always food for thought on what's going on, even if I don't agree with most of these takes.
Teasing Master Tagaki-san: A Lifelong Love
Life can be heavy sometimes. It’s why you don’t always want to watch dramatic or sad movies. This was one of the reasons I ended up watching this Japanese movie “Teasing Master Takagi-san”, a lighthearted drama that continues from a well rated television series of the same name.
Nishitaka and Takagi were two middle school friends on a small Japanese island. Takagi leaves for Paris and exactly ten years later returns to the island as a teacher trainee at the same school they attended. One, where the very shy Nishitaka ends up being her supervisor.
They go back to the same teasing & fun relationship they had, even as adults. The way Takagi-san looks at awkward Nishitaka is beautiful. Realizing their childhood crush, The blooming romance. It was just cute and heartwarming. What happens when you know you have met the one. The one you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with. And the scenes & views of small town coastal Japan were magical to me.
Takes one back to anyone’s childhood. Looking back to mine, it helps me remember that it wasn’t all bad. The moments of silliness. Goofing around with friends. The childhood crushes & unrequited love. I realized now how easy and wonderful I had it in many ways then. The innocence. You are only ever that age once. I just wish I was more brave then.
“So if you meet someone special, tell them how you feel. No regrets.
First crushes don’t turn into real love. But the feeling of love makes your heart feel full. So even just the act of loving someone is a wonderful thing.”
Batman Begins: Every boy and Man’s Dream
I was a fan of most of the Batman franchise movies but still think the best one was the Christopher Nolan series starring Christian Bale. It really was perfect in my eyes.
It chronicles the journey of how a billionaire becomes a crime fighting superhero after suffering a tragedy in his youth, losing his parents in a robbery gone wrong. I grew up reading the comic books of Batman. Batman was the original Jason Bourne. He pretends to be an unserious billionaire bachelor by day and a crime fighter terrorizing criminals by night.
“The training is nothing. The will is everything. The will to act.”
Bruce Wayne is a normal man with brains and resources but through tremendous discipline he travels the world and learns fighting skills to enable his mission of cleaning up Gotham City.
On his journey to gather skills he eventually joins with an assassin guild, the League of Shadows.
His mentor there tells him:
“I know the rage that drives you. Like you I was forced to learn there are those without decency, who must be fought without hesitation, without pity. That anger gives you great power, but if you let it, it will destroy you.”
What I learned in myself is that fear is a driver of anger.
“You travelled the world to learn the mind of a criminal and conquer your fears. But a criminal is not complicated. What you really fear is inside yourself. You fear your own power, fear your anger and the drive to do great & terrible things. Now you must journey inwards. Breathe. Breathe in your fears. Face them. To conquer fear, you must become fear. Embrace your worst fears.”
I’ve always been driven by fear. Fear of poverty, of not being respected, of not belonging. All of us have some fear that drives us and debilitates us subsconsciously. And most of us don’t understand this, let alone face it. “This is a world you don’t understand. And you always fear what you don’t understand.”
We have our external journeys, chasing wealth, love, health and fitness. I certainly have. Yet all of our journeys end up focusing inwards eventually. No matter how successful we become for some reason I see us do stupid things, almost like self sabotage. It’s like we have a self destructive instinct. Not exploring, not knowing ourselves and our shadows are the seeds of our eventual ruin.
“Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves back up.”
But like Bruce Wayne, if you face it, you might have a chance. “People need dramatic examples to shake them out of their apathy….l’m using this monster inside to help others.”
“If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal. And if they can’t stop you, you become something else entirely. A legend.”
So for all the guys out there, maybe be more courageous and take action. “It’s not what you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you…..We can bring Gotham back!”
Sun, Sand and Grounding: It’s the Small Things
It’s Sept 2025 in Batumi, Georgia. I came for the final GITA (Georgian Innovation Technology Agency) Grants program and I’m stressed. Home is a mess, some financial payments did not show up on time and I’m in the middle of several big business initiatives besides all the IC stuff I need to do here. Jet lagged to boot. To say I was a mess was an understatement.
Yet I’m at the Paragraph Hotel which is one of the nicest places I’ve ever been. With views of the sea that are unparalleled. A pool that juts into the Black Sea & beautiful black sand beaches renowned for their healing effect.
So instead of locking myself in the room to work. I took a small break. Hit the gym and some weights. Got some sun. I walked the hot black sand beach to get some grounding and dipped in the Black Sea and the amazing pool. I breathed and everything just seemed clearer and brighter. I just felt better. Things seemed lighter.
So whenever you are feeling stressed and down. Take a small break and get into nature. Even if it’s just for an hour. Breathe a bit and things will be alright. Step back to go forward.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Jan 4th, 2026
"Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right" –Oprah Winfrey
A real American immigrant story. A Navy SEAL turned Defense-tech founder. Learned a lot here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8DjGa16PQM&t=2889s
2. "Read that again. The Netherlands seized a company. China responded by requiring RMB settlement and making European customers negotiate directly with Chinese entities while accepting they’ll get chips only after Chinese domestic demand is satisfied.
This isn’t just retaliation. This is weaponized supply chains advancing RMB internationalization while teaching Europe exactly where they sit in the global manufacturing hierarchy. The Dutch played stupid games with geopolitical theater. Europe’s automotive industry gets to win stupid prizes.
The sanctions boomerang isn’t coming back—it’s already embedded in Europe’s skull. The question isn’t whether it hits. It’s how many more times Western policymakers need to get smacked before they understand that leverage only works when you control what matters. The Dutch controlled a corporate entity. China controls the chips, controls the production, and now controls the currency those chips trade in.
That’s what leverage actually looks like."
https://no01.substack.com/p/play-stupid-games-win-stupid-prices
3. Impressive folks here. Hard tech renaissance and atoms over bits. We need to Million X the El Segundo movement in America. Mission and satisfaction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ1kHP_TRF0
4. "Even if you are a government, there are only two ways to pay for stuff, using savings or debt. For a government, savings equates to taxes. Taxes are not very popular, but spending is. Therefore, when handing out goodies to the plebes and patricians, politicians prefer to issue debt. Politicians will always favor borrowing from the future to get re-elected in the present, because when the bill comes due, they won’t be in office.
If all governments, because of the incentives of its officers, are hard wired to prefer issuing debt rather than raising taxes to hand out goodies, then the next question is how do buyers of government debt fund these purchases? Do they spend their savings/equity or finance purchases by borrowing money?"
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/hallelujah
5. "What If I started late?” You get to work harder and longer. That’s how life works. You can turn around your life at any time. Expecting to magically skip steps doesn’t exist though.
“Kids?” You cannot blame them for your failures. You brought them into the world not the other way around. Also causing psychological trauma to someone decades younger than you. Weak.
“I’m Not Risk Taking.” Cool. It is more dangerous to rely just on your W-2. The days of being at one company forever are gone. Only works at 5-10 companies on the planet. If you work at those 5-10 you already know it.
“I Don’t Have Time”: Utter nonsense. Coinbase was started on off hours after work. Go look it up. You can start a e-com business from your smartphone at this point if you’re talented. What you’re really saying is you lack priorities. Or you don’t care. Neither answer is good."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/no-non-sense-age-by-age-making-it
6. Caught up with this last week's best VC conversation on Silicon Valley online now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PNd9qV5FzA&t=2058s
7. Live Like a King in Buenos Aires. One of my favorite cities in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DfKLar4zCw
8. "We in the west used to play dirty – and during the cold war, we were good at it. Nowadays, we leave grey-zone tactics and hybrid warfare to Russia, which is winning the disinformation war. Europe’s pride in playing by the rules might just be democracy’s achilles heel."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/04/west-moscow-berlin-airlift-cold-war-civilians
9. A spicy episode this week, but it's always educational and plenty of excellent takes on recent big tech news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MftJZXDzPpw&t=1133s
10. Lots of interesting perspectives on Silicon Valley news. Etiquette is back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv4VdtKpQQk
11. What a fascinating conversation about the new form of PE. Bending Spoons, buying digital businesses and owning them forever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLSXhmRHpFU
12. The geopolitical view of Asia Pacific & the critical importance of Australia and Japan and Taiwan for America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RxBUpHqnME&t=1s
13. "Why is NYC a great place to invest in and build companies? As I reflect on my own experiences with NYC companies, the through-line is their focus on the fundamentals. These companies aren’t (or weren’t, in the case of the ones that have exited) exciting because of hype driven by media or by massive fundraising rounds. They worked, or are working, because they look like great businesses. The teams are executing such that the P&L tells the story.
I do believe that San Francisco and Silicon Valley continue to have the highest concentration of the most ambitious founders, and likely always will. But NYC has plenty of founders with world class ambition, and most let their businesses speak for themselves, which feels different from a lot of what we see in SF.
Perhaps one of the keys is that NYC has many people, not just startup founders with world class ambition — arguably the highest concentration of any city anywhere. You may be a great founder, but you’re around great artists, bankers, chefs, lawyers, and more. When everyone around you is reaching for the top, it can’t help but raise the collective ceiling. Everyone honing their craft, finding their footwork in every field, in the city that never sleeps. Just as in San Francisco, I don’t believe elections affect this spirit; there’ll be ups and downs but NYC will always attract many of the best."
https://nbt.substack.com/p/nyc
14. "I was already a published author; a content manager for two companies, one for a big Series D fintech startup in New York City; I’d worked in broadcast journalism; I had a 7-year career in financial services.
I took those skills and created a profitable business doing what I knew and felt the market needed: someone to take complex financial content and turn it into stuff that everyone could understand and want to read.
Which brings me to today, where I have the absolute, luxurious privilege of picking what I do and who I work with to make money on my terms.
The de rigueur term is “portfolio career,” where you generate income by wearing different hats, similar to how a portfolio showcases an artist’s many mediums, or the components inside an investor’s portfolio (stocks, bonds, alternatives)."
https://shindy.substack.com/p/rituals-portfolio-career
15. "If your goal is a great lifestyle, there are countless opportunities to build a business that supports that. If your goal is to create something transformative with a major impact on your city or industry, the idea needs to be correspondingly more ambitious and scalable.
The best part is that none of this is fixed. Some entrepreneurs start with an idea that grows far beyond anything they could have imagined, and that’s the beauty of putting yourself in the arena."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/11/08/align-ambition-with-startup-idea/
16. "Post–high school, the social contract that binds America — work hard, play by the rules, and you’ll be better off than your parents were — has been severed. Seventy-year-old Americans today are, on average, 72% wealthier than they were forty years ago.
People under the age of forty are 24% less wealthy. The deliberate transfer of wealth from the young to the old in the United States over the past century has led to unaffordable and indefensible costs for education and housing and skyrocketing student debt, all of which directly affect young men. It’s why twenty-five-year-olds today make less than their parents and grandparents did at the same age, while carrying debt loads unimaginable to earlier generations.
Neither the minimum nor the median wage has kept pace with inflation or productivity gains, while housing costs have outpaced both. As the costs of college have soared beyond the reach of most families, many of the manufacturing jobs that didn’t require a college degree and were often a ticket to the middle class for (mostly) men have been offshored. A prohibitive real estate market is a contributing factor to why 60% of young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four live with their parents and 1 in 5 still live with their parents at age thirty.
Stuck and unable to afford greater economic opportunities in nearby cities, they find the same crush and collision of density, stimulation, humanity, creativity, eroticism, and conversation that urban areas offer on their phones instead. In Manhattan, a four-hundred-square-foot apartment costs $3,000 a month. In its stead is a seventeen-square-inch mobile studio apartment costing roughly $42 a month, served up by AT&T, T- Mobile, or Verizon."
https://www.profgalloway.com/notes-on-being-a-man/
17. Michael Every: Geoeconomics and some important terms: what is GDP for and the rise of Neo-Mercantilism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOF59C62G9Q
18. This is a great primer to understand stablecoins and how this is becoming the money rails of the world. Important to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FsGlsfIIkc
19. Understand your enemies. A detailed discussion on Russia and China's "complicated" historical relationship.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH_ycZYH8-s
20. Excellent episode from NIA. Some good takes on the latest news and topics on the internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DdJjs_WtIM
21. A strong case being made here that we are NOT in an AI bubble right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ze3ZNvOdRY
22. Doomberg living up to his name. Energy is life & there are huge implications of this for the EU, USA & the world at large. Don't always agree with all the takes but worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTBFzJDiWsc&t=3176s
23. An insight dense conversation on AI and its impact on the labor market and economy at large. Build your network, stack assets, learn tech & AI agents, build a personal brand and become your own business ie. portfolio career.
Economic singularity coming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aonr8aJfKb8&t=5s
24. Update take on what's happening in Ukraine right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucuMc4nxlto
25. Always insightful and fun to listen to Alex Karp of Palantir.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG9fdLzxTaw
26. I am always happy listening to this. Even though I haven't done any B2B startups investments since Q2 2024, I still learn tons from this conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Euj5TAon_Q0&t=292s
27. "Confidence can belong to everyone who chooses to build it. It grows when we are disciplined and when we keep showing up. As we do so, we will build our skills and abilities. As our confidence grows, it will be manifested in our actions. A confident person will speak clearly, stand tall, and believe in themselves.
Whether you’re a man or a woman, confidence is not found in approval from others. Rather, it is found in the personal conviction that who you are is enough, and you are working hard to be even better."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/the-quiet-power-of-confidence
28. “Europe speaks the language of progress but thinks in the language of comfort,” Krotevych writes.
Every buzzword—”game-changer,” “AI,” “drone revolution”—creates an opiate sense of control, replacing actual preparation for war."
https://underfirenews.substack.com/p/the-drone-wall-is-a-european-myth
29. "The secretary announced two changes that address this imperative. The first is the creation of “Portfolio Acquisition Executives,” or PAEs, who “will be the single accountable official for portfolio outcomes, and will have the authority to act without running through months or even years of approval chains.” The Pentagon is putting the pebble in the right shoe, ensuring that authority and accountability for program success flow to a single person with a face and a nameplate on the door.
The second is the creation of “four-year minimum terms with two year extensions” for key program and portfolio leaders, with “incentives to competition, capability delivery time, and mission outcomes.” No more two-years-and-out. No more musical chairs. Leaders should stay with a program long enough for their career—and yes, their reputation—to be linked to the success or failure of that program.
Secretary Hegseth’s speech was a battle cry for the heretical heroes in defense."
https://www.firstbreakfast.com/p/war-footing
30. "Being right in isolation, insofar as it ever was actually true, is a dead strategy. If you have an insight but cannot coordinate follow-on capital, you lose. If the state floods your sector with subsidies favouring different players, you lose. If megafunds deploy $500 million rounds and dilute your position to irrelevance, you lose. The era of the lone wolf VC who finds the overlooked founder and waits for the world to catch up has largely passed.
Success today is all about coordination. Sam raised $6.6 billion for OpenAI by assembling Microsoft, SoftBank, Nvidia, and a consortium of megafunds. Elon built SpaceX and Tesla by coordinating NASA contracts, state subsidies, and public market capital and crypto manipulation. Jensen turned Nvidia into a 5+ trillion-dollar company by becoming the essential supplier to every AI lab and every hyperscaler simultaneously. These are the new industrialists. Like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan before them, they understand that controlling capital flows matters as much as controlling production. They coordinate capital across institutions and align coalitions around a shared vision. Financing is the key to success.
Questions.
Can you and your founders access megafunds that write $100 million checks?
Can you coordinate with corporate strategics who bring procurement and distribution?
Can you navigate policy and plug into subsidy regimes?
Can you build relationships with sovereign funds that provide patient capital at scale?
If not, you are operating in a different game than the one being played at the frontier.
The best founder today assembles coalitions of capital across VCs, corporates, and government, then aligns them around a shared vision.
The best VC today is not the one who sees the future first. Or writes the best blog. It is the one who convenes the consortium that funds it. The future that is, not the blog."
https://stateofthefuture.substack.com/p/consensus-capital
31. "Most people are used to simpler forms of investing, such as using a Robinhood account to buy a share of Google. Angel investing is a hundred times harder to do well, and those willing to put in the effort will do much better."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/11/15/where-to-start-evaluating-an-angel-investment/
32. "Men are builders. Creators. We’re designed to impose our will on the world through action—not sit at home watching other men talk about being hard.
Watching Goggins scream about staying hard doesn’t make you hard. Reading about manifestation doesn’t manifest results. Listening to a podcast about discipline doesn’t create discipline.
Action does.
Aggressive, relentless, systematic action applied until your mind rewires itself for success."
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/how-to-build-a-lethal-mindset
33. "These past couple of years have taught me a lot about how to build a life outside a high tax country and I want to lay out what I think is the best way to go about it all. If you’re sitting in Australia or any Western country feeling squeezed by taxes, cost of living, and that growing sense that the harder you work and the more successful you become, the more headwind you cop.
South America is the answer to start building something freer, and, quite frankly, a lot more fun, in 2026 (although it’s certainly not for everyone)."
https://www.geologotrader.com/p/how-to-become-a-sovereign-individual
34. "These negative shocks would be brutal for any country. But for China, which has known nothing but skyrocketing living standards for over three decades, it’s especially galling to be suddenly thrust into a world where you have to run flat-out just to stay in place.
Ten years ago, Chinese people worked hard because they knew that tomorrow would be much better than today; now, they work hard because they know that if they don’t, tomorrow will be much worse than today. Their dream has suddenly flipped from aspiration to survival."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/chinas-people-are-on-a-treadmill
35. "National service benefits everyone who serves, but the benefits are likely more profound for boys — a cohort that’s fallen farther and faster than any other group in recent memory. For boys, physical development progresses more rapidly than intellectual or emotional maturity. My friend Richard Reeves has argued in favor of “red-shirting” boys, just as we hold back college athletes for a year so they can develop further on the field. A structured period of one or two years after high school would give boys the opportunity to mature without the pressures of college or a career. It would also give some a second chance.
Former IDF boss General Aviv Kochavi called national service a “societal take two” for young Israelis. “It doesn’t matter where you came from or what your background is,” he wrote. “A mediocre pupil or youth with a criminal past who dropped out of school can leave the past behind and become an outstanding leader.” We should give the same opportunity to every young person in America.
If we want our youth to feel invested in their country, then America needs to invest in its youth."
https://www.profgalloway.com/national-service/
36. "Switching between tools incurs costs. The tools, the workflow, the prompts that I’ve optimized for Claude code must all be ported (at my expense!) to other tools.
As the capabilities of these models begin to plateau, the costs to shift increase."
The Thunderbolts: Tormented Heroes
I did not expect to like this Marvel movie, especially as Disney has just wrecked the franchise through woke crap. But it was fun to watch. A rag tag group of down on their luck, ex-super heroes who come together and save the world from a rogue CIA director. Anti-heroes doing heroic & good things.
I got some good takes from it. So many of us are in pain right now, especially in the post Covid and ZIRP-era. Life has gotten tough. Many of us are sad and angry.
“You can’t stuff it down. You can’t hold it in alone. No one can. We have to let it out. We have to spend time together. And even if the emptiness doesn’t go away, I promise you it will feel lighter.”
Meditate. Spend time in nature. Make friends. Take action. Transmute this pain. Channel it. That’s what I do. “Keep working on it everyday. Never give up.”
Their former boss and villain of the show said it best. “Do you want to be good or do you want to be someone who changes the world. Righteousness without power is just an opinion. Look, you are brought up to believe there is a bad guy and a good guy. But eventually you come to realize there’s a bad guy and a worst guy. And nothing else.”
I certainly feel this way. Sometimes you just have to crack people’s skulls. Bad guys & criminals need to be put down. And the line between civilization and barbarism is very thin. Too thin. The world is an ugly place full of bad people as we have been learning the last few years especially. Pax Americana is over and our enemies are at the gates, lots inside the gate too. I think this is something most Americans and Europeans are still coming to grips with.
“Dark times, very very dark times.”
But as one of the heroes Bucky says: “Look, I’ve been where you are. You can run but it doesn’t go away. Sooner or later it catches up to you. When it does it’s too late. So you can either do something about it now or live with it forever.”
So this is a call to action and a call to arms. Get fit. Get ripped. Get rich and get organized. Take action. Get power. Protect the shire.
Get strong, so you can be the one to step up when you are needed by others: “Be the one they rely on when they make a mistake.” To be someone. To be more. To matter.
Offensive or Defensive: Portfolio Strategy for Your Life 2
I mentioned Howard Marks in a previous post and I listened to a great interview with him here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfgNtbr2KuE&t=1666s
He introduces the concept of InvestCon levels based on DEFCON based on US Military classifications. Based on your assessment of the global macro and investor sentiment.
“Things are elevated, but I don't think it's a bubble because a bubble is
characterized by just crazy psychology. And I did not detect that.
I still don't detect crazy psychology, but stocks have gotten more expensive as the year has gone on. And so you know I said in the recent memo calculus of value that Nancy and I like to watch action movies and when the bad guys threaten the United States, the Pentagon declares you know like Defcon 2.
They always say, "Well, should we buy or sell? Buy or sell, hold or dump?" And the world is not black or white. It's gray. It's always gray. And anybody who understands how the world works understands that it's always gray. And it's never risk on or risk off. But I think that we should manage our portfolios conscious of our balance between offense and defense. And we can change that balance given what's going on in the environment. So, I said in the memo that I recommend possibly going to Investcon 2.
Now if you decide you want to be a little more defensive than usual for whatever your usual is, you can go to Defcon 1, which is stop buying. Defcon 2, which is tilt your portfolio more toward defense. Sell some of your aggressive holdings and buy some more defensive holdings. Number three, which is get out of all your aggressive holdings. Investcon four is sell some of your defensive holdings. Number defcon five is to sell all your holdings. And number six, defcon six is to go short the market.
And I'm never confident enough. It's not my nature to be confident enough to go to five or six. But I think it's reasonable at this point in time to just be a defcon two, which is to say just to start biasing your portfolio more towards defense and less towards offense. I'm not saying get out of the markets. I'm not saying don't have investments. And I'm just saying maybe you should shift some of your investments towards lower returning
things which offer more safety.”
What an interesting framework to act on. While he got the Defcon Numbers flipped, Defcon 1 is highest readiness and most defense, while Defcon 5 is lowest readiness and peacetime, the point still stands. Classifying the present investing or economic environment will help you figure out the best course of action. Even better if these actions are pre-planned already and automatically triggered without too much analysis paralysis which many of us get stuck in sometimes.
Marks gives guidance in how you do this with a concept called asset allocation:
“I wrote a memo called ruminations on asset allocation, roughly October of last year and I said there are two kinds of asset classes: owning and lending. Your brother-in-law wants to start a business and your spouse says you have to give him money.
You have two choices. You can lend him money in the hope that he'll pay you interest and get your and you get your principal back at the end. You're not involved in the business. You don't rise and fall with the success of the business, but you hope to get repaid at the end.
Or you can become a partner and if he kills it, you do well. And if he does terribly, you lose all your money. Ownership or lending. Stocks are ownership. Bonds are lending. If you shift towards lending because it's safer, you usually give up return, but you offload a great deal of uncertainty. If you stay with ownership, you have the possibility of a much higher return, but also the possibility of a low return or a negative return or a total loss. So every investor at every point in time has to ask themselves what do I want? Do I want to maximize my potential return or do I want to minimize the uncertainty I face?
You can't do both at the same time. I said in one of my books that people come to me for financial advice, friends, and they ask what they should do and I say, "Well, which is more important to keep what you have or make more?" And what did they say? Both. Yes. You can't maximize both. You can't maximize the probability of increasing your wealth and maximize the probability of holding on to what you have at the same time. Everybody has to make a choice and I think it's reasonable to alter your choice as conditions in the world change.”
All this is directly applicable in life. Have plans for different scenarios. Do you take more risk like work for equity, invest in crypto or startups or do you go more conservative. Ie. get a job, go cash or focus on cash flow. It all depends on the situation. Where do you spend your time with something as basic as spending more time with close friends or family or branching out and meeting new people?
“I think today by saying none of this is easy and it's not. It's a complex field. It
requires expertise. You know Charlie Munger Warren's partner who passed away a year and a half ago, he said to me and I put it into my first book. None of this is meant to be easy. Anybody who thinks it's easy is stupid. You know, the worst thing you can do in the world is overlook complexity and think things are easy because if you do, you're likely to be victimized.
I'm not panicked. And you know the most important thing if you're going to be play in this game and be investing, you better not panic because if you permit yourself to be ruled by your emotions, you will constantly do the wrong thing. And I don't panic, but this is not the time for a carefree attitude.”
This all sounds a lot like life in general. And as I wrote in a previous post, investing is life. You are investing your life force, your time and your energy. Life is meant to be variable & challenging, it’s meant to have big ups and downs. Bringing portfolio management skills & thinking can help you weather the inevitable challenges better.
A 2025 Recap & Retrospective: Navigating Thru The Storm
Talk about a tumultuous year. I was pretty optimistic in the beginning of 2025 but it got really messy as the year went on. With Trump 2.0 changing pretty much everything on the geopolitical front, combined with even more financial challenges, my perspective on the world got pretty dark. Not 2020 dark & hopeless but just dark. As folks who read my regular postings, there was a much more ruthless tinge and flavor. Something I deplore but this view is what I have come around to. My conclusion is that this mindset is what is required to survive in this new world order. Perhaps even thrive. Don’t hate the player, hate the game as they say. But it was not all bad.
Business: B
Lots of new business lines in our core business, private credit, real estate, a few deals in the defense/industrial sector. Also preparing to do a few PE deals in 2026. Also joined advisory board & IC of new reindustrialization focused credit fund as well as standing up a new Defense-tech focused PE firm.
Lots of new assets and strategies to learn which is something I look forward to as someone who is naturally curious, learning drives me. The violent reset of the geopolitical board has opened up lots of new opportunities and this is exciting although a bit scary at the same time.
Personal Finance: C-, maybe D
Just a brutal year. Still lots of accounts receivables, 19 months now from an unnamed Balkan country institute. Massively negative cashflow from investment properties due to vacancy and lots of renovations and repairs. Anyone who tells you rental properties are easy money is lying to you. There has been a massive emergency and literal cash crunch every 5 years since I’ve owned these properties, going on 22 years now. And my family's cost structure is slightly out of control. Selling off liquid assets is the dumbest way to fix this but here we are.
A continual one step forward, three steps back. It’s infuriating. It's hard not to feel like I lost momentum these last two years and the lack of progress is incredibly frustrating for type A individuals like myself. Clearly something is not working and close to the point of being sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Having said all this, I have been surprised by how calmly I’ve accepted all these setbacks. I guess all that internal work is working somewhat. I learned the hard way in the past, panic always leads to even more losses. Ultimately, I know I’ll be fine in the long run but these last few months have forced me to do a complete rethink of how I manage my finances. The obvious conclusion is I need a complete revamp and a focus on driving cash flow, not stacking more illiquid assets, which is what got me in trouble leading up to 2020. I need bigger reserves and it’s Code Red now. Or more popularly said online, “going more autistic.”
2026 will be a ruthless focus on managing my cost structure better + prioritization on monetization to grow cash flow. I just don’t have much time left for much pro bono stuff anymore. I don’t feel it’s valued by most people these days. In fact, they feel entitled to my time and energy. It does not serve me or my family anymore. I’ll always be happy helping good people and those I consider friends and family, but this circle is getting smaller over time. A tribe by nature needs to be tight. I am taking a harder-edged stance in general: “Gold for my friends, steel for my enemies.”
Travel: Travel was out of control. Said “Yes” to way too much stuff. Spent way too much money. Many of these trips were not even monetization or strategic ones. I need to fix this. But while tiring, I had fun though so it’s something at least. I did do more trips back to Canada to spend time with my folks which was good and I don’t regret that at all as my folks are getting old.
Having said that, I was pretty burned out on travel by the time December rolled around. Impacted my training and sleep in a negative way. Will be cutting back on travel in 2026, I finally need to operate under the age of austerity and focus. I will finally see if I have any of that supposed discipline that I pride myself on.
Went to lots of countries in 2025:
Saudi Arabia: 3X
United Kingdom: 2X
France: 3X
Germany: 1X
Canada: 9X
Poland: 3X
Ukraine: 2X
Georgia: 1X
Japan: 2X
Uzbekistan: 1X
Turkey: 1X
Health: A-
Continually working with my personal trainers although my travel schedule did not allow me to do my annual muay thai fight training trip. But will rectify this in 2026 and probably do the “Lethal Gentleman” training camp in Poland too. (Yes, this is a real thing). I trained and ate plenty of protein and gained 8 pounds of muscle mass. I feel and look better than I did 20 years ago.
Family & Relationships: A-
Some big breakthroughs this year and have enjoyed some calm at home (famous last words). Nice to have the home element feeling a bit more safe and secure compared to the last few years. Lots of fun family trips together to Whistler (twice), Banff, France & Germany. I am really enjoying time with my teenage daughter. Trying to be present in the last year and half with her before she heads off to college. It’s so much fun wandering palaces, museums, national art galleries, farmers markets and shopping malls with Amber. She shares many of my interests, particularly in history and architecture.
Personal Development: A-
Continuing the streak I had from 2024, I have read even more books and watched lots of Youtube videos on a wide range of Silicon Valley, investing, geopolitics, global macro and military/defense related topics. One of the few areas of progress this last year. I’ve also continued to be active on LI and X (aka Twitter) and mined these places for lots of great insights on where the world is going. I can’t believe these tools are free, or relatively free that is.
2026:
So some thoughts as we move into the next year, from the very intelligent Arbitrage Andy:
“If 2025 was the prelude, 2026 is the chapter where the plot actually detonates.
The world is moving faster, systems are wobbling harder, and nobody is coming to save you or me.
Most people can agree things never really returned to how they were pre-pandemic. It just kind of feels like life accelerated.
Life didn’t “go back to normal”, it just hit the gas across the board. Everything started moving faster: the economy, the news cycle, the politics, even the way people think. It feels like we skipped a chapter and woke up in a different country. The pace, the pressure, the instability.
You can feel it on the roads, in the stores, in the way people interact.
The jump from the end of the pandemic to now (almost 2026) was even faster.
Society feels thinner now, stretched out to some extent. People are stuck in some super quick race to survive and “make it” before we hit some type of terminal velocity. You either adapt or get rolled by it.
It genuinely feels like America and the world hit fast-forward while the floor underneath us started to crack. You can sense it in the silence on the subway (where you hopefully aren’t being attacked by a vagrant), in the tension at the grocery store, in the way people drive like they’re in downtown Fallujah. Even in the media masturbation of the same stories, scandals, and pop culture slop.
This is the environment we’re stepping into for 2026 kings, a world moving quicker than the majority of people can process. Normies are entirely stagnant. Based lords and chads see where things are trending.”
The polycrisis is here. We’re surrounded by literal predators, scam artists and wolves. I enter 2026 with some trepidation but I never doom. I’m a grinder and survivor. I’ve reinvented myself many times already. My whole life has prepared me for this.
While I expect 2026 to be a tough year, I will squeeze out as much health, wealth, learning, fun and adventure as I can. I will attack my problems with calm determination. I will focus deeply on the critical path to navigate my way out of this storm. Stay optimistic, stay mentally and physically strong, expect a lot of hard work and pain and you will be okay.
As I have stated before from Dune Prophecy: “Adversity always lies in the path of advancement. Most would run from it, I will walk through it.”
Happy New year everyone!
Asset or Liability: Portfolio Strategy for Your Life
I have been on a Howard Marks kick these last few months. The legendary investor and founder of Oaktree Capital he has documented his intellectual journey through decades of writing. His letters are a must for any investor.
So why should everyone read his letters? Well, at the end of the day we are all investors. Some of us invest our money. All of us invest our time and energy, all in hopes of some return at some period of time. We invest in our hobbies, our health, our relationships, our family, our education, our reputations and our career. For me, it’s an interesting way to think about your life. A valuable framework.
If you use a portfolio strategy, when looking at your life there are questions you need to ask and honestly answer here:
Are we investing in the long term or short term?
Are you presently holding assets or liabilities?
This is especially relevant not just in investments. The truth is most of your relationships are probably liabilities, not assets. This is why you have to really curate your circle and find the location of a maximum number of high ambition, smart & competent people. You also really need to be careful of what you read and listen to aka your media diet.
Most people listen to mainstream media and it’s why they are NGMI. If you listen to and read what everyone else is, you will do whatever one else is doing. The crowd is usually wrong or at least always too late.
The unfiltered reality when I reflect on my life so far, is that I’ve over-invested into my career & underinvested in my health, family and true friendships. I wasted too much time on limited upside opportunities and tolerating incompetent and bad people.
So basically on my “life balance sheet”, I find I have far too many liabilities. Something I’ve spent a considerable time this year trimming & fixing. Just like selling off money-losing stocks in your portfolio, you should do the same for energy sucking relationships or time wasting situations. Time is of the essence and none of us are getting any younger.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 28th, 2025
"Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius." – Pietro Aretino
"State Capitalism, American-Style
China has been forcing the action of the game, and the US is now responding with its own industrial policy, albeit with a lag.
The US has recognized it needs access to more raw materials and manufacturing—and fast.
So over the last six months, the United States Government has shifted from a head coach to a player, identifying key areas of vulnerability and no longer being content to let market forces determine outcomes.
The moves haven’t been subtle regulation changes, tax incentives or subsidies - but outright ownership in private companies. And as we will see, the government can be the ultimate activist investor—write a cheque, and then modify policy to complement the business model."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/a-new-seat-at-the-table
2. Love the promise of this initiative: California Forever. Let's Build!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElhxzUO7YQM
3. "Product-market fit is not a one-time event. As the technology changes rapidly underneath, so must your product."
https://tomtunguz.com/product-market-fit-not-static/
4. An absolute masterclass on investing. A legend in the hedge fund business. Dan Sundheim of D1 Capital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRh0KTutZis&t=2080s
5. "We’ve been in the lean times for several years now, excluding the AI boom, and entrepreneurs in the current grow, margin, burn phase would do well to recognize that economic cycles always repeat. It’s worth doing the mental exercise: what might the next grow, grow, grow cycle do to your business? What changes would you make, if any? And vice versa, if you happen to be in a grow, grow, grow phase now, what lessons from grow, margin, burn would you carry forward?"
https://davidcummings.org/2025/10/25/from-grow-grow-grow-to-grow-margin-burn/
6. Solid vibe check on this week's Silicon Valley news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDYdIoHe4XA
7. A solid interview with Peter Zeihan, Jay Martin asks some good questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjFQQ5Q_U-A
8. "Of course, the real insidious process is happening online, where every big web platform is imitating a gambling casino. And they rake in gangsta profits bigger than any gangsta has ever made.
How bad is it? Consider this fact: Among the eight largest companies in the world, at least half of them promote addiction with screen interfaces that mimic slot machines."
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/why-is-everything-turning-into-a
9. "History evolves through competition between models of governance, and this moment is ripe for change. Even the most rigid systems will soon adapt to the demands of global natives, because they hold the ultimate power: they can vote with their feet. I don’t expect today’s nation-states or government authorities to build the systems of tomorrow. I expect global natives to build them."
https://globalnatives.substack.com/p/parag-khanna-foreword
10. A timely take on global geopolitics with Hal Brands.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gkw2vbJCFkQ
11. Quite a helpful discussion on public investing and thinking about AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLlmQoCZe2A&t=88s
12. "U.S. healthcare isn’t about caring for health — it’s about monetizing it. Just as Big Tech found the gangster app for shareholder value (rage), the industrial food, hospital, and pharma complexes have found obesity. They get you addicted to sugar and salt, then hand you to the “non-health” complex for replacements, dialysis, and statins. They’ve even rebranded disease as identity: You’re not obese, you’re living your truth. No — you’re finding diabetes. McDonald’s and Coca-Cola celebrate obesity so UnitedHealthcare can monetize it. These stocks aren’t equities; they’re obesity indices.
We know exercise, healthier food, and less screen time help. But they’re not enough. The good news: Obesity may have peaked in the U.S., and we have the tools to actually reverse it. Pushing for a radically lower price and rolling out weight-loss drugs to tens of millions of Americans could be revolutionary — possibly the best civic investment in recent history."
https://www.profgalloway.com/americas-best-bet/
13. "In today’s age, as soon as you snap out of the spell of the traditional publishers and look around, you do notice inspiring experiments.
Stripe Press clearly cares about books. Infinite Books and Jimmy Soni are entering the industry with an author- and tech-first mindset. James Clear helped launch an authors-first hybrid publisher at Author’s Equity, and the authors I talk to love working with them. Bookvault pairs beautiful design with print-on-demand flexibility. Lulu gives you an API to print & ship books anywhere in the world.
Craig Mod has nearly a decade of putting art and craft first, publishing beautiful art editions of his work. Derek Sivers sells direct and only makes authors pay for his books once. Steel Brothers is turning books like Walden into breathtaking collectibles. MSCHF is remixing reality itself with its releases. Even rogue divisions within Penguin’s imprints prioritize design, like their clothbound classics."
https://newsletter.pathlesspath.com/p/reclaim-the-book-310
14. A view of the emerging new world order from the eyes of Singapore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXSI4cCm3BM
15. "The core problem for high earners? Fixed cost escalation: 1) housing, 2) vacations, 3) private schools, 4) country clubs and more. Now the lifestyle owns the person.
Most don’t buy freedom. They buy overhead.
Once lifestyle steps up, it becomes the new baseline. It is easy to go from Toyota → Porsche. It is painfully hard to go from Porsche → Toyota. You’re locking in higher floor level spending.
You are in copper handcuffs: too rich for empathy, not rich enough to keep up with increasing responsibilities and family obligations. You’re getting smoked at high marginal brackets, you don’t own the firm - can’t sell the job you have, you can’t pass expenses through an entity - minimal deductions and you can’t arbitrage residency or corporate structure without blowing up your career.
Gross income sounds enormous. However, your after-tax is significantly lower than you like to admit. Privately, when talking with financial advisors, they will explain that making $200,000 a year is required to save $100,000. After taxes and lifestyle overhead, the rest is already gone
That’s why high earners feel broke. Optically they are not broke. They are living a good quality of life. What you don’t see? The minimal change in net worth."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/how-to-end-up-broke-despite-clearing
16. Lots of good insights into where we are in the AI market and some learnings in Defense. Pretty interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGoUu5VLvLY
17. "Navies are what make ambitious, civilizational projects possible. Pirates are fast, but disorganized and limited in reach. A navy builds the infrastructure, supply lines, and trust needed to operate anywhere. That’s what lets a company move from one clever product to a lasting platform — from a single ship to an empire.
Building a navy means designing systems that keep working when the founders sleep. It means turning individual heroics into collective excellence. The founder’s challenge is to evolve; to go from the pirate who captains the ship to the admiral who commands the armada. Even the great pirates of history knew this. The ones who thrived built fleets, ruled cities, and became the very order they once defied.
The instincts that made you decisive early on still matter, but they must be embedded in the culture so others may move with the same conviction. The pirate spirit is not contempt for order but a hunger for the horizon — the need to press beyond the edge of the map. A strong navy gives this fire a purpose. The greatest fleets were forged not by taming the reckless, but by giving them command and a cause worth their daring."
https://a16zamericandynamism.substack.com/p/be-the-navy-not-a-pirate
18. "The headlines of declining growth, persistent inflation, and stretched federal budgets confirm that the economy is not in good shape. But how severe are the problems and are they likely to reach a point where the Kremlin really does have to reappraise its war strategy?
There is no formula that can identify a certain tipping point. At one extreme one could imagine economic disruption triggering mass discontent, runs on the banks and a collapsing currency - something functionally equivalent to a decisive military victory. But the point might be no more than realising that the choices between spending on the war and sustaining the civilian economy – between ‘guns’ and ‘butter’ - are becoming more acute and unlikely to get any easier."
https://samf.substack.com/p/ukraines-theory-of-victory
19. "Seeking fortune, you’re more likely to find it in extreme environments. This argument was core to If Nassim Taleb were a VC: venture should unabashedly go after the most right tail things. A high loss ratio is a feature. Most companies, funds, and vintages are bust, some are milli-baggers. It’s the exact opposite of Buffet being perfectly willing to trade away a big payoff for a certain payoff."
https://jordsnel.substack.com/p/vol
20. "Despite Africa’s growing relevance, the U.S. is challenged to engage there, hindered by fragmented policy tools, disjointed agency missions, and a reactive strategy. The US excels in mature, but relatively shrinking markets, but struggles to compete in less mature but growing economies. These are symptoms of a broader shortfall in how Washington conducts economic statecraft. Africa is the leading edge of a global problem.
China understands this. Its approach to economic statecraft fuses commercial, diplomatic, and security objectives into one coherent campaign. China’s model had real appeal: it brings rapid execution of projects and provides much needed capital to nations eager to develop. For some states, China also provides a level of financial opacity that would not survive the scrutiny of more transparent western capital formation avenues.
Using state-owned enterprises, concessional loans, and infrastructure-for-resources deals, Beijing secures control over ports, access to critical minerals, and digital infrastructure, often on terms that weaken local sovereignty and grant China exclusive access to key value chains. While African nations gain roads and railways, they also are burdened with debt, opaque contracts, and long-term strategic dependency."
https://theledgereconstatecraft.com/issue1/outcompeting-china-africa.html
21. "The RUBBER DUCKY concept aims to maximize targeted Defense Industrial Base (DIB) production capacities by inferring and cataloging the industrial base's production functions. This is achieved through economic modeling of diverse incentivization mechanisms, which generate 'bodies of evidence' to support optimal investment strategies. This approach would transform industrial policy from a reactive, crisis-driven function into a proactive, strategically managed element of national security."
https://theledgereconstatecraft.com/issue1/rubber-ducky-defense.html
22. "I always try to emphasize the human factor in “unmanned warfare” — how we keep forgetting to include the cost of labor to produce these drones, the cost of training crews, and the need to build the infrastructure that enables such training.
Governments may provide their forces with thousands of advanced drones, but without trained personnel to operate them, the equipment becomes useless. NATO allies should not only acquire technologies but also start training their crews as quickly as possible.
Both Russia and Ukraine treat drone crews as the most valuable targets on the battlefield. Yet while NATO countries focus on acquiring fleets of unmanned hardware, they should prioritise just as much training thousands of pilots, mission planners, and engineers — people capable of performing defensive and offensive operations and adapting to multiple types of drone threats."
https://ukrainesarmsmonitor.substack.com/p/unmanned-warfare-80-of-drone-success
23. "Quite simply, the elite are the ones who have lost faith in the system that has served them until now. They think it’s all going to crash—at least economically—and, more importantly, that there just won’t be enough food and shelter and energy and stuff to go around when it does.
Convinced an inevitable collapse is coming—private bunkers aside—their best answer for survival in the chaos is to get as rich as possible, buying up as much land and assets as possible, while also building a military force capable of controlling the hordes of us who won’t have enough food or shelter or medicine. Even if it means enacting policies that hasten the collapse, that’s preferable to losing control over one’s monopoly on the remaining spoils. As long as the edifice is coming down, may as well do controlled demolition.
So they invest in crypto while devaluing the dollar, lower their own taxes while raising taxes on the poor through tariffs. The tariffs simultaneously bankrupt farmers who can’t find a market, and see their land purchased by private equity who can then rehire them as sharecroppers. Put as many people as possible out of work by firing government employees, which leads to a cascade of failures of the businesses they patronize."
https://rushkoff.substack.com/p/the-intentional-collapse
24. Really neat company here. Durin: building automated drilling rigs!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCYGhHQYzjI
25. "It is probably too early to judge the general effectiveness of drone warfare across a full range of tactical or operational scenarios. Against a fully functional combined-arms operation benefiting from a superior reconnaissance-strike complex, electronic or physical countermeasures, or even drone killing drones, it is possible to envision a force blowing through the drone opposition before it can have much effect.
Dispatches from the front already report that drones are more effective when accompanied by artillery barrages to disrupt electronic warfare, cripple air defenses, and send infantry to ground. The strategic and political impact of drone use is also an open question, that is, how will drones interact with war as a “political phenomenon and a social institution.” Nevertheless, there is no doubt that drones are both a multifaceted opportunity and a dynamic problem that manifests at the blistering pace of wartime innovation."
https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/colin-gray-the-rma-and-the-rise-of-drone-warfare/
26. Constraints are powerful and pain leads to growth. Learning from Roelef Botha of Sequoia Capital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_MkoMeihWk
27. An insight dense conversation on building startups and investing with Keith Rabois.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLZoJ_Wv5oE
28. Either way, Japan is ramping up defense spending.
"But while the ministry said defense-related spending in fiscal 2025 was at 1.8% of GDP — near the 2% gold standard targeted by many Western nations — those figures may do little to satiate Trump.
The U.S. president has already won acquiescence from NATO nations to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense, while his administration has demanded that American allies, including Japan, target a “global standard” of 5%."
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/10/23/japan/politics/japan-pm-takaichi-defense-spending/
29. "When we see something like a wildly-distorted view of artificial intelligence get enough cultural traction to become considered “conventional wisdom” despite the fact that it’s a wildly unpopular view held by a tiny, extremist minority within the larger tech sphere — that is the result of focusing on investors instead of inventors. Who cares what the money-movers think? We want to hear what motivated the makers!"
https://www.anildash.com/2025/10/24/founders-over-funders/
30. "In a unipolar globalisation era, such as 1991 to 2008, an empire can survive, and arguably thrive, without deep industrial might by leaning on reserve currency status, financial dominance, technological leadership, and nuclear deterrence, while outsourcing manufacturing to global supply chains. This model produced decades of prosperity, but also deep fragility.
The world stage has shifted into a multi-polar configuration, where sovereign industrial supremacy is a critical factor to ultimately decide who comes out on top, ideally purely by deterrence. The Western world's neglect of its manufacturing base over the past 30 years has led to an existential cross-road by eroding the very foundation of its historical power.
The West has to find its way back or risk a decline and ultimately potentially a replacement of the Western Empire, the timing of which will be decided by method of replacement: Either through continuously escalating military conflicts or, more likely, a drawn-out economic decline."
http://www.theintegrationage.com/
31. Another excellent discussion. Read books and you can just do things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw2bK_jLz8M
32. "Interception is fast becoming the next great defense market.
The wars in Ukraine and between Israel and Iran have made one thing clear: saturation works — and the economics of defense are being rewritten.
On some nights, more than 600 drones have been fired toward Kyiv. Each wave forces Ukraine to spend orders of magnitude more than its aggressor to defend itself. The same pattern played out in Israel: each round of Iranian drones and missiles cost Israel tens of millions to $200 million per day to intercept. A month-long war with Iran could cost around $12 billion. In the first week alone, Israel spent roughly $5 billion, or about $725 million per day.
The reason is simple. Most of Iran’s projectiles cost only tens of thousands of dollars, especially the Shahed family, while Israeli interceptors cost 10 to 100 times more per shot. That asymmetry — between cheap offense and expensive defense — is now shaping procurement policy across the West."
https://louiseboucher.substack.com/p/interception-is-the-next-big-defense
33. "For decades, China’s grip on rare earth elements (REEs) has been viewed as an unbreakable monopoly — a moat built on chemical expertise, industrial scale, and patience.
But over the past year, the U.S. has begun to dismantle that logic piece by piece.
And it’s not doing it by catching up.
It’s doing it by leapfrogging — rewriting the game entirely."
https://tanviratna.substack.com/p/how-the-us-plans-to-leapfrog-the
34. A very thoughtful discussion on investing in public and private tech investments: Thomas Laffont of Coatue. True masterclass of investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDvL98GLQB0
35. "“Will to fight” is not a fixed category. Instead, it is a social potential: something that can be cultivated or suppressed. Across issues as varied as tax compliance, welfare take-up, or financial bailouts, we know that trust or mistrust in society can shape outcomes. Defense is no different. If planners assume society won’t step up and design policies around that belief, they make it more likely that society will live down to expectations.
It is easy to show how leaders’ pessimism about society can become self-fulfilling. People are unlikely to meet the moment when political leaders use conscription to discipline youth rather than to build trained mass. The same holds when leaders oppose pragmatic fixes to recruitment or retention problems, such as allowing soldiers to sleep longer, because they feel it looks “soft.” And when armies place conscripts and reservists in static or dull and dangerous roles out of mistrust in their ability to master complex skills, they squander their potential."
https://warontherocks.com/2025/10/is-europe-too-soft-to-fight/
36. "These dynamics do not bode well for the United States in a long war with China. Right now, the U.S. has what appears to be the more capable military, and certainly the more battle-tested and technologically advanced one. It might inflict disproportionately higher losses on the Chinese at first. But because of its diminished production capacity, the U.S. would struggle to make up even a small part of the battlefield losses that it would inevitably suffer. China—which is as much the workshop of the world today as the United States was in World War II—could churn out replacement weaponry at an impressively quick pace."
37. AI & Job loss and plenty of other topical news. NIA this week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vjKolzu08U&t=2s
38. Spikey people and how to make a good decision in the Investment committee. This is how Sequoia crushes and continues to crush.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38m7mp8bngg
39. Another excellent discussion this week on B2B & AI. Good stuff.
Learning from Balaji Srinavasan: Tech Visionary
Balaji Srinavasan is one of the most influential people online, formerly of Silicon Valley, now residing in Singapore. Libertarian & wildly successful tech investor & entrepreneur in both biotech and crypto. He is a wickedly sharp observer of the world. A true savant.
His keen knowledge is clear in this interview with Peter Diamandis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ_S6S7-z5E&t=5879s. I’ve rewatched it a few times and pulled out some recommendations he has on how to thrive in the future below.
Peter Diamandis: “So between the entrepreneurs out there and people just listening who are tech fans what's your top points of advice. What's your most heartfelt advice to both entrepreneurs and the average individual listening to this?”
Balaji: “Okay. So for entrepreneurs first I would say go direct. Build your own following
on social media, get good at AI, create content, don't give interviews to legacy media, only do tech podcasts, tech shows, but even more than that, basically build your own influential individual voice as a creator, as the authentic voice of your company. Don't hire public relations people. Only hire creators if you're hiring them. You don't have to hire too many but basically don't outsource your content creation. Content creation is as
important as code and you should be doing that in-house and you should be using all the modern tools and you don't have to use full AI by the way. You can use half AI. So go direct. That's number one.
Number two: move to Florida or Texas. Get there as soon as you can if you can. Get to a place. Move to Starbase maybe where Elon is. And you know essentially take it from a company town to a portfolio town and a tech town. If I was in the US, I'd be in Texas or Florida, specifically Miami or Austin and near Starbase and so on and cluster with other folks there. I think property rights have a better chance of getting protected there.
Number three: if you have cryptocurrency, get your keys off exchanges. Get your coins off exchanges. Do that now. Figure out your cold storage. Figure out all that stuff. And don't talk to anybody about the details of it. Right. I'm just saying that basically you don't want to. I don't have any imminent thing, but I'm just saying to do that now. And there are two things. Exchanges can be and governments can take them over. Yes. Like look, if Bitcoin really really runs, if it really runs, then at a certain point people basically start getting scared and then all kinds of crazy things are going to happen, right? So, be in a state where property rights are respected, where Bitcoin is respected like for example, Texas, I think the state legislature has something which is the right to hold Bitcoin shall not be infringed, right? That's a good place to be, you know, right, with your cryptocurrency and so forth.
Get involved with your local tech community. Tech is a community. And so, actually thinking of it as a community and doing as much offline social. I almost don't have to say this because people kind of already do it organically in tech, right? But tech is a community. And so, for example, that might mean not simply homeschooling, but crowdschooling, microschooling, right? Where you're educating your kids together, right? Start doing collective action, you know, things with tech people in your spare time because you're going to want community in, I think, the years to follow, right? You're going to want people you can rely on in the physical world, not simply the digital world. That's why I'd also go to those places.”
Location matters, especially places full of like-minded individuals. But also places that recognize property and money rights. This has been eroding in almost every part of the world but especially in Europe, Canada and America in the recent decade.
“Finally I would say read as much as you can of BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) content in translation.Okay? Because unless you've actually and and travel, if you have not been to Riyadh, if you haven't been to Dubai, if you haven't been to Shanghai, if you haven't been to Bangalore, if you haven't seen how much better the rest of the world is getting and has gotten at in a meteoric rate over the last 5 to 10 years.
You aren't calibrated unless you've been to Shenzen, Bangalore, Dubai, and also Eastern Europe. Hopefully Russia there's some peace treaty or something like that. I would also say you know hopefully Russia gets to peace and the Russia Ukraine thing gets to peace. I think Moscow has also improved a lot since the Soviet era but Eastern Europe, Russia, India, China and Dubai and Riyadh have radically changed. So really calibrate what the world is because movies will not show you that. The only movie that's shown rich non-westerners in recent times is probably Crazy Rich Asians or maybe Squid Game, right? And so they're not really showing it, right? So you have to get the on the ground experience. Otherwise, you're not calibrated.”
This part is the most important. You have to get out of your bubble. Both your information and location bubble. These are dangerous blinders and the only way to open them is to travel and read things that don’t just confirm your world view. Most dangerous if you only follow Western media, it’s the most dangerous and deceptive filter bubble around. The West has fallen behind and it becomes clear when you travel to Asia or the Middle East. The first part of dealing with a problem is acknowledging you have a problem.
Peter Diamandis: “All right. For the general public, you hit that for entrepreneurs.
Let's go to the individual who's in a job in LA, in San Francisco, in middle America. What's the most important you know things that they need to be thinking about?”
Balaji: “Where's all the money going into? It's going into the tech companies, and it's now going into all the crypto treasury companies, right? Which is like the Bitcoin treasury companies, but also Ethereum treasury companies, all this kind of stuff, right? So, in a sense, American capital markets are getting sunsetted in favor of internet capital markets. And actually if you look at just crypto alone, crypto is the number four global market after Shanghai, NYSE, NASDAQ and gaining fast and will become the number one global market. Right? If you don't own crypto right now, begin to look at it. I never give anybody financial advice in that sense but as a technology and as a platform yes, it's taking over. Right now every bank is adopting it. And so you should definitely understand it.
It's kind of one of those things, sometimes what happens is people will see something in the news and they'll see it says it was a scam or whatever. And they tune out of it and they come back, you know, years later like, "Wait a second, it actually developed a lot." Like the dotcom crash and then web 2.0 was like that. People didn't pay attention to the internet over the 2000s and the whole thing got built back up, right?
So that's a related kind of concept when you see something in the news, especially if it's like an asset. Again, I'm not telling anybody to buy any asset, but a useful thing to do is set like a if you see something that's interesting, set a calendar reminder for it. And then 30, 60, 90, 120, 150 days or what have you, you can make a purchase or whatever decision, a research decision when it's not in the news. Because when in the news, it's usually overpriced or underpriced because it's making a big move, right? When it's outside the news, you're not reacting on emotion and you can reallocate your position accordingly, right? So, that's just something I think is a useful thing to do. You can be hyper hyperrational about it especially if you write down, you know, what your long-term thesis on it is.”
Basically Balaji says track the trends that you see around you, whether geopolitical, demographical or even technological, both short term and long term. This is fun and can be incredibly profitable. Additionally it helps you understand what is happening around you and buffer you from the shocks.
Balaji: “Related to that, don't gamble, right? There's a lot, unfortunately, there's a lot of, you know, day trading type stuff andI know people like to do that, but I think it's just too hard to just buy and hold for the long run if you're if you're putting something somewhere else.
Let's see other things. I would say that from social media that it's like watching pro sports in the sense for example when you watch like tech founders or something like that on X it's like watching really really successful athletes on TV. Like if you ever dribble the ball it's actually really hard to dribble a ball and run and dunk and and they make it look effortless. They make it look so easy to do that and it's really so so so hard right? So, anybody who is building something, first you yourself should be a builder, but second, you should also in general not attack other builders, right?
It's always easy to do that on social media. It's a cheap way to make oneself feel superior. ‘Look how dumb Elon is. I can't believe he missed a spot on that rocket.’ There's like a lot of people who do this kind of thing, you know what I'm talking about, right? And so, look, if Elon isn't successful, nobody's successful. If Elon isn't smart, really, there's very few people who are smart.
You know, so you have to be able to give respect to others to get respect for oneself, right? And so just like, you know, I'm not saying slavish. You don't have to flip to the other extreme, but just know that game recognizes game, right? You know, respect people online and try and build. I mean, I know X is just a player versus player environment. Everybody yells at each other all the time. There's sites like Farcaster and so on that have a more healthy and civil atmosphere.
So try to seek out online communities as well that model the civility that you want to communicate to your friends, to your family members, your loved ones and you know community members….. Be a relatively good example. I've recognized by the way that sometimes you have to defend yourself online and it's a dangerous environment and all that kind of stuff. But try not to be the person who's doing the first strike, you know. Try to make it a better world for people in that sense.”
No one likes a jerk. Yet it feels like the internet is filled with them due to the engagement algorithms. Be a good citizen, be a good human, be a good example. Try to stay positive and be supportive of other creators and builders.
So much to take in but you can never go wrong from listening to Balaji, one of the first truly world internet citizens. He really knows what he is talking about. So pay attention if you want to really thrive in this new world.
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
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.
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.”