Get The F-ing Money Part Deux: Money Matters
This is a regular reminder. 24-36 months to really make it. Don’t do dodgy, immoral stuff. You need to do it right, unlike all the stupid scammers and kids out there.
Money matters for survival. For taking care of your family and community at large. But it goes beyond that. It gives your point of view and vision weight.
Chamath Palihapitiya, ex-FB exec, investor extraordinaire said it best at a talk he did at Stanford University: https://x.com/F_Compounders/status/2016568450047483971
“So, that's what you have to do, you gotta go and get it. If you control the capital and you have a point of view, you can now, not be a sell out. (sic)
Whatever your world view is, you should be spending time to think about what that is. So that when you control some of these purse strings, you push that view into the world. I will never judge you, and you should not judge me for what that worldview is.
But the point is the more diversity of those views, the more rational actors we have and the more of a balanced, fair system, that is what diversity really means to me.
It doesn't mean let's manage back to a quota, it doesn't mean, okay, we need a black guy, a brown guy, we need a few, that's not what it means. This is what it means, right?...
You have a very unique worldview that matters. In the absence of capital, you're irrelevant, with capital, you're powerful. And then you decide in small ways, in medium size ways, in large ways, right, and it just depends on the scale of capital that you have.
And so that's what's necessary now in capitalism, which is that we have to come back to what is it really?
Is it an economic system, yes. But it is a philosophy as well, right?
And it's a philosophy that says we will vote for the change we intend based on the views that we have. And when you look at the most successful people that operate in these tentacles, that's what they do. Look at the Koch brothers, that's what they do. They have built a network of influence based on capital. Their world view is propagated into the world at an unbelievably aggressive rate that has been compounding for decades, that is genius.
It is genius, it doesn't matter whether you agree with their world view. Irrespective of what you think of the Kochs. You want both views out in the world at scale. Well right now, you have this and you don't have this. And there are many examples of that. And so get the money and don't lose your moral compass when you do.”
If this is not a case for making lots of money, not sure what is. Money is power. Money is influence. Money is leverage. Money is a tool for making the world and future you want to see. God knows we need it.
So go get the F–king Money! Do some good to the world with it.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads April 26th, 2026
"The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm... It's the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle." — Napoleon Hill
A concerning conversation. End of an era and looming civil war in America.
There is a big difference between wealth and money. Move to places where there is safety, civility and your $$ is treated well. Be prepared to move and go to where the opportunities are. Gonna be a wild next half decade as the cycle turns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eskzPuh_5w&t=1065s
2. An interview with Joe Tsai of Alibaba. Smart dude although symbolic of the old global system that is now ended. It will be interesting to see how he navigates this running Alibaba in China, yet having lots of assets in America and being of Taiwanese descent in a world of growing China-USA rivalry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbV1sMfv9TQ
3. Understanding the complicated Middle East region and how UAE punches above their weight geopolitical. By creating connectivity, dependencies & weaponizing chokepoints via air cargo, financial assets, banking & owning ports via DP World.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQgUflzxejs
4. "Every platform shift compresses the distance between user & value. The web required a URL & a browser. Mobile required a download & a homescreen slot. Skills require a sentence."
https://tomtunguz.com/can-you-fly-that-thing/
5."In the final years of the Fourth Turning, according to the The Fourth Turning framework, societies enter a period of intensifying stress in which long-standing institutions lose legitimacy faster than they can be reformed. Political systems polarize, financial structures strain, and public trust in elites collapses. What begins as diffuse anxiety hardens into decisive confrontation—often triggered by a catalyzing crisis such as war, financial collapse, or systemic failure. Compromise becomes rare; history accelerates. The defining feature of this phase is not chaos for its own sake, but forced choice: societies must decide what is worth preserving, what must be dismantled, and what new rules will govern collective life.
The beneficiaries are highly asymmetric. Those tied to the existing order—financialized elites, bureaucratic institutions, over-leveraged systems, and cultural gatekeepers—tend to lose power, credibility, and wealth. The Fourth Turning is hostile to rent-seeking and abstraction; it punishes systems that grew detached from productive reality. In contrast, people and entities aligned with real assets, national cohesion, and practical competence often gain. This includes builders rather than financiers, producers rather than speculators, and actors capable of operating amid volatility—whether that means industrial capacity, energy, food, metals, defense, or social leadership rooted in tangible outcomes. Younger generations, especially those forced to mature quickly under crisis conditions, often rise into leadership faster than in prior eras."
https://robertsinn.substack.com/p/ray-dalio-how-to-survive-the-coming
6. The crazy story of CZ of Binance. What a journey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQwXgxJxwnw
7. Markets work until they don't. New mineral strategy by the US to break dependence on China, long overdue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSYPubDjK9E
8."The global innovation system is not breaking. It is reorganizing.
The conversations at the World Government Summit pointed toward a clear conclusion. The future will not be won by those who assume a return to frictionless globalization. It will belong to those who can operate fluently across borders, stages, and systems, building companies that are grounded where they operate, but informed by the world beyond them.
In an age of fracture, local context is the new advantage."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/innovation-in-an-age-of-fracture
9.One of the most differentiated new VC funds with the distribution/audience/super brand of the Paul brothers. The Anti-Fund. Longtime SV OG Geoff Woo is pretty awesome too. Lifemaxxing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMzYK_kqm8M
10.I'm enjoying this series: interviewing power couples: in this case, the Lonsdales.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo5hTYmoQI4&t=481s
11."Thinking thru scenarios now for the on-going war in Ukraine:
First, let’s start with thinking thru the motivations of the individual players."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/ukraine-scenarios-for-peace-and-war
12. "NATO is fine. The alliance is fine. Know that people and institutions are looking to exploit any opportunity to promote division. Don’t be distracted because we argue like brothers and gossip like old women. We’re long-standing friends who get on each other’s nerves, but we stick together more often than not because the rest of the neighborhood is dangerous."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/all-euro-nato-reporting-is-suspect
13."This may all sound very transactional, but getting access to the people, events and opportunities that can accelerate your business is an essential part of being a successful founder.
When it comes to startups, distribution wins. And networking is how founders distribute themselves.
If you spend time getting to know people who are well-connected and they see that you are genuine, high-value and have something to contribute (assuming that you are, in fact, all of those things), before you know it, you’ll start to find yourself nodding at the bouncer on your way in."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/the-bouncer-at-the-nightclub
14.Global macro with Luke Gromen. Trying to understand the rise of gold and the rise of mercantilism and the importance of critical minerals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc-swyVCDPo
15.Lots of good takes on recent news like Super Bowl ads, Saaspocalypse and BTC sell off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbQUsC8_QoA
16. "Look at the four areas of your life: Work, Health, Family, Friends. Pick the one that will build your legacy and turn the other three down to Low. For the next 30 days, do not apologize for your absence. Use that reclaimed energy to force a Systemic Breakthrough.
Stop trying to be “well-rounded.” A circle has no edge. Be a spear: sharp, narrow, and designed to puncture the status quo."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-balance
17."This isn’t temporary hype. Copper prices have already hit unprecedented levels, reflecting genuine supply fears rather than froth. Retail interest is picking up—FOMO is creeping in—but institutions drove the early moves. Equities in the sector are rotating higher as leverage to the metal becomes apparent. Miners with scale, low costs, and de-risked projects stand to capture outsized gains.
The broader implications are profound. Copper isn’t just wiring; it’s foundational to modern civilization. Shortages threaten economic stability, energy security, AI ambitions, even national defense. Trump has upped the US defence budget by 50 percent. Other countries are following suit. Munitions, drones, 6G networks—all are copper-intensive. And this global rearmament competes directly with civilian needs.
Two years ago, copper was about $3.80 a pound. A year ago it was around $4.50. As I write this, it’s approaching $6. The dollar, burdened by debt and printed promises, will continue its slide against hard assets like gold, silver, and copper. Prices could easily spike in the coming years. We’ve entered an era where physical reality trumps paper illusions."
https://frankgiustra.com/posts/is-copper-at-the-start-of-the-next-supercycle/
18."Your life is the canvas, and game is one of many brushstrokes. One brushstroke without the others leaves you incomplete. But when they work together, when you have built something worth seeing and you know how to invite her into it, you become the kind of man most guys do not even know exists. The kind who does not struggle because everything he has built does half the work before he even opens his mouth.
A real life James Bond and Bruce Wayne.
Today’s post is about a very significant brushstroke for your masterpiece of a canvas. Building a life so textured, so full, so undeniably magnetic that every move you make lands harder than it has any right to."
https://www.thefinalman.com/p/how-to-build-a-life-so-good-she-begs
19."What I’m describing is a version of the power law. It’s impossible to ignore as a venture capitalist, where a few investments and companies drive the majority of returns. It’s hard to internalize this sort of exponential function as a human (at least, it has been for me). But it’s out there, in all sorts of places. A few stories that command the most attention. A few cities in which most of GDP is concentrated. A few people that have the most wealth. Power, in the hands of a few.
What keeps me up is that I believe AI is already exacerbating this dynamic, and will only continue to, as any exponential function is want to do. Since my post over the weekend about agentic engineering and how code generation has become much more autonomous since the start of the year, I’ve heard from a number of founders and companies, most of whom think that they are in the “bucket 2” I describe: “Those who are learning what’s possible by already generating a lot of code.” They may be, but the gap between them and the small set of companies in bucket 1 is huge."
https://nbt.substack.com/p/levels-of-greatness
20.Guest appearance from Atlassian cofounder. So many great nuggets to understand what's happening in the Age of AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdunfbobxaY&t=1615s
21."Becoming a venture capitalist is a very weird story for almost everybody. It’s a rare subset of finance where people stumble into it rather than taking a well trodden, planned path, for the most part. That was true for me."
https://www.newinternet.tech/p/how-i-became-a-venture-capitalist
22. Always learn new stuff from Zeihan, don't always agree with his takes but this is interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ribrY5okACk&t=2361s
23.Lots of good insights on the drone market from this convo. Zipline has been under the radar until now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF5Ocop7A_I
24.This was a helpful discussion: lots of frameworks and insights on investing at series A stage investing from A16Z. How you evaluate founders too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq0JSbuIppQ
25.Understanding the new Risk board. Globalization is over, we are now in a Neo-Mercantalist world. Very important to understand what the future may look like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sTkt0dtxF4
26."Medical students, aspiring entrepreneurs, and sartorially confused Zoomers don’t choose their role models at random, however. In his 2015 book The Secret of Our Success, Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich argued that what sets humans apart from other species is our capacity for cultural learning. According to Henrich, role models are “storage units” for cultural survival skills, and we’re hardwired to identify high-prestige role models.
Explaining a scenario where players had the choice to contribute money (or not) to a community project, Henrich wrote, “When the high-prestige player had the opportunity to contribute money first, he or she tended to contribute to, and thus cooperate in, the joint effort, and then the following low-prestige player usually did as well. So, everyone won.” But when the low-prestige player went first, they tended not to contribute, and then, neither did the high-prestige player. In effect, high-prestige people can initiate/veto collaboration, giving them power to set a group’s agenda, whereas low-prestige people have limited veto power and often follow the lead of … a role model."
https://www.profgalloway.com/role-models/
27. I like listening to Doomberg, his takes are always sober and rational. Helpful to question my own views on what is happening and where the world is going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSAN5JmgvAk
28. "Every paradigm shift in enterprise technology produces a land grab — and, inevitably, a shakeout. Cloud computing launched thousands of SaaS startups between 2005 and 2015; most were absorbed, acqui-hired, or zeroed out, while a small cohort graduated into durable, category-defining platforms. We expect the same pattern in Vertical AI, but with greater ultimate market opportunity, faster potential growth, creative new monetization models, greater early capital efficiency, and — for all those reasons — unprecedented levels of competition.
The wedge that enables much of the current generation of app-layer startups is cheap intelligence. The trap for AI Services founders is mistaking a scalable wedge for a defensible business. The companies that will endure are those that use the current window, while cost differentials are large, adoption is nascent, and incumbents are slow to embed themselves so deeply in their customers’ operations that switching becomes structurally painful, not just inconvenient. As we wrote in “Early-Stage VC in the Age of Vertical AI,” the profiles of Vertical AI company-building are forcing investors and founders alike to reimagine what success looks like. This is no exception.
This is not a new idea. It is, in fact, the oldest idea in enterprise software, rediscovered. What’s new is the surface area: SaaS companies could embed in a few workflows and capture data from the screens users interact with. AI-native platforms can embed in every workflow, capture data from every interaction — whether a human is present or not — and build compounding intelligence that makes the product better the longer it runs. The opportunity to build “load-bearing infrastructure” has never been greater. Neither has the temptation to settle for being a “cheaper vendor.”
As Benchmark Capital and Wealthfront co-founder Andy Rachleff argued, the “value hypothesis” of a startup — the what, the who, and the how of demand — is "seldom correct" on the first attempt, because founders must discover who is truly desperate for their product… not just who says they're interested. This is also why we’ve argued that when megafunds suggest that market winners are obvious within two years of founding, these are logical, if not self-serving, positions for their fund models, but not how markets behave or category-winners emerge.
Customers are always interested in cheaper services, and AI can help deliver them. What customers truly want — and what they’ll pay to retain — is a system that knows their business better than they do: one that compounds institutional knowledge, connects them to their ecosystem, and becomes more internally valuable with every interaction. Building that system is harder than reselling cheap inference. But it’s the only thing worth building."
https://insights.euclid.vc/p/who-gets-to-eat
29."Most of the time, a high valuation is a debt, not a prize. It forces you to hit massive goals just to stay alive. If your price grows faster than your business, you lose the power to make your own choices. You become a prisoner of the expectations you accepted.
For investors, the cost at the start determines the win at the end. A great business is a bad deal if you pay too much for it.
True success comes when the price of the company stays close to the truth of the work. When those stay in line, everyone wins. When they don’t, the math will eventually settle the score."
https://www.thevccorner.com/p/brex-exit-venture-capital-math
30."The adage “invest in what you know” is increasingly possible today. As a result, market participation is no longer a specialized profession. It's a mass-participation culture with its own status games, memes, heroes, villains, subcultures and language. Because of their newfound expressivity and accessibility, financial markets are increasingly intertwined with culture. And culture, from trends to events to political outcomes, is increasingly expressed through markets."
https://x.com/jessewldn/status/2022291132080644339
31.Enjoyed this discussion: what's happening in VC LP land and tech journalism land. Good takes. Charles is a smart and kind man, a rare combo in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mue5kE4UVLE
32.The father of "Geomacro", less "sell American assets" and more time to "buy rest of world assets" like Europe with extra money or move a little bit abroad. Strong case for looking at some European sectors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61a6TZQyG-8
33.Always watch this show weekly to get a pulse and make sense of the culture and zeitgeist happening here in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUA7ue5vB1E
34. Sober takes on geopolitics and the movement to a multipolar world. WW3 started in 2014 and the rise of gold as reserves in many central banks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQa6mNXcM4s
35."It’s the Universe’s way of testing you to see if you’re one of the Real Ones.
You can get to the level where you’re essentially permanently successful, but you have to suffer first.
And part of the way the Universe makes you suffer is by giving you a taste of the way things could be…right before it rips it all away from you.
You advance a few levels and then drop right back to where you were.
Unlike before (during the Eternal Grind Stage of the true beginner), you now know what you’re missing out on because you’ve (briefly) lived it.
Going back to suffering and working hard for no money when you’ve felt how things could be is a total nightmare.
It’s one of the ‘dropping-off points’ where tons of people throw in the towel for good.
The re-humbling process CRUSHES people. They retreat back to the corporate world with their tail between their legs, begging for a life of stability.
But some people get a taste of how things could be and it motivates them to get back to (and even surpass) that level.
If you can push through it then you’ll know for a fact that you’re one of the Real Ones."
https://www.tetramarketing.io/p/the-downside-of-elevating-your-lifestyle
Get The F–ing Money: Personal Finance Advice for the Young Man (and Old)
Money is something I’ve always fought hard for. Bad scarcity mindset, lack of confidence and lots of fear of not having it. It’s led to broken relationships and lots of anxiety & stress. Unnecessarily I might add. And I came up during a time which was a much nicer, prosperous globalized world where the world was literally your oyster. I can’t imagine what it would be like for young men in their teens and twenties now, looking out at their future. To make it now as a young man requires so much more focus, toughness and creativity.
That’s why I keep going to watch Andrew Tate interviews because he is the guide for many young men these days for better or worse. I watched an interview he did with Bradley Martyn and Tate did a great breakdown on what’s happening right now. And why it’s so tough out there.
Bradley: “What would you say because I know a lot of young men follow you and a lot of young men are interested in what you have to say about success and finding success. You found yours. What would you say are some of the most important things men can do right now if they're in their early 20s to figure out what they can be successful at because a lot of guys are wandering.
Andrew: Yep. They are wandering. And not only are they wandering, they're also gambling. The system is completely broken. I think it's very important before we have these conversations we understand that the system that you and I grew up in and the system that especially our parents grew up in is fundamentally completely now totally
broken.
The idea that you can go to school, get a degree, go get a good job, work hard at your job, get a promotion, start to save money, compound your money in the bank over time to buy a property which you own is bullsh-t. All gone. Never going to happen. You're never going to get a degree, which puts you $200,000 in debt, then get a job and pay off that student debt and then save enough money to now buy a house and then pay off that house. You're talking by the time you're 70, you'll still be paying this crap off. Yeah. So, there's no way this works anymore.
The traditional system that everybody was supposed to invest in which was good for society because 1) it educated people 2) gave everyone a path gave everyone hope 3) gave everyone stability 4) gave everyone a home which gave them a vested interest in their societies. All of that's gone so young people today are effectively gambling. When I speak to young men what they are doing basically is memecoins or crypto or literal gambling in a casino because they realize the game is so rigged they can't work their way out. They have to get lucky.
If you add into the fact that AI is accelerating and even more importantly a lot of the world's money is becoming heavily monopolized and I see this all the time, there are less and less small independent companies and there are more and more branches of Black Rock and Vanguard and these huge super conglomerates which are just sucking up all of the world's liquidity and all of the money is going to them. So you're living in a world where you have to gamble your way out. If you try and start a company, you're competing with monsters. And AI is coming and replacing jobs in real time.
Yeah. So, it's an extremely difficult position to be in. And unfortunately for young people, it's only going to get worse. So, every day you waste, I think the first lesson if you're a 22-y old trying to escape now. is that every day you waste, the game gets harder. So, you need to act now. You don't have three years. Your biggest weapon now in the world is time.”
It’s not a pretty take but I think he is exactly correct here. And it gets even worse as Tate continues. But he has some good recommendations which he starts with here:
“And that's why you actually need to resist, I believe, traditional education. It's not that they steal $200,000 from you. It's that they steal four years from you. Time. Four years ago, ChatGPT didn't exist. You don't have four years to learn from a textbook from 1996. The biggest waste of time on the planet. So, you don't have time because the game's rigged against you.”
The second thing is that I think that every generation has its wealth, its large wealth generation event. I think that each age bracket of people had something that happened when they were alive that gave them the chance to generate a whole bunch of wealth. And for our parents primarily, it was property. People in the generation above us, they could buy cheap homes. Yeah. And the homes exploded up in value.
And I think in the world we live in today, there’s only thing that's still cheap. In fact, it's cheaper than it's ever been. We already touched on this, information. Because you don't have to go to school to get information, and you don't have to get a degree to get information. And you don't have to hire someone who has the information to get information. You could just ask your phone. So, information is the new gold rush. It's the new cheapest thing that you can get hold of and everyone has access to it. It's true.
But most people are lazy. Most people are stupid. And if you get some good information and you get first movers advantage, you actually take action and do things before other people, there's still a way you can make money. But it's just having the perspicacity, my favorite word, to pay attention to opportunities all of the time and actually have the agency to act on them and to be quick because the world is so fast now you don't even have time. You don't even have a day to make a business plan.
So, how do you know what to look for? Well, I'll tell you some ways I make. So in the age of financialized capitalism which is where we are, the most difficult thing about making money in the world today is that you need money to make. And this is what makes it so difficult to do because if you have no money in the first place how do you make money. Any Dip sh-t now can turn 10 million into 20 million. They just buy stocks and wait. That's it. It's not even hard. I mean Bitcoin's not doing what it's supposed to do but if you have enough belief you can buy Bitcoin and wait. Yeah.
You know, in the olden days, if I said double your money, you had to take that money, go build factories and hire staff and sell whatever product you were producing to double your money. You haven't got to do that now. And the reason you don't have to do that is because you're buying into a monopoly. If you buy Amazon stock, you're effectively shutting down mom and pop shops all around the country because you're buying into the monopoly, which is crushing all the mom and pop shops because they can't compete.
So, everything's becoming monopolized. It's very difficult. So to make money, you have to find an opportunity or find a way to make your first chunk of money because it's easier than ever to turn money into money, but you need money in the first place and it's harder than ever to make money from zero. I think a lot of the money now comes from the arbitrage on the lack of knowledge in simple things. So if you can speak to boomers and basically use chat GPT for them, you can get paid.
But it's getting off zero, which is the hardest thing. But a lot of it just takes agency. And there is an arbitrage now between the generation above us, which don't know how to use all of the things that the 17-year-olds know how to use. And I think this is where the money is. And that's going to disappear as the older people die. It's going to be harder for someone who is now currently five years old once they get 15 to call you and I and try and convince us to do something on a computer because we know how to use computers.
So right now currently as we sit in as we sit here if you were to ask me
the best way to make money in the world today, it is to take advantage of the fact that there is a large subsection of the population that not only have all the money. But secondly, don't know how to do a lot of things that most young people already know how to do. And if you can leverage that correctly you can actually make quite a lot of money simply. That's the best way to make money in the world today. And that's going to change because how to make money changes every 10 or 15 years.
Like I said before, not too long ago, 20, 30, 40 years ago, property was the way. Now, I think that is the way. What comes next, I don't know what's going to happen when every single person on the planet and the entire generation below us is grown up. We're grown up. Everyone knows how to use AI. Everyone understands what crypto is. Everyone's already done their own investing. Then how do you make money then? I don't know. But right now there's a huge arbitrage. So that's where the money is.”
If you made it this far, I think it becomes much clearer on what you have to do. Have agency, take action. Find a customer segment, figure out their problem, and figure out a solution. Sell. Repeat rinse. Simple, not easy. Go forth young man. Works for old men too.
Stay Grounded: Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself Part Deux
I keep thinking about the day when I get massive liquidity. I keep thinking about what I’d do. As an introvert, I’d stop meeting people, cut my circle. Do all the things wealthy people do, vacation at luxury resorts, fly private, have a personal trainer & shopper, and probably never leave my house if I did not have to.
I’d really enjoy my introvert time but I know I’d just end up rotting mentally and physically. I did some version of this back in 2012-2013 and I got bored after 2 months with a little bit of liquidity and ended up re-engaging with reality. I read something on X that explained why you need to do regular people stuff, whether it was true or not, it rings true: https://x.com/HamptonAc_/status/2016134704504746060
"I fly commercial because the second you start thinking you're too good to sit next to regular people, you stop understanding what they actually want." Said he built his company selling to normal restaurant owners. People working 80 hour weeks just to keep their spot open. "If I start flying private and staying in penthouses, I forget what their life looks like. I forget what problems actually matter to them."
The moment you separate yourself from the people you're selling to, you lose your edge. Proximity to reality is more valuable than comfort". I asked if he's ever tempted to buy the flashy cars, the beach house, and the whole flex. "I bought a nicer house. I travel more. But I'm not trying to look rich. I'm trying to stay useful" He said the wealthiest people he knows are the most paranoid about losing touch. "They know the second they stop understanding normal problems, they become irrelevant."
Completely 100% makes sense. This is not just about business either. This is about regular everyday life too. Don’t get disconnected to people. Don’t become an out of touch rich person. These are the people who lose touch with reality, and start making really bad decisions. They are also the first to get eaten, figuratively and literally.
Surviving An Uncertain Future: Building Lighthouse Skills
I find myself really anxious these days. It’s such a weird time. There are so many changes and I’ve never been great with uncertainty in my life. Massive technological changes, I mean AI is literally going to rip through white collar jobs. Even bigger socio-economic changes as the K-shaped economy fractures our society. Geopolitical stresses and global macro are crazy at the moment too. No wonder everyone feels like the world is ending.
First of all, you need to have the right mindset. That you can overcome any and every one of these issues. You have no choice. People rely on you. You have to have determination that you will thrive. You have to expect to work harder than you have ever worked before.
And this is where X comes to the rescue. I always end up with some piece of advice or recommendations that really help. Sahil Bloom posted a great write up on Lighthouse Skills https://x.com/SahilBloom/status/2015775632911692209
If you need to focus, focus on building skills that will last the test of time. He writes:
“Further, there are timeless skills—those that are likely to remain valuable and relevant across a wide array of future states.
I call these Lighthouse Skills:
Sales: Sales is the most useful meta-skill for life. No matter what path you choose to go down, you need to learn to sell: Sell yourself, sell your story, sell your product, sell your vision, sell your ideas. My richest friends aren't the ones with the highest IQs. They just know how to sell. They aren't afraid of being told no. They keep refining the message until they get to a yes.
Storytelling: Become exceptional at aggregating data and communicating it simply and effectively. Data in, story out. Learn to pick up on cues from listeners that signal the story is connecting (eyes lighting up, leaning in posture, etc.). Iterate accordingly.
Clear Communication: The ability to clearly communicate (with computers and humans) is going to stand out. AI is going to amplify the output capacity of the clear communicator by 100x.
Emotional Intelligence: Human interpersonal skills are arguably going to become the most important skills in a future where more and more of our lives are run through technology. The ability to create meaningful, real connection with other humans will stand out even more than it does today. Note: I plan to write a full piece on how to become more emotionally intelligent. Reply YES if you're interested in reading it!
Public Speaking: Strong, confident public speaking builds authority and improves status. It's not just about presentations in front of a large audience. It applies to normal conversations and small group settings just as much as the huge conference hall.
Taste: Good taste is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. It requires a level of forward-thinking to be in front of trends to capture value before the market squeezes out the opportunity.
Clear Thinking: Gather data, process it thoughtfully, make a decision, iterate accordingly. Avoid the "that's just the way we do things" mentality and question underlying assumptions. As the pace of change accelerates, maintaining rational, clear thinking will be more valuable than ever before.
The goal is to focus on developing a set of skills and attributes that are relevant and valuable in a range of potential futures.”
Hard to add to these, but I would say learn AI tools & agents, test everything. AI will be a massive leverage for humans. It already is. People with AI will beat people without AI.
Get good at copy writing. Get good at project management and organization. Even more important is to build a community and network of like-minded people.
Developing these Lighthouse Skills will give you the confidence and enable you to overcome any challenges that the future throws at you. As Sahil said even better than me: "The one who can tolerate and embrace the most uncertainty is the one who will eventually win."
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads April 19th, 2026
“Spring is the time of plans and projects”--Leo Tolstoy
Important discussion from two guys on the frontlines of defensetech in Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6efOuq5x7I
2."Ukrainian soldiers complain that U.S. companies lack an understanding of electronic warfare, as well as the different types of air defense and other countermeasures that both sides use against the drone threat. If the U.S. is ever dragged into a large-scale war against a peer or near-peer adversary like China or Iran, it will be ill-equipped for a drone-heavy background like that in Ukraine."
3."Bessent has already shown his hand. Rising gold prices are not a problem to be solved. They are capacity being created.
Watch the gold price relative to fiscal stress. Watch central bank accumulation. Watch the language Treasury uses around asset-side policy. And watch which country moves first to formalize what markets already know.
In the next phase of currency competition, balance sheets will matter more than slogans. The United States has a trillion-dollar card it has not yet played."
https://tanviratna.substack.com/p/bessents-1-trillion-treasury-secret
4."America’s economy has become one giant bet on AI, with seven tech companies representing more than a third of the S&P 500. The concentration of economic power in so few hands renders those businesses uniquely vulnerable to a boycott, as consumers can focus on a short target list. Big Tech’s vulnerability is further multiplied by the subscription model, as valuations for subscription companies are typically 8x to 20x revenue.
One example: In 2022, Netflix reported losing just 200,000 subscribers in a single quarter, and that wiped out $50 billion in market cap overnight. (Netflix attributed the churn to increased competition and the lifting of pandemic restrictions that had kept people in front of their TVs.) The free gift with purchase? Consumers maximize political impact while minimizing household expenses. In America, 4 out of 5 adults spend nearly $200 per year on unused subscriptions. I had three HBO Max subscriptions … somehow.
Some of you have asked why we are targeting Amazon, my 2026 stock pick? Others want to know why we didn’t target Disney? A: I’d rather be effective than right. The companies at ground zero of Resist and Unsubscribe have an outsized influence over the national economy and our president. The stocks in the “blast zone” belong to consumer-facing companies we’ve identified as active enablers of ICE. Collectively, ground zero and blast zone businesses don’t represent the totality of complicity, but rather the jugular of American authoritarianism."
https://www.profgalloway.com/resistance-infrastructure/
5."But in general, I strongly recommend inverting the idea stage - focusing on demand before you focus on supply - because life is too short to build something people don’t want right now. This approach seems to be the lowest-risk way to build what people actually want, and a way to mostly avoid the infinite pre-PMF wilderness."
https://howtogrow.substack.com/p/inverting-the-idea-stage
6."And that’s taste as something that is not subjective but objective and universal—taste as the ability to identify quality.
That’s a topic rich enough to fill a whole other essay (or an entire book).
But regardless of whether or not you believe in this definition of taste, I think the best path there is the same: You make things. And as you make them, you try to be aware of how you make them. You try to speak your why—why “yes” to this and “no” to that."
https://every.to/p/what-is-taste-really
7. Lots of good stuff here: SpaceX acquisition of xAI + Clawcon & Wapo Layoffs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbhGfYsFUls
8."And Bessent, it seems was quite the player, albeit one who seems to have a knack for a holistic approach rather than a Systems-oriented one … and a player who now may have finally been given free rein to take aim at the game itself.
The real game.
After all, following the massive success—or catastrophic economic failure, depending on which side of the trade you were on—of the trade that made (or unmade) a decade in England, Bessent didn’t stop there, as he rose through the ranks to head the firm’s London office, then returned as Chief Investment Officer from 2011 to 2015, where he orchestrated multibillion-dollar bets like the successful short against the Japanese yen in 2013, reportedly adding another $10 billion to Soros’ coffers through trades that once more preyed on governmental fiscal vulnerabilities and exposed the fragility of their ongoing and long-running fiat manipulations; yet, in a twist that screams defection in the language of the narrative warfare I track most closely, Bessent parted ways in 2015 amid reported personal and professional frictions with the Soros dynasty—we’ll get back to that—founding Key Square Capital Management with a $2 billion seed from his former mentor, only to steer the hedge fund toward windfall profits during the 2022 market downturn by betting against overleveraged assets, demonstrating an uncanny knack for profiting from the very systemic instabilities he now seeks to eradicate.
To wit, from where I’m sitting, and despite optics to the contrary, this pattern of exploitation isn’t representative of mere opportunism; it’s the profile of a wolf who learned to hunt on the borders of the rival pack’s den, internalized the mechanics of soft power projection through currency warfare and hedge fund hegemony and emerged with a publicly-stated zeal for a “global economic reordering” that prioritizes Main Street’s resurgence over Wall Street’s dominance—as he articulated in his April 2024 address to the American Bankers Association, vowing that after four decades of elite enrichment, it was time for tax reforms like eliminating levies on tips, overtime and Social Security, coupled with deregulation and balanced tariffs to compel fair global trade and domestic onshoring, core pillars of Donald Trump’s Golden Age economic pitch.
And so, while Bessent’s history positions him as a key asset of those who both subsist on and who exploit the central banking cabal, he now stands as the key architect of its impending collapse, and perhaps a more consistent source of existential dread than Trump himself, and yet, a man who fits ‘The Donald’ template to a Trumpian T: an ex-insider who knows their rituals, their weaknesses and who harbors no loyalty to their perpetuation."
https://burningbright.substack.com/p/the-wolf-of-main-street
9.Kevin is one of the OGs in Silicon Valley: a rare top tier investor and operator. Super insightful conversation on investing in the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmKPCcbo2e0&t=2145s
10."Look at what Anthropic did when Clawdbot showed up. Open-source project that wrapped Claude into an always-on personal agent. Persistent memory, messaging integration, real computer access. 60,000 GitHub stars in weeks. The company that just caused a $285 billion selloff reacted to Clawdbot like it was an existential threat. Tightened enforcement on third-party harnesses. Pushed trademark claims. Forced a rebrand. Twice.
Why would the model maker panic about an open-source wrapper? Because the wrapper was capturing the value. The context, the memory, the user relationship.
The model does the work. The harness decides what work is worth doing. That’s where the margin lives.
Back to the bounce
The selloff fades. Markets overshoot on fear.
But the question remains. Who has a story.
US tech gets absurd multiples on narrative. Indian IT gets modest ones. Indian IT is arguably more capable at enterprise delivery than Palantir.
India doesn’t have the insane valuations. We’re far below. A company here getting even a fraction of Palantir’s multiple would look completely different. The opportunity is to position as the credible alternative that makes Palantir’s promises real at a fraction of the cost. Nobody in Indian IT is telling that story.
Markets don’t pay for value. They pay for the story about value."
https://mtrajan.substack.com/p/value-capture-has-nothing-to-do-with
11."The speed of a team is limited by its slowest member’s “concerns.” By removing the need for consensus, you restore Radical Velocity. It is better to move fast and be 10% wrong than to move at a crawl and be 100% “aligned” with a group of people who have nothing to lose."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-collaboration-myth
12.Biotech Prime: Learning about Pilgrim.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxj41-p8xyo
13.Lots of nuggets to understand Kongsberg, one of the top European Defense primes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6p-UAmfs_E&t=13s
14.I appreciate this week's discussion: Especially on the SaaS crisis and AI + Moltbook. These guys know what they are talking about on the tech industry topics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTiHheA40nI
15."The ultimate status symbol is remaining perfectly calm during a public crisis. When everyone expects you to explain, apologize, or “vibrate” with the chaos, you respond with a single, cold directive. This signals that your Internal Fortress is impenetrable. You are the eye of the storm."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-vulnerability-fetish
16."SaaS valuations have been under pressure for some time, particularly after the bubble of 2020 and 2021. The last few weeks have been especially dramatic and may represent an overcorrection. Even so, the valuation landscape for SaaS has changed permanently.
For these reasons and others, the future of SaaS fundraising and valuations will likely be more modest on a long-term basis. Entrepreneurs would do well to embrace this disruption: build AI-first SaaS companies with low cost structures, flexible pricing and packaging, and a focus on solving the hardest customer problems at dramatically lower cost.
The future is not fewer SaaS products—it’s ten times as many. And wherever there is opportunity, entrepreneurs will step in to fill the void."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/02/07/seven-reasons-saas-valuations-are-crumbling-in-the-age-of-ai/
17."The ultimate signal of a sovereign individual is the ability to end a long-term relationship or partnership the moment it becomes a net negative for the mission. No drama, no long explanations, no “second chances” that were never earned. A clean break signals that your time is a finite resource and you are the only one authorized to allocate it."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-loyalty-debt
18."A Golden Age is a period of intense innovation, category creation, velocity, and productivity that lasts typically several years. Golden Ages at companies have the property of attracting all the greatest talent in the industry, very quickly. That’s happening at Anthropic right now.
So now you see how the magic starts and ends. During Golden Ages, there is more work than people. And when they crash, it is because there are more people than work.
As soon as there wasn’t enough work, people began to fight over the work that was left. It kicked off a wave of empire building, territoriality, politicking, land grabs, and, as Lydia Ash taught me, Cookie Licking–a phrase folks at Microsoft had invented to accuse people of claiming work that they will never actually get around to doing."
https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-anthropic-hive-mind-d01f768f3d7b
19."To the point: economies of scale and market dominance are key to competitiveness particularly for manufacturing companies exposed to global competition. Takaichi knows this very well, and is now taught by “Team Trump” more than by anyone else that Japan has got what it takes to be the engineering and industrial powerhouse that can help re-industrialize the United States. What Japan lacks is scale and genuine “National Champions”.
The idea of promoting both regional and national champions by state-sponsored M&A has been a longstanding dream of METI technocrats. Now the time has come.
Takaichi has made it very clear she favors greater regional empowering, even going so far as to agree to plan for a second capital city in Osaka. Even if the LDP wins a majority in the election and, technically, is no longer dependent on the Isshin Progressive Party to govern, I expect her commitment to regional government reform and a gradual re-design of central-to-local government to move into greater focus.
Specifically, here is what PM Takaichi’s fiscal policy changes are poised to focus on — greater autonomy of regional governments to pursue local industrial policy - its not about growing the budget, but about re-allocating it and, more importantly, changing the budget stewardship to empower the regions.
And yes, the national government will still get to direct the funds — regional gets to compete for projects deemed urgent and essential for national economic security reasons; they submit their plans, and the elite technocrats from METI and MoF decide the winners."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/beyond-the-takaichi-trade
20. "Taylor Sheridan is straddling the same divide in his popular western shows. In Yellowstone he deftly balances the two agendas. Kevin Costner (playing rancher John Dutton) is a flawed person, but we still sympathize with his love of the land and rugged determination. He is both dysfunctional and idealistic—those traits coexist in the same complicated person. So you can watch this series either way, as deconstructing the myth or building it back up.
We still live with that dilemma today.
Do we trust our gunslingers and authority figures? Or do we fear them? And allow me to point out the obvious—this is not just a question about cowboy movies. It’s a question about our society as a whole.
So do you vote for Gary Cooper as president, hoping for a courageous man of conviction. Or do you pick Clint Eastwood, because you need a cruel bastard to maintain law and order?
Maybe the western film is a good place to explore these issues. It provides all the necessary archetypes, and is perhaps the purest setting where we can grasp the trade-offs between freedom and social order, independence and authority, toughness and benevolence, innocence and experience.
If that happened, the western story would have gone full circle. After rising in status as popular entertainment, it collapsed into cynicism and senseless violence. And now may be the moment when it returns to its legitimate place as a foundational myth—a kind of Iliad and Odyssey rolled together for the American psyche.
We need myths and stories. And, for better or worse, this is the one we’ve inherited. Let’s not abandon, but make the most of it."
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/what-i-learned-from-binge-watching
21."Trust is lubricant. It is the grease that lets the gears turn without grinding, the oil that prevents the machinery of cooperation from seizing. And because it is lubricant, it is invisible when it works. No one notices the oil until the engine burns out.
What does the market see? Trust does work markets might otherwise intermediate. Friction creates demand for products. When trust disappears, someone must sell its replacement. The lawyer who drafts the contract the handshake didn’t need. The compliance software that monitors the worker who was once trusted to do her job. The credentialing body that certifies the competence that reputation once established. The background check that investigates the neighbor who was once known. The audit that verifies the books that were once taken on faith. Each of these is a profitable service, and each becomes more profitable as trust erodes. There is now an entire industry—call it the friction industry—whose revenues depend on the continued destruction of the commons it has learned to replace.
Trust does not appear in GDP. Its absence does. When neighbors watch each other’s houses, no transaction occurs; when they install surveillance systems, GDP rises. When a handshake closes a deal, no lawyer bills; when contracts replace handshakes, the legal industry grows. The successful destruction of trust registers as economic growth—more services sold, more professionals employed, more activity to measure. A high-trust society looks, to the econometrician, poorer than a low-trust society frantically purchasing substitutes for what it has lost. We have built our measure of prosperity around what can be counted, and trust cannot be counted—only its expensive replacements can. This is how a civilization can impoverish itself while every metric shows it getting richer.
The economists call trust “social capital,” but the name obscures the crucial asymmetry. Trust is not like money. It is more like topsoil—built up over generations through countless small depositions, easily washed away in a single season of careless extraction, and once gone, recoverable only on timescales that mock human planning. The farmer who strip-mines his soil for a decade of bumper harvests will leave his children a desert. The society that strip-mines its trust for a generation of efficiency gains will leave its children something worse: institutions that still stand in their accustomed places but have been hollowed out from within, and a friction industry selling services to navigate the rubble.
Private equity has refined this extraction into a playbook called brand arbitrage. Acquire an institution that has accumulated reputational capital over generations—a regional hospital, a beloved newspaper, a century-old consumer brand. Extract value by cutting the quality that built the reputation while riding the residual trust. The brand will carry the degraded product for years before anyone notices. By the time trust has fully eroded, the fund has exited, returns secured. The shell remains. The commons has been enclosed."
https://thechoiceengine.substack.com/p/the-strip-mining-of-trust
22.Some global macro, why Trump picked Warsh for new Fed chairman. This and the Imperial Circle concept which is super helpful to understand how the US will weaponize capital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtbwA2bWHBc
23.A perspective on global powers and geopolitics from the eyes of the Islamic world. 4 active blocs: US, EU, RU, CN, 4 passive blocs: Islamic, India, Africa, South America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DnMnpp8SkU
24.I appreciate these takes on venture capital and PE. The Slow Ventures guys just like the Founders Fund folks have super contrarian views which usually tend to be right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xClBbMQldg0
25."Even in the absence of a formal arms control treaty, a nuclear arms race on the scale of the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union and the United States added thousands of delivery vehicles and tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, is difficult to imagine. Russia, in particular, and the United States lack the industrial and financial capacity to pursue such an effort, especially amid competing defense-industrial priorities in the conventional domain.
From a European perspective, strengthening conventional defense and deterring Russian adventurism beyond Ukraine remain the top priorities. This does not change, even if a modest increase in deployed Russian nuclear warheads were to materialize."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/the-treaty-is-dead-relax
26."This wasn’t fickleness. It was economics. And it reveals why virality—once the holy grail of marketing strategy—has become economically worthless.
Death of virality can be traced to social media’s algorithmic personalization, exponential growth of content (and content creators), and corresponding fragmentation of culture.
More people, more content, smaller audiences."
https://andjelicaaa.substack.com/p/virality-is-dead
27."The stocks have largely recovered and analysts are being more sanguine about how important it is to keep track of inventory, product sales, accounting and other key enterprise data, not to mention how to secure that data. These key databases and applications aren’t likely to be vibe coded.
But, but, but: enterprise SaaS companies would be stupid to ignore the implications of the rise of “professional” vibe coding. There is emerging two classes of vibe coding: hobbyists building apps to deal with annoying tasks and professional programmers using it to reduce the drudge work of building systems. The latter category of vide coders could well change the fundamental dynamics of building and selling enterprise systems. That won’t happen overnight but it may well become a strategic issue for the existing players in the SaaS world."
https://salsop.substack.com/p/dear-silicon-valley-resistance-is
28."There is an opportunity here to lean into authenticity, and I’m going to embrace it. While others complain about AI ruining everything, let’s see what we can do here before becoming totally blackpilled on everything in the genre.
Again, this is good news for people with something to offer. The AI slop era is making genuine human insight more valuable, not less. You just need to prove you’re the real deal, and video/audio is the most effective way to do that. So that’s what we are gong to do."
https://www.dossier.today/p/how-the-dossier-will-stand-out-in
29."TLDR — moats are dynamic things that are actively evolved over time, not a singular breakthrough that sustains the company."
https://www.alsoblogposts.com/p/what-is-a-moat
30."If China cuts this supply off, all these other critical industries will be significantly impaired if not shut down entirely. What good is having a $200 billion subsidized Intel fabrication facility if the workers do not have access to cleanroom gloves?
Gloves, however, are a $0.03 commodity and therefore face a unique challenge when enticing private investment. Without public policy support, businesses will continue to spend a penny less per glove buying from China or other East Asian nations. This would leave many critical industries at risk.
The bottom line is that times have changed, but public policy has not fully caught up. We are too dependent on too many critical goods, leaving us too vulnerable. Only deliberate, mapped-out government action in support of specific industries will dig America out of its dependence hole. Yet the lingering influence of arguments favoring a more laissez-faire approach to national security perpetuates a chicken or egg argument that is causing endless delay and endangering the nation.
Goods are either critical or they are not. Rare earths are. Critical minerals are. Semiconductor chips are. And it is time for public policy to treat nitrile gloves as the critical goods that they are, through public policies that guarantee they can serve the national interest in times of need."
31.Some good data points from the folks at A16Z on the AI boom in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSohMpT24SI
32. "The founders who build $10B+ companies don’t have this problem. Because the company IS the point.
The number is exhaust from the engine, not the engine itself.
This is what we’re actually underwriting when we invest at inception.
At Antler, we write $500K commitments to a founder before they even make their first dollar. Before traction. Sometimes before they’ve picked a co-founder. I’m not underwriting a market or a product at this stage, those will change fifteen times before the Series A. I’m underwriting the founder’s relationship with the work, and their ability to do the work itself.
The ones who scare me the most, in the best way, barely talk about money. They talk about the customer. They talk about why the existing solution is broken and it’s personally offensive to them. They talk about the problem at 11pm on a Tuesday with the same intensity they had at 9am on Monday.
The ones who lead with “I want to build a billion-dollar company” make me nervous. Not because ambition is bad. But because that tells me the goal is the number, not the work. And the Hampton data now puts hard evidence behind something every experienced investor already feels: when the number is the goal, the founder runs out of fuel exactly when the company needs them most.
The best founders I’ve backed aren’t optimizing for an exit. They’re optimizing for the next thing they can make better. The exit, if and when it comes, is a consequence of the obsession, not the cause of it."
https://mondaymorning.substack.com/p/the-50-million-lie
33."Japan is in a real fiscal bind. The only way it will really be able to pay for expanded defense spending is to cut government spending in other areas — which, most of all, means benefits for the country’s burgeoning masses of elderly people. Cutting off grandma to build missiles doesn’t usually make for very good politics, but if anyone can persuade Japan’s people to accept the sacrifice, it’s probably Takaichi.
Fortunately, defense spending offers Japan some economic advantages beyond simply countering China. First of all, it offers the government the perfect excuse to wind down other, more inefficient forms of stimulus spending, like bailouts for failing companies. The Japanese economy doesn’t need stimulus at all at this point, of course, but some Japanese people will be afraid that growth will crater if spending drops. Diverting money from bailouts to defense will be good for productivity.
More importantly, defense spending will help revive Japan’s manufacturing sector, which has been under extreme pressure from Chinese competition in recent decades. Defense spending gives manufacturers a cushion from China’s export flood, and stimulates investment throughout the supply chain.
The defense imperative may also help bring Japan up from its position as a technological laggard. Japan has fallen behind, partly due to its weakness in software, partly due to the fact that most of Japan’s R&D is incremental stuff, performed by risk-averse corporations. Defense spending will allow Japan’s government to get into the game, funding bolder research efforts that benefit many companies instead of just one. It will also spur faster adoption of AI technology — out of sheer necessity — that will probably solve Japan’s software problems.
Finally, defense will be a great area for Japan to solicit greenfield investment — a big missing piece of Japan’s economy. American defense companies looking for places to make drones, ships, and missiles unencumbered by the U.S.’ legalistic regulatory state would be well-advised to build some factories in Japan, which can set them up quickly and easily, and where supply chains, labor quality, and infrastructure are all very good.
So while Takaichi has some big challenges ahead of her, she also has some big opportunities. It’s sad that Japan is being forced to leave behind its long pacifist moment. But with the right leadership, this necessary change could end up helping the country escape economic stagnation as well."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-takaichi-era-begins-for-real
34.One of the most insightful interviews on operating in the age of AI and learnings from some of the top people in Silicon Valley. Gokul is an SV OG and top tier operator and investor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUsb1FYOstA&t=2s
35."The market doesn’t pay for what you know; it pays for what you can execute without supervision.
The Skill-Stack Protocol: Utility, Velocity, Uniqueness.
The curator replaces “Credentials” with “Proof of Work” to ensure absolute market dominance.
1. The Proof of Work (PoW) Mandate: Stop telling people what you “studied.” Show them what you Built. A GitHub repository, a profitable newsletter, or a functioning marketing funnel is worth 1000 MBAs. If it doesn’t exist in the real world, it doesn’t count."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-education-trap
36."A key theme which has been a stabilising force for global markets in an increasingly uncertain world, and policies seen as batsh*t crazy from Trump, has been diversification, away from the U.S., whether that is in foreign affairs, defence or investment. And this diversification is being seen in the weakness of the dollar, coming despite those investment pledges noted above and U.S. growth exceptionism still.
The latter would suggest a stronger dollar but while leaders from the Gulf, Taiwan, Europe, et al, have been turning up in the White House, kissing the ring, and promising big investment in the US, they have doing the opposition in effect. They have been voting with their feet and investing away from the US, at home and in each other’s economies."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/trying-to-gauge-geopolitical-risk
37."This is where the yuan enters, not as a reserve asset to be worshipped, but as a settlement instrument to be used. The mechanism is straightforward in concept and profound in consequence. If your import dependence on China rises, your need to settle trade with China rises. Your willingness to hold working balances of yuan, or at least to access yuan liquidity via swaps and offshore markets, rises with it. You do not have to store your wealth in yuan to be pulled into a yuan linked circuit. You just have to transact.
China is not becoming the world’s reserve currency. It is becoming a regional settlement hub, and it is using manufacturing and exports as the engine of that settlement orbit.
That claim needs more than trade totals. It needs evidence that Beijing is intentionally shaping the currency’s reference frame.
China is not replacing the dollar as the world’s savings asset. It is constructing a regional settlement sphere where a growing share of real economy flows, goods, commodities, infrastructure, can clear without touching the dollar, and it is using manufacturing dominance and a managed stronger yuan posture to accelerate that shift.
This is a different kind of power than reserve currency status, but it is power nonetheless. It changes the marginal dynamics of trade invoicing. It gives Beijing leverage over crisis liquidity in its neighborhood. It weakens the automatic assumption that every meaningful cross border transaction must ultimately pass through a dollar bridge.
If Japan’s carry unwind is the tremor that shakes the legacy system, China’s export and yuan strategy is the slow pour of concrete setting a new foundation next door. One is a sudden stop. The other is a creeping reroute."
https://tanviratna.substack.com/p/is-china-bending-global-finance-without
38."The deeper issue is clear when examining the energetics layer of the munitions stack. Energetics—the explosives and propellants encased in shells, missiles, and rockets—are not simply another industrial input. They are a distinct class of material governed by uniquely restrictive handling and transportation standards. Finished explosives and many energetic intermediates are subject to stringent limitations on packaging, routing, shipment size, carrier certification, storage, and transfer.
As a result, energetics do not scale like metals, electronics, or structural components. Even when domestic production exists, movement remains expensive, slow, and capacity-limited, particularly as volumes increase. In crisis conditions, these constraints intensify. Insurance retreats, transport availability narrows, and regulatory waivers struggle to keep pace with operational need. The consequence is that production capacity can become functionally inaccessible long before factories reach physical limits. Throughput collapses not at the point of manufacture, but along the transportation spine that connects industrial nodes."
https://www.firstbreakfast.com/p/why-the-ammunition-surge-is-stalledand
39."We’re going to walk through what this means and how it signals some general bad choices being made by brands. Specifically, going for the largest population is rarely a good move at this point. We’re entering into the world of the sovereign individual which means you only care about the talented few, not the masses.
The day of marketing to the biggest population is on the decline since they will inevitably be on government support as AI eats up low paying positions.
Yes we realize this all sounds pretty brutal. Doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Also. We don’t really fault the advertisers for going after the only growing population. Seems logical if you’re not looking at second derivative impacts.
30 years ago a talented person could only make money in one industry. Now? A talented person can earn money off 10 different skills and (surprise, surprise) these people are typically in the top 1% of more than one activity! Competition simply rises exponentially.
As usual this is just viewed from our own lens. We’re max long digital immersion, degeneracy, loneliness and wealth disparity.
People misinterpret the Sovereign Individual for “USA is doomed”. It really doesn’t say that. In fact it suggests that it will be extremely polarizing and expensive. Sounds oddly familiar to today no?
The US is the best house in the bad neighborhood and strength + chaos can coexist for a long time. You can have huge amounts of debt and socio-economic dispersion before anything breaks. As long as NPCs have their chips + VR girlfriends + Sportsball, they won’t be rioting any time soon."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/demographic-destiny-usa-and-abroad
40."So the topline goal of the venture firm now is creating the best interface to help founders win. Everything else—how you staff a firm, how you deploy capital, what size funds you raise, how you help get deals done and broker power in service of founders—is downstream from that.
Mike Maples is famous for saying that your fund-size is your strategy. What’s also true is your fund-size is your belief in the future. It’s your bet on how big startup outcomes are going to be. It may have been “arrogant” to raise big funds over the last decade, but the belief was fundamentally correct. So when top firms continue to raise massive funds to deploy over the next decade, that’s them betting on the future and putting their money where their mouth is. Scaled Venture isn’t a corruption of the venture model: it’s the venture model finally growing up and adopting the characteristics of the companies they back.
Scaled and boutique will both be fine, it’s the middle that’s in trouble: the funds that are too big to afford to miss out on the mega-winners, but too small to compete with bigger firms who can structurally offer a better product for founders. a16z is unique in that it’s both sides of the barbell—a collection of specialized boutique firms benefiting from a scaled platform team.
The firms that can best partner with founders will win. That could mean a supersized reserve of capital, or unprecedented reach, or a huge platform of complementary services. Or it could mean irreplicable expertise, excellent counsel, or simply unbelievable risk tolerance.
There’s an old joke in venture capital where VCs think that every product can be improved, every great technology scaled, and every industry disrupted—except their own."
Learning from Morgan Housel: Personal Finance and Human Psychology
Money is important and most people have complicated feelings in regards to money. As an Asian immigrant kid, who had to start over several times, I personally struggle here. The intense insecurity and fear of losing money, the even more intense materialism and the constant need for more. Been fighting this my entire life. Which is why I found Morgan Housel’s books: The Psychology of Money to be incredibly useful in managing these feelings. I really appreciated an interview he did with Shane Parrish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWZZEa9BURw
“It’s not necessarily how much you have. It’s just a contrast to what you have before. Would you rather have a net worth of a million dollars when you used to have 2 million or would you rather have a net worth of 500,000 when you used to have 200,000? And psychologically, most people would rather have 500,000. The speed at which a luxury becomes a necessity is 2 seconds.
But I bring that up. I think that’s an important thing to bring up because what has driven me are people like you and and others James Clear, Michael Lewis, people who I’ve really looked up to and not been so crazy to say I want to be that person one day.
Both because everyone should just do it in their own way. But I’ve always seen there is a difference between envy and aspiration. You can be really inspired by somebody’s success without envying them. And you know, if I can name half a dozen people that I’ve really looked up to and say like, man, they’re a good role model. But the important thing is I don’t envy them. I can also name half a dozen people, I won’t who, I’ve envied. And when I try to get introspective about that, why do I envy that person? It’s usually because they achieved a level of success, but I didn’t like how they did it. And that’s a subjective thing. Maybe they’re all good people in their own right. I won’t be too judgmental, which I won’t name them. But I think it’s an important distinction. People in your life who inspire you versus you envy them. And I think everyone, if they’re honest, probably has, you know, some of both.
And so, you ask what inspires me. I think it’s that having people in your life that you look up to and you can use as a north star is important. The other that I think is really important, I think this was a Buffett line. He said: “It is really good to have people in your life who you don’t want to disappoint. Nothing is a bigger motivator in life than having a couple people, rarely more than that, that you really don’t want to disappoint. I really desperately do not want to disappoint my wife and kids. I really don’t want to disappoint my parents.”
That’s fundamental. I think most people will have their own version of that, but something like that. And nothing is more of a motivator than that to want to live a good life.”
I think the world is player versus player. But ultimately the best competition is with yourself. And more importantly how to manage your own psychology and demons.
“But if you look back 30 years ago and you could see what you’ve accomplished today, the financial success, the status success that you’ve had, you’ve blown away any goal that you would have had. Why keep going? I think in a healthy way, I can have a very split personality of on one hand, I can say, man, I’m really good at what I do and I’m achieving a lot and this is amazing. And then I can very quickly flip a switch and say, “I’m a nobody and I’ve done some really bad work lately.”
And I think on balance, that’s a pretty healthy personality because if you only have the ego side, you’re going to run yourself off a cliff. And if you only have the humble/ depressed side, you’re never going to get anywhere. And so I’ve been pretty good at being able to toggle back and forth sometimes, you know, within the same hour, certainly within the same day.
Shane: And so what keeps you going?
Morgan: I really enjoy what I do. Writing has never felt like work to me. And I think that it’s the same for you. It’s just an extension of kind of who you are. It’s never felt like work. And so I enjoy doing it. But also what keeps me going is like the healthy side of me.
Part of me says like I can keep doing this and do good work. And then a minute later the other bird on the shoulder, being like you suck. You suck at this. And again on net I think it’s a very healthy personality even if it’s just the two extreme sides.
Shane: What can money do for us and what can it do for us?
Morgan: It can do a list of positive things for everybody. What I think is true is that
on average, people who have more money tend to have fewer bad days, but I don’t
know if they have more better days. I think it is more likely that when you have more money, you are less likely to wake up and be like, man, things are not going well. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to wake up grinning ear to ear. Now, that’s a lifestyle improvement. If you have fewer bad days, that’s like great. Your life, your life is better.
That’s obviously better than the alternative, but it’s not happiness. It’s a very different thing. And I think it can throw some people off when they are when they aspire to happiness or they think that what they’re achieving in the money they’re making should make them happy. Sometimes it does. Very often it doesn’t. And they wake up and they’re like, “What happened?” Like I thought this was going to make me happy, but I’m not.
So, I think there’s a level of expectation setting where it’s like I think money can be more like a vaccine where it can prevent a lot of misery, which is great. Vaccines are wonderful. Like we don’t have polio. It’s a great thing, but maybe that’s a good analogy because you and I don’t wake up in the morning being like, “Oh, I’m so glad I don’t have polio. So grateful for the fact we don’t do that. We don’t think about it.” And I think that’s a lot of what money can do. It is a lifestyle improvement, but don’t think it’s going to make you waking up ear to ear, grinning ear to ear. It’s kind of like oxygen in a way, I guess, right? When you have it, you never think about it, but the minute you’re lacking it, it’s all you can think about.
…..Happiness is always a fleeting emotion. Like most people are rarely happy for more than a couple minutes at a time. And I think it’s very similar to humor where if I tell you a very funny joke, you don’t laugh for 10 years. You laugh for a couple minutes. Humor is a fleeting emotion. And happiness is the same. Most people, you have moments of it. And you can situate your life. So maybe you have more moments of it than others and more than you used to, but it’s momentary. And so I think what people actually want to get to, what they aspire to whether they know it or not, is contentment, which is not happiness. It’s a different emotion. You’d want to get to a point where you’re just like, I’m good. Like I’m very grateful for everything that I have and I have everything that I need and most of what I want and I’m totally cool with that. And if there’s more to come above this, that’s the cherry on top. But I’m really cool here. I’m great right here. And I think most people can realize that with a lot of work and constant upkeep, you can get to that level at a lower income than you think. I remember talking to Daniel Kahneman about this and he had a distinction between happiness and satisfaction.
And the distinction was happiness is an emotion. Most people think they want to be happy, but it turns out that most people want to be satisfied. And satisfaction was more based on the story that you can tell about your life. So it actually had to do with how much money you had, how much status you had, how many promotions you had. You were able to tell yourself the story that I did. I sacrificed all these things. Maybe my relationship with my partner in order to achieve them. And I think it’s when you daydream about having more success or more money or more stuff. When you daydream, when you do that daydream and it feels good and you’re like, “Oh, if only I had that house. If only I had that car. If only I had this income.” By and large, what you are doing is imagining yourself having those things and being totally content with them. And that’s what feels good. That’s why the daydream is fun to do.
But you can see in the individual life where if you feel like there’s a hole in your soul and you’re not feeling like you haven’t done enough, you just want more. That the idea of like, oh well, if I just keep shoveling money in that hole, then I’ll get to a place where I’m good. It’s actually very difficult to do that. That makes sense sort of evolutionarily because you think about it, evolution cares about survival of the species, not the happiness of the individual. Give a damn how happy you are. Yeah. And the other thing with evolution is like it doesn’t matter how much money I have. What matters is that I have more than you. It doesn’t matter how fast I can run. It’s got to run faster than you. And so in a world where we are lucky enough to live in relative prosperity and abundance relative to previous eras, I’m going to measure my success relative to you and the size of my house relative to yours.
Shane: How do you think about money and independence?
Morgan: I think what you described is a level of independence but its independence is always a spectrum. So there is a high level of independence in which you don’t need to work anymore and I would call that you know making this up that’s like level 13 independence and below that are several different levels. Even if you have a $100 in the bank that is a higher level of independence than if you had zero and certainly if you had negative if you were in debt. And so you realize that literally every dollar that you save is a little claim check on your future that you control that somebody else doesn’t.
I think it’s an important mindset like redefining independence like that that it’s on a spectrum and every single dollar is an independence claim check. For me, I’ve always viewed it like I’ve always been a big saver my whole career and I’ve always viewed it as not saving money for delayed gratification. I viewed it as purchasing independence for which I get value out of right now today. There’s nothing delayed about saving this money because I like waking up tomorrow morning and being like there’s a big cushion here so if something bad happens in my life whatever it is, whether it’s in my personal life or the macro economy or you know your pandemics, whatever it might be a gap, there is a channel of outcomes that I can endure.
And the less Independent, the less savings, the more debt you have the narrower that channel of endurance becomes and so within that channel is like all the ups and downs of life, individual and macro. And the wider the channel is, the more that you can endure. And so much about compound interest, not just with money, but with relationships and careers and friendships, comes down to what can you endure? How much how many unknowns and the depths of those unknowns can you endure and survive? And so much I wrote this in psychology money. If you have to sum up doing well financially in one word, I think it’s survival.
That’s true in your career. That’s true for savings. That’s true for investing. Absolutely. It’s just survive. It’s just what can you endure? What can you put up with? And when you view it like that, you realize that like every dollar that you save is a claim check of
independence that will serve you not just in the future but today. Izzy Sharp, the founder of Four Seasons, has this excellent quote which is excellence is the capacity to take pain. And when we think of that, our minds just instinctively go to physical pain, but we don’t think of psychological pain.
We don’t think of financial ups and downs and being able to just survive because you can’t compound if you don’t survive. And then the other thing about compounding I think people misunderstand is that all the advantages come at the end. And not at the beginning. They’re very slow at the beginning. But it’s that last double that makes a huge difference. I mean in terms of the dollars accumulated that’s true. So I wrote about this in psychology money. 99% of Warren Buffett’s net worth was accumulated after his 65th birthday. That’s just how compounding works. Like the numbers get nuts at the end.”
He gives the importance of your social circle, something fully under your control. Your ambitions and lifestyle creep happens because of this. This is where the point: Comparison is the thief of Joy really comes true.
Shane: How does our social group impact our desires and how should we think about our social group in relation to spending money?
Morgan: I always say like be very careful who you socialize with because it will full stop will set your expectations of what you want. I use the example that I grew up out in the out in the mountain sticks outside of Lake Tahoe and it was very much a mountain town, not poor but not rich by any standards.
And then I went to college in Los Angeles. Los Angeles during the housing bubble in the mid-200s when it was just overflowing with literally trillions of dollars of fake money and it was such a material culture then and now that, like when that fake money flew around it was just everyone spending it on lifestyle just inflating everything. And I realized, who was happier? It’s not even close, that it was the people in the middle mountain town were happier because it was so much easier to keep your expectations in check. You’re like, it was so easy to be like, look, I drive a three-year-old Ford pickup and the rich guy drives a two-year-old Ford pickup. And that’s the stratification. The stratification was this big. And then in LA, the stratification was 10 miles long. And so, even if you are a dentist doing well in LA, you’re a dentist making 300 grand a year driving a Mercedes, you’re absolutely amazing, crushing it. But no dentist in LA making 300 grand a year feels like they’re crushing it because they are driving past 30,000 foot mansions and Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis and what not. And so by comparison, even if you’re not socializing with those people, you’re aware of it.
But when you start socializing them with those people, then truly your expectations just blow off the charts. It’s very difficult. It’s possible, but it’s very difficult to be a dentist making 300 grand and be friends with someone who’s living in a 30,000 foot mansion with a private jet and have it not impact your expectations. Very difficult to do.
Shane: We keep coming back to happiness. Is that something we should be optimizing for?
Morgan: I think we said earlier what you want to optimize for is contentment. And when you socialize with people who are dramatically wealthy, are living a better, a bigger life than you, it is much harder to remain content. Possible but harder to remain content, so being careful who you socialize with I think is very important. That’s true for a lot of things not just outside money but values…..what I’m willing to do might be very influenced by who I’m hanging out with. I think that’s true for nearly all of us.
Morgan also talks about how to live an authentic life. One that is specific for you. He shares his perspective.
Shane: One of the things I admire about you as your friend is that you’ve built this life that is just totally authentic to you. What advice do you have for other people about going about building this life that’s authentic to them, discovering who they are as a person and how they can use finances as a tool to accomplish that.
Morgan: One is, I would say thank you for saying that and noticing that.
But it takes work. It is not just you get there and you’re like, “Oh, everything’s great. Now I can just cruise on this authentic life.” It takes, I think daily work. And so even as someone who writes about expectations and keeping up with the Joneses and whatnot, I think I feel I have to remind myself daily of it. Now there are a lot of things like that in life. If you master meditation, you don’t get to stop. You got to do it every day. And if you do stop, you just revert back to where you were.
See, with exercise, you don’t get to physical fitness and then you get to stop. You got to work on it daily. So I think this is one of those things as well that takes a lot of effort. But I think the realization, easier said than done, but the realization and the observation that people are not paying attention to you as much as you think they are. And therefore, you should stop trying to impress strangers and use money to give yourself a tool of things that are giving you a lot of fulfillment, your relationships, your health, and whatnot. That’s to me was the biggest breakthrough. And it’s so simple.
Like there’s nothing that profound about what I just said, but if you can actually
come to terms with it, it can totally change your life of just being like, “Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s watching. They’re not paying attention to me. They don’t care what I’m wearing. They don’t care what car I’m driving. But if I can instead use that money to be independent and be able to make my own decisions about what’s authentic to me, that’s amazing.”
Shane: What is success for you?
Morgan: I think about two things. It’s the idea of it’s very important to have people in your life that you don’t want to disappoint.. And so those few people in my life, success is not disappointing them. And I know I’m not perfect and there will be times when they look at me and say, “Morgan, I wish you had done this differently. You didn’t consider my feelings enough when you did this.” But there’s a couple people in my life who I really really don’t want to disappoint.
And it would be hard. There was no amount of financial material success in life in which I could look back at my life and say I had a great life if I really disappointed my kids or my wife or my parents. Hard to imagine that. And so even when relationships don’t work out, I think really disappointing the people that you don’t want to. I think that’s fundamental to my definition of success. I also think, related to that, loyalty to people who deserve your loyalty is a very rewarding thing. The important thing is people who deserve your loyalty, which is a small list. A lot of people do not deserve your loyalty. But loyalty to someone who deserves your loyalty is unbelievably rewarding.
And so I think when you experience that in life, when somebody deserves your loyalty and you give it back, it’s not just rewarding to the other person, it’s rewarding for you personally.”
I’ve watched this a few times. For anyone trying to design and build your life, this is a great conversation. First is understanding yourself and Morgan’s frameworks are helpful. Additionally, his lessons are very practical. His life is one to model oneself on.
Bundling and UnBundling, The Barbell in Media: A Creator’s Lesson in the 2020s
John Coogan is half of the super star TBPN media team (Jordi Hays being the other half). He had a good interview few months back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVLRuIuLBe8
It felt like these guys came out of nowhere in the last year but they have crushed it. For anyone in tech, these guys seem to be everywhere, with focus on being a media company that talks about latest news and topics but with a respect and love of the tech industry unlike most mainstream media right now in the West. You can tell they really love what they are doing and talking about.
Both were very successful technology entrepreneurs prior to TBPN and most likely independently wealthy. This is clearly a labor of love. Which is why I pay attention to what they say about the media and creator business. Media (besides gaming) is one of the industries where technology is usually adopted first and tends to be bleeding edge of business model changes.
He talks about the media landscape and what is happening:
“I wonder how they're defining media because if they're defining media as I think they said mass media, the just the New York Time then yes it's low but I would say that if people uh are saying like where do they get their like do you trust the place where you get your news I would imagine that that's almost at an all-time high interesting because I think that people get their news from commentators who are filtering news like I have high trust in my media sources the ones that I've selected.
I don't know if you gave me a random newspaper every day. I don't know that I'd have high trust in that. But I've selected, you know, I've curated a group of sources that react to each other and contextualize and fact check and debunk and dunk on each other. And all of that has created something that I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the truth. And I feel like most people can do the same thing.
They're just picking like ever nicher influencers. We've become a lot more selective than the mass media. They're another channel that if we pick them we obviously trust them but most times we haven't picked them. And so we've created this somewhat artificial dichotomy between mass media and new media or independent media.
If you zoom out, a human is getting information like maybe nothing's changed and like,yes, they get it from an internet website now as opposed to a physical paper or in my case I do get it from a physical paper. But it does depend on where people think it's a little bit of an artificial read on people's satisfaction with obtaining information.”
And of course, the topic of bundling versus unbundling in business models is well described. Basically every industry is in the midst of this process and you need to understand where you are in this cycle, particularly in media.
“In terms of media and alot of different industries have this kind of bundling unbundling kind of cycle back. And for what's happening right, you know obviously, this is the era of substacks of the unbundling. But I do imagine this to be a kind of start of rebundling again….. I think it already has rebundled in the sense that the platforms do the rebundling such as Spotify, YouTube, Twitch, like these are the bundles and they bundle up the advertisers and they distribute the ad revenue across all the creators.
And so when you download Instagram, you are paying with your time and your ad clicks into a pool that gets distributed across everyone. Instagram might not be the best example. YouTube's better one, right? You watch the ads and they just go straight in the creator's pocket. So I am not expecting crazy rebundling for the most part. I would expect continued unbundling. There are certainly opportunities and like all these things kind of move slower than you think.
There are people that are doing cool things. Arena Mag is a great example of I guess a rebundling in the sense that there's a number of journalists that write for that magazine, but it's a very special product because it's physical. As kind of like a throwback product. But in general, I think the barrier to actually running your own show independently and having your only major counterparties be the major platforms is fine and will continue to be the trend. And it's so if you're kind of imagining YouTube's like being the big platforms to be the bundle like the big bundles, is there any way to kind of unbundle from there because they've gathered so much?”
Ultimately, every industry ends up with a barbell. Big platforms and aggregators on one side and niche players on the other. You don’t want to get stuck in the middle. We see this in the automotive industry, in the Defense industry and even in venture capital. John does a good job describing how barbell effects show up in the media business.
“Well, it is this barbell effect. So, it's like you have an individual creator who has a laptop and can make a video that goes viral and YouTube just automatically sends them a check. And so, you have the individual creator who's like, you know, creating the content by themselves essentially and the talent is purely isolated from all other talent. And then at the extreme end you have the platforms. And so my belief has always been you want to be in one of the two camps and not in the middle because the middle is just constantly getting squeezed because all your best people are saying I'll just go be an independent creator. See Johnny Harris spinning out, Cleo Abrams spinning out, the Try Guys, Hamilton Morris, like I could name 25 people that now have successful individual creator businesses that make probably millions of dollars a year. Who are no longer tied to some middle, like middleman packager. And then but then simultaneously owning Meta, owning Spotify, owning Netflix, owning YouTube, like these are fantastic assets.
And if you owned either of these, you did quite well. But if you were in the middle, I feel like it was a lot of headache and maybe not as much financial return as people would like. So, I don't know that there will be any sort of rebundling. I would expect competition just get further pushed to the edges. Especially with AI and better technology.
We're already seeing this like the reason that the reason that I would have done this show on a bundler on a network years ago would have been not just the distribution, you get the distribution for free but also the cost to produce right. And so when you were saying I want to do a TV show on CNN you weren't just getting CNN's distribution which was incredibly valuable which now you can get through YouTube, go viral. But also CNN has a building with a bunch of producers in it. And if you need a prop department, that prop department is shared across everything. But now we have Amazon, you know, and you can just get props as you need them, right? And there's rental houses. And you needed a camera department with a bunch of people. Well, now the cameras are cheap and easy to operate. And you needed all this staff that was probably shared somewhat fluidly between the different shows.
Again, I'm now unbundling myself because I want you to be able to consume the show live as a three-hour show. If you want, you can tune in, watch it live. You can watch, you can listen to it as a podcast on Spotify. You can watch a YouTube video. You can see a clip. You can go and watch a 20-minute interview with someone you really find interesting. You can read, you know, a little text summary of what happened. And also, you can consume it via newsletter.”
Lots to learn from the media space. The cutting edge where trends show up first, whether in technology adoption, bundling vs unbundling business models and barbell effects. It’s the place to watch as a precursor to effects in almost every other industry.
Anglo Empires: Great Britain, America and the Eternal Search for the Frontier
I believe one of the great things about the British empire and America were the adventurous people. People who were attracted to the edges of the earth. Great explorers, scientists, soldiers, adventurers who pushed to the frontier, discovering new lands and people. Expanding the realms of knowledge and physical realms of empire.
Resavager wrote about this frontier spirit (https://resavager.com/p/the-ultimate-frontier-and-the-american):
“Most Americans, I believe, have a yearning for the frontier. A yearning to experience what their ancestors must have experienced when they came to the new world. They may even feel that smothering oppression their ancestors must have felt before they made that decision to leave to an unknown land.”
The moment these frontiers were conquered, civilized or were closed off, the people and ultimately the empires began to decay. This is my sense of what is happening even now in America. Globalization and the internet being the last major frontiers that are now ending.
Resavager describes why we need new frontiers to conquer aptly:
“There is a great cynicism that has taken over our people. This cynicism is greater and more terrible than anyone believes it is. It is antithetical to the American ideal and pioneer spirit. If you look back to the character of the early Americans, you will not find cynicism. You will find me who believed themselves destined to conquer this new world. This new world given to them by God. They were the chosen. Destiny had decided. They believed the time ahead of them would be better than the time they were in. God had a plan for them.
There is great power in belief. It lends a heavy hand to the survival instinct and allows man to go beyond mere survival. It gives man the opportunity to leave his mark on the world. It allowed our ancestors to carve out an empire out of the new world from nothing. You are not going into space without it. Now, this isn’t throwing my hat in with one religion or another, but as Pindar said, “custom is the lord of everything.” There is an American metaphysics and Americans are most adapted to it and it will remain ingrained into our very cores until something superior takes its place.
The bare minimum a man must have is this belief, and despite everything, optimism over cynicism. No doubt this is the most challenging obstacle in our path because belief is being stomped out of everything with a merciless fury by the enemies of mankind. Without it, there is no hope.”
He rightfully calls out the last frontier. Space. I’d argue we should conquer the oceans first but space makes sense too. A place to awaken humanity’s spirit by it’s great challenge and openness, the way mountain climbers look at Everest and K2.
“Most settlers knew about the new world before they arrived. They were attracted to the idea of a new beginning in this“new world.” But the men who first embarked on this voyage to see what was out there were the men of true bravery and daring. They were the real pioneers. Men who wanted to see just how far they could throw the spear of mankind.
Perhaps space will be the new frontier, where new opportunities and empires can be built. Exciting times ahead.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads April 12th, 2026
"April showers bring May flowers." —Thomas Tusser
This was enlightening. All about SpaceX and lessons from Elon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPXYqPXo_R0
2. Enjoying this series of interviews with VC iconoclasts from Slow VC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRhe6JxJruI
3."The point is what we’re teaching. Every employee who got that Slack learns that “mission” is a recruiting pitch. Every founder who watches their VC fund a competitor learns they were a bet, not a partner.
I still back founders. I still believe there’s never been a better time to build. But I try to find people who still believe the oath matters. The ones who would rather go slower than abandon the people who believed in them. Even when faster often means richer.
So pick carefully. Ask your VC who else they have backed in your category. Ask what happened to employees at the founder’s last company. Understand what the numbers actually mean before you sign anything."
https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/loyalty-is-dead-in-tech
4. "Entrepreneurs, my recommendation is this: choose a North Star metric that truly represents the value you deliver, track it rigorously, and ensure your entire team rallies around it. A startup is more than a single metric, but there is nothing more powerful than clarity about what you are working toward and why."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/01/31/pick-a-north-star-metric-not-revenue/
5."This is the “Your King Sucks” theory of software investing. For the last decade or so, public market investors treated annual recurring revenue (ARR) as the ultimate form of material. If a company had $500M in ARR growing at 30% with 80% gross margins, it was a winning business with a material advantage. You could argue about the valuation—is it worth 10 times revenue or 15?—but there was never a doubt that the revenue was real. You also assumed that because the product was “sticky” (a word VCs love because it sounds like a moat but often just means “too annoying to uninstall”), the material advantage would eventually translate into a win.
But AI has effectively turned every software value-prop chessboard (I’m stretching the analogy here) into a tactical mess where every almost every “safe king” is suddenly exposed. If you are an enterprise software company whose primary value proposition is “we provide a slightly better UI for a database” or “we help your HR department fill out forms,” your material doesn’t matter anymore. You might have $1 billion in revenue, but if a generative AI agent can do that same task for the cost of a few API calls, your product sucks. Your king is standing in the middle of an open file, and the half-trillion-dollar-backed-AI is the opposing queen coming down the board for your margin."
https://oldroperesearch.substack.com/p/your-king-sucks
6."It’s a cold, grey, and sludgy early afternoon in Kyiv. Today, the brightest minds of the defense industry are meeting with military experts and international funding providers to discuss on how to best win the war being waged against Ukraine by Russia, almost four years after it started.
This event is unique in that it is sponsored by an American investor, Perry Boyle, CEO of MITS Capital, in conjunction with Ukraine’s elite Azov Brigade."
https://underfirenews.substack.com/p/soldiers-and-startups-inside-the
7. "Modern culture often encourages men to be self-serving and concerned with themselves. If we look closely, history offers us a more enduring standard. The men who shaped our world were often those who accepted responsibility willingly and served others before themselves.
Character is not a relic of the past. It is the foundation of anything worth building and preserving. We must continuously guard against the erosion of character in our lives and society. By studying great men in history, we can learn how to do that through their example."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/five-men-of-character-who-shaped
8. Job loss versus Task loss in AI. Educating your kid in the age of AI. One of the better interviews with Marc Andreessen in recent months.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Pm0SGTtN8
9. "This is what capital wars might actually look like — not slogans or secret meetings, but states reclaiming control over funding, liquidity, and strategic inputs.
For Japan, this was a reclaiming of agency. Higher yields allow domestic capital to fund defense, semiconductors, and technology instead of subsidizing global speculation. Grandma finally gets to spend on herself.
For the United States, the outcome is complex but strategic. Cheap foreign funding is fading, but a stronger dollar and falling commodity prices cool inflation without forcing a recession.
For the global system, the implication is stark.
The old assumptions — that cheap funding would return, that central banks would cushion disorder, that markets could externalize sovereign costs — are no longer safe.
New norms are emerging:
Funding is political.
Leverage tolerance is lower.
Volatility is not a bug — it’s enforcement.
Even “safe” assets depend on funding regimes.
A thirty-year family arrangement built on indulgence is ending. Returns will increasingly come from productivity, not leverage. Borrowed patience has limits."
https://tanviratna.substack.com/p/gold-silver-the-dollar-the-week-that
10. "This probably tells us something about how investors think about gold versus Bitcoin. They probably think of Bitcoin as something that benefits from the success of the American economy — probably because when the U.S. economy does well and Americans are feeling rich, they put some of their money into Bitcoin. Whereas they still think of gold as something that you need when nations as a whole do poorly.
Ultimately, safe-haven assets are a coordination game — people just sort of collectively decide which assets to buy in order to protect themselves from international financial anarchy. So far, they’re still coordinating on gold, not on Bitcoin."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/international-financial-anarchy
11. "So what’s going to happen here is the physical world is going to compete with the bullshit financial world, some of these crazy hyper dreams. And then we’re going to end up with much higher prices for these metals in real terms against a depreciating currency.”
https://robertsinn.substack.com/p/robert-friedland-the-physical-world
12."Friedland on the more obscure strategic metals that are absolutely vital for defense & aerospace industries:
“….we really need to talk about metals like scandium, rhenium, niobium, or tantalum, you absolutely have to have for national security requirements. These are metals that are more thinly traded, less transparent, and these metals can go up 10x, 20x, 50x in price. And this is really going to open at a theater near you because we’re in touch with the demands of the United States military, and we know that these metals are very hard to find and they absolutely have to be had. So, it’s some of these more interesting metals that we should talk about at some point in the near future…”
Tantalum is used in jet engines, scandium is added to aluminum for high-strength, lightweight components in aerospace. Meanwhile, niobium and rhenium are superalloys that are used in jet engines and rocket components due to heat resistance."
https://robertsinn.substack.com/p/robert-friedland-i-would-not-be-surprised
13."Three indicators would signal the bubble is bursting: hyperscaler capex decelerating more than 20% year-over-year as spending reverts toward historical norms; enterprise AI production deployment rates stalling below 15%; and Nvidia’s revenue concentration from its top four customers exceeding 70%, indicating the loop is tightening rather than expanding.
Conversely, three indicators would confirm the floor is solidifying: healthcare and manufacturing AI spending exceeding $20 billion annually; enterprise AI deal conversion rates sustaining above 45%; and Fortune 2000 AI budgets growing 30% or more with documented productivity gains.
The 2026 AI market isn’t a bubble in the 1999 sense—the companies are real, the profits are real, the technology works. The question is whether the customers become real. Until AI revenue flows beyond the circular loop of hyperscalers and their subsidiaries into the productive economy of the Fortune 2000 and below, the trillion-dollar infrastructure bet remains exactly that: a bet on diffusion that hasn’t yet occurred."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/what-to-watch-in-2026-to-evaluate
14."Most people are Emotionally Over-Invested. They need the deal, they need the approval, they need the “Yes.” This need creates a Desperation Scent that high-level players can smell from a mile away. When you need something, you lose the ability to walk away. And if you can’t walk away, you have zero leverage. You are not a negotiator; you are a beggar with a pitch deck."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-indifference-edge
15."Founders who started 2-3 years later (2020-2021) are now facing a much harder path: higher customer acquisition costs, more skeptical investors, mature competitors, and a tighter funding environment. Building a comparable war chest at an early stage would be comparatively rare today.
Yes, Brex is selling past the fintech peak. But they benefited from it too. Ultimately, being early to a good wave can be just as valuable as riding the peak."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/second-order-lessons-from-brexs-acquisition
16."One of the most surprising things for me is that many of the folks who provided me guidance and mentorship early in my career have become less active in the venture business or have less to offer about this phase of the journey. This isn’t a criticism, but more of an observation. By the time you get to the second desert, many of the folks who helped and advised you in the beginning will be less involved in the business or doing it in a different way that suits them better, but is potentially less aligned with the questions you have and the advice you seek. I find myself searching for a new set of advisors who know how to navigate this phase of firm building and who are still actively engaged in it.
Finally, most of the questions are about the firm and not the next fund. There will always be questions about what it takes to raise the next fund, which LPs will come back, which companies will deliver the core returns, etc. But in the second desert, many more of the questions are about firm longevity, succession, and other longer-term issues that feel very far off when you are first getting started."
https://chudson.substack.com/p/the-second-desert-in-venture-capital
17.Oren is an OG in Silicon Valley. Oren Zeev and Elad Gil are literally taking Solo GP-ing to another level.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuurCxYog5k
18."What most people do is they wait until it is “time to show up” or they overstay thinking that people are suddenly going to show up the last hour. Unlikely.
In market terms it would be: 1) buying when it is consensus = no returns left, 2) selling when there is low interest = party/venue is empty = unless going to zero likely fills up later and 3) repeating this over and over thinking that investing is about following herds… It is the exact opposite.
The Cheat Code? Your nervous system is giving you the answer every single time. If you find yourself feeling FOMO you should write that down in your one day journal. If you back track the info, you’ll find that your emotions are the exact reverse of what ends up happening. If you’re excited? Usually the peak. If you’re depressed? Usually the bottom. So on and so forth.
Instead of trying to outsmart billionaires and quants, the easier move is to monitor your own feelings and emotions. Get control of your dopamine receptors and you’ll perform much better making a handful of moves per year. This also frees you up to build up that WiFi money = absurd financial gains every 4 years."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/how-to-be-a-better-investor-without
19.How to be the best. Ovitz is intense but brilliant. How to stay current. No better friend, no worse enemy. This is an instructive interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp1Wn6QkkKU&t=2212s
20.Building a massive VC brand and platform. Lots of great insights on the history venture market and how A16Z is dominating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID27juNvAfc
21. Sam Lessin is one of the few original thinking investors in Silicon Valley. This is worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir7yLNgZ3gM
22. "If you want to make real money online stop thinking like an employee.
Start thinking like a modern philosopher with a business system.
Your new daily routine should look like this:
1 hour of input: learn something that upgrades your skill or perspective.
2 hours of creation: build one digital asset per day (post, guide, offer).
30 minutes of leverage: automate, schedule, or repurpose your best work.
10 minutes of reflection: ask yourself, “Does this earn or distract?”
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-modern-art-of-earning-elegantly
23."Leveraged software companies running on leveraged infrastructure. When AI compresses software revenue, the stress doesn’t stop at equity. It cascades into debt."
https://tomtunguz.com/the-other-leverage-in-software-and-ai/
24."Look at the three most difficult decisions you’ve been avoiding. Ask yourself: “Am I avoiding this because it’s the wrong move, or because I’m afraid of how it will make someone feel?” If it’s the latter, execute the decision before sunset today. Every hour you wait is a tax on your authority."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-empathy-trap
25."The takeaway is this: the Pentagon’s needs determine what gets funded and what doesn’t. So if you want to get paid, your product must address a priority need."
https://stanfordh4d.substack.com/p/selling-to-defense-explaining-the
26.A great discussion this week on NIA: the Elon X empire, Silver/Gold boom & bust + Moltbook aka OpenClaw.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuQwe3fxAsY
27."The other was the understanding that when there’s a war, you have to be ruthless. There were ruthless actions taken that were effective. Afterwards, my parents never, ever mentioned it. I never heard a word about it, nor did they ever talk about what they left behind.
It was my parents who brought me to Sicily, and therefore I learned Sicilian, and therefore I learned many, many things, including the art of violence, controlled violence. Even as very young children in Sicily, you could never escalate fights, because if you won the fight over the other 8-year-old, the 10-year-old would come, the brother. Then, another brother, and then the parents would come out, then guns would come out.
You learned, actually, the coherent use of force, which is very typical of the culture, which is the mafia culture, really, is that you don’t waste force. If you go around punching people for no reason, this is really terrible. All these other stuff were all giving to me without any credit on my own, any merit on my own. It was what you might call an extraordinarily fortunate childhood for somebody whose final destination was not to paint, or make films, or build houses, but to do what I have done, which is to study war and all these other things. I was given all this right at the start."
Technology intervenes in war, incrementally and invisibly, changing nothing.
Then, suddenly, technology intervenes and changes everything. It ended the possibility of the cavalry charge. Cavalry gets swept off the battlefield."
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/ed-luttwak-on-military-revolutions
28."In 2010, during a diplomatic dispute with Japan, Chinese rare-earth exports suddenly slowed. Prices spiked. Panic followed. Although China denied imposing a formal embargo, the message was unmistakable.
A decade later, amid rising trade tensions with the United States, Beijing made its intentions clearer. Export controls were tightened. Licensing requirements expanded. Restrictions on rare-earth processing technologies were imposed.
By 2025, China was openly treating rare earths as a strategic asset, one that could be weaponized in response to tariffs, sanctions, or military pressure. The risks could no longer be ignored. Modern defense systems depend heavily on rare earths. An F-35 fighter jet contains hundreds of pounds of rare-earth materials. Missiles, radar, satellites, and secure communications systems all rely on specialized magnets and alloys for which there are no easy substitutes.
And 2026 continues the uncomfortable dilemma. The United States has the resources, capital, and technical expertise to rebuild domestic capacity—but not quickly. Processing facilities take years to permit and construct. Skilled labor must be trained. Supply chains must be reassembled. In the short run, dependence remained. Trump’s sudden tariff war, framed by Beijing as yet another affront to China’s long-promised redemption from its “century of humiliation,” sharpened the confrontation between what the Chinese Communist Party perceives as a resurgent Middle Kingdom and a declining hegemon.
All of this helps explain the White House’s eagerness to secure Chinese assurances. The deal bought time. It did not solve the problem."
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/chinas-rare-earth-monopoly-and-why-markets-will-break-it
29."While I remain steadfast in my believe that the founders who focus will win, this very much feels like a moment-in-time when it’s important for founders to take stock of what’s going on around them.
That doesn’t mean diving down the rabbit hole of agent social networks, but it does mean checking out the latest tools. And it’s always better to do that with friends.
I’m setting aside time in the next few weeks to stop, collaborate and listen. I suggest you do too."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/stop-collaborate-and-listen
30."When institutions start to lose their soul, the people inside them start to care about different things. Aesthetic warmth, values coherence, institutional vibe. These are now functioning as primary signals for where elite talent goes (and more importantly, stays), and by extension, which companies breakaway and which don’t.
The Tipping Points:
So how does this actually progress?
First, people will fleece investors for all they can. Secondary sales, SPACs, HALOs, whatever structures exist. If you are going to do the thing that is losing status you might as well gun for the kind of money that gives you options later, because you may need those options.
Second, there are early cohorts of founders who will aim to find vibe-alignment with their capital. This is the bull case for more opinionated or smaller firms at the early-stage. I’m talking my own book here, but as the mission actually starts to matter again (not in the “wink-wink” sense), if a core value-add of VCs has been “brand halos”, then founders will align with investors that show an aesthetic they want to feed into their startup’s status signaling. The capital you take becomes a statement about who you are, and people will start to treat it that way.
Third, what people care about when they join a company will start to shift. Despite the desire to say that we can all be solopreneurs, I don’t think human beings actually want this. We are starting to see the full rejection of the illusion of freedom that remote work offered us, driven by the complexities of how it has changed us. What matters now is identity, community, belonging, and being out in the world, experiencing life in various ways. This means the intersection of who you work with, why you’re building, and what you’re building really matters and will directly reflect your values and your ability to be in communities. The vibes must be good at your company to have it be viewed as high status to work there, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy once the flywheel begins.
Fourth, people will stop building venture-backed businesses."
https://mhdempsey.substack.com/p/vc-backed-startups-are-low-status
31."If we return to this earlier point, what exactly is the short leg? I’m being a bit cagey because there are many answers to this question, most of which I’d probably agree with...
Short USD
Short traditional employment & the career ladder (wage cuck)
Short social mobility
There are valid arguments for each of these, and the real answer is that it’s complicated. But as I said earlier, I think a lot of the core message10 is inadvertently warped in a way that leads people down the doomer rabbit hole. And my sense is that the majority of people who have begun this descent are effectively short agency.
It is an intellectual short position on human adaptability, creativity and ambition. And to me it’s one of the most alluring yet dangerous ways to frame the world, especially to young people. It suggests the genie is out of the bottle for some inevitable future where humans are sorted into either an elite utopian status or the permanent underclass living like the Tailies in Snowpiercer. But that line of thinking presupposes we have no discretion over how the future unfolds. It is a defeatist view."
https://0xsmac.substack.com/p/the-children-yearn-for-the-fiat-mines
32.A sober geopolitical take on Ukraine-Russia peace talks from one of the few credible experts out there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LqP8CUh3TI
33.Learning from leaders at some of the top financial institutions. Goldman and A16Z. Well worth watching for the global macro takes and tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLVgGGz5bvk
34. Electronic warfare innovation from Ukraine and Russia coming to the rest of the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdofxOjKmd4
35.Good takes on Elon and SpaceX acquisitions and what's up in AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9NekS6PCM0
36.Instructive discussion with the Benchmark team, the craftsmen of venture capital. A true partnership. One of the most unique firms in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPxB1oeAIIc&t=58s
37. Some good global macro: invest in stuff that is scarce. Hard assets: silver, copper, BTC. Uranium & microchips too.
The return of basic economics: supply and demand. Invest in scarce things (manufacturing, hard assets) & avoid abundant things like software & tech.
The Two Types of Startups to Invest in: A Framework for 2026 and Beyond
More or Less is one of the best podcasts to get the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley. I really enjoyed this specific episode as they talked about the environment of seed stage investing which is intensely competitive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q99bDO-a1E
”Look, at the end of the day, I think that seedstage investing is the most defensible part of the entire investing world. Everything should get more efficient, ETFs, algorithmic trading. Does that come down market? Of course, it comes down market and expands. But any idea that a bot can route to the six right firms and everyone bids and everyone top ticks it, no one will make any money, which is fine. That's actually what the whole point of why capitalism works is it creates efficiency, right? So that's fine, but that's not what we do.
Like I'll give you an example, like candidly, we don't do outbound sourcing at all. Like there are companies there are venture firms inside whatever that built machines for outbound and market mapping on stuff. I don't do any of that. Like we say sh-t on the internet and then people email me, right? And I only want to talk to a certain percentage of them…..And so like the idea I think, the answer is for a lot of types of investing. Yeah, like all this data if you're doing something like an associate can do in Excel that's going to be overly efficient and you'll have no margin in it.
But that's not really what we do. I don't think it's what you guys do either. Well…. what I think is interesting in the seed market, you have the multi-stage firms and 2,000 seed funds competing for the 75th percentile of all of the sort you said, the mainstream stuff out there in the market. And so that effectively means you have almost perfect pricing and a bunch of synthetic beta in the top quartile of the seed market.
And so where in the seed market is there alpha is like a question and it's you know I think you and I have always agreed, it's in the illegible spaces. But the question is how to stay there ever more. You have to be smarter, more original, have access to networks that everyone else doesn't have access to, ideas other people aren’t willing to take risks on…..”
Sam Lessin of Slow Ventures talks about his framework for how he operates in this kind of competition and the two types of startups he thinks are interesting.
“What I've been telling founders for 2026 is there's only two business types I'm interested in right now….
One type is you have a secret about the universe and you should tell no one ever what that secret is because it is an incredible idea and insight and way to mint money. It's like a secret incantation and if you know what you're doing is like a great way to make money with all the technical leverage. But don't ever tell anyone and your hope is that no one ever finds out.
There are lots of cool businesses being built right now that look like this. What's the example of that? Yeah, give me an example. What's one that already exists that was like this? Coca-Cola. They're all pretty stealth. Yeah, I guess they have a formula. Nothing lasts forever, but there are businesses I keep hearing of…. I have a business like that, but it's not based on one of those. It's based on consistently generating those things that aren't known, that are important.
These are companies where it's like someone has a brilliant insight about a way to make money using like a bunch of AI tools and they're minting cash, but they will never tell anyone what they're doing because it's infinitely copyable. Everything's infinitely copyable, right? That's option one.
Option two is there are these things that everyone agrees. So there are none of these in option one. There is a new phenomenon that there's no such thing as an example that's big that you can point to. Probably are, but in some ways you don't know what they're like. There are a lot of businesses in America that make a ton of money that you've never heard of and will never find, right? Like these exist, right? Who represents the copying at launch like the second it launches because no one cuz you don't even know.
There's no website for these things, right? These are literally businesses people are minting cash off of very quietly using more and more technical leverage.
Yeah, it's mostly with AI leverage and tech leverage, you can now build things and connect things together with an insight where you're like, "Oh my god, I can get this type of data here and sell it there. I can do this here and do this here. I can make this."
There are all sorts of things going on with tons of levers that small teams are doing. They're making fortunes. That's type one. There are those that exist. It's just they're really hard to talk about and find.
Type two, which I really do believe in, is like there are all these businesses out there which you can say will obviously be categories, right? Like everyone knows what they are. Like we all know that ads are going to get hyper hyperpersonalized, right?
Like there's no question about that. So then the other thing is the only way to win is you must own the narrative very loudly.
I'll give you an example that we can talk about. You know, I love Memelord and like this mimemetic warfare platform. It’s like, I would argue everyone understands if you're smart that the future of communication and marketing whatever is mimetic, right? And there's an argument that you should be able to build the defining platform at scale in AI mimetic warfare, right?
You can make that argument. You might disagree with it, but it's an argument. You have to fully own that narrative is like I am the meme warfare company. You will buy it from me, right? And so I think there's this big schism of like you either are a secret company or you're the most obvious company in the world, but you lead the narrative. You can't be in the middle.”
Sam further elaborated in later podcast:
“Now, I will say just to justify it, I think there is one like I've been telling entrepreneurs a lot this year like this is my theme of the month that there's only two ways to make money right now and build companies, right? One which we've talked about. One is have a secret that no one knows, right? And like just send it capital efficiently. I know people doing this. It's great.
The other is own the narrative. And the only justification you could give, and it's just a matter of, can you be the company that quote unquote owns the narrative and gets cheaper acquisition for customers. And there's an argument that if it's very capital consumptive to do that, you might need a lot more capital to own a narrative than you would to, to go from a series seed to your millions in ARR to get your series A in our world. Like you can kind of squint and make it justify. I just don't think it's going to work out very well for most people.”
Always food for thought. As an investor, trying to stay relevant in this competitive world, you always need to be updating your frameworks. You always need to be learning and gathering input and learning. As always, but maybe more so than ever, it’s an exciting time to be investing.
The Precariousness of the Shire: Peace Through Strength
Palmer Luckey, a young Silicon Valley startup impresario of Oculus Drift and defensetech giant Anduril fame, did an amazing interview with Mike Rowe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dejWbn_-gUQ.
Palmer talks about being a massive nerd and fan of Tolkien of the Lord of Rings books. His description of Tolkien:
“Tolkien was not someone who was pro-war by any means. The things he saw in World War I. He made that very clear. But he did believe in good and evil and he did believe in wars that needed to be fought. And he made very clear that those are the wars you need to focus on fighting.”
He pulled out a passage from CS Lewis that was incredibly apt:
“Almost the central theme of the book is the contrast between the hobbits or the Shire and the appalling destiny to which some of them are called. The terrifying discovery that the humdrum happiness of the Shire, which they had taken for granted as something normal, is in reality a sort of local and temporary accident, that its existence depends on being protected by powers which the hobbits forget against powers which the hobbits dare not imagine.”
This truly describes most Americans and especially our allies in Europe and Canada. Palmer goes on and it’s a long passage, but it perfectly sums up the challenge of most countries in the West right now.
“They're being protected against powers that they forget, against forces they dare not imagine, and they forget that it is a local and temporary situation. And you look at the map of Middle Earth and you see where the Shire is. That's right. It's far behind lines. And so you have the men of Gondor basically holding the line, fighting every day.
It's more of the themes around universally what is good and what is evil. You can tease out his worldview to some degree. We take the times we live in and immediately juxtapose it to whatever the story is and it's not quite so simple, right?....But one of the interesting things that he does call out is how you have this human nature for the people who live far away from Mordor to basically not believe any of these things. They literally don't believe in this invasion. They don't believe that these monsters exist.
Contrast that with the men who are living literally on the front lines of this conflict. They are the last line of defense for the entire kingdom of man and everyone who lives behind them. They don't have the luxury of wondering if these things are real. They don't have the luxury of thinking that maybe evil doesn't exist. They're confronting it every day.
And I think there's a very similar analog to our modern military. You'll talk to people who say, "Oh, well, you know, I don't think that anyone's truly evil." And I think that nobody deserves to die.
There are a lot of people who have been on the front lines of conflicts who don't have the luxury of that. Someone who's been who's looked evil in the eye can't pretend, well, I think it doesn't exist and really we shouldn't be killing anybody……
That's right. Because you're isolated. That's right. There's no isolationism in, you know, Hapsburg or the World War I Europe, right? You're like, sharing a border with everybody and the knives are out all of the time. Well, and I think too in World War II, we got a really good bit of immunity to these problems in that every family had someone who fought. I mean, almost without exception. The draft was so extensive and the number of volunteers was so broad.
And so people understood that we were fighting for something that mattered, that we were fighting for allies who mattered, that we were fighting a just war against a real foe. And I think that as those people have died off, we now live in a country, I think it's less than a third of families in the US have a family member who is in the military.
And you wonder what does that do to the character of a nation? And it becomes much easier for a whole family of people to become, you know, anti-military. Not anti-war. There's a difference between these things to become anti-military, right?
In their pursuit of being anti-war. And it's because they don't know anybody who's actually been part of it. They don't know anyone who's been part of that, at least not directly. Maybe they did in their past, but they forget. There's a lot of kids today who can't remember 9/11. Do you really think that they're going to be remembering the lessons of World War II or World War I?
This is why it's such an incredible quote where it talks about, you know, a sort of local and temporary accident, really describes the relative peace we've had since the end of World War II till now. It is a local and temporary accident that comes as a result of PAX Americana, this post World War II era.”
Unfortunately Pax Americana as we know it is over. CRINK being led by China is competitive, vicious and wily, knowing what levels to push so they don’t seem like a threat, winning over formerly strong stalwart Western allies like in Europe, Canada and New Zealand, who are run by either deluded, naive politicians or blatantly corrupt, power seeking sociopaths. It’s difficult to decide what is worse.
But for all the rest of us, wake up. Look at the world and our situation with clearer eyes. Our way of life and values are precious and worth defending. But the enemy is already at the gates and we have disarmed ourselves due to our stupidity and blindness. Naivety and delusion leads to literal slavery and death. It’s not too late to reindustrialize, build our militaries and ourselves, and get smarter and stronger. Peace through strength.
The Mountain Never Ends: Grinding and Thinking Long Term
I’m a member of Radigan Carter’s excellent Fortress group and there are always great learnings and recommendations that really make me question my views and opinions. Radigan pulled a quote from prominent investor Eric Peters that was powerful. So powerful, I had to share it here.
“Anecdote (Jan 2011): Pretty much everything I learned about climbing mountains, I learned from Vincent Ravanel. He’s a 7th generation high altitude mountain guide from Argentiere, France. From father to son, the Ravanel’s passed a simple mantra: “The Mountain never ends.” And like most things profound, it touches on something universal and fundamental. Because climbing mountains, physical and metaphorical, is what Man does, and has always done, and will always do.
Vincent would calmly whisper that mantra high on the rock and ice when we faced a challenge, a fork, a decision. It served to humble us both, remind us to pace ourselves, and to only press for the summit if conditions and timing were optimal. And it also served to inspire, to capture in a sentence our ambition to tackle something so large and enduring. You see, to bag a tough peak and return intact, of course you need skill/strength/tenacity, but you also need the right temperature/weather/visibility and a measure of good luck. Combine all those well, find the opening, push like hell, and bang – success.
But fight the elements, force it, press your luck, and, well, you know the result. So, I take a deep breath, and look up, a new quarter looms and above that, a new year, a new decade, a new century, even a new millennium.
And on these first steps of this ambitious climb, I remind myself of the importance of patience and humility, optimal conditions and timing, and a little good luck. But mostly, I tell myself to listen carefully, at those tough and lonely points that surely lay ahead, for the Ravanel whisper, “The Mountain never ends.”
What a beautiful passage. An analogy of investing. Even more an analogy of life. A mountain to me means problems, pain and challenges in life. A life without mountains aka problems & challenges is not a true or real life. There is always another mountain to climb.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads April 5th, 2026
"When Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also"--Harriet Ann Jacobs
"We are taught that “Personal Branding” is an asset. We are told to be consistent, relatable, and visible. But consistency is often just another word for stagnation. If you are forced to act according to how people perceive you, you are no longer free to evolve. You become a prisoner of your own “Success.” You start making decisions based on what “looks right” rather than what “is right” for your Sovereign Variable.
The ultimate signal of power is making a massive life change—changing your career, your location, or your philosophy—without a single public announcement. It shows that you do not require external validation to authorize your growth. You are the only “Stakeholder” in the corporation of your life."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-reputation-prison
2. "Even as Trump pulls back from his threat to invade Greenland, the broader trajectory is unmistakable. We are drifting—not by accident, but by structural necessity—toward a world that looks far less like the liberal universalism of 1945 and far more like the balance-of-power order of the late 19th century: spheres of influence, managed rivalry, and transactional diplomacy. The United States will dominate the Western Hemisphere; China will dominate the Asia-Pacific; Russia will contest Europe’s eastern frontier. International law will persist, but as rhetoric rather than restraint.
There are no obvious winners in this world. Economic growth will fall as trade walls rise. Border-blind threats—to health, to the environment, to financial stability—will rise as cooperation falls. Wars will be quicker to start and harder to end. This world was always latent in liberal universalism itself. Trump did not invent its contradictions; he merely stripped them of their euphemisms."
3. America is in really big trouble due to over-financialization and elite incompetence. One of the most rational & cold takes on global macro. The world has changed, hard assets rule. Luke Gromen is a realist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYYF1HjnCZo
4. "Entrepreneurs looking for new ideas should lean directly into this. They should find the most unloved SaaS software they can and vibe-code their way into a new entrant in that market, grinding away to create a product customers love that delivers maximum value for minimal cost. It will not be glamorous, but I am confident thousands of entrepreneurs will do exactly this and build strong small businesses.
Incumbent SaaS companies are already under tremendous valuation pressure, and things are only going to get more challenging as a Cambrian explosion of vibe-coded SaaS applications comes online."
5. "Non-fiction works are great and we can learn a lot from them, but fictional characters like these inspire us to overcome the challenges of life and put forth the best version of ourselves to the world. That is why we continue to read fiction. It is not for entertainment alone, but to learn lessons that can make us better men."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/ten-fictional-men-who-still-teach
6. "This reflects a deeper reality of the New Cold War amid ongoing industrial revolution which proclaims the same mindset as during the previous one - the winner takes all. Power now flows through factories, data centers, logistics corridors, energy systems, and chokepoints as much as through military bases.
Deterrence in the 21st century is not only about how fast you can deploy forces but about how fast you can replace losses, scale production (including defense one), and deny adversaries geoeconomic leverage.
The 2026 U.S. National Defense Strategy does not promise peace. It promises managed confrontation amid New Cold War between the U.S. and the DragonBear. It accepts the permanence of competition with China, the persistence of the Russian challenge, the volatility of North Korea, and the impossibility of global U.S. dominance at the current stage of international affairs.
What it offers instead is a system design: homeland- and hemisphere-first security, denial-based deterrence, allied industrial mobilization, and geoeconomic statecraft."
https://substack.com/inbox/post/185630161
7. Good tips for running or setting up a Family Office for "Poor Millionaires"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m87E0nxsFg
8. Always enlightening. Palmer Luckey is an American hero.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxPE7dvjVOk
9. Shipbuilding, USVs, and the Economics of Naval Autonomy. Pretty good discussion on defense-tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzvbrmw0Oyo
10. "If you want inspiration for this moment in time I have two recommendations: watch Babylon Berlin and read the Foundation Trilogy. They are roadmaps for living a moral life in a time of profound regression.
The old order was clearly decaying. The rule of law had been undermined for years. Jack Welsh and his acolytes broke the economy. Private equity raided industries for short term financial gain. Everything got financialized. Government grew ever more bloated and ineffective. Well-meaning laws were weaponized to prevent anything from being built."
https://continuations.com/what-now-slow-down-the-worst-and-build-the-new
11. "New startup opportunities emerge not from training the largest models, but from training the specialists the executives call first."
https://tomtunguz.com/the-scaffolding-shift/
12. This was a fun OG old man VC conversation on the nuttiness of seed rounds right now. Loved it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsci7cd8a5s
13. "In my view, global equity markets are undergoing a profound regime change. We’re transitioning from a two-decade cycle defined by software abundance and capital-light scalability to a new era characterized by physical scarcity, kinetic friction, and industrial re-arming.
For the past twenty years, the prevailing investment orthodoxy has favoured the “intangible economy”: as it’s commonly said, bits over atoms, platforms over plants, and globalized efficiency over sovereign redundancy.
This period relied on two foundational axioms.
First, that the physical layer of the economy (energy, materials, manufacturing) was a commoditized utility that would remain cheap and frictionless. Second, that geopolitical integration would prevent great power conflict, allowing supply chains to optimize purely for cost rather than security.
Both axioms have been falsified."
https://www.polymathinvestor.com/p/asymmetric-opportunities-in-the-re
14. The world is still in play between America & China. Global macro with Luke Gromen. Growing importance of Gold and neutral assets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiHy1FoRl-Y
15. This is probably one of the best interviews with Tony Robbins I've seen in a while. Deeply insightful and it will make your life better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_w81rptxkc
16. Timely topic of covert action in the world we live in now. We are now in a new golden age of coups, assassinations & covert wars unfortunately.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=incV9B5Ry1M
17. "Then again, Silicon Valley’s political record so far ought to be surprising. The leaders of the tech sector are almost the only people in American life since the end of the Cold War who actually have some experience of sustaining our inherited greatness, and of foreseeing and building a better future. Indeed, tech elites today might well be said to have the same sort of reasonable claim to national leadership and esteem that the generals, planners, and engineers who won World War II enjoyed in the generation after 1945. Almost alone among contemporary Americans, intelligent young people at the Valley’s intersection of information technology and finance can find themselves not only richly rewarded for their talents and risk-taking but also equipped with the resources, skills, and mentorship to transform their own and our collective life.
With the innovative products they invent or bring to market, they reshape the way we buy, sell, make, move, talk, and think. Many of those who have made fortunes doing so turn their abilities to envision and execute far-ranging plans from commerce to broader goals on behalf of the shared future of humanity. In these respects they fulfill, whether they know it or not, functions that were once those of political, religious, scholarly, and industrial elites, whose own recent accomplishments seem comparatively dim.
Yet they seem to lack the ability to transfer their success and skills into politics. It is not that tech elites have failed to think about the subject—or about philosophy, culture, and other fields beyond their core areas of professional competency. They are conspicuous readers, or at least conspicuous owners and discussers of books that consider society and history from perspectives far removed from those of the engineer or capitalist.
As a historian, literary critic and political theorist, I have been struck, along with many of my colleagues, by the recent proliferation of a so-called “canon” of such books read by many of the Valley’s leading technologists and financiers, along with people who, from within or beyond Silicon Valley, wish to outdo, imitate, or simply better understand the mindset of those leaders."
https://colossus.com/article/education-broligarchy-silicon-valley-canon/
18. This is an impressive founder. A masterclass on running a high growth startup. I actually learned a lot from this. Also syncs with lots of my experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhbVnUBmygA
19. The great geopolitical re-anchoring. Trying to understand the world from the lens of top analyst George Friedman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAXd5v5Ebb8
20. The man does not pull punches. Bessent is clearly the most articulate and smartest person in the Trump admin right now. Good to listen to if you want to hear where the US economy is going.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NdoWTWwVUQ
21. "Today, YC’s increasing investment in defense tech startups is a microcosm of a broader industry shift — from building consumer and business applications to now embracing the technology of warfare. Such a shift for a respected incubator that attracts the crème de la crème of startup offerings is exemplary of the industry’s multi-year shift toward investing in warfare tech; it’s gone mainstream. While tech companies once downplayed their military contracts, the defense tech sector’s loudest voices now argue that their focus must move from consumer diversions to defending their nation.
Alex Karp, who founded Palantir in 2003 alongside entrepreneur Peter Thiel and others, bemoaned in a new book co-written with the company’s legal counsel Nicholas Zamiska, that Silicon Valley has “lost its way” for viewing the U.S. government as “an impediment to innovation and a magnet for controversy.” The country’s best engineers worked on delivery apps when they could’ve contributed to America’s military strength.
Silicon Valley has apparently begun to wake up, as investments and valuations in defense tech have ballooned. In just five years, from 2019 to 2024, venture capital investment in U.S. defense-tech startups grew more than 10 times, reaching around $3 billion, according to Crunchbase data."
https://www.noemamag.com/silicon-valley-goes-to-war/
22. I used to be a big fan of Chamath until the SPAC scam. But this interview with his wife really humanized him to me again. People are multifaceted. And can't argue with his investing chops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG4LWSJ_Xiw
23. "Bezos was right. Your margin is my opportunity. In software, that opportunity isn’t price. It’s the race to outspend everyone else.
Still, $8.7 trillion in enterprise value says the race is worth running."
https://tomtunguz.com/is-your-margin-my-opportunity-software/
24. "As this Stanford study asserts, winning isn’t an inherent skill, it’s something learned. Tom Brady didn’t win national championships at Michigan and Elon Musk didn’t sell his first company for a billion dollars, but as I look at the most successful folks in society, they have developed and reinforced patterns that enable them to win. They don’t complain about problems, they solve them. They attack them head on and are ruthless in their self-improvement to identify pathways to help further improve their odds of winning.
I often come back to this Tom Brady quote, “To be successful at anything, the truth is you don’t have to be special. You just have to be what most people aren’t: consistent, determined, and willing to work for it.” That’s how you win, not by scapegoating, whining or complaining, but by consistently showing up with the determination and work ethic necessary to take small wins and compound them into big ones. That’s how you learn how to win.
If you are a founder (or board member), don’t just identify problems, solve them. Stack the solutions on top of each other and sure enough, you will be sitting atop some wins. Those wins can help catapult you to even bigger wins. Complaining about the problems isn’t going to get you anywhere and will only reinforce patterns to failure. As Robert Frost once said, “The best way out is always through.”
https://newsletter.equal.vc/p/winner-or-whiner
25. "By extinguishing visibility, the regime has shown how dominance over communications infrastructure can neutralize coordination and insulate repression from scrutiny. The blackout functions less as censorship than as an operational enabler, transforming digital control into a mechanism for managing society itself.
Digital Control as an Instrument of Regime Survival.
The implications extend far beyond Iran. America’s adversaries are absorbing an important lesson: in modern conflicts between state and population, mastery of communications infrastructure can be as decisive as material force. Digital isolation compresses timelines and allows coercion to outpace accountability. Applied more broadly, this logic points toward the systematic use of advanced cyber and surveillance capabilities to penetrate encrypted channels, map opposition networks, and suppress resistance before it becomes politically visible, offering a replicable model for regime survival in an era of mass connectivity."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/cyber-power-iran-and-the-uschina
26. "Noblesse oblige matters because it is the answer to the challenges of human inequality. However much we might want to believe that perennial hierarchies can be quashed by the feel-good pronouncement of egalitarians, nature is hard to overwrite, and nature is hierarchical. Rather than breezily wishing it away, the aim must be to moderate the potential excesses of hierarchy and cultivate its advantages. A culture of noblesse oblige reminds the powerful that their blessings are to be used for good and not for plunder—and it attaches prestige and honor to good conduct, shame and disgrace to bad conduct.
The ideal has been in severe decline in recent centuries, and we need it back. Everything is riding on it."
https://thechivalryguild.substack.com/p/reviving-noblesse-oblige-here-and
27. "The petrodollar’s slow fade isn’t just about oil; it’s about trust. When allies like Europe grumble about US unpredictability, they start exploring expansion of trade with China. Trump’s “America First” sounds tough, but it’s leaving the US lonelier. Europe might cave short-term, but long-term resentment builds and EU countries are considering closer trade ties with China.
The irony is striking. By trying to contain China, the US is supercharging its rise. Beijing doesn’t need to provoke; America’s blunders do the work. The bombing of Iranian sites might have scored points with the military industrial complex, but it rallied anti-US sentiment, driving Tehran closer to China. The oil grab in Venezuela further alienated Latin America, where China’s presence grows unchecked.
In the end, the US’s behavior isn’t benefiting America; it’s making China great again. The weaponization of the dollar, the tariff tantrums, the ally-alienating antics—all of it is fueling a multipolar world in which China emerges as the steady hand.
If Trump really wants to deliver to his shrinking MAGA base, he might be smart to dial back the chaos. Otherwise, we’re all in for a bumpy and dangerous ride. The big winner of this geopolitical smackdown won’t be wearing stars and stripes. It will be the dragon waiting patiently in the shadows, gaining strength and credibility with every American misstep."
https://frankgiustra.com/posts/americas-geopolitical-blunders/
28. "The mountain woomph sounded the alarm to danger underneath a beautiful layer of powder. The financial markets went woomph as the yen weakened and JGB prices collapsed.[1] Quite a coincidence that both occurred in Japan. Many macro commentators smarter than I proclaimed Japan will be the match that lights the filthy fiat system ablaze. I don’t believe our betters who inhabit the relevant organs of power around the globe will allow said collapse to occur without trying to print their way out of it.
Therefore, analyzing the fragility that the yen and JGB injects into global markets at this juncture is extremely important. Will a meltdown of the yen and JGB markets cause some sort of money printing by the BOJ or the Fed?[2] The answer is yes, and this essay will explain the mechanics of the said intervention that was foreshadowed last Friday.
This discussion of Japanese financial markets is important because for Bitcoin to exit its sideways funk it needs a healthy dose of money printing. What I will present is a theory which the actual flow of money through the corroded veins of the global monetary system doesn’t support yet. As time progresses, I will monitor the changes in certain line items on the Fed’s balance sheet in order to validate my hypothesis. But most importantly, I will listen for the “Woomph”. Our masters want us to trade based on their manipulations. Therefore, I must be vigilant and listen to what is said and not said by the likes of US Treasury Secretary Buffalo Bill Bessent and BOJ Governor Ueda-domo.
This yen and JGB market manipulation by the Fed solves many financial problems for the Trump administration.
Strengthen the Yen
This will strengthen the yen against the dollar, which will help US export competitiveness.
Lower JGB Yields
Lower JGB yields will dissuade Japan Inc. from selling treasuries to buy JGBs. Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi can roll out a massive stimulus program funded by increased bond sales to placate Japanese plebes. Understandably, the average voter doesn’t relish the fact that their nation got nuked and then turned into an American colony. Prime Minister Takaichi can also increase defense spending and purchase more American-made weapons of mass destruction."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/woomph
29. A good juxtaposition interview with Legora as compared to Harvey CEO interview previously. This one is much more Aggressive and competitive. Both companies are crushing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjwrXqjr59A
30. "Unless you’re building dev tools, those customers are probably going to have the same problem on Monday that they did on Friday. The latest AI model or open source agent didn’t change that.
By all means try new things. Spend time to test the new models and try the new toys. But for the love of god constrain the amount of time you spend doing that. If you started a company to solve a pain point that you’re passionate about, keep your eye on the prize (provided, of course, that you continue to believe that pain point matters).
And if you find yourself spending more time on the shiny new thing than you are on solving your customer’s pain points, think about that too.
In an age of distractions, the winners will be the ones who stay focused."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/when-distractions-are-everywhere-focus-wins
31. "Every quarter, calculate exactly how much “Dry Powder” you have available for a sudden 20% market drop. If you don’t have a War Chest, you aren’t an investor; you’re a gambler hoping for good weather. Sovereignty requires the ability to be the only person with a checkbook in a room full of sellers.
Takeaway
Stop praying for stability. Stability is where you get stuck. Pray for the storm, and make sure you have the boat to sail it."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-chaos-premium
32. "Every time access to the dollar system becomes conditional, participants learn to treat it less as infrastructure and more as exposure. Exposure demands management. Management demands hedging. Hedging demands alternatives.
This is not ideological de-dollarization. It is rational balance-sheet behavior in a world where financial plumbing has become an active instrument of policy rather than a passive utility. Once a system is used as leverage, it stops being treated as neutral. And once neutrality fades, even slightly, defaults become choices.
That is the true story of the dollar in early 2026. Not collapse. Not replacement. Not revolt. But a gradual shift from unconscious reliance to conscious management.
The world used to default into dollars without thinking.
Now it defaults into managed exposure.
That distinction is small in language, but enormous in consequence."
https://tanviratna.substack.com/p/the-dollar-system-is-acting-weird
33. "Outsourcing helped finance a Chinese bio industrial base with the scale, capability, and learning velocity to become a competitor. WuXi alone targeting 100,000 litres of solid phase peptide reactor volume in 2025 was not just contract research. That’s sovereign capability.
The Apple and Tesla lesson was not ‘never build abroad’. It was simpler. If you build your business on top of someone else’s factory, do not be surprised when the factory becomes the business.
Biotech is there now."
https://jwcass.substack.com/p/sovereign-risk-the-geopolitical-price
34. Great discussion on Clawdbot aka MOLbot & other topical subjects. Helpful to understand what's up in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_KyoqaXg1A
35. "Look at your biggest win this month. Ask: “How could I have achieved this with 90% less effort?” Usually, the answer involves a better relationship, a better piece of code, or a better narrative. The moment you find the answer, stop doing the “work” and start building that bridge.
If you’re tired, you’re doing it wrong. Efficiency is for the poor; Effectiveness is for the Sovereign."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-meritocracy-myth
36. Lots of great takes and insights on Silicon Valley news.
Be Present: Old Man Wisdom From Landman
I love Landman the tv series and season 2 is excellent. Incredible acting.
There is this one scene when the main character is eating lunch with his dad and he is about to rush out to solve the regular intractable problems with running a massive oil company.
His dad says:
“What’s your hurry, son? All those problems you are racing home to fix is problems when you get there? And once you’ve solved ‘em, there is a whole new set right behind ‘em. You got to enjoy the moments between the problems. Otherwise, problems is all you’ll have.
You take a long hard look at me, I am the road map to living life wrong. Whatever time I got left, I’m gonna enjoy. This steak. That sweet tea. A dance with your wife. That granddaughter’s smile. You got it all, son. But you’re too fu-king stupid to see it. Or too mad. Or too addicted to the fix. Whatever it is, you’re missing it.”
Source: https://x.com/Mindset_Machine/status/2009262045665849508
Hard words. Powerful words. A good reminder that life is short. A wake up call.
Yes, you should work on hard problems, you get rewarded for solving hard problems. But don’t ignore your important relationships, your family. Be present more. Be grateful for even the smallest pleasures. And don’t forget to enjoy the time you have on earth.
The Thinking Game
For anyone who is curious about AI and the future, I strongly recommend the documentary on Demis Hassabi and his journey building Deepmind, now part of the Alphabet aka Google empire. It’s really well done and free on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ
The man is brilliant and maniacal, accomplished chess player at young age, early admittance to Cambridge Queens College, man behind the video game Theme Park. At age 11, he came to the hard realization. "Although I love chess this is not the thing I want to spend my entire life on." Thankfully for humanity he did as he started focusing on exploring AI before anyone else, leading him to cofounder Deepmind, where wanted to build AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) which is an intelligence just like the brain that learns many things versus AI which is single task focussed and specific.
He built and modelled Deepmind on the best of academia with a collection of some of the smartest people from around the world. "The founding principle of this place (The Institute for Advanced Study), it’s the idea of unfettered intellectual pursuits, even if you don't know what you are exploring. Will result in some cool things, and sometimes that then ends up being useful, which of course, is partially what I've been trying to do at Deepmind."
Tackling big hard problems and as one of their experts said: "I can tell you, if you are at the forefront of science, you will fail a great deal." But when it works, it really works. Power law again.
They started using the technology to win in video games, the complicated board game Go and even Alphafold, to figure out protein folding which could literally lead to life saving science. “These are gifts to humanity. Every single biological and chemistry achievement will be related to Alphafold in some way. Alphafold was an index moment. A moment people will not forget because the world changed.”
Demi’s learning from this: "The lesson that I learned is that ambition is a good thing, but you need to get the timing right. There is no point being 50 years ahead of your time. You will never survive 50 years of that kind of endeavor before it yields something. You'll literally die trying."
The race to AGI is on. "The advent of AGI will divide human history into two parts. The part up to that point and the part after that point. It will give us a tool that will allow us to completely reinvent our civilization" Exciting times.
As Demi says: “Everybody’s realized what Shane and I have known for more than 20 years, that AI is going to be the most important thing humanity’s ever going to invent. The pace of innovation and capabilities is accelerating, like a boulder rolling down a hill that we’ve kicked off and now it’s continuing to gather speed. AGI is on the horizon.”
So if you want to learn and be inspired by this exciting technology I highly recommend watching the documentary. It’s really worthwhile.
Go Get Some: Andrew Tate Motivation
Sometimes you just need a kick in butt to get going. The grind is hard I know so you have to find inspiration wherever you can. I find Andrew Tate’s harsh truth to be freeing. He did a video beginning of 2026 that I still go back to frequently when I get discouraged: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=azZzdQEg4t0
I warn you though, it’s a long one.
“This year is going to be a transformative year. There will be energy in the universe. Energy that you can grab and transform into the building blocks required to improve your life in all realms. But none of it's going to matter unless you're prepared for it. None of it's going to matter unless you're doing due diligence on yourself.
You should only spend your time doing what you are good at. This is an extremely important concept not many of you understand. There's two primary ways you get to make money. You either give up your time or you give up your money. Now, if you become a specialist in something, your time is amplified. If you're a doctor, your time is worth more than if you're a cleaner. Why? Not everybody is a doctor. Anyone can clean.
With money, it can also come down to how much you know and how well you know how
to amplify your money. It's true. But to a degree, you need a specialization…….
Imagine you wanted to be completely self-sufficient and you had to make your own clothes and grow your own food and build your own house. Now imagine you were a very talented musician, but because you want to be self-sufficient, you don't have time to play piano because you have to build your own house, make your own clothes, and grow your own food. And you may have a few spare minutes in the day to play some piano. Whereas if you only play piano all the time because it's what you're good at so that you earn enough money that you can pay someone else to build your house, buy your clothes, now you get to become rich cuz it amplifies the value of your time.
If you want to be good at something, then you need to identify, well, what am I good at? Let me focus on that, which increases the value of your time so you make as much
money as possible. Conor McGregor was a good fighter. So he focused on fighting.
When he wanted to launch a whiskey brand, he then uses the money and
notoriety he had obtained from the only thing he is good at and hired people to
deal with distilleries to deal with starting an international alcohol brand
distribution.
Imagine instead he said, "I want to do a whiskey brand all by myself" and wanted
to build his own distillery, make his own whiskey, and drive it around in
trucks trying to deliver it to pubs. You don't get rich that way ever. Then
what you should be doing is doubling down on that thing, making as much money
as possible, and finding someone else to do that for you. You may ask yourself, well, how do I then find people who I can trust to do the other things that I can't do?”
I think this point is key. I think you have to both be a specialist and generalist. Like a T. Know something super super well, be an expert on one thing, this is the leg of the T. But you should also know a bunch of things generally. The top of the T. Knowledge is power.
“This comes back to the sofa store and learning how to manage people and manage relationships and not be a little social autist. Sitting on a chair all day will make you autistic. Nobody's going to like you. To be likable and trustable and relatable. You're going to learn that the hard way most often. But this is an extremely important concept I want many of you to understand. If you're making three grand a month from a pet store and that's what you're good at, you need to spend your time getting that
three grand a month up to 10 grand a month.
Not sitting there gambling the three grand a month trying to catch a lick because you saw shiny object with a once in a generation, god knows when it's ever going to come again. Because what crypto is doing is it's brain draining and there's people now who are forgetting the thing they are actually talented in to just sit and chase imaginary gains in a minus some gain and most of you are going to lose.
I make a lot of money with lots of things. I make a lot of money with property. I make a load of money because I can talk on a microphone and you will listen to me. I have a coffee shop. I have a car wash. I do everything. So, I'm not against money. What I am against is the idea of people not prepared to sit down and do actual genuine work. This obsession with shiny objects, this easy come, easy go, fast.
The truth about life is that there is no easy way out. There is no shortcut home. It's rocky. It's round 10. It's a slugfest. It's broken eye sockets and it's swinging. That's all life is ever going to be at the top. Even with money, it's the same for me. It's still jail.
It's still court. It's still problems. I can only deal with them because of my poor man lessons.
I went to jail in Romania. The gypsies who tried to pick on me. Not knowing I grew up in Luton. I'll fight all 10 of you right now. And they learned better. If I had caught a 10 million lick at 16, how would I have survived in jail?
Being poor saved me. Being poor saved me. And my brand has only ever been telling you that life is hard as a man. It's never happy. It's never smiles and rainbows.
And the ones who do are not going to end up happier than you. You have to wake up, realize life is do the right thing even though you don't feel like doing it. Dedicate yourself. Grind out brutal, terrible, hard labor. And if you do it the way you're supposed to do it, the lessons you will learn along the way makes money worth having.”
“There's no point having money if when you walk into the club, nobody gives a hoot who you are and nobody respects you. What's the point in money then? You see it all the time in Miami now. These crypto kids spending their 400 grand on bottles in a night. Who cares? Cuz we don't give a damn about how much money you have. We care about the quality of your character as a man.
How good are you in a firefight? You don't want a Ferrari before you can handle it.
Trust me, you're going to hit a tree. Ask yourself, do you deserve millions of dollars? You know you don't deserve it. And God knows you don't deserve it. And if he gave it to you, it would be a punishment. God only gives you what you're ready for.
And on the rare occasions he gives you something you're not ready for, you're going to regret it. You know, I wasn't even rich till I was 27. And I think back and I thank God I wasn't rich when I was because if I got rich before 27, I wouldn't be strong like I am now. And that's worth more than being rich.”
Money is important, especially in America these days. But it’s just one element of a man’s life. We all know folks who are super wealthy but are unhealthy, weak or worse, uninteresting. I see a lot of this in Silicon Valley. Tate is correct that you need to have the whole package, health, wealth and respect. To get respect from others, you have to have accomplished something hard, to have interesting experiences and stories. Interesting hobbies. And maybe more importantly, being physically and mentally strong. As Tate’s friend Justin Waller said: “I believe the true definition of a man is a person who can hold a baby and slit a throat on the same day.” Probably something to that.
“And I wouldn't have the lessons that I say to you on all these emergency meetings. And that's worth more than being rich. I like all the lessons I had when I was poor because I have the poor man's lessons and the rich man's money. So if God's decided you need some more of the poor man's lessons, then that is a blessing. So ask yourself a question.
If you were honest, do you want a 1% chance of making it today or do you want a 100% chance you're going to pull it off in 3 years from now? The intelligent people would say, "Well, three years of working, learning lessons along the way, plus a guaranteed success, I'll take the three years."
But most of you, if offered that chance, you would take the instant gamble bet. You want the hard work and you want the difficulty. Life is a neverending series of tests and battles. 80-year war and there is battle to win every single day. The best thing you can do is prepare for the future battle because you can be sure as you are that the sun will rise that a battle will come. Tomorrow's problems are guaranteed. But if you do not fix today's problems, you do not earn tomorrow's problems because problems in and of themselves are a blessing.
There is nothing worse than living in the eternal still, the ether of insignificance where you have no problems. It is stagnation which is destructive for the male soul. Is perhaps the most destructive thing. You don't want that life. You must change your attitude towards problems and see them as a blessing. If you do not get to enjoy today's problems and solve them, you're going to have no problems tomorrow.
And I guarantee you that the life you dream of with no problems doesn't exist. Because if you ever do find that life, it is torturous. And if life is perfect all the time, you don't appreciate anything. I actually think one of the worst lives you can have is a life where everything goes right all of the time. If you're spoiled to that degree, especially as a man, as soon as you reach any kind of difficulty, you're going to crumble. And I do not pray for an easy life. I pray for a difficult life with difficult challenges to solve and being strong enough to handle them.
If you really want an exceptional life and to do exceptional things, you can't only hope for the positive exceptional. The only reason you appreciate being rich is because you were poor. If you were born rich, you don't appreciate it. Only reason you appreciate being in good health is because you were once sick. If you've never experienced sickness, you don't know what health is. I don't believe that God will ever put you in a position where you get to tell the entire world how masculinity and how a rigid mental model and how an iron mind works without ever being tested.”
There is no light without darkness. Contrast is important and sadly you only appreciate something when you lose it. Nothing good comes without struggle and pain. The more important the mission the harder it is. The bigger the dream, the bigger the struggle. Nothing worthwhile is easy. This is the way it is. The sooner you understand this, the better off you will be.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads March 29th, 2026
“Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring." – Vladimir Nabokov
I enjoy learning from Ryan McBeth and his takes on geopolitics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcUvd8dEZko
2. Luke Gromen is probably one of the best analysts of global macro and his takes are very sober. A world of financialized USD vs hard assets/commodities driven BRICS.
Net net: stack cash and get hard assets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re5CqaZXfCI
3. "No one else will truly care. So why do you choose to live like anyone’s opinion actually matters? If they won’t care about you struggling to make ends meet, to feed your family, to take care of medical bills, to bury your mother, to deal with health disasters of your own, then why the fuck do you care about what they have to say?
They are no one. You are everything. And everything you want should belong to you. Or at least, you should be able to go after anything and everything you want without fearing what a nobody will have to say.
That is your superpower. Wield it fiercely."
https://www.rawmanifesto.com/p/no-one-gives-a-fuck-about-you-and
4. "Most people are “Narrative Consumers.” They adopt the labels, the benchmarks, and the definitions of success provided by society. They compete in “Red Oceans” because they accepted someone else’s definition of a “win.” If you allow others to define what is “expensive,” “successful,” or “urgent,” you are playing their game on their board. You are a character in their script."
https://substack.com/inbox/post/185104164
5. These folks are tops in pre-seed. So some good insights in what is happening in venture capital investing right now in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD2MlxhH2qw
6. Inside TBPN, the tech media phenomenon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVLRuIuLBe8
7. "Money doesn’t change you. It amplifies you.
If your mind is chaotic, more money just makes the chaos louder.
If your mind is structured, more money makes you unstoppable."
https://substack.com/@luxlifestylelab/p-178626294
8. Some good perspective on investing in AI startups from A16Z. Data moats are real.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XVDtPU8xKE
9. Investing in the age of conflict.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-AH0UD_xsk
10. "The more gold trades in yuan, the more the yuan starts looking like a reserve asset. Meanwhile, the dollar—once as good as gold—now looks more like the Turkish Lira. With U.S. debt racing toward $40 trillion, it’s backed mostly by history, faith, and reassuring briefings.
The Shanghai Gold Exchange won’t replace COMEX or LBMA overnight, and the dollar won’t vanish tomorrow. But history moves in powerful tides, and you can see them if you pay attention. Empires rise and fall. The accelerating decline of the dollar against gold signals that America’s long run as the unchallenged hegemon is nearing its end.
Every trade settled in yuan instead of dollars, every bar stored in Shanghai instead of London, every central bank swapping Treasuries for bullion—these are all tremors in the tectonic plates underlying global finance. The old unipolar system is slowly giving way to a multipolar world where value isn’t just promised—it’s measured in something real.
The Shanghai Gold Exchange has played a quiet but pivotal role in this shift. It’s where finance reconnects with physics, where the abstraction of money meets the unprintable reality of atomic number 79. While central banks can print paper until the forests run out, gold remains gloriously finite.
The twentieth century belonged to the dollar. The twenty-first probably won’t belong to any single currency. It’s more likely to be a network of regional systems, each anchored by something that doesn’t need cheerleaders to prove its worth."
https://frankgiustra.com/posts/paper-promises-meet-physical-truth-how-shanghai-stole-the-gold-crown/
11. UAE's setbacks in their chaos agent strategy geopolitically. Also interesting possible development of a Muslim NATO with Saudi, Turkey & Pakistan, maybe even Egypt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFAuZg1w_Gk
12. "What struck me then, and still does today, is how Mark has never lost his craft of operating as a forward deployed engineer—deeply close to the problem, clear-eyed about the people building the solutions, and relentlessly iterating on his own craft.
When Mark told me he was raising Fund II, I knew we needed to capture more than just the headline. This is the story of what it took—the real story—to go from a first-time $10M fund to a $45M Fund II in a tough market."
https://embracingemergence.beehiiv.com/p/how-mark-scianna-raised-his-fund-ii-in-a-matter-of-weeks
13. Learning about the MrBeast attention economy empire. Leveraging audience into new businesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9gSO66oC6U
14. "We have been sold the lie of “Productivity.” We are obsessed with doing things faster, better, and cheaper. But if you are moving at 200 mph in the wrong direction, your efficiency is just accelerating your failure. Most people spend their lives optimizing tasks that shouldn’t exist in the first place. This is “Busy-Work” dressed in high-end software.
The Thesis in One Line.
It is better to do the right thing slowly than the wrong thing at the speed of light."
https://substack.com/inbox/post/185210328
15. "The decline of the middle class began with the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War, a thriving middle class was seen as essential to US survival, leading to policies designed to grow and strengthen it.
It provided the industrial and technological capacity needed to fight a total war. People capable of wielding the complex machines of war and making them.
It stabilized US politics by forming a prosperous majority under a unifying identity: American. This shared identity simplified decision-making at the national level (people didn’t see each other as enemies) and provided a vast pool of loyal people willing to defend the nation if needed.
A prosperous and loyal middle-class majority was impervious to the ideological pressure of Communism.
When the Cold War ended, the need for a prosperous, protected, and loyal middle class evaporated. There weren’t any threats left to fight. This led to;
A reorientation of decision-making from a focus on nationalism (tied to the middle class) to globalism (GDP growth, corporate profits, financial market size/growth, the cost of labor/imports, etc.).
This shift began with deregulation and changes to tax/monetary policy that financialized the economy and eliminated rules, roles (jobs), and economic factors (cost suppression, pensions, etc.) that enabled the middle-class to produce and accumulate wealth.
Next, spurred by new levels of global connectivity (the Internet), the US focused on global expansion by eliminating barriers that protected the middle class, from trade barriers to immigration. US middle-class citizens went from being able to produce and accumulate wealth to becoming economically stressed competitors in a vast global market.
With the shift to globalization, a new group arose to replace the middle class. A small (10%), thriving group of people capable of competing on the world stage and/or exploiting weaknesses in domestic systems. A Cosmopolitan elite that has absolute faith in globalization. A faith proven by their success at producing and accumulating wealth."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/the-cosmopolitan-elite
16. “When you have conflicts, international geopolitical conflicts, even allies prefer not holding each other’s debt. They’d prefer to go to a hard currency. It’s logical, it’s factual, and it’s repeated throughout history.”
And the coup de grace:
“But let’s be cleareyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable. And there’s another truth. If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate. Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.”
It is an understatement to say there is a lot to think about these days.
Gold received the message from Davos loud and clear."
https://robertsinn.substack.com/p/ray-dalio-the-monetary-order-is-breaking
17. 10 non obvious things about Silicon Valley fundraising
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/10-nonobvious-things-about-silicon-valley-fundraising
18. "It means re-engaging in our communities from volunteering to serving in government to religious services to being involved at your kid’s school. It means deciding that the path we’re on is unsustainable for all but a lucky few and choosing to use your resources, your voice, your time differently. It means making sacrifices for the greater good. It means rejecting a zero sum view of the world that may feel good in the short term, but, unless you’re a sociopath, you always regret deep down in the long term.
This is still the greatest country in the history of the world. But not by accident and not by divine intervention. Because we’ve sacrificed and worked together and taken risks to make it so. That can continue. But only if we make it so."
https://bradleytusk.substack.com/p/the-manchurian-economy
19. This was incredibly timely. Every Type A individual should watch this. Learn how to live a better life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz-ymFOhBAE
20. "After the grand experiment in egalitarianism failed to go as the reformers had planned, we still have all of the old problems in full. Instead of equality we have laundered oligarchy—the rule of billionaires, tycoons, experts, and managers who embody the exact opposite of noblesse oblige (and who actually aren’t impressive in any way except for their ability to game the system). These new oligarchs experience no such pressure to do right for those beneath them; instead they dedicate themselves to extracting from them.
Almost every aspect of modern American life is defined by the oligarchic mode of demeaning, demoralizing, and extracting from normal people—from the mass immigration which drives wages down and housing prices up, to the ugly architecture, sports-betting apps, weed dispensaries, homo entertainment, and more. Big Medicine now has little to do with promoting health and everything to do with managing and medicating sickness. Big Food, seemingly in cahoots with Big Medicine, has poisoned just about everything on the shelves of our grocery stores.
Meanwhile fake experts make the matter still worse by confusing you with bad advice about what’s healthy and what’s good. “A patient cured is a customer lost,” they say—and this pattern applies almost uniformly across American life. The point is that our “elites” don’t give a damn about you and have turned our country into a “sheep-shearing operation,” as one poet put it."
https://thechivalryguild.substack.com/p/the-death-of-noblesse-oblige-the
21. "About 375 nautical miles to the east of Ramstein, you will find Wrocław (roughly the distance from Washington, DC to Portsmouth, NH). That is 375 nm closer to—yes, say it with me—NATO’s eastern front.
If you are a logistics geek—which you should be—there is a lot of important and serious work being done in Poland. This will help her security, and that of the NATO alliance.
While some of the—mostly—Western European allies are more interested in drama or reliving their anti-American tendencies from their youth—Poland is a serious nation and a serious leader in Central Europe. They are not playing around."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/plan-salamander-operationalized-at
22. "The geography is identical. The logic applied to it is not. One side approaches the Arctic as a field in which control and leverage are built incrementally. The other continues to treat it as a domain in which order can be maintained through management.
These different frameworks produce different conclusions across the board. When the United States looks at Russia, China, or Iran, it sees adversaries probing for advantage and testing enforcement over time. When many European governments look at the same actors, they see risks to be managed, delayed, or compartmentalized in order to preserve domestic stability and political cohesion. Agreement on who the adversaries are fails to translate into agreement on what confrontation requires.
Political constraints reinforce this divergence. In Europe, aging populations, coalition politics, and deeply embedded welfare commitments push leaders toward minimizing visible cost and escalation. In the United States, global commitments, industrial competition, and expectations of primacy force prioritization, trade-offs, and explicit burden calculations. These pressures shape not only policy outcomes but the way threats are conceptualized."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/babel-at-davos-why-the-transatlantic
23. This was a great episode this week and lots of good takes on OpenAI ads & D-RAM chips and learning from Matt Damon & Ben Affleck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVANS_4McfM
24. So instructive: learning the art and science of venture investing from two masters of the game. Not the nicest people but super smart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBf1LZbk2Pk
25. "The ultimate status symbol in 2026 is a calendar with no recurring meetings and 80% white space. It signals that you are in total control of your time and that your presence is a scarce asset, not a public utility. When an elite individual says “I’m available,” it carries the weight of a rare astronomical event."
https://substack.com/inbox/post/185411259
26. "With Greenland suddenly back in the headlines, it feels like the perfect moment to revisit one of the most extraordinary men ever to set foot on its frozen terrain: Peter Freuchen. Towering at 6’7” in stature and even larger in spirit, Freuchen was not merely an explorer, he was a force of nature. He lived among the Inuit, crossed vast ice fields by dog sled, fought fascism, survived conditions that should have killed him many times over, and once famously saved his own life by carving a dagger from frozen feces.
Freuchen’s story reads less like a biography and more like an epic novel. It is equal parts survival tale, political thriller, and travelogue of a lost age of exploration. Yet every astonishing detail is true. This is the story of the man who helped map Greenland, defied death, and lived with a courage that few could imagine."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/forged-in-ice-the-man-who-became
27. Some of the best takes on Silicon Valley news and topics. I appreciate all the insights that come out from their conversations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_ZpvRjB9JI
28. "I anticipate that we will see the rapid development of defensive swarms in the not-too-distant future. Just as naval ships no longer protect themselves with heavy armor and point defenses, but instead distribute air, missile, and subsurface defenses among several escort vessels, it is easier for air and ground platforms to disaggregate their own defenses.
Drone swarms can be used to protect armored vehicles, radar sites, and any number of other high-value targets. The rate at which this is done may well determine how soon mobility is restored to the battlefield."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/swarms-packs-and-stigmergy-animal
29. "In the Mid-2020s, we have some of the same trends: 1) tech taking up more and more value, 2) people becoming more location independent - making it easier for tax havens to compete for citizens, 3) larger K-shape division of the haves and have nots, 4) massive need for more infrastructure and 5) encryption/privacy.
Tech Taking More Value: Simplistically, all the low end paper pushing or “if then” statement jobs will be replaced by AI. An example of “If Then” is booking a flight. Just put in the parameters and have it find the best flight at the lowest cost.
Similarly, this hits low-end white collar positions. Having a lawyer find and replace the same document and just change the name? Going to have even more wage compression. In the 1990s it was cool to be a rich lawyer in Chicago, in the mid 2020s, unless you’re at a top firm… pain
All that value gets transferred. Similar to energy. It has to go somewhere and that somewhere is tech as it replaces them.
Mega companies have the best information, this means betting against the monopolies is a bit foolish. How do you expect to create a high quality Artificial General Intelligence with bad info? Exactly."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/investing-in-technology-2026-version
30. "A lot of people have become familiar with Venezuela over the past few weeks, since Operation Absolute Resolve, in which the United States captured Maduro and shipped him to Brooklyn. Many are trying to understand the implications for Venezuela, the region, and the United States. I’ve seen emotions from my friends and online bubbles that range from full blown catharsis to a cynicism that nothing substantive has actually changed.
I’m excited about it. Operation Absolute Resolve has created more open and exciting possible outcomes for Venezuela than any other event in my eight years in the region.
That said, in order to reap the country’s full benefits, people need to get excited about the right thing.
Oil is the obvious prize. But it’s a complicated one. President Trump asserts that selling oil from Venezuela is “gonna make a lot of money,” and it is true that Venezuela’s 304B barrels of reserves are the world’s largest. Until recently, more than 80% of its oil exports went to China. Redirecting the flow of Venezuelan oil would hamper Chinese road building and cut off 50% of Cuba’s oil supply, while giving America cleaner access to (very heavy, harder to refine) oil. Realignment could be as big a geopolitical win as a financial windfall.
But oil isn’t the only prize in Venezuela. It’s not even the biggest.
We must rebuild and reopen Venezuela because it’s the most underpriced opportunity on Earth."
https://www.notboring.co/p/the-venezuela-opportunity
31. Trying to understand the complicated geopolitics of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia & MBS asserting themselves in alliance with Turkey & Pakistan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnhgnVm-peE
32. A good role model for young men and old men. From the military, intelligence services, private security, businessman and now tailor. Good conversation here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFCJzbUdrwo
33. "What proves far harder to replicate, and far more consequential, is the invisible layer: China’s manufacturing base. This is the part of the ecosystem that actually reshapes global supply chains, yet it remains the part most visitors never see and, in many cases, never think to see.
The concept of involution — roughly, competitive intensity that becomes self-destructive — captures something real but incomplete about Chinese manufacturing. Foreign visitors ask when margins will improve, assuming profitability is the primary goal. In the environment we saw, it isn’t. Endurance comes first. Margin expansion is earned later, once scale and position are secure and paired with groundbreaking innovation at irrefutable scale. CATL has achieved this combination. Huawei has as well. But these are rare winners.
China’s manufacturing system is optimized for survival under pressure, not comfort. That pressure shapes how companies think about success, risk, and reward.
The concern is legitimate. But it’s worth considering whether this perception is precisely what the sector intends to project. Manufacturing here is not a business where you sit back and collect profits. It is a relentless grind unless you are among the very top players, and the warning embedded in that reality may serve as its own barrier to entry."
https://ruima.substack.com/p/inside-chinas-real-advantage-manufacturing
34. "The tragedy of American power isn’t that it’s declining; it’s that it’s increasingly unserious. We still have the muscle, the money, and the moral case. What we lack is patience, humility, and the stamina for the boring part — asking “What happens next?” Until we relearn how to write second acts, every intervention will look the same: dazzling, destructive, and destined for a sequel no one asked for."
https://www.profgalloway.com/license-to-intervene/
35. "Do something UNIQUE. You want to be the only person who does what you do. Build a personal monopoly."
"Fewer emails. I send six emails every month (four free and two paid). Daily emails are not required, especially in professional services. People would much rather read something great once a week, than something mediocre every day."
The advice I would change from 2021 is on distribution. Back then I wrote:
"Use Twitter. Almost all successful newsletter authors use Twitter to promote their newsletter. It is a great way to get momentum and build true fans. Twitter, word of mouth, and earned media are best growth strategies IMO."
Twitter, now X, was a great platform to promote newsletters in 2021. That diminished after Elon Musk bought the platform and heavily demoted any links to Substack. Today, a Twitter presence helps growing a newsletter but is not as important.
Three points:
Niches have tremendous value.
It's much easier to monetise if you directly help people do their job better.
Having an extra distribution channel (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube) helps when getting started."
36. "From New York to Beijing, London to Dubai, the world’s major cities display remarkable aesthetic convergence: glass towers, disciplined geometries, restrained interiors, and consumer products that speak the same visual language. This global unity of form is often dismissed as the bland residue of modernism, but it was not an accident. It was constructed by a previous generation of elites, people closer in spirit to today’s founders and industrialists than to their cultural critics. The visual language of the modern world did not assemble itself. It was designed.
The architecture and design we inhabit descend from a deliberate cultural project born in Germany in the early twentieth century. A group of artists, architects, industrialists, and educators realized that the machine age would not produce a coherent society on its own.
Industrial life would require a cultural elite capable of shaping the conditions of everyday life rather than merely adapting to them. The aesthetics of the world we now inhabit, whether or not they match the spirit of our century, are the distant aftershock of this German project."
https://letter.palladiummag.com/p/the-triumph-of-german-industrial-051
37. An excellent glimpse into what's up in Silicon Valley. And it is silly and fun and exciting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgwMFLjxQa0
38. "You should strive to be interesting because once your time is up you will not think back to the money left in your bank account or the litigation of your business underway, rather all the marvelous stories you’ve created, the friendships you’ve formed, the life you’ve lived that only 1 in a million get to live, and even then, you did it better than them. To be interesting is to have the world as you see fit.
There are zero rules to this man, he truly has it all. Any desire gets acted upon because he has the skills, network, and resources to do so. The women, the dopamine-sources, the culture, the history, the knowledge, the skills, the people, the food. You have had a slice of every thing the pie of life had to offer. You beat the game and did it with a smile on your face. That is why you should strive to be the interesting man."
https://www.rawmanifesto.com/p/how-to-be-an-interesting-man
39. Really good explanation of the battle for dominance in the Middle East. Incredibly complicated. Qatar was the original chaos agent, now it's the UAE.
Eyes on the Prize: Focus on the Basics
As we get close to the end of Q1 in 2026, I am not sure about you but for me it’s sure been a grind. Plenty of business travel, lots of calls, lots of meetings, plenty of writing, plenty of learning. I keep wondering if I am making any progress at all. But then I remember to focus on the basics. Focus more on inputs and less on the outputs. Don’t get discouraged. Don’t get distracted.
Brother Lobo summed it up pretty well:
“If you just focus on exercising, reading, learning a martial art, picking up an outdoor activity, spending time with loved ones, building a relationship with God, working on something consistently, you will live a vibrant and fulfilling life. Everything will work out. It’s really that simple.”
Source: https://x.com/ellobosalvaje/status/2006868073958306199
It really is that simple. Life is a grind. Always has been. And now more so than ever before, it’s the grinders that win. So keep grinding.
Liquidity Kills: Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself
We are our own worst enemy. Having been in Silicon Valley, I’ve seen far too many cases of people blowing themselves up after a massive exit. As exited founder Steven Simoni said: “Liquidity F-cks you up!”
As many folks have worked most of our careers to get this liquidity (myself included), you may think: what are you talking about? This is the goal. Liquidity, financial wealth and independence. This is the dream. But like everything this cuts both ways.
I saw a tweet https://x.com/_The_Prophet__/status/1999972581135503541 on X that explains exactly why this happens:
“If you woke up a billionaire tomorrow, the most dangerous thing in the room would be you.
Not greed. Not enemies. Not bad investments. You.
Because sudden abundance does one thing almost no one admits: it destroys constraint, and constraint is what keeps identity coherent. Before money, reality pushes back. After money, reality goes quiet. That silence is not freedom. It’s loss of feedback. Most people mistake that silence for arrival.
They fill it with motion. Projects. Statements. Philanthropy. Visibility. Legacy narratives.
That’s how they rot. The real first act is restraint to preserve signal integrity. When constraint disappears, your thoughts get louder. Your intuitions feel divine. Your worst ideas arrive with confidence. Your ego stops being checked by friction.
That’s why billionaires get weird. Not because they’re evil. Because they are no longer corrected.”
Now I’m not saying you shouldn’t go for the big exit. You absolutely should. Money is a tool. Money is energy. Money is a score card. And especially in a place like America, money is survival. The more money you have, the better your life and those of your loved ones will be. The issue is that money enables everything and anything. Any vice you have. It means you can do anything. Worse, maybe it means you can do nothing. Literally nothing. So your brain starts to rot.
But Sightbringer has a cure. A way to deal with this so you don’t go crazy when it happens.
“So the real first move is re-introduce resistance on purpose. Delay. Isolation. Silence. Unobservable time.
You rebuild an artificial gravity well so your thinking doesn’t drift into fantasy. Only once you’ve proven to yourself that your internal signal still works without external correction do you act. And here’s the part people don’t like hearing: If you don’t do this, the money will eventually control you. Not through need. Through narrative.
You’ll start justifying. Explaining. Performing meaning. Believing your own story. At that point, the money has already won.
So the truth is: The first thing I’d do is protect my inner coherence as if it were the only scarce asset left. Because at that level, it is.”
Source: https://x.com/_The_Prophet__/status/1999972581135503541
Basically don’t change anything in your first year. Keep doing some kind of work. Don’t scale up your lifestyle. It helps to keep hobbies you had from before. It helps to stay curious and curate your circle. To stay fit, healthy and strong. Do everything you did when you were working toward wealth and liquidity. Keep internal coherence. It helps to have religion. It helps to have a bigger mission in life now that you are post economic.
Don’t be the cautionary tale we hear about all the time in Silicon Valley, Wall Street or Crypto. People who lose everything at a time when they supposedly gain everything, everything materially that is.