Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 10th, 2026
“Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.”-- Kahil Gibran
"We are conditioned to seek “External Validation” for our ideas. If people like it, we think it’s good. If they ignore it, we think it’s a failure. This is a Strategic Error. When you rely on the crowd to tell you what is valuable, you are outsourcing your Taste to the average. And the average is, by definition, mediocre. Praise is a cage that forces you to repeat your past successes; criticism is a wall that prevents your future ones. Both are noise."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-validation-trap
2.US Navy forward positioning in Australia as plan B ie. when the breakdown of globalization is in full effect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UeDdWm-8-s
3.Klarna CEO is on the bleeding edge of adopting AI. Klarna has been leading the charge of AI in his company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7vIRAFSXmk&t=2169s
4."Scarcity generates pleasure, anxiety, and purpose. But a world that is post-scarcity in the sense that there is more than enough material resources for everyone will still have another form of scarcity—people’s respect, admiration, attention, desire, and love.
The bad news about a post-scarcity utopia is that we will still be unhappy much of the time. The good news is that our lives will still have meaning."
https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/assistant-to-the-regional-manager
5.Managing the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund. Learning from the best investors & how to thrive in the age of AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyvuM3J9QqQ
6. Fun convo this week. Openclaw, Ferrari & Jony Ives & Winter Olympics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x43XMee7-Kk
7.Lots of implications of India and others taking apart the Oil Shadow fleet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJdFi0rvj8M
8."It’s easy to sneer at the folly of billionaires and tyrants surrounded by yes-men stumbling into preventable catastrophes.
Harder to acknowledge that we ourselves are vulnerable to the same forces which blind us from our own self-authored missteps, surrounded by those who see our flaws clearly but chose silence over uncomfortable conversations.
Now pause and turn the mirror inward one more level.
Consider not just the times you stayed silent about someone else’s unforced error higher up the gradient - but the times you committed a preventable error, perhaps years ago, that only became clear in hindsight through delayed consequences, external events, or someone finally letting slip what they’d long observed."
https://kaichang.substack.com/p/the-distortion-field-why-power-makes
9.The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (+ Pakistan-Turkey-Egypt) versus UAE (+Israel-Ethiopia, maybe India?). Growing rivalry in the MENA region.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3G6tDycuz8
10.Some good takes on investing in AI by the 8 VC team.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aETqFYCrIoA
11.Lots of great frameworks and perspectives on how to do comms right for founders. We are in the age of narrative and founders have a huge advantage if they do this right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Njb8Lw5Xc
12."One of the most overlooked lessons from If Russia Wins is that deterrence in the 21st century is as much an industrial and financial challenge as a military one. Masala’s scenario does not hinge on technological surprise, but on speed, scale, and endurance: Russia rebuilds its military capacity faster than Western policymakers expect, while Europe’s defence ecosystem remains fragmented, under-capitalised, and slow to adapt.
The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that modern deterrence depends not only on traditional military hardware but on technological innovations: unmanned systems, AI-enabled targeting, secure communications, cyber defence, satellite intelligence, and agile manufacturing. These are domains where startups and private capital can outperform traditional defence contractors."
https://resiliencemedia.co/if-russia-wins-lessons-for-the-uk-and-europe/
13.Some good insights on geopolitics right now. From one of top analysts from BCA Research.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYrdjsOKqO8
14.Geopolitical uncertainty. Some diversification outside of the USA is probably a good idea, particularly in Emerging markets like Latam, India & Eastern Europe and SE Asia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYrdjsOKqO8
15.Kind of dark but a cold hard look at the world. The leadership of Canada, the UK and EU are a "tornado of incompetence."
In the US, our leadership is just ultra corrupt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMkxlJfIb4
16.All things AI, energy & Semiconductor chips. This was a fascinating convo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqBMzuzxZog
17.This show helps you make sense of the crazy news in Silicon Valley. Always worth watching every week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVfDfse13es
18."If you can get the same objective results from hitting the gym 3 times per week, why would you want to get that same outcome training twice a day, 7 days a week?
When you start to think in this lens, it allows you to think more about output over how many hours you clock in.
It’s time to start admiring the man who gets what he wants as effortlessly as possible.
Who surgically works to build results.
Who doesn’t waste years, ‘doing it his way’, but instead learns from world class mentors & practitioners who can speed up their development.
If you’re in a phase of your life now where all you feel you’re doing is grinding, sit back & really analyse…. Is this mode of operating really giving me results?"
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/why-grinding-is-overrated
19."But for many who outwardly appear successful and agentic, their agency is actually narrowly contained within psychological ‘hidden walls’. Other domains and challenges which are patently important are never even considered as targets of action because there has been no subconscious reification of personal efficacy in these domains.
Wealthy and powerful men will live their whole lives in ugly places which need beautification, sterile communities which need family formation, and social groups with declining standards which need to be reversed. But in these domains, they self-conceptualize as object, rather than agent. They don’t even think about changing them, let alone mounting a head-on attack.
Whatever your views on them, true agency is exemplified in our age by figures like Trump and Elon. In 2015, Trump presented a vision of America’s future which was completely at odds with orthodoxy, and the execution of which alienated him from polite society. He wasn’t even a politician—but he did it.
Pretty much all of Elon’s enterprises are characterized by attempting radical breakthroughs in languishing domains—most of which he is not a personal expert in before he gets involved; and yet he consistently finds tremendous success. Buying Twitter to personally guarantee free speech is high agency.
Most of us will not be the next Trump or Elon. But we can calibrate ambitions accordingly."
https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/our-low-agency-elite
20.Was an educational conversation on the economy. Good for global macro investors. “The world is run by thieves.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC3eM69jn0Y
21."When does life change drastically?
The general answer is that it happens once you escape "survival mode". Those with a tougher upbringing will have a harder time getting out of it than those who had it easier. To explain our point further, if your parents always had to think about how they would put food on the table. There is a good chance that you were consistently operating in survival mode.
On the other hand if you grew up in more comfortable surroundings where you went skiing once a year or always had a travel abroad… There is a good chance your parents didn’t operate fully in survival mode. To get back to our point. Once you get out of survival mode, you finally have time to think about the things you never considered before. This is where mental, mindset and other woo-woo stuff make sense. Why? Because you finally have time to think about them instead of worrying about whether you can pay the bills."
https://www.beautyofsaas.com/p/faq-how-to-escape-the-mediocrity-and-rise-above-the-average
22."Skills are for interactive conversations. Code is for agents. Skills are easier to debug. When a skill fails, you know exactly where to look. When an agent chains ten function calls & the output is wrong, you’re hunting through logs."
https://tomtunguz.com/9-observations-using-ai-agents/
23."Nothing ever happens unless you cause it to.
Nothing good ever just falls into your lap.
You have to make your own luck.
You have to take ownership of your own life."
https://substack.com/@colejaczko/p-188521648
24.I always get energized when I listen to David Senra. "The Hard way is the Right way."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PBgbS0N86I
25. "In the end, the real threat to taste isn’t AI - it’s the way content keeps trying to package it. The more we polish it for virality, the more we strip it of what made it powerful in the first place.
Developing taste means actively resisting the gravitational pull of popular consensus and algorithmic predictability. It means allowing yourself to be guided by intuition and curiosity rather than the expectation of external validation. It means being conscious and careful about the clothes you buy, the books you read, the music you listen to. Above all, it means learning.
Taste doesn’t just come from liking things.
It comes from disliking things - and knowing why."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-169036769
26."I am talking, of course, about the status game.
This game is inside us. We can’t help but play it. For millions of years, high status meant better mates, more food, greater security. Low status meant genetic extinction, inceldom, zero hoes.
Status-seeking is hardwired into our brains. It is universal, but its expression is context-dependent. What codes as high status varies by ecological niche. In the Stone Age, Cro-Magnon man would stomp, yell, and flex in front of women. This was scarcely more sophisticated than a silverback gorilla thumping his chest. Me strong. Me loud. Me get woman.
Suffice to say, this ooga booga behavior wouldn’t be appreciated by members of the Royal Sydney Yacht Club. In rarefied environments, displays of raw strength are vulgar. They signal an unfortunate proximity to the brutish classes. But in other ecological niches, chest-thumping codes as ‘alpha’ rather than apish. El monstruo Texano drives around in a RAM and injects steroids. Like his paleolithic ancestors, he signals status through physical dominance. In the American south, this is an adaptive strategy. In America’s coastal regions, it is uncouth, proleish, and irredeemably low status.
In short, status is contextual. What’s considered high-status in one environment can be irredeemably low-status in another. There isn’t a singular way to be high status. To quote W. David Marx, ‘There is a Hollywood entertainment mogul way of being high status that is distinct from that of Texan oil magnates.’"
https://substack.com/home/post/p-174511393
27.I know there is a negative slant from loser mainstream media on the tech industry. But I also get the reason people hate the tech bros. This article exemplifies both leanings. FTR as long time SV guy: Roy Lee and his ilk are awful POSs.
"What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before.
For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.
The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley"
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/
28."Fortunately for the Taiwanese, there’s a possible workaround for the ammo problem. Taiwan may be struggling to stash enough artillery rounds, but there’s nothing stopping it from stockpiling a new alternative: tiny explosive drones. Taiwan’s high-tech industry could produce these in huge numbers and without outside help.
These drones would be even more important in the alarming scenario where Taiwan fought alone—even if it only temporarily fought alone. But a pivot to drones should begin now."
29."Every mistake above is actually the same mistake: confusing access to the commodity with a competitive advantage.
Intelligence is the commodity. I want that to land, so I’ll say it one more time as plainly as I can: the thing everyone is racing to adopt is the thing that will differentiate absolutely no one.
What won’t be commoditized:
distribution
domain knowledge
customer trust
brand, and
the ability to aim intelligence at exactly the right problem in a specific market.
That’s it. That’s the whole list. And it’s a short one."
https://vikrantduggal.substack.com/p/intelligence-is-cheap-now
30."But what is Project Vault, precisely? Think of it less as a government program and more as a structured insurance product for American industry. Participating manufacturers pay upfront commitment fees, essentially a security premium, in exchange for guaranteed access to stockpiled raw materials during defined market disruptions. They cover storage costs. They can draw down inventory for normal operations, provided they replenish it. The architecture borrows from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but the ambition is considerably broader: all 60 minerals on the U.S. Geological Survey’s Critical Minerals List, covering everything from lithium to rare earths, the inputs that underpin modern manufacturing, defense systems, and the clean energy transition.
Critically, and this is a distinction worth understanding, Project Vault is not the National Defense Stockpile. It is not, primarily, a military program. It is demand-led, built around civilian and commercial industry, a point made plain by the roster of initial participants: Boeing, GE Vernova, Clarios, and Western Digital. General Motors, Stellantis, Corning, and Google have reportedly expressed interest. With the exception of Boeing’s defense arm, this is, at its core, a commercial play dressed in the language of national security.
The private capital in the deal flows from three trading houses — Hartree Partners, Mercuria Energy Americas, and Traxys — firms whose core competency is exactly the kind of global commodity logistics that a program of this complexity demands. They will serve as the procurement engine, sourcing and moving raw materials through supply chains that the federal government has historically shown little aptitude for managing directly."
https://matthewbernard776320.substack.com/p/project-vault
31.Lots of good takes this week. The continuing AI wars in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CewrGGMjRI
32.I've had my issues with Chamath but this is pretty wise stuff. You can learn from anyone, even if you dislike them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-LAT4HjWPo
33."For the European services that failed to foresee the invasion, a period of soul-searching followed. One European intelligence officer said they were furious over the failure and had pushed internally for an inquiry into what could have been done better. “The whole raison d’etre of an intelligence service is to predict when the next war will come,” said the officer. “And we completely messed it up.”
Huw Dylan, a historian of intelligence at King’s College London, said there was a long history of intelligence analysts being unwilling to predict that future events will create a dramatic break with the past. People could not imagine what a major European land war would look like in the 21st century, so assumed it was unlikely to happen. Additionally, scepticism is usually the safer option. “If you’re predicting something that has massive implications, you’ve got more to answer for if you get it wrong,” he said.
The Ukraine failure has started to change that. As one German official put it: “The main thing we took away from all of this was that we need to work with worst-case scenarios much more than we did before.”
Now, as the world has entered a new era of uncertainty, there are more worst-case scenarios to ponder. Recent European military exercises have focused on how to maintain order after massive attacks on power and communications infrastructure that cause civil unrest. For the first time in a century, Canada is modelling potential responses to a US invasion.
For many, the key intelligence lesson from Ukraine was stark: do not rule things out, just because they might once have seemed impossible."
34.Michael Every is one of the best geopolitical analysts around. This was pretty helpful to figure out where Europe may be going. The likelihood of fragmentation is high. Trump doing reverse Perestroika in the USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlklWpxw7zo
35.Helping to decipher Trump's moves globally and at home. Lots of huge implications and various scenarios via "reverse Perestroika". This is a must to watch for global macro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JHrddtDqbA
36."What happens when the skill you spent your life learning can be done at 80% proficiency by a novice in a matter of minutes. We’re already there across most disciplines. AI and robotics will eventually flatten all surface-level skills.
The skills that will matter in the future will be things like judgement, taste, the ability to make connections across disciplines, story telling and moral/ethical reasoning. Going back to the car example, the skills you will need will more closely mirror a navigator than that of the actual driver.
Taste, judgement, cross-disciplinary connections, story-telling and moral reasoning are much harder to foster. These require life experience, failures, interests in many different areas and a lot of time spent in contemplation. It will require you to understand how you actually view the world, what you stand for and who you are."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-188351223
37."The future is a fiction. The past is a graveyard. The only reality is the current system. Build for the kill, not for the history books."
Mountainhead
I decided to watch the HBO movie so you don’t need to. It was made by the creators of “Succession”. This time it’s a story about the weekend getaway between 3 tech multi-billionaire friends & their near billionaire host while the world burns down around them due to the products they released. Yet ironically their wealth and net-worth continues to grow. Troddling around the world like giants.
And like in “Succession”, you pretty much end up hating all the characters who are just awful people. Insecure, self-righteous, callous & surprising catty too. Maybe even with a lot of sociopathy & megalomania. Self serving for sure. All plotting against each other. Caricatures of what bored, rich douchebags with infinite resources would do. “I know everyone and I can do everything” is literally one of the lines.
It’s just a movie but it seems to reflect all the animus that Hollywood and media seems to hold toward the tech industry, especially Silicon Valley elites. The movie's dialogue include well-used Silicon Valley terms like decel, first principles, disintermediation, decentralization, AI doomerism or transhumanism. Mockingly I might add.
And I get it. I’ve been in Silicon Valley for a long time. It’s a literal bubble, filled with brilliant, ambitious and somewhat deluded people. People who think they can create something from nothing. The amount of wealth creation here is ridiculous. Unfortunately this rise has led to incredible insularity and a lack of understanding of the rest of the American populace. There is such a focus on technology and wealth that there is little thinking about the negative impacts across society of the tech being created.
Add the arrogance from the incredible wealth and it seems to explain the anger and hatred that the rest of America and people from other industries feel. It started happening with mobile phones and social media. It’s only coming to the head with AI. No one wants to be disrupted. This disruption that is coming for white collar jobs will match the pain that globalization & outsourcing brought to manufacturing.
No wonder most major AI Labs CEOs are not doing any public appearances anymore. They see the techlash coming as one of the billionaires says: “because really we are in a moment of tremendous creative destruction….A great turning…..nations are teetering and I think we play a role.”
Watching Mountainhead reminded me that unless we start going back to basics: doing good, building great products, not the gambling and Enshittification of products for a quick buck, we will probably deserve everything coming for us. Mobs with pitchforks. This movie is a not so subtle warning. “Winners take all, loser takes a fall.”
Purehearted
“Based on a true story. Majimu, an office worker in Naha City, embarks on a journey to make a new type of rum using Okinawan sugarcane.”
I mean with a description like this, how can you not be intrigued. Basically it’s a dramatized “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” but for rum. Super random and something I’d ONLY trust the Japanese to do right. Why is it that the Japanese are able to take a concept and turn it into the ultimate apex of the craft. Making something as close to perfection as humanly possible: whether sushi, sake, French pastries, wine, tofu, green tea or whatever. It’s incredible. The care. The craftsmanship.
Majimu decides to apply for her company’s in-house ventures competition after trying a foreign rum. She realized there is no local rum. She gets inspired to make it. Okinawan rum using freshly squeezed sugarcane: in a style called Rhum Agricole. “Why does delicious alcohol make you feel so happy?”
Her entrepreneurial journey begins and like all journeys it’s a rough start. She is discouraged by her family: “it ain’t an easy thing to do, making stuff for people’s mouths.” But she makes it past the first round and starts to learn about the details of rum and figure out where to find the top ingredients around Okinawa. An example of “You can just do things.”
Like many Japanese people, Majimu goes all in on her dream. Detailed research and plans. As they said in the movie: “it’s not a pipe dream if you take action.”
She crushes it and makes it past phase 2 but as usual runs into challenges. Reality. She needs to figure out a distiller, suppliers and a license. Convincing a stubborn village headman on her idea.
But she is determined: “I know nothing about making alcohol. I don’t know how hard it is to create a product but I’m determined to make one Okinawa can be proud of…..All I want is to make Okinawan rum.” She gathers believers along the way. Early believers. No startup ever succeeds without this happening.
She draws inspiration from her family’s tofu business. “You need to know the face of the person making it. Make sure you get the most important things right.” The basics: The founder matters. Founder driven sales and founder driven customer support. Founder driven product. The founder is everything.
We are entering a world where people are tired of buying from big faceless corporations. Small & personal is better. And customers will pay a premium for it. Especially if there is a personal touch and relationship with the founder. One of the overlooked advantages of early stage startups. The best founders are purists. They really care and it shows. They are obsessive and relentless like Majimu.
“We need more than knowledge. We need someone who is with us all of the way. I’m sure now.” You need to create a movement. A religion. A cult even. This is how you manifest ideas into reality. She even finds a distiller that shares her same values & love of the product.
“Making alcohol is like raising a child. It changes and develops every day so you’ve got to give it love and attention. That’s my duty as a parent…..a winemaker can only produce a limited amount during their lifetime so I want my wine to be loved and shared by everyone. That’s why with every bottle, I put my heart into it….and I always will.”
This mindset is why Japanese products rock. This is why startups rock. What an inspiration.
“If you try to do something. You can do anything. If you don’t try something, you’ll never be anything. Those who are purehearted, without fail, through whatever, they’ll have their wishes granted. And flourish forever.”
F1: The Movie
Damn that was a great movie. I’ve always liked Brad Pitt and have a passing interest in F1 as a cultural phenomenon. This movie really captured it well. The thrill of being a modern day gladiator in modern form. Competing against others and yourself at the dangerous edge of extreme speed. I also get why ownership of F1 teams are the sport of billionaires and big PE funds. It is expensive to run a team.
Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a former Formula 1 driver that never fulfilled his great promise but ends up driving at racing championships like Le Mans, NASCAR and even was a NYC taxi driver. He is literally a modern day knight errant traveling around the world but driving, not fighting.
But 30 years later he is recruited back to an F1 team run by his old friend Ruben as a Hail Mary. Ruben sells him:
“I’m offering you an open seat on Formula One. The only place you can say one day if you win, you are the absolute best in the world.”
Hayes is intrigued and asks his waitress:
“Hey, let me ask you something. Close friend of yours made you an offer that was 100%, positively too good to be true. What do you do?”
The waitress asks: “Well, how much we talking about?”
He responds: “Not about the money.”
She says: “So what is it about?”
He responds: “Hmmmmm.”
It took the rest of the movie to figure it out. It’s about ego. But also self worth. Pride. Proving beyond a doubt you are the top of the top. That you are beyond a doubt the best.
He also talks about Flow states:
“It’s rare. But sometimes, there’s this moment, in the car where everything goes quiet, my heartbeat slows, it’s peaceful. And I can see everything and no one…..no one can touch me. And I am chasing that moment every time I get in the car. I don’t know when I’ll find it again. But man, I want to. I want to. Cause in that moment, I’m flying.” Probably one of the best descriptions of finding flow.
And if you want to get a view into peak single masculine life, this movie is it.
“What the hell you smiling about man? Did you win something? There’s 20 other drivers still out on that track and you’re in here posing for that nonsense. Do you think any one of them respect us? Do you? They need to learn that no one gets past us without a fight. No one.”
“Plan C is for combat. Combat! Combat! Combat!”
He has to pull the team together, a younger hard charging driver Joshua Pearce who is troubled by the financial issues of the team, his future and the competition of the new driver.
His mom gives Joshua good advice: “Don’t mind that. Focus on you. You can spend your whole life worrying about other people but your time is right now.”
His mom asks him: “you still love it?”
He responds: “Of course I still love it.”
She says: “Remember what your father used to say: Put your head down and drive.”
Seems like great advice for all of us right now. Get focused. It’s Q2 and there is work to be done. And watch F1 and be inspired. It’s never too late to make a comeback.
As Sonny Hayes says: “Create your own breaks. Hope is not a strategy.”
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 3rd, 2026
"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." — George Orwell
"frontier-tech corridors are the next great American economic engine - and the time to shape who benefits from that engine is right now, whether we are ready or not. As AI, and great-power competition reorder the global economy, the United States is already sliding into a new epoch; if we do not deliberately connect our people and our states to that future of work, we risk locking in a generation of under-prepared workers, stranded regions, and justified malaise about what comes next.
The frontier-tech corridor is a model meant to solve that problem of economic disconnect: to give states and regions a concrete way to align their industrial base, their talent pipelines, and accordingly their governance models with the frontier technologies that will define the next sixty years.
In the United States, services now account for roughly four‑fifths of GDP; finance, insurance, and real estate alone contribute about 21 percent, health care nearly 18 percent, while manufacturing has fallen into the single digits. For reference, China and Korea went the other way. China’s secondary industry - manufacturing plus construction - still makes up around 38 percent of its economy, with manufacturing by itself in the high‑20s as a share of GDP, even as services rise toward the mid‑50s. South Korea keeps roughly 30 percent of its GDP in manufacturing value‑added, the second‑highest share in the OECD, with services closer to the low‑60s. On the defense side, as mentioned the United States spends a little under 3 percent of GDP on its military, China has hovered below 2 percent (speculated), and Korea around 2.6 percent - but both Asian competitors are stacking that defense effort on top of far more muscular industrial bases.
Over the last three decades, our neo‑liberal model encouraged U.S. firms to offshore a large share of the hard work of making things - electronics, ships, machine tools - while we deepened our specializations in finance, software, and health care; China and Korea treated manufacturing and dual‑use industry as national projects. Wright’s Law takes an institutional form here: the nations that actually build at scale accumulate line workers, technicians, and engineers who get better with every unit shipped, and they now over‑index not just in exports but in engineering-intensive research, and patents across the very technologies that will define the next fifty years."
https://innoblepursuit.substack.com/p/frontier-tech-corridor-southeast
2."The strong man is not the one who fights every battle. It’s the one who waits until the fight is worth his time. He doesn't throw himself into martyrdom to prove he has a spine. He survives. He grows. He watches. And when it's time to collect the debt, he does it with interest.
You don’t have to stand your ground every single time it’s challenged. Sometimes the wisest option is letting things go, only to attack when your boundaries are truly crossed and broken.
If you were to fight every battle every time available, you’d constantly be in war. Battle-torn, cortisol-maxxed to the roof. Zero enjoyment for anything beautiful in this world. But you absolutely cannot avoid conflict. You must be conflict-ready."
https://substack.com/@finalman/p-161414752
3.Whatever you think of Elon Musk, he has built an incredible business machine in Tesla and SpaceX and Xai.
Lots of insights on how he runs his businesses and shows his first principles engineering thinking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXbuik3dgA
4."If your time isn’t yours, your money isn’t either.
True wealth is:
– Building in the shadows
– Growing without noise
– Owning your hours, minute by minute
Money’s just the key.
The door is time."
https://substack.com/@luxlifestylelab/p-170072842
5."Let’s be real: Burnout doesn’t discriminate by net worth. Today’s top business owners know that health isn’t a luxury. it’s leverage.
From boardrooms to beachside workcations, the modern entrepreneur is optimizing not just for profits, but for peace. Because the real flex? Feeling sharp, focused, and calm no matter what the day throws at you."
https://substack.com/@luxlifestylelab/p-170303236
6."The ultimate signal of elite status is the ability to run a multi-million dollar empire from a single high-end backpack. It signals that your Intelligence and your Systems are your only real assets. While the “new rich” show off their mansions, the Sovereign shows off their Zero-Anchor Lifestyle."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-ownership-trap
7."The bet has risks. Energy at 21x P/E isn’t cheap by historical standards, it’s expensive. The sector typically trades at 10-15x. Grid buildouts face 3-year transformer lead times & 10-year permitting cycles. If AI monetization disappoints, hyperscalers will cut capex as fast as they deployed it. Ask anyone who held fiber stocks in 2001.
In 2026, the market is betting on hard infrastructure."
https://tomtunguz.com/rotation-software-energy-materials/
8."In the Army, soldiers undergo rigorous training to instill discipline and a strong work ethic that transcends individual interests. In civilian life, that same focus can drive you to excel in school, work, or personal goals.
When you develop discipline, you set high standards for yourself, hold yourself accountable, and get stuff done even when you’re not feeling it. Over time, you’ll notice you feel more confident walking into any situation, because you’ve trained yourself to handle challenges—much like a well-trained unit ready for any mission."
https://gbnt1952.substack.com/p/boot-camp-for-life
9."Saizeriya is the people's champ, supporting Japanese families, students, anyone really, for decades. You won't be able to find food of this quality for $2-3 USD a plate in any other developed economy. Yet they're profitable and continuing to grow double digits. There's really 2 elements: Cost advantage + Quality.
The cost advantage isn't just one thing, like Amazon or Costco. it's doing a thousand small things right to operate a restaurant chain with an industrial level of efficiency without compromising on quality. They've really thought in first principles and really went up the supply chain to rethink cost AND quality. The extent they are going to do this is impressive."
https://madeinjapan.substack.com/p/saizeriyans-at-the-gate
10.Excellent discussion this week, particularly on the impact of AI and what you can do to prepare. That and global macro & getting hard assets. This reminds me of these guys at their best during pandemic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnaegIpkenA
11.This speech was excellent. Direct but hopeful. A call to action for unity, ramping defense & reindustrialization for Western Civilization. Decline is a choice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HtGx-GWgZU
12."Entrepreneurs should deeply integrate advanced AI tools into the workflow of every team member. If someone isn’t willing to adopt them, that’s a real issue. The companies that fully embrace these tools will move faster, learn faster, and compound progress more quickly.
It may feel uncomfortable at first. But over time, founders and teams who put AI at the center of their workflow will increase their velocity and accelerate progress toward their vision.
Don’t wait. Make AI foundational—personally and across your startup."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/02/14/ai-is-a-super-power-start-treating-it-like-one/
13."True elegance is a lifestyle, not a performance.
It’s about aligning appearance, behavior, and communication in a way that feels natural.never forced.
When mastered, elegance becomes your silent business card, working for you long before you say a word.
Elegance is the most powerful form of quiet influence."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-7-rules-of-true-elegance-a-complete
14."In a world obsessed with luxury consumption, quiet intellectualism offers a compelling alternative, focusing on depth and meaning over superficiality. This path is not about flashy logos or extravagant possessions, but about the profound satisfaction of getting lost in a book, unraveling a complex idea, or mastering a new skill. True wealth is not a public image you project, but a personal fortress you build within yourself."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-allure-of-quiet-intellectualism
15."These past couple of years have taught me a lot about how to build a life outside a high tax country and I want to lay out what I think is the best way to go about it all. If you’re sitting in Australia or any Western country feeling squeezed by taxes, cost of living, and that growing sense that the harder you work and the more successful you become, the more headwind you cop.
What is a Sovereign Individual?
A sovereign individual is someone who structures their life across borders, legally, to reduce dependency on any single government, minimise taxation through jurisdictional choice, and increase personal freedom, mobility, and economic opportunity.
South America is the answer to start building something freer, and, quite frankly, a lot more fun, in 2026 (although it’s certainly not for everyone)."
https://www.geologotrader.com/p/how-to-become-a-sovereign-individual
16.Everything is about energy and cheap energy at that. This is leading geopolitical de-risking and diversification. Massive investment into infrastructure and hard assets is happening in the West.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piXBXRXHiQA
17.Everything that worked in the last 50 years for investing will not work going forward. Hard assets aka industrials, energy & commodities. Hard power is sovereignty in a “might is right” world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VdSlnBxhUM
18."The ultimate signal of elite status is a massive change in business direction or lifestyle that is never announced only observed. You don’t post a “rebranding” thread. You don’t explain the “new vision.” You simply start operating at the new level. Those who are meant to be in your Phalanx will see the result; the rest don’t matter."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-feedback-loop-of-silence
19."The Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) taught me that there is always a recovery, despite the prognosis at the time. And by focusing purely on a company’s fundamentals I could distance myself from the noise. For well-managed, cash-rich companies, crises throw up many opportunities. There will always be crises so one needs to be positioned to get through them and emerge stronger. The best managements will do that for you."
https://www.readideabrunch.com/p/idea-brunch-with-james-hay-of-pangolin
20."To make these substrates rigid, heat-resistant, and electrically stable, manufacturers use woven glass fiber fabric (T-Glass) as the structural reinforcement material, similar to how rebar reinforces concrete. This gets combined with resin to create the layers of the substrate.
For the most advanced AI chips, you need the highest-grade glass fiber because these chips run extremely hot, need ultra-precise signal routing, and can’t tolerate any warping or electrical interference.
Nittobo’s T-Glass is apparently the only material meeting these extreme specifications at scale.
So when you control 90% of this specialized glass fiber, you effectively control a critical choke point in the entire AI chip supply chain; the structural foundation every advanced chip needs to actually function."
https://www.polymathinvestor.com/p/investing-in-the-antipodes-of-the
21."Yes, intelligent machines will soon supersede us in a whole range of ways. But we are still the creatures who created, and listen to, the Brandenburg Concertos. Who read Shakespeare. Who marvel at nature. Who can say to one another: I know how you feel.
Perhaps in time, and via the new machine lifeforms we seem to be creating now, the world in which all that happens may indeed pass into history. But we don’t have to embrace that outcome, or hasten it. We can fight for the human way of seeing. And if we fight, I think we’ll find a way through."
https://www.newworldsamehumans.xyz/p/what-you-are-that-machines-are-not
22."From 2020 to 2025, there were 5,700 AI & ML acquisitions. Only 21% disclosed a deal value. The remaining 4,500 share a pattern : small teams absorbed into larger companies. No fanfare. No valuation headlines. Just talent migrating from startup to incumbent.
It’s cheaper to buy a team than to compete for hires or build from scratch."
https://tomtunguz.com/ai-acqui-hire-wave/
23."This is the new literacy. Not prompt engineering. Not learning to code. The essential skill of the AI era is probabilistic thinking — the ability to assess confidence levels, estimate expected value, and make decisions under uncertainty. It’s knowing when to fold a losing hand and when to push your chips in.
The people who will struggle are the ones who demand certainty before acting. They’ll wait for AI to be “perfect” and miss the window. The people who will win are the ones who understand that perfection isn’t the standard — positive expected value is. They’ll make more bets, lose some, win more, and compound those gains over time.
So if you want to prepare for an AI-driven future, don’t just learn how the technology works. Learn how to think in probabilities. Read about Bayesian reasoning. Study decision theory. Or, frankly, just go play some poker. The table has more to teach you about the next economy than most business books ever will."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/if-you-want-to-win-in-an-ai-world
24."In a frontier‑tech economy, most of the work that matters will not be happening in conference rooms. As Elon Musk likes to remind his own engineers, the factory (the machine that builds the machine) is harder than the product itself, and it demands more smart people, not fewer. Shipfitters and composite technicians, mechatronics operators and depot maintainers may never need a bachelor’s degree, but they will need to read digital work orders, interpret schematics, and troubleshoot software‑enabled equipment.
Start with K‑12 performance and not with factories: if the South’s children cannot read and do basic math, they will never be able to claim the blue‑collar frontier‑tech jobs coming to their backyards. The irony, and the opportunity is that states like Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee are now leading the country in early‑grade literacy recovery, quietly building the foundations of a technically capable workforce.
If they can sustain this turn and pair it with real pathways into apprenticeships and technical colleges, then within a decade the corridor will graduate a much larger share of working‑class kids who are actually capable of doing frontier‑tech work, right when the nation most needs them. The rest of this section is about that foundation: the Southern surge in literacy, and what it means for the blue‑collar reservoir that sits beneath the corridor."
https://innoblepursuit.substack.com/p/two-pipelines-three-theaters-one
25.Optimistic for the future based on this convo. Dispatches from the Munich Security Conference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD3lWdWDMgA
26.How to build an effective sales culture. Lots of good points here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXGLftcRHAE
27."The US is the most attractive market for new high-end technologies and has the best innovation ecosystem. The market wants to create these technologies; the barrier is activation energy.
It seems clear that hardware entrepreneurs have (re)learned that iteration speed and hardware-rich development are a more effective way to create new things. Vertical integration is now the dominant solution in mind share. The downside is that it requires tens of millions of dollars and numerous highly skilled employees to kick off. It works for Elon, but not everyone has that skill set.
Amazon Web Services enabled software startups to begin without having to set up on-premises servers, lowering the activation energy. Instant quote, short lead time manufacturing companies and services can do the same for many hardware startups and tinkerers.
The emphasis on speed is because the model only works if the latency is low. The gravity model for frontier technology is much stronger than for existing products. Leading engineers become more productive, iteration cycles shorten, and new ideas become reality faster. Not only does fast service and lightning logistics help convert existing customers, but it also helps create the downstream manufacturers of tomorrow."
https://www.austinvernon.site/blog/manufacturing.html
28.Italy is winning. Milan particularly as an international city.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67KqRfgyP7M
29.Zurich is the epitome of stealth wealth. Quiet money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw1KzQ_9V0Q
30.This is a really cool & important company. Metal Manufacturing with Machina Labs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQpwOkDUHvg
31."Beyond That The Common Thread? Data, energy, computing. These three things are needed to power AI/robots in the future. Therefore you should calculate how much data, energy and computing you own. Being negative on tech over the next decade is insane to us. Owning those three things = owning the new workforce.
If you want a set and forget stock portfolio it probably looks like this: QQQ, SMH, AI/Data stocks (META, GOOGL etc.) and Data Center/Solar/Nuclear exposure.
If you have anything in those three categories we’re not going to debate with you. The big picture is what you need.
On the W-2 Side: Since we’re in the first stage of this “junior co-worker” vibe, this means you’re going to slowly thin out middle roles (fancy for not generating revenue or making decisions). Your job is to position yourself for accountability and judgement. Use all the advanced AI tools you can find to appear capable of future judgement/accountability. Being fast at filling in excel sheets is no longer valuable."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/indicators-for-the-bottom-aie-com
32."As the capabilities improve, it is inevitable that every company will have the ability to automate most functions. For now, there are levels, and a set of companies are pushing the frontier of what’s possible. Human taste and decision-making will be more important than ever as AI does more of the grunt work."
https://nbt.substack.com/p/automate-the-entire-company
33."At this point, I don’t think we will hire another human for at least a year or two at our firm, but our efficiency will increase by at least 10% a month – the equivalent of two new full-timers.
Why?
Because it’s easier, faster, and more cost-efficient to set up replicants.
The replicants burn $1,000 in tokens a month (but never ask for a raise).
The replicants don’t make mistakes.
The replicants will get 10% better at their jobs each week, which typically takes humans about a year.
The replicants don’t complain, they train."
https://jcalfromallin.substack.com/p/openclaw-and-the-great-hiring-hiatus
34."If you find yourself entering a category with dozens of nearly identical competitors, pause. The problem may already be solved. You may be refining.If you find yourself confronting a bottleneck that others avoid because it is slow, complex, or governed by hard science, pay attention. That is where leverage hides.
Innovation, at its finest, is not aesthetic restlessness. It is structural defiance.
We must not build AI for the sake of AI, but build where a constraint dies, a category is created or an industry is transformed."
https://droninghead.substack.com/p/constraint-is-the-real-frontier
35.This was incredibly helpful for founder CEOs, lots of great management and leadership insights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UyitfSbY6c
36.A reality check for us in the West. Emerging Markets are booming and China has lots of advantages now. A global macro perspective.
No Apologies
I noticed I say “sorry” a lot. When I run into someone or do something wrong. Or even when someone runs into me or it’s someone else’s fault. WTF? It led me down a long thought chain to understand where this is coming from. I think it’s the weak overly polite Canadian in me. I grew up in Canada and lived there for 21+ years.
I also think it’s from the last decade or two where the Western culture for some reason started to promote weak, inoffensive apologetic men. Or even the ridiculous woke cancel culture, where you had to go on some apology tour if a tweet or something you said 10 years ago offended some rando or set of randos.
This is the system that the matrix propagates. It keeps the populace in check. It’s a pernicious form of societal control. Keeps you docile. You have wide swathes of weaklings now in the UK and Canada. America too. Every Western country. Rudderless passengers in their own meaningless lives. It’s harsh but it’s true.
Language is programming. Specific language leads to specific behavior. Talk like the weak, you are weak. The reverse is true too. You have to “act as if.”
However, if you observe the real world, everyone you know who has accomplished anything or done anything of impact was not afraid of ruffling feathers. I mean you don’t have to be a complete dick all the time as I see in Silicon Valley or Wall Street but sometimes you have to break some eggs to make an omelette. Fortune favors the bold as they say.
Going forward I’ll always be polite but no more “I’m sorry”. The only people I’ll ever apologize to are my family, my friends and business partners. I owe them my best and I also know I sometimes am not at that level or there when I am needed. But for anyone else, no more. If you don’t like it, I don’t care, F—k off!
I’ve finally realized weak behavior and apologizing does not serve me well. Not in the past. Definitely not now. You are just signaling to the predators you are the prey. And as we are operating in a world where it’s the law of the jungle, as prey you are now more likely to get eaten. It is what it is.
So no more apologies anymore. This is what I think is critical reprogramming. No more slave mindset. Onwards and upwards.
Aristocrat Hours: Work Like a Lion Part Deux
I’m a big believer of 996 and crazy work hours. Especially if you are in your twenties and thirties.
When I hear a twenty-something talk about work-life balance, I think they are stupid, probably deluded and maybe even retarded. WTF? You have the energy and the whole life ahead of you.
You literally don’t know anything about how the world works and you have to prove yourself. Prove yourself to yourself and to others. These are foundational: the skills, the reputation and relationships. So you have to grind when you are younger. That is the way the world works.
But this is different when you get into your mid-late 40s. At least it was for me. You probably know more. You have less energy, despite biohacking, exercise and other things. So you have to be more strategic and focused. I heard the term “Aristocrat Hours” from my friend Arjun. Basically 10 am to 3 pm. Hours where you work. The rest of the time it’s yours to spend on whatever you want to do. Reading, writing, family time, exercise, walks in nature. It’s about sustainability. It makes sense to me. I want to work till the end of my life. My retirement plan is death. That means I need to be able to do this for at least another 40 years. I might add you can’t do this as an employee, only if you are self employed or run a business.
In my business it’s about staying relevant and understanding what is happening in technology, startups and geopolitics and global macro. That means like investors of old, you have lots of downtime to read, write and think. To parse the signal from the noise as they say. Finding the reality. This is critical to stay on top of things and get new ideas. Or at minimum understand what is going on and how to position yourself and business accordingly.
That doesn’t mean I don’t grind or turn it on when I need to. You work like a lion as I wrote about before. There are days and weeks (sometimes even months, like in the summer) of relatively low activity, followed by periods of intense activity and work weeks. Like 100-120 hour work weeks, just like in my good old days. Aristocrat hours enable this, slow pace for a while as you build knowledge and energy that gets expended on the right activities in a short period of time. Rinse and repeat.
I’ve learned a lot of this mindset and tips from Lux Life Style Labs: https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/. I highly recommend them. As they wrote, it’s about effectiveness, not efficiency.
“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.
The curator doesn’t manage time; they manage Leverage. They refuse to participate in the “Efficiency Race.”
The concept of Aristocrat Hours helps you sustain and become more effective in life.
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.