Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 14th, 2025
“In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.”--William Blake
Two of the smartest individuals in the world, sharing their knowledge. Naval & Balaji. Worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiN1orWlZvw
2. Arthur Hayes is a one of best observers of global macro & crypto. Short but good conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uSEqggMvNw
3. "Ukraine has shown how quickly a major war can escalate and how asymmetric it can be. Europe spent decades in “peacetime mode” — shrinking forces, aging equipment, under-invested innovation. Scaling back up takes time: training recruits, reopening barracks, refitting vehicle fleets, rebuilding supply chains.
Security is not just the military’s job; civilians contribute to it as well. Founders, investors, media, everyone. Most tech waves come with a moral story—social networks “connecting the world,” crypto “democratizing finance,” AI “advancing science.”
Defense is different. It’s not optional lifestyle tech; it’s about protecting our societies."
https://new-defense.com/investing-in-defense-tech-startups-matt-kuppers/
4. Lots of good takes here on latest tech & AI news. NIA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeb53UD4_dk
5. "Every major success story is a case study in pain tolerance and conviction. Compounding only works for the few who stay solvent long enough to experience it. It’s the price of admission to the 1%.
Most people can’t tolerate being underestimated or delayed. They need recognition and attention. So they cash out to scratch the ego.
They need comfort, so they give up options. They mistake motion for progress and validation for security. They exit the game voluntarily, right before it turns unfair in their favor.
The irony is that singular focus on survival/adaptability creates inevitability.
If you stay in the arena long enough, the odds eventually tilt toward you. The longer you can withstand pain, boredom and obscurity, the more tail events you’re exposed to. Life runs out of ways to stop the man who refuses to leave.
If you’re in that grinding phase where nothing seems to click, that is entirely mental., If you’re making the right choices the momentum piles up silently. You’re not supposed to feel rewarded. You’re supposed to survive.
Every month you stay solvent, every year you hold your ground, your probability of breakthrough rises. That’s the math of attrition.
People Hate Cockroaches and Yet They Teach a Valuable Lesson, Find a Way to survive"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/getting-rich-is-a-game-of-attrition
6. What an interesting concept: The Network State. Good to have a plan B these days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfsaiGWv7oU
7. Pieter Levels at the Network State Conference. Illuminating conversation with the OG Digital nomad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw2EKZNI5p4
8. Lots of nuggets of insights for anyone working or investing in defense-tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGgPwKDJBrc
9. Frexit coming? An interesting take on global macro right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRmgw52426g
10. "By the fall of 2023, Thrive Capital, the New York-based investment firm Kushner started 13 years earlier, had become a kind of overnight sensation. In 2010, Thrive’s first fund was $5 million, and included companies like Kickstarter and GroupMe; by 2023, its eighth fund was $3.3 billion, including a maniacally concentrated $2 billion investment in Stripe at a $50 billion valuation, and a $150 million check to OpenAI at a $29 billion valuation. (The companies are now valued at $107 billion and $500 billion, respectively).
Along the way, Thrive’s bets on Instagram, Spotify, Warby Parker, Skims, GitHub, Slack, Robinhood and other companies had become conspicuous for being prescient, aesthetic, and exquisitely timed (among its mostly vindicated admirers), or for being absurdly priced, momentum-chasing, and too highly concentrated in dysfunctional businesses with unproven returns (among increasingly sheepish critics).
In 2010, moreover, the unknown Kushner brother’s unknown little firm was making a bunch of large but weird-sounding claims for itself, like that it was a stage-, geography-, and sector-agnostic venture firm that would concentrate all its investments in a very small number of companies; that it was not only an investment firm but also itself a company; that it incubated its own companies as well as invested in others; and that it didn’t just invest and incubate but functioned as a service provider, product creator, and embedded operational commando unit for founders.
By 2023, every self-respecting investor on Sand Hill Road was also saying such things about themselves, even as they wondered how a New York firm made up of a handful of kids in their 20s and 30s—many of them with zero experience in venture capital and from the technology Bermuda Triangle of New Jersey—had become some of the most desired investors in tech, and the ones most closely associated with the otherwise distinctly West Coast boom in artificial intelligence."
https://joincolossus.com/article/joshua-kushner-thrive-new-world/
11. "Given the fact that the Russian finances are largely dependent on the money brought in by oil and gas sales, that missing 20% is creating an uncomfortably looking hole in the state budget. This missing revenue is an objective problem for the budget and the economy, especially since the Russian state is - once again - spending more this year than the year before. And as a result, 2025 is probably the first year when the Russian economic luck has started to run out - and the economic and fiscal effect of the war is increasingly seen and felt.
Unlike in previous years, economic growth has slowed to just about 0.6% GDP, inflation is still relatively high, and Moscow has been forced into some uncharacteristic admissions of trouble. The 2025–26 budget is still heavy on defense spending but lighter everywhere else and as officials are having to rethink what can they actually afford and what will need to be cut. Taxes are going up, debt is inching higher, and the government is searching for more and more places to cut spending without triggering public backlash."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-176215638
12. "Perhaps this particular point is here because I’m writing this piece after 3 years of non-stop recession/stagnation/stagflation (whatever) and many years of COVID, but there was a TON more optimism in 2015 than in 2025.
The general public (not guys making money online) are seeing their costs rise, their real incomes decline, and they are worried they are going to lose their job to AI and global turmoil.
Just a decade ago, people were far more optimistic and more willing to spend money. Having luxury products and big brands was considered aspirational.
Now people are cutting spending where they can (which is a mistake, they need to build online businesses and find ways to increase their income) and consider big brands to be “flaunting” i.e. instead of aspiration, it’s seen as social ineptness."
https://lifemathmoney.com/the-state-of-the-world-part-1-what-changed-in-the-last-10-15-years/
13. Some learnings from a top PE firm, in this case Orlando Bravo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1q4wcV-ImY
14. This was eye-opening. How to be an elite operator in the military and the costs of it. How to recover from serious injuries both mental and physical.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwRc2SEo-VI&t=257s
15. "As venture capital moves deeper into Hard Tech and reindustrialization, investors who understand how commodity risk flows through a business will underwrite smarter and help founders scale faster. Out-engineering competitors isn’t enough. Founders will need to manage pricing risk, backlog, and capital intensity with the same precision they apply to their technology.
Revenue quality matters just as much as revenue growth. Know the shape of it early and keep learning how it moves."
https://www.alsoblogposts.com/p/commodity-futures-and-hard-tech
16. "But one of the most threatened business models of the pre-AI, human knowledge worker era is seat-based pricing. Seat-based pricing is entirely predicated on the fact that a single human can only accomplish so much, causing the need to hire more humans and pay for more seats as a business scales. In such an era, sales incentives were aligned with the industry – companies added more employees and salespeople sold incremental seats.
Now, as individual employees can spin up countless agents to scale, salespeople pitching more seats is sounding increasingly tone-deaf. Modern companies will increasingly aspire for talent density in the form of a smaller group of more productive and more capable people, as opposed to “growing seats” as they scale.
AI-native startups are taking advantage of this new world with outcome-based pricing (e.g. pay per new lead, per new project, per item sold, etc) with a simple “let us reduce your seats of X” sales pitch. I anticipate smart incumbents will eventually cannibalize themselves by splitting their sales teams, having one team sell seats and the other team sell against seats to those customers who are ready. Won’t be fun, but will be necessary."
https://www.implications.com/p/the-next-frontier-of-data-moats-verticals
17. One of the best shows in tech. "AI Bubble, Stablecoin Boom, and Runnin' Down a Dream."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX6q6lvoYtM
18. "I believe the best part about the Japanese stock market, IMO is that you can really find investment opportunities across the spectrum of value to growth - and there are specific ways in which you can try and find an idea that fits a certain style. Sure, maybe a traditional screen may work but some might be less obvious or immediate. Whether it’s to look for a massive value unlock from a cash-rich balance sheet, a potential take-private or simply just a great business that’s growing but is overlooked."
https://madeinjapan.substack.com/p/how-to-find-interesting-investment
19. "New technologies tend to advance rapidly and often in unexpected directions. Mature technologies advance much more slowly, much more expensively and with much more difficulty. The West’s problem is that it has an enormous financial and doctrinal investment in systems of mature technologies, which are increasingly unlikely to ever be asked to perform the missions they were designed for.
And it’s not, once more, just a hardware problem: indeed, the majority of the confusion in the West at the moment results from the fact that no-one really knows yet how to make use of the new technologies of drones and their various different capabilities, in a networked war. As we can see in Ukraine, the Russians are still in the process of working this out themselves, and it’s anyway not clear that lessons learned will be applicable everywhere: the Israeli use of drones against Hezbollah was quite different.
I mentioned the Battle of France in 1940 earlier, and I’ll close with a comment by the famous historian and Resistance martyr Marc Bloch in his posthumously published work L’Étrange défaite. “Our leaders,” he wrote “in the midst of many contradictions, strove, above all to recreate, in 1940, the war of 1915-1918. The Germans fought the war of 1940.” Our leaders today are trying to recreate a war that was never fought, but that was widely anticipated, and until recently was the model for military planning.
The Russians learned the hard way that the nature of war has changed and is still changing. But for the reasons I’ve discussed I’m not at all sure that the West can adapt in the way that the Russians are trying to. Going back to the start and trying again is never easy."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/learning-from-the-defeat
20. Understanding Nvidia and the future of AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE6sw_E9Gh0
21. "So, contrary to common belief, the promotion of multipolarity reflects subversion rather than realism. It serves the interests of powers that want to weaken the United States by convincing it to limit itself."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/the-multipolarity-farce
22. "What sets the world’s best accelerators apart is the strength of the teams working with founders. The quality of the mentorship, as well as the introductions that mentors can potentially make.
This starts with the employees of the accelerator. The best accelerators employ partners, entrepreneurs-in-residence and even operational staff who have firsthand experience working in some of the world’s fastest-growing tech companies."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/why-do-99-percent-of-startup-accelerators-fail
23. "This concludes our coverage of politics as a field in the Decline of the West. Beyond this, I refer you to Caesarism, but this is the point where apathy for politics begins and systems decay into private operations. We are living in the height of this control-matrix and the younger among us will see everyone they know give up with the notion of change over their lifetime, paving the way for imperial politics and great men to do as they wish with no one in their way."
https://spenglarianperspective.substack.com/p/how-money-controls-democracies
24. Luke Gromen is one of the best global macro observers in the world. AI will wreck the debt market we live in right now. Lots of brutal implications of the trend line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeTzV0kP2S4
25. A grim take on declining neoliberal order. The importance of energy & commodities coming to the fore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkHusA154Ng
26. NIA with usual good takes on the latest tech and crypto news on mid October.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JGJ4c3CBk8&list=PLIBc05HkMJHFpVxxZTD-_MbTAYtwAOEg_
27. Fascinating discussion on the new 1929 book, need to check it out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQcveYRfZgs&t=2s
28. Learning the art of venture capital in the latter half of the conversation. But lots of good takes on the latest tech & AI news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZAstljD60c
29. "Italian towns on the Ligurian coast. But here’s what makes them different from every other Italian coastal option:
France is 15 minutes across the border. Monaco is 40 minutes away.
Timur’s point was simple: you get similar elegance to the Côte d’Azur at a fraction of the price. A sea view villa in Sanremo runs around €600k. The same thing in Cannes costs... well, significantly more.
But what really caught my attention was the three-system access.
You live in Italy, so you get Italian tax residency. The 50-60% impatriate exemption I wrote about before applies here – effective tax rate of 9-15% if you qualify for it.
You shop in France. Fifteen minutes and you’re at a Carrefour where grocery prices make more sense than Italian supermarkets (some will say they’re better…I would need more convincing…).
You network in Monaco. Forty minutes and you’re in a zero-tax jurisdiction where serious European money lives and does business.
Portugal gives you Portugal. Spain gives you Spain. Even Switzerland, you’re fundamentally operating in one system despite the borders.
But this? You’re actually moving between three different jurisdictions depending on what you need.
Three tax systems. Three cost structures. Three business cultures.
I’d completely overlooked this possibility."
https://palombo.substack.com/p/the-three-country-arbitrage-nobodys
30. "But for those who get in early, they could lock in a wonderful Italian chapter.
In my view, America is the greatest country on earth to build, to create, and generate value.
It's easily the best country in the world to "build."
But this does not necessarily mean it is the greatest country for enjoying what you have built.
Italy's tax regimes could allow you to have both – career optimization through location arbitrage and lifestyle maximization through cultural depth.
Personally, I'd love to spend more time in Italy.
Build in USD. Save in Bitcoin. Spend in euros.
Live longer!"
https://palombo.substack.com/p/the-new-italian-renaissance-is-here
31. "We're not just talking about a lifestyle hack. We're witnessing the emergence of parallel systems that operate independently of traditional infrastructure.
Starlink and Bitcoin essentially allow these systems to run everywhere – money and communication decoupled from local governments and banks.
Think about it: in 100 years, how strange will we look to our descendants for needing paper passports to travel and physical banks to access value?
Right now, we're in the early stages of this transition. You can build your base wherever brings you joy – a small town in southern Italy, a village in Portugal – and still participate fully in the global economy.
Do you want to optimize for the world as it was, or as it's becoming?
The old model: tie yourself to expensive hubs, compete locally, accept whatever tax and lifestyle trade-offs come with that choice.
The new model: generate value globally, optimize costs strategically, design life intentionally. Optimize for lifespan, not just income.
We're in the early stages of the biggest reorganization of how value gets created. Individual sovereignty – the ability to optimize across multiple jurisdictions while maintaining parallel systems for money and communication – becomes the competitive advantage.
It won't be easy or super smooth. But what fascinates me is that we're living in a much more "possibilistic" era. You have choices previous generations never had.
The question isn't whether this shift will happen. It's whether you'll be positioned to benefit from it.
The infrastructure exists. The opportunities are real. The arbitrage is measurable.
But windows like this don't stay open forever.
My take:
Earn US Dollar. Spend Euro. Live Longer."
https://palombo.substack.com/p/earn-us-dollar-spend-euro-live-longer
32. A much deeper interview with Dan Wang on China vs. America. It’s really quite insightful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSY68wBQ97I
33. "Industrial competitiveness is a moving target. As China supports the diffusion of capability across the Global South, the entire global cost curve shifts downward. Nickel refining in Indonesia, lithium processing in Chile, and phosphate-based battery production in Morocco all draw on Chinese technology and finance capital. Each new project adds scale, deepens experience and lowers the marginal cost of production globally. Each project can impact global pricing, thereby creating risks for new aspirant projects, as has been seen in the case of Indonesia’s nickel project, which has effectively delivered such low global prices that other projects are no longer viable.
For the U.S. and its firms, this means entering a marketplace where the baseline for efficiency has already dropped. Even if localised production is achieved, its cost base will sit above the new global norm. What begins as strategic autonomy ends as cost isolation. The US runs the real risk of becoming an industrial island in an ocean of lower cost, Chinese-enabled capacity. Put another way, the US can make the transition it aspires to, towards greater industrial autonomy, but it will end up as a higher cost, lower standard of living social settlement and political economy.
Industrial time is not linear. For China, it compounds but for the U.S., it compresses. Beijing’s model is iterative. Every project informs the next. Washington’s is restorative. Each project seeks to rebuild a lost ecosystem. The longer the lag, the more subsidy required, and the higher the relative cost base becomes. Tesla’s experience encapsulates this trap. The more it invests to localise battery supply chains, the faster China’s ecosystem grows globally, eroding Tesla’s cost advantage. Even if Tesla achieves full vertical integration in the U.S., it will do so in a world where Chinese-supported production elsewhere has already redefined global efficiency standards.
Time, in this sense, is not neutral. It is the medium through which advantage accumulates. While the U.S. struggles to rebuild the factories of yesterday, China is building the industrial geography of tomorrow. And by the time America’s vertical integration is complete, the world will already be horizontally integrated through Chinese-supported industrial ecosystems that define the next global cost frontier."
https://warwickpowell.substack.com/p/tick-tock-time-matters-and-pax-americana
34. "A self-sufficient semiconductor industry may be out of Europe’s reach, but a more vibrant one is not. Europe has a meaningful edge in certain steps of the semiconductor supply chain, and it can cooperate with allies—including the United States—for the supply chain segments it lacks.
The billions of euros being poured into the continent’s rearmament can also be an opportunity for its chip makers, given how critical artificial intelligence has become to defense. To take full advantage of these trends, European leaders need to build on the chip industry’s strengths with deeper partnerships, not a futile drive for self-sufficiency…"
https://chrismillersnewsletter.substack.com/p/why-strategic-autonomy-is-the-wrong
35. What an excellent interview. Enjoyed watching this. Lots of stuff around career, life, Christianity, Anduril & Defensetech, AI + the Future of War.
You’re Too Online: Touching Grass & The Unmooring of the Real Life World
For Succession fans, that term “You’re too online” would be recognizable. But the reality is that many of us are way too online. I’m certainly guilty of this. I spend hours everyday online, email, Youtube, messenger and X aka Twitter. Way too much X.
I get lots of insights and inspiration but also lots of rage. It has also led to a marked decline in sociability in real life and dramatic decline in my ability to focus and concentrate. The quick dopamine hits are really damaging. And I’m generation X where I had to adapt to this in my twenties and thirties, not teens. No wonder the kids these days are so whacked out. Their brains are fried.
I think this is why there has been a backlash against mobile phones in some schools and households. We see the rise of digital sabbath where 1-2 days of the week are spent away from phones and computers. I see the rise of experiences and more hardcore athletic endeavors whether mountain climbing or martial arts where you have to be present. Or you literally will fall off a cliff or get punched in the face. We see the popularization of meditation. These are all signs of the counter-reaction to the digital trend. A way to retake our lives back.
As the ever wise Tai Lopez said: “Never stay fully connected to the (digital) world. Leave the phone in the house and go outside for at least an hour a day.”
Go take walks in nature. Grab a coffee or long lunch with some friends. Go rock climbing. Learn martial arts or how to shoot a gun. Travel to obscure places off the beaten path. #LiveExperienceMaxxing is a thing. If you do this, you may have a chance to recover from the digital dopamine hits wrecking all of us. Besides, IRL experiences are always better than virtual ones.
Complete and Total Personal Ownership Is the Only Path to Success
Every day I learn something new. I find an interesting podcast or Youtube video or have a great conversation with a friend or new friend. Or whenever I read a newsletter. It’s no different today. I am a fan of Justin Waller, the blue collar baller and he wrote something that stood out to me.
“If it’s not your fault, you can’t fix it.
I learned that in the steel business.
You think guys show up on time?
They don’t.
You think projects run smoothly?
They don’t.
Men drink too much, make mistakes, fight in hotel rooms, and cost you contracts.
And here’s the truth,
If I let myself believe that was their fault… I was done.
Because the moment you put the blame on someone else, you hand them all the power.
But if I say, “It’s on me”?
Now I can do something about it.
I can fix the hiring process.
I can change the training.
I can track back and find where I failed.
That’s how you win.
Not by crying about circumstances.
Not by blaming other people.
But by making everything your fault.
See, accountability isn’t a burden.
It’s the only way to keep control.
And control is how you survive in business.
So the next time something falls apart, I want you to stop yourself from pointing the finger.
Instead say, “This one’s on me.”
And then fix it.
That’s the difference between conquerors and victims”
I think my lack of success was not due to a bad work ethic but a bad attitude to life. Avoiding hard problems, avoiding problems and conflict. That is the way of the weak man. But I think the biggest piece is really taking personal responsibility. It’s so much easier to blame your parents, society, your boss or whoever instead of where the finger should actually be pointed. To yourself. It’s always on you. No excuses.
I learned this the hard way. But once I started taking responsibility for everything, I was able to tackle the problems I was dealt. Life got better in general. You earn your way to the next level of problems. To new levels of personal growth. Almost like in a video game. So for all the men out there, don’t complain, this is a privilege. You will always have problems. It’s up to you on how big a problem and how to deal with them. The world rewards the problem solvers.
Taking Losses and The Humbled Investor: Ego is the Enemy
I finally had the courage to go check my old crypto and stock trading accounts, to review the investments I made in 2020 and 2021. Yikes. A massive sea of red. Most of my crypto investments were 90-98% down.
I went into Q4 of 2020 with arrogance and euphoria. After some very good startup exits & exits in general in the year, lots of markups, I thought I was smarter and better than I was. Plus with the craziness of the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon) era, it seemed like everything was going up. I admit I got caught up at the top of the cycle. Nothing like a bunch of money in your pocket to make you get cocky and stupid. I went big into investing in startups, VC funds, crypto and stocks. Well, no surprise, post-2022 many of these investments are not doing well. Especially my crypto and startup investments.
Nothing like big losses to humble you.. Reality smacks you in the face and you are forced to learn and rethink your investment thesis. I learned I clearly did not do enough research. I learned I needed to concentrate my investments, or else I might as well just invest in Index Funds. I learned DCA aka Dollar Cost Averaging is your friend, as slow and steady is better for my personality.
I learned that investing at the top of the cycle for startups is bad for your portfolio. My 2021-2022 vintage portfolios are pretty god awful. Not like investing in Chamath SPACs awful but pretty close. Yet at the same time Power Law is truly amazing, in Venture Capital and stocks. That winners sometimes can more than make up for all the losses.
And I learned that no matter what, no matter the preparation, you will inevitably have losses. You will always have losses & bad investments. That’s the game. No risk, no reward. So take your losses, learn the hard lessons and keep on going. Stay in the game and use the power of compounding both in capital and knowledge to your benefit.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Dec 7th, 2025
"Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era."--Will Durant
Palmer is an American gem. Wide ranging conversation on geopolitics, tech and defense. Building the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCKdPLMmXkE
2. "As incumbents move upmarket, they leave the bottom of the market ripe for disruption. Small funds, disciplined early stage investors, and emerging managers are the ones filling the gap. Because of our fund sizes, fees are tiny—this sector of the market makes money off the carry, not the fee, in perfect alignment with our LPs, which our LPs also love. The best of these disruptive managers are hungrier, more aligned, and structurally motivated to find alpha-rich founders and ideas—exactly what LPs want.
Over time, more and more LPs will realize this, and will add a pocket for “new VC” to their portfolios. These upstart funds will thrive—historically, smaller and emerging funds return way more to their investors. And eventually, this emerging layer of investors will become the true, new venture capital industry.
The megafunds will continue to make money, right up until the opportunity to deploy it profitably in gigantic pre-IPO megarounds disappears."
https://www.fastcompany.com/91413783/andreessen-horowitz-leaked-decks
3. "There’s a corollary here too. The companies that will win aren’t necessarily the ones training the best models. They’re the ones that make it easiest to use AI effectively. That might be through better APIs, better workflow tools, better evaluation frameworks, or better ways to combine multiple models for different tasks.
The future isn’t about picking the winning model. It’s about building systems that can flexibly use whichever model is best for each specific task at any given moment.
So if you’ve been paralyzed trying to decide which model to build on, stop waiting. Pick one that’s good enough for your needs today and start building. When something better comes along—and it will—you’ll be able to switch. The model doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you build with it."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-model-doesnt-matter
4. "What looks like a coincidence is in fact a design.
China’s economic planners have built a system that uses foreign innovators as catalysts — importing technology, competition, and expertise, then converting them into domestic advantage.
The state opens the door just wide enough for learning to occur, then quietly closes it once local players have mastered the game.
The result is a generation of Chinese champions — Baidu, WeChat, Didi, BYD, Alibaba — each forged in the friction of foreign competition.
The catfish were invited in to stir the tank; the cod that survived now rule the sea."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/chinas-secret-strategy-for-beating
5. "How Takaichi Sanae deals with these two issues will determine whether she’ll be a success or failure. The fact that - unlike her two technocrat-led-consensus-first-and-foremost predecessors - she’s been a fighter all her life makes me hopeful she’ll serve for more than just one three-year term. Like in “Shogun”, there’ll be plenty of drama, intrigue and unexpected plot twists: to succeed, Takaichi will have to create both an asset bubble and Yen appreciation."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/takaichi-bubble-banzai
6. Glad to see this conversation. Building hard stuff in San Francisco.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FddjP_zNkyc
7. The Future of war: AI & Autonomy. Worth watching. America is very behind in all these areas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmRRolaIGZA&t=28s
8. AI will be eating the labor market. This is the promise for VC & businesses and peril for society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhyhR4Bzc0I&t=7s
9. David Senra: How Extreme Winners Think and Win. Talk about intense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mesjY6l2T8c
10. "The dollar has long been among America’s most powerful strategic assets. Preserving the dollar’s centrality helps sustain US oversight of global transactions and Washington’s ability to enforce rules against drug cartels, terrorist organizations, and other transnational threats. It is also a key diplomatic tool in the current great power rivalry.
BRICS threatens to chip away at the dollar’s dominance by creating opaque, unregulated channels for trade and finance. Unless Washington acts decisively to defend SWIFT, regulate stablecoins, apply diplomatic pressure, and reinforce the legitimacy of US global financial oversight, BRICS will continue to construct an anti-US financial order while presenting itself as the champion of neutral nonalignment and multipolarity."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/break-the-brics
11. Alot of my concerns as well on America's direction in the long run.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWFJH__wxlY
12. "Latin America is not what we think. It isn’t local, and it isn’t peripheral. It’s the new epicenter of superpower rivalries and global organized crime. Today, drug routes, crypto flows, and geopolitics intersect more directly in Latin America than anywhere else on Earth. When President Trump threatened Hamas over the hostages, they sent an armada to Venezuela. His message wasn’t just meant for Hamas in Gaza — it was aimed squarely at Hamas operations in Latin America.
Hamas’s survival doesn’t depend solely on its presence in the Middle East anymore because it’s gone global. Hamas depends on its cash flows out of Latin America, and so does Syria, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, and even Iran’s Quds Force. They all operate from the Tri-Border Area, where Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil meet, as well as in Venezuela. The geopolitics of Latin America are no longer regional — they’re globalizing too, like everything else, with logistics and finance operations run with the same efficiency as those of multinational firms.
Latin America has an abundance of resources — and just as many vulnerabilities. Trump sees it for what it is: a geopolitical RISK meets Monopoly board. Every move is about property — staking territory, tracking the opposition’s bets, seizing assets that matter. But this isn’t just a contest for land or ports. It’s a battle for narratives and neural space — who controls the story, and who controls belief. In the 21st century, the front lines of power run not only through pipelines and ports but through perceptions.
Forget the old clichés of coups and cartels. This is about battleships, bitcoin and bananas - not bullets. At least so far. Latin America is no longer a distant theater. It’s where the world’s next balance of power is being written — in cash flows, code, and cognition. It’s not just a contest for physical land, raw materials, and critical infrastructure but a fight for narrative and cognitive control."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/bananas-battleships-and-bitcoin-how
13. An important discussion on how we got into the mess we are in right now in the West. The failure of NeoLiberalism and the consequences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pmb2VZ0Jg8Q
14. "The self-help aisle promised transformation through commitment. AI promises transformation through experimentation."
https://tomtunguz.com/ai-enables-instant-workflow-adoption/
15. "Investing is very good at enforcing a sensitivity to reality". A philosopher hedge funder. Fascinating convo on the art of investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xkWJq4Qcps&t=3s
16. "The unusually prosperous boomer decades produced more elite aspirants than legacy prestige tracks could absorb and the imbalance has been further exacerbated by globalization and immigration.
The result is a civilizational oversupply of strivers and a bottleneck of prestige. Status is inherently positional, and not everyone can be at the top. Coupled with stagnant living standards, this social scarcity amplifies anxiety and mimetic rivalry across the striver class and creates the cultural phenomenon we see today.
Strivers typically come from home environments that set high expectations for achievement, emphasize hard work, and normalize competition. Mimetic rivalry is the motivational engine of the striver. Most strivers are routed into prestige tracks like finance, tech, law, consulting, and medicine. It has gotten harder over the last generation to strive and prestige tracks have grown crowded, drawing more strivers further out the frontier of risk.
Strivers are overrepresented in the Crypto and AI industries, where much of the outsized opportunity of this decade has emerged. These industries offer the best chance of breaking into the modern landed gentry class: accumulating enough wealth to live entirely off of capital gains."
https://www.scimitar.capital/p/self-reflections-of-a-striver
17. I always learn from Raoul Pal. Lots of global macro, AI & Crypto and investing. Worth listening to. The great reset.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JcuRhCKZdA&t=3785s
18. "While governments are powerful, the people always find ways to retain their sovereignty. In many cultures that experienced endemic inflation over centuries of successive governments or dynasties, cultures created gifting rituals marking major life milestones (birth, marriage, and death) that involve the exchange of hard money. In this way, the people save through cultural rituals. No politician dares subvert these rituals lest they lose their mandate to lead and find themselves headless.
In the modern era, when the power of centralized governments — whether a democracy, socialist republic, communist state, etc. are all powerful because of the advances of thinking machines and the internet, how can we the people preserve our rights to sound money? The gift that Satoshi gave to humanity via their Bitcoin whitepaper is a technological miracle that was launched at a very important time in history.
Bitcoin in the current state of human civilization is the best form of money ever created. Like all money, it has a relative value. Given that Pax Americana quasi-empire rules via the US dollar, we value Bitcoin relative to the dollar. Assuming the technology works, Bitcoin’s price will ebb and flow because of the price and supply of dollars.
The Pax Americana quasi-empire is but a nostalgic dream. What comes next? This is the question with which global leaders wrestle. Change is not good nor bad, but change creates economic winners and losers. Sometimes the losers are politically and economically powerful, which creates issues for ruling parties. In order to shield the negative effects of change from the populace, politicians print money."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/long-live-the-king
19. "It’s only 2025 (not even 2035) and we’re entering a phase where active income is no longer a viable path to making it. Making it means you are personally free from future obligations to outside entities (defined as a boss and anyone who can take away the most valuable asset in the world - Time)
“You can sell a business. You can sell land. You can sell stocks. You can sell assets. You can’t sell your job.” - BowTiedBull Philosophy
If that saying doesn’t stab you in the heart, you’re not paying attention. Likely stuck in the world of NPCs and NGMIs
The next decade you’ll witness a tectonic/earthquake level change in how freedom, power, and survival are distributed.
Life’s winners (You): people who own durable, productive assets.
Life’s losers (NPCs): people who rent out their time, allowing someone else to compound their equity.
This is the new reality. Based on compounding math + policy + technology. Here we’ll walk through what you need to own, why it works and why asymmetry is the only way to operate. Daily life is going to change. The vast majority won’t even start the smallest scalable niche item: WiFi Money/managed-internet biz that makes money while you sleep."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/you-cant-sell-a-job-the-final-decade
20. Lots of juicy discussion on the latest Silicon Valley news. AI is dominating the news, investing and business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1bmrugU_6E
21. Overall, a pretty important discussion for America.
"Manufacturing's Future, The Electric Tech Stack, and Automation"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOv2EqojRkw&t=200s
22. "For entrepreneurs thinking about an exit strategy, remember this: the best exits happen when you first build a great business and the market comes knocking. Once you’ve built something truly great, potential acquirers will notice and opportunities will emerge. Focus on greatness, not on the exit."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/10/11/focus-on-building-a-great-business-not-an-exit/
23. "I was most struck, though, by the similarities with today’s links between industrial capacity and national power. In Beijing and Washington, policymakers look nervously at a “war of the factories.” Xi’s statements about the geopolitical implications of industrial capacity would not have sounded out of place in the 1930s.
The tech transfer and localization requirements imposed on Ford in the 1930s look like those imposed by China on Western firms in recent decades—and those that Washington has tested recently on chip and battery firms to push them to move to the U.S. I read a lot about the ‘end of globalization’ today, but what I see in practice is remarkably similar to what Link sees in the 1930s: a “furious” effort to remake it."
https://chrismillersnewsletter.substack.com/p/the-war-of-the-factories
24. "Most people think small. Most people live small. They don’t care to step outside the ordinary, and that’s why so few ever get the extraordinary. I often use the “walk sign” theory as a reference: most people will follow once someone takes the first step, but they rarely make the first move.
Thinking big takes no more energy than thinking small. In fact, it often takes less. And when you think big, you’re competing against fewer people. The kind of people you want on your side. Few understand this."
https://brittanyhugoboom.substack.com/p/you-need-to-start-approaching-beautiful
25. Japan is treating their defense very seriously. Offensive power is the best defense as they say.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/01/asia/japan-warship-tomahawk-missiles-intl-hnk-ml
26. "According to Liherko, the actual situation on the battlefield looks different from maps that show Russia surging forward. He drew an alternative diagram with several small blobs representing enemy troops. “It’s more dynamic. We stay in our position. They try and go forward,” he explained."
27. Some of the best commentary on Silicon Valley news from some top tier investors around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72htG-AOykI&t=336s
28. Wow this was one of the best interviews on how to scale a growth stage venture firm. Insight Partners, one of the biggest and best investors out of NYC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4zzkuFyI18
29. "You’re essentially trying to build discipline during the least disciplined time of year.
The Alternative? Start in Q4 (October).
Starting your 2026 goals in October 2025 gives you a three-month head start. By the time January arrives, others are just beginning their doomed resolutions, you’ve already stacked habits, built colossal momentum & began rewiring your identity."
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/why-91-of-new-years-resolutions-will
30. AI Chip Wars. Learning some new things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvlE8-MzxyA
31. "That’s why the new export controls don’t target NdPr. They target the aforementioned heavy rare earths - because those are the ones with real geological scarcity. And now that Myanmar’s supply line has proven how fragile it is, the timing starts to look intentional.
With this in mind, China’s latest export controls begin to make a lot more sense. As seen previously with antimony and other metals, dual-use regulation is the official framing, but this also appears to be a calculated move to ensure that domestic downstream industries - magnet producers, EV manufacturers, defense contractors - aren’t left short in a market where heavy rare earth supply is both limited and under pressure. In that light, the move is as much about industrial policy as it is about playing tit for tat with the Trump administration.
And here lies the uncomfortable truth for the rest of the world: if you want to build a rare earth industry that can actually compete, it’s not enough to copy what China did with NdPr. You need to go where the heavies live - and for a part, that means developing ionic clays. It means dealing with messy permitting, environmental risks, and all the local politics that come with it."
https://sustainabledude.substack.com/p/why-china-banned-rare-earths-but
32. "While crypto is having a moment, refining is too - in the opposite way. It’s rising in value.
In March, President Trump ordered all U.S. military bases to build refining facilities and begin stockpiling critical refined metals. It sounded obscure at the time, but it’s central to what’s coming: a world where the 3D printing of metals and materials becomes the backbone of military power. Modern battlefields are turning into print-on-demand environments. As I said in recent Substacks, the 3D printer is the equivalent of the metal stirrup the Mongolians used to create the largest empire on Earth. See my piece, War in an Era of Intelligent Machines: Stirrups, Conoidal Bullets, 3D Printers, Lunar Nukes, and Special Ops Forces.
And, as Elon Musk has said, we need to keep people off the battlefield because drones - 3D printed drones like the “Widowmakers” - combined with AI will be immediately lethal to all humans. In a robot-to-robot world, refined rare earths and Helium-3 become the decisive variables. Wars won’t be won by territory or troop counts. Wars will be won — or lost — by who runs out of critical materials first."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/no-laughing-matter-the-race-for-helium
33. Probably one of the most critical and important companies in America right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgRo82sSPCU
34. "AI will not distribute prosperity evenly. Its impact depends on whether firms can retain the surplus it generates—a function of market structure, capital intensity, and institutional context. The key divide lies not between manufacturing and services but between businesses able to escape the market economy’s competitive pressures and those that remain trapped within them.
Manufacturers with scale, process knowledge, and high capital barriers will likely capture surplus and reinvest it, compounding returns. Client-facing service providers will see most gains flow to clients or upstream AI vendors. Proximity services remain the crucial variable: if AI can unlock productivity gains there, and workers organise to claim their share, it could trigger the first meaningful realignment of the social contract since the post-war boom.
America will extend its dominance in platforms and professional services, deepening existing advantages while leaving most workers behind. China will tighten its grip on manufacturing, converting scale into market power as AI amplifies control and efficiency. Finally, Europe will pursue scale without mass, using AI to enhance precision manufacturing and perhaps pioneer a new balance between capital and labour."
https://www.driftsignal.com/p/capitalism-in-the-ai-powered-economy
Interregnum: Stuck in Limbo
Interregnum is an interesting word. It’s defined as a period during which a leadership role is vacant or a lapse or pause between world orders. Seems apt as we move away from the world of Pax Americana we have grown so accustomed to.
I’ve alluded and written many times about the strange state of the world we are in right now. Everyone’s deeply anxious because we know the world we used to live in is disappearing. But we still can’t make out the shape of what the new world will look like. It’s been hard to articulate or even grasp. Trust me, I feel like I’ve spent much of my time & resources these last few years trying to do so.
Thankfully I follow “Train Everything”, a true world philosopher and brilliant thinker on X and in his private Telegram groups. He wrote something that was really helpful to me.
“It feels as if the world has been holding its breath this year. There’s motion, but no momentum. Many events have caused a ripple across the surface, but nothing has pushed us forward in a definitive direction. I think this is the nature of us being at the quarter century mark. Every hundred years or so there are inflection points where the past is exhausted and the future has not yet declared itself.
It reminds me of the 1920s. The world had just emerged from the ruins of a physical global war. The old order was shattered but not yet replaced. Today we are coming out of a global cultural war. The greatest ideological war the world has ever seen. A prolonged conflict over values, identity, and the meaning and purpose of civilization and life itself.
If history rhymes then the next quarter century will determine the trajectory of our age.
The 1920s birthed not only globalism and modernity, but it also gave birth to radical movements in Italy and Germany. Movements that did not simply ride the tide of change, but attempted to seize it, shape it, and propel the world towards a new future.
I predict we are on the cusp of something similar. The old liberal order is visibly dissipating. The promises of globalization and digital utopia have been found to be fraudulent. People are atomized, hopeless, distrustful, numb, and nostalgic. Everyone is searching for something that feels promising and real. These are the perfect conditions for a radical movement to emerge. It will not be moderate or polite. Just like a century ago, it will be born from disillusionment, stress, and the hunger for higher ideals with more meaning.
We are still in the waiting room of history. But the door is about to open, and when it does, the world will not walk through, it will be forced through.”
It really feels like we are in a momentous time, for better or worse. It’s as Lenin was reported to have stated: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” We are getting close to this time I think. Looking back on this time, we may even be experiencing this in real time right now.
The Mindset to Thrive in the Chaos: Bet on Yourself
It’s hard not to be confused or scared right now. Everything is changing. Literally everything. Jobs and industries that we thought were secure are gone. Institutions in the West are crumbling. Technology is ripping through barriers and everything is under threat. But sticking your head in a hole is the wrong move. Flaying about without a plan is just as stupid.
Surprisingly, the man who has provided me with some insight for how to thrive in times like this is the controversial and hated Andrew Tate. Listening to an interview he gave a few months ago (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ-UED-LOUw), it really helped me sort out my mindset and plan properly.
He said: “What allows me to compete and predict the future, because everything is so chaotic. The only thing I can predict is I’m going to work harder than anyone else. I’m going to get up earlier than anyone else. I’m going to pay more attention than anyone else. I’m going to research harder than anyone else. I’m not going to feel sorry for myself. I’m going to dedicate myself. I’m going to find some F–ing money. That is what I’m going to do.
Right now, it’s almost like go “100 hundred percent in on yourself” season. Going all in on Bitcoin might backfire. Going all in on property might backfire. Going all in on yourself will never backfire.”
He goes on to say: “So my mentality currently is I just need to make sure I am my absolute best self all of the time. And that I am permanently motivated to do whatever it takes to win. And I am the most adaptable. Darwin said: its the most adaptable of the species that survive. Its not the biggest, its not the strongest. It’s the one that identifies the forest is on fire and grows some fins and jumps in the water. It’s adaptability season now.”
Even the smartest folks out there don’t know what’s coming, big company CEOs, successful entrepreneurs, VC, PE and hedge fund investors. Trust me, I’ve read their books & articles, listened to the podcast and even met and conversed with many of them. No one knows. But you can prepare yourself to recognize trends, to jump on them fast. Fix your mentality and take total ownership of your life. And execute ruthlessly.
This is how you win in all this chaos and change. Adapt or die.
36 Months to Make it: Time is Running Out
I think if you spend as much time online as well as just talking to many entrepreneurs and investors around the world like I do, you get the sense that something major is changing in the world. A bizarre unease. Everyone is trying to “get their bag” aka get their money. Severely short term greedy. For a while I was not sure why. But the reason it only crystallized in my brain when I heard a talk by Dan Koe.
“You have about 36 months to make it. And it makes sense because AI will continue to replace jobs no matter how much people fight against it. Money as we know it will change or even cease to exist because millions of ASI’s or artificial super intelligences will rapidly execute tasks beyond human comprehension, dictating humanity’s future. And beside the point, if you are interested in crypto, this is probably the last time you’re going to see incredible gains because they are being regulated, they are being adopted, and after this, they are going to become more like stocks” (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve1L21l1GW4)
A bit extreme but when considering all the technological and geopolitical changes right now plus the cultural and demographic trends in this Fourth Turning event, the world will have changed beyond recognition for all of us. Growing inequality and the continuing K-Shaped economy where the winners really win and losers really lose. It’s gonna get really ugly.
So assuming you all agree with me on this take and trend. What can you do about this?
Dan Koe gets very tactical and says “you have three super powers at your disposal right now to take control of your future. And those are one: learning-the ability to adapt and figure out what actions you must take to get a specific result. Two: persuasion-the ability to build trust and attract people to a mutually beneficial vision or narrative. We’re talking persuasion and mutual benefit and not manipulation. And three: execution-So the ability to turn ideas into reality through automation, creation and delegation.”
He goes on to say:
So this creates a clear distinction between who will thrive and who won’t. Doers versus directors. Employees versus entrepreneurs. Low agency versus high agency. Those who assign work rather than being assigned work. So you assigning the work either to yourself, self direction, directing your own career or to an AI prompt, or an automation tool or something of that nature that allows you to do more and pursue your personal goals that bring more fulfillment and meaning to your life.”
If this does not make you have a sense of urgency, and take some action, not sure what will. Get locked in!
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Nov 30th, 2025
"No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn." — Hal Borland
Palmer Luckey is a true patriot and working on one of the most important companies in America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-nCPZW1o50
2. "Every generation mistakes its turbulence for the end. History proves it is often the beginning. Nations in turmoil see only shadows. History decides which were omens and which were illusions
All I am saying is that you must hope. You must have purpose for the future. Times of lead do define countries. But they also define how you build in the aftermath."
https://pplsartofwar.substack.com/p/how-do-nations-survive-years-of-lead
3. "The mistake most people make is believing stability is the norm. It isn’t. Chaos is the default state of the world. Your ability to survive and thrive - depends on how well you move through it.
You don’t need to know what comes next, only that you have the ability to handle it when it arrives. That’s confidence and determination to use chaotic times to your advantage. Even to your benefit.
Confidence is not knowing the future - it is knowing that no future will arrive without you adapting to meet it.
Survival in a chaotic time is not about avoiding hardship—it’s about being the kind of person who outlasts it. You do not need to predict the storm. You need to know where to stand when it arrives."
https://gatelessbarrier.substack.com/p/how-to-survive-in-a-time-of-chaos
4. "Why does this old-world virtue still matter? Because sprezzatura represents the antidote to today’s fast paced and self-centered culture.
In a time when people chase constant validation, the man who quietly excels without self-promotion is magnetic to others. He reminds us that true confidence comes from within. That kind of elegance is not something one flaunts to gain the attention of others. It is part of a natural mastery of skills and confidence in every aspect of life.
Sprezzatura is about presence, not performance. It’s about elegance without effort.
To live with sprezzatura is to live with grace under pressure and humility in success.
A gentleman should never be too rigid or frantic. And he must never appear desperate to be noticed. Instead, he should be known for his cool presence, his ease, and the quiet mastery that speaks even when he says nothing at all."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/sprezzatura-the-gentlemans-art-of-61c
5. "The bear case on Google usually centers on innovator’s dilemma – they’re too wedded to search revenue to fully embrace AI. But that misreads what’s happening. Google isn’t trying to protect search; they’re using search to bootstrap into AI dominance. The search business generates $200+ billion annually to fund AI development. That’s a war chest that dwarfs any competitor.
In the end, AI competition isn’t about who has the best demo or the most hype. It’s about who can train the biggest models, deploy them most efficiently, and improve them fastest based on real-world feedback. On all three dimensions, Google’s structural advantages compound over time. They might not win every news cycle, but they’re positioned to win the war."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/why-google-will-win-the-ai-race
6. "When strategists sit down to move pieces on the global chessboard, they aren’t just moving tanks or ships — they’re answering that first, deceptively simple question: What kind of world are we living in?
If you believe in liberalism, you’ll bet on trade, democracy, and institutions to keep the peace. If you believe in realism, you’ll assume every rival is out to maximize power — and you’ll plan accordingly.
The tragedy, as John Mearsheimer reminds us, is that leaders may wish for peace, but the system rarely lets them choose it. The world isn’t a seminar room or a family dinner table — it’s closer to a cage match with no referee.
And that’s why, whether in the Pentagon or Zhongnanhai, the answer to that opening question still determines everything."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/from-the-pentagon-to-beijing-one
7. Living large in Shanghai. Also some insight on how China is winning the EV war and are just able to build stuff.
We need to be paying attention and stop with the Western Cope and arrogance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4yBZ4QJYNY
8. "The model for making money on the internet these days is straightforward, if difficult to execute: build an audience and charge subscribers for content.
This is how OnlyFans influencers like Mia Khalifa have made millions. It’s how Substack writers like Heather Cox Richardson have become more influential and profitable than traditional media outlets. It’s not that different from “as a service” business models, which rely on marketing to build a customer base and then charge customers for a recurring online service.
Who popularized this style of business? Who should numerous people and companies credit for determining how to make money online?
All roads lead to an unlikely source: a stripper and softcore porn star who went by the name Danni Ashe.
Ashe, who’s been lauded as the only person in history to be featured on the cover of both the Wall Street Journal and Juggs is the original internet subscription entrepreneur. But even as her pioneering business ideas have become the surest way for creators to make money online, she’s largely been forgotten."
https://thehustle.co/originals/the-stripper-who-ushered-in-the-modern-subscription-based-internet
9. 7-15 years out. Humanoid robots, the biggest opportunity in tech. Driven by AI. "Infinite Labor machines."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdHLZt_B51U
10. "The counter-intuitive truth is this: to build manufacturing strength, invest where it already exists. Spreading jobs evenly across regions may seem fair from a regional development perspective, but it dilutes expertise, limits knowledge spillovers, and undermines competitiveness. Manufacturing excellence depends on dense ecosystems where process know-how circulates naturally between suppliers, producers, and supporting industries. Networks of specialised suppliers, technical education institutions, and related sectors cannot be recreated through isolated factories.
Accordingly, European industrial strategy should concentrate resources in existing geographic clusters rather than dispersing them for political reasons. Some regions must become centres of excellence, while others focus on complementary economic strengths. In addition, modern clusters need more than factory space. They require housing for technicians and engineers, proximity to urban centres that attract skilled professionals, and a critical mass of related industries to generate career progression, innovation, and knowledge spillovers.
Concentrating industrial investment in clusters may feel counter to traditional notions of fairness, but it creates the density and dynamism that underpin long-term industrial competitiveness.
Now, clusters provide the physical and human foundation, but without the right financial tools, investment cannot scale effectively—Europe must also develop production capital."
https://www.driftsignal.com/p/europes-new-industrial-challenge
11. Stephen Kotkin on how Europe can defend themselves against Russian hybrid war & general aggression.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gymefXjpn5A&t=75s
12. Another good episode from the NIA guys, teardown of latest tech news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt7llzftWF8&list=PLIBc05HkMJHFpVxxZTD-_MbTAYtwAOEg_
13. It's hard to listen to this. So much admiration for the Ukrainian armed forces and people. Incredible spirit and endurance. We owe them support.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7mCuNQiE6w
14. "I see this constantly. Founders with ten users claiming they’ll have millions next year. No business model, no go-to-market strategy, just slides full of dreams. They’re so busy pretending to be crushing it, they forget to actually build something."
https://newsletter.startupistanbul.com/p/the-next-unicorn
15. I guess we will see if this comes to pass.
"It looks like Russia is also being pulled into China’s priorities, namely helping them with Taiwan. Meanwhile, Trump remains on track with China, especially with the Communist Party, to reach some kind of a deal. The ramping up on the American side is no doubt related to the meeting the two sides have now agreed to. I remain convinced that, in the end, the US and China will set the terms of the Grand Bargain. Russia, Europe and Ukraine will have to accept whatever deal the US and China announce. Trump will meet his Chinese counterparts next months in south Korea and both sides have agreed to a state visit in Beijing in early 2026."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/the-hot-war-in-cold-places-continues
16. Pretty important discussion on how to reindustrialize America and build scale. Creating Freedom's Forge 2.0.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShkxpBoObCQ
17. "Smart local capital tells us that something is seriously amiss. That is why France has the largest TARGET deficit of any country in the euro. If the second-largest economy in the euro with the largest debt load is experiencing a bank walk, it doesn’t bode well for the future of the common currency. The problem is that France is too big to fail, but too big to bail out as well. And this is where it becomes interesting for Satoshi’s faithful. What will the policy response be from the French politicians, the ECB, and foreign monetary authorities to the quickly deteriorating French finances?
This essay will focus on why France is fucked. Why a change in US monetary and foreign policy means German and Japanese capital can no longer finance the generous French welfare state. The variety of ways France can steal capital from domestic and foreign savers. And finally, what the policy options are for the ECB. The TLDR is that many folks will wake up one morning and understand that money in the bank is not yours and then fully comprehend why Bitcoin is so necessary. The ECB will valiantly print money to forestall the loss of its raison d’être. It shall be a glorious day for the faithful as printed euros will combine with printed dollars, yuan, yen, etc to bid up the price of Bitcoin.
If you are not a denizen of Europe™ do not buy European financial assets under any circumstances. Instead, buy some Bitcoin, sit back and watch your sick gainz as printed euros contribute to the bull market in growth of the fiat money supply. If you want to know when the cracks in the euro will emerge, watch the trajectory of France’s TARGET deficit."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/bastille-day
18. "Socialism-lite turns out to be a very delicate balancing act. The oligarchs need to constrict the economy sufficiently to mute the rise and influence of rivals, but not so much that they cause economic collapse or specific catastrophes that would result in them being discredited and thrown out. They were managing this balance fairly well until the Ukraine war messed it up for them, and now their backs are against the wall.
At the same time, they have turned their gaze towards the Atlantic with trepidation. They see in Trump’s election a vision of the dark future that awaits them if they let New Men like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and whoever else get out of hand. They’ve also noticed that key actors in the American tech sector played some role in Trump’s victory, and this is yet another reason for them to hate the whole world of technological innovation, from the internet in general to social media and large language models and everything in between. It is a very worrying source of New Men.
Please don’t misunderstand me: I don’t think our oligarchs sat down at a table somewhere and hashed out climatism to mess up the economy. The oligarchy is very large and diffuse, but like everybody else they are inclined to believe things that redound to their practical benefit. Climatism emerged via a confluence of interests, but the oligarchs’ enthusiasm was decisive."
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/climatism-as-an-oligarchic-strategy
19. Supply chains are the key to victory in war. Logistics in Ukraine & Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4EOL_Nn3Xk
20. The best B2B investing show right now. Worth listening to every week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4uXoaRVoCQ
21. Critical Minerals Crisis. This is a bit depressing but solving a problem requires acknowledging we have one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUZbLsNrOoM
22. "Truly great companies don’t just talk about what they make possible. They bear witness to what’s at stake. What could be lost; what could be gained; and why it matters — in human terms. That’s how American Dynamism companies earn trust, build momentum, and convince the brightest people who could probably work anywhere to take on challenging, dirty problems for (often) lower salary. Because it’s worth it.
The most important work can’t be reduced to an abstraction. American Dynamism sectors are too consequential and too complex for platitudes to carry the weight. Tim O’Brien’s lesson is that the most powerful storytelling makes the message vivid in concrete detail, in the contradictions customers actually live with, and in the people whose lives are shaped by it."
https://ryanomics.com/p/storytelling-in-american-dynamism
23. Wide ranging but valuable discussion on building tech & great startups in Silicon Valley with Marc Andreessen, Charlie Songhurst and John Collison.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_1cTlLpNMg&t=2721s
24. "Notable here I think that Europe is now moving full pelt in using immobilised CBR assets - the underlying assets, all $330 billion in Western juridications, to support Ukraine. German chancellor Merz has announced his support for a €140 billion reparations loan to use these assets to secure Ukraine’s financing for the next few years - the European Commission is in agreement. I understand the UK, US and other G7 countries will follow suit.
That will secure Ukraine well over $200 billion in financing, more than enough to cover its financing needs for several years to come. And how better than to get the Russian taxpayer to pay for the costs of its aggression against Ukraine and for the defence of Europe. I expect some of these monies will be used to fund joint ventures to take Ukrainian defence innovation and put these into mass production in Europe and to ensure Europe’s defence. Likely some will be used as seed capital for Ukrainian - European defence innovation funds to again fast track Europe, and Ukraine’s defence capabilities against Russia.
Europe’s defence, and survival, now depends on Ukraine. Ukraine can win this war for itself, and for Europe."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/ukraine-is-the-key-to-europes-defence
25. We are nowhere close to a coherent strategy right now.
"While Trump’s first administration was famous for assembling a “team of rivals,” Trump 2.0 takes the dynamic to new heights — featuring a bureaucratic civil war (and occasionally literal fist fights) between economic nationalists seeking to rebuild American industrial capacity, hard-power competitors determined to maintain technological and military superiority, and transactional restrainers pursuing concrete deals that reduce the cost of foreign entanglement.
The tragedy of Trump’s China policy is that each camp has legitimate goals and credible policy ideas to achieve them — but pursuing all three at once creates a strategic schizophrenia that leaves America weaker than committing fully to any single path.
The past nine months have delivered contradictory lurches on trade, technology, Taiwan, and American alliances in Asia. A coherent National Security Strategy — one that finally clarifies what the United States wants from China — is the administration’s best path out of this morass."
https://www.choosingvictory.com/p/the-war-for-americas-china-policy
26. Understanding stablecoins and why it's a big deal in America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgFvKjVmbRI
27. Reality is brutal. A big self-own by America. End of US dollar dominance & geopolitics. Gold, Bitcoin and Land (and bullets) probably not a bad idea to have as part of your portfolio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZNS1zjBthU
28. This was a great episode, back to business like it started.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddAwgZ6ietc&t=394s
29. "Entrepreneurs would do well to remember this: control your controllables. What’s within your power? What’s outside of it? How can you keep your team focused on what they can control—and not distracted by what they can’t?
At the end of the day, entrepreneurs must control their controllables."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/10/04/control-your-controllables/
30. "If anyone could claim the title of the most interesting man in the world, it would probably be Sir Richard Francis Burton. The Victorian Era adventurer spoke 29 languages, translated the Kama Sutra into English, and completed the sacred Islamic Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca while in disguise. While these feats alone are impressive, they merely scratch the surface of this gentleman’s incredible life."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/sir-richard-francis-burton-the-most-257
31. "This is what the 996 crowd doesn’t understand. They post their suffering like medals. Screenshot their commits. Count their hours. They’re performing intensity to avoid asking if they even care.
Mercenaries do performance theater about 996. Missionaries don’t even look at the clock.
You can’t beat someone who thinks they’re playing.
When you genuinely love the problem, the hours disappear. You’re not counting. You’re playing."
https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/996-is-not-your-competition
32. Back to the future. PMCs aka Mercenaries will thrive in this new global disorder. Especially in the global south.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuuANWNrOtA
33. "This is balance through multiplicity. The Saudis are creating overlapping deterrent links that prevent any single regional power, Israel included, from claiming a monopoly over Gulf security.
It’s mostly signaling, rather than a broader military policy shift. Riyadh is showing it has options.
Saudi Arabia aligns without binding itself, diversifies without replacing its core patrons. Then exploits the contradictions between powers to create room for its own diplomacy. Others must now calculate with that fact in mind."
https://pplsartofwar.substack.com/p/whats-behind-the-saudi-pakistan-mutual
34. As always, an eye opening take on China's grand ambitions and capabilities.
Living in and Surviving Boomtowns: San Francisco in the 21st Century
I was rewatching Landman and they got around to talking about the oil boomtown of Midland, Texas.
“Boomtowns. It ain’t different than Tombstone. Dodge City. San Francisco. First come the dreamers. Then the bankers. Then the salesmen. Then the sharks. Then the desperate. And then the thieves.”
This is definitely the cycle I’ve seen now 4 times in Silicon Valley. We are in the midst of the AI boom and my take as of 2025, we are in the banker & salesman phase right now. The sharks & the desperate have not shown up yet, although I am seeing a few emerging these last few months. I guess that means we are still early in this cycle.
Longevity in this town is hard. Irrelevance is just around the corner. Paraphrasing Tommy, the main character said: “You can be a dreamer but you gotta have a plan.”
Besides location, location, location. My career plan was always to follow my curiosity. Even if it was not cool or on trend. And if it doesn’t work out and most of the time it doesn’t, I meet some new people, pick up new skills and learn something new. It becomes a latticework of knowledge that surprisingly almost always turns out to be useful in future.
I take as many swings as possible, big or small. This increases the possibility of something going right and hitting big. This is why you have to stay in the game. Take the hits and survive. That means being liquid and being able to take the inevitable losses or downturn. So you can then reposition. Catch the next cycle on the way up.
An apt quote from the show: “My dad told me something a long time ago. You got two choices. You gotta get really good at balancing a check book or you make enough money you don’t have to…..When the money comes, it comes fast.”
The rule is to make sure you don’t cut corners along the way. Quoting Tommy again: “Short cut is always the longest road.” That is why I am always “long term greedy”. Build relationships and never trade your reputation for money. Don’t over-optimize.
If you do this wherever you are, whatever industry or career you pursue, you will be fine.
It Won’t Be Free
I spend far too much time on geopolitics and global macro. And I try to avoid the filter bubble which is why I listen to or read everything, whether right or left. From whatever country. And it is damn uncomfortable. But in discomfort comes truth. Or from truth you don’t want to accept.
One of the guys I listen to is Balaji Srinavasan who I’ve written about before. Watch this interview he does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-CjidoeMaE&t=1s.
He is damn smart. And he is damn negative on America and makes a damn persuasive case of why. It’s a hammer blow of fact after fact. And then a litany of facts about why China is winning. They make almost everything from PPE to robots to solar panels to electrical transfers to refining rare earths to pharma to steel to batteries to drones. All things needed to dominate the 21st century economy and war. As he says “China is strong, Zeihan is wrong”, which as an aside, Zeihan is a well known geopolitical analyst famous for predicting China’s end.
I think any American who has been paying attention would concur. We have a divided political elite and populace. Our elites in America are venal and clueless. Most Americans still think we are stronger than we really are.
Yet we literally cannot make anything anymore due to over-financialization and outsourcing to China including our critical industrial base and defense base. We have massive bureaucracy that gets in the way of everything. We are losing because of political cowardice, arrogance and decades of bad decisions. One big self-own after another. I get depressed writing this. And it’s far worse in Canada and Europe.
But I will never doom. I still think about what an ex-US Marine friend told me when he used to get into fights in his younger years. His mantra was “It won’t be free”. The point was that even if he got his ass kicked, he would fight so hard and make it so painful that it would feel close to a loss for his opponent, or opponents in some cases. Basically he went down fighting. I try to channel this energy. The odds might be stacked against us but from what I saw from the community of the Reindustrialize Summit, there are people who feel the same way as I do.
It’s going to be a hard road but I saw a passage from Ernst Junger that may be helpful for all of us in this challenging decade.
"Today only the person who no longer believes in a happy ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live. A happy century does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and there is freedom in the moment."
NEVER EVER Underestimate Your Enemy: Western Arrogance and Ignorance Kills
I stumbled on this scene from the Pacific tv series on the US Marines fighting in World War 2 against the Japanese. The scene is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbUJLqQ3HWU.
A young inexperienced Marine makes a derogatory statement about the Japanese soldier.
The Gunnery Sergeant quickly disabuses him very quickly. “That’s what the enemy is to you huh? A F–king bucktoothed cartoon dreamed up by some asshole on Madison Avenue to sell soap. Well, let me tell you something. The Jap I know—the Japanese soldier—he’s been in war since you were in diapers! He’s a combat veteran, an expert with his weapon. He can live off maggoty rice and muddy water for weeks and endure misery you couldn't dream of in your worst nightmare. The Japanese soldier doesn’t care if he gets hurt or killed—as long as he kills you. Call ’em whatever you want—but never ever fail to respect their desire to put you and your buddies into an early grave! Is that clear?”
Yet here we are in the West, in the US military, in NATO, by geopolitical pundits, in DC Think-tanks, in Washington and in western media deriding both the Chinese and Russian militaries. Saying the Chinese are not a warlike people or the Chinese have not fought in a war since 1979 and lost to the Vietnamese. Or the derision of the barbarian Russian army, being barely held off by the Ukrainian military. Both the Chinese & Russian militaries massively impacted by corruption and a top down hierarchy and missing non-commissioned officer corps ie. sergeants who act like centurions to hold the unit together.
But this is the wrong way to look at the situation. It’s all Western cope. Both enemy countries have the massive industrial base to back a long extended war. They own the natural resources and supply chains that are critical for a functioning war economy. In a drone and production-driven fight we will lose. Additionally, they don’t care about casualties. Let's be frank, the people in China and Russia are just way more used to deprivation and pain than we are in the West. They are naturally tough. We are in deep trouble. And Russia particularly has a battle hardened corp of soldiers now. Plus they are leading in integrating drones into war doctrine and they have the manufacturing mass of China to back it up.
If our NATO militaries go up against them, they will get rekt. We are in deep trouble if we don’t leverage the hard earned knowledge the Ukrainian military has gained. Yet I see very little learning from most Western militaries right now, even in 2025 still.
Whether in war, fight or in business, it never pays to underestimate the enemy. This is how you get destroyed. But it seems it’s a lesson that we keep learning, the HARD way. Pay attention to and respect your enemy. Being paranoid in this situation and acting accordingly to prepare can only do you good.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Nov 23rd, 2025
“The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.”– Harry Golden
A candidate for the world's most interesting man: Erik Prince.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yImmJth6vKE
2. George Friedman has been one of the keenest geopolitical observers forever. He can be a bit too optimistic from an American lens, but he has been right more than wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hya3dMD_eOE
3. Always an enlightening conversation. The OG Tai Lopez.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixf-6eHJbz8
4. A discussion: Are we in Cold War 2?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhv9PhJT_QE
5. Glide bombs coming to the world. Scary stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7puZUPjOoOI
6. "Japan's ability to deliver the goods, from frigates and aircraft to Hello Kitty and Super Mario, has put Japan in the pole position in Asia as an alternative to both the US and China. This is a relief for American policy makers and a major problem for China.
The PRC prefers to paint the conflict in Asia as one between a resurgent China reasserting its rightful place and a decadent, overbearing America in decline. The centrality of Japan rests in its delicate combination of soft and hard power and in Asia's history of resisting the ascendant hegemon, whether it be Japan in the 40s, the US in the 60s or China in the 2020s. As I write this, a record 19 nations have joined the Talisman Sabre exercises in Australia. While the headlines focus on the role of America, it is Japan who has forged this alliance by mending fences with old foes and steadfastly focusing on a free and open Indo-Pacific.
For investors, very little of this "hard power" opportunity is in the price of Japanese equities when compared to peer companies in other countries who supposedly will be invited to the same party. Based on head-to-head comparisons, Japan has the most to gain and the least to lose from a successful deterrence effort: its systems are optimized for modern conflict and its exports can only go up."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/lets-talk-about-japan-hard-power
7. A grim view of the AI future. Still helpful to understand the dystopian world we are entering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziLmtuLm-LU
8. A pretty interesting discussion by Google billionaire Eric Schmidt on the future of warfare: AI, robots & drones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkuVqdj8O6E
9. "For businesses currently on the T3D2 plan, the fundraising market may be a bit more challenging because of the comparison to AI growth rates. Also the expectations around size at IPO have increased.
$100m in trailing revenue growing 50% used to be the target. But now the expectation is closer to $300m growing at 50%. Attaining those numbers requires sustaining high growth rates for longer."
https://tomtunguz.com/t3d2-ai-era/
10. Some crazy stories about the early days of PayPal, Clarium Capital & Palantir.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dUSYgGYT0Y
11. "What began with the abandonment of the gold standard, continued through the era of fiat currencies, and accelerated during successive financial crises, now reaches its logical conclusion: money that can be created, allocated, and controlled according to the whims of technocratic authorities.
The eurozone's structural problems, including unsustainable debt levels, political fragmentation, economic stagnation, cannot be solved through monetary gimmicks or enhanced surveillance. They require fundamental reforms to fiscal policy, regulatory frameworks, and institutional structures. CBDCs represent an attempt to avoid these necessary reforms by implementing technological solutions to political problems.
European citizens face a choice that will define the next century of economic development. Accept the digital euro and surrender financial autonomy to unelected technocrats, or demand preservation of monetary alternatives that maintain some degree of individual choice and privacy.
The stakes couldn't be higher. Once implemented, CBDCs create a one-way ratchet toward greater control. The infrastructure built today will be used tomorrow for purposes not yet imagined by today's policymakers. History demonstrates that powers granted during emergencies are rarely relinquished during periods of stability.
As Rahm Emanuel said, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”
https://dollarendgame.substack.com/p/the-plan-to-enslave-europe
12. An interview with a living entertainment, media and internet business legend: Barry Diller. A must watch. "You have to be stupid before you are smart."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAKINNEVs-M
13. “Ukraine needs two sorts of funding: investment capital and customer capital. It needs revenues derived from non-Ukrainian buyers because that’s what will improve the macro environment. But nothing will happen without free exports and free repatriation of capital,” Boyle said."
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/60553
14. Arthur Hayes on Global Macro and the implications of the global debt doom loop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLcafgSuXew
15. This is an old one. But it's a damn good ad. Classy, stylish and smart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTUKMhw4hr4
16. Lots to think about from this conversation.
The world of tech and investing from the perch of one of the big Venture Banks dominating the VC landscape: General Catalyst.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWvYbRzC-g0
17. Jared Kushner is a frigging smart dude. A combo of global macro, PE & tech investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MOsEtyKqXw&t=4s
18. This is troubling, data points on future war. Still worth watching. Forewarned is forearmed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dh0USZT950
19. "While both paths steady compounding & hypergrowth can lead to the same destination, the latter creates more value because of the time value of money. The sooner a startup reaches $1b revenue, the more valuable it is.
Of course, a hypergrowth company with significant churn isn’t worth very much at all. The CAP theorem equivalent in business is some combination of growth, margin, & retention. Most businesses can’t optimize for all three."
https://tomtunguz.com/hypergrowth-vs-steady-compounding/
20. "To a man who has spent the past 60 years automating as much of his business as feasible—to the point where Interactive Brokers has higher profit margins (71%) than Visa, a so-called perfect business—my journey to meet him was an absurd misallocation of resources.
Peterffy is the 23rd richest person in the world. He pioneered automated trading before the millennium and built Timber Hill, once the largest options market maker on earth. He’s the reason you can trade stocks in your pajamas. His second act, Interactive Brokers, is worth over $100 billion. I was surprised he was surprised that anyone would travel to hear his story."
https://joincolossus.com/article/thomas-peterffy-market-maker/
21. "What I do know is this: if we keep doing one-off deals like MP Materials or Intel—as amazing and critical as they are—we will never mobilize capital fast enough to fund the thousands of industrial startups and small businesses we need to win the AI and energy race, preserve our way of life, and avoid a fiscal crisis.
We need system-level solutions that scale shops and startups together, not piecemeal. We need a closed-loop credit ecosystem that lends at scale and cycles revenue back toward paying down the national debt.
We need to inject trillions into rebuilding America’s industrial base—efficiently and urgently.
When the government is the buyer, loans can be simple and fully guaranteed. When the buyer is commercial, layered protections make deals bankable.
With Industrial Base Treasuries and private credit, capital can flow into the industrial base—funding innovation, expanding capacity, and offering more competitive compensation for American factory workers. This is how we start to close the loop on America’s next industrial revival."
https://adastracapital.substack.com/p/americas-financial-system-is-brokenbut
22. Another great episode this week and what's up in B2B AI & enterprise software investing. So much to learn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ7eeLU-G-Y
23. Good short take on semiconductor landscape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWloFh_hLyA
24. This conversation is very clear headed and a good take on truce between USA & China. And what happens to Taiwan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngOfkDgLzBo&t=34s
25. Controlling the metaphorical "trade routes" in a fragmenting de-globalizing world. Solid conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWntiqnjXYc
26. This short video helps you understand how Japan, South Korea and China ended up dominating ship building.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gk61ginOqo
27. This is a great overview on the importance of Ukrainian defense-tech for the West.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90p0AnTjRcs
28. "History is clear. Technological breakthroughs create short-term disruption and painful job losses but also unleash lower production costs, creative ideas, bold new businesses, and, over the long term, a net increase in employment. In the car industry, automation destroyed jobs on the factory floor. But we didn’t envision the new jobs that building heated seats and car stereos would create down the road.
In 1999 the average cost of developing and launching an e-commerce site was $1 million. Today you can set up a decent website for around $5,000. Your investment is 99.5% less, and you’re entering a market that’s more than 40 times bigger. Hollywood will follow a similar path as AI opens the door to independent filmmakers. You won’t need tens of millions of dollars and Hollywood connections to produce a movie of theatrical quality. Ben Affleck is right: AI will make it easier for outsiders with compelling scripts to produce the next Good Will Hunting.
AI has become the Ozempic of the corporate world. While GLP-1 medicines switch off the signal in your brain that you need to eat more, AI suppresses the appetite to hire more, reducing companies’ cravings for the protein of human capital. Hollywood is no different. AI will create new roles and elevate the careers of those who learn to leverage it successfully, but jobs will vanish. The collision between Hollywood and Silicon Valley signals the end of the blockbuster and the industry as we know it. Disney’s Bob Iger and Warner’s David Zaslav will be out within 12 to 24 months, as their affinity for, and relationship with, the creative community is quaint and outdated. They grew up in an era when talent held the power. Their job was to not piss off people. The Ellisons, like the honey badger, don’t give a shit.
The younger Ellison wants to bring the best of Southern and Northern California together. In this case, the “togetherness” is Northern California invading the city of Angels. Like most wars, the battle is over before it starts, based on which side has more brute force."
https://www.profgalloway.com/the-end-of-the-blockbuster/
29. “Thinking twice” becomes the permanent condition. The cost is estrangement. Our first impulses — where thought actually begins — are smothered before they can be tested. We no longer recognize them as thought at all. The mind, trained in this way, does not grow sharper but duller, endlessly rehearsing conclusions while losing touch with the raw material of thinking itself."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/thinking-twice
30. "For today’s defense technologists and acquisition leaders, the lesson is pointed. In times of disruption, processes and committees can become fatal luxuries. Sometimes survival depends on heresy—on giving one frenetic outsider the power to cut through the system and deliver what the moment demands.
More tactically, political leaders building their executive teams need strong, empowered lieutenants—men and women who can bring outside perspective and credibility to government institutions, but still operate with speed and precision inside the complex reality of government.
These leaders must step away from rewarding careers, and, along with their families, endure the costs of entering the political arena. Changemakers like Lord Beaverbrook must be ready to make enemies and face vicious attacks in the press. And in a hyper-political era, they must wield the press, feeding their wins into the national discourse to fuel their own political power.
Today, as in 1940, critical military production is stalling. China’s fleet of warships grows while the U.S. fleet shrinks. U.S. missile and artillery stocks are dwindling, with production rates creeping up too slowly. With such trends, People’s Liberation Army commanders may gamble that their American counterparts won’t risk a force they can’t regenerate.
Might deterrence in the Pacific be saved by a 21st century Beaverbrook?"
https://www.firstbreakfast.com/p/lord-beaverbrooks-production-magic
31. "Knudsen's core principle holds true: industry cannot build at scale without reliable, long-term, financeable demand signals. However, the financial ecosystem has undergone a fundamental change. Where Knudsen coordinated with major banks and corporate leaders, today's defense industrial base must attract capital from stock and bond markets, derivatives traders, institutional investors, private equity firms, family offices, foundations, credit funds, and venture capitalists.
This presents both challenge and opportunity. The challenge: traditional defense procurement – with annual appropriations, continuing resolutions, and termination-for-convenience clauses – doesn't align with how modern capital flows. The opportunity: America's capital markets, properly engaged, represent resources that could transform our defense industrial capacity.
The principles Knudsen championed – bankable commitments, clear demand signals, partnership between government and industry – remain our superpower and north star. But the implementation must reflect today's financial reality. When we align defense needs with how private capital actually flows, we'll build the modern Arsenal of Democracy."
https://bens.org/freedoms-forge-2-0/
32. "AI is reshaping both soft power and hard power around the globe. The United States, to its credit, has an early lead with the former. The leading LLMs are trained on Western text, global training and inference are still dominated by American companies, and we are ahead in the global race for market share of total tokens generated.
But as it stands, China is running away with the hard power part of AI – robotics. As the incredible progress in AI continues, we start seeing intelligence embedded in the physical world – culminating in generalist robots that perform a wide variety of tasks across applications, from manufacturing to services to defense. This will redefine every aspect of our society and reshape daily life. The country betting on that future is China, not the US.
In the 10 years since the CCP released its “Made in China 2025” strategy, Chinese companies have leapfrogged the rest of the world’s density of robots per capita. They passed the United States in 2021, then the famously automated economics of Japan and Germany in 2024, and will soon eclipse Singapore and South Korea, their last remaining contenders. In short order China has become the world’s central robotics power. Entirely autonomous “dark factories,” like those of smartphone and automobile manufacturer Xiaomi, operate in complete darkness with no humans present.
China has successfully executed what we once thought impossible. Only ten years ago we scoffed that “China can copy, but they can’t innovate,” which we then revised to, “They can innovate, but they can’t make the upstream high-precision tooling.” Maybe we shouldn’t have been so comfortable, given how Chinese companies had outcompeted the rest of the world in industry after industry – from solar photovoltaics, where competition outside of China has been practically decimated, to 5G, whose global deployment was a massive success for China’s national champion Huawei. The same pattern is playing out now with robotics. China has built a playbook to dominate strategic industries, and has used that playbook to become the robot superpower."
https://a16z.substack.com/p/america-cannot-lose-the-robotics
33. This is an important conversation and interview with the US Secretary of the Army. Very unapologetic and direct. I appreciated this and where the US military is going.
Shawn Ryan asks lots of hard and good questions as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TdYR9sfRIw
34. What a fascinating conversation on the future of anti-drone and anti-missile technology. Aurelius Systems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZQ0RLvcHTA
35. "For entrepreneurs pitching investors who don’t buy into the market opportunity, it can be incredibly difficult. The best approach is to find an analogous market or a complementary product and make the case that what happened “over there” is going to happen “over here.” Even if investors aren’t convinced, the one thing within your control is to provide tremendous value to your customers and grow at least as fast as the market itself so that when the opportunity arises, you’re in the best position to raise capital and scale even faster."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/09/27/when-potential-investors-dont-like-the-market/
Inside Out 2: Raging Emotions
I remember watching the excellent Pixar Inside Out, in 2023 as part of a family therapy assignment. It’s an animated movie about the raging emotions of a young girl named Riley. Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust & Sadness. Emotions that drive every person, some more than others and ones we all need. It was cute and somewhat instructive even for an adult like me. No surprise I figured out quickly that my predominant emotions seem to be anger and fear. Usually anger, that is driven by fear.
But I had the chance to watch Inside Out 2 where the original cast of staple emotions is joined by new emotions especially as Riley becomes a 13 year old teen going through puberty. Anxiety, Envy, Ennui and Embarrassment. These new emotions take charge and kick out the old emotions. Or dominate them at least, ruining her growing sense of self. For anyone going through their teen years, this seems absolutely true. Myself included. Such a confusing time in your life.
Especially the feeling of anxiety, which is driven by fear about the future. It literally plays out all the worst possible scenarios so you can prepare for them. Scenarios of being alone, being seen as stupid, failing in whatever you are about, losing friends or whatever. Anxiety makes you act out in different ways due to the uncertainty of life. You are always planning. I realize this has always been a big driver of my life.
Epigenetically, I get this from my dad. He can be tense in tough situations. But I think I’ve taken this to a whole new level. This attention to detail was very useful in my career. I’ve channeled my anxiety into work. I’ve been accused of being a workaholic. I think it’s certainly true. I don’t stop until I get the work done. I literally cannot relax unless everything is finished.
I pay attention to details and wired myself to be super responsive. This is always probably why I am usually a stress basket that erupts into rage when things don’t go my way. Or my plans get wrecked. And especially angry when others don’t follow this example of reliability either. I find most people I meet disappoint me in this way.
I’ve had to learn to manage my emotions better through a disciplined regime I’ve mentioned many times. A proper sleep regime, ie. Getting 7-8 hours of sleep every night is helpful. As is a regular meditation and exercise regime, Church mass, and a good diet. I control my coffee intake and don’t drink it past 3 pm. It also helps to make sure my schedule is not overly packed, so I end up with lots of time to unwind, read books and listen to podcasts.
The point is that it’s really important to understand yourself and the dominant emotions that drive you. Human beings are complex creatures because of our emotions. We react very differently to every situation. Knowing ourselves is key to this so we can thrive better. Regulating our emotions and maybe finding some joy just like in the movie. :)
Dune Prophecy: Faith, Purpose & Action Wins
The Dune books and movies are works of art. An incredible universe filled with intrigue, lessons and wisdom. How to get power and how to keep it. But most important is the philosophy & lessons on growth.
The HBO series prequel Dune Prophecy exemplifies all of this. It revolves around the growth of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood and Corrino royal family and the great noble houses in a great galactic empire. So much plotting. But the philosophical underpinnings & lessons that Dune is known for is found throughout.
There were some really good insights relevant to all of our lives. Comments like:
“True strength isn’t always something you see from the outside.” Or “A focused mind is your greatest protector.”
But one observation that stood out to me as said by the Mother Superior: “Crisis, survival, advancement. We found Adversity is the key to change. Sometimes misfortunes are the sails that take us to the shores we are meant to be on.”
I feel this lesson was one I’ve lived and experienced in 2001, 2013, 2020 especially, 2023 and 2024. Searing challenges & hardship that nearly broke me. But I survived, I learned and I grew. Pain leads to growth. Immense pain leads to immense growth.
“Each man must face their own conscience and his own testing.” I’ve learned to face the tiger directly. You can’t hide. As the Mother Superior said: “Adversity always lies in the path of advancement. Most would run from it, I will walk through it.”
There is even commentary that seems incredibly apt for our present disorder in Western Society and geopolitics. Emperor Corrino in a speech states: “Those whose actions seek to destroy the social order have always warranted a swift response. Now more than ever we need to defend our values with ferocity and pride.”
I could not help but think of the grave threat we face right now from external enemies like China, Russia, Iran and extremist Islamicists and internal enemies like the mass of criminals, leftist and right extremists and the apathy of the general public. “There are predators in our midst.”
Our political & business elites' greed, our weakness, the lack of intellectual and moral courage have led to barbarians at our gates and in our gates, threatening everything our great Western Civilization stands for. The great reckoning is coming. It’s probably here now.
I’ll repeat this again. “Now more than ever, we need to defend our values with ferocity and pride.” As was stated in the series: “We’re in a time of crisis and sacrifices need to be made.” Only then will we be able to defeat our enemies internal and external so we can get our civilization back on the path of greatness.
Point Break the Remake
I find myself returning to watch the 1991 remake of “Point Break” (original one starred Patrick Swayze) when a rookie FBI agent named Johnny Utah goes undercover to investigate some extreme sports athletes who are behind a string of massive heists. He has a hard time sorting out his duties against the attraction of the philosophy the robbers espouse.
The storyline of the remake doesn’t always make sense, the acting is meh but the stunts whether street fighting, big wave surfing, snow boarding, paragliding, extreme motorbiking, big cliff rock climbing, HALO and parajumping are truly incredible even now. Incredibly wild and beautiful landscapes. It is still impressive today and totally hits.
But the philosophy behind what they do, and how they live is interesting. They believe you are the agent of your destiny and you own your decisions. Bodhi, the ringleader explains his philosophy to Johnny:
“There are few things in life I don’t compromise on. But the world’s a pretty messed-up place, and we still gotta live in it. We live on the grid. Just on our own terms. We change the grid. We give back. The second that kid got killed you gave up life. You turned away because of something someone else did.
You were selling sports drinks? Fine. That’s not for me to judge. But you let someone else determine the direction your life took. That I judge.”
Total & complete ownership of your life. Not blaming others. And taking responsibility for your life only. I wish I had understood this and followed this more earlier.
If you follow someone else’s line down the mountain it becomes your line. Literally.
When their friend dies during a wild snowboard trip: Johnny goes ballistic “Are you crazy. That was my line!
Bodhi responds: “The minute he committed to it, it became his line, not yours.”
Something to this. Letting people live their own lives. Letting them own their own decisions even if it’s the wrong one in your eyes. Probably would have saved me from plenty of the stress and problems.
One of the characters says to Johnny:
“As much as I worshipped Ozaki, that was his Achilles heel. He truly believed he could change the world with an idea.”
Johnny says: “Ideas are powerful. If not ideas, what else is there?”
She responds: “Action.”
So true. In movies, in startups, in investing and in life. You need ideas but to make it work, you always have to back it up with action.
But I leave this with the title of the movie, Point Break: “The point where you break. Where fear becomes master and you’re his slave. A man who pushes his boundaries ultimately finds them.”
Johnny says: “So basically, you’re saying I’m going to die.”
They answer: “we’re all going to die, the only question is how.”
Wise words. It’s how we live. Death comes for all of us, so let’s make the best of our time here. Make no compromises. Think big thoughts. Do big things. Have a big impact. Push the edges. Find our own Point Break.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Nov 16th, 2025
"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work." – Steve Jobs
Syria is the precursor to March areas. Back to the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASv1W0G81-E
2. A great episode this week. What's up in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3Gzl2ZDXWw
3. "Our accelerating cavalcade of bloodshed rests on three pillars:
First, the massive tech media platforms, which feed us a daily diet of misinformation and tribal distrust. Sex sells. But Big Tech — 40% of the S&P 500 — has found something even better: rage. Eisenhower rightly warned us about the military industrial complex. In the decades after he left office, weapons manufacturers, think tanks, and politicians — the violence entrepreneurs of their era — conspired to make foreign wars and proxy conflicts into billion-dollar businesses. Today, Meta dwarves Lockheed Martin. “Make Memes Not War” is the trillion-dollar strategy.
My argument is not that politics is unrelated to the violence. (Or that there isn’t actual organized political violence, mostly from the far right, as has been well documented.) On the contrary, the ever more violent and inflammatory rhetoric and misinformation and the relentless demonization of every available scapegoat have left their marks all over the lives of the perpetrators. But demagoguery, dog whistles, and tribalism aren’t new. The dangerous novelty of our time is the fusing of capitalism and technology to make rage, and violence, profitable.
We’d go a long way toward dismantling the rage machine if we exposed its makers to liability, as we do with every other corporation. Reforming Section 230, which insulates online platforms from the externalities of the conspiracy theories and Chinese misinformation schemes they peddle, would be a massive first step. Age-gating social media would be a good follow-up.
And online media is an accelerant to our problem. As I often say, (including in my next book), the fire it fuels is disconnected rage."
https://www.profgalloway.com/violence-entrepreneurs/
4. Understanding what is happening on the frontlines of Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Buv7SCAWSAk
5. I don't agree with all of his geopolitical takes but it's good to listen to alternative views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIWZv4_OvhM
6. "Here’s the twist: not every department in a company will adopt the same organizational structure. AI’s impact varies dramatically by function, creating a world where the shape of a company becomes more nuanced than ever."
https://tomtunguz.com/pyramids-to-cylinders/
7. "The above does suggest that Türkiye has options - Europe, the Middle East, even China, in term of future defence cooperation. But maybe what it will decide is a pragmatic multi-vector strategy in terms of defence cooperation, with Europe, the Gulf/Middle East, whatever works best to deliver Türkiye’s fast track to full defence industrial autonomy.
From a Turkish perspective at least the challenge now presented by Israel, and the wider ones in Ukraine, with Russia, doubts over the U.S. security backstop, must affirm the prudence of the decision two decades back to invest heavily in an autonomous Turkish military industrial capability. That and tensions with Israel might well act to buoy Erdogan’s current lagging opinion poll rating hurt by inflation and the travails in the courts with the opposition CHP.
Tensions with Israel will surely continue to spur on the Kurdish peace process within Türkiye - which does appear to have been a motivation for the remarkable about turn by Erdogan nationalist ally, Bahceli in moving to support this process earlier this year. I guess all this just affirms the reality of the many moving parts, or plates in the current tectonic geopolitical mix, which presents both threats and opportunities for Türkiye. It complicated, but that’s the neighbourhood in which Türkiye operates."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/turkiye-facing-geopolitical-threats
8. "Similar to the wealth divide, 80% of all your wealth is likely going to come from concentration. The other 20% from diversification. If you learn to build and sell businesses, you don’t even care too much about investing. You only invest with excess money (ironically allowing you to take even more risk + becoming a better investor!)
With the high level out of the way: 1) cut risk significantly at ~80% of *your number*and 2) you can invest in high risk forever with all assets *in excess* of your never sell set for life bucket.
Based on Earnings: Sticking with the same $5M example. If you earn $1M a year or $200K a year the set up is drastically different. A good way to think about the portfolio volatility? Match it to about 1-2 years of *savings* per year.
If you earn say $500K and can save around $350K a year, this means you want you max drawdown to be around $350-700K."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/get-rich-via-concentration-retain
9. It's always an illuminating conversation. World minus one. A realistic view on how America is declining due to our own stupid policies, internal cultural wars & lack of any coherent strategy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IbKMOvH4_0
10. A historian’s view to understand the world in 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwEYTYgbdd0
11. Another excellent episode of NIA this week. Getting solid takes on internet, tech and creative business news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByaeOdacht0&t=2s
12. This is a solid interview to understand what is going on in the world. The case for India.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_hLL_4rzow
13. "Today’s wealthy activists are the meritocratic descendants of this ruling class—and now, they face their own reckoning. Once upon a time, their education and résumés guaranteed them status. Now, as the economy stratifies, many feel themselves slipping. And once again, socialism—or its progressive equivalents—offers a way to explain the loss and to seek revenge on those who have outpaced them.
How this pent-up rage erupts is still unclear, but it’s certainly not going to be pretty. The children of privilege may not starve. But their disappointment—sharpened by ambition, magnified by envy, and amplified through elite networks—has the power to unsettle politics in ways that hardship alone rarely does.
The result, as we’re discovering, is a cruel paradox. While the American dream of upward mobility built this nation’s mythology, the reality of downward mobility may be what destabilizes it."
https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/rage-of-the-falling-elite
14. "Failures are happening because organizations haven't grappled with the fundamental challenge of human-AI interaction. The path forward requires acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: sometimes the best human-AI collaboration is no collaboration at all."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/is-correlated-uncertainty-leading
15. "The fact that the United States is the only supplier of turbofan technology to Europe is far from ideal. Turbofan engines are essential for producing heavy cruise missiles that can carry large payloads over long distances while maintaining a stealthy flight profile. While turbojet engines can, in principle, power longer-range land-attack cruise missiles, their performance is inferior.
It is therefore unsurprising that the Taurus KEPD 350 program relies on Williams International to supply the P8300-15 turbofan engine, and that Kongsberg selected Williams International’s F415 for the Joint Strike Missile rather than using Safran’s TR40, as in the Naval Strike Missile. Both systems depend on ground-skimming trajectories for survivability and mission success, and both emphasize extended range to execute complex, non-linear flight paths to their targets.
From a strategic autonomy perspective, continued reliance on U.S. technology in 2025 is obviously not great, especially in such a critical sector, but Europe lacks alternatives. While developing a European mini turbofan engine would theoretically be possible, it’s not a short-term solution."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/small-thrust-big-questions-the-precarious
16. Geopolitics through the lens of energy and trade wars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=699dsom_fuM
17. "The price of that fear, however, is simply very high. This is not the 19th century; America has low birthrates among its elite (and in general), so it can’t replenish its elite through reproduction. Instead, if we want to keep having the world’s best engineers and researchers and such, we need to import some of them. Cut off that flow, and Americans will discover why a country with only 4% of the world’s population can’t remain the center of global research and development without a lot of skilled immigration.
On top of that, Trump’s poor treatment of Indian H-1b workers and Korean construction workers will end up weakening America’s alliances — and economic relationships — with those two Asian countries. Weakened alliances in Asia will make it nearly impossible for the U.S. to effectively resist the encroachment of Chinese power.
So right-wing fears of an Asian-led America are going to end up making the actual America poorer and less globally relevant. Personally, I don’t think that tradeoff is worth it. Demographic change among the elite can be unsettling, but not as unsettling as a collapse of America’s global power and domestic economic dynamism. We’ve dealt with a changing elite before, and it worked out fine; we can do it again."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/indians-and-koreans-not-welcome
18. "History rarely repeats in exact form, but it often rhymes. Britain and America offer a case in point. Britain was once the world's leading power, shaping the 19th century with its factories, navy, and empire. America took on that mantle in the 20th century, with unmatched industrial scale, a dollar-backed financial system, and global reach sustained by alliances. Both nations seemed, in their respective peaks, to stand at the centre of the world economy.
Yet Britain's experience shows that leadership is not a permanent state.
Britain's story is not one of sudden collapse but of gradual slippage. Industrial dominance was lost first, to rivals who invested more boldly in the technologies of the future. Imperial reach then ebbed away, as the costs of war and the rise of nationalist movements made the old model unsustainable. Finally, Britain's supremacy in finance, which for a time offered a residual source of strength, came under strain as the material foundations beneath it weakened.
America today is not Britain in the 1950s. It is larger, richer, and more integrated into the world economy than Britain ever was. But echoes are there, and the same question runs through both stories: what happens when the industrial base of power erodes, yet the financial and strategic commitments built on that base remain as heavy as ever?"
https://www.driftsignal.com/p/britain-then-america-now
19. "Even if both countries prefer peace, they often act aggressively—just in case.
That’s the “Tragedy of Great Power Politics”, to quote Merscheimer: survival demands aggression, not because states are evil, but because the system rewards power and punishes naïveté.
And on the global stage, power is relative: it matters not how strong you are in absolute terms but how strong you are compared to potential threats. When one state builds up its military to feel safer, others feel less safe - and build up too. Everyone becomes more armed, more tense, and more likely to clash - even though nobody wanted a fight in the first place."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/why-power-never-sleeps-lessons-from
20. This week on what's up in B2B, lots of great takes here by investors on the top of their game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujuUUduQXgQ
21. Tony Robbins is the man. I always get something from listening to his talks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giUU6aMosoA
22. A must read to understand why the world is the way it is now. Especially in the West.
"China is growing fast because many still lack basics like a car, while Europe and the U.S. have reached saturation, with little incentive for further growth. And many are discovering that lifestyle improvements, such as bicycling paths and pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly cities, may not produce economic growth.
The problem is that it is saturated economies, like the U.S. and Europe, that carry the most debt. There’s a French saying: On ne prête qu’aux riches (“One only lends to the rich”). But when you’re rich and borrow heavily, you need growth to service that debt, which is harder at the top of the S-curve.
Further, policies like tariffs, as seen under the current administration, can stifle growth by forcing resources into lower-margin activities — like asking a brain surgeon to do some gardening two days a week to avoid being “ripped off” by professional gardeners. This shift from higher added value to lower added value depresses GDP, a point orthodox economists agree on — and this, at the time when we need growth the most."
https://nntaleb.medium.com/the-world-in-which-we-live-7255aad3e18c
23. "Among the most notable groups within the 2nd Legion are Brazilian volunteers. Brazil is home to a Ukrainian diaspora of roughly 600,000 people, many living in the Parana state. For some, cultural roots provide the motivation to join; for others, anti-communist convictions or personal outrage at the Russian invasion drive them. With many being veterans of Brazil’s military or police forces, bringing specialized skills in small-unit tactics, reconnaissance, and urban combat.
Around Pokrovsk, the 2nd International Legion’s Brazilian contingent has demonstrated how their jungle-honed skills transfer seamlessly into Ukraine’s contested forests and villages. One video shows them advancing quietly through dense woodland on a reconnaissance mission, using their natural ability to move unseen, camouflage effectively, and set ambushes. Such expertise allows them to surprise Russian troops, capture prisoners, or eliminate threats before they can endanger larger Ukrainian formations. Their precision reduces risks for accompanying units and speeds up the clearing of hostile positions, as proved by numerous released videos."
24. "The US effectively operates the world's financial operating system. This dominance grants Washington extraordinary leverage: it can unilaterally impose sanctions that exclude nations from the global banking system. Countries and corporations must maintain dollar reserves and access to US banks to participate in international trade, giving America the ability to reward allies with market access and credit while punishing adversaries through financial exclusion. This "weaponization of finance" has become increasingly central to US foreign policy. In an increasingly on-chain world, US policy will continue to shift to ensure that US Dollar Stablecoins (and not something Yuan or Euro backed) remain dominant.
There are a lot of people in crypto who fully embrace the crypto-anarchist vision of a fully decentralized finance system. This is great and a fun part of crypto but my view is that crypto will never be fully mainstream if it is fully decentralized. Stable coins that are regulated and fully backed by dollars tie the system more tightly to the traditional banking system than they allow a system to be removed from it. Even if these stablecoins are used in places like defi and for decentralized use cases, they are still very much anchors to the traditional banking system and that’s actually a good thing."
https://kylelibra.substack.com/p/a-lot-of-what-people-think-about
25. "The central challenge of American statecraft today is this very visible disjunction between the systemic scope of the threat beyond its borders and the psychological unreadiness of the society on whose commitment any effective response depends. Recognizing this gap is only the beginning.
In many ways, even though the strategic imperatives are unmistakable, the mechanisms for addressing them remain contested. Time, however, operates as an independent variable in this equation, and it favors America's adversaries.
Each interval of American strategic paralysis permits Moscow to consolidate its influence networks, Beijing to advance its technological supremacy, and Tehran to expand its destabilizing apparatus across multiple theaters. What American policymakers frame as prudent deliberation, hostile powers exploit as operational opportunity."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/the-new-cold-war
26. Lots of good ideas and thought exercises here for the aspiring tycoon or who just wants to have a good life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pug5Q_3XHjk
27. "Pre-AI, a common benchmark for best-in-class enterprise startups was $1 million in ARR in its first 12 months. The path to Series A typically took 12-18 months after achieving initial revenue traction, with companies needing to demonstrate sustained growth over multiple quarters before investors would write larger checks.
Today? It’s twice as fast per A16z’s data"
https://www.saastr.com/a16z-the-median-enterprise-ai-startup-now-hits-2-1m-arr-by-month-12/
28. "Tashkent, the capital, felt modern and safe to Joey. The culture shock was less severe than he expected, and once he settled in, he discovered a thriving, vibrant city.
“Hip cafés, shopping centers, good coffee—even the same international pop songs playing in the background,” he laughs. “Seeing all the teenagers glued to TikTok and Instagram made me feel closer to home.”
This is the paradox people often mention about Tashkent. In some ways it feels worlds apart from the West with its slower pace, traditional crafts, and ancient mosques—but it also has glass skyscrapers, ride-sharing, food delivery apps, and all the modern comforts of Europe in 2025. The ancient and the modern coexist in near-perfect harmony."
https://www.escapeartist.com/blog/living-in-uzbekistan/
29. Modular jamming & Drone shield. Great convo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCrT6xBCY9c
30. "Every company has these people. They work within the seams. Between the levels. Outside the performance matrix.
They don't hit your L5 requirements because they're doing L3 and L7 work simultaneously. Fixing the deploy pipeline while mentoring juniors. Answering customer emails while rebuilding core systems. They can't be ranked because they do what nobody thought to measure.
Performance reviews punish them. They lack "scope" because they fix problems before they become projects. No "leadership" because they lead by doing, not declaring. No "impact" because preventing fires doesn't generate OKRs.
By the time they ask for recognition, they're already gone. The ask isn't a request. It's a test you've already failed."
https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/the-quiet-ones
31. Kind of wacky stuff, alt-geopolitics. But helps illuminate some of the crazy MAGA stuff and geopolitics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2ua2E5b6aA
32. "The essence of Buffalo Bill’s plan is to move credit creation and by extension economic growth out of the hands of the Fed and various non-bank financial institutions like private equity firms into the hands of small and medium-sized bank loan officers (I will call these regional banks). In his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed where he lambasted the Fed, he described it in populist terms of elevating Main St. over Wall St. Don’t get too hung up on the fact that entrance into his economic Valhalla requires the use of the undemocratic tools of Fed money printing.
The banks will now lend to the real industry that can produce the weapons needed for another glorious century of Bombs of Baghdad / Tehran / Gaza / Caracas (yes, an attempt at Venezuelan regime change is going to happen by 2028) etc. fill in your brown or Muslim population center and now the American military can bring forth DemocracyTM … assuming the denizens are still breathing :(.
That fixes the industrial side of the equation. In order to placate the American plebes, who require the ever-expanding welfare state to purchase their allegiance, the government must finance itself more affordably. By fixing the yield on long-term bonds, Bessent can issue infinite amounts of dogshit treasuries that the Fed dutifully buys with printed dollars. The interest expense collapses, as does the federal deficit.
Finally, the value of the dollar relative to other filthy fiat currencies and gold collapses. This allows American industry to export competitively priced goods to Europe first and then the global south in competition with China, Japan, and Germany.
Trump and Buffalo Bill Bessent believe it is their mission to restore the global primacy of America. That requires rebuilding a solid manufacturing base to produce real goods, not “services”. President of China, Xi Jinping, came to a similar conclusion when faced with the 2018 US-China Trade War started by Trump. Xi crushed the animal spirits of the financiers and big tech CEOs to change the economic direction of China. Who would have thought Alibaba CEO Jack Ma would be called to Zhongnanhai to drink tea and serve a stint in tycoon jail.
Instead of building shitty apartments and bike-sharing apps, the best and brightest in Xi’s China would conquer the green economy, rare earths, military drones, ballistic missiles, AI etc. And after almost a decade, China can endogenously produce all the real goods a nation state needs to preserve its sovereignty in the 21st century without the help of America."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/four-seven
33. One of the best global macro analysts around. She is such a great clear thinker & incredibly knowledgeable on financial history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aSOf31fZ68
34. One of the wisest humans on the planet. Naval on wealth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEPkweR086A
35. "BRADLEY TUSK IS a political consultant for tech companies. Uber and FanDuel have enjoyed his services as they rewrote the rules of their industries, and he’s used to political rough and tumble. As he sees it, Trump’s tactics are the government moving fast and breaking things.
When we talk, Tusk rattles off what he views as the components of US tech exceptionalism—independent markets and institutions, freedom of speech, intellectual property protections, strong educational institutions, decent immigration policy. Then his voice gets hard. “Trump is doing the opposite of every single one of those things,” he says. “There is definitely potential that he will destroy everything that makes the US economy unique and successful.
Maybe that’s the thing I got most wrong about Silicon Valley. Those Davids I wrote about seemed fearless and full of verve as they challenged what was possible and rode the power of the chip and the net. I mistook this for character. They may believe, as Moritz told me, that submitting to Trump’s protection racket protects their shareholders. But tech giants are certainly capable of standing up for the long-term viability of their industry. And for democracy. So far they are doing the opposite. “I think they have made a bad deal,” says Tim Wu. “Everyone who thought they could work some deal with Trump ends up getting burned, if not imprisoned.”
There will probably be no reckoning. Tech leaders, like all rich people, always have alternatives to life in a declining country. Reid Hoffman has his, as he put it, “contingency plans.” Another source for this story let drop that he’s getting Portuguese citizenship. Lovely country. But it’s hard to imagine myself as a young reporter, roaming the streets of Lisbon and finding the excitement and promise I discovered in California. It’s even harder to imagine a young reporter finding that spirit in the industry as it stands today. The way I now feel in Silicon Valley is how Sam Altman described himself politically: homeless.”
https://www.wired.com/story/silicon-valley-politics-shift/
36. "With capital drying up at home, Chinese AI firms are increasingly turning to the Middle East, where sovereign wealth funds and state-driven digital transformation programs provide opportunities for growth. These initial AI deals prove that sensitivity to the Gulf’s religious and cultural norms can help Chinese firms secure backing in the region."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/chinas-great-leap-south
37. Implications of the Israeli missile attack on Hamas in Qatar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiL_TDQF0VY
38. Insight dense conversation on startups, culture and productivity.
Margin Call
This is the classic Wall Street movie outside of “Wall Street”. Full of top drawer Hollywood actors. It also explains the 2008 GFC so well. And you learn how Wall Street and Investing banking works.
You also get a sense of the attitude you need to thrive, even with the Hollywood embellishments as one of the mid level bankers tells his junior.
“If you really want to do this with your life you have to believe you are necessary. And you are. People want to live like this, with cars and the big houses they can’t even pay for. You are necessary. The only reason that they all get to have this like kings is because we have our fingers on the scales in their favor.
I take my hand off and the whole world gets real fair, real quickly. And no really wants that. They say they do but they don’t. They want what we have to give them but they also want to play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. Normal people.”
There is a great scene around a late night emergency board meeting with all the Directors and the Chairman. So good and recommend watching it. The Chairman Mr Tulda played by Jeremy Irons also talks about how business on the Street works:
“What did I tell you since the first day you stepped into my office. There are 3 ways to make a living in this Business. Be first, be smarter, or cheat. Now I don’t cheat. And while I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building. It sure is a hell of a lot easier to be first.”
He also describes the game of Wall Street and finance oh so well. It’s worth paying attention:
“It’s just money. It’s made up. Pieces of paper with pictures on it so we don’t kill each other just to get something to eat. It’s not wrong. And it’s certainly no different now than it ever was, 1637, 1901, 1907…1937…..1987….1992…. Whatever they call this.
It’s all just the same thing. Over and over. We can’t help ourselves. You and I can’t control it. Or stop it or even slow it. Or even so slightly alter it. We just react.
We make alot of money if we get it right. And we get left by the side of the road if we get it wrong.
And there’s always been and always will be the same percentage of winners and losers. Happy and sad sacks….Fat cats and starving dogs in this world. Yeah. There may be more of us than there’s ever been these days. But the percentages, they stay exactly the same.”
Some thoughts to ponder. And it helps you understand how the world of money really works. Or least in America which has been so financialized now much to our detriment as we don’t make anything anymore. “The ground is shifting below our feet”….
The big lesson to me as was said many times in the movie: Crisis is opportunity, “No loose ends” and “Take the money”. Money is impact. Money is power. Money is freedom.
Power Is Everything: Playing to Win
I had written previously about Resavager, a somewhat white supremacist writer. But boy, that dude can write. He really is good. I stumbled upon another one of his write ups and it’s a banger. (Source: https://resavager.com/p/power-gives-the-first-right). “Power Gives the First Right.”
It revolves around the important topic of power and its importance. We’ve been psy-oped into thinking it’s a bad thing or we need to hide from it. Well, this is wrong. Many of us shy away from it but if you care about your family, your country and even yourself and making an impact, you need to understand it. In fact, you need to master it. I used to think Money and wealth is all you need and it’s a subset of power for sure. But as we see from China, power trumps riches. Just ask Jack Ma. Or Elon versus Trump, power always beats wealth.
Resavager writes:
“You will never take power if you abandon power. You’re putting you and your kin at the mercy of your enemies. The steps described above are half measures easily overcome by the people that hate you.
The US military in Afghanistan and Iraq had one arm strapped behind its back. Our kin in the military did not have free rein to conquer their opponents. They were made to believe that the peoples they fought were a small minority of terrorists holding hostage peoples who just wanted liberal democracy.
Historically, you had to be able to kill off at least 30% of the enemy’s fighting age males to get victory. Our military was told not to fire unless fired upon, that most Afghanis or Iraqis were oppressed by small number of terrorists. That if you simply cut off the heads of the snakes, victory would be ours. You know what happened and you know that isn’t the truth. Why would you apply it to our situation?”
Basically, he says, if you want to win a war, you fight it, no holds barred. We’ve lost all the last few wars because we never truly fought it. Truth is, most of these wars America fought were never existential. And we never treated it as such.
“War, like nature, continues to progress. It knows no rest. It continues to grow more complex. This is not the barbaric age of swords and shields. War is immensely complex and a people that abandon it, will be conquered by the ones who don’t. You can argue all day and night about how we are better, how we are superior, but nature demands that you compete. You stop competing, you give your enemies an opening. Sure, maybe they aren’t as smart as we are, but that’s ok, they will have the numbers and funding to overcome anything you and yours could put forward.”
“There is a powerful book on the first US Civil War written by John Keegan called The American Civil War, that I encourage you to read. The South was united in their cause. They have none of the racial hang ups our kin have today. They knew they belonged to a race. They had the superior warriors. Hell, they had the superior leadership. The Confederate fighting force was revered by generations of Americans to come for their valiant struggle against the Union. But they still lost.
How the South lost the Civil War was best explained by Keegan. All the infrastructure in the United States was in the north. The North controlled the seas around the states. The vast majority of the population was also in the north. On top of this, the north enlisted vast numbers of immigrants and blacks to fight on the frontlines. The North made many mistakes that drew the war out for as long as it did, but the reality was the North was fighting with one arm behind its back. If the South put up a better fight, the North would have simply used its other arm. Victory was never in the cards and many of the Confederate generals understood this.”
So the key lesson he highlights: “As Nietzsche said in his early essay on the Greeks, “Power gives the first right.” You cannot abandon power and expect to win.
This is why for many young men, the military or building true ties to the military make sense. I wished I had done military service, but I do the next best things. I fund military innovation and production and I work with the Department of Defense and US & our allied militaries. I also make friends with present and ex-Military people. They are good & capable people.
As I mentioned earlier, modern warfare is immensely complex, so you can go into the military and not be in a combat arms role, if that’s what you are worried about. Our people need to be on the cutting edge of warfare, on the frontier itself, if we want to survive. The military does TAKE, but you can also TAKE from the military. You will learn skills you won’t learn anywhere else. The military will pay you to learn these skills and you will get benefits for your service. Three years gets your college paid for and the ability to buy a house. You will get connections that might lead you in directions none of our kin are talking about: the deep state and the military industrial complex, for example.
The reality is that you need to do more. He who does more, is worth more. Anyone can enlist or commission, but how much more can you do? Can you get yourself into positions of power? Can you get yourself into elite units like the 75th Ranger Regiment or the Navy SEALs? Are able to make connections and get into the deep state or military industrial complex? Life ain’t about paying bills and dying. Make your mark on the world. The way we act now would be the equivalent of the colonists never rebelling because the British Empire was too strong or never venturing out into the frontier because of the danger of Indian raids. He who dares, conquers.
The world belongs to those who TAKE power. If you want to see your sons do better than you, you must set the example. If you run and hide, how could you expect your children to be any different? The WILL to win is something sorely missing in our race and it falls upon us to embody it again. We who know have the duty to pick up the sword. Never forget Nietzsche’s words: POWER gives the first right. MIGHT makes right.”
This is absolutely correct: Might makes right. It’s a hard brutal truth but the world is getting harder. Pax Americana is over, or at least the one we know. A colder and more brutal ruthless world.
A world that no longer purely revolves around money and GDP growth. A world with mass job destruction, growing income inequality, rudderless & venal politicians, and a decaying law and order. To be truly sovereign, it doesn’t matter how much money you have, although it certainly helps. But if you don't have health, fighting & shooting skills in times of chaos you will be eaten (maybe literally). Even if you have a well trained security team, who knows how reliable they will be if you are just paying them. Or if they don’t respect you. They will if you have skills, similar to medieval noblemen who have both money and training and are seen as leaders and comrades.
So go make plenty of money, go get some fighting and weapon skills, and go make some really tough and well trained friends. You and your kin may make it out of this mess intact. Desperate times require desperate measures.
Andor 2: Beginning of the End of Empire
It’s probably the best thing to come out of the Star Wars Universe in many years. I’d argue in the last decade outside of Andor season 1. A dramatic series about key players on both sides and at all levels of society about the beginning of the rebellion against the growing tyranny of the Galactic Empire.
And the season starts off with a bang. Great drama and action. And plenty of comments on the nature of people. The silent instigator & ringleader Luthen, when in reference to a former friend: “People fail. That’s our curse.” He is right. Maybe this is why I trust so few people. And when I find someone trustworthy I really treasure them. But it’s a sad fact of life: most people are unreliable & unworthy of our time and energy. Doesn’t mean you don’t help people, you should. But you should never expect anything from others. Least of all gratitude, this way you will never be disappointed.
There is even great wisdom from the minor characters, Perrin, the husband consort of Rebellion finder & future leader Mon Mothma, said: “Pace yourself or Pay the price.” That is great advice whether drinking or really anything in life. For someone as extreme and excessive as I am, this is a good reminder. My workaholism over the last two and half decades has really hurt my health and family life. It will take a while to fix.
But Perrin also has had a great speech to his daughter and guests:
“Pain will find you. Trouble and disagreement will arrive without summons. There’s no choice in this. There’s no effort required. You simply stand still and the galaxy will deliver a daily basket of fresh anxieties to your door without fail. My hope, my hope. My hope is that you learn to reach past this constant cloud of sadness.
Pleasure. Gaiety. Amusement. These are the hidden things. The music buried beneath all that noise…..Joy! Joy! Joy. But Joy had no wind at it’s back. Joy will not announce its arrival. You need to listen for it, and be mindful of how fleeting and delicate it can be.
But search out these treasures. A moment of….of pleasing sensation, the memory of laughter and good company, the comfort of a fine meal.”
These are the small things that keep all of us going. Most of the time it’s enough.
You have to learn to find some pleasure in pain. Just like at the gym & hard training and exercise.
But more importantly you will overcome pain by having purpose. A BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal). A mission. There was a great scene when Andor meets a conspirator.
She asks him: “If i die tonight, was it worth it? You’ve done this before, you must have thought about it.”
Andor responds: “This makes it worth it. This. Right now. Being with you. Being here at the moment you step into the circle. Look at me. You made this decision long ago. The Empire cannot win. You’ll never feel right unless you’re doing what you can to stop them. You’re coming home to yourself. You’ve become more than your fear. Let that protect you.”
Many of us will find out soon enough. As Andor says: “We’re in a war. Not everybody knows it yet, but it’s happening.”
We absolutely are at war as I have written many times. If we really think about it and are honest with ourselves. We’ve always been at war. Society is always at war, externally and internally. This is human history. More so now as America lines up against the Axis of China & Russia.
And we are also always at war with ourselves: our misconceptions, our delusions, our limiting beliefs, our laziness, our greed, our fear. A war to conquer our weakness. It’s strangely ironic but I’ve finally realized that life is war, it’s when I came awake. Alive even. Once I got this I started to overcome my challenges and start to thrive. To win.
As rebel leader Saw says in a spectacular and apt speech: “Remember this. Remember this moment! This perfect night. You think I’m crazy? Yes, I am. Revolution is not for the sane. Look at us. Unloved. Hunted. Cannon fodder. We’ll all be dead before the Republic is back and yet….here we are. Where are you boy? You’re here. You’re here. You’re right here, and you’re ready to fight! We’re the Rhydo kid. We’re the fuel. We’re the thing that explodes when there’s too much friction in the air. Let it in, that’s freedom calling! Let it in. Let it run! Let it run wild! “
Amen. Let it run people. LFG!