Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads April 30th, 2023
"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant." -Robert Louis Stevenson
"People ≠ Economic output
Economists still have this stupid idea and it’s also ingrained in politics that labour force size is equivalent to population. This is false.
Technology amplifies human output. It increases the leverage of a single person exponentially. Computers, telecommunications both decrease costs and increase output. The average company needs less employees and by their metrics creates more Revenue, Profit, GDP and every other metric etc per person.
We know this, and yet we somehow haven’t transferred this business knowledge to the realm of politics and society. Yes, automation reduces the number of people in the factory and that’s bad for jobs, but if you’re in a declining population it’s just fine.
We don’t need to be doomed if birthrates are lowering if can leverage the people we have. Telemedicine can decrease medical costs if it’s implemented well. Japan is applying ChatGPT to make their Civil Service more effective already. We don’t need more people or longer hours, what we need is to leverage the tools we have and create new ones."
https://mercurial.substack.com/p/population-problems
2. I highly recommend this interview with Dan Martell. This was personally enlightening. Can't wait to read the book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FE8Nk0mVbH8
3. "In a protracted conflict with China, the U.S. military may not be able to continue riding its wave of successful precision-strike campaigns in limited and regional conflicts. Rather than looking backwards toward a historic comparative advantage that no longer exists — raw industrial capacity — the United States should embrace the comparative advantage that it still enjoys in the present — high technology.
The Department of Defense can start by procuring increased quantities of the advanced weapons it currently fields and augmenting the capabilities of existing precision munitions with modular add-ons and upgraded payloads. These initial steps toward modular weapons can pave the way for the widespread adoption of digital engineering and “mix-and-match” weapons in coming years.
Of course, innovative technologies and concepts may not be enough to win a prolonged war of attrition. Quantity remains a quality of its own, particularly with expendable weaponry. But relying on outdated assumptions and refusing to utilize America’s enduring technological advantage to its fullest potential risks defeat in future military operations where the demands for precision weapons will inevitably exceed supplies."
https://warontherocks.com/2023/04/money-isnt-enough-getting-serious-about-precision-munitions/
4. What a very sad story. What happens when you surround yourself with "yes men & women" & drugs. The fall of a brilliant tech tycoon.
5. "Theories of deglobalization do not hold water. Trade as a percent of GDP is far closer to a peak than a trough. There are few signs that this will retreat anytime soon as manufacturers like Apple focus on moving production to India rather than reshoring. When manufacturing returns to the US, it will likely be part of a wave of automation and additive manufacturing that skips labor in the same manner that agriculture no longer involves meaningful labor content."
https://michaelwgreen.substack.com/p/what-really-happened-in-1971
6. "The solution to this paradox lies in the different ways that the two armies use their artillery. While Russia has stuck mainly to Soviet doctrine of massed area fires, Ukraine uses artillery fire as a long-range sniper weapon to pick off individual targets. This has been made possible with the widespread use of two innovations: small drones for artillery spotting, coupled with cheap tablet computers running software like Nettle system to direct fire.
It currently looks as though big data may be more powerful than big guns, and future conflicts may be determined more by the available drone fleet and its supporting software than the number of artillery barrels. But the current conflict may still have much more to teach us."
7. This is a good thing. Japan's growing military assertiveness.
"China’s expanding military footprint across the South and East China Seas has been a major driver of Japan’s growing defense ties with Southeast Asia. In more recent years, however, Taiwan has also emerged as a strategic priority for Tokyo. A few months before his assassination in mid-2022, Abe called for the U.S. to abandon its longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity over Taiwan, arguing that “showing it may intervene … keeps China in check.” During a high-profile speech in Taiwan, he declared that “a Taiwan emergency is a Japanese emergency,” suggesting the high likelihood that Japan would react militarily to a Chinese attack on Taiwan.
Amid major reforms of its defense and security policy, Japan is now in an unprecedented position to play a decisive role in shaping peace and security outcomes in the Indo-Pacific region, especially along so-called First Island Chain that contains the South and East China Sea as well as Taiwan. While the government will likely run into obstacles in its bid to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution as a step toward codifying those reforms, the steps Tokyo is taking to achieve strategic autonomy and assert itself as a major power mean that it is poised to play a key role as the linchpin of Washington’s “integrated strategy” against China."
8. These guys are living the life. Big fan of Mike Thurston and Iman Gadzhi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04TPNtV9coA
9. This was so good. What an excellent interview with a brilliant young business man. The CEO of Gymshark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfKwidYQW6M
10. "Don’t promise to add value. There’s endless discussion about how VCs must provide value and how most don’t.
The reality is simple: If you adhere to the rule of investing in founders that are smarter than you tackling crazy problems with huge markets, there’s no value add you can provide that will meaningfully change the trajectory or outcome of the company.
The most honest VC pitch promises no value add to founders. Be helpful if you can. Encourage founders think big. Believe in them, especially when times are hard. That’s the best value most VCs can add aside from money."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/everything-i-know-venture-500-words-douglas-clinton/
11. Good guide to starting your commerce business. It’s pretty useful for anyone.
https://bowtiedopossum.substack.com/p/broseidon-from-zero-to-something
12. "This has nothing to do with politics. If you’re left winged or right winged that’s fine. This has to do with scale and opportunities.
Scale: Prior to mass adoption of the internet, going on CNBC/FOX/CNN was a status symbol in many cases. It meant you were a “somebody”. Today? That signal has turned into noise particularly as you see a large chunk of “30 under 30” winners charged with fraud (much more than a single case!).
Why has it all changed? Scale changed everything. Now that people spend more time in front of their computers you get easier direct access to people you like. You get information directly from the source. And. You don’t even need to watch the news since a video of the event is loaded faster on the internet anyway.
Prediction time. Both Lemon and Tucker likely make more money. The only issue we see here is *speed*. If they don’t do anything for a year or two? Interest dies. Life does not reward slackers."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/tuckerlemon-and-get-ready-mainstreet
13. "General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, "There's a really an underreported arms race going on in the western Pacific right now. These countries are arming themselves up, and they very much, with very few exceptions, want the United States there”. The US is also arming itself, of course. The Commander of the Indo-Pacific Fleet, Admiral John Aquilino, pleaded for his colleagues to stop guessing when this next war would begin.
Instead, he tried to remind everybody that deterrence is all about preventing war and that’s where the focus should remain. Yes, you have to be ready to fight and win (whatever that means in a nuclear world) but the main this is to make it hard or impossible for the other side to commence a war."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/pippa-passes-earth-day-the-galapagos
14. "This debate underlines the temptation in Washington, D.C., both in think tanks and high-level policy circles, to believe that deterring or defeating China will be difficult, dangerous, and probably deadly, but not extraordinarily so. I believe such assessments are a profound mistake.
In turn, the U.S. must make harder choices about what resources it can expend in Ukraine, and America must demand the European Union to do more for Ukraine, including by providing the country with weapons stocks from European field armies.
That does not mean abandoning Ukraine. But it does mean more difficult choices, especially when it comes to man-portable anti-air and anti-armor weapons systems."
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/a-critical-debate-on-the-ukraine-taiwan-weapons-trade-off
15. "In short, even if most people aren’t addicted to reality cosplay, almost everyone (many billions) will be using AI-fueled AR (augmented reality) to modify and enhance what they see and hear. Adoption will be fast; smartphones went from zero in 2007 to 5 billion users in 2022). It will be an experience that is so addictive that almost nobody will want to go without it."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/who-will-control-reality
16. "So where is the chessboard? It seems to be on a checkered landscape of backroom deals being done under organized crime threats. Will moving nuclear weapons around fix this? No. I hear people in the military world talking of tactics that won’t make any difference.
You can place naval assets in the Baltic and soldiers in the Baltic states, but you may wake up to find that the opponent already owns everybody hundreds of miles beyond your position. You think you control the territory because you have tanks.
But they control the territory because they have terrorized the locals into accepting cash to save themselves. You are already surrounded by “merchant adventurers” who work for the other side, and all their victims are bound to them, perhaps even exhibiting signs of Stockholm Syndrome."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/pippa-passes-the-case-of-the-missing
17. Taiwan needs to get its defense together fast in the face of China's military threats. Time is running out. The sooner it becomes a spikey well armed porcupine the bigger deterrent it will be.
18. "Hopefully, this explains my modest proposal: unless you’re the CEO or CFO and it’s the finance section of the meeting, you should never talk about ending ARR. Talk about what drives it, instead."
https://kellblog.com/2023/04/23/dont-say-ending-arr/
19. "At the same time, it feels like an indictment of the collective creativity of the tech industry that my median group chat feels livelier and more relevant than any so-called social product on the market.
Some critics say that feeling reflects a societal change in how people want to use apps — that the era of public social networks was a detour on the road back to smaller private spaces — but I think they’re giving up a little too easily.
Whatever you think, assuming there is a big new social product to build, I can’t imagine that there has been a better time to do it in the past 10 years than right now. At the same time, the opportunity requires a level of ingenuity and product-level execution that no one in the space has yet been able to muster.
Here’s hoping that all of these companies have more tricks up their sleeves. In the meantime, I am sad to report, it is no longer ⚠️Time to BeReal.⚠️
It is time, instead, to go faster."
https://www.platformer.news/p/how-bereal-missed-its-moment
20. "I’m not saying BRICS has to top NATO and Japan to become economic power houses but if they want that multipolar world they talk about. They at least need to be able to constantly patrol all of their trade routes. For that you would need a big blue water navy and lots of foreign bases and friendly ports, these guys are lacking.
In this article I didn’t even get into the India and China border fights and China’s past untrustworthiness on the global stage. Things and behaviors that could potentially undermine their BRICS relationships. I also didn’t even get into culture exports.
If BRICS want to actually create their own system they need years and years of work. It’s not just about having meetings and running your mouth. You need to put your economies into overdrive, competent modern militaries, innovation, relationships built on trust and more.
These things take decades and these guys are jumping the gun.
When I see BRICS all I see is a school kid (China) standing next to a bunch of degenerate friends his mom told him not to hang out with."
https://bowtiedhitman.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-brics
21. Masterclass on micro-Private Equity. Fascinating stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmpbMjTBew8
22. This looks like a great mastermind to join.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJyjf0eKHxU
23. Amazing learning experience here for business people from my buddies Pomp and Nick! Highly recommend listening to this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clursScJ8is
24. This is a good perspective on US-China relations. I do think Dalio is bit biased due to his ties and extensive business interests in China but this is cogent and important discussion to both sides getting off the brink.
War would be very bad for everyone.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-i-think-going-1-china-us-relations-2-other-countries-ray-dalio/
25. "There is a certain part of that statement that was obvious to me then and is still obvious now. Your fund size, for the most part, dictates your check size, ownership targets, and portfolio construction. A fund of a given size only has a few levers to pull to get to top-tier returns. The larger your fund, the fewer levers you generally have to tinker with to generate great returns.
There is a second part of this that I didn’t really appreciate until about three or four years ago. The size of your fund also dictates the scale of outcomes that can actually move the needle for your fund, and that shapes the lens through which you evaluate the terminal scale of startups that come across your desk. The larger your fund, the larger absolute scale of outcomes you need and the more of those outcomes you need to acheive to make your math work."
https://chudson.substack.com/p/fund-size-is-still-strategy-the-growing
26. "The most vulnerable firms are the newcomers, or emerging fund managers, and solo venture capitalists. The latter path became extremely popular during the latest boom both with investors looking to strike out on their own and with LPs, who thought betting on stars with strong networks could deliver strong returns.
Now that LPs are favoring more established players with several funds’ worth of returns to prove their strength, emerging and solo VCs are at risk.
They may still be able to raise capital, but their funds could end up too small for them to meaningfully compete for the best deals. One way around that is to combine forces with a competitor."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-looming-layoffs-for-venture-capitalists
27. This is a calm, sober view on the macro global view of the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDuXvOs0d_k
28. Vigorous discussion especially on lab grown meats and Big tech. Worth a listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3slYsEzJZoY
29. "Lastly, these data points signal a small, but growing, interest in bitcoin-only companies. If the trend persists, more capital will pour into these historically underfunded companies. The big test will come in the next bull market — will investors push further out on the risk curve or will they stay true to their apparent interest in bitcoin-native companies today?"
https://pomp.substack.com/p/venture-capital-investments-in-bitcoin
30. "As is widely known, the Russian economy is dependent on revenue generated from its exports of energy and related commodities like foodstuffs, fertilizers, and mined goods. The Biden administration’s plan to attack Putin’s revenue by restricting these goods from reaching the global markets was conceived under the dubious assumptions that (1) they could so restrict trade to a meaningful extent, and (2) the price action arising from inevitable commodity shortages wouldn’t undo their efforts.
Predictably, they were wrong on both counts.
We say predictably with bold confidence because we were among a small number of voices who did just that. The price elasticity of demand for commodities all but guaranteed Putin would more than recoup any volume losses by way of the foreseeable increase in prices that would follow."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/the-peter-principle
31. "These green vegetable products are better than nice-to-have solutions. There’s clearly nutritional value and we should consume them. Only, they aren’t the main course. They aren’t what gets people excited when sitting down to dinner. People buy enough of them to build a business, but the share of wallet and willingness to spend isn’t great enough to build a big business."
https://davidcummings.org/2023/04/29/green-vegetables-of-startupland/
32. "This is world-shaking not just because of the sheer numbers of people involved, but because of the prospects that those 1.4 billion will become key contributors to the global economy and key actors on the stage of global politics, as China’s have.
India has always been there. The difference is that the world can no longer choose to ignore it.
India’s economic rise will give it greater military power and geopolitical clout on the world stage. It’s not yet one of the “poles” of the emerging multipolar world order, but if it can keep economic growth humming for another decade or two, it will be. A huge amount has been written about that, so I won’t recap it here. Instead I’ll point out another way that India will become more important to global life: culture and the internet."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/herecomesindia
33. Rick Rule is one of the best resource investors & speculators in the world. Difference between Inevitable and Imminent.