Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads December 1st, 2024
"I never dreamt of success. I worked for it." —Estée Lauder
Good overview on global geopolitics and economics from Zeihan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksbEkjAXgNc&t=2753s
2. A must listen conversation on geopolitics, America and the rotting of American primacy due to our own stupidity & lack of courage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHoxK2CPzDs
3. Climate change, Zeihan does a great job talking about its implications for various countries and cities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOLqXxe8Cfs
4. "Eva Longoria stepped in at the last minute with a $6 million investment that saved "John Wick."
Since then, she's invested in two soccer clubs, a tequila, and a food brand, and she has her own production company.
"I want to be making money while I'm sleeping," Longoria said of her investment philosophy.
But something that I've learned, looking back, I love investing in people. You can tell me you're opening a chicken farm, but if you're fucking passionate about it and you've done the work and know the market, I mean, Chad and David did their work. They put in their 10,000 hours as stunt guys and second-unit directors; they had seen all the bad movies and knew how to make a good one. It was that. They were undeniably passionate, and I knew they were going to make an undeniable product.
They have that hunger and scrappiness that I have. I'm very scrappy in my life. I'm like, "Why can't we just do this like this?"
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/funding-john-wick-kick-started-120801144.html
5. "The phrase “temporary hardship” has quickly become notorious. It bears similarity to Xi Jinping’s admonishment to the Chinese people to “eat bitterness”. Americans are not used to their leaders promising economic pain.
But is Musk’s austerity proposal a good one? And would it in fact cause the kind of pain he’s forecasting? Here there’s quite a bit of uncertainty.
But the general contours are probably right — big cuts in corporate and personal income tax, tariff hikes, and deep cuts in government spending on health care would absolutely have this general effect. And unlike the macroeconomic pain, this distributional impact would likely be long-term, rather than temporary.
So on one hand, I think it’s refreshing that Musk is talking about fiscal austerity, and about the hardships that will be necessary to get the government’s finances back on a sustainable footing. On the other hand, I don’t like the way he plans to go about it — giving massive awards to himself and his own lofty social stratum, while inflicting pain on the masses. There are better ways to do austerity."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/thinking-about-temporary-hardship
6. "Throughout the second half of the 20th century, higher education was the key that allowed remarkably unremarkable kids (e.g., me) to unlock America’s promise of upward mobility. Today higher ed is a bouncer at the entrance to an exclusive club, where wealthy kids and a cadre of freakishly remarkable 18-year-olds build lasting relationships and lucrative networks with elite peers, while obtaining certification that gives them access to the greatest wealth-generating vehicles in history: S&P 500 companies."
https://www.profgalloway.com/high-anxiety
7. "From a supply chain point of view, commanders will have to consider the number of UAVs they have on hand and how long it will take to be resupplied. The more advanced the weapon, the fewer are stockpiled—the era of precision-guided munitions raises the real possibility of running out of ammo in the opening phases of a conflict. This will force commanders to reserve drones for deliberate offensives, where they can achieve combined effects in conjunction with other forces. The old rules of warfare will still prevail, in other words.
Finally, there are major tactical vulnerabilities in the current crop of drones. Most of their recent success has come from their ability to loiter as they seek out targets or wait to be fed targeting data. The skies will not always be uncontested, however, and the longer that drones loiter the more easily they can be targeted by ground fires or counter-drone swarms.
In 1513, awed by the cannons which had recently brought down castle walls across Italy, Machiavelli argued that fortresses were obsolete. Just seven years later, in The Art of War, he detailed the kind of fortifications a prince should build—fortress design had caught up to the offensive power of cannons. So it always is in war: new weapons do indeed alter the battlefield, but the change is far more gradual than early encounters suggest.
Drone maximalists tend to imagine buzzing drones filling the sky and vaporizing any ground forces, but don’t think through what that would entail. Just as artillery in the First World War and bombers in the Second failed to simply wipe out the enemy from afar, UAVs will take their place in modern armies as one piece of a complex, slowly-evolving system."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/a-look-back-at-the-nagorno-karabakh
8. This was a fun conversation on the business of venture capital and the unconventional path.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRvFnYBP7_I
9. The writer really hates the West but this is an important perspective to understand.
"It has been an extraordinary experience to follow throughout the year how Russian diplomacy managed to successfully bring together delegations from 36 nations – 22 of them represented by heads of state – plus six international organizations, including the United Nations, for the summit in Kazan.
These delegations came from nations representing nearly half of the global GDP. The implication is that a tsunami of thousands of sanctions imposed since 2022, plus relentless yelling about Russia’s “isolation,” simply disappeared in the vortex of irrelevance. That contributed to the immense irritation displayed by the collective west over this remarkable gathering. Key subtext: there was not a single official presence of the Five Eyes set-up in Kazan.
The various devils, of course, remain in the various details: how BRICS – and the BRICS Outreach mechanism, housing 13 new partners – will move from the extremely polite and quite detailed Kazan Declaration – with more than 130 operational paragraphs – and several other white papers to implement a Global Majority-oriented platform ranging from collective security to widespread connectivity, non-weaponized trade settlements, and geopolitical primacy. It will be a long, winding, and thorny road.
The collective west’s incomprehension of what transpired in three historic days in Kazan only highlighted their astonishing arrogance, stupidity, and brutality. That’s precisely the reason why the BRICS matrix is working so hard to come up with the lineaments of a new, fair international order, and despite an array of challenges, will continue to flourish."
https://thecradle.co/articles/brics-post-kazan-a-laboratory-of-the-future
10. "BRICS is not seeking to overturn the world financial order, nor replace it with another one. Their objectives are more modest: to provide alternatives for those who wish to escape, in whole or in part, from the current US and western-dominated financial system, and to progressively modify the way the system works from within, by organised cooperation. The Partner Country system is likely to mean less the formation of a new BRICS-based “bloc” in the Cold War sense, and more an increasing ability for countries in and around the BRICS area to play the West and BRICS off against each other.
To this extent, BRICS is not an alternative to the current international system, but rather the creation of a powerful bloc of countries who have a common interest in substantially changing the way it works. This is hard for westerners to understand and accept, since we are brought up to think in Manichaean terms, and of unbridgeable differences between groups and ideologies. But BRICS and its partner system represent a different model: it is hardly “new” since it is how most of the world has always worked. It relies on “sufficient” commonality of interest for nations to cooperate with each other in particular areas.
It recognises that on other issues the countries may have different views, or even be totally at odds with each other. It acknowledges that international politics is a massive series of Venn diagrams, not an assembly of strictly regulated geometric shapes separate from each other. BRICS is an example of an institution that flows naturally from such an recognition, and may well inspire others. For that reason, together with the suppleness of the concept itself, BRICS is likely to survive and develop, and to continue to be a puzzle to western pundits."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/unlike-for-like
11. "From population growth to college students to recent developments and a major airport, Atlanta has everything needed for startups to thrive. Startup investors should invest both their time and money in Atlanta."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/11/02/why-atlanta-for-startup-investing/
12. "The elite and expert class comprises a uniquely integral caste system within the Western hegemonic model of civilization. This protected upper echelon is molded then harbored by an intricate network of institutions whose sole purpose is to maintain the unassailable cachet of honors they manufacture: various awards, certificates, degrees, scholarships, fellowships, chairs, residencies, et cetera. These institutions act as a credibility shield to perpetually encase the ‘system’ in a tempered glass dome of unquestionability.
But due to how intrinsically oppressive the system has had to become in order to root out free-thinking opposition, it has dealt itself a mortal wound by perpetuating a positive feedback loop which only drives it into further and further ideological isolation, such that the system begins to appear as a corrupt tower of Babel ready to topple to anyone watching from the outside.
The uselessness of our leaders plays into it because the system requires good, public-facing PR people to act merely as the shepherds or crowd-control maestros in keeping the public woozy, and from asking too many inconvenient questions. In our globalized, increasingly centralized world the CEO is now hired less for his innate leadership or talent to inspire, and more for the connections to foreign governments, banks, regulators, or other beneficial special interests they bring along.
It all comes back down to basic human nature and systems theory. We are programmed by these structures to believe that we rely on them for survival; that the structures are essential to our civilization and progression.
The blob grows and grows, and it knows only how to feed, like a runaway malignant cell.
The feedback loop requires the state to continue increasing in size in order to constantly expand the fat tissue buffer between the ruled citizenry and the elite caste."
https://darkfutura.substack.com/p/belfries
13. "Here’s what to watch for;
If the election is close and Trump is ahead in a drawn-out and contested counting effort, the potential for a swarm developing is high.
As we have seen in previous swarms, there aren’t any protections against a swarm rapidly mobilizing. Once it is mobilized, it will quickly seek to shut down all dissent at every level (including extrajudicial means to suppress X).
Additionally, decentralized elements of the swarm (devoid of any worry over long-term damage to the country’s stability, the rule of law, or cohesion) will simultaneously seek to overwhelm the opposition to overturn the election.
If this does happen, networked totalitarianism and a long night of AI-fueled controlled speech and behavior won’t be far behind. Let’s hope it doesn’t."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/an-american-swarm
14. History is fascinating.
"But who were the Zanj and how did they manage to resist the powerful Abbasids for over a decade?
After the Arab conquest of Mesopotamia, a military camp was established in the marshlands of southern Iraq. This camp soon grew into the wealthy port city of Basra, the link between Baghdad & the rich lands that lay on the Arabian Sea & beyond.
Southern Iraq was once a fertile region, the cradle of the first cities & Sumerian civilization, but flooding & poor upkeep reverted the land to marshes. The wealthy residents of Basra were given ownership of these marshlands on the condition they brought them under cultivation.
For this task, many thousands of Bantu-speaking slaves were imported from the Swahili Coast, the Zanj. Clearing the marshes & working the salt flats was a miserable existence, compounded by the cruelty of the overseers. These unimaginable conditions made the slaves restive."
https://varangianchronicler.substack.com/p/revenge-of-the-zanj
15. “The way that liberal Western democracies prevail over a centrally commanded nation is by doubling down on what made our countries strong, which is the free flow of talent and capital,” he said. “And so we don’t win by the civil-military fusion, by forcing companies to do things, but rather by investing, supporting and allowing free enterprise to succeed.”
It sounds good in theory, but in practice the idea has hit hurdles in both the U.S. and in Europe — in part because the private sector moves quickly and takes big risks, while the military is a lumbering bureaucracy that makes it challenging for all but the biggest defense contractors to break through.
“You have this great pipeline and most of it falls on the floor,” said Steve Blank, co-founder of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation at Stanford University. “While we have all these legacy acquisition processes, our adversaries don’t.”
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2024/10/31/tk-daniella-top-00186582
16. Fearsome and impressive weapon system from Anduril. Barracuda-M series of Cruise missiles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw7kF4vomA4
17. An educational discussion with one of the best operators and investors in Silicon Valley: Elad Gil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzjIfkNAp8U
18. This is always a fun conversation. Not sure I agree with everything here but it's a good centrist view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSyxm_AQfeE
19. "Victory in modern war is about winning the peace as well as winning the war. The initial American military successes in Iraq in 1991 and 2003, and in Afghanistan in 2001, followed by subsequent long-term instability, testify that military successes do not always ensure a favourable and enduring political solution. Russian interventions in Afghanistan and its first war in Chechnya are further examples.
The concept of victory, or the word itself, is one Western politicians and academics like to avoid. In 2009, US President Barack Obama said he was “always worried about using the word ‘victory,’ because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.” As Heuser has written: “for most Western liberals in the early 21st century, victory seems of little value as a thing in itself, as the price at which it might come seems disproportionate to the gains.”
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/victory-21st-century-conflict-0
20. Always lots of nuggets of insights for what's happening in SaaS. Must listen for founders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0L_l4pc4rU&t=1081s
21. The man at the center of Silicon Valley and AI. Plenty to take in here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peg-aX1oii4
22. Well a somewhat grim assessment. Well, America, run by empty suits which leads to brainless foreign policy. Check.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdGXMaYKRik
23. Interesting new future alliance: Saudi, Turkey and Israel?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiBWgUdGaIo
24. The Podcast election and Betting markets. Fascinating time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOOvOQbzw1M
25. Global norms eroding and we are entering a more anarchic world order, where the strong act with impunity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyS_euuncKk
26. Masterclass on building a long lasting venture firm. The guys responsible for the turnaround of the legendary Kleiner Perkins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BekWZv3CCA
27. "We should pay Trump the compliment of believing what he says when he speaks about NATO and Ukraine—and indeed what those who worked closely with him say about that. There is a very good chance that the North Atlantic Alliance, which has dominated much of the globe since 1949, will become dysfunctional in fewer than 3 months.
Trump doesn’t have to withdraw from the alliance to do that—all he has to do is remove the US from the military command (which is what De Gaulle did with French forces in 1966). As commander in chief, US forces will only fight if Trump orders them to do so—NATO cannot order US forces into action if the President doesnt want that. So, no US forces will fight to protect Europe if Trump doesnt want them to.
Btw—this also needs to be faced by the USA’s allies in the Indo-Pacific, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and even Australia, who can no longer look for the USA to be a reliable partner in defense."
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/the-usa-is-trumps-now-europe-must
28. "All of this inevitably produces bad faith and terminal embarrassment. It is an unchallengeable article of belief in Liberalism that the world is advancing steadily and ineluctably towards a morally better future. Never, it appears, have we known such tolerance, diversity and inclusion. Unfortunately, though, nothing works, and the political, media, business and intellectual elites of our society are more incapable, and more morally dubious, than they have ever been. At some deep level, everybody knows this, no matter how firmly they are convinced that we live in a shining present and are moving to a shininger future.
0ur elites are thus conscious that they cannot match their predecessors, either practically or morally, and that makes them embarrassed, which in turn makes them angry. So the result is logical enough: if the past offends us, let us destroy it. If we cannot measure up to great figures of the past, let us undermine them and bring them down to our level, so we never need to feel inferior again. Having no heroes today, we must destroy the heroes our predecessors had.
But, surrounded by sleaze, incompetence and corruption, it’s increasing hard for us to look back on the past with an attitude of moral superiority.
Except, of course, that we do actually need heroes. All societies do. And so the most fervent anti-militarists seek out, as they have always done, surrogates from abroad to admire and respect: what George Orwell famously called the “patriotism of the deracinated.” From the Viet Cong to the Afghan Mujahideen, to today’s examples of Hezbollah and the Houthis, we admire and find heroism in people outside our own societies, because we are too embarrassed to seek it within them."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/no-more-heroes
29. "The reality is on much of foreign policy the U.S. has been leaderless - and the West because of the US under Biden was AWOL."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/history-will-likely-judge-biden-poorly
30. Geography as destiny and how it affects geopolitics. Fascinating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgEopGPkL_M&t=567s
31. "All this may be part of an even larger story: the fight in the US Presidential race is not between the left and the right. It is between the Establishment and the Anti-Establishment. Or, more accurately, between the Old Establishment and the New Anti-Establishment. This helps explain the Cheney-Harris alignment. This is the Old Establishment, which likes the way things have been done. They like a world where the government knows best and external commentary is not welcome. Putting it bluntly, they believe in the old adage, “after the war begins, to reason is to treason”. This side says any commentary that opposes the government’s position is misinformation, disinformation and its ok to use the state apparatus and the media to maintain the government as it exists.
The Old Establishment is not opposed to reform, but the basic apparatus and core narratives must be kept intact. They might hire Tech Bros to make government more efficient but have not grasped that the Tech Bros can already anticipate their every move because they already have a clear picture of everyone in the Old Establishment because their digital twin gives away their actual position. The Old Estabishment group wants to know everybody else digital twin secrets but does not want the government’s digital twin available to external parties, including voters. But, its too late.
The New Establishment is comprised of Tech Bros who have more insight than any existing government apparatus. They increasingly align with each other because they see that the government (whether left or right) is failing to meet the needs of the public. The nation’s finances are blowing out.
The bigger possibility is that this becomes the moment that the New Anti-Establishment reveals that it already controls public opinion more than the Old Establishment. While the two parties argue and fight, the New Establishment may commence what might be called a “reverse coup” in the future. I’m watching for Thiel, Zuckerberg, Elon, and various others who are usually fighting amongst themselves for turf to start to align and offer public stability. They will also turn on their Tech Bro opponents."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/and-the-winner-is-kennedy
32. "While we know what candidate Trump and those around him have said about Ukraine, it remains to be seen exactly what President Trump 2.0 will do about the conflict. In his victory speech, Trump states that “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars but this is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom.”
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/president-trump-20-and-ukraine
33. Incredible discussion on global macro investing with one of the best in the business. Stan Druckenmiller.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5Weeox0Xus
34. An instructive discussion on vertical Saas investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEsuJPMDFok
35. "This follows a campaign of arson and sabotage across Europe that intelligence officials say demonstrates an increasing recklessness on the part of the Kremlin. As the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6 put it, “Russian intelligence services have gone a bit feral, frankly.”
In recent months, Russian agents have been accused of plotting sabotage attacks against US and German military targets, arson attacks in the UK and Lithuania, and the attempted assassination of a major German defense contractor, among other plots."
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/383330/russia-georgia-bomb-threats-gray-zone
36. A varied discussion on our geopolitical & deglobalizing future. Lots of work to do as we reindustrialize America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBtPd9a5TwE
37. This is a great conversation re: going down the PE exit track versus the VC one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQv1-ZFv-5s
38. I always learn from Tai Lopez. Always be Networking and Masterminds are awesome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlzbbW4hrSw
39. "But either way, don’t get lazy and say “business outcomes” because you don’t want to enumerate them or, worse yet, because you don’t know them. Check yourself each time you write the words. Ask yourself: Can I climb the stack higher? Can I enumerate actual benefits? Am I truly in a situation where “business outcomes” is the best I can do?
If yes, say it. And then start thinking about the next piece you need to write so you can change the rules."
https://kellblog.com/2024/11/07/should-marketers-say-business-outcomes/
40. New guy to learn from. Interesting story and rise to the top.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh33mpINrxc
41. "So the more you think about it, it was the First, not the Second, World War that is at the origin of most of the world’s problems today. By destroying high-level supranational and multi-ethnic structures overnight, it created massive problems.
By selecting “self-determination” as the solution, without really thinking through what it meant, it ensured that those problems would be insoluble without brute force, and perhaps not even then. In fact, if you consider where crises and political instability have arisen in the last thirty years, from the Balkans through the Levant to Libya, Algeria and Tunisia, these are all territories of Arab/Ottoman conquest: even Yemen was added to the Empire in 1517.
This is not because the Empire of the Ottomans was especially bad—though there is a tendency to romanticise it— but because of its organisation of the population into religious groups, and the speed and nature of its collapse and the vacuum left behind.
In a very real sense, we are still dealing with the consequences of the fall of three Empires in 1918."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/people-states-and-borders
42. "Trump might not realise it but he goes into potential talks with Putin from a position of overwhelming strength. Trump needs a Ukraine peace deal much less than Putin. If Trump fails to agree any such deal, so what? What are the consequences for the US? Not much. Ukraine has shown it is willing to fight, and even if the US pulls financing Europe has to continue writing the cheques as the best way of defending itself against inevitable future Russian aggression.
And if the cash is short Europe can dip into the $330 billion in immobilised Russian assets to continue to fund Ukraine. Ukraine and Europe will inevitably continue to put big orders for US defence equipement - in almost any scenario, and which US President is going to say no to defence orders for literally hundreds of billions of dollars from Europe. That represents millions of US jobs for Trump to secure. Putin literally has no leverage now over Trump, and Trump should play very hardball.
I would argue that Trump is being presented with the mother of all opportunities for the greatest peace deal ever. Why he would not use all his leverage to extract maximum concessions from Putin.
Does Trump really have the Art of the Deal or is he just Putin’s tool and full of crap? We will now soon find out. Putin is weak, Trump has all the cards. Let’s see if he can actually play a great hand to clean up the table. If not - what a loser Trump would be in that he was gifted a scenario of a deal of the century in Ukraine and bottled it. That would be sad for Ukraine as selling them out now would see the likely collapse of Ukraine and devastating consequences then for Europe as an emboldened Russia would be better armed with the addition of Ukraine’s huge and tech impressive military industrial complex, and seeing a green light from Trump for further conquest in Europe by Russia."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/putin-no-longer-has-the-trump-card
43. "I actually suspect that there are other reasons why inflation bothers voters even more than unemployment. Inflation is something that’s obviously beyond an individual’s control — if the price of eggs goes up, you can choose not to buy eggs, but otherwise there’s not much you can do. But unemployment is something that individuals do exercise some degree of control over — if you work a bunch of extra hours during a recession and establish a good relationship with your boss, maybe you can avoid getting laid off.
In general, I think people are less worried about risks they have some control over, even if the overall level of danger is higher. Look at how people are more afraid to fly than to take long road trips, despite road trips being much deadlier per mile. The leading theory is that in a car you have some control over your safety, while in a plane you have basically zero control. Similarly, I suspect that inflation makes people feel powerless, like being stuck in a crashing airplane."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-hate-inflation-more-than