Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads December 22nd, 2024
“Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller
Interesting take on Ukraine and geopolitics under Trump. I guess we will see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQDCRLJHRTc
2. This is very educational, disturbing but an educational take on geopolitics right now. It's gonna be hairy for the next 2-3 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEFuY-2YRqE
3. Good way to categorize where to live in your life (cities and countries). This is pretty useful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uAdMll70sc
4. "Are you necessary?
To establish necessity means that you fill a very specific need in completing or enhancing the customer’s current plan. That you address a very clear gap in their technology or strategy, a gap that is costing them time, money, competitive advantage or all three. That by paying $2 to add your services to the mix they will see a return of $20 – and that you’ll be able to show the math on how you plan to deliver on that promise."
https://upstreamgroup.com/the-drift/are-you-necessary
5. "To conclude, America doesn’t need some hastily stitched-together new ‘mythos’ or ideal, some pastiche of foregone antiquities or factitious symbolisms akin to Kwanzaa or Festivus. After all, it was the ‘left’ which went down that troubled route, attempting to confect some new national mythos with a host of artificial celebrations like Pride Month, which slowly grew into a kind of ecumenical monster. No, what America needs is to be shorn of its managerialist throttling to let society breathe naturally, and expand its own stifled vision forward, in an organic way.
It’s the only real way to do culture: seed the ground, keep off the locusts, then let grow what may—otherwise, you’re just playing god, and a fall awaits all those of such hubris."
https://darkfutura.substack.com/p/staring-ahead-from-the-crossroads
6. This is a fun take on geopolitics, global macro and crypto from one of the most interesting individuals around. (he is a great writer too).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iz0tazs3Uqc
7. Important conversation with the CEO of Anduril Industry on the defense industry and why we need to reform the Defense department and Reindustrialize.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKUmvIVTyz8
8. One of the most important conversations if you want to understand how the CCP took advantage of globalization, the World Bank and why they are a malevolent competitor via IP theft, incredible leverage on our business people & Hollywood & the active support of many of our enemies.
All because of our blindness and naivety. This is highly disturbing. Thank goodness people are slowly waking up to this. Time to get serious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqZNy5fSDxU
9. Startup confessional, words of truth from founders. Get out of the Tech VC bubble.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TFqODW7rIk
10. "This is a hot Cold War II. The West has empirically lost deterrence. We must respond to this emergency to regain it.
We have a peer adversary: China. “Near-Peer” is a shibboleth, a euphemism to avoid the embarrassment of acknowledging we have peers when we were once peerless. In World War II, America was the best at mass production. Today that distinction belongs to our adversary. America’s national security requires a robust industrial base, or it will lose the next war and plunge the world into darkness under authoritarian regimes.
In the current environment, American industries can’t produce a minimum line of ships, subs, munitions, aircraft, and more. It takes a decade or two to deliver new major weapon systems at scale. If we’re in a hot war, we would only have days worth of ammunition and weapons on hand. Even more alarming is our lack of capacity and capability to rapidly repair and regenerate our weapon systems.
Given the vast sums we have spent on defense in these decades of Pax Americana, it would be reasonable to wonder: what went wrong?"
11. Master class in thinking about the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zg--ouGl7c
12. Luke Belmar dropping knowledge and wisdom. A look into the future of money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHYyEhjKtmg&t=1s
13. "When discussing the dynamics surrounding Taiwan today, Beijing is already waging what it would call the “three warfares”: legal warfare, psychological warfare and public discourse warfare, which is information warfare that’s designed to create a sense of futility, a sense of cynicism about democracy, a sense that resistance is futile.
So the war, from Beijing’s perspective, has already started. They’re not yet using kinetic warfare. There are several more steps they could take short of that, including a quarantine of the island. They are building up to doing what I would call a “flash quarantine”, which would be a short-term quarantine to prove or demonstrate that they can exert jurisdiction over Taiwan’s near shore waters. Then they could, over time, decide to impose a much broader quarantine or even a blockade, which is technically an act of war. That said, I don’t think a full-blown blockade is likely until Beijing is ready to wage a full-blown war.
My views are designed to prevent war, not to invite miscalculation by Beijing. I want Beijing to be crystal clear on where the US stands. I want them to be crystal clear that we have the capacity to win a war over Taiwan and that we have, well within our grasp, the means to improve our capacity relative to Beijing in terms of the military balance."
https://mekongreview.com/the-hardliner/
14. An important discussion to understand what’s happening with supply chains, logistics and Globalization 2.0.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKsq258SkQQ
15. "The NATO Innovation Fund (NIF), a €1bn vehicle backed by 24 NATO allies to invest in defence and deeptech startups, is already seeing a shakeup in its upper ranks: founding partner Thorsten Claus and managing partner Andrea Traversone have both left the fund just over a year after it launched."
https://sifted.eu/articles/nato-innovation-fund-partner-exit-news
16. Didn't know Dave Frankel was a successful founder in South Africa before he started top VC fund Founder Collective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHhLOgEiLnw
17. "Having the most advanced intelligence capabilities—I think, maybe like our Navy, we’re second best now—is useless if our most senior leaders cannot understand a threat that has been fighting us for over a year. I’m not sure what is worse, the failure to push information to senior leaders, or the senior leaders not pulling it to them.
Either way, another example of systemic institutional malfunction."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/behold-the-red-sea-clown-show
18. "If you want to grow faster, first you need to understand why you aren’t growing faster already.
To do so, I like to use the simplest possible growth framework which considers four factors:
Prospects. How many potential customers do we reach every day/week/month?
Conversion. What percentage of potential customers do we convert into customers?
Value. How much do we make from each customer?
Retention. How many customers do we lose every day/week/month?
Each one of these factors is critical to growth. Often, when you think about growth you see the need to improve all of these factors. That might be true, but you can’t fix everything at once!"
https://www.breakingpoint.tech/p/a-simple-growth-framework
19. "Red tribe politics comprises many superempowered individuals with highly evolved digital ledgers capable of overwriting the digital ledgers of their followers. In most cases, they overwrite intuition (often experienced as a feeling) for how to perceive reality or truth. This transferrence/overwrite allows superempowered individuals to mobilize their networked followers into action (Larmarkian evolution).
Blue tribe politics: a massively co-curated ledger that all networked participants must adopt (encouraged, trained, and coerced). Blue tribe members are mobilized through empathy triggers, another process of overwriting (empathy is a rapid and holistic mental modeling of the victim; it’s not sympathy) that spurs them into action."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/red-tribe-dynamics
20. "The question is: are the tradeoffs you are making today appropriate for you? Is your attention focused on the right things? Are you maximizing your wealth at the expense of your health, your family, or your time?
With Bitcoin, U.S. stocks, and many other asset classes hitting new all-time
highs, it’s easy to get caught up with what’s happening in financial markets. There is an overwhelming sense of FOMO that can make you feel like you need to make a change. Trust me, I’ve been there before.
But, what you may have failed to notice is how little these events will actually impact your life in the long run. How much will the price of Bitcoin today affect your life in 20 years? What about Nvidia? How about gold? The answer is practically nothing. A rounding error at best.
But do you know what will impact your life in 20 years? How you spend your time, how you treat your body, and who you spend your time with."
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-things-you-cant-buy/
21. "AI will change the world. It just won't happen as fast and as suddenly as many people fear.
Think of this essay as playing out over many decades, not next year or next week.
While people are predicting AGI is just around the corner, anyone who works with AI agents like my team does knows just how stupid these models really are and how limited they are in the real world. We live in a weird world where AI is smarter than many PhDs and yet dumber than your cat. They can tell you about nuclear physics and speak 100 languages fluently and yet they lack any and all common sense and they can't seem to get tasks done without going completely off the rails.
This confuses a lot of people. If it can speak a 100 languages it must be smart. But it's just dead wrong. It's only part of the story. These models are smart and getting smarter but they're still dumb too.
Change is coming and it’s coming relatively fast and it will only accelerate.
For first time in history we have a technology that can do just about anything. Just like us.
We're about to see a Cambrian explosion of intelligence.
And life will never be the same."
https://danieljeffries.substack.com/p/the-middle-path-for-ai
22. "Perhaps this is the right framework to think about the future of education and software development (as well as all the other functions impacted by AI). Will AI lead to millions of new students sitting in virtual classrooms scribbling notes as professors opine on a chalkboard (as was imagined with MOOCs)? Probably not. Will AI lead to millions of new software developers as they exist today? No, I don’t think so.
(That doesn’t mean the coding copilot companies are uninteresting, by the way. There will still be millions of software developers out there.) But it seems undeniable that there will be a platform that leverages the ease of code generation as a first-order primitive (just like Instagram did with the smartphone camera) to make software creation truly ubiquitous."
https://newsletter.angularventures.com/p/cameras-code-and-creation
23. "Attitudes about San Francisco have reversed since the pandemic, when remote work and doom-loop fears drove white-collar workers out of the region. As excitement over AI crescendoed last year, many observers rolled back prognostications that the tech capital of the world was dead. Entrepreneurs boomeranged back, giving up lower taxes and spacious quarters in Oregon and Montana for a jam-packed schedule of nightly hackathons, demos, and networking events in San Francisco.
Now, a new cohort of techies is arriving: founders from outside the U.S. Like their predecessors in previous tech booms, they say San Francisco is second to none as a location for building their companies. These founders are themselves a bellwether that the AI boom is well underway, with San Francisco as the epicenter."
https://sfstandard.com/2024/11/19/ai-startup-founders-international-donald-trump/
24. Lots of good insights here on global macro, personal finance, crypto investing and how to thrive in the next 5 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyhhwVJB9Z4
25. "AI is ushering us into a brave new world of Outcome-Based Pricing. This whole concept of “units of work completed” is way different from charging for access to software, which is what we’ve traditionally done. It moves the burden from the customer having to extract value from a tool to the vendor delivering measurable results.
Let’s consider some analogies using the gym world.
Planet Fitness: A subscription model. You’re charged the same amount each month for access to the gym. They don’t care if you actually use the treadmill or not. In fact, they hope you don’t show up because it allows them to sign up even more deadbeat members based on expected capacity. The success of the business is based on people paying for something they don’t fully use—CFOs know this all too well from seat-based pricing in software.
Barry’s Bootcamp: A usage-based model. You’re charged (an extraordinary amount) per class. The pro here is that you don’t pay if you don’t use the services. The con? You could theoretically show up, pay an arm and a leg, and just roll around on the mats for 45 minutes without breaking a sweat (guilty as charged). It’s aligned with usage, but it’s still not connected to actual success.
If AI Were a Gym: This would be an outcome-based model. You’d be charged based on actual improvements in fitness. For example, this could be measured using a proxy like muscle-to-fat ratio or an increase in how much you can lift. It’s not about whether you attended the gym or how many classes you took, but whether you achieved your fitness goals."
https://www.mostlymetrics.com/p/the-age-of-outcome-based-pricing
26. A very sober view on Trump, geopolitics & energy. I don't think his isolationist views are correct but Doomberg looks at the world & facts coldly which is helpful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXSEa4kTl64
27. A very topical discussion on what’s up at the edge of the internet. Educational and entertaining. All vibes, no facts! :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DldBuNHF_70
28. Lots of great advice here for startup founders. "Every startup is a sh-tshow"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViQ3Espcm3U
29. "How is the USA doing?
All you have to do is look at the mismanagement of this century—from Iraq to Afghanistan to China’s rise—to see that this generation of national leadership has failed the nation. They were given the gift of victory in the Cold War and squandered it.
In the last week we have two events that are not-too-subtle warnings that whatever reserve of respect we may have remaining on the international stage, it is thinning to depleted.
You can dismiss these two events if you wish, but if you open your mind and think it through, you can only come to the opinion that our nation is not in a very good place.
Even 10 years ago, these events would not have happened."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/in-case-youve-missed-it-the-usa-is
30. "The first step to becoming a warrior happens in the mind. It’s willing yourself to suffer. To become hard. To maintain iron discipline in a world that goes out of its way to make you harmless and soft."
https://resavager.com/p/becoming-a-warrior-in-the-kingdom
31. "But we are also confronted here with a security crisis, and our political classes and their parasites are completely ignorant of how to deal with such crises, or even how to understand them. During the Cold War, governments were forced to confront security issues regularly: often, they were also domestic political issues. Security issues were also objectively important, as East and West glared at each other across a militarised border, with the possibility of nuclear annihilation never very far away.
None of that is true now. NATO summits still happen of course, but until recently they have been concerned with peacekeeping deployments, counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and the endless succession of new members and partnership initiatives. No fundamental security decisions of any kind have been needed in the political lifetime of any current head of a NATO (or EU) country, until now.
This is the more unfortunate because a security crisis is a highly complex thing, and involves a whole series of levels from the political down to the military/tactical. And a security crisis is just about impossible to manage multilaterally: the only remotely comparable example I can think off is the 1999 Kosovo crisis, when a much smaller NATO effectively stopped working after the first week, and came quite close to breaking down completely.
I’ve pointed out before that NATO has no strategy for Ukraine, and no real operational plan. It just has a series of ad hoc initiatives, glued together by vague aspirations unrelated to real life, and by the hope that something will turn up. In turn, this is because no individual NATO nation is in a better state: our current western political leadership has never had to develop these skills.
But it’s actually worse than that: not having developed these skills, not having advisers who have developed these skills, they cannot actually understand what the Russians are doing and how and why they are doing it. Western leaders are like spectators who do not know the rules of Chess or Go trying to work out who is winning."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/a-strange-defeat
32. "This shift is reshaping our cities in unexpected ways. When the internet first emerged, experts predicted the "death of distance" and the decline of cities. Instead, the opposite occurred – cities became more vital than ever as centers of innovation and creativity. But now we're seeing another twist: even as the AI boom makes San Francisco's tech companies more valuable than ever, its offices sit half-empty. The relationship between economic activity and physical space is breaking down.
The new economy, Poleg argues, looks less like a factory production line and more like Hollywood. Success is unpredictable and often binary – massive hits coexist with total failures, with little middle ground. Just as no one can reliably predict which movies will succeed, no one anticipated that ChatGPT would reach 100 million users faster than any product in history. Value appears suddenly and compounds dramatically, while traditional metrics of input and output become less relevant.
This has profound implications for how we think about real estate and urban development. Our cities were built for an industrial economy – one where masses of people worked similar jobs on similar schedules in predictable patterns. Our zoning laws, tax systems, and infrastructure all assume this kind of stability and uniformity. But that world is disappearing.
Instead, we're seeing the emergence of what Poleg calls a "nonlinear economy." Work is becoming more specialized and unpredictable. Success increasingly depends on matching exactly the right talent with the right opportunity at the right moment. Companies are discovering they can collaborate effectively across multiple locations, accessing global talent pools rather than requiring everyone to be in the same building."
https://www.drorpoleg.com/nobody-knows-anything/
33. "But the new world isn’t without its challenges. There is so much about the old world of tech investing that needs to be unlearned. The old world is dominated by legacy tech networks that lack the relationships and industry insights to serve the new world’s customers. Legacy best practices for SaaS aren’t the same in a world where services are being sold – for better or worse, the operating models are going to be incredibly different, requiring a nuanced understanding of the customers needs and how they buy.
This equally impacts the nuance that investors will require to successfully invest and support these companies. With new margin structures, investors will have to properly understand the difference between value creation and revenue growth (hint: revenue multiples never mattered much, but mean even less now), comping a business to its category and its comparative unit economic performance.
This looks very different from the traditional “growth at all costs” methods of venture and likely needs to borrow from other methods of investing to better align with how these companies would be valued in the public markets."
https://newsletter.equal.vc/p/the-new-world-for-entrepreneurs
34. Another great episode here. Best convo on tech investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SewIKjE1Lec&t=228s
35. This is a good overview on semiconductors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkuxNg-j6uI&t=17s
36. Must listen to. Taking a big swing and not making it, getting back up again. But this is what makes Silicon Valley work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvoaEuSmKM0&t=1186s
37. This is an interview I will rewatch many times. How to live a dope life. So many great nuggets of entrepreneurial insight. Shaan has crushed it and it's been fun watching his rise.
He shares all his learnings of his career: "Do cool nerdy stuff with smart people"