Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads February 23rd, 2025
"The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision”--Helen Keller
A wake up call for all Americans. We have so much work to do as we are completely behind on many important tech sectors like EVs, Drones, robots & manufacturing due to bureaucracy & regulations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqeI7iViRmE
2. "Remember the formula for success: 10% reading 90% action. If you spent 1 hour reading, spend 9 hours applying it.
Most do the opposite – 90% reading and 10% action. Those are people who slowly become weirdos – the dad bod guys making $150k a year or less but think they’re the shit while coming up with all sots of excuses to justify their delusions (“It’s because I live in X country” in the internet age)."
https://lifemathmoney.com/how-i-know-someone-will-make-it/
3. "Ultimately, without security, everything else is meaningless. And without a strong economy, Europe cannot rebuild the strength needed to guarantee its security. The priority list, therefore, should be clear: we invest in security so that we have the luxury to focus on everything else."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/europes-last-chance
4. "Yet edible seaweed, which is commonly red or brown algae and includes a variety of subsets, such as kelp, hasn’t quite caught on in the US.
Even with more stores stocking seaweed snacks and salads, the vast majority of seaweed is produced in Asia and imported overseas. US companies produce a mere ~.01% of the world’s seaweed, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, trailing smaller countries like North Korea and the Philippines by a wide margin.
But American startups are racing to catch up, expanding beyond traditional seaweed products into everything from supplements to seaweed-based livestock feed that studies show could reduce methane emissions from cows.
Will seaweed become a dominant new ingredient, or be permanently relegated to side dish status?"
https://thehustle.co/originals/is-seaweed-the-next-kale
5. Basically we are in big doo doo if we don't get our act together. Strong alliance of CRINK stepping up against us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYaZPEjU79s
6. "As we move into the prime twenty-twenties, aesthetic distinctions have returned and displaced brand. Once again, we are acknowledging the social meaning embedded in how we look. These aesthetic distinctions are grounded in value judgments. For boom boom that means embracing the codes of formality, hierarchy, and tradition.
Inevitably, many find this intolerably regressive."
https://www.8ball.report/p/the-globalization-aesthetic
7. "The United States was once the arsenal of democracy. Today it is the arsenal of bureaucracy, with an army of federal civilians making it difficult for American companies to sell to willing buyers. To wit, it took the State Department and the Pentagon nearly 30 months to finalize a sale of Harpoon anti-ship missiles to Taiwan. Though upgraded in recent years, the Harpoon has been in service since the 1980s. It is not a new system, and Taiwan is the nexus of our Pacific deterrence.
We have a unique opportunity for American workers and innovation to be fueled by investment from our friends, strengthening both our economy and national security. This process should be simple. It isn’t. The haft of the arrow in America’s side was feathered from our plume.
Moreover, the past three decades of obsessive consolidating and regulating and subsidizing has undercut the core element of the new Administration’s foreign policy and national security.
Trump has rightly emphasized deterrence, a concept that escaped the outgoing president and his team. Deterrence is a simple framework and does not require a mountain of PhDs to grasp. It means, in plain terms, terrifying adversaries with a combination of iron forged national will and fearsome weapons to lend that patriotic resolve credibility."
https://blog.joelonsdale.com/p/america-needs-better-defense-acquisition
8. "AIs are something new. They are highly compressed models of the information available on the network. This attribute allows them to do nearly everything search and social networking automation currently does and so much more. It’s also why AI is rapidly eating the UI for search (Perplexity, etc.) and social (TikTok is an example of a highly evolved version of this).
Most of the advanced jobs that AIs (both virtual and robotic) will fill will be jobs that currently don’t exist. The household maid or cook for a middle-class family or the personal security guard, tutor, or companion/in-home support (from children to the elderly). Not only will there be vastly more work done, but the pace of everything will also increase."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/the-social-ui
9. We have always been in an age of the great man. Wide ranging conversation on how elites drive civilization forward or make it fail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6k-eFlkIsS0
10. This is a thought provoking and wide ranging conversation. Important discussion on many technological and cultural developments right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHWnPOKh_S0&t=10080s
11. "Let’s put it all together. A dollar, yuan, and yen are interchangeable in the global financial markets. They all find their way into US big tech stocks in some shape or form. You may not like it, but it's true. I just stepped through why, at least in the very short term, the US, China, and Japan are not increasing the pace of fiat money creation and in some cases, are raising the price of money.
Inflation is still elevated and likely to go higher in the near future as the world decouples economically. This is why I expect 10-year yields to rise. What will stocks do if they are rising because of fears of inflation and a large and quickly growing pile of US debt with no marginal buyers in sight? They will dump."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/the-ugly
12. The reality of Cyber warfare. Scary but not a knockout strike.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tifAF65rBcY
13. Japanese Ryokan is one of the best experiences one can have.
https://www.afar.com/magazine/japanese-ryokan-what-it-is-and-what-to-expect
14. A masterclass on the art of venture investing. Gurley has forgotten more than most VCs know about the business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PkWc-IDTHk
15. "$300,000 has become the new baseline for what $100,000 once represented.
Build Passive Income: Once you build one successful business, you can build other small ones. The typical millionaire has around 5-7 income streams. The mainstream loves to psyop you into believing that 90% of businesses fail. Even if true, they don’t teach you that you’ve developed valuable scalable and irreplaceable skills. Once you’ve developed a skill for earning, it’ll translate quickly if you start a new idea or if you buy a company that you *know* is run incorrectly.
In the end, life is just a game of probabilities. We try to look for the highest probability answer at all times. Notice. That does not say a “guarantee”. It says probability. If you’re making the right probability based decisions, eventually lady luck shows up and hands you the gold at the end of the rainbow."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/300000-a-year-is-the-new-100000-a
16. This is a good conversation on the situation of the Russian military versus the Ukrainian military going into 2025. Lessons from the last 3 years of the conflict.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj6oiILlJrY
17. Great teardown on Deepseek by the NIA boys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2UKOUBIIiY
18. Really insightful conversation on Deepseek and what’s up on AI & Chips. Big implications for all tech players.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P6CUIPrrtU
19. "Satya Nadella has described a future where this business logic migrates to an AI layer, transforming the role of traditional SaaS apps. Now, AI agents serve as intelligent orchestrators, integrating multiple platforms and consolidating various workflows, decision-making and automation into a tier of AI.
Essentially, this means that SaaS applications are looking to revert to their most primal form of simple databases. At the same time, the AI layer takes the part of “intelligence”, organising and elaborating processes without being bound to a singular backend. Consequently, SaaS tools will become domain-specific enablers, losing their standalone prominence as the brain of business systems and transitioning fully to AI.
We are entering an era of integrated platforms where AI drives innovation. More and more businesses expect seamless integration across tools, as siloed solutions generate inefficiencies, fragmented data, and disconnected workflows."
20. 10 TYPES OF PEOPLE YOU SHOULD IGNORE
https://lifemathmoney.com/10-types-of-people-you-should-ignore/
21. "Logistics is what made the great captains of history great. Those early empires were possible because the great captains who led them understood how to sustain the long campaigns necessary to build and maintain them. At the operational and strategic levels of war, success is made possible by the purposeful synchronization of logistics.
That's proven true throughout history — when you address the art of war, concepts like reach and culmination are inherently tied to logistics. So, when we shortcut logistics — the resources that fuel military strategy — we handicap our ability to achieve our desired goals."
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/military-logistics-in-the-21st-century
22. "Interesting to wake up to an FT report saying that Europe is considering a return to Russian gas supply as part of a Ukraine peace deal.
God give me strength, surely Europe, and the EU particularly cannot be this stupid.
Let’s just rewind 3.5 years to mid 2021 and after years of appeasement and selling out to Russia, Europe has found itself hugely over dependent on Russian gas and energy supply and then subject to blatant blackmail by Putin’s regime turning off the gas taps, creating an energy crisis in Europe to blackmail Europe over Ukraine."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/is-europe-really-this-stupid
23. "The fate of Taiwan will basically determine the future of Chinese naval power. There is no island so well placed either to protect the vast majority of Chinese naval and air bases (to say nothing of naval production facilities), or correspondingly to represent a constant challenge to the Chinese Navy’s ability to deploy force in this vital area."
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/taiwan-is-strategic-and-its-fate
24. "The startup ecosystem purge continues. As mentioned above, I think the cleanse that started in 2024 will continue into 2025. In many ways, startup investing is like playing craps. You play for a long time, accumulate bets on the table, and either win slowly as different bets pay off at different times – or lose a lot all at once when the shooter rolls a seven.
Personally, I’ve never had more angel investments sell, cease operations, or return money than I have had in the past 12 months. There are two opposing forces in play: cash reserves and exit multiples. I think that many startups have strategically decided to sell, but don’t want to start a process in what’s clearly a buyer’s market. Look at these feeble M&A-specific exit multiples from Aventis."
https://kellblog.com/2025/01/29/kellblog-predictions-for-2025/
25. "Moving by leaving nearly everything behind may seem like a drastic step, but ultimately it was what set us free from all of the things holding us back. We learned what we needed to live and what we could live without. We are going to give it a month. We will go back slowly and take whatever we need in that month and then we will donate or discard everything else. Ultimately, this move taught us something. Sometimes the best way forward is to leave things behind. From now on, we are adding, not subtracting."
https://debliu.substack.com/p/adding-not-subtracting-what-leaving
26. "There is a moderate amount of research on athletes’ long term outcomes, and I think it’s a model we ought to be looking at more as AI progresses. For decades, the 33-year-old soccer player has had to grapple with the knowledge that the skills that were central to both his prosperity and identity no longer apply. In the years to come, the 55-year-old accountant or lawyer may be struck with the same realization.
That 33-year-old athlete has built up a set of skills and habits — fitness, discipline, fame, and connections — and (with the development of non-soccer skills) can deploy them to his advantage. Similarly, that 55-year-old accountant has a base of skills and habits that she can use to her advantage even if her ability with that one specific accounting technique is no longer a highly valued skill.
This is something we ought to talk about more and get ahead of."
https://mikegreenfield.substack.com/p/re-sorting-and-adaptability
27. "What I’m questing after, instead, is an idea with power. That new framework that helps us see a relationship we’d previously missed. The essay that says something new about our experience in this moment.
That work doesn’t come from busyness. It comes from open thought. From long walks. From space to breathe.
Now is not the time to stop pushing. But maybe I need to redefine, a little, what pushing looks like. I think it turns out that amid the acceleration we’re living through — in what may be the last days of the Before Times — the most important variable of all is thinking time.
If I’m to do my best work, I need to find more of it."
https://www.newworldsamehumans.xyz/p/thinking-time
28. "Argentina had seen this cycle before — crisis followed by recovery, only to slip back again. But today, there are real signs of change. Inflation, once out of control, is finally slowing. The stock market has surged, reflecting renewed investor interest. And while challenges remain, the country is moving in a direction that, for once, feels different.
Fifteen years ago, I left Argentina wondering if it would ever escape its economic rollercoaster. Today, I’m starting to believe that maybe — just maybe — this time, the country is on the right path."
https://www.markmobius.com/news-events/then-vs-now-argentina
29. Demographics is destiny and this has huge impacts on Chinese real estate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2AJvCPcNUE
30. "Questions were asked about how much a Ukrainian defence tech company could scale just in Ukraine. Artem pointed out that the production capacity of some defence related technologies is greater than the national budget for defence, so it is likely that in the future the government will lift the existing restriction on exports.
This would open up international markets to Ukrainian defence tech startups that have battle-proven technologies. An investor in the audience pointed out that we should not be concerned now about foreign markets, as that will develop naturally after the war."
https://www.resiliencemedia.co/p/what-we-learned-from-ukraines-brave1
31. "It’s important to note that the results of these force-on-force exercises cannot be replicated through virtual / constructive exercises such as table-top exercises and wargaming. Only by actually stressing the systems can we truly determine what will be successful.
So, as the DoD faces the opportunity to shape its future, we need to ensure that we maintain a certain amount of optionality and that we actively experiment and test innovations to see which will likely yield the greatest results."
https://buildingourfuture.substack.com/p/techno-military-optionality-ensuring
32. "Super Bowl ads are a proxy for the addiction economy, as advertisers for the food industrial complex, beer and alcohol brands, online gambling, crypto, and social media platforms offer you dopa on demand. But there’s a downside to gorging, no? Not to worry, there will also be ads from the medical-pharma industrial complex for products that manage (some of) the damage. Pundits claim we live in an “attention economy.” We don’t. Attention is just a metric for addiction. The addiction economy is broader, encompassing media, technology, alcohol, tobacco, gaming, pharma, and health care.
The Spice
The world’s most valuable resource isn’t data, compute, oil, or rare earth metals; it’s dopa, i.e., the fuel of the addiction economy, which runs the most valuable companies in history. Addiction has always been a component of capitalism — nothing rivals the power of craving to manufacture demand and support irrational margins. Sugar and rum were the dopa-delivery systems and currency of the Triangle Trade. Later, the British East India Company was the Sinaloa Cartel of the 19th century, producing and distributing a product China became addicted to: opium. At its peak in the last century, Big Tobacco acquired customers with TV ads and endorsements from doctors, but the addictive ingredient, nicotine, is how the industry extracts $86k to $195k per customer — and costs those customers $1 million to $2 million in expenditures, opportunity costs, and health-care expenses.
Historically, the most valuable companies turn dopa into consumption. Over the last 100 years, 15 of the top 30 companies by cumulative compound return have been pillars of the addiction economy. The compounders cluster in tobacco (Altria +265,528,900%), the food industrial complex (Coca-Cola +12,372,265%), pharma (Wyeth +5,702,341%), and retailers (Kroger +2,834,362%) that sell both substances and treatments. To predict which companies will be the top compounders over the next century, consider this: Eight of the world’s 10 most valuable businesses turn dopa into attention, or make picks and shovels for these dopa merchants."
https://www.profgalloway.com/addiction-economy
33. Good overview and teardown of the UAE military. Punching above its weight with hired foreign soldiers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fpuQOB0_j8
34. Great episode this week. Lots of discussion to understand what is happening with AI and autonomous driving.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RkgkOqWs0s
35. For anyone who is interested in what’s happening in Silicon Valley and the technology industry writ large.