Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 21st, 2024
"When all else fails, take a vacation." –Betty Williams
Excellent dissection of a niche media business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBv7ebE6ZrA&t=5s
2. "Given the progress of AI in the last years and the speed with which AI is transforming the way software is developed and used, any prediction comes with a high risk of not aging well, but my best guess is that the fundamental need for software persists — and AI will enhance the value and importance of software rather than diminish it."
3. "In the developed societies almost all of us manage to stay a few steps out of reach of that monster for our entire lives, and this fact is the wonder of the world. The artifice we have built to keep it at bay — vast farms blanketing whole continents and tended by fantastic machines, sprawling landscapes of ersatz caves to keep us sheltered from the elements, endless roads and rails, an empire of warehouses and supermarkets and pharmacies and just-in-time logistics — is the only meaningful thing that has ever been built within the orbit of our sun in billions of years.
It is industrial modernity — our single weapon against the elemental foe. It took centuries of blood and sweat to build, centuries of sacrifice by our sturdiest workers, our most brilliant inventors, and our most visionary leaders. And it is fantastically complex, far beyond the ability of even the most brilliant individual to understand in full; only collectively, at the level of society, do we shore up its fragile walls and keep it from collapse every day.
When smug intellectuals sneer at “economic growth” or “GDP”, they are denouncing the very walls of the fortress that has allowed them to live more than an animal existence. Safe within its sheltering bastions, they are free to indulge in the extravagance of pretending that the foe isn’t lurking right outside.
They revel in the luxury of their material security by staging mock revolutions over differences in social status and relative wealth among the elite. With their bellies full of industrially grown sugars, they wander through pleasant fantasies of an imagined past — pastel-colored worlds filled with noble savages, happy indolent peasants, and glossy 1950s advertisements. Sometimes they imagine they could move to one of those fantasy worlds.
As shallow as all that sounds, it’s precisely to allow the luxury of shallowness that humanity struggled so long and hard. Yet we can never afford for luxury to become complacency, because the foe has not been defeated."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-elemental-foe
4. "If we take too many detours chasing this kind of distracting knowledge, we risk consuming our lives with content that ultimately doesn’t nourish us and is instead an obstacle to the development of our personalities and to our becoming fully alive.
Contrary to our bodily appetite for food and drink, our intellectual appetite toknow is never fully satiated. There is always more to learn. Our desire to know is always active. So, in a way, getting our curiositas under control is even more important than our physical fitness. We are desiring to know at every moment of the day. We are not necessarily desiring to eat.
The age of social media and the 24 hour news cycle is completely dominated by curiositas, by distracting knowledge, and that’s why the virtue of studiositas is more important than ever to try to cultivate."
https://read.lukeburgis.com/p/there-are-no-more-hedgehogs
5. Masterclass in building an SDR team.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USC4q0fcApQ&t=1881s
6. “Are you sure the Chinese Communist Party isn’t behind the anti-nuclear movement in Taiwan?” That’s the question I get over and over again as I explain Taiwan’s seemingly inexplicable decision to close its last nuclear power reactors in the face of a possible energy blockade.
Unfortunately, the aversion to nuclear power is entirely home-grown with no help from the Chinese. It goes against not just our stated efforts to reach Net Zero by 2050 but threatens our very survival as a nation."
https://taipology.substack.com/p/is-taiwan-sleepwalking-into-an-energy
7. "Between the lines: Geopolitical and national security concerns are also motivators as China's prominence grows.
--Globalization didn't work, these leaders say, because the U.S. wound up giving away working class jobs — and its industrial advantage.
--"The fact that we can't make anything here has screwed our ability to stay leaders in the battery industry," for example, says Austin Bishop, co-founder of Atomic Industries and now a general partner at Tamarack Global, an early-stage investment firm.
--"Once we lost the ability to make basic batteries, then we missed the entire revolution with cellphones, and leading the lithium ion generation, and then that means we've now missed the opportunity to be the leader in [electric] cars."
What they're saying: The alliance's goal is to modernize manufacturing, not re-create the past."
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/01/us-industry-leadership-summit-detroit
8. Such a great conversation here on AI & Defense. Also great discussion on where entrepreneurial talent sits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QJR1LOxXz0
9. Always learn from Peter Thiel, one of the most controversial but orthogonal thinkers in Silicon Valley (altho he is based in LA).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3ZXrTzskw0
10. An interview with one of the men (and women) who literally runs the world (for better or worse). Larry Fink of Blackrock + Central banker & CEO of Honeywell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XYwJAH19Eo
11. "By borrowing against your assets instead of selling them, you don’t have to pay capital gains taxes. Borrowing money against your assets is not a taxable event. If you borrow $50,000 from your house, that is not a taxable event. Same concept.
Even on a thirty year span of borrowing $1,000,000 per year, you can end up saving money for your legacy (kids/family/charity whatever you like)."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/buy-borrow-die-the-basics
12. "There have historically been two types of periods: Local and Global. In a Local period, the authorities financially repressed savers to fund past and present wars. In a Global period, finance is deregulated, and global trade is promoted. A Local period is inflationary, while a Global period is deflationary. Any macro theorist you follow will have a similar taxonomy to describe the major cycles of the 20th century and beyond historical periods.
The purpose of this history lesson is to invest wisely throughout the cycles. Over a typical 80-year life expectancy, I better get more time due to the stem cells I’m injecting; you can expect to experience two major cycles on average. I boil down our investment choices into three categories:
If you believe in the system but not those governing it, you invest in stonks.
If you believe in the system and those governing it, you invest in government bonds.
If you believe in neither the system nor those governing it, you invest in gold or another asset that doesn’t require any vestiges of the state to exist, like Bitcoin. Stocks are a legal fantasy upheld by courts that can dispatch men with guns to force compliance. Therefore, stocks require a strong state to exist and hold value over time.
In a Local inflationary period, I should own gold and eschew stocks and bonds.
In a Global deflationary period, I should own stocks and eschew gold and bonds.
Government bonds generally do not preserve value over time unless I’m allowed to infinitely leverage them at low to no cost or am forced to own them by my regulator. Primarily, that is because it is too tempting for politicians to pervert the government bond market by printing money to fund their political objectives without resorting to unpopular direct taxation."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/zoom-out
13. Title says it all. US & China: Edging toward War. Panel of 2 Chinese and 2 Americans (who actually speak Chinese fluently and spent time there).
Chinese folks seem really ultra reasonable but it's hard to believe them looking at the facts and what China has been doing since Xi took power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il_XQhIBR7M
14. I so want to watch this movie. Tokyo Cowboy.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2024/06/13/film/tokyo-cowboys/
15. "Unless a Trump victory in November results in a drastic reduction in U.S. support for Ukraine, Russia is unlikely to be gifted another chance like the one it has had in the past six months to make progress in the war. European defence industrial capacity is increasing, and its political resolution to resist Russia is strengthening. Ukrainian defence production is increasing. But then, Russian defence production has also exceeded the expectations of most western analysts. Whether this can be continued indefinitely is another question.
Ultimately, the past six months offer another case study of a military institution that has failed to effectively change its doctrine, training, structure and equipment during wartime in a way that increases its chances of tactical, operational and strategic success. The Russian gains hardly justify the burning through men and materiel that has taken place since January 2024.
The sources of their failure to capitalise on their strategic opportunity in 2024 are many. Russia has yet to develop a new offensive doctrine for land operations in modern conditions. It has not been able to balance quantity and quality across the force, generally leaning on mass for its attacks. Its military leadership is clearly not capable enough to build and implement the right military strategy for such an intellectually demanding war.
And Russia’s style of fighting in 2024, and how poorly it treats Ukrainian civilians and soldiers, has meant that Ukrainian resolve is sustained. In due course, the Russian 2024 offensives will be added to the failed campaign for Kyiv in 2022, and the failed 2023 Ukrainian counter offensive, as examples for military analysts and scholars to study well into the future.
Russia may still have a couple of months where they can conduct more offensive activities against Ukraine before they culminate. But, given Russian losses so far, the lack of any new, wide-ranging offensive doctrine, and that Ukraine’s strategic prospects are improving with respect to manpower, air defence and munitions, Russia appears to have blown what might have been its last chance to strike a decisive blow against Ukraine in this war.
The question now is whether Ukraine, which wants to liberate more of its territory occupied by Russia, can build all the different physical, moral and intellectual elements of offensive combat power to do better than Russia has either later this year or in 2025?"
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/has-russia-blown-its-2024-opportunity
16. "The nuance in selling between GPTs compared to search & chatbots is a great example of how the market is evolving differently in different segments : lumping all AI solutions into the same category is a mistake.
Leveraging the executive sponsorship to bypass procurement processes is consistent with the AI imperative boards & executives have championed.
The AI market isn’t a single market : it’s reflective of the software market both older segments & newer segments."
https://tomtunguz.com/the-first-of-your-newsletters
17. "As you age though other costs begin to come up that can wrinkle your cash flow — this month I got a delayed bill from my accountant, an unexpected medical bill for my son, and a car tax payment for my town on the same day after apeing BTC/ETH with my free cash flow from my business. My goal is to always be comfortably saving or investing money each month — these random expenses can add a bit of pressure to that regimen and I am a bit OCD about having that cushion.
We’ve all heard BowTied Bull recount the classic conundrum of the NYC Managing Director who saves basically no money due to lifestyle inflation and absurd spending each month.Today I want to talk through areas that I have personally identified waste in — that is — areas where I am potentially vulnerable to lifestyle inflation or overspending for no good reason."
https://arbitrageandy.substack.com/p/stop-wasting-your-money-on-these
18. "This flipping of risk-free return in US Treasuries to return-free risk will be a defining development for the next decade in finance. Trillions of dollars are sitting in a global 60/40 portfolio with US Treasuries as a major component of their asset allocation. At some point, common sense must win out over doctrine. This brings me to another development that seems to be happening simultaneously — bitcoin is becoming the risk-free return for digital natives.
In the same way that US Treasuries were the “safe” asset that was backed by the US government, bitcoin is becoming the “safe” asset that is backed by the strongest computer network in the world. That may sound insane to traditional investors, but I hear and see it from digital natives every day."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/risk-free-return-vs-return-free-risk
19. Get equity in a business. This is the lesson.
"Federer becoming part of On made him much more than Nike was ever going to pay him. Per a 2022 report by Quartz, when On went public in 2021, Federer’s 3 percent ownership was worth $180 million. It’s this opportunity that’s given him a new perspective on how athletes should or shouldn’t approach deals, although he admits that not all athletes are in a space where they can accept long-term money over short-term financial success.
“Not thinking as an athlete is not easy,” the tennis icon says."
https://www.complex.com/sneakers/a/matt-welty/roger-federers-big-bet-with-on-is-paying-off
20. "But even if you don’t decrease your spending over time, there’s nothing stopping you from adjusting your spending when necessary. As I’ve shown previously, you can spend more money in retirement if you are flexible. The trick is to not withdraw as much from your portfolio when it’s in a large decline. In other words, don’t kick your investments while they’re down.
If you can embrace this idea, then you don’t need to worry as much about running out of money in retirement. This is especially true if you experience a period of high inflation. After all, the best way to fight back against higher prices is not to pay them! While this is easier said than done, a little flexibility in your spending can go a long way in retirement."
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/how-does-inflation-impact-retirement/
21. Lots of great life lessons here.
"It’s almost impossible to imagine how much your psychology around money will change once you start seeing those kinds of numbers. And no matter how much of a minimalist, smart saver and investor you think you are, you might be surprised by how quickly your attitude can change.
I imagined five, ten, twenty years in the future, and asked myself how I would feel if I never became an extremely successful crypto investor or programmer.
And the truth was, I wouldn’t care. That skillset was near meaningless to me, it was just a means to an end.
But when I imagined not being a successful author that far in the future, I realized I would be filled with regret.
This is how success can become a curse. If you get really good at the wrong thing and you’re making a bunch of money from it, people are telling you how smart and capable and accomplished you are, you might start to think that it is the thing. And then you wake up one day and realize you were duped.
Obviously you probably need to get good at something you’re less thrilled about to put food on the table and get your career started. But don’t forget that it’s merely a tool for the work you really want to do later. Deprioritize it as soon as you can."
https://blog.nateliason.com/p/losing-10-million
22. "A South Korean weapons manufacturer that traditionally specialized in older, less advanced armaments is seizing on demand for 155mm howitzers by producing them faster than the West.
Hanwha Aerospace can build its K9 self-propelled howitzer in about six months at $3.5 million apiece, Bloomberg reported, estimating the company to be two to three times as fast as its competitors.
By comparison, French supplier Nexter was estimated to take about 30 months to deliver its Caesar self-propelled howitzer. However, it was reported in early January to have reduced the wait time by half.
South Korea's defense contractors have emerged as significant industry players, making the country the world's 10th biggest arms exporter, per theStockholm International Peace Research Institute."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/south-korean-weapons-company-once-072157477.html
23. "The political divisions imposed on society by the elite have degraded the sense of community. Many videos on YouTube feature people traveling the country, speaking to those in struggling neighborhoods, and one common theme I noticed was this idea of a strange social closing up, a guardedness or even avoidance of neighbors.
Multiple slightly older to middle aged people expressed how, when they were growing up in the 80s or 90s, their communities felt more connected. Neighbors and your “block” or street was an open, hospitable space where people interacted and knew each other’s names and families, sometimes helped each other or solved problems together. Now, they say in the same neighborhoods, no one says hello or talks to each other, the sense of commonality replaced with a growing sense of enclosure, mistrust, standoffishness, a kind of paranoia and cynicism growing like weeds from the neglected sidewalks and untended yards.
Most readers can likely relate. There’s a mountingly pervasive feeling—a defense mechanism of sorts—that keeps us a little more bottled up, wary of oversharing, reluctant to ‘step out of our comfort zones’ into spaces we know may be culturally or politically hostile to our guarded alignments.
When before we may have waved at a neighbor, engaging in chitchat over weather or the ballgame, now we may simply pull our hat tighter over our eyes, give a curt nod while avoiding eye contact for fear they may be “one of them”—a hostile from the other side of the spectrum, the politico-cultural divide: maybe a pro- or anti-vaxxer, a Democrat or conservative, a pro-Choicer abortionist or transphobe, ad nauseam."
https://darkfutura.substack.com/p/the-hoi-polloi-are-sick
24. The spirit of entrepreneurship alive & well in Cuba.
https://restofworld.org/2024/cuba-dancers-social-media-restrictions/
25. "Indeed the Russian micro-advance strategy is probably making the Russian army less efficient. It’s basically working overtime simply to pace losses. It can only do that with very quick training time (if that) leading to deteriorating unit cohesion and little military learning. There are stories of whole units basically becoming combat inefficient in a few days of fighting around Vovchansk.
What the Ukrainians have to do is accelerate Russian losses by encouraging them to keep these micro-advances up. It will lead to a horrible summer of fighting, but if the Russians are willing to keep slaughtering their own forces for tiny gains, the Ukrainians have to let them—while keeping Ukrainian losses as low as possible.
And when the Ukrainians return to trying to liberate their own lands, they need to do something else entirely."
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-87-the-russian-micro
26. "Every team of more than a few people will have at least one employee struggling. Sometimes it’s because they were an mis-hire, and sometimes it’s that their job is changing faster than they can adapt. Sometimes it’s their fault, and sometimes it’s not.
The first step is to identify struggling employees, and here are some signs an employee is struggling:
--They take longer than their peers to complete the same tasks, or cannot complete them at all.
--They push back on simple tasks that should be easy to complete.
--They start to work fewer hours, or be less available online.
--They start complaining a lot about everything wrong with the company.
When you find a struggling employee you need to act. Maybe you need to change their role, or provide deeper training. Or maybe you need to part ways. Whatever the solution, you can’t let the situation continue and simply hope they will figure it out."
https://www.breakingpoint.tech/p/struggling-employees
27. "If you are a Limited Partner at the very beginning of the Emerging Manager journey, here is my unsolicited advice: do not take shortcuts in honing the craft of identifying the best Managers.
Accessing Emerging Managers won’t be your problem, but how to underwrite them is a challenge. The only way to master this challenge is by developing taste. The only way to develop this taste is by genuine curiosity to explore the entire landscape that is unfolding in front of you.
And every now and then, on a rare occasion, you come across a very, very, very special Emerging Manager, and the feeling of sensing the quality within seconds is priceless. It’s like tasting some french soil in your wine - it’s special."
https://embracingemergence.beehiiv.com/p/1-advice-limited-partners
28. "America is the only major “empire” in history whose entrepreneurial magnitude exceeds its government magnitude. America is the first Capitalist Empire.
That is an unbelievably important distinction. It means that America’s success or failure isn’t exclusively determined by the strength of its institutions or the people running them. As long as the Constitution remains in place and rule of law reigns supreme, individuals have more opportunity to define the trajectory of the American Empire than they’ve had in any Empire to date.
While China’s manufacturing capacity is awesome, and while its growth has been eye-popping, China does not have the same dynamic: recall just a few years ago when Xi Jinping Thanos-snapped Alibaba CEO Jack Ma to show the country that he, and not tech companies, were in control.
China, strong as it is today, is fragile to the whims of its leaders.
America, chaotic as it is, is decentralized and antifragile.
To the extent that it is an empire, America is an empire defined not by its ability to expand geographically to capture existing resources, but by its ability to expand technologically to create new ones. America, therefore, is a boundless empire.
We will see more legacy institutions fall and weaken, and it may feel chaotic. Good! That chaos, underpinned by a stable Constitution and legal code, is the lifeblood of America’s success. The greater the challenges, the bigger the opportunities, the better the solutions.
We can even build new and better institutions to replace old and sclerotic ones."
https://www.notboring.co/p/the-american-millennium
29. "There is much that should be learned, or relearned, from these modern military failures. They provide the most recent, and perhaps more relatable, examples for the current generation of military and national security professionals.
Military failure should be an essential aspect of study for aspiring military leaders and effective military institutions. It may not be the ultimate guarantor of battlefield success or victory in war, but it is certainly a better strategy than ignoring lessons from the past in order to personally learn the agony of defeat."
https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-misfortunes-of-war/
30. "The quick summary of all this if you’re planning on building something long-term that doesn’t go down in flames after a short burst of sales (see thousands of businesses in 2021) is as follows:
--Sell to Women, selling to men is a fools game
--Try to find something that causes instant results and is hard to return. You can’t return botox but you can easily return a sky blue shirt that wasn’t light enough
--Majority of people will not have any savings, this means debt based purchases have to be encouraged
--You can charge more for speed since people are impatient. Could be shipping could be digital entertainment
--Anything lottery/quick high “could change your life or go to zero” is going to sell extremely well
--If you’re looking for more stable income focus on targeting the wealthy, if you’re looking for more cash flow based items, look at bare necessities for the low-end. Don’t buy middle class suburban homes!
All of this leads to the same general direction. Staying at home, glued to screens and lower population growth due to high vice/addiction and belief that the only way to make it is via overnight success."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/understanding-the-future-of-the-consumer
31. "Any wifi money business you start is going to be a 100% remote company.
It’s just the way things are done, unless you get HUGE (then it might make sense to open up an office).
But for the businesses I talk about in this newsletter, it’s all going to be remote. By the time you get so big that you have to start looking for office space you’re probably going to want to cash out and start over anyway, because that’s how builders are wired.
So if you’re serious about building online, you’re going to have to confront a few realities about managing a team of atomized people who are scattered all over the world who you only see on Slack and the occasional Zoom call.
Hint: It’s not always awesome."
https://www.tetramarketing.io/p/pros-and-cons-of-managing-a-remote
32. One of the best tear downs of media businesses in recent American history. Great for media biz junkies like me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJBdd9D3nEg
33. "Christopher Morley said, “There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.”
A lot of financial mistakes come from trying to copy people who are different from you.
So be careful who you seek advice from, be careful who you admire, and even be careful who you socialize with. When you do things quietly you’re less susceptible to people with different goals and personalities than you telling you you’re doing it wrong."
https://collabfund.com/blog/quiet-compounding/
34. "Everyone eventually has to sit down and produce their work, and are held to goals and quotas. But as the economy shifts to knowledge work, we should respect that what actually produces good work can at first look lazy, and (even more so) vice versa.
In investing, where there’s the potential to win by pure luck, it’s wise to judge someone by their process, rather than their outcome. Work may be the opposite. Judge people by their outcomes, not by the visibility of their process, which is often hidden inside their head."
https://collabfund.com/blog/lazy-work-good-work/
35. This was how I felt in the early days of Alibris, Yahoo! & 500 Startups. Good times & magical times career wise.
"In your career and life, you will hopefully have moments where you feel championship level success.
You might even be part of a dynasty for many winning years. When that happens, remind yourself that it won’t last forever. And celebrate with champagne.
A dynasty ended yesterday — and now a new journey begins."
https://jeffmorrisjr.substack.com/p/the-end-of-a-warriors-era
36. "Seibel likens defence tech to similar recent hype cycles: “They're like, 'Oh shit, we need to do AI; oh shit, we need to invest in WeWork or whatever.’
“I have a little bit of the feeling now that a lot of dual use VCs say, 'We have to defend Europe, blah, blah, blah,' and they just jump on the train, which means they also make bad decisions on who they invest in,” he says.
Although he expects there will still be a lot of investment in the drone space in the next few years, there will likely be a lot of consolidation: he predicts there will be three or four European winners 10 years from now."
https://sifted.eu/articles/vc-defence-tech-hype-drones-quantum-systems