Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads October 1st, 2023
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” – Albert Einstein
"In an era where luxury cars and extravagant timepieces once symbolized success and prestige, a profound but quiet transformation in our values has taken place. No one talks about it much, our modern cinema and music ignore it because they’re incentivized to, but the internet forced a change here — you see it on display constantly.
I believe strongly in the thesis material possessions have ceded dominance to the virtues of mentorship, the free/open exchange of ideas, the art of creative expression and other intangibles. In essence: we’ve moved past status being biased to financial achievements and once again care more about intangibles (the transcendental).
Related, the notion of ‘getting rich, then getting off the grid’ as some on fintwit love to say is deeply nihilistic. These are lost individuals. Affix your oxygen mask, then lift others up. Stay on the grid and help shore up our shared infrastructure, take off the VR and join the rest of us in base reality."
https://www.hottakes.space/p/on-status-in-modernity
2. Always learn stuff by listening to Sam Lessin of Slow Ventures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4MQldIKMg8
3. "He will keep coming back to that darkness, and is likely to submerge himself into it all the more as the realities of mortality enfold him. When you are as messed up as our hero, there is a lot of psychological work to be done to stop the downward spiral, work more boring than building a rocket. Work even more boring than this book.
It is no wonder that Musk has renamed Twitter “X” after his favourite letter. X is also a crossing out, the opposite of a tick, and that is what Musk has been steadily doing to his legacy. Isaacson’s book constantly tries to build dramatic tension between the species-saving visionary and the beaten bullied boy. But we know the ending to Musk’s story before we even open it. In the end, the bullies win."
4. "In other words, expensive-to-make chips with slightly trailing performance will slowly deprive Chinese companies of market share, and thus of the market feedback necessary to help push Chinese chip innovation in the right direction. The Chinese state can lob effectively infinite amounts of money at Huawei and SMIC and other national champions, but its track record is very poor in terms of getting bang for its buck — or even any bang at all — from semiconductor subsidies.
And the greatest irony is that China’s government itself may help speed along this process. Confident of its ability to produce high-quality indigenous phones, China is starting to ban iPhones in some of its government agencies. Those hard bans will likely be accompanied by softer encouragement throughout Chinese companies and society to switch from Apple to domestic brands.
That will give a sales boost to companies like Huawei, but it will slowly silence the feedback that Chinese companies receive from competing in cutthroat global markets. Voluntary Chinese isolation from the global advanced tech ecosystem will encourage sluggish innovation and more wasteful use of resources — a problem sometimes called “Galapagos syndrome”.
What effect all this will have on China’s military capabilities isn’t clear, because that depends a lot on the pace of military innovation. It might be that old chips are fine, and China can just overwhelm the forces of developed democracies with sheer mass of missiles and drones. Or it might be that new AI algorithms that allow the creation of highly effective drone swarms might need to run on bleeding-edge chips, in which case China could be at a qualitative disadvantage in a fight.
We just don’t know for sure; the argument that China’s military will be hampered by a weaker chipmaking industry is probabilistic, not a law of the Universe. But it’s still one thing that might help put a check on Chinese expansionism in the 2020s and even the 2030s, and every little thing counts."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/whos-afraid-of-the-huawei-mate-60
5. "TL;DR: Vast majority will not get raises that keep up with inflation and will likely lose 4% of their purchasing power again. Unemployment goes up as we’ve been expecting. This implies a period of some stagflation. Don’t expect rates to come down any time soon so please don’t lever up praying for a sudden pivot that is unlikely to come. If the math works (of course take it) just don’t leverage on a “prayer”
It should be relatively obvious but if it isn’t we might go into it deeper.
-It’s logical to assume that a CEO selling shares is horrible.
-It’s logical to assume an attractive management team is a horrible red flag.
-It’s logical to assume that Sales people are not good long-term thinkers due to years of quarterly payouts.
-It’s logical to assume that there is a “halo effect” on management teams that were in the right place at the right time due to pure luck (no way anyone would predict COVID). If you can’t control your weight you probably can’t control your spending. And. The last one.
-It’s logical to assume that a company shouldn’t be spending time impressing retail and investors with fancy events, your company is likely in the dumpster."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/declining-real-wages-evaluation-of
6. Hard not to agree with this. Still think there are some use cases for Crypto but I guess we will see.
"Crypto seemed like a giant slot machine that had been rigged to pay out almost every time. Hundreds of millions of people around the world gave in to the temptation to pull the lever. Everybody knew somebody who’d hit it big. And the more people who bought in, the higher prices rose. By the time of the conference in the Bahamas, the total market value of all of crypto was $2 trillion.
From the beginning, I had thought that crypto was pretty dumb. And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined. There was no mass movement to actually use crypto in the real world. The crypto apps hyped as the future of finance and art barely worked. As I crisscrossed the globe, from El Salvador to Switzerland to the Philippines, all I saw were scams, fraud, and half-baked schemes. By the end, I’d find myself in Cambodia, investigating how crypto fueled a vast human-trafficking scheme run by Chinese gangsters."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/zeke-faux-number-go-up-book-excerpt.html
7. "Critics can quibble, of course, with Ukrainian commanders’ decisions about when and how to go about recovering territory occupied by Russian invaders. But for all the anonymous sniping about how Ukraine should fight like NATO, the reality is that other countries, including the superpower United States, have a great deal to learn about war from Ukraine."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/ukraine-war-nato-kathleen-hicks/675310/
8. This is sadly depressing. Regulatory capture in America. Telco, Healthcare, Education, Pharma, Defense industry. Proof is these are awfully terrible for customers and capitalism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9cO3-MLHOM&t=138s
9. "If interest rates stay well above zero and productivity fails to experience a late-90s-like boom, expect more articles like this. As interest costs rise and start squeezing the rest of the budget, expect Democrats to call for higher taxes and Republicans to call for cuts to Medicaid and other social programs. Expect to see analyses from think tanks detailing all the wonky little ways we could restrain federal spending. In other words, expect somewhat of a return to the intellectual and political climate of 1992.
In other words, an age of austerity will force everyone in the country to tighten their belts and lower their expectations. The last 15 years pushed us to imagine what more the U.S. government could do if only it had the political will to open its purse-strings. Unless a productivity boom and/or a return to near-zero interest rates with low inflation saves us from having to make hard choices, the next 15 years will force us to curb our imaginations and put a damper on our fiscal dreams."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/an-age-of-austerity-is-probably-on
10. "The good news for us—at least for now—is that it was much easier to wipe the Templar Order from the face of the Earth than it will be for our overlords to take away the entirety of our crypto, gold, cash, and other items of value we can use for trade. But they’re not lacking in effort to do so.
However, they’ll never be able to control a silver coin in your hand, and who you choose to give that coin in exchange for goods and services. That’s why I believe the time is now to prepare for a future when that may be one of your only options to trade with some semblance of privacy.
For me, the important thing is to not wait until it’s too late to stock up on items that you can use to trade with in an untraceable manner. Holding even small amounts of gold and silver isn’t about taking part in illegal trade, it’s about owning something that all cultures and people agree has an equal value, that can be used to buy things on your own terms. Terms that are very difficult for your government to force you into; terms that are between two consenting human beings.
So, a few silver coins, or an ounce of gold per month? It doesn’t matter how much. Something is better than nothing. And now is better than never."
https://abundantia.substack.com/p/the-holy-war-over-your-money
11. "At this point the writing is on the wall. Heavily levered businesses and individuals will be sent into bankruptcy. People hoping for the Fed to bail them out won’t get it.
The best solution is to position yourself for the tail end of both risk and no risk assets. The middle has absolutely no value in times of volatility. If you want to own stocks it makes little sense to own anything but the tails (ultra safe or ultra risky).
People will choose to flee to 1) safe assets - mature companies/utilities or T-bills - we’re in short term t-bills or 2) hyper growth/near gambling stocks like the “magnificent 7” or crypto (you can see the second one playing out in part 2 of this post) - we’d suggest adding in the rough $25K/$1600 ranges for BTC/ETH."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/bond-market-crypto-alts-in-tax-havens
12. Somewhat negative view of Biohacking. My view is why not?
Health is wealth and you have nothing to lose except for a little bit of money and time for plenty of upside. Why not try to optimize your longevity if your life is good & you have the resources.
This is why the reporters and academics who are closed minded on this lose in life all the time. Haters=losers.
13. "Members of the Creative Class gravitate towards a cluster of creative expressions, ideas, experiences, places and things that both unite them and differentiate them from each other and everyone else. The politics of the creative money aesthetics is that never stand out in an obvious way, but to be immediately noticed and envied.
It has to be aspirational: others need to wonder where a member of Creative Class acquired this particular piece of clothing (Osaka? Shoreditch? Milan?), or heard about a particular book or a movie. Differentiation is in the details visible to the insiders, never in-your-face."
https://andjelicaaa.substack.com/p/the-creative-class-starter-kit
14. "Looking at the examples set by India, LATAM and SEA, we can see that, once the foundational layers of digital payments has been established, the speed and scale of FinTech startups accelerates rapidly.
While there remains work to be done, Central & South Asia are reaching that inflection point as government and private sector backed payment solutions approach a critical mass. One variable to monitor will be whether the traditional financial institutions are able to adapt and evolve their technology stacks to compete with FinTech startups, as they have in India.
Collaborative efforts involving technology, innovative business models, and strategic embedding of financial services within ecosystems are likely to drive further growth and financial inclusion in these regions."
https://sturgeoncapital.substack.com/p/the-100m-arr-club-part-ii
15. I think many men do think about the Roman Empire. I do it all the time. Fascinating time as a history major.
https://time.com/6314544/tiktok-roman-empire-trend/
16. Awesome NIA episode with guest George Mack. Excellent discussion on creativity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP9-qbFXBWE&t=3390s
17. Hilarious.
https://www.theonion.com/ivy-league-graduate-risks-it-all-for-love-of-consulting-1850840626
18. "We assume that because Russians generally are so good at chess that it influences all their strategy. This is not the case with Putin. The exiled Russian Grandmaster Gary Kasparov notes ‘Putin, as with every dictator, hates chess because chess is a strategic game which is 100 percent transparent.’ He sees the Russian leader as more of a poker player, in which you can play a very weak hand, ‘provided you have enough cash to raise the stakes—and also, if you have a strong nerve, to bluff.’
In fact we know that Putin’s favoured game , to the point of obsession, is judo which is intensely tactical. In 2015 Kimberley Marten observed that for Putin the judoka to win it is not necessary to be ‘bigger or stronger than the opponent, just quicker and shrewder.’ The goal is to survive, to be sure ‘to be the last one standing at the end of the tournament, come what may’. Judo also does not allow for a draw. There must be a winner.
Hence, having started a war, that he intended to win rapidly through exploiting his opponent’s weakness, now Putin fears a conclusion that exposes his own. He is determined to hang on, absorbing losses and playing down difficulties in the hope that something may turn up to save the day."
https://samf.substack.com/p/stalemate-zugzwang-and-a-long-middle
19. Zeihan has been a China bear for a long time. But there is not a lot of good news coming out of the place recently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqA5NODRnQI
20. Interesting opportunity for real estate investing & living in Rural Spain. I'm a fan of Calvin Froedge, who is one of the sharpest thinkers in alternative & contrarian investing.
https://twitter.com/calvinfroedge/status/1703344635806900649
21. More people should study the Hanseatic League: Baltic ocean merchant city states that challenged kingdoms.
https://twitter.com/germanshistory/status/1703676753514791239
22. "Since 2020, Sand Hill Road's most successful individuals have broken away on their own to raise capital for their micro-funds. Europe, often a few years behind when it comes to startup trends, is also starting to produce its own solo GPs."
23. "Grosberg estimates that Putin has enough resources to continue waging the war against Ukraine “at least as long as it has already been ongoing.” But this depends on several factors outside of Moscow’s and Kyiv’s control.
“It depends on if the sanctions hold and how well we can implement them. It largely depends on how well we as the West can endure and how well we recognize that it is not just a piece of land. Ukraine is fighting over the same values that we respect and protect. As long as we understand this, the situation is satisfactory – far from good, but satisfactory.”
Another factor explaining why Russia hasn't been strategically defeated yet is the West’s initial reluctance to arm Ukraine before that abortive airbridge to Hostomel was even attempted. “Now, 550-plus days into the war, we have agreed to supply Ukraine with weapons and equipment that Zelensky asked for on Day 1,” Grosberg said. “If these had been granted right then and had we not delivered heavy equipment a few pieces at a time, the situation could be much different.”
F-16 fighter jets and ATACMS, Grosberg insists, will bring Ukraine “one more step closer to victory” but won’t be “silver bullets” that will decide the war. “Russia is not sitting idly and waiting for the F-16s to arrive. They are taking measures to adapt against them and they have nine months to do so.”
Grosberg isn’t much persuaded by the argument that providing these weapons systems will somehow cross Russia’s “red lines” for escalation, including the use of nuclear weapons."
https://theins.press/en/politics/265092
24. Demographics is destiny.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66850943
25. 2 businessmen and guys I respect a lot. Good people building massive empires.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgyqch_0JXw
26. "Evans has been working steadily and successfully in Hollywood for more than 20 years. But he has not always felt in control there. When he was younger, he acted in a lot of what he now describes as “bad movies.” His first real successes in the industry came by way of a series of characters who were “jocky pricks,” he says: handsome, muscular assholes whose smugness was their most memorable quality.
And then came Steve Rogers, otherwise known as Captain America, a character so defined and iconic—unlike other Marvel heroes, Cap has basically been the same virtuous guy since the day of his invention in 1940—that Evans’s main job was as much to be a caretaker as it was to be an inventor or an explorer.
None of these roles line up all that precisely with the way Evans is in his daily nonworking life, a fact that suits him. “There are some people that you meet and you just think, Man, that’s a movie star,” he says. He is adamant that he is not one of them. “I love to act,” he says. “But it’s not something that I couldn’t live without.” He has had enough success to be financially secure for the rest of his life, and probably a few lifetimes beyond. But despite that success, or maybe because of it, he is interested in, well: anything but the grand narrative of Chris Evans.
“When I don’t pay attention to myself at all,” he says, “and just, you know, question why black holes exist, that brings into perspective a macro understanding of the fact that I’m even here is a miracle. It’s like shooting a bullet with another bullet. I mean, the fact that any of us are here is unbelievable. And that kind of just brings me a sense of deep peace. And I don’t have any more thoughts or questions about my own career.”
https://www.gq.com/story/chris-evans-october-cover-profile-2023
27. Must watch if you are a newbie or old VC. Mike is the BEST and I always learn stuff from him. So many great insights here & Mike has mentored an entire generation of new VCs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45v9vOJlK_E
28. Ukrainian SF drone forces targeting Wagner in Sudan. Unexpected but inevitable expansion of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Battlefield is global.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/19/africa/ukraine-military-sudan-wagner-cmd-intl/index.html
29. "While his affable sales persona had helped win over customers and investors alike throughout much of Flexport’s history, and his storytelling skills rocketed him to pandemic-era stardom with his public reporting on the supply chain crisis, Petersen will have to come up with a new playbook to rescue the company from a serious slump.
Flexport is feeling the pain from an industrywide collapse in freight volumes and a sharp drop in the prices that ship, truck and plane operators charge to move cargo. While the company offers flashy tech to help customers see shipping options and track their goods, the way it makes money is by acting as an intermediary, booking freight shipments and pocketing a cut of the price.
Flexport's revenue dropped nearly 70% in the first half of this yearto around $700 million, and it burned through roughly $300 million in cash.
Petersen declined to be interviewed for this story. But in a text message to The Information last Friday, he laid out his agenda for Flexport: “Cut a lot of waste, solve a handful of issues hurting our customer quality, and grow so fast the only answer for how Flexport became so profitable will appear to be divine intervention.
“We will make believers out of all these atheists yet!” Petersen added."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/can-ryan-petersen-fix-flexport
30. As always, a good convo with Justin Waller. This man is a great model for young men.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=areO3acpMwQ&t=3047s
31. "And as the creator economy began to evolve into a real industry in recent years, he saw his chance to put his idea into motion. Earlier this year, his venture firm, Slow Ventures, set aside $20 million to invest in creators themselves. Now the firm has gone and done it, joining a few individual investors in spending $1.7 million in the future of Marina Mogilko, a 31-year-old YouTube personality with multiple popular channels that touch on topics like life in Silicon Valley and learning new languages. (Slow Ventures is also investing in “serial entrepreneurs” like the Liberman siblings, at least two of whom are coincidentally individual investors in Mogilko.)
The decision to invest directly in humans brings about a host of legal, ethical, and moral questions that Lessin will surely need to confront head-on. The idea that someone might sign a 30-year employment contract and that society should explicitly value a human brings up questions of indentured servitude and worse—claims which Lessin sees as entirely ill-founded. (“it's def not indentured servitude,” he recently wrote in response to someone who said the legal issues seemed “daunting.”)
He believes that he is setting society on a path where we are free to invest in our favorite humans through multiple venture rounds, providing young, brilliant people with the money to fund a path to success that doesn’t exist today."
32. Graduation of seed to A will be 20% not 80% like it was in the past. Seed stage still needs to correct. AI is real. Back to basics: SaaS should be at massive margins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEFLjAshxLk
33. "let’s assume in an imaginary and highly unlikely scenario that the US and Europe stop arming and funding Ukraine. Can we imagine that the Ukrainians will just stop fighting, even then? Why/how can they when Putin has made it clear that he is at war with the Ukrainian nation.
This is a war for Ukraine and Ukrainians’ very survival. They will fight on, long and hard, and as noted above, still will have plenty of arms supplies to make a Russian occupation very costly. And focusing on this, how can Russia enforce a victory in Ukraine? How can it invade the whole country, occupy and sustain that invasion, when we saw the inability of the Russian military to hold even one third of the country, through to Kyiv in the initial few weeks of the full scale invasion. The military, human and economic costs to Russia of forcing through a victory in these circumstances would be unsustainable.
So I don’t buy the line that a long war suits Russia, or that Russia’s position is somehow going to be greatly improved come January 2025 and a Trump second term. All scenarios in the longer term just get worse for Russia.
That is why I think that Putin would still jump at the prospects of peace talks towards the end of this year, perhaps brokered by China - and perhaps after his meeting with Sullivan et al in Malta, perhaps that is what the Chinese foreign minister was angling after with his follow on trip to Moscow this week."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/ukraine-outlook-q-and-a
34. This was a solid episode. Always talking about timely topics in the tech and cultural businesses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS7ypWFGWOQ
35. "The Roman Empire is of course celebrated for its incredible achievements in architecture, governance, and military conquests. However, one aspect of Roman civilization that is often overlooked but really fun is their sophisticated marketing and branding work.
Yes, the Romans were not just builders and conquerors; they were also expert marketers well before ‘marketing’ was a codified practice. After all, every civilization brands itself, it is a natural byproduct of the organization of humans and the sprawling of empires."
https://www.hottakes.space/p/marketing-lessons-from-the-roman
36. This is a great geopolitical snapshot of the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF7uuxRliBU
37. Part 2 of this Geopolitical Snapshot of the world. Very interesting perspective.