A Good Death (and Life): Civil War the Movie
I think many of you all have seen the Civil War movie in 2024 by Alex Garland. It's a dystopian near future movie following a group of embedded reporters and photographers crossing America to DC as the literal modern & very violent new civil war in America winds down.
It’s chaotic and atrocity-filled which is tough to take in. As one of the soldiers in a scene says: “No one’s giving us orders, man. Someone’s trying to kill us, we’re trying to kill them.”
If you haven’t, it’s worth watching. If you haven’t and want to, there will be spoilers here.
There is that infamous scene, when they face some armed militia members at a mass burial site, one of the journalists says: “We’re American”, the militia man responds: “What kind of an American are you?” He starts threatening them, even executing their Hong Kong journalist friends until the older journalist mentor Sammy drives their truck over and runs the militia men down. It’s a pretty shocking scene.
But it’s the scene after, the montage after that really stuck with me. We find out their older mentor friend Sammy is shot while rescuing them. The scene is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YMLtx3xA4A. Sammy is bleeding out in the back, looking out at the window while they drive through a burning forest at night. The accompanying song “Breaker’s Roar” by Sturgill Simpson is just perfect. I’ve watched it like 50 times trying to process it.
I don’t know if there ever is a good death, especially from a gunshot wound. But the more I think about it, maybe this is it. Sammy died saving his friends, people he considers family. And during his last hours, he is with them. He has lived a full life and as he drives through the forest fire, you see him smiling. It’s hauntingly beautiful and he reaches out to touch all the sparks outside.
Maybe that’s all a man can ask for. Living a full life. Passing on your hard earned knowledge, protecting your friends and family. Dying while surrounded by beauty. That is not nothing.
These are the lessons I take from this movie. And also more practically, make sure you are fit, well trained and well-armed so no one messes with you!
The Future Face of War: Economic Sanctions, Proxy Wars, Cyber-Infowar, Drones & Special Forces
Most people may not know this but I’m actually a history major and have studied war and geopolitics even as a young kid. It also helps to have visited many parts of the world having been to over 70+ countries at this time. And no surprise I started investing in Defense-tech startups in 2022, after the barbaric Russian invasion of Ukraine.
So I had to do a quick ramp up on what’s happening in the military world. I really hate that we are now in a world full of armed conflicts, driven by revanchist rising powers in China-Russia-Iran-North Korea. This when there seems to be a growing weakness in America and the West at large. But it seems to be forced upon us so we better understand and prepare for it. This is a darker post than usual but here we are. It’s a much darker and more scary world we are in compared to the one we lived in before 2020.
Ukraine is the template for the future of war for the USA, as well the Iranian driven shenanigans in the Middle East with their support of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. The most recent success of Turkey in toppling Assad in Syria is the most successful example of this. I think China is watching this closely too.
No more American troops on the ground (that we know of). These will be proxy war: picking sides, preferably one with a strong military cadre and saturating them with key weaponry like infantry portable anti-tank and anti-air missiles, artillery, ammo, long range missiles or whatever is most suited to win on the battlefield. This and training like what NATO forces have been doing with the plucky Ukrainian armed forces since 2014. There will be no American troops on the ground (publicly, more on this below) as the public is weary of war after the debacle in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It will be a Cyber-Info War, using America’s advanced Satellites & Signals Intelligence & Targeting. One clear example are the decapitation operations aka Headhunting missions. Identifying and killing groups of generals & officers or major logistical targets or major concentrations of arms and weapons. This has happened continually throughout the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKhLuXh_4MM
Widespread use of drones. Even drone swarms. These are spotting technology to actual kill missions with Bayraktar TB2 & Ghost Phoenix & Switchblade 2 kamikaze drones. You really can’t hide anymore due to the incredible ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) capabilities most militaries have via drones (and satellites) and mass movement of troops will be discovered and hit with artillery.
Special Forces on the ground: You can’t tell me US SOF, CIA SAD or Polish GROM are not on the front lines. But the Ukrainian SOF has been critical in gutting Russian supply chains in Ukraine and Russia proper itself. Lots of mysterious fires happening in factories, key railway lines and arms depots on the front and in Russia itself.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dkNAcdBKFI
These measures would all be accompanied by financial Sanctions: Most of the world is still reliant on the US Dollar which is the plumbing of the world’s financial system. Many countries are also reliant on our tooling & machinery, advanced technology like microchips and general know-how. Cutting this off obviously makes sense as the more you can damage the enemy’s economy the less capable they can feed their war machine.
So why should you care? As I have said many times before, as we go into a deglobalized and multipolar world, there will sadly be more war. Some hot, some cold or more likely hybrid. But war is coming. This is the regular reminder from Trotsky “You might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”You might not like this but it does not make it less true. So it helps to know what form it will take as war will impact all of us in some way.
It’s Still A Great Time to Be Alive: Paul Han & Youtube Influencer Hustle
I’m always looking for new sources of wisdom and inspiration. Youtube has been a massive boon here. I stumbled upon a young 21 year old Korean-Canadian Youtuber named Paul Han: https://www.youtube.com/@PaulHan23. He and his older brother, who live at home with their parents, are in the process of building an ecommerce empire. He has decided to document his day to day for everyone.
He shares everything, the good and the bad and he admits he is just starting off and not quite made it yet to his goal of a 10 figure ecommerce business.
What I also like about Paul Han is that he shows everything and provides a good model for all young men. He gets up around 4 am in the morning, does the cold ice bath, listens to inspirational podcasts and interviews for motivation. He works out at the gym with his brother and then spends a few hours coordinating with his team. He reads a bit and then does 3-4 hours deep work, working on new ads, going through analytics. Chills/rests, followed by another 3-4 hours of deep work. He reads and then goes to bed, ready to do it all again the next day.
It’s inspiring and a reminder that these kinds of opportunities just did not exist when I was growing up. Entrepreneurship just wasn’t a thing back in the 90s in Canada. The internet was just coming out to the Universities. There were no examples of folks like Paul for young ambitious kids to emulate. Not that I have much to complain about at the moment, but I probably could have done with a bit more of this kind of inspiration growing up.
Now there are literally thousands of examples. There are tons of new tools and platforms to leverage. So many kinds of opportunities: ecommerce, dropshipping, selling digital courses, building an ad agency, real estate investing, commodity, crypto and stock trading. There are so many courses to take and masterminds to join so you can learn and take advantage of the multitude of opportunities out there. You are literally one search away from whatever it is you want to learn and master. The upside for an ambitious and hardworking young person is absolutely infinite.
There is much to absorb from Paul Han’s videos and shows the zeitgeist of our time. It’s the “Age of Individuals” as Tai Lopez calls it when ambitious people, young and old are able to leverage all the incredible tools available to us like Shopify, the various ad platforms on Facebook or Google or Tiktok, using the best copywriting tactics and aided by virtual assistants and AI tools. All to build a life they want. Being their own boss and incorporating goals of making money, while enjoying travel, freedom, health and fitness.
Another reminder that it’s a great time to be alive. Make sure you take advantage of all the opportunities available to craft the life you want for you and your family. The future is bright for those who are ready to do the work.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads January 5th, 2025
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” – Maya Angelou
"Black Label Logic clearly liked writing. He did it for 6 years. He published hundreds of articles and made countless podcasts.
And then he shut down and disappeared because his life got busier, he had to focus on his job, and his art wasn’t making enough money for it to be worth his time.
If you are any kind of an artist – writer, podcaster, YouTuber, creator, etc., learn from the mistake of Carl Adaugeo and his defunct blog Black Label Logic.
MONETIZE YOUR WORK. Do not be “above” making money. Do not act like selling is “bad”.
Earn a living from your art and do it virtuously. Create products and sell them at a decently high price point.
Make them so good that you can put your heart and soul into selling them. Make them so good that the customer is DELIGHTED when he buys them.
If you can do that you will stand the test of time. You will never shut down."
https://lifemathmoney.com/black-label-logic/
2. "There are several tech “strategies” we have seen successfully deployed to DoD. The first includes those creating entirely new technologies for defense use, like Anduril, which pioneers systems that require significant customer education and high R&D costs but establish deep tech moats and long-term influence over requirements. These startups must navigate a fine line of convincing the DoD to change how they operate in order to take advantage of modern technology opportunities. However, this path has the benefit of establishing a unique and defensible market position, typically resulting in the aforementioned PoRs.
Another strategy involves startups improving existing DoD technologies by reducing costs, improving usability, or expanding scalability. Companies like Apex Space and Albedo Space exemplify this strategy by refining satellite technology – satellite bus manufacturing and 10cm earth observation imagery respectively. The DoD already has access to satellite bus manufacturing technology and 10cm earth observation imagery, but the current state of the art for both technologies are extremely expensive and inefficient. While these startups avoid the need for customer education, they face the challenge of displacing entrenched vendors and risk competing primarily on price, requiring strong execution and process advantages.
The third strategy adapts private sector technologies for DoD use. For example, C3.AI developed data analytics products for the DoD, leveraging technology that had already demonstrated successfully in commercial applications. These startups focus on integration and execution moats rather than technical innovation, as their value lies in adapting existing tools to meet specific defense needs."
https://maggiegray.substack.com/p/mission-driven-metrics-a-framework
3. A true American hero here. He provides a good perspective on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnk8GQGkAjM
4. I've always enjoyed my time in Belgrade and Serbia in general. Been way too long since I've been back. Great food, nice people and amazing nightlife.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyEzseB_VSs
5. LOVE Tbilisi. Yes, some big protests going on right now against the Russian influenced government. But it's a lovely and wonderful place. Can't wait to return there soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmcIz-MhQ8g
6. Istanbul, what a grand city. The restaurant shown here Nisantsi Baskose is excellent. Been there a few times myself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5H01enlHDM
7. Always wanted to visit Bogota, and Colombia the country in general. One day. Enjoying this video series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T_LFhCYsDc
8. Frightening conversation but it's very clear China is the biggest threat to the West. And CCP have learned that the Western politicians are weak & cowardly from their haphazard approach to supporting Ukraine against Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__tFFlZKoMM
9. "If you aren’t sensing a theme here yet, let me make it explicit: China used the power of government subsidies to dominate the entire manufacturing world in 25 years. They may be smart. They may be hardworking. But the main reason they won was INSANE government subsidies that would give your favorite libertarian cold sweats.
Trump and JD Vance claim to want to bring back American manufacturing. Some of their advisors also claim to want small government. Unfortunately, this problem (imo) is ONLY solved by an extreme partnership between the government and private industry."
https://carriednointerest.substack.com/p/bringing-back-american-manufacturing
10. "The science on icy soaks is a bit murky. But you could still get something out of cold plunging—just maybe for a different reason than you think. “Lacking physiological evidence of the purported benefits, many of the positive effects associated with cold water immersion can be concluded to in part [be] due to a placebo effect,” Horan says. Meaning: If you think you’re less sore or stiff because you cold plunged, you’ll actually feel less sore and less stiff—and then you may be more likely to hit the gym and go at it again.
So the timing of your cold plunge could largely depend on what feels good for you, with the caveats being that you’ll want to let your body warm up if you’re plunging pre-workout, and you might undercut some muscular adaptations if you’re plunging after a resistance workout."
https://www.gq.com/story/cold-plunge-before-or-after-workout
11. "You have to understand – if you take entitlement and shit from people, more of it will be given to you.
Sometimes you need to show people their place. Especially people who have an air of unearned superiority who think they can say anything they want.
You need to have some a-shole in you."
https://lifemathmoney.com/sometimes-you-have-to-show-people-their-place/
12. "The reality is that, in many respects, Merkel paved the way to today’s crisis. Her advocacy for stringent austerity measures, implemented both across Europe and within Germany after the 2008 financial crisis, ushered in over a decade of stagnation and underinvestment. Her policies left Germany’s infrastructure — bridges, roads and railways — to crumble; her doubling down on Germany’s neo-mercantilist, export-driven economic model, especially during the euro crisis, stifled internal demand by compressing wages and encouraging precarious employment, while leaving the economy overly dependent on exports.
By pursuing an industrial policy that emphasised traditional manufacturing sectors — automobiles, heavy industry and mechanical parts — she left Germany lagging in the high-tech revolution. By phasing out nuclear energy, she deprived the country of a clean and cost-effective energy source. By opening the door to over a million asylum seekers, she created serious challenges in social cohesion and public safety. By embracing a paternalistic and TINA-driven approach to politics, exemplified in her concept of “market-conforming democracy”, she starved the German democratic discourse."
https://unherd.com/2024/11/angela-merkel-architect-of-german-decline/
13. "To me, this is just more schizophrenic / bi-polar market activity than any real indications of any structural issues. The Brazilian right absolutely hates Lula and is negative no matter what the reality is. Bolsonaro left the Lula government with increasing deficits, which the Lula government has actually been trying to reverse. Basically, try as I might, I can't really find anything truly wrong with Brazil, especially when measured on the same standard that other countries are. The trading action seems to come entirely down to ridiculous telenovela drama.
Buying Brazil worked out well for us in late 2022 / early 2023. I dare say it may be that time again. Any rally in EWZ should be hugely positive for Brazilian names like Vale and Braskem - names which I am now overweight - especially considering Vale is looking at big export increases in iron next year and Braskem is forecasting a return to positive FCF for 2025."
https://calvinfroedge.com/que-viva-b/
14. "Everyone goes to war with an idea of how they can win, and a few brilliant exceptions manage to pull it off. But not every campaign is France 1940. Even the best strategists face serious setbacks, and rarely end up winning precisely as they anticipated. The measure of strategic ability is not just the brilliance of the plan, but the ability to adapt to the unexpected. Older writers were correct: it is better to think of strategy as an action, not an idea."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/is-strategy-just-a-theory-of-victory
15. Russia's ongoing grey war against the west. The unfortunately effective unit at their forefront of this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt6_9m5qXdU
16. Learning about this Agentic AI thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdfxRlMpxPg
17. "The first step to recovery is to recognize that one has a problem, and in the case of the United States foreign policy elite we seem no longer able to craft a workable strategy, operationalize and execute it to reach the proclaimed objectives.
We need to ask ourselves a simple question: Why has the United States been routinely unable to win wars over the past three decades (the Desert Storm battle to dislodge Iraq from Kuwait a notable exception)—not in the sense of breaking the adversary’s military and destroying its government, but when it comes to achieving the strategic objectives we set out to accomplish? Is it that we no longer have the resources to implement what we set out to do?
Or perhaps it is that what increasingly passes for strategy is more reminiscent of a policy conversation in a self-contained echo chamber, rather than being grounded in the realities of the Darwinian ecosystem we call international relations? I submit that it is the latter, and here is why."
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/09/27/a_crisis_of_competence_1061277.html
18. Angola in play and shows the critical importance of minerals and natural resources in the new multipolar world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3b3FBvEB30
19. Always look at diversifying and it's super interesting. Watch capital flows.
This is a solid conversation on investing in the emerging markets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jU2DZiCIGE
20. I truly hope Zeihan is right here. He seems way too confident that we can replace metal and mineral processing from China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRT5MJBcd-c
21. Disturbing discussion on the surveillance and disinformation industry that operates in America and around the world. I believe probably 60-70% of this, which is frightening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrJhQpvlkLA
22. Erik Prince always gives a cold & sober assessment of geopolitical events.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqusNtLF32s
23. "Bryce Roberts of Indie VC first highlighted the trend of “one-and-done” rounds back in 2017. Back then, it was something of a rarity, but these days a considerable number of founders are intentionally pursuing that path. At a broader level, the best founders today are raising fewer rounds with less dilution and/or skipping rounds altogether.
And many VCs are struggling to come to terms with this.
Firms with mediocre returns that don’t have much of a differentiator or positioning beyond “solid, inoffensive fund that’s a good fallback if you can’t raise from a top tier VC” are struggling to raise new funds or closing up shop entirely. Many individual investors who are later in their careers or who don’t have the inclination to reinvent themselves are opting out of venture capital as a career. Others who are refusing to adapt are being managed out by their firms."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/venture-capitals-changing-of-the-guard
24. "In the year 2000, the United States and its allies in Asia, Europe, and Latin America accounted for the overwhelming majority of global industrial production, with China at just 6% even after two decades of rapid growth. Just thirty year later, UNIDO projects that China will account for 45% of all global manufacturing, singlehandedly matching or outmatching the U.S. and all of its allies.
This is a level of manufacturing dominance by a single country seen only twice before in world history — by the UK at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and by the U.S. just after World War 2. It means that in an extended war of production, there is no guarantee that the entire world united could defeat China alone.
That is a very dangerous and unstable situation. If it comes to pass, it will mean that China is basically free to start any conventional conflict it wants, without worrying that it will be ganged up on — because there will be no possible gang big enough to beat it. The only thing they’ll have to fear is nuclear weapons.
China’s leaders know this very well, of course, which is why they are unleashing a massive and unprecedented amount of industrial policy spending — in the form of cheap bank loans, tax credits, and direct subsidies — to raise production in militarily useful manufacturing industries like autos, batteries, electronics, chemicals, ships, aircraft, drones, and foundational semiconductors. This doesn’t just raise Chinese production — it also creates a flood of overcapacity that spills out into global markets and forces American, European, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese companies out of the market.
By creating overcapacity, China is forcibly deindustrializing every single one of its geopolitical rivals. Yes, this reduces profit for Chinese companies, but profit is not the goal of war.
America’s most economically important allies — Germany and Japan — are bearing the brunt of China’s most recent industrial assault.
Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now
25. "The only point of money is to improve your life, make sure you know what the plan is. House, car, whatever it is. Do not forget the point of the digits on a screen
Do not kill your health or personal life. You are allowed to catch the mania a bit, but giving up your health isn’t worth it for the extra 10% returns you “could have made”. Doesn’t make any sense and you’ll pay for it dearly on the come down during the next bear market (we don’t plan on riding that one down)
Rule #1 - No Round Numbers: On the paid side we’ve walked through tons of personal examples of when we’d recommend taking money off the table. In the free side it’s easier to explain it like this: No round numbers.
If you’re young and the number is $1M? Guess what you’ll probably hit $876,000 or something close and then we have the massive correction.
If your number is $5M? Probably you hit $4,678,923 and then suddenly a massive -70% correction. So on and so forth."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/mental-health-and-lady-luck-during
26. "The core question in this scenario is what portion of the returns in seed investing will come from the proven, repeat founders who the multi-stage funds are likely to attract. If you believe 75% or more of the future returns in seed will come from this population, there is a strong argument that the multi-stage funds will dominate seed.
The remaining alpha available to seed specialist firms is too small to support the number of seed-focused firms in the market today. I have spoken with institutional LPs who do believe multi-stage funds will capture enough of the alpha in seed to obviate the need to focus on dedicated seed-only managers. I would not describe this as a consensus opinion, but it is one that I’ve heard enough times to know that it is a view held by some who allocate capital to private equity and venture. I do not think that 75% of the best opportunities in seed will come from that pool of founders, but I also believe proven, repeat founders will make a meaningful contribution to overall seed returns.
I have spoken to many smaller, sub $200 million fund managers with strong opinions about how good multi-stage funds will be at seed investing. While we can argue about how successful these larger firms will be, there is no argument about whether they will be run; LPs have already voted with their dollars, and this will happen."
https://chudson.substack.com/p/three-future-states-of-the-early
27. "I have my own three-pronged theory about why crypto is one of the fastest-growing networks in human history.
Government Capture – Big business, big tech, big pharma, big military, and big [Fill in the Blank] have used their wealth and power to capture most large governments and economic blocs. While the standard of living and lifespan gains have been rapid and consistent since the end of WW2, they have slowed for the 90% of the population that owns very few financial assets and ultimately possesses little to no political agency. Decentralization is the antidote to a dystopian concentration of wealth and power.
Magical Tech – The Bitcoin blockchain and the plethora of blockchains that spawned in its wake are pieces of magical new technology. From an innocuous beginning, Bitcoin, at least, has proven to be one of the most battle-tested monetary systems. There is an almost $2 trillion bug bounty in the form of Bitcoins that can be double-spent for anyone who can hack the network.
Greed – The rise of the fiat and energy value of cryptos that power blockchains or the tokens created via these blockchains made users rich. The riches of the crypto cohort were on display this November during the US election. The US, like most other nation-states, features a pay-for-play political system. The crypto banditos were one of the largest contributors to political candidates of any industry, which resulted in wins for pro-crypto candidates. Crypto voters were able to shower largesse upon political campaigns because Bitcoin is the fastest-growing asset in human history."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/the-cure
28. Always a good episode on what’s up in cultural businesses and tech at the edge of the internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxluK76HuEE&t=55s
29. Ed Sims and Boldstart VC has crushed it at seed stage. They know and choose the specific game they want to play (inception rounds), and not try to be something they aren't. Something we can all learn from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSPpQFEmHX8
30. Hard truth: China has always been an aggressive, expansive power since the beginning of their history. We the West are in Cold War 2 with the CCP.
Great discussion with someone who actually understands China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR8kn92HNRc
31. "To summarize: These things are important for defense applications, especially electronic warfare and communications. Perhaps China is cutting us off from them to show force, leverage in future negotiations, or because they rightly want to kneecap us the way we kneecap them. It’s a move that we should respect and should have expected.
Additionally, although we're not going to run out tomorrow, we need to get ready and it’s frankly a little surprising to me that we’re not already moving forward on initiatives to start Gallium mining. Maybe there are and it’s not public, but I am skeptical.
We should take this whole thing as a “learning moment”: Free trade is a national security risk when you’re obtaining a critical component from your adversaries. Overregulation killed an industry, one of many, and we now have to make the right decisions, not just for Gallium, for America’s industrial and mining base as a whole."
https://www.glinert.co/p/china-just-kicked-us-in-the-shins
32. Some good investigative work here. Definitely Ukrainian & Turkish intelligence and special ops involved here in Syria.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCGEWrgX54c
33. Jeff Bezos, some of the clearest thinking and communications around. "We are in multiple golden ages at once"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s71nJQqzYRQ&t=4s
34. "Unlike the classic apex predator, which evolves alongside its prey, a nonnative apex predator arrives with such disruptive force that instead of dominating an ecosystem they transform it. Legacy media looks like Florida 30 years after the arrival of the Burmese python. A nonnative apex predator (digital) is out-hunting and out-reproducing the previous apex predator (legacy media).
An apex predator released into the wild has reproduced asexually, doesn’t need distribution partners, and is devouring the ecosystem. Since launching its original content business in 2012, Netflix’s market cap has increased 7,337%. This means the industry is booming for all involved, no? The dominant means of production for scripted television is Netflix, which has flexed this muscle to reshape the flows of value. Specifically, it has reduced production costs, while massively investing to create an explosion in the amount of content, transferring value from all parts of the ecosystem to the company’s shareholders and subscribers. If you live in L.A., you’ve likely given 4 stars to a former producer of a reality-TV series.
There are 180,000 members of SAG-AFTRA, and last year 86% of them didn’t qualify for health insurance, as they made less than $26k. Constant reminders from CNBC re the market touching new highs masks a deeper issue: As in the future described by William Gibson, the future/prosperity of media is here, just not evenly distributed. AI, Netflix, and the Big Tech platforms are eating everything, and they have few, if any, predators. The deer and alligators (industry workers) have no means of defense, because they’ve never encountered this species/technology before. The result is an atmosphere of anxiety and fear. These emotions are common sense."
https://www.profgalloway.com/media-consolidation/
35. Enjoyed this week's episode with two special guests: Joe Lonsdale & Gavin Baker. Heartened by the convo on AI, Defensetech and rare earths. But we got a lot of work to do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2xfW3hgxb4
36. "While it’s popular to say, “Follow your passion,” it’s better for potential entrepreneurs to develop an eye for how the world is evolving. Becoming a student of what’s changing and why will lead to opportunities."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/12/07/the-unknown-entrepreneur-arc/
37. What an interview. Javier Milei, responsible for the turnaround of Argentina. The battle needs to be fought at both the economic and cultural level. Some lessons to be learned here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NLzc9kobDk
38. An excellent discussion with one of the top VC investors in Europe with an incredible investing track record. Valuable conversation on the art of venture investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9MK3n9m7SM
39. Quite an interesting conversation on how and what Western analysts got wrong on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Full Benefit: Embrace Challenges
I learned this term “Full Benefit” from some ex-Navy SEAL friends a while ago but had forgotten it. It got resurfaced on Linkedin by Teddy Mitrosilis and it was an excellent reminder. Here it is below.
“Navy SEALs have a saying.
When something sucks, they say:
"FULL BENEFIT"
It’s an instant mindset shift.
• Lose an important customer?
• Hiking and it starts pouring rain?
• Driving and your car breaks down?
• Working on a project and lost a draft?
• Didn't get the job opportunity you want?
Full Benefit.
***
Lesson: Adversity is an opportunity
The message is simple.
Every adversity is an opportunity.
• To grow
• To learn
• To evolve
• To get stronger
• To become better
These moments forge us if we let them.
The next time you're facing something hard, welcome it.
Work through the process.
Learn the lessons.
Reap the full benefit.”
No wonder the Navy SEALS are so bad ass.
Man, I so wish I had understood this earlier in my life and career. I wish everyone heard and understood this. The world would not be the disastrous mess it is now. But alas, better late than never. So remember, when you meet the inevitable challenge or problem in life, just say to yourself “Full benefit” and reset your mindset to tackle it head on.
Kingdom of Heaven: Our Own Personal Crusade to Find Purpose and Do Right
Kingdom of Heaven is one of the best periodic movies to come out by the always excellent Ridley Scott. It takes place during the Middle Ages across Europe to the Far East right before the 3rd Great crusade. It’s an amazing story of bravery, treachery, honor, duty and war in exotic lands at a grand scale.
Focused around the true life character of Balian of Ibelin, a true knight and exemplar of Chivalry who ends up defending Jerusalem against the noble Muslim knight Saladin and his grand army. He becomes the key man and leader of the Christians.
He has trouble when he first arrives in the near East, he faces off against a Muslim cavalier and is forced to fight and kill him. He ends up capturing his servant but releases him as he will ‘not suffer to have a slave’ even though it’s his right.
Balian is told by the man: “Your qualities will be known among your enemies wherever you meet them.”
The irony is that this servant was apparently a great lord among the Muslims whose army he unknowingly fights and loses to in the future. Captured and expecting to be executed, Balian is released with the answer:
“You reap what you sow. You have heard of this, no?”
Karma. Love it. And life in the long run you do see this happen. If you do good, it will come back to you in some form. It’s certainly something I’ve seen in the last 25 years of my career. Try to treat all people well. You really never know.
Balian is an honorable character. He is noble, he always tries to do the right thing. But he questions whether he is in God’s Grace because he had killed men before. And his friend, Hospitaller monk and knight answers him:
“Holiness is in right action. And courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves. And goodness, what God desires is here (points to head) and here (points to heart) and what you decide to do everyday, you will be a good man. Or not.”
I think there is a great lesson here. Most bad and evil done in the world is not from Ill intent but from cowardice. Or doing the expedient thing. Doing the right thing is hard. It’s supposed to be. But you can do right in small ways, every single day as you find your purpose in life. As was said in the movie: “If God does not love you, how could you have done all the things you have done.”
A 2024 Recap & Retrospective: Still in the Middle of the Storm
What a rough year. But we made it. And as always I try to take stock of the year and squeeze whatever learnings I can. So like last year, doing my 2024 recap.
Business and Personal Finance: Give it a B-. On the business side, only did a few investments as LP and few defense-tech/ manufacturing tech related deals. Spent most of the year rethinking/reformating my entire investment strategy and thesis. Did not help that much of our Holding Co cash and attention has been on getting regulatory approval. Thankfully we have some strong foundations in place for the next few years.
On the personal side, far too many accounts receivables. Cash flow was a mess and my cost structure literally was out of control. Again. Had some big projects fall through due to numerous reasons but this is still on me. I need to be way more conservative on my cash flow projections. But as a wise man once told me, if you aren’t close to bankruptcy every 5 years you aren’t pushing hard enough. Thankfully, I have reserves and some accounts payables finally came through the last 2-3 weeks of December.
Travel: No real grade. Did not make it to Japan, Albania, Ukraine or Taiwan this year, which is a shame and part of my longer term vision. So will rectify this in 2025.
Spent more time with my parents in Canada which was good. Lesson from Codie Sanchez is to think not in years but in times. How many times will you see them? I will be going back to Vancouver often in 2025.
But this year was still busy.
Saudi Arabia: 2X
Thailand: 1X
Canada: 4X
Poland: 1X
Georgia: 4X
United Arab Emirates: 2X
Hungary: 1X
Azerbaijan: 2X
Australia: 1X
Germany: 1X
Czech Republic: 2X
Bosnia Herzegovina: 1X
I went to New York City a few times this year which was great. Also visited Detroit and Chicago for the first time and I will be back there. I really need to explore more of the USA & Canada.
Health: It’s an A-. Did Muay Thai training in Phuket at this really nice resort training center that had all the fixings, amazing gym, personal coaches, Muay Thai ring, sauna & Onsen center and sports clinic. It was incredible.
I now have my in person personal trainer and virtual personal trainer that I’ve been using for this last year. The accountability has been amazing and I feel fitter and stronger than I have been in decades. I’ve also not traveled as much as I did in 2023. That helps with some routine at home. I tend to take short afternoon naps and sleep better at night overall. Thank you ZMA supplements.
Family & Relationships: Still pretty bad, but better. So give it C-. Yet as Charlie Munger says: “Self pity has no utility.” I’m a grinder and never quit on stuff that is important.
So still lots of therapy happening for all of us. But at least we are talking now. Home life is still a bit uncomfortable at times but it’s civil now at least. We all have some Modus Operandi around the house.
I can tolerate more pain, handle my rage issues better due to my regular fitness training and just being better rested ie. good sleep. I keep reminding myself of Ernest Shackleton’s motto: “Through endurance we conquer!”
Personal Development: Give myself a B+. Tied into my business and investing especially as I’ve focused more on geopolitics, global macro, military stuff for my new investing thesis.
I’ve been much more disciplined & systematic about learning, doing at least 1-2 hours of listening to podcasting, writing and reading online. I read twice as many books this year than in 2023. My focus for 2025 is reading a lot more books. Physical books. Consistently too is the plan. I bought so many books this year (like hundreds). Now I need to start reading them.
I have spent too much time in Europe. However, the world has changed so starting in 2025, I will be focusing more time in Japan (and probably Taiwan), my so-called pivot to Asia.
But also more focus in America, whether in Texas, New York or the industrial heartlands of the midwest.
I will make exceptions for defense-tech or manufacturing conferences as I am still in learning mode. These wherever they are or in places like Ukraine, Baltics or Albania, but otherwise will limit my time now in Europe as much as I love that region.
But again, I am grateful for surviving mentally and making it through the year. Grateful for the learning. Grateful for my health. And feeling the major positive vibe shift that came in the USA mid-November. A confidence that seems to have grown in Silicon Valley and the rest of America.
I have a clear plan for next year. Now, it’s just plain discipline and hard execution. Leveraging the principle of Kaizen, making small but regular incremental improvements over time. As the philosopher Khalil Gibran wrote: “Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing towards what will be.” Happy new year everyone. Let’s make 2025 amazing.
Preparing for War: It’s Gonna Be Nutty Out There (Your Regular Reminder)
Many folks know I’ve been a prepper for a while. I was even written as part of that 2016 New Yorker profile on Preppers of Silicon Valley. Unfortunately I think my views have been proven right. The world has only gotten disordered.
A Unipolar world of an American led West shifting fast to a multipolar one, with the Global South asserting themselves and the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea are engaging in hybrid war against us. Complex global supply chains breaking down.
The gap between wealthy & poor is only increasing. In the meantime we are seeing a breakdown of law and order due to desperation of some people. Aided and abetted by stupid progressive left pro-crime policies as they gut police forces mainly in most blue states (thank you Alexander Soros and Dustin Moskowitz, billionaires who push damaging policies in cities they don’t live in). Driven by insane ultra leftwing ideology. Our institutions are rotted from within as DEI initiatives have driven out competence.
We can sit and take it. Or we can do something about it. You have to prepare for the hybrid war happening against us.
That means you have to be independent of thought. And the only way you can do so is controlling your media diet and education.
You also have to be able to speak up when you see stupidity and evil. To do this you have to be financially independent. It’s hard to speak up when you are dependent on a job.
You have to have multiple streams of income, cash and cold and lots of invested assets you can draw from in different geographic locations. Able to fight back against “cancel culture” or fight back against Law-fare. This is one of the scariest things I see. Lawfare is the use of the legal system to shut someone down through fake accusations like Amber Heard did to Johnny Depp or Bryan Johnson’s fiancé did to him. War is not cheap.
You have to have a personal brand, strong relationships and a good reputation to draw from. Credibility and influence is power. You also need anti-censorship platforms to leverage like X or Rumble. The mainstream medias like Television, Newspapers, YouTube, FB & Instagram are all risk adverse and actively censors people and messages that go against mainstream narratives.
Going back to my prepper interests, probably also a good idea to have a small garden or even better agricultural land. And like the Mormons, at minimum, have a stockpile of canned goods, barrels of drinkable water and other useful supplies in case there are more supply chain issues. Unlike Mormons, you should also stockpile some weapons and bullets for protecting yourself and your supplies.
Last and equally as important, you need to be in good health and physically strong. I invested in a personal trainer that is getting me very fit. I actually did trips to MMA fight camp in Thailand. I will do more of them in 2025.
You should also get some training in martial arts and learn how to properly use a gun, whether pistol, shotgun or rifle. I’ve signed up for training in tactical shooting and CQB (Close Quarter Battle) from Sheepdog Response in 2025.
Remember, that many of the ancient Greek and Roman learned men like Socrates or Pliny the Elder were soldiers and more than competent fighters. Sometimes You have to be able to back up your words with physical strength and skill.
All these initiatives are confidence building and have enriched my overall life well. More importantly, it helps prepare me to ride out the ongoing craziness in the world. And better able to help those around me. Like it or not, War is here so it’s time to get FIT.
Happy NEW YEAR!!
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads December 29th, 2024
“Your most important work is always ahead of you, never behind you.” – Stephen Covey
"Recognizing the importance of timeliness, thoughtfulness, enthusiasm, effort, and consistent communication can significantly strengthen these relationships. Entrepreneurs would do well to evaluate their current level of interaction and look for opportunities to enhance or improve it."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/11/23/the-quality-of-entrepreneur-interactions/
2. "By the early 12th century, Georgia stood at a crossroads. For nearly a century, the Caucasus had been a battleground in the Seljuk Wars, a protracted and brutal conflict between the Christian kingdoms of Byzantium, Georgia, Armenia, and Outremer and the expansive Seljuk Empire. The Seljuks, masters of a vast domain stretching from Bukhara to Baghdad, sought to tighten their grip on the strategically critical Caucasus region.
The Georgians, despite enduring years of devastation, retained an unbroken spirit. Under the leadership of King David IV, known to history as David the Builder, Georgia mounted a resistance that would culminate in one of the most stunning military triumphs of the medieval era: the Battle of Didgori.
This clash, fought on August 12, 1121, has been immortalized in Georgian memory as a miraculous victory against overwhelming odds. For David, the battle was not merely about survival but about reclaiming Georgia’s sovereignty and ensuring its place as a bastion of Christian power and culture in a tumultuous region."
https://varangianchronicler.substack.com/p/wolves-of-kartli
3. "F1 has long had large and rabid fan bases in Europe and South America, but that enthusiasm didn’t land on U.S. shores until 2017, when Liberty Media bought a controlling interest in the league. Under new boss Greg Maffei, F1 took a big swing at America. Targeting young people, Maffei and the F1 Team built an iconic brand, in the most competitive market, in less than a decade. There were races with celebrities in attendance — Tom Cruise, LeBron James, Rihanna — new sponsorships, and an aggressive social media presence.
However, Liberty’s gangster move was the Netflix docuseries Drive to Survive. Now in its sixth season, the show is rewriting the playbook re how sports leagues market themselves. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at “a lot of young, good-looking guys,” as Maffei once told CNBC, hard-charging billionaire team owners, and high-tech pit crews competing in a series of überluxe international locations. (F1 wasn’t the first to try this; the NFL’s Hard Knockspremiered on HBO back in 2001.)
By focusing on individuals and harnessing the power of storytelling, Drive to Survive used streaming to introduce U.S. viewers to drivers who were superstars overseas, among them Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen. It gave newbie (read: American) fans a compelling point of entry and became a fount of bingeable video that was easily shared, particularly on Instagram. There are accounts devoted to what Hamilton wears as he walks on red carpets.
Tribal rivalries, betrayal, greed, revenge — all the stuff humans are hardwired to love in a lustrous package every week. Champions muse about “having a target on my back.” Young guns talk about “being hungry.” Everybody obsesses about forces beyond their control. Shakespeare knew this turf pretty well — Marcus Aurelius would have felt at home. The song remains the same; the actual game being played is unimportant.
The results: Liberty paid $4.6 billion for F1; it now has a market cap of about $22 billion. In 2023, F1 generated about $3.2 billion in revenue, up from $2.6 the year before, most of it from promotional deals with host cities, media rights, and team sponsorships."
https://www.profgalloway.com/f1-is-at-an-inflection-point/
4. "That same feeling of inquisitive frustration was peaked by something I tweeted this week. An exceptional question that Tyler Hogge asked Marc Andreessen. A similar complicated multi-variate problem is "which part of the startup value chain is the constraint preventing us from 10x'ing the number of exceptional startups?"
First, what is an exceptional startup? At one point, Theranos, WeWork, Hopin, and FTX would have been considered exceptional startups. Do we want more of those? I think there is a mix of outcomes we want. We want more small business, even if they're lifestyle businesses. But we especially want more large outcomes that push human progress forward.
Second, what are we trying to unlock? Why do we want 10x the number of great startups? There is so much animosity against ambition, progress, technology as an industry. But the reality is that the protests of people who hate Elon Musk or hate technology is a privilege that, in large part, is enabled by (1) democratic freedoms that America affords, and (2) privilege engendered by the progress of the same technology those people now hate. But despite those protests, progress is good. And I desperately want more of it.
Finally, third, what is the bottleneck? What is the constraint that, if addressed, could unlock 10x more of what we're trying to unlock from question 2?"
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/the-levers-of-innovation
5. Important discussion on the rise of massive VC funds. This is critical for founders to understand.
Are you working with a 2% fund or 20% fund: incentives matter. Worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqT014gNssU
6. "The distortions to credit, money, asset prices, and the economy that arose under the non-system cannot be unwound quickly. A rapid reversal could probably only be accomplished via deflation and depression or, alternatively, a hyperinflation—events that would bring huge socioeconomic disruption and likely political dislocations. To prevent such an outcome, governments will increasingly see their role as managing the wealth of the nation to ensure that the imbalances of the non-system are unwound gradually.
This greater government action will make it very difficult for savers to preserve the purchasing power of their wealth. For those who wish to attempt to do so, it is time to take the radical step of preparing to benefit from a fixed-asset investment boom in the United States and across the “friend-shoring” world, which is the antithesis of what has come before.
Few investors can correctly anticipate future returns. In a time of structural change, many investors, however, do not even begin by asking the right questions to assess likely future returns. Today, the key question is whether China is already moving away from its managed exchange rate regime and thus destroying the current international monetary system. Those who ask that question have a radically different outlook for the future of credit, money, asset prices, and the economy."
7. This is a great look into a top investor’s mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLIFDNlWGCU
8. "Things may have changed considerably since the time of Xanthippus. Still, one thing has remained the same: even in our modern world of digital transactions, strict reporting, and ‘Know Your Customer’ laws, paying very little or no tax is not only possible, but easier to achieve than you might think.
And it won’t require dedicating all your assets to a Greek god, either.
The only main caveat? You can’t be an employee in order to achieve zero tax.
If you’re employed by someone else, the avenues to reduce what you have to pay to the state are almost non-existent. This is because, by default, your taxes will usually be taken from your paycheck and sent to the government before it ever hits your bank account."
https://anticitizen.com/p/death-and-taxes
9. "Gold is a small part of my portfolio, but that’s all I need. The bet is asymmetric. I’ve acquired gold passively over time, dollar-cost averaging into my position without ever putting a disruptively large portion of my net worth at stake. It’s a long game, not a sprint.
In a way, it’s like how I approach combat sports. Fighting has never been a primary focus of mine, but I’ve consistently invested a small amount of energy into it over the years. The results have compounded. The skill has become part of me, though it’s rarely useful. And yet, possessing it carries no downside.
Much like gold, fighting is an asset of low utility most of the time. It’s done very little for me compared to other skills like reading or writing. Over the years, there have been almost no occasions where I’ve needed to defend myself physically. Almost.
But in that rare, Black Swan event—the one-in-a-decade moment where you need it—the value of the skill skyrockets. That’s asymmetry: a small investment, low carrying cost, and an outsized return when you least expect it."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/id-rather-be-caught-with-it-than
10. Off season travel can be fun and more bang for your buck. Good list of European cities in Winter.
https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/best-european-cities-to-visit-in-winter
11. Expect this hidden covert war in Africa to continue over the next few decades. China, Russia, USA, France and UAE all have major interests there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4U0mRt64c4
12. This is a geopolitical conversation that goes very tinfoil hat. So bizarre if not entertaining.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8cBPbszHto
13. "These are the rules of the game, and they’re non-negotiable. In the Startup Hunger Games, it’s not luck that gets you out alive—it’s these principles in action. So ask yourself: Is my team strong enough? Am I agile enough? Do I have control of the numbers?
Most of you are showing up with a slingshot while someone else built a flamethrower.
In this arena, the odds are against you.
By default, you won’t survive."
https://2lr.substack.com/p/startup-hunger-games
14. Some more tin foil hat conspiracies and global macro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ1ajvAWAC4
15. "That is why I would say that a reputation is more aligned with the goal of building a firm. A firm is a long-term goal, not a short-term goal. A reputation is built over years. A personal brand is built through virality and can be built within days or weeks - that might not always be the case, but a reputation is never built over days."
https://embracingemergence.beehiiv.com/p/building-a-reputation-not-a-brand
16. Super valuable for founders.
https://kellblog.com/2024/11/24/five-success-principles-for-startup-founders/
17. "What we are looking at, in other words, is a complete shift of the balance of power in Eastern Europe. In the short term, Poland and the Baltics will have no choice but to pick up slack and assume a stronger position in Europe than they have in memory, as they stare down the barrel of a Russia that will only be further emboldened by a de facto triumph in Ukraine and the weakening of the American security blanket in Europe.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is facing its worst-case scenario, with the spigot of U.S. support likely to turn itself off—forcing Europe to take the reins of Ukraine’s, and its own, defense for the first time in generations."
https://www.persuasion.community/p/eastern-europe-is-in-the-crosshairs
18. Europe is not well set up for the new world of war (hybrid or kinetic).
“NATO is a defensive military alliance that thinks in terms of peacetime and wartime,” General Thierry Burkhard, France’s chief of the defense staff, told the French newspaper Le Figaro earlier this month. NATO’s tools simply aren’t designed for the gray zone in “the world of competition and contestation.”
19. "There's another reason these liquid paths are in high demand. Sure, competing for a McKinsey job isn't easy, but everything from recruiting to promotions is structured and streamlined. Job seekers and employers are cushioned from uncertainty and ambiguity in a way that only becomes obvious when you consider the counterfactual. Moreover, one can also more reliably predict future income and gain psychological security (or at least perceived security) around one’s career trajectory.
Given these hidden benefits, you'd expect these paths to be crowded. That’s one argument in favor of pursuing non linear, illiquid paths instead. You should expect “alpha” in these paths precisely because lots of smart, conscientious people are terrified of uncertainty. Maybe you can afford to be less of those things if you're willing to be brave?
In financial markets, illiquid assets often command a premium - investors accept lower liquidity for the prospect of higher returns. I can't prove empirically that this is replicated in human capital markets but that's a reasonable prior."
https://www.optimaloutliers.com/p/liquid-vs-illiquid-careers
20. "This and similar adventures by Moscow in the post-Soviet space do not bode well, from a Ukrainian standpoint, for negotiations with the Kremlin. Ukrainians, as well as other nations and ethnicities of the former Tsarist and Soviet empires, have, over the centuries, accumulated many bitter experiences with Russian imperialism, which is—once again—Moscow’s barely disguised ideology.
These historical lessons advise not only Kyiv but also Helsinki, Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Warsaw, or Prague that Ukraine must reach, at least, partial victory before entering meaningful negotiations with Russia. Only when facing military disaster will Moscow engage in a genuine search for a diplomatic solution that may be acceptable to Kyiv and have the potential to hold."
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-diplomacy-can%E2%80%99t-end-ukraine-war-209268
21. Such a great convo if you want to understand the Defense-tech drone space. These guys know what they are talking about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nelwxvDCUks
22. "Finally, remember that while covenants are black-and-white tests, what to do when they’re breached is not. The debt provider has a lot of different cards to play, and the vast majority of debt providers are not in the “loan to own” business, so they have no desire to take control of your company. The cards they choose to play will be not only a function of the business situation, but of existing relationships and people.
Which is why I always say that your CFO should be the customer testimonial on your debt provider’s homepage. Who wants to call that loan?"
23. A very fascinating conversation with Marc Andreessen of A16Z. So many interesting takes on American culture, government and regulations & the incoming Trump admin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye8MOfxD5nU
24. "Between them, Sony and Kadokawa already control ten anime studios that together produce roughly a third of Japan’s annual anime output, but they currently work with many other companies. A merger could shut out these rivals, resulting in even longer wait times to bring non-Sony-Kadokawa series to screens. Anime News Network, itself a Kadokawa subsidiary, is cheerily predicting this will result in “less anime in the future, but of better quality,” but the reality is that it would take several multi-year production cycles to really assess the impact on Japan’s content machine.
One thing is for certain: if the merger happens, it might mean a more corporate approach to anime-making going forward. Both Sony and Kadokawa are publicly traded firms, but many of Japan’s content megahouses – Shueisha, Kodansha, and Shogakukan, among them -- are family owned. This is a unique feature of the Japanese entertainment landscape. In his recent (Japanese language) book All About the Manga Business, industry veteran Takeshi Kikuchi argues that privately-held companies are key to the growth of manga (and by extension anime), for they are not beholden to shareholders to deliver immediate growth, and can take a longer-term view towards nurturing talent."
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/clash-of-the-titans
25. This is not good for the UK. British ag stuck between rock and hard place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZLC8LcCaB8
26. "Ghosting refers to a sudden ending of active communication without any apparent warning or explanation. If you had an ongoing back-and-forth email thread with someone and they suddenly stop replying, that’s ghosting. And it’s unequivocally not culturally acceptable. Anywhere.
But what if you reach out to someone with a brand new request?
In Silicon Valley, it is culturally acceptable to not respond to such an email as a form of “no” (even if you know the person)."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/in-silicon-valley-no-answer-is-an-answer
27. Another excellent episode on what’s up in tech. BG2, the best show online right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7bJtS7koQM
28. Incredible breakdown of Microstrategy's brilliant BTC strategy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFUIhJ9ntlI
29. "When hegemony is broken, conflict returns. At worst, the strong take what they can and the weak suffer what they must. At best, innovation returns. When there is no dominant power to ensure peace, there is also no bureaucracy to ensure stagnation. No global hall monitor. The same environment that produced Sparta and Athens––one of iteration and competition––is allowed to flourish.
Hegemony brings peace, competition brings innovation.
If America slips from total hegemon to standard first power, we’ll see a much more dynamic global environment. Ideally, the US will rise to the challenge and become more competitive as well. Decentralized currency means small network states can operate with a globally valid currency––no confederate dollars. Startup founders are now using LLMs to run companies with 2 people instead of 20. The same may be true of countries."
https://americanreformer.org/2024/06/rise-of-the-dutch-republics/
30. Incredible track record but now focusing on defense-tech here.
Europe has a steep curve to overcome to get themselves technology and defense industry sovereign.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtcCqAr6Z7o
31. Really sharp kid here. Mach Industries is on the forefront of this wave of defense-related startups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5l-VLzpT1M&t=1411s
32. Good stuff to know!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqR_fDGTAUw&t=229s
33. A deep conversation with one of the most unique, curious and original thinkers & investors in Silicon Valley. So many great insights here. "Embrace random."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQ_myzmV_Q
34. "Smaller engineering teams can build more comprehensive software products faster and cheaper. Companies like Linear get to tens of millions in ARR with only tens of employees.
The positive consequence is that specific opportunities requiring considerable software development investments before getting to market will be easier to seize. The negative is that other markets will become increasingly competitive.
Beyond “pure software” opportunity and, as we wrote in this blog published earlier this year, we (and many others) now believe that specific repetitive tasks humans perform will be partially or fully automated through LLMs.
People are attacking this opportunity by building AI-first service businesses from the ground up or buying, merging, and automating existing businesses.
I heard of multiple roll-ups in accounting, healthcare, and customer service on both coasts of the US (none in Europe). Another exciting thing I encountered was a prominent film production company raising money to train a foundation model on their film archives."
https://medium.com/point-nine-news/some-thoughts-on-software-1c43db57c40f
35. The best conversation on the "innards of Silicon Valley"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2E-V6Boguo
36. Love this conversation. Making competence & results in government important again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GIjx0_8yXk
37. Good insights into Poland and its growing geopolitical & military heft. Makes sense as they are the next target of Russia after Ukraine.
Russia has partitioned Poland many times in the past history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5kMsKWSIf4
38. "In the early days, throwaway comments might not seem like a big deal. But as the company scales, founders need to be deliberate in communicating their ideas and recommendations, ensuring their intentions are understood. A clear distinction between casual brainstorming and actionable directives helps the team prioritize effectively and avoid wasted effort."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/11/30/beware-of-throwaway-comments-as-a-founder/
Surviving the Storm: A Rough Couple of Years
It’s winter break and I have had some time for reflection. Which brings me to this passage from Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore” that caught my attention (h/t to Dylan O’Sullivan for surfacing this):
“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
My god, what a rough couple of years. Lots of ups and downs. Personal, family, national and geopolitically. But here we stand. Shifting to the wind and water that bash us around. I don’t think we are out of the storm yet but remember the Charles Darwin quote: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change”
This storm will end sometime and most of us will be better off having gone through it, as painful as it has been. And I think for most of us, while we are banged up physically and emotionally, we are definitely stronger, smarter and hopefully wiser.
Coming Home: Men and Emotions
I recall this hilarious but insightful comedic series called Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy:
“It takes a big man to cry, it takes an even bigger man to laugh at that man.” I still laugh about this when I read it. It’s also a signal that at that time, men weren’t supposed to show emotion. It’s definitely outdated now.
Being a tough guy meant you kept a stiff upper lip and kept all your emotions bottled up inside. Well, most emotions except anger. Or maybe that was my take growing up. Unfortunately Asian immigrant families reflect this. They are pretty cold culturally. The rage is real though.
What I’ve learned is that bottling up your emotions, especially negative ones, only causes them to come out in very unexpected and disruptive ways later. I would even say explosively. You can never hide from it, you just postpone it. Sometimes for years or decades in my case.
I’ve been able to transmute much of this into my career, business and fitness. These activities take the edge off it. But learning to let it out is pretty critical.
I remember when I was moving to Taiwan in January of 1997. It was after a lovely Christmas at home with my parents. I was 23 years old. My father took me to the airport and while at the airport I literally cried my eyes out. Very publicly. Also very uncharacteristically I would say.
But looking back at that moment, I think I sensed that I would never be the same. Things would never be the same and there was no coming home. I was moving away and saying goodbye to my childhood, my friends and most importantly my family.
I would gain new eyes and experiences and I wasn’t sure where it would lead me. It was part fear of the unknown and excitement for a new future. It was also grief. I needed to grieve for my old self and old life to open up space for the new one.
What an adventure it has been since then. I transited through Tokyo Narita where I spent a whole night at the bar hanging out with my dear friend Michiko. Catching up and talking about life. It was such a fun night. And then my flight and the entry into my amazing life in Taiwan that next day. I vividly remember these moments in my life. Sadness and pain usually and eventually leads to personal growth & joy.
So my point is don’t be afraid of your emotions. Don’t suppress them. They are signals. Examine them. Embrace them and don’t be afraid of expressing them. Emotions are a tool and guide to a better life and decisions. Learn to use it.
Random Stories From Backpacking in Prague: The Kindness of Strangers
I’ve always been wary of people. Especially as an immigrant kid in Vancouver who never quite fit in. Remember that Canada during the 70-80s was not overrun with Asians like it is now. I grew up being called “Mr Kung Fu man”.
Sure I was friendly and social and hung out with everyone. But I had so many interests that were seen as weird or uncool. Collecting and reading lots of books, especially history/sci-fi & westerns, loving Japanime and comic books. I was kind of a geek and hated most sports except for the martial arts I took. So I think many people were surprised that I ended up doing a long backpack trip after graduating from University.
I spent half a year traveling through Europe and used Prague as a base for 2 months while I explored the region. I took this wariness on people with me on the trip. Especially after I got attacked by some neo-Nazi skinhead locals. That knocked the Canadian naivety out of me.
But in reflection, overall I had great experiences with people during that trip. Especially on that first leg in Prague. Many of them were super random.
There was an European expat guy I met on flight, who kindly drove me from the airport to the subway station because he knew I had no money.
There was the Chinese mother and daughter living in Prague who saw me by myself in the park and invited me over for a home cooked dinner and showed me around the city. This became a very regular occurrence during my entire time there.
There was a group of 5 older and much bigger Australian guys who took me under their wing after they heard of the skinhead attack on me. They were protective of me for the 2 weeks we hung out and it was especially meaningful to me as I was feeling quite unsafe at that time. We had a great time hanging out, drinking, partying and camping in the forests of the Czech Republic. Maybe this is why I like Aussies so much to this day.
Or the night me and a few other residents ended up consoling a fellow backpacker, a young Indian American girl who had her family heirloom and stuff stolen by a fellow backpacker. We took her for drinks and food and stayed up late talking with her and trying to make her feel better.
I’ve experienced countless little and not so little kindnesses by people during my time there and since then too.
It’s interesting how quickly bonds and tribes form, even in a nebulous community of foreign backpackers in a youth hostel. People are social creatures. We are hardwired for this.
And what I found is that most people are good and want to do good. I’ve traveled all over the world in the 28+ years since then and this experience seems to hold true in most places, situations, organizations and countries I’ve been in. This gives me hope in our world and future.
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"
Elemental: Family, Duty and Sacrifice
I was assigned to watch Disney Pixar’s “Elemental” animated movie by our family therapist as I was trying to salvage the trainwreck of my marriage and family life. I honestly was wondering why the heck?
But I am glad I did watch it. Like all Pixar movies, it’s beautifully written and based on Director Peter Sohn’s experience growing up as a son of immigrants in New York City. In a city where fire, water, land, and air residents live together, a fiery young woman and a go-with-the-flow guy discover something elemental: how much they actually have in common. It deals with ethnic xenophobia and the immigrant experience, cross generational conflict as well as cross ethnic relationships. It’s a wonderful story with some dark undertones.
Ember the fire resident is set to inherit her fathers store but cannot control her temper (kind of like me). But she must, if she wants to take over the store, as this is her fathers dream. Like many immigrant parents, they sacrificed everything to start over and give their children better lives. And this weight of responsibility falls very heavily on the next generation.
Ember says in a moment of weakness: “I don’t think I do want to run the shop. Okay? That’s what my temper has been trying to tell me. I’m trapped. Do you know what’s crazy? Even when I was a kid, I would pray to the blue flame to be good enough to fill my father’s shoes one day.
But I never asked what I wanted to do. Deep down I knew it didn’t matter. Because the only way to repay a sacrifice so big is by sacrificing your life too.”
But in the end, she admits her true feelings to her dad, who responds rather surprisingly: “The shop was never the dream. You were the dream.”
At the end of the day, that’s what most parents want is just the best for their kids. But they don’t really do a good job sharing warm or positive feelings with their kids. Unfortunately Asian immigrant parents use shame as their main tool. And any love or praise tends to be conditional on performance at school or for good behavior. It certainly works well to drive performance for most Asian immigrant kids. I should note my parents were fairly open minded compared to other Asian/ Taiwanese Immigrant parents, they told me I could do whatever I wanted, versus being pushed into medicine or engineering or the sciences. The only thing they demanded was that I had to be the best at it.
I guess this is what my therapist wanted me to view through another lens and animated kids movies work well here. Gave me a lot to think about.
I write a lot about intergenerational trauma and my issues with parents. Well, really more my mom, who pushed me as hard (harsh) as her mom pushed her. But i will say, now being a father myself, this Sh-t is damn hard and my parents did their best. I get that now.
Like the character Ember’s parents, mine sacrificed everything to come to North America and have a better life for us here in Canada/USA. If I had grown up in the strict and conformist culture of Taiwan, I would probably have ended up as a school drop out and become a gangster (seriously).
My petty rebellions in a much more tolerant and forgiving Canada led to a pretty damn interesting international business career so far. And for that, I will forever be grateful to my parents, to Canada as well as to my present home America.
Dying Slowly in America: The Heart Always Wins
Another flight and of course, another movie. I flipped in and out of the excellent Spielberg Movie called “the Fabelmans” and it definitely seemed like an autobiography. It’s a story about a young Jewish boy’s coming of age as he aspires to be a filmmaker. “But he soon discovers a shattering family secret and explores how the power of films can help him see the truth.”
There is this scene where his mom is about to leave the family and she tells him:
“You do what your heart says you have to, you don’t owe anyone your life. Not even me.”
So many of us take the career or life paths that our parents, our families or society says we have to. Or should. We give up our dreams to do what we think is expected of us. And this just leads us to a lifetime of wondering what could have been.
How many people do we know that are dying inside? Married to someone they don’t love, working at jobs they hate with people they dislike. All for a paycheck to survive. Barely getting by. Dreading Monday mornings, feeling sick on Sunday night, and eager for Friday and the weekend.
Yet that is most people’s lives in our modern day. Living without purpose. Living without a mission. Living without passion. Losing time which is the most precious and perishable asset on the Earth.
Benjamin Franklin reportedly said “Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75”. It’s not too late. Don’t become one of these people!
It’s incredibly sad especially in a time of great change, uncertainty and opportunities. It’s a time to be “risk on” in life. Better a 50% chance of success trying than no chance by not attempting anything. DO SOMETHING! Do anything! Anything to get you closer to your dream life.
Technology Without Culture Does Not Work: The Future is Better
I’ve recently discovered a new sci-fi series called “Moonhaven”. I had a hard time getting into it at first as it started slow but it grew on me. It takes place in the future when the earth is an ecological mess plagued by resource wars and where the strong take from the weak.
The only hope is the terraformed Moon Haven colony on the Moon which has the special IO technology and well-trained people & society whose sole purpose was to prepare it for mass colonization from Earth. The mooners think and act with an abundance mindset and are thus better able to leverage and build new technology. It’s why the Earthers turned the tech and all their best people over to the mooners, their scarcity mindset coming from a crowded and war-torn land.
But trouble ensues as after several generations the gap between the civilized Mooners and now frustrated war scarred Earthers is so wide that the planned colonization fleets from Earth are being denied. Extremists from both sides bring violence to this paradise.
It’s interesting as it covers so many relevant topics for a technology driven society like ours. The role of technology and how it tends to outstrip human ability to process and understand let alone adopt. How technology is dual use, it can be used for both good and evil.
And that even in paradise, devils exist. That the quest for power will never leave us humans and some will take any measure to get it and keep it. Humans haven’t really changed over the last thousands of years and doubt this will be the case in the next future thousands.
But at the same time, we all have hope. Hope for a better world and life for our children and future generations. Better to think of technology and view technology through the lens of utopia, versus the dystopian perspective we find ourselves in the USA, Europe & the West at large. This is not the perspective of technology in Asia or India and that is why they are catching up to us. If you think life will be better through technology, then you usually will develop more of it. And probably be more optimistic about the outcomes from tech as well.
Hope is a great driver for progress and cooperation, which is why I love the main mantra of the MoonHaven society: “The Future is Better.” I am happy to write that the vibe shift happening in America now seems to be in this more positive direction after the last 8-10 years of malaise.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads December 15th, 2024
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new” – Socrates
Incredible business story. Basically an angel round to massive exit many, many years later. Big lesson: be humble and be of service.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8RjsF1ygNg
2. "At the end of the day, if you’ve backed great companies, ‘hold and wait’ is certainly a reasonable strategy but it’s not clear it’s still the optimal one."
3. "The smaller players in the defense-tech ecosystem have been rooting for a Trump victory, seeing him as the kind of disruptor who could give them a bigger share of the Pentagon’s budget. For years, defense officials have said they have a strong appetite for cheaper, more nimble defense technologies — but new players have found it challenging to carve out a space under the Pentagon’s rules.
Many venture capitalists and defense tech entrepreneurs bet early on Trump’s campaign, convinced he could reform the Pentagon’s arcane budgeting system in ways that will push it to adopt their cutting-edge innovations faster.
“The single biggest thing that will make the difference is the amount of investment that the next administration puts into these advanced capabilities, and when I say investment, I mean procurement dollars to buy them at scale,” Chris Brose, Andruil’s chief strategy officer, told DFD.
Defense tech startups have long struggled to persuade the DOD to buy from them.
Venture-backed defense tech companies took less than 1 percent of the $411 billion in federal defense contracts awarded last fiscal year. That’s even as the department increasingly seeks out AI-enabled systems, defense venture funding continues to pour in and new global conflicts have stoked calls to modernize military arsenals."
4. "The vibe shift this time is a story about progressive Millennials realizing that when they declared total victory for their politics in 2020—it was a Pyrrhic victory. They aren’t out of the running, yet.
But they are going to have to think much more pragmatically about the trade-offs involved in their policy preferences, walk back activist overreach, and give up on the idea The New York Times or FBI or any other institution has a monopoly on truth. They have to get into the trenches and convince people that their interpretations of reality are correct."
https://www.8ball.report/p/vibe-shift-america
5. "Scott Bassett, the man most believe will be Trump’s pick to replace Bad Gurl Yellen as the US Treasury secretary, has given many speeches about how he would “fix” America. His speeches and op-eds provide details on how to execute Trump’s America First Plan, which bears a considerable resemblance to China’s development plan (which started with Deng in the 1980s and continues to this day).
The plan is to run nominal GDP hot by providing government tax credits and subsidies to re-shore critical industries (shipbuilding, semiconductor fabs, auto manufacturing, etc.). Companies that qualify will then receive cheap bank financing. The banks will again fall over themselves to lend to real companies because their profitability is ensured by the American government. As companies expand inside of America, they must hire American workers. Better paying jobs for ordinary Americans means more consumer spending.
The effects are amplified if Trump limits the number of Sombrero-wearing, cat and dog-eating, dark and dirty immigrants crossing the borders from “shithole countries”. These things juice economic activity, and the government takes its cut through corporate profit and wage income taxes. The government deficit must remain large to fund these programs, and the Treasury Department funds the government by selling bonds to banks. The banks can now re-lever their balance sheets because either the Fed or lawmakers suspended the supplemental leverage ratio. The winners are ordinary workers, companies that produced “approved” products and services, and the US government, which sees its debt-to-nominal GDP ratio fall. This is QE for poor people on steroids.
Wow, that sounds great. Who would be opposed to such a magical era of American prosperity?
The losers are those who hold long-term bonds or savings deposits. That is because the yield on such instruments will be intentionally kept below the nominal growth rate of the American economy. Folks also lose if their wages cannot keep up with the higher inflation levels. If you haven’t noticed, being in a union is cool again. 4 and 40 is the new mantra. That is, pay workers 40% more over the next 4 years, i.e. 10% per year wage hikes, to continue working.
For those readers who believe themselves to be rich, don’t worry. Here is a cheat sheet on what to buy. This is not financial advice; I’m simply sharing what I’m doing with my portfolio. Every time a bill passes and hands out money to approved industries, read it, and buy stocks in those verticals. Instead of saving in fiat bonds or bank deposits, purchase gold (the boomer financial repression hedge) or Bitcoin (the millennial financial repression hedge)."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/black-or-white
6. "You’re exiting the protocol application investing time period and will be entering into the application investing time period.
Will you make it? Who knows. Only time will tell. By 2025 the winners in applications will likely be clear. Just don’t miss it and ruin your bloodline."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/2025-last-chance-for-easy-gains-in
7. Excellent and timely discussion on Anduril and the defense industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUV4s71apbA
8. "Sphere is part of a bigger story about the city: about how a place that was once a playground out on the fringe of the country feels as though it has moved, for better and for worse, to the very center of American life and America’s future.
Just ask Las Vegans, who are feeling it, let me tell you. Not for these guys the usual boomtown lament that things used to be better. In the desert—where the population of the Las Vegas metro area has nearly doubled since the start of the 21st century—things are only heading upward! At every turn, I seemed to run into an unofficial member of the Chamber of Commerce, all but finishing one another’s sentences in their enthusiasm to make the case: The dining scene is booming. Chinatown is blowing up.
The Vegas residency beckons the biggest stars in the world, an irresistible alternative to the ordeal and economics of touring. The outdoors scene has become recognized as world-class. A high-speed train to Los Angeles is on its way, supposedly in time for the 2028 Olympics. Warner Bros. Discovery and Sony have each floated the idea of building major studios, the latter in partnership with Mark Wahlberg.
Above all, the argument for Las Vegas’s new status is spoken in the language of sports. Professional leagues’ fear of the taint of gambling once made it all but unthinkable that the city would ever have a home team to root for beyond the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Runnin’ Rebels. Now, in a cultural loop de loop, that school’s Confederate mascot has been canceled, while sports betting has become the all-but-official national pastime.
Vegas got its first big-league franchise in 2017, when the Golden Knights arrived as an NHL expansion team. Today, it’s eyeing the Royal Flush, including the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces, the NFL’s Raiders (most recently of Oakland), soon enough baseball’s Athletics (also ripped from poor Oakland), and an all but assured NBA expansion franchise. The city hosted its first Super Bowl earlier this year, and will welcome the second Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix this month. Nothing soothes an urban identity crisis like the sweet Xanax of professional sports. They are the fairy dust America sprinkles over a city to let it know that it is really real."
9. An especially excellent episode of NIA today. Worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgb9x0Pt_pM
10. Valuable and sober conversation. Not a fan of Tucker but Colby is sharp. This is important to understand the future of geopolitical strategy for America in the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtsGqGc-Iuw
11. A thoughtful discussion on the state and evolution of venture capital. Chris Paik is one of the smartest guys in the business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjTKo1kz3KI
12. "The creator/celebrity brands that endure do three things right: 1) They’re authentic to the creator, 2) They have a genuinely unique insight, and 3) They move beyond the figurehead. The two most successful examples, in my mind, are Rihanna’s Fenty and Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS.
I expect we’ll have a few large venture outcomes that also touch on all three—creation, distribution, and monetization. I’m particularly interested in a next-gen Roblox (it boggles my mind that you have to know Luau to build in Roblox) that uses AI to crowd in a longer tail of creators, and I’m also spending a lot of time in the fan-fiction world, looking at how AI allows fans to spin up their own stories and build with each other’s IP Lego blocks.
The creator phenomenon—the concept of people having parasocial relationships online, making stuff and sharing it and earning income—isn’t going anywhere. It’s one of the biggest phenomena of the online age, and it will underpin another generation of large technology companies."
https://www.digitalnative.tech/p/the-evolution-of-the-creator
13. "Ownership percentage matters to VCs because of the explicit target return we discussed earlier. This is the most fundamental difference between VCs and angel investors.
Most angel investors aren’t too worried about ownership percentage because, unlike VCs, most angel investors don’t have specific return objectives. Whenever I’ve made angel investments, I wasn’t overly concerned about whether my investment had the potential to return 4x, 40x or 400x. My motivation was quite simply to invest in amazing founders who I thought were doing amazing things. At the end of the day, any positive return would generally be good for me (as part of a healthy, balanced portfolio 😉).
But VC funds are financial products that aim for a very specific target return (3x over 10 years). When you combine this objective with the power law nature of tech startups (that is, the notion that the majority will fail and a small percentage will drive most of a fund’s returns), the need to be explicit about ownership percentage starts to make sense."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/why-do-vcs-care-about-ownership
14. "All these misunderstandings are a result of taking the Washington Myth at face value, and the US at its own evaluation; Things become much clearer if we recognise that the US is a powerful nation, but not an all-powerful one, that (without going full Andrei Martyanov) its military has quite serious structural and doctrinal problems that limit its effectiveness, and that its vast and conflictual government system makes it very hard to apply any kind of long-term strategy that takes account of reality on the ground. It’s also true that there is a tendency to confuse vague aspirations with actual plans.
This is what I call the Rain-Dance Fallacy: I want it to rain, I do a dance, it rains, therefore I have caused the rain. All over Washington there are stones where, if you turn them over, someone will crawl out with a long-lasting obsession about something or other which they will write and speak about incessantly, and for which they try to get support. Occasionally these correspond roughly to real things that happen in the world later, but there is seldom any kind of causal relationship.
And it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Washington Myth is just that: a myth.
The domination of the elite European mind by US examples and ways of thinking over the last few generations was not obvious or automatic at the beginning, and was the product of some of the cultural, political and economic factors described above. But it was also the product of chance: no other well-articulated and large-scale system of thought was available to challenge it, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, still less in a language that everyone more-or-less spoke. It’s probably these contingent factors that have done the most to keep US intellectual dominance intact, in the absence of any obvious alternative. The problem is, it’s not clear what the alternative actually is now, or where it might come from."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/a-wasting-asset
15. "This new off-price environment shows no signs of slowing down. At Equal Ventures, we believe the future of retail lies in these next-generation off-price platforms to create value for consumers and brands alike and we’re incredibly excited about companies that are seeking to redefine what off-price retail can be. Off-price is no longer taboo — it’s the future of premium retail."
https://newsletter.equal.vc/p/inflation-sparks-the-off-price-boom
16. "Glasnost unleashed a gang fight of epic proportions. As a result, Russia ended up in Perestroika, meaning restructuring. That will happen in the US too. The difference is that America is not the Soviet Union. Americans understand capitalism. They know how to create businesses or policies, restructure them, and adapt to change. Nobody does that better than the USA. But, any time you throw out the old to make way for the new, it’s more than painful. It’s a fight.
The fight is increasingly visible. The raid on the CEO of Polymarket is a telling sign. This was probably not only because Polymarket visibly signaled to voters that Trump would win by a landslide, which obviously would not have been welcome by Democrats. He was not arrested or charged. There is speculation that the issue is about insider trading.
Either way, Polymarket’s algorithms were stronger than anybody else’s, and now they may be accessible and visible to the current enforcement authorities. But, it is perhaps not totally coincidental that Polymarket is a Peter Thiel-backed firm, and Thiel is certainly the invisible power behind Trump and Vance. The raid signals that more will come. The French are investigating polymarket, too. All the Tech Bros that have backed Trump will be vulnerable to such raids."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/american-glasnost
17. One of the more original and interesting folks in Hollywood. I like Mr Matthew McConaughey. This is a good interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu1kHIztT24&t=2s
18. This is a great discussion on the latest in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsJMJK97EyM
19. We have not understood the huge positive effects that the Shale Revolution has been for America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-qI-dFcKGA&t=1s
20. “Imperfect progress is progress. Perfect progress is unrealistic.” It’s simple, but it’s a truth worth repeating. It reminded me of a quote from a character called Jake the Dog on Adventure Time: “Dude, sucking at something is the first step towards sorta being good at something.”
It’s funny, but it’s spot on. Whether you’re a founder, an investor or a new podcaster like me, the early days can be rough. But it’s all part of the process."
21. "For any military strategist, geography is both the first and most unforgiving adversary and in the case of Taiwan, the island's natural defences present a labyrinth of complexities for China. The Taiwan Strait, a mere 90 miles of restless, churning waters, serves as more than just a separation between two lands; it is a formidable moat where, as conflict watchers put it, "distance is measured not in miles, but in minutes of vulnerability." What appears to be a narrow gap in geopolitical terms expands into a sea of operational headaches, with each wave and current posing a threat to the cohesion of an invading force.
The seasonal monsoons and tempestuous typhoons that regularly sweep across the strait are not mere inconveniences—they narrow the invasion window to brief moments of calm amidst nature's fury. An amphibious assault of this scale would require impeccable synchronisation of air, sea, and land forces, moving hundreds of thousands of troops and countless tons of equipment, all while exposed to Taiwan's formidable missile defence and the unblinking eye of US-backed satellite surveillance.
'In war, amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics', and nowhere is this more evident than in the daunting task of launching an invasion across this hostile strait. China's amphibious fleet, though growing, still falls short of the capacity needed for such a monumental undertaking. In a desperate bid to close the gap, civilian vessels, slower and more vulnerable, would likely be pressed into service. These roll-on/roll-off ships, often described as lumbering giants of the seas, would be prime targets for Taiwan's anti-ship missile systems. Military experts often note that a fleet of that size is a gift-wrapped target waiting for a strike. Thus, the perilous voyage across the strait could quickly turn into a nightmare of logistical unravelling before the first boots even touched Taiwan's shores."
https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=3825
22. Incredible connections & insights when you listen to this. Derek Sivers, Philosopher-entrepreneur.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGnDhd--BiM
23. "Entrepreneurs would do well to answer these questions not only before starting a business but to revisit them on a regular basis in the context of their current direction and initiatives. Products and business models are dynamic, just like most things, and it’s easy to get in a rut without zooming out and asking the big questions consistently. Every business must answer these seven questions both for today and tomorrow."
https://davidcummings.org/2024/11/16/thiels-seven-questions-every-business-must-answer/
24. "In other words, the USSR tried to build the edifice of industrial economy starting from foundation, and got stuck there. If you start from foundations, you will never ever get to the roof.
China, on the other hand, started from the roof, skipping the foundation part altogether. Unlike the Soviet way, Chinese way does work. The flip side, however, is that leaping to the front end, you leave many, and many, and many back end-related critical points behind. And that is because you never even bothered with developing them.
Still, it is important to remember that it doesn’t just materialise on the supermarket shelf out of nowhere. There is a long and complex manufacturing chain behind the shelf. And the production of a ready consumer good, such as a towel, a bicycle or a quadcopter is but the final, ultimate step of the chain."
https://kamilkazani.substack.com/p/why-the-ussr-failed
25. "Smaller models represent a significant innovation for enterprises where they can take advantage of similar performance at two orders of magnitude, less expense and half of the latency.
No wonder builders view them as small but mighty."
https://tomtunguz.com/small-but-mighty-ai/
26. "Whatever rules you pick, use common sense in picking them, and be respectful in applying them. The best time to discuss rules is while you’re still negotiating the terms sheet. Once a board gets in the habit of treating observers like directors, it can be hard to break. So from the outset, you should be ready to set norms for observers. Talk to new observers in advance so you know they understand the rules. And then respectfully enforce them if they get violated in the meeting."
https://kellblog.com/2024/11/14/the-proper-role-of-the-board-observer/
27. "Despite a 51-48 split in the popular vote, three-quarters of Americans agree on one thing: We’re on the wrong track. That’s been the political reality for most of this century — high levels of dissatisfaction, resulting in a series of “change” elections. The reason? Voters recognize that millennials and Zoomers aren’t as prosperous as their boomer and Gen X parents. One example: In 1981 the median age of a homebuyer was 38, today it’s 54.
The epicenter of the 2024 political earthquake wasn’t immigration, bodily autonomy, or democracy. It was the social contract between America and its citizens. The contract is straightforward: Work hard and play by the rules, and your children will have a better life than you did. For the first time in 250 years, that contract has not held."
https://www.profgalloway.com/the-testosterone-election/
28. "If you believe in liberalism, this is what you’re now fighting against — a combination of the petty Lenins of social media, the panopticon of smartphones, and the long arm of the world’s most domineering governments.
You are the rebellion, and technology has stacked the deck against you. Your only hope, essentially, is to either A) innovate new technologies that take power out of the hands of the petty Lenins and domineering governments,3 or B) somehow use the cultural and media spaces not dominated by those illiberal forces to spread liberal ideas strong enough to overcome the innate disadvantages of modern technology.
It would still be an exaggeration to say that you now live under the thumb of a global authoritarian regime ruled from Beijing. China’s military might hasn’t been used yet, and other countries’ nuclear deterrents still give it pause. Its control over your speech is far from complete — there are still many outlets for bashing the CCP without suffering dire consequences. And its influence over Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and various European elites, while considerable, is not total.
But the idea that the U.S. could engineer an industrial revival, take action against CCP domination of social media, and lead a coalition of liberal powers to balance China’s rise, now looks fanciful. With the election of Trump, China is now simply first-among-equals of a loose concert of illiberal great powers.
Which leaves us, the people who still believe in liberalism, as the rebellion. If you believe in the primacy of individual human freedom and dignity, you are now fighting a desperate underground guerilla struggle to carve out any kind of a liberal space in a world that only 25 years ago upheld your values as paramount.
History has returned — indeed, it never ended — and there is no destiny or fate guaranteeing that you will end up on the favored side of it.
But that is no reason to give up."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/liberalism-is-the-rebellion-now-38b
29. "And thus, the Unholy Trinity of Venture Capital was born.
Agglomerators who could run further and faster with bigger funds, more fees, and bigger platforms.
Allocators who were looking to take massive chunky checks and have a shot at a good yield.
Absorbers who have an endless supply of places they can shove their cash, from training and inference to marketing or lobbying. It's expensive to rule the world.
A match made in heaven. Maybe not the heaven, but certainly a heaven.
And this all comes back to the point about the loudest people with the most capital shaping the future of a thing. Today, the loudest people are agglomerators like a16z and GC, allocators like UAE and CPP, and absorbers like OpenAI and Anthropic. And whether you like it or not, they are intent on shaping the game in their image.
I've said this before and I'll say it again. I am, by no means, saying that a16z or CPP or OpenAI are bad. But they are different. They are very different from the venture capital of yore. Granted, they may, literally, unlock artificial general intelligence in a way that will transform the world in ways unimaginable even in comparison to the renaissance, industrial revolution, or digital age.
So maybe that's worth letting them dramatically reshape the face of how innovation gets funded.
But remember what a stupider game is—a stupider game is thinking you're playing the same game when your opponent is, in fact, playing a very different game."
https://investing1012dot0.substack.com/p/the-unholy-trinity-of-venture-capital
30. This clip is important for anyone who thinks we can still work with the CCP or China. It syncs with my experience there, you will always get cheated or ripped off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCnMz0Kx2f8
31. Important conversation on politics and tech. 2025 will be critical. American regulations under Biden have been disastrous for our future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4jWb-0nj44
32. Quite an educational and interesting conversation with the ultimate biohacker and man who won't die: Bryan Johnson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAPaW5S_RbI
33. "The NIF, based in Amsterdam, is one vision of how the region might do that. The fund plans to jumpstart ailing European deeptech innovation in a way that may also benefit its members and their militaries—independent of US support.
The US, which already spends more on defense than any othernation, is among eight NATO members that have so far decided not to contribute to the fund.
“They obviously weighed up the pros and cons and just felt that this doesn’t make sense for the US, given their strong heritage in venture capital,” says Rob Murray, the former British army officer who was an early proponent of the NIF in Trump’s first term.
In theory, the NIF will become a funding model that’s self-sustaining for NATO innovation priorities, says Michael C. Horowitz, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who worked on emerging capabilities in the US Department of Defense until earlier this year. He sees what the NIF is trying to do as part of a worldwide trend. “Governments around the world, including in the United States, have understood they need to change the way they’re interacting with the private sector if they want to be able to more effectively both harness and nurture technology development to achieve their national security goals.”
https://www.wired.com/story/natos-tech-scouts-are-fortifying-europe-for-a-world-after-donald-trump/
34. "It’s extraordinary how inculcated this weasel-speak has become in the business world (similar copy is on many large brand and agency websites) with the ad and media industry particularly guilty. To me this is striking as they should be the ones who know better. There’s an old saying that the people who make propaganda are frequently the most susceptible to it, perhaps they’re also susceptible to other things such as going along with rot.
I would be extremely skeptical of working for organizations that suffer from this. It’s emblematic of how life under them will be (political, subversive, bureaucratic) vs a place focused on merit that champions creativity and rewards results. Note that a company being ‘inclusive’ as an independently chosen value could be great, but say it directly and in your own words, not mindlessly repeating rebranded Marxist slogans which in practice are illiberal and divisive.
It’s clear the ads and media sector needs its own ‘founder mode’ movement, or something like it, to cast off the decay and do great work once again. It’s past due, as everyone is fed up with our dystopian management consultant manufactured reality. We really need to do better here, because remember, these teams are the ones advising the rest of the world how to communicate."
https://www.hottakes.space/p/the-media-industry-badly-needs-to
35. "It initially all seems academic—numbers too big to make a difference to small startups. However, these dynamics change the incentives for companies making decisions even at the earliest stages. Where to locate, where to hire, which partnerships to accumulate, which customers to target and more are up for grabs.
The dollar reserve disparity has set up US markets to gear towards uber-productive technology-driven companies. The monetary premium boosts those home assets by funneling trillions of future cash flow towards capital markets. And the result is that the M&A activity in the US, especially in the tech sector, greatly outpaces Europe.
This is also why most European venture investors encourage their companies to target US markets. Even in the worst of times, it remains the land of liquidity."
https://www.eu.vc/p/the-land-of-liquidity-europe-and
36. Good geopolitical discussion with Ryan McBeth, found a new analyst and interesting influencer too.
The Time Capsule: Lessons of Staying Young While Getting Old
I watch the most random movies on flights. But there was this movie called “The Time Capsule” that was intriguing.
The story is that in the near future, a politician named Jack escapes to his family’s summer lake house. His vacation and life is disrupted by the appearance of his first love Elise who has returned from a 20 year space journey and hasn’t aged a day having been in hibernation. What a premise.
They end up at this lake party one night and they have a very deep conversation as they catch up after so long. 20 years actually. A strange situation, reliving his past again.
Jack: “I mean if you want to get the job, you got to do the bull sh-t. And that goes for everything, not just politics.”
Elise: “You sound like a bitter old man.”
Jack: “There is a reason people get that way. I mean if I knew then what I know now.”
I remember a conversation:
Jack: “What do you want to do? What do you want to do? Driving, talking, nothing to do. Sigh. Now there is always something to do.”
Elise: “I remember you said to me “try to be what other people want you to be but if you lie about who you are it won’t matter.
It’s weird as I’ve only been back for a little while but I’ve managed to meet some of my old friends. And they all say the same things: ‘you’ll see.’ ‘You’ll learn’. It’s sad. Everyone looks tired, distracted like they had a dream and lost it. Even if they never had one to lose.”
Jack responds: “but people have children and responsibilities.”
Elise: “It’s not that. They just seem content to be disappointed.”
Jack: “well as you get older, disappointments add up, you start to expect more of it.”
Elise: “Don’t you wish you could have kept your excitement for life when you were younger?”
Jack: “It’s easier to be excited about life when it’s all in front of you.”
Elise: “you should be even more passionate about life cause there is less of it left. You are just like the rest of them, used to be cool but now you’re boring and jaded.”
It’s an excellent reminder.
Sometimes you need a break in your life. Nostalgia attached to people and places is powerful. Old friendships are important. The past can also sometimes help you figure out your future. Help you rediscover your old zest for life that we all used to have as young kids.
But you just have to be yourself. You can’t lie to yourself. You can never hide. Hiding from your dreams is what makes you old. It’s what causes you deep regret. “Somewhere along the way it became about playing a part and getting to the next level.”
By being yourself, having passion, taking risks and being willing to put yourself out there. That is how you get the most out of life. Have expectations and don’t settle. “So go out and live. Travel. Meet people. Discover yourself. You may think you already know who you are but sometimes it takes getting a little lost to know for sure.”
Beckham: The Documentary
I’m not a football or sports fan in general. Definitely not a huge pop fan or fashionista either. But I am impressed by people who thrive in these environments. David Beckham is one of these people who seems to be one of these people, thriving in all of these realms.
The 4 part Netflix documentary shows his rise to football stardom, model, businessman/one man company, personal brand and then just general stardom overall. He is a major face of pop culture now.
I learned a lot about him and really like him more than I did before as the documentary tracked his entire rise to the top. Joining Manchester United at age 15 and growing up with the team. Playing for team England for the World Cup, especially the Argentina-England 1998 game controversy (fans are stupid and flakey to say the least). Recovering from having all of the UK hate him due to the red card during that game. His romance and marriage with Posh Spice. Surviving the fame and the media frenzy since he was young.
His perfectionism and his discipline. One of his team mates:
“If you lose discipline, you don’t play at 100%.You play at 80% or 90% and then you go down very quickly. You Know? Very fast. In a few months….you’ve disappeared completely. And then you wake up in the morning and you say “Oh Sh-t”’
I don’t know how he did it. He’d just performed despite the madness of his life. Watching his goals throughout his career. Wow. Pure artistry.
But the way he got very good was because his football fanatic father pushed him extremely hard. At a level many people in this present weak-minded age would call abusive. Or as I call it Tiger mom or Asian immigrant parenting. Nothing was ever good enough. Doing corner kick after corner kick after corner kick to put it in the same spot that his dad wanted. “And if I didn’t he’d kill me.” I know how this feels. This seems to be the spur that leads to excellence though. And his dad told him: “It’s moments like corners at the end of the game that can create history.” His father was right and this was how Beckham helped his team win the treble that year.
Yet the higher you are, the harder the fall or better said: “The wind blows hardest at the top of the mountain.” It’s so extreme these kinds of pop star fandom. One minute everyone loves you, the next minute it turns to extreme hate. Unfairness and extreme inhumane behavior of the crowds he had to deal with at age 23 when the controversy happened. Madness of the crowds, especially brutish English ones. Beckham handled it well. I honestly probably would have lost it, probably fought or maybe even shot people in his position. But thankfully he had his soon to be wife, his family, his friends.
And Alex Ferguson of Man United who helped him through it & told him “Go on your holiday. Come back here. We’ll look after you. Don’t read the papers. There is no point to it. What you can do is ignore it.” Goes to show you the importance of people in the key tough periods of your life who help you and who create an island and inner sanctum for you to recover in.
He just kept grinding and kept everything inside, like a “working class, old school mentality, to like, roll your sleeves up, you get through this.”
He sucked in the negative attention and all the abuse he and his family got from fans and used it as fuel for his performance. He started playing incredibly well and scoring goals. All the way to Man United winning the FA Cup, Champions league & European Cup Final. A historic treble. A victorious turnaround through stubbornness, hard work and determination that he kept up throughout his entire football career. He even became Captain of the Team England for the 2002 World Cup.
Being surprise-traded from Man U. Joining the legendary Real Madrid football club playing with other football legends like Carlos, Figo, Ronaldo and Zidane. Beckham grew tremendously during these moments and the years after despite the turmoil in Spain. He helped turn things around in his last season in Madrid, even as he was injured the last game, but they won the championship. He took a big risk and eventually moved to LA to play for the Galaxy team for a $250M USD contract. Regardless of the crap first year, overall it paid off well and he helped put MLS on the map, winning the MLS Cup. He is now co-owner of MLS football team Inter Miami CF with one of the most lucrative business deals ever signed in the league. And he signed the best football player in the world Leo Messi to Miami. Legend.
He’s transcended football at this point. The man who has everything it seems. At the top of his game, good looking, married to a gorgeous pop star. He has good taste & style + all the toys and fixings of his wealth and fame. Yet he has a loving family and is a humble, good and normal guy with lower middle class upbringing. He did not seem to let the fame and wealth get to his head like it has for so many others. I find that incredibly impressive. An overall good dude and a documentary worth watching.
All Your Problems Lie Within: Heal Thyself
I detest Tucker Carlson but you have to admire his skill as an interviewer and media personality. He is clearly a very smart and well educated person at the top of his game. Too bad his game is spreading hate and division in America.
But he said something that was deeply insightful during his “All in Podcast” interview. He identified a deep seated self-loathing that we seem to have in America and especially among the elites and the well off.
I can’t believe I’m quoting him but here is what he said: “I think the problem is prosperity and I’ve noticed this as a middle aged man, as I’ve gotten to know people who have become successful. In some cases very successful. I’ve noticed that when they succeed and they get everything they want, they destroy themselves. I’ve noticed this again and again and again.
You are the dog that caught the car. I think it’s more than idle time, there is a metaphysical quality, there are factors that I don’t understand that are deeper actually. But I just noticed it. There is something about affluence that over time convinces people to kill themselves.”
Something self destructive comes out when we are doing well. It’s like we are purposely shooting ourselves in our foot. Like we feel we don’t deserve our success as a country or even as individuals. This certainly describes many of the rich kids I have met. Or successful entrepreneurs, celebrities and business people. They completely self-destruct. Sometimes in their business life but almost always in their personal lives. A “self own" we would call it.
It’s so strange, yet when I think back on my life either as a child or even adult, I’ve done this to myself. Every time I’m getting ahead, I seem to do something stupid. Any financial windfall I had I would squander.
And when I didn’t mess things up financially, I did so on the personal side. Closing up, or worse, lashing out at family (not physically, but emotionally). No wonder my family life is such a disastrous mess. I’d been doing this unconsciously for decades.
I wonder sometimes if this goes back to my upbringing of never feeling enough, being the disappointment in the family & community. Not feeling worthy. Something I’ve overcompensated by focusing so much energy and time in my career and financial success. Only to self sabotage when I start to really get somewhere.
People are strange. The minute you start to think you know yourself, there are stranger depths you stumble upon. However, like all problems you need to attack it head on. Directly, which is the only way I know how to. You have to face these dark urges if you want to overcome them. Therapy helps. So does meditation and lots of reading & thinking.
Ultimately, to paraphrase an old Cherokee tribe saying: “we all have two wolves inside us. One is good aka positive. One is evil aka negative. The one that wins is the one we feed.” I think about this often.