Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Aug 23rd, 2026
“Hard work beats talent if talent doesn’t work hard”--Tim Notke
"Garbellotto had always been prudent with cash, holding more reserves than they strictly needed. There was slack in the system because they understood that survival sometimes demands resources that look inefficient on a balance sheet.
The cash was one element of their survival, but the deeper belief in what they were doing — and the courage to keep spending it in the face of total uncertainty — was another. And really, what made that courage rational was the nature of who they were protecting. These were not interchangeable laborers on a payroll. They were master craftsmen whose families had spent decades, sometimes generations, accumulating knowledge that existed nowhere else. The manufacture of barrels, as the family has always maintained, is an art that can only be transmitted from master to apprentice, generation to generation, through proximity and patience.
Lose the people, and you lose the company. It’s that simple."
2."The core similarity between the internet boom and the AI boom is the same six-word assumption: build it and they will come. Warren Buffett, quoting Benjamin Graham, put it best: “In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” Today we are in the AI voting phase. The weighing phase has yet to arrive.
I am not predicting that the AI mania will end the way the dot-com mania ended. But the similarities are striking, and for investors, and particularly for retirees, the possibilities of what might lie ahead deserve serious attention. Because there is always the other side of mania. And almost no one in today’s market has experienced what that other side looks like."
https://resilientportfolio.substack.com/p/the-other-side-of-mania-part-1
3."I am not saying you sell everything and hide in cash. I am just highlighting what is possible because it’s happened before.
The dot-com bust is not ancient history. It happened within the working memory of anyone over 45. It destroyed portfolios, delayed retirements, and forced people back into the workforce years after they thought they were done. The retirees who were concentrated in technology stocks in March 2000 did not get a do-over. There was no reset button. The capital they spent on the way down was gone permanently, and the 20-year recovery was 20 years they didn’t have.
The next time your financial adviser tells you to stay in "for the long haul" or repeats that old adage "it's time in the market, not timing the market," show them the chart above and ask how much time they really mean."
https://resilientportfolio.substack.com/p/the-other-side-of-mania-part-2
4.Two very interesting interviews: Pippa Malmgren's optimistic take on world economy and geopolitics counterbalanced by Jim Bianco's more pessimistic take, especially on outcome from the Iran war and lack of resolution of the Hormuz gulf blockage.
Worth a listen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCk0fQR78Tk&t=3s
5.Japan is rising and is a credible military & trade challenger to China. Albeit still an underdog without its allies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS1kPNJMsg4
6.Learning from one of the best in the investing biz: Bill Ackman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TJFqEhxQg4
7.I was pretty impressed by this interview. Good to understand what OpenAI's strategy is and some great details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjrShuj_Zsg
8.I learned a bunch about one of the most exciting sectors: Robots!
AI is what will supercharge the rise of robots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_UWD5aoJkc
9.Latest weekly business news takes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9GjLulqsFc
10.This was as always a great conversation on the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley and AI & VC. Insightful as always.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPBG1F2Y8Mw
11.This conversation is super relevant and helps folks understand what's happening in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e102lRVCFyI
12."Bryan Johnson, an entrepreneur whose philosophy is “don’t die,” spends $2 million a year optimizing for longevity. Each day, he tracks hundreds of biomarkers, adheres to a strict vegan diet where every calorie that enters his body “must fight for its life,” uses shockwave and red-light therapies, and hangs out in his home sauna and hyperbaric chamber. He ingests a stack of prescription drugs and dozens of supplements, and exercises up to 90 minutes a day — without rest days. Bedtime is 8:30 p.m., sleep temperature is strictly regulated at 65° to 68°F, and he wakes up between 4:30 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. without an alarm. My Pivot co-host Kara Swisher, who interviewed Johnson for her CNN series, Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever, observed that Johnson has an “obsession with measurement.” I’d add he has an aversion to “l-i-v-i-n,” as Matthew McConaughey famously put it in Dazed and Confused.
Our obsession with metrics, says journalist Derek Thompson, is akin to a modern religion that’s making us miserable. “Modern life is awash in statistics,” Thompson wrote in March. “Often, the quantification of modern life makes us play the games we can easily measure rather than the games we deeply value.” When we do this, we’re succumbing to “value capture,” according to University of Utah philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen. “Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle,” Nguyen wrote in 2024. “They enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning.”
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/optimization
13.Coatue does the best presentations on the technology business. This is a must watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIoV8rG_25s
14.No one is better than the British SAS and special ops in general. Still are. (up there with US Delta, Canadian JTF22 & Polish GROM)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0_iOV-Jo-4
15.This was surprisingly interesting. One of the last podcast shows I ever expected to listen to: Trae Stephens on Goop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_iqQElj7vY
16."The early years were minimal from a value-creation perspective, but necessary to get to the scaling years where value creation is strongest.
For entrepreneurs, when reading headlines or stories about wealth creation that imply a linear rate, know that the framing is incorrect. By and large, almost all value creation for entrepreneurs occurs in the latter years of the business."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/06/06/the-backend-loaded-nature-of-startup-value-creation/
17."Power is the root of all success. In the Middle Ages that is no different, whether it be political power, military power, cultural power or anything else in between. Power is what builds kingdoms, empires and dynasties. Power however is not so easily attained; it requires sacrifice. Those who want power must sacrifice blood, sacrifice money, sacrifice honor—or die trying.
The Valois Dukes of Burgundy sought power not for its own sake alone, but because in a fractured medieval world, power was the only guarantee of survival, security, and lasting influence. Without it, even the greatest houses could be reduced, divided, or destroyed by stronger rivals.
Burgundian power was not created through conquest alone, but through a calculated blend of dynastic marriage, political opportunism, and calculated extreme violence. These methods secured immense influence while the dukes sought to master their region of Europe. To the Burgundians, power meant control over wealth, control over land, and ultimately control over their own destiny.
This is the story of how the Burgundians rose to riches through trade, marriage and murder. Their story matters not simply because of what they achieved, but because it reveals a broader truth of the medieval world: that power was fragile, contested, and always demanded a cost, and that those who pursued it changed the course of history."
https://feignedflight.substack.com/p/the-pursuit-of-power
18."The company claims it delivers 125 petaflops of peak AI performance and is up to 15–20x faster than competing GPU-based systems on inference workloads, with 250x more on-chip memory and 2,625x more memory bandwidth than Nvidia’s B200 on certain configurations.
For most of its existence, Cerebras was a company ahead of its market. It sold to national laboratories (Argonne, Lawrence Livermore, Sandia), sovereign AI programs, and specialized research institutions. It basically targeted buyers who valued raw speed and didn’t mind immature software.
The backlog is the more telling figure. $24.6 billion in remaining performance obligations against $510 million in annual revenue is nearly 50x forward revenue coverage — an extraordinary cushion that, if converted at healthy margins, represents the core of the bull case."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/cerebras-systems-and-the-speed-bet
19.Drone tech: Israel vs Hezbollah. It's a big learning curve for the IDF.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNO5tiJcFck
20.IPO Comeback. A discussion of Space Compute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLICvWE7w2Q
21."Palantir’s Karp said it without the spin: don’t rent your capability from a lab that “doesn’t care about you at all,” own the means of production. Obviously, he’s selling something when he says it. But he’s also right. A model is raw material, like bar stock. You don’t hand a competitor your bar stock and your tolerances and ask them to run the job for you.
And here’s the thing: you already own the means of production. The machines, the floor, the people, the quoting/ops logic in your head. That’s the reason a shop in Shenzhen can’t copy you overnight. The stakes just doubled. You used to win by owning the factory. Now you win by owning the factory and the AI that runs it.
So treat AI like infrastructure, not magic software. Capture what’s in your people’s heads before it walks out the door. Keep your data on something you control. Buy cheap where it’s throwaway, own it where it’s you. Skip that and you’re not cutting costs. You’re building someone else’s advantage."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-200666147
22.Secondary markets versus going public.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0lFjTWx36I
23."The ultimate status symbol is a highly profitable platform that looks like it was coded in 1998. It signals to the world that the data, the product, or the access provided inside is so lethal that the consumers willingly tolerate zero luxury packaging just to get a piece of it. While others are paying UI/UX designers, the Sovereign is Packing Shipments."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-friction-fetish
24.Moving from the asset light era to capital intensity era. This also means the Critical Minerals era.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTO1aQ_m44I
25.Drones being launched off naval drones. The new world of war is scary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qkDJRUczz0
26."If you’re an investor… know the old hardware vs. software divide is obsolete. The best companies meld both.
If you’re an entrepreneur… understand all the physical industries frozen in time, like energy manufacturing, construction, defense and mining, are now being unlocked by cheap intelligence. There’s at least one Silicon Industrial in each of these sectors.
If you’re a parent… make sure your kids and grandkids know the frontier is opening again. Make sure your children know not to take on $100k in debt to go to college without learning any real skills. Have them try to intern at an emerging Silicon Industrial."
https://rationaloptimistsociety.substack.com/p/its-hardwares-turn-to-eat-the-world
27.A solid perspective on AI and cybersecurity. A view from Palo Alto Networks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hObRMv6qCi0
28."We need youth for energy and openness, age for pattern recognition and patience. When markets get crazily overvalued and the zealots promise “This time is different,” the old-timers’ skepticism serves as a vital counterweight. Many audacious new ideas succeed and transform society. But distinguishing the pepper from the flyshit, as a friend puts it, requires the wisdom that only time and experience can impart.
We all die. Philosophical traditions from Stoicism to existentialism remind us that finitude is what makes life precious. The inevitability of death encourages creation before time runs out.
Recognizing our own mortality fosters humility and gratitude for our brief span of time on the planet. The dinosaurs aren’t here to block the future. We’re here to remind everyone that patience, skepticism, and a keen nose for nonsense have their place — especially when the music is loudest and the valuations most absurd."
https://frankgiustra.com/posts/this-time-is-different/
29."The only wild part is that Cash/fixed income has practically never been a great investment. Unless you look at pure recessions (2008) or market down turn years, the idea of holding cash/bonds long-term isn’t great. Unless you’re in your 60s, you’re better off just shoving money into anything else (Real estate, stocks, commodities etc.). This is because one of the other markets will go through a bull market and you’ll outperform the low returns of AAA fixed income."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/one-casino-per-year-marginal-buyer
30."To reiterate, the inability to come to a deal immediately between Trump and the IRGC ultimately leads to higher oil prices. The higher oil prices anger voters because shit is more expensive. At that point, the only hot-button issue Trump has agency over is data center build-out and AI regulation/taxation. Therefore, the only path to victory is turning on the AI tech bros. If the market falls 50% between now and November, that is a small price to pay not to face an endless stream of House Democrat subpoena requests.
Trump knows that once the election is over, he can walk back any of the anti-data center build-out and AI rhetoric, and it’s back to business as usual … and hopefully S&P 500 to 10,000! The problem for your portfolio is that things are path dependent, and watching one’s portfolio dump will permanently change future expectations for AI stock returns. You can never unsee the impact progressive taxation and regulation has on the AI complex; and as such, you will not invest with such insouciance as before."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/reality-test
31."When I zoom out, I think model providers, whether closed- or open-source, will be the primary beneficiaries of single-user software applications; budgets for those products will be capped (no more tokenmaxxing) but still available, provided the application is, in fact, valuable.
I also suspect that support and maintenance will become more important as the sheer volume of machine-generated code will mean that fewer humans will really understand any company’s codebases or the decisions made by coding assistants or agents. Keeping these applications up and running and up to date with the latest advances in AI will continue to be a challenge. There will still be money in the software business, just perhaps not as much and not at the same margins that we’ve become used to as investors and founders."
https://chudson.substack.com/p/what-is-software-worth-when-everyone
32. Some good frameworks on AI and tech adoption in general. Using S-Curves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZt1DDmMNGk&t=1411s
33."That is the whole game. Not more intelligence or more nerve, just better questions asked a little earlier, on the few decisions that actually shape the rest.
Most of your life is reversible. Life itself is the one door that never opens twice, so save your best deciding for the things that truly cannot be undone."
https://conductlab.substack.com/p/how-to-make-better-decisions-than
34.An Important company for America. General Matter & The Nuclear Renaissance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMF24c0kjEg
35."The wider lesson is that a country can now build a competitive, export-grade defence industry fairly quickly, and that it is a strong business to be in. These are high-value products that carry years of maintenance, training and political relationships with them. Israel sells more than $19B of weapons while under diplomatic pressure, because the systems work. South Korea moved from a minor supplier to one of Europe’s leading sources in under five years.
That points to an ever more competitive market rather than a settled new order. Almost every region is trying to depend less on foreign, and particularly American, suppliers, and wants to build its local champion. The likely outcome is a more crowded field."
https://defensebrief.substack.com/p/the-new-lords-of-war
36."Institutional investors, including pension funds and insurers, continue to expand allocations to infrastructure and private debt in search of yield, duration and diversification.
Yet despite both technological readiness and capital availability, many hardtech startups face a familiar problem: once their technology works, early customers are secured and unit economics are proven, the financing playbook for transitioning to large-scale deployment is unclear.
Most turn to the familiar allure of venture capital and the equity markets, rather than recognizing the similarities between the assets they are trying to fund and the trillions of assets (such as real estate and cars) that are already funded through the debt capital markets via securitization structures."
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/06/asset-based-finance-scale-technology/
37. "So don’t shed a tear for the strivers. Think of the rules, norms, and strictures that you feel most suffocated by. Enumerate every if only in your life, all the things you’d do if you were brave enough, if nobody was judging. What would you do if you were barred from the rat race? Now is your chance!
The thing about crisis is that it makes the world topsy-turvy. Consider the following provocations:
Freelancing is as secure as employment
Founding a startup is as secure as a big tech job
Young people know as much as seasoned professionals
Physical labor is valuable; cognitive work is cheap
Nothing is sacred; everything is fallible
Some insist that touching AI will leave your soul forever stained, while others insist that tokenmaxxing is the only way out of the permanent underclass. I think both are wrong, and we should learn from the economists. What is your comparative advantage as a human? What traits will be scarce? How can you stay a complement to machine intelligence? These are the qualities to lean into most."
https://jasmi.news/p/2026-advice
38.Dissecting this week’s news in tech. Love this show if you want some blunt and insightful takes.
Face the Tiger: Dealing with Unexpected Surprises & Challenges
I can look back to April and sort of laugh. Well not really. That was a brutally expensive 2025 and start to 2026. I was bleeding cash through my cursed real estate properties. Then despite all the losses and such, I still ended up with a massive tax bill. Especially painful when I was so cashstrapped in 2025 and Q1 2026. Surprisingly, I was pretty equanimous about it.
Rule number is don’t mess with the taxman. It’s just not worth the trouble and smoke. At the end of the day, philosophically, it’s just funny money and digits on a screen. Don’t get me wrong, it really hurt me to cut those checks. But I’m healthy and still in the game. I can go make more money.
I happened to listen to the excellent Invest Like the Best podcast where they did the 2nd interview with Alan Waxman of Sixth Street Partners, one of the biggest and pioneering private credit firms in the world. They live “facing the tiger”. The old prior to 2020 Marvin, would have freaked out and panicked. I was still pissed but I took a deep breath and tapped into my inner sociopath. I just looked at this coldly. Facing the tiger as Waxman describes it: “ there's hard things in this world. We're gonna make mistakes. We're gonna have problems. But when those problems happen, instead of pointing fingers……we have a saying from day one of our firm is that we look at the problems head on.”
So that’s what I did. I called my tax guy and we went through the report line by line. How did this happen? What did I miss? What can I do better and make sure it does not happen again? I took personal ownership, this was totally my fault.
Then I controlled the controllables as they say. I sold and sorted assets. I went to austerity mode and managed my cost structure super tight for 4-5 months to sort it out. I also went hard into exploring new cashflow opportunities and projects.
You do what you have to do. So when you run into surprise challenges. It’s okay to get mad, I certainly was but channel it to face the tiger. Then you can move on to solving the next inevitable challenge or curve ball that life throws at you.
Off Season Travel: A Parable for Investing
I took my family to Niseko for a ski trip during my daughter’s spring break. It worked out well because I had some business meetings in Tokyo and was speaking/judging at the Take Off Tokyo conference around that time anyways.
What I did not know was that the peak season had just ended right before we arrived. Hence many stores and restaurants were closed, as were the regular services like direct and regular shuttle buses to the hotels and main center of Hirafu. So we had to take a few trains to get here. Basically it was not so convenient.
On the other hand, there were less people, less crowds. Lots of discounted services and products in the places that were open as it was off peak. Additionally we had the hotel all to ourselves. There were literally 3 other families in a 200 room hotel. I got the Onsen Hot spring all to myself. I loved the outdoor one. It was magical, nothing like soaking in a hot spring at night, relaxing and looking at the stars. Very little light pollution in the mountains so it was pretty clear.
So the main point besides off season travel is great, is to avoid peak season travel. It’s crowded but things are more convenient. It’s expensive because it’s convenient. Peak season is exactly like the top of the hype cycle. But the best deals or alpha for investing is in the off season either right before or right after the bubble has popped. You have to do a bit more planning & homework but the results are worth it.
The parable is to avoid the crowds. Timing and entry point price matters if you want to make money in investing. Many investors in the 2024 to 2026 vintages will be learning this the hard way, just like investors in the awful 2020-2021 vintages.
The Kindness of Strangers
I visited Kyiv back in March and as some folks know, the only way into Ukraine is via car or train. So I usually end up taking the train in.
This was week two of the American-Israeli attack on Iran. Lots of noise online. Plenty of grifting by government officials and their family members. I was feeling very cynical and down on humans. Especially when I think about all the geopolitical and economic after-effects as well as pain that will come from this.
I felt a bit down, even after a very enjoyable and productive trip to Kyiv, which was especially lovely that time of year. I love Kyiv which is a world class city, even with the regularity of cursed barbarian Russian missile and drone attacks.
But on the train ride back to Warsaw, an old Ukrainian lady that I shared a cabin with started feeding me with some of the food she brought on the long train ride. A simple cheese and butter sandwich, sour cream cakes and she even bought me some water and a banana. She did not know who I was. We could barely communicate yet she was kind and hospitable. Sharing with me what little she had. Maybe because I looked like a lost young kid. (I’m not young but I do look lost many times :) And especially when I doubt we would ever run into each other again.
I always encounter these situations when I travel and it’s a reminder there are wonderful & generous people out there. I will make sure I pay this forward myself.
If these moments don’t re-awaken one’s hope and faith in humanity, I’m not sure what will. People can be kind and awesome. Never forget that.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Aug 16th, 2026
“Nobody’s a natural. You work hard to get good and then work to get better. It’s hard to stay on top.”--Paul Coffey
1. "Airpower is not obsolete yet. Success in war still depends on layered defenses and systems that are capable of operating within each of the layers. In judging the future of drones versus legacy airpower, however, the question is not one of pure capabilities, since airpower will remain superior in certain operational and strategic missions. Rather, the issue is one of relative cost.
While a Patriot missile can shoot down a Shahed drone, the Patriot costs north of $4 million, while the Shahed is produced for less than $40,000, and in much larger quantities. In the future, countries like Ukraine will be able to unleash swarms of low-cost drones, controlled autonomously by AI systems. Operation Epic Fury in the Middle East, meanwhile, has demonstrated that the sophisticated air defenses provided to America’s friends in the Gulf have been unable to prevent serious damage to their facilities from Iran’s drones and missiles. This balance of capabilities will persist until someone comes up with a cheap and effective anti-drone system. Many countries and companies are working on that today, but we are not there yet."
https://www.persuasion.community/p/were-in-the-midst-of-a-warfare-revolution
2."America has the most dynamic, innovative, and resilient economy in human history. It has outgrown everyone. It keeps doing it. The people who have been betting against it in markets, in policy, in prestige magazine essays have been wrong consistently for 250 years. Permabears recognize no such track record. They just invent new words for the same bet.
As always: stay curious, ignore the doom merchants who profit from your misery, and remember that things can be imperfect and still be extraordinary."
https://www.hottakes.space/p/the-atlantic-is-just-left-wing-zerohedge
3.I was pretty impressed by this discussion. The Cerebras CEO is brilliant. Timely conversation as well as on the importance of AI infrastructure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EOwSXE3Xws&t=132s
4.A great interview with Mark Rowan of Apollo, a trillion dollar financial giant. Learned a bunch here re: culture and building a great firm & positioning to help American reindustrialization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYK_MmZW9XI&t=1356
5."The ultimate status symbol is a brand that operates completely in isolation, ignoring industry collaborations, joint ventures, and co-branded noise. It signals that the ecosystem is self-sustaining and demands absolute compliance from anyone who wants to interface with it. While others are busy "networking at panels," the Sovereign is Enforcing Monopoly.
Two weak pillars do not make a strong roof; they just create a larger collapse. Stop looking for partners to save you. Harden your infrastructure, buy your tools, and stand alone as a monolith." https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-partnership-parasite
6.The man and the investing legend. Patrick does an amazing interview with Dan Loeb. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhTi_8QwXjg&t=2086s
7."Our willingness and capacity to deliver violence against our enemies anywhere in the world is a significant asset, but American magnanimity is what makes the country unique among history’s greatest powers. During World War II, the U.S. sustained 400,000 dead and another 670,000 wounded. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the country provided emergency aid to its former enemies in Austria, Germany, and Japan.
Then, in 1948, Congress passed legislation to fund the Marshall Plan — a $13.3 billion aid package ($180 billion adjusted for inflation) to rebuild 17 European nations, including West Germany. Separate from the Marshall Plan, the U.S. spent an estimated $2 billion ($25 billion adjusted for inflation) between 1946 and 1951 to rebuild Japan. We offered similar support to the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc, but were rebuffed. Regardless, America wrote checks when other victors would’ve demanded reparations.
In hindsight, it’s easy to discount U.S. magnanimity as Cold War pragmatism, but that misses the contribution of the American spirit and our capacity to forgive. Had American voters been consumed by hatred and xenophobia — understandable sentiments after years of war and sacrifice — the isolationism of the pre-war years might’ve returned. Instead, seven months after signing the Marshall Plan into law, Truman won reelection, suggesting that a significant number of American voters found space in their hearts and wallets for people who had been their enemies just three years prior.
That selflessness helped install a global operating system financed by American capital, secured by the U.S. military, and held together by American generosity and kindness. Eight decades later, one of our most underrated assets remains our talent for turning enemies into allies. Similar to many relationships and brand equity, the current administration has taken a blow-torch of performative masculinity and stupidity to these assets." https://www.profgmedia.com/p/magnanimity
8."But the reality is that any new technology deployment cycle will always oscillate between the euphoria that drives massive amounts of capital behind it and the disappointment when it fails to achieve the massive expectations behind it.
The remedy, however, is not to ban bubbles. In fact, there’s good evidence that bubbles are a feature of the innovation economy.”
https://www.alsoblogposts.com/p/why-bubbles-are-all-that-bad
9.One of my favorite weekly discussions on tech business news. You will also learn new things. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhZsQb3YvDg
10.My other top discussion on Silicon Valley news. It's the cooler "All in Podcast"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyC7N42o36s
11.I believe that Olympic results require Olympic level effort.
However, Nico and Corgi Insurance seem like an overreaction to the laziness that overtook Silicon Valley in the late 2010s but not sure how this work pace is sustainable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgkXOE-V-fc
12.This was important to get a view into the future of war. In this case in Africa. Good to see Vice and Shane Smith back at gonzo frontline reporting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B66Zl-Zd2DI
13.One of the OGs of El Segundo scene. Great convo on the defense-tech landscape. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v34dmEDp5Nk&t=162s
14."The central hypothesis is that between roughly 1750 and 1800 France developed a distinctive culture of precision centered on military engineering, navigation, metrology, and scientific instrumentation. This culture did not itself create industrial capitalism. Instead, it created the conceptual and technical preconditions for industrial capitalism. The United States later inherited portions of this French precision culture and transformed them into a system of scalable industrial production."
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/from-cannons-to-chronometers-to-factories
15."No two days are ever alike in venture capital (VC), and no two venture capitalists spend their time in the same way. Each successful VC has their own unique strategy to see, pick, win, and support the best early stage technology companies. VC feedback cycles are long – it can take 5-10 years to know if an early stage investment is successful. As such, I’m always trying to learn how best to spend my time to maximize my chances of seeing, picking, winning, and supporting generational technology companies building in national security."
https://maggiegray.us/p/how-i-spend-my-time-as-a-natsec-venture
16.Trae is one of the nice guys in Silicon Valley, top founder and investor. Every founder should listen to this interview. How to think about fundraising and stack wins in the biz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ3HLcqciA0&t=67s
17.Stay calm, stay positive & never give up. Focus on investing on the right neighborhoods (in this case real estate but works for all kind of assets). Enjoying these vignette interviews.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPjQe_n2JKI
18."The central paradox of our age is now impossible to ignore.
The global transition to electrification, renewable energy infrastructure, and advanced defence technologies was intended to free humanity from dependence on fossil fuels.
Yet the chemical reagents that make this transition possible are not new green inventions; they are direct by-products of the fossil-fuel economy itself. And today these same reagents have become the arena for an unforgiving contest between two of civilisation’s most basic imperatives: feeding eight billion people and powering the electrified world.
The molecule at the heart of the conflict is sulphuric acid. It is the single most important chemical input for almost every major hydrometallurgical process in modern mining. It leaches copper from oxide ores in Chile and Africa, dissolves nickel and cobalt from laterite deposits in Indonesia, extracts uranium in Kazakhstan, and separates rare-earth elements.
At the same time, sulphuric acid is the primary feedstock used to convert phosphate rock into phosphate fertilisers, the nutrients that sustain global agriculture. More than half of all sulphuric acid produced on Earth (55–60 %) is consumed by the fertiliser industry. Mining, even at the peak intensity required by the energy transition, accounts for only a fraction of total demand.
This creates a direct, molecule-for-molecule competition. Every extra tonne of copper cathode, nickel mixed hydroxide precipitate, or uranium yellowcake produced through acid-intensive methods consumes acid that could otherwise have been used to make fertiliser.
The dual shocks of 2026, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz to elemental sulphur shipments and China’s comprehensive ban on sulphuric acid exports have turned this latent competition into an immediate, zero-sum geopolitical triage.
Governments facing hungry populations have already begun choosing food security over metal security. To make it even more complicated, governments may have to choose between food and defence. Weapons and green energy manufacturers use the same reagents as herbicides, fertilisers and pesticide manufacturers.
Export controls in Zambia, domestic redirection of acid in Indonesia, and internal prioritisation orders in Chile are no longer exceptions; they are the new operating reality. When fertiliser prices surge 40–70 %, and crop-yield forecasts fall, political leaders make the same ancient choice: they feed their people first.
This is the deeper tragedy of our moment. In our urgent drive to decarbonise and escape fossil fuels, we have deepened our dependence on the chemical supply chains the fossil economy created, supply chains that great-power competition can now weaponise at will."
https://ctindale.substack.com/p/the-global-reagent-squeeze-supply
19."Today the Big Four collect more than $300 billion in combined revenue for delivering a service built for a world that no longer exists. Sampling made sense in 1850, when checking every transaction was impossible. In 2026, a machine can examine every record, every transaction, multiple times a year. Sampling is now indefensible. You need a machine to check the machine.
To the builders reading this: if you are building a vertical AI agent that replaces a partnership-bound professional services category, in any geography, we want to talk. Legal has Crosby. Audit has Oath. Healthcare, tax, regulatory compliance, asset management operations: every one of these categories has the same structural opportunity." https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/introducing-oath-our-latest-fluent
20.Mindblowing interview here. Quant hedgefunder turned VC. This was worth listening to. Career alpha. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRLZ-XwyPyo
21.Didn't know much about Brookfield until this interview. One of the biggest platforms of alternative assets. Canadian too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSwHXjH8Og4
22.Base Power, probably another one of the most important companies in America. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph2d-AsHdKE
23.So many interesting ideas here. Joe is always on the cutting edge of investing and operating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hBncWJnVNE
24.The top 1% of outcomes now in Venture is $30B usd. Crazy. A conversation between a top LP and Growth stage VC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiM9mZCmVPY
25. An optimistic take on AI here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O70ZAPnEM7w
26.This was such a great overview on the implications of the SpaceX IPO & defense tech and more patriotism in corporate America. Reindustrialization is happening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG4jGwnxDhw&t=716s
27."The ultimate signal of power during a downturn is silence. While the “new money” is loud about their losses or their small wins, the elite are quietly moving their pieces. They don’t announce their acquisitions. They don’t gloat on X. They simply wait for the dust to settle to reveal they now own the entire sector. Stop praying for stability. Stability is where you get stuck. Pray for the storm, and make sure you have the boat to sail it." https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-chaos-premium
28."Luxury isn’t about noise. It’s about restraint. In business, in art, in life subtraction is the new sophistication.
When you refine your systems, your words, and even your possessions, what remains is pure, powerful, and premium. True elegance lies not in having more, but in needing less."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-luxury-of-simplicity-why-less
29.A grim but enlightening conversation on the breakdown of the global order, end of globalization and implications for investors. Invest in physical & industrial assets is what I get.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaqjVxGEhKg
30.Crash course on wealth management with the CIO of A16Z Perennial, A16Z's multifamily office. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiu81s0iyj8
31.Part 2 with the CIO of A16Z Perennial (Multifamily office). Lots of details on how and why the private secondaries/ SPV market is rife with fraud. Some good basic tax set up recommendations for Americans: QSBS is your friend. Net net: do your homework.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_Ia9xKL0vI
32."Open models still represent a fraction of overall inference, but the thriving competition, increasing usage, & surge of experimentation suggest developers are increasingly willing to route production traffic to them." https://tomtunguz.com/the-thriving-ecosystem-of-open-models/
33."The petrodollar is not vanishing; it’s adapting to a world that is quietly building alternatives and thus reducing the dollar’s power over time. What’s likely to follow is an incremental, multifaceted shift; a pragmatic response to a weakening dollar rather than a dramatic overthrow.
In this environment, holding tangible assets, especially gold, makes eminent sense. I’ve been accumulating physical gold since 2001, recognizing the long-term pressures on debt-heavy fiat systems. Central banks have come to share this view, and they're increasingly useing gold to navigate the changes ahead.
Investors would be wise to follow their lead. History suggests these transitions reward patience. Gold will continue to rise as it gradually becomes an indispensable part of the new monetary system." https://frankgiustra.com/posts/what-comes-after-the-u.s-dollar-system/
34."So what cracks it? Not the technology, the financing. I’m not anti-AI; I’m against the speculative capital structure stacked on top of it. Watch the canary: the first undersubscribed round on the subsidy side. When the subsidy thins, compute has to fight the economics of the labor it replaces on honest terms, and the stack starts grinding toward marginal cost the way wine does.
It rolls downhill, layer by layer. Thinner subsidy means weaker projected demand for compute; weaker demand competes the margin out of the data centers; thinner data-center margins pull the bid out from under the chips; and a softer bid for chips reaches all the way back to the fabs, where the underwriting was written on straight-line growth and fat margins that no longer clear. This competition flips the incentive from scale to efficiency, which strands the least efficient chips (current generation), because they cost too much to run. Each layer reprices from a venture multiple to a project-finance one. Utilities, not unicorns.
The obvious objection is Jevons: make compute cheaper and you simply use more of it, keeping power draw and capex high. I think that’s right, and it’s exactly why I expect inflation rather than collapse. Cheaper, more efficient compute doesn’t kill demand; it lets AI percolate into the processes when it’s actually economic. Volume keeps climbing while margin per unit caves in. That’s the whole shape of the thing: the technology wins, the pool of activity grows, and the people who paid venture prices for utility cash flows are left holding the angel’s share, the value that evaporated from the barrel everyone assumed could only appreciate." https://conduitofvalue.substack.com/p/what-a-napa-wine-cellar-taught-me
35."Depending on where you are in self assessment, you might feel overwhelmed. Most people who read us are beyond that and simply on the paid side going through various new markets and testing demand.
If you’re new then you should do a bottoms up approach. Look at the foundational skills/tools needed in 2026 and beyond.
Sales: If you don’t have any knack for what your skillset is? Start learning sales. This can be in person sales or it could be copywriting. Really doesn’t matter. You will need to have this skill in every aspect of life. Want more dating options? You’re selling yourself. Found your niche skills but need to impress the interviewer? See selling yourself. Found you’re terrible with people but can find trending e-com ideas in seconds? Yep you’ll need to make high quality ads/copywriting skills.
The message is that you choose this as a base layer because it will be useful to you regardless of the path.
Data Literacy: In the end, people are going to choose what they want to buy/sell. This means you’re going to take all those new fancy AI tools and figure out the intention behind the data. You should avoid the trap of saying “oh women like this new lipstick brand”. Instead, you will have to go through all the data related to the new brand.
You need to solve for: 1) what exact age band/ethnicity/location etc. 2) what exact price point, 3) what search filter is causing it and 4) if it is repeatable and if there another similar hole in the market
Similar to sales, data literacy is going to be extremely valuable. Most will take a bunch of information from AI and then make the AI solve for what is important. This is simply not good enough. AI is only at average intelligence. While it can organize the data quite well, the judgement layer leaves much to be desired (to say the least)
How fast can you spot a new market trend? Pick a few, write them down, come back in 6 months… were you right? This doesn’t even cost money if you’re extremely risk averse.
Creating a New Workflow: If you go through the second process this will naturally happen. You’'ll find trends or patterns that are obvious to you but not obvious to 99.9% of people. This needs to be automated with AI/software into something only you look at. In an ideal world, the workflow helps you research any topic you like in half the time.
What Do Strangers Say: Not your mom. Not your best friend. Total strangers. If complete strangers are saying you’re good at something, that’s a hint. Start writing them down and take it seriously.
People are extremely critical. They can’t solve their own lives but they can certainly tell you what to do after your meaningless 1 hour interaction. If strangers are telling you that you’re good at something, this is a sign of being in the top 10% at minimum (already)."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/you-run-out-of-doors-how-much-does
36."Travel is not just about leisure. It’s one of the finest forms of education available to us. It broadens the mind, deepens our character, builds gratitude, and teaches lessons that can’t be learned from books alone. Those who travel often return home wiser than when they departed."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/why-travel-matters-7-life-changing
Chhaava: Marathan Warrior King
A stirring patriotic Indian movie about the great warrior king Sambhaji Maharaj of the Maratha empire and his war with the Mughal empire after the death of his great father. It’s a grand movie that can only be made in India these days with hundreds of extras. Violent, at times exaggerated but it was entertaining.
You get a sense of this legend who fought off the Mughals for over 9 years, despite being massively outnumbered. Without giving away too much in the movie, he dies the way he lives. Heroic. Defiant, fierce and with his family and people in his heart. Unconquerable. Undefeated even in captivity. They lived in harsh and brutal times.
“In this very pain lies the joy of life.”
In one of the more serious scenes he talks with his poet friend and there is great wisdom here:
“The man who masters the mind, masters life. The one who succumbs to it, won’t survive.
Those who yield without a fight, bring upon them shame every time.
Shame on those who fail to dream and strive, for the right to dream is our birthright.
For the sake of our own, we must act today.”
Wise words. Stirring words. Jai Bhavani!
Being on Tilt: How to Reset Yourself
I loved the F1 Movie. There is a scene when the team has false allegations against them regarding their new cars. So they have to use the older cars and lose their edge. This causes the main character to lose his head during the race. His GM observing the race says: “He’s driving angry. It’s not good. It’s not good.” Of course, he crashes badly.
This is how I felt a good part of March this year as I was sorting through massive cash flow issues due to my real estate investment problems. There was a specific day when it felt like everything went wrong, one incident had me backing my car into the garage causing damage to both the garage and car. And this is when it gets really dangerous. I was clearly on tilt.
Tilt refers to a mental state where frustration, anger, or emotional distress causes you to play way below your normal level — usually by making reckless, overly aggressive, emotional, or just plain irrational decisions.
I dug into this via Grok:
“The phrase comes from old pinball machines: if you shook the machine too hard (out of frustration), it would "tilt" — trigger a sensor, freeze the flippers, flash "TILT" on the display, and end your game as a penalty for cheating. Poker players borrowed it to describe when someone gets so tilted emotionally that their game "breaks" and they start hemorrhaging chips/money.
In modern usage (especially in games like League of Legends, Valorant, CS2, Dota 2, poker, chess, etc.):
You lose a close fight / get bad-beaten / griefed / run into insane variance → frustration builds
Instead of resetting and playing your A-game, you chase, force plays, flame teammates, spam abilities, take dumb 1v5s, bluff insanely wide, etc.
Results get worse → tilt snowballs → massive loss of LP/rank/money/sanity
Common signs you're on tilt
Heart rate up, breathing shallow/fast
You're muttering/swearing at the screen/teammates
Playing hands/champions/positions you know are -EV just to "get it back"
Tunnel vision — ignoring map info, team comms, fundamentals
Rage-queuing the next game immediately after a loss streak”
I was definitely on tilt. And this was why I quickly cancelled many of my plans that day. I was a danger to myself and everyone around me. Then is when you have to step back to regain control of your emotions. Maybe even go to church. Definitely not drive a car in this mode.
I went back to Grok for some suggestions both short term and long term which I copied below.
“How to get off tilt (quick fixes when it's happening)
Immediate stop — Best and hardest: just quit. Close the client, walk away for 15–60 minutes (or the rest of the day if it's bad). Playing while tilted is almost always -EV long-term.
Breathe & reset — Take 10 deep belly breaths. Physically stand up, stretch, splash cold water on your face.
Label it — Say out loud (or in your head): "I'm tilted right now. This is emotional, not rational." Naming it reduces its power.
Short break routine — 5–10 min walk, listen to music, watch a funny video, do push-ups — anything to change state.
Reframe the trigger — "That's just variance." "Bad players make those plays sometimes." "One game doesn't define me."
Long-term ways to tilt less:
Build mental bankroll awareness — Accept that bad sessions/runs are part of the game (variance in poker, matchmaking in ranked games).
Pre-session ritual — Warm up properly, decide session length/buy-in limits in advance, never play tired/hungry/stressed.
Post-mortem without emotion — Review losses later when calm, not right after.
Track tilt triggers — Journal what sets you off most (e.g., inters, slow-rollers, smurfs, RNG) → prepare countermeasures.
Lower stakes/expectations temporarily when you feel fragile.
Everyone tilts sometimes — even pros. The skill isn't never tilting; it's recognizing it early and not letting it destroy your session/week/month.”
Tilting is normal for everyone. It’s just about recognizing when you are in it, so you can head it off before you do any more damage.
Health, Wealth & Fame: The Surprising Wisdom of Logan Paul
I actually didn’t know anything about Logan Paul, except for being a massive Youtube influencer, consumer products guru and apparently WWE wrestler. And brother of also massive influencer, boxer and investor Jake Paul, who runs Anti-Fund with my friend Geoff Woo. So when I stumbled upon an interview he did with Iced Coffee Guys I figured, why not? You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nuea3ejCPI0
I liked his ideas on the importance of fitness and it’s made a huge difference in my life in recent years especially during the hard times. “If you are not taking care of yourself, how can you take care of something else? Your body is your temple. This is the one vessel you have” “Treat it like a temple, why would you not? If you don’t have the discipline about the thing that’s powering your entire existence on this planet, how can you expect to have discipline anywhere else?”
Logan talks about why most people are haters and why most people are losers. These are my words but it’s kind of true.
“The only way they make themselves feel better is by pretending that everything is happening to them, that the world is happening at them, that life is just serving them situations, instead of becoming an adult, grabbing life by the horns, and taking charge of their own life” “It’s difficult to manifest your own reality, take action, find motivation, and do things that compel you. It’s much easier to place blame on other people and make yourself a victim of life”
Ditch the victimhood, take charge. Have deep personal ownership for everything that you do.
However, I found myself really impressed with his mindset and he articulates it well.
Logan also talks about the importance of picking your path. Hard work is important but finding the right thing that fits your personality and skillset is pretty critical.
“Celebrities, influencers, and all these motivational speakers tell you that you can do whatever you put your mind to. We are all equal. I’m gonna be honest, that’s not true. I’ve tried to do things and worked really hard. I will immerse myself in a project or an endeavor, go all in, and I found that no matter how all in you go, sometimes it just doesn’t work”
“‘Work hard and you’ll win no matter what’ doesn’t always apply. What I think can apply is finding what makes you tick. Find the thing that makes you want to get out of bed every morning, even if it’s something that you wouldn’t consider for one second to be a viable business opportunity. Because if you do what you love every day, you won’t need to work a day in your life”
And of course, if you want to get anywhere, you gotta have goals. A north star even. Logan says:
“Being goal-oriented really helps… Having goals that you write down on a paper, and when you achieve them, you can cross them off the paper. Something about that to me is deeply fulfilling.”
It was an interesting interview. How to live a polyglot life. And what makes an accomplished young man tick. I learned some good stuff here.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Aug 9th, 2026
“Alas, summer sun can’t last forever. The days will grow cooler and shorter, and our skin will once again pale”– Sarah MacLean
This is a great discussion and framework for looking at the world. I don't agree with all her conclusions but it's a valuable lens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjtlOd2lbWU
2."It is not that the US is abandoning Taiwan. Nor is the American withdrawal of troops from Poland and Germany an abandonment of Europe. The message is not one of abandonment but of enticement. It is, “there’s a deal to be had IF China can become more like Taiwan,” and “there’s a deal to be had if Russia can stop lobbing advanced weapons systems at Ukraine,” and “there’s a deal for the IRGC if they can stop blocking the Strait and aiming missiles at nuclear power plants”.
The message is the same in each case. The old approach will now be more harshly punished, while embracing America will bring rich rewards. China can hardly argue against the offer. Their economy is substantially underperforming what it is capable of. Foreign Direct Investment has dried up. Yes, they have made immense technological advances, but the general population is increasingly agitated by the debt problem and the inability to find a job or to trust banks to return their savings.
Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai are fine, but the beneficiaries in smaller, secondary, and tertiary cities are far fewer. So, there’s no deal if China wants to crush Taiwan as they were seen to have done in Hong Kong. There’s a great deal if China becomes more like Taiwan. In the meantime, the US passes the night watch to Japan. They are closer and now extremely militarily capable. They’ll be guarding Taiwan like a temple dragon, meaning fiercely.
The same conversion dynamic has now unfolded in Venezuela. The U.S. has already agreed and implemented a comprehensive oil framework with interim President Delcy Rodríguez. Washington now controls all crude sales and revenue accounts, Venezuelan budgets are subject to a monthly U.S. audit, and funds must be spent on U.S. goods and services. More than 80 million barrels have already been delivered under these terms. Yesterday’s adversary has become a stakeholder who benefits from the new order. This is exactly the model Trump and Xi are applying on the global stage.
In case you are still wondering why now, let’s be reminded that both the US and China know we are living in an era of extraordinary scientific and technological advances that will allow us to cure diseases, extend longevity, grow food more easily, and achieve virtually free energy. We can also now harness the power of atomic energy to destroy humanity in a nuclear flash or to power a much brighter future with new TRISO-fueled nuclear power stations that bring no meltdown risks. China has already industrialized the mass production of such power plants. Huge progress is being made by both countries on nuclear fusion as well. The target date? July 4th, 2026, America’s 250th Anniversary. Trump wants to show the world that he has delivered (virtually) free energy to the world. That’s a whole new kind of fireworks. A Star in a Box, as I called it in a previous substack, is nuclear power in a container half the size of a car, powered by half a handful of TRISO pellets that can power 5000 homes almost indefinitely. This tech can be used to illuminate humanity's future or destroy Earth altogether. We can go light or go dark. So, it is now civilizationally essential that the superpowers agree that this kind of power will be used for peace and not for war."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/the-hug-and-the-circumpunct-us-china
3. "Future historians will likely have trouble gauging Xi’s skill. On the one hand, he’s a serious statesman. On the other hand, his opposite number is Donald Trump. Regardless, the Chinese see blood in the water, even if American leadership won’t acknowledge we appear to be committing superpower suicide. In January, a Beijing think tank published a report called “Thank Trump,” which concluded that tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies, and the president’s war against American institutions have strengthened China while weakening the U.S. Citing polarization, government dysfunction, and “Latin American-style instability,” the report’s authors labeled Trump an “accelerator of American political decay.” A decade ago, our priority was to manage the Thucydides trap such that we maintained our leadership of the rules-based world order, avoided conflict, and increased global prosperity.
Today, we’re riding shotgun with a president who never met an American interest he didn’t seek to monetize. Superpowers don’t die when adversaries breach the gates. They die when the people inside start auctioning off the gates."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/art-of-the-sellout
4. Good Silicon Valley discussions for the week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLjYWaT_Du4
5. My favorite weekly discussion on the latest B2B news in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z94zlbVn048&t=1051s
6."An entire generation of tech workers came up believing the apparatus they walked into was the bare minimum any reasonable employer would provide, when it was really just a recruiting offer that nobody ever bothered to take back once they’d hired you. We built daycares for adults.
You don’t learn agency in a place that never asks you to have any. And ownership is the same kind of problem, in that you can’t really learn how to do it when there’s always somebody else around to do it for you. You learn it the first time you realize nobody is going to push a notification to a billion users to make your problem go away. You’re the only person in the building who can actually fix what’s broken."
https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/the-coddling-of-the-tech-mind
7. "Anyway… There are several countries in Latin America that are primed for real economic booms because the populations within those countries may see incredible windfalls in the coming years.
This will mostly be happening because of rising commodity prices. These countries are rich with copper, lithium, zinc, and all of the minerals that are in demand for the build out of the global AI economy.
It helps that over 30% of gold and silver deposits are also found in Latin America.
Rising commodity prices will lift Latin American economies."
https://www.codyshirk.com/p/drugs-gangs-surf-now-time-for-investors
8."The thing standing between me and the life I wanted was a man running pessimistic models in his own head and calling it being realistic. Get him out of the way, and the world opens up. That’s not a metaphor. That’s actually what happens.
The realist thinks he’s avoiding the cost. He thinks by staying in the 95 he’s the one playing it safe, hedging properly, protecting himself from the downside. He looks at the optimistic delusionist and goes well, he’s going to crash and burn eventually. He’s going to learn the hard way. I’ll be the one standing when it all goes wrong.
The thing nobody tells you about the safe option is that it’s not actually safe. It’s just a slow version of the same loss. You don’t avoid the pain by avoiding the risk — you just spread it out so thin you stop noticing it. Twenty years of mild regret feels different to one moment of acute embarrassment, but it adds up to a lot more weight. And by the time you feel it properly, you’re too far in to do anything about it."
https://lifemaxxers.substack.com/p/optimistic-delusion
9."Is it time to start stacking nickels again?
If you think the world is going to need more energy, then yes…
What’s Nickel Used for Anyway?
We use nickel for pretty much everything.
It’s found in almost every type of metal that you touch everyday and is used in all types of industrial processes."
https://www.codyshirk.com/p/nickel-arbitrage
10."Despite the scale of their operations, few people have heard of the trading houses. This is deliberate. The trading houses are mostly private opaque companies based in Switzerland and do not want their operations scrutinized. The story of how a group of obscure companies came to play such an outsized role in the functioning of the global energy system dates back to the aftermath of World War II when the great powers became locked in a secret war for control of the world’s natural resources."
https://arenamag.com/articles/black-gold-and-grey-markets
11."SpaceX targets a $1.75 trillion valuation at IPO on June 12, 2026, making it one of the five most valuable companies globally. The S-1 reveals the tremendous scale & nearly limitless ambition of a modern AI conglomerate."
https://tomtunguz.com/spacex-s1-analysis/
12."From space lasers to nuclear EMPs, GPS spoofing, and the rise of commercial space superpowers, the Bond franchise’s “goofy” space plots has proven remarkably prescient. The weapons 007’s villains wielded are now the focus of actual military programs and international concern. We may not have laser-rifle battles in orbit yet, but the space battlefield Fleming imagined is very much becoming reality."
https://arenamag.com/articles/the-man-with-the-golden-satellite
13. "The optimization should always be for the most DURABLE profit dollars generated as QUICKLY as possible with the LEAST about of capital required.
High gross margin (%) is just a proxy for doing that well, but focusing just on that will cause one to miss great opportunities."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-198840308
14."But deep tech is not just “harder software.” It is a different game, and founders and investors who understand its rules early will have a real advantage. Companies that remove physical bottlenecks will not be built, financed, or evaluated like software companies, and the key differences show up in three layers:
People and path dependence
Risk and reversibility
Capital and value creation
While many of the constraints below make it harder to start, those same constraints make the winners more defensible, better financed, more valuable, and harder to copy.
The best deep tech companies will not look like software companies with slower sales cycles. They will have different markers of quality: exceptional founder-market fit, clear technical inflection points, urgent customer demand, and the ability to turn manufacturing, regulation, performance, and supply chains into durable moats.
The key is that deep tech is not just harder. The difficulty is part of the opportunity. Scarce talent, regulatory friction, manufacturing complexity, technical risk, and slower iteration are real obstacles, but they also keep casual competitors out and give the winners a chance to become structurally important companies. When a company solves a hard physical bottleneck, it does not just capture demand; it can reshape an entire industry around itself."
https://www.codingvc.com/p/deep-tech-companies-are-built-different
15.Pretty geopolitically naive and ignorant as always but the discussion on SpaceX was worth it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGbA6ze0_3M
16.Always an inspiring and educational discussion about technology and geopolitics. Palmer Luckey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--Ef5Q-3Iq8
17.A good take on AI investing in 2026. Was surprisingly insightful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3HGhlV6dD0&t=2s
18.2026 is going to be scary and wild due to drone warfare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IVtLIeZwkc
19.The asymmetric edge and divergent results of technology. Makes me optimistic for America despite the dysfunction in this country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyhNOoXevY4
20."If you’re targeting the lower end of the K-shape are people going to stop eating? Will they stop general hygiene? Will they kill their internet connection? Will they eat out a ton? The answer to all of this is no.
You can do the same to the luxury. Are they going to spend less money on their kids education and their pets vet bills? Will they buy status goods to showcase where they are in society? Are they going to pay up for safety, speed and comfort? The answer to all of this is yes.
We don’t really care which side of the K-shape economy you target. As long as you’re not making excuses and relying 100% on a W-2, we’re square with your preference. Both will make money. Just don’t delude yourself into believing they are the same market.
If you go into the bottom of the K, you can’t switch to the top of the K. Similarly if you target the top of the K, it’s hard to go after the bottom of the K since your margins would get killed along with the name brand recognition."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/spacex-and-how-to-benefit-from-the
21."If you want deep seated confidence that is drilled down all the way to your subconscious, the only way you will ever achieve this is through action.
Men are creatures of action. Not of manifestation. Not of words of affirmation. And not of visualization.
No one on the planet has ever achieved their full potential dreaming about a life they wish to live from the comfort of their couch.
So instead of faking it until you make it, stack relentless action."
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/how-to-build-real-confidence
22."As usual, there is no point in evading taxes. You should always pay them, just pay what you owe legally and use the rules intelligently.
You do not owe anyone additional money for being inefficient. Do things correct and you’ll find that your real tax burden goes down a cliff if you are a business owner/equity owner vs. W-2 employee.
There are a lot more complicated items to go over but this is good enough.
If you have questions on this we’re always around on the paid side. None of this is legal or financial advice, DYOR and we’re confident you’ll find what you’re looking for.
Ain’t no one rich worried about inheritance taxes or income taxes. It’s all wealth, capital gains, deductions and debt. By the book."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/basic-tax-saving-strategies-as-you
23."It is very easy to imagine all kinds of ways we might subvert new technology to empower a lone individual, but these are all fictions so far. We should not ignore these fictions; in fact we should work hard as a society to make sure they don’t happen. But we also should not fall under the spell of the lone villain myth. The evidence so far is that they have no superpowers."
https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/myth-of-the-lone-villain
24."Like countless other supply chains, the sulfur industry has been disrupted by the war in Iran, as Middle Eastern refineries are heavily involved in the trade. The situation has been compounded by an unexpected and highly protectionist move by China, as well as Ukraine’s relentless attacks on Russia’s refinery network. These developments are significant, and the Twitterverse is awash in chatbot-generated catastrophizing, with predictions that global food and metal production are imperiled, and famine and factory closings are sure to follow.
Is this panic justified? Has a smelly byproduct that could hardly be given away suddenly become irreplaceable?"
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/something-stinks
25."Our leaders, in the US, in China, in Russia, in Korea, in Cuba, in Iran, and everywhere else are still human beings. They are disinclined to bring humanity to an end. They are inclined to find a place in history for good reasons. You may not like them or any one of them but heartware seems to be playing a role in bringing us back from the brink of annihilation.
Each is facing or being forced to face the new realities: annihilation or abundance. All will choose abundance ultimately. The only question is what everybody’s price is. We’re in a bidding war for protection money at this point. The IRGC wants protection post-Iran's reentry into the world economy. Cuba’s leaders do too, though they have less negotiating power now.
The hardest nut to crack here, the Gordian knot of geopolitics, remains the war in Ukraine. When I look at the war in Ukraine, I see symbols and gestures that most are missing. Most do not recognize that Ukraine is a center stone. It is the ultimate crucible where we will either emerge, free from conflict, transformed and ready to leap into an abundance economy together, or where all will be lost. It is the darkest node of geopolitics and the ultimate crucible.
We need to understand why and how Russians and Ukrainians think about this. My bet is that this conflict ends in one of two ways: a hug or an Armistice. Either way, it ends. We might end teh Armistice in Korea but begin a new one in Ukraine. Either way, a Peace Dividend is forming, but it may come in the form of signals we might miss, like a football being thrown across a war zone or a meeting of leaders at a Temple."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/the-hug-manifests
26."Visiting Harmattan’s new factory last week, the same logic came up unprompted: production remains mostly manual today because designs are still changing too fast to justify locking in automated tooling. The moment you automate a specific assembly step, you’ve made it rigid. In a product still evolving, rigidity costs more than it saves.
The Ukrainian shops I visited operate under a more extreme version of the same constraints. Output runs around 300 units a month per shop, assembled entirely by hand. But there is an additional variable that does not apply in the Western world: the factories move. Ukrainian drone producers operate across dispersed, constantly rotating sites because fixed facilities are targets for Shahed strikes.
The production model has to be light enough to relocate on short notice - no heavy tooling, no fixed infrastructure, nothing that cannot be packed and moved. The reason it works at volume under those conditions is the same reason the model has to be mobile: the design is simple enough that humans can assemble it anywhere.
The automation question, in other words, is largely answered before anyone steps onto the factory floor. Assembly can stay human-heavy and still reach volume, provided the design decisions have been made correctly upstream."
https://defensebrief.substack.com/p/the-factory-floor-nobody-imagined
27.Some interesting takes from Doomberg. Don't always agree with everything but it's worth getting different views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bByr29QHG4I&t=5s
28.Rise of Neo-Primes, Geopolitics and the difference between Democracy vs Dictatorships.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-HmjiXKlvg
29.One of the best discussions on the defense industry but with a public market perspective. This was incredibly insightful on why the defense space is so complicated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VElWGgso2FY&t=592s
30.A crash course on history of trade and logistics and the implications for the future. This was fascinating especially for me as a history guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlHd3-0eXOA
31."Right now there is still no real place to put money beyond big tech and luxury RE. Unless you’re saving up for something major (house, new car etc.) then the move is basically the same: Luxury RE (notable increase in risk) —> VOO, QQQ, SMH/GRID, Nuclear. Those are ***roughly*** ordered in how much risk you’re taking.
We’re a bit overdue for a quick update on housing as well but directionally it's still playing out. Median isn’t doing great due to high rate and the luxury market seems to get more luxury every 3 months."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/some-adjustments-crypto-and-wealth
32.My regular dose of painful reality from Doomberg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vAXXMT4cko&t=631s
33."Recent global conflicts, from Russia and Ukraine to Iran and Israel, have seen a resurgent awareness of the frailty of US munitions stock, which has been drawn down by both direct and indirect involvement in these events. While exact stockpile volumes are not disclosed, it is estimated that supplies of US warheads and the missiles that carry them have declined by nearly an order of magnitude since their peak during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Analysts have estimated that in the event of a conflict in the Pacific between China and Taiwan, US munitions supplies could be depleted in as few as three days, with some higher-tier terminal-phase missile supplies potentially depleted in the first 24 hours of conflict."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-199361654
34.As always, a fun and educational episode on recent business news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCjPU7fcBHs
35."Add it up: around $50M for a modern, vertically-integrated, software-driven contract-MFG hub in 2026. Jim started with six-packs of beer and one $700K laser. In seven years the barrier to entry moved two orders of magnitude (and that’s not inflation, it’s a different product entirely).
That’s the real comp for the operators reading this. Next time you see a “SendCutSend for [X]” pitch (for injection molding, for PCBA, for composites), $50M is the price of table stakes for a true vertically-integrated hub. Anything claiming to build one for $5M is quoting you a job shop and calling it a factory.
Belosic, Chamberlain, Sessa, Hengsperger, Liu are proving the operator side on American soil. Decade of pain, priced. The venture stack is finally following, even if the debt market underneath the median shop still isn’t.
The talent magnet is the second half, and it’s working too. Chris Power, every foreign-born floor lead at every robotics startup in the country, every immigrant founder in 46% of the Fortune 500. That’s the American asymmetric weapon, and China cannot replicate it.
What we’re getting wrong is the policy collision. $100K on the H-1B, a wage-weighted lottery, no STEM-PhD pathway, no skilled-trades carve-out. We’re filing down the one structural advantage that makes the rest of the reshoring math work.
We are not building Shenzhen. We never will. Shenzhen was built on a form of national hunger we don't have and shouldn't want (and shouldn't want it back, frankly). What we have is something different, and on the right time horizon, something better: a culture that turns the world's most ambitious 22-year-olds into American founders, American shop owners, American floor leads, faster and at higher volume than any other country has ever managed."
https://constiv.substack.com/p/the-hopium-moat-vs-magnet
36."In this era of sameness, narrative matters far more than it used to. You can hear when a founder has been deeper than they’re letting on. Faked secrets fall apart inside four follow-up questions. You can hear the script underneath. Your viral launch video won’t save you there. The real ones get weirder and more specific the deeper you push. The best ones paint trillion-dollar visions and walk you through the exact steps to get there. You really can’t shortcut your way to it.
The best pitches don’t end when the meeting does. They have you thinking about it at dinner with your family, still working out why his second customer mattered more than his first and how those two together create the network effect.
Before your next pitch, remember: stories create the frame. Logic fills in the colors."
https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/share-your-obsession-304
37. A good summary of the Gulf State militaries and their deficiencies. But it's changing fast cuz they got cash.
Everything is Barbell: Don’t Get trapped in Murderous Middle
I swear Naval Ravikant is a business prophet and genius. I’ve only seen a few investor-operator types in Silicon Valley like Naval. He isn’t just ahead of the trend but is able to articulate what he sees so well. It truly is impressive.
He wrote on X: “Software will proliferate just as videos, music, writing did. The market structure will shift from a “fat middle” to mega-aggregators and a long tail.”
Basically a barbell. Two sides where all the action is. God help those who are in the middle. Disaggregated, irrelevant and rekt. Arjun @neuralunlock responded with specific example:
“Yes. Music and video industries had thousands of mid-sized labels, studios, and distributors that captured meaningful revenue.
This was before Spotify and Netflix emerged. The market structure then changed: massive platforms at the top and a long tail of creators.
AI collapses the cost to build, so aggregators like Google absorb the most common use cases, followed by a long tail of tiny, hyper-specific tools.
If you’re in the middle, you’re in trouble. The mid-sized vendor will be getting squeezed on both sides.”
So if you run a company in the murderous middle, or work at one. You better be careful. Or better yet, go build something new. It’s not all bad. There will be massive opportunities around the corner. They are probably already here.
Arjun goes on to say:
“Also important to consider: if AI eats the switching costs, the moat that kept enterprise software sticky disappears.
Expect to see a ton of micro SaaS companies emerge.”
I think they are both right. Forewarned is forearmed. Start building and start selling, now is the time.
Cyclical Investments: Learning from Calvin Froedge
I know I mentioned Calvin Froedge before, an American entrepreneur based in Panama and private investor extraordinaire. He also has quite the following on X aka Twitter. He is acerbic and sometimes way out there but you cannot say he isn’t smart and original.
I listened to a great interview he did a few years back that really still holds strong. It’s quite insightful and gives you an idea why he has done so well investing. You should watch it yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=VCTc3Btp8O0
I pulled some interesting points from the conversation:
“the nice thing is that you remember Gordon Gekko and Wall Street talking about: ‘I create nothing, I'm at the top of the food chain, I own everything.’ I mean that's really what Equity investing is all about.
I mean you've got the ability with practically no regulation with no employees with you…. You know you don't need to make sure your contractors get there. You don't need to make sure that nobody gets drunk on the job. You don't need to make sure that everybody's doing their quality control. You just need to be right. You are only responsible for you. I mean that is the ultimate, the most refined form of capitalism that exists right! That is pure capitalism.”
This is why I get the appeal personally as a private investor. I wish I had discovered equity investing much earlier. Unfortunately or fortunately, my realm of so called expertise is in startups, investing in startups. Super illiquid startups. So in the few cycles where I got liquidity I ended up putting money into real estate VC funds and startups versus equity investing, much to my chagrin and financial pain. There is much to love about equity investing for sure. Especially in unsexy cyclicals. Doubly so as the world fractures and refocuses on reindustrialization and securing their own supply chains.
“I love equities, I really do. I love equities also because you know there's a saying that the most about the most volatile thing is the equity, the earnings are the second most volatile thing and then the replacement value of the assets is the least volatile thing.
And you know that's the great thing about the stock market is if you have a long enough, if you can look back long term at a particular sector, mining and shipping are two outstanding examples.”
However, as Calvin states, it’s not for everyone. You have to be a long term investor and have the emotional stomach for the inevitably crazy ups and downs.
“You can see that there are cycles. You can see that sometimes times are really good, sometimes times are really bad. When times are really good, people are paying crazy multiples for these companies, right crazy multiples for the assets.
You know when times are really bad people think that they're never going to have value again they think everything's a zero. You might in equities, have to weather a 50% drawdown on something. Like that could happen especially in mining stocks.
I have had 80% drawdowns before. I've just you know sat there and watched
it and did nothing. And just accepted it and waited.
But in cyclical Industries you know that the Mania times are always going to
return and the depression times are always going to return.”
And there are opportunities in these cyclicals everywhere, unlike in real estate or even startup investing.
“In real estate I can go out and look for something cheap. And occasionally here because it's not a very liquid Market I seldom find something like selling for less than replacement value. But I gotta look over every rock and maybe I'll find something that's selling 40% or 50% off.
In equities you frequently find stuff, I mean in these cyclical businesses you frequently find stuff that's had 90% drawdowns. Like I buy stuff all the time that what I paid for it, a couple years later they pay me that much in a dividend in a single quarter. I mean it's just stupid. Equity is the only asset class where you can find that.”
I also got some good nuggets on how Calvin manages his business life, between a core money business he runs, called Marhelm and his private investing. And the critical importance of patience. Something I lack and am working hard on.
“I'm trying to spend almost all of my time on Marhelm my shipping information Service and I think that we've got a pretty good track record and we've done a good job. I love shipping because it's cyclical. I like cyclical businesses because I know that other people are impatient and they lack the emotional fortitude to wait on through these cycles. People have some cash that they want to put to work.
They want to put it in, you know they want to do it now. They don't want to wait. They don't just want to sit on cash for a year or two years and just wait for the opportunity.
They want to buy something now and in cyclical businesses you can't do that. You have to be patient and you have to wait for different points in the cycle. You have to look at those long-term fundamentals and you gotta wait for the right opportunities or move on.
But you know these cyclicals, they're always going to give you the chance for multibaggers. Mining, shipping, steel, even agriculture. But mining and shipping, those are the kings of cyclicality.”
So if you are interested in equity investing, and assuming you have the willingness to do the research, have great pain tolerance, patience and a long term inclination, cyclicals are an interesting area to look at. The cyclical industries Calvin discusses are well set up during this time of major geopolitical and global macro change. I hope you found listening to Calvin Froedge to be as instructive as it was for me.
The Frontier Versus the Core: A Discussion with Maxwell Meyer
Maxwell Meyer is the founder of Arena Magazine, a beautiful collectible magazine that harkens to my beloved Monocle magazine but whose topic is more optimistic American propaganda as he calls it. The magazine is beautiful, the images standout, the writing is awesome. A throwback as everything else becomes more digital. He is a thinker and observer of America and its culture, stating that “Risk Tolerance is an American advantage” which is very true.
But one of his most important ideas is that of the Frontier versus the Core. You need both to work together but they are very different. He talked about it in a podcast with Jackson Dahl.
“The root question is, how do we export more of this? Clearly, people are thinking about exporting this to government. There's no new founder in the government. There's no new founder of Kodak or a big, dumb, slow company.
People even say Satya Nadella refounded Microsoft, and that's what has enabled him to be so effective. You could say that Microsoft is a bit of a Theseus's ship that's been rebuilt. What are they still doing that they were doing back then? They still make Windows. Excel. They make Excel. Excel is probably the through line. They have the cloud business. They did the foray into phones; it totally blew up and didn't work at all.
By leaving that, the joke ended up being on Apple because Microsoft built this other huge business that Apple wasn't even paying attention to.
The point about a Kodak, or why government is different from Silicon Valley and why some Silicon Valley people misapprehend how the government works, is related to this idea of an engineering culture. Concrete things are easier to prove or disprove.
Just look at the data. This is also tied in with the idea of the frontier, where you're really testing out whether things are or are not working. Joe Lonsdale and I have written about this conception of the frontier in American history, trying to connect literal cowboy culture and the spirit of technological experimentation. Some people will be skeptical of this connection, but I'll try to persuade them.
On the old frontier, if you don't have your wits about you, you get shot, you get scalped, you get eaten by hyenas. There are lots of things that happen. Adventurers, if they survive, turn out stronger on the other end. The ideas that they're proving out on the frontier tend to be very resilient and very long lasting.
They tend to be people or ideas that can solve new types of problems. Maybe there's a connection between the fact that California is this Pacific frontier. It's over the mountains, there are these valleys, there's this coast. It's the energy of the west.
The other idea that Joe and I talk about is that the opposite of the frontier is the core. In any empire or civilization, you have a core and a frontier. It's a dialectic. They're both very important. You need the core to set the laws and give cohesiveness and unity, and you need the frontier to push it. It's like pace layers—the fashion and the culture or the natural layers. It's a dialectic, and they need to remain in balance.
A country or a civilization or some other organization can drift a little bit more toward the frontier. For example, the United States from 1789 when Washington became president all the way until 1861 when the Civil War started. It was just expand, expand, expand, expand. Then it was a little too "frontier-y," and we forgot the core was on fire—Civil War, et cetera.
One of the arguments that we'd make right now is that America has been a little too heavy on the core. Washington, D.C. is now the richest place in the universe. The suburbs of Washington are the wealthiest place in the world. It's the craziest thing. You have all these laws piling up, all these federal employees, all this bureaucracy, and that is clearly not being battle-tested like things are at the frontier.
There's no possible way for government programs to go away naturally. There's no natural churn. Where's the natural churn? They're not forced to fight for their survival. If you can apply these principles of competition, the frontier, and the Karl Popper idea of falsifiability—if something's not falsifiable, it's not science—we should be trying to be more scientific or have a more engineering mindset. There are some things that were more political reforms rather than implementing an engineering culture. But one thing the critics of DOGE got wrong is that they were never going to accept any cuts. As soon as the cuts got concrete, it was going to be on the attack.
Karp does not talk about DOGE in the book. The book was actually written before 2024. It's the example of: can we apply this mindset? Joe Gebbia, one of the founders of Airbnb, has just been announced as the Chief Design Officer of the United States.
They're clearly going to implement these ideas in various areas of the government, in a way that may not be less offensive to political objectors.
Is there objectively a better way to design a website? The government says, "No, let's pay someone to do it." Silicon Valley says, "Yes, there's an objective way to do it, and this is why we have $70 billion and you don't." There was something provably, falsifiably true about it. You would know if we were bullshitters because it wouldn't work.
In the government, there's no such competing pressure. There are no hyenas, there are no Comanches coming to rip your hair off. You don't have the paranoia of the frontier. The paranoia of the frontier.
This is closely connected to Elon's erratic personality, in that he's repeatedly taken these things to the utter limit, to the edge of the abyss. That is where you can learn.
It goes back to how blowing up the rocket was more valuable to Elon than the people in the core could possibly know because he was testing something at the edges of what's possible. That is where you get to falsifiable results. Is this working or not? That's the engineering culture.
There were political reasons why Elon was unpopular with some of these people.
Could there have been a DOGE without some of the more partisan elements? Yes, and maybe it would have worked better. But part of the reason for the hatred of DOGE, the idea of it, and the hit pieces on the young men working on it is that there will always be a negative reaction from the established set if it threatens them.
That's a natural human emotion, and I'm not necessarily attacking it. Sometimes there's a pendulum swing, and people need to accept it.”
A bit of a long one. But it’s so helpful to understand what happens in the empire and where you belong in it (and for those who don’t think America is an empire, not sure what to say). I’d go insane if I lived in the core. Don’t mind visiting the core but I'm a frontier kind of guy. And a big part of any success in life is knowing where you belong and where you can thrive.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Aug 2nd, 2026
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.--Wallace Stevens
1.Vinod Khosla, not the nicest man but a great investor and operator. And he says what he thinks which is not common these days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ3IDtwqBc8
2.One of the most successful and biggest private companies in the world. Koch Industries. Creative destruction and principles driven company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIo3AuyvV84
3. The "It AI" company right now. Insight dense conversation with the CFO of Anthropic on scaling and compute. Lots of good stuff here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEEZPpx8qow&t=15s
4."The reality though is that the war in Iran might have boosted oil and energy prices in the short term, but that it has fractured OPEC, with the UAE opting to exit the organisation and promising to pump baby pump. From Moscow’s perspective this might well suggest a future oil price war, with more supply coming on stream a year or so out, just at the time when current short term higher oil prices will destroy demand as the global economy slows. For Russia this would be catastrophic as it could suggest a year out from now oil prices could be lower than at the start of the Iran war, and if Russia then suffers still from the one third Urals price discount from sanctions then that could suggest $30-40 a barrel price for Urals.
Meanwhile, if the outlook is for an oil supplier free for all, in terms of trying to take market share, Russia is in a terrible position, as a combination of sanctions and Ukrainian deep strike drone attacks means that Russia has not even been able to meet its existing OPEC production quota.
Combine that with years of underinvestment and Russia is in no position to make up for lower oil prices with increased production. Such an oil price/supply scenario would mean a melt down for the Russian economy - think 1998 style crash. Indeed, I think this is what Russian economists and advisers to Putin are telling him, hence his new found willingness to talk peace."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/putin-might-finally-need-to-find
5."The Beijing summit will produce deliverables. There will be purchase agreements, fentanyl enforcement announcements, and carefully calibrated language on Taiwan. Markets will react. Headlines will declare progress or failure. But the real measure of this summit is whether it moves the US-China relationship from transactional crisis management toward the kind of structural framework that the Fourth Systemic Crisis demands.
China’s decision to pressure Iran is the most significant signal so far that Beijing recognizes the Hormuz crisis as a threat to its own economic model. That recognition is necessary but not sufficient. What the world needs from Beijing this week is not a deal. It is the beginning of an architecture: a set of rules, mechanisms, and mutual restraints that allow the Triumvirate to manage the simultaneity of cascading crises without tipping into the abyss. The trillion-dollar entourage on Air Force One represents the commercial weight of the American economy. Whether it also represents the diplomatic imagination required to build a durable framework for great power coexistence is the question on which the stability of the international system now depends."
https://velinatchakarova.substack.com/p/the-beijing-summit-two-superpowers
6.Tesla (and SpaceX) are where many of the top industrial founders are coming from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnJaDj5zUhY
7."While the most important part is positioning yourself to launch a niche business based on youth trends, if you look at investing you could group up the items that will likely repeat vs. struggle:
We wouldn’t assume that oil/utilities end up being complete home runs like the 1970s. Domestic production is much higher, alternatives exist and its the easy scapegoat for the masses to say “go after the utilities/oil companies” to reduce the cost
Luxury Real Estate is probably the safest. Back in the late 1970s farmland did well but that is not something you can do without significant active effort
Stocks, unlike the late 1970s, we’d expect tech to actually do better and in a worst case buying something like the S&P would simply keep pace. A lot of companies would get crushed in another wave of inflation but you’ll be offset by the winners (a general wash)
Bonds are un-investable once again
Wages will unlikely keep pace with inflation. Tons of deflationary pressure from technology will make it hard to recreate the 1970s wage/price spiral. Once again more like the “modest stagflation” set up
Printing money is where the incentive is. Trump would prefer an asset boom vs. bust
We expect Dupes to be the new rebrand of “counterfeit”. Much like prediction markets were used to rebrand outright gambling"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/1970s-vs-today-another-chaos-opportunity
8.One of the best shows on Silicon Valley news. This week was no different. Awesome conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsqnQqhbSrU
9.Deal Team Six. Former Wall Streeters now investing on behalf of the Pentagon.
10.Geopolitics and energy. Global Macro discussion with Doomberg & James Lavish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3ZXBl-tXR0
11.I don't agree with his geopolitical takes: but Doomberg is rational & well informed but also isolationist American. But it's good to hear different takes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6z64C7aGmo
12."I’d argue that this is the first U.S.-China summit in history where the Chinese leader sits down with the stronger hand. I’ll also go back to the 1970s. When Richard Nixon visited China in 1972, U.S. GDP was roughly 11 times China’s. When Trump headed to China in 2017, the U.S. was unambiguously the more powerful of the two. In nominal terms, the U.S. economy remains larger. But adjusted for purchasing power parity, China has eclipsed the U.S. In manufacturing, China accounts for roughly a third of global output, compared with about a sixth for the U.S. And when the Liberation Day tariffs hit 145%, China’s threat to restrict critical mineral exports was enough to bring those tariffs down to around 47%. That episode showed who blinks first. Today, Trump’s hand is relatively weaker, and Xi’s is relatively stronger.
Both sides see each other as an implacable adversary, and suspicion runs deep. But the rhetoric in public will be positive. The U.S. and China need each other. Each side seeks stability. The U.S. realizes China can play a critical role in resolving the conflict in Iran and unblocking the Strait of Hormuz. China is focusing on Taiwan. What Xi wants exactly remains unclear, but he will push for something more concrete. China is playing for big stakes."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/coexistence-or-confrontation
13.Lots of good stuff today. AI Monks in Middle America. Worth a watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O3zyxR-wS0
14.Great title: Inside the Mind of a tech investor. Short but solid interview. Worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ryr95iiYNk
15.Some nuggets of insight re: investing in defensetech. This was fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=552p-kdoZ_g&t=1606s
16.The case for the Decline of American Power. Bruno Macaes has been a strong critic here and his case based on the lack of conclusive success in Iran. That and no organizational capability anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84438yW3skY
17."The key with entrepreneurs who have a hypomanic edge is that their energy and enthusiasm must be focused on the most important and pressing issues. Sometimes there is a tendency to try to do too many things, and an element of whiplash can be introduced inside the startup. Everyone is heading down one path, rallied and motivated, and then suddenly a different shiny object appears. Now everyone has to get aligned around this new direction. Then, as the team starts working on that new direction, yet another opportunity arises."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/05/16/the-hypomanic-edge-in-entrepreneurship/
18. The massive opportunities in Central Asia, specifically Uzbekistan. Very interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-yczbyJ7n8
19.A state of the Union on the private credit market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwfwskW6dQE
20.This interview shows why Orlando Bravo is one of the best in the business of Software PE investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb84Ua4UDvs&t=
21.The most important discussion in geopolitics today. The Thucydides Trap of China and America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A29mlEodQTg
22.The complicated power politics in the New Middle East.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-R0R3Njmyg
23."The finding is this: between 2020 and 2025, the share of African VC-backed exits going to international buyers fell from 56% to 33% by event count. Domestic and regional buyers picked up the slack. The shift holds directionally whether read by count or by disclosed value, though disclosure gaps make the latter harder to read cleanly.
The argument of this piece, in one line: borrowed rails travel, but only to acquirers who already operate the rail. Built rails almost never travel, unless the target market is big enough to justify the acquirer creating a permanent separate operation. Africa hasn’t yet been big enough for the latter, and may not be for a while.
As argued before, African VC isn’t broken. But the dominant exit channels look different from what a Silicon Valley model would predict, probably more like what India, SE Asia, and LatAm went through at comparable stages, and may require us to adjust. We’re likely to see: domestic strategic roll-ups at modest valuations, regional strategics doing the larger built-rails deals, PE for the profitable middle, and a slow build of public-market liquidity for the largest infrastructure plays. Africa will produce companies and exits we can’t currently model, and AI may rewrite parts of the framework. What I’m reasonably confident about is the structural logic: acquirers buy what they can integrate, and integration capacity is a function of pre-existing rails."
https://idosum.substack.com/p/africa-exits-who-buys-what-and-why
24."Because Hormuz remains closed, oil and inflation are climbing, foreign creditors are walking away from American debt, and the swap-line band-aids will eventually run out, Warsh now faces a decision he cannot avoid.
He must walk the United States through one of three doors.
Door One - Save the dollar. Stop creating new dollars and raise interest rates to defend the currency, at the cost of crushing the bond market and the economy underneath it.
Door Two - Save the bond market. Create enough new dollars to absorb the bonds that no one else wants, at the cost of debasing the currency.
Door Three - End the war in Iran on Iran’s terms. Let oil come down and the pressure on the system release, at the cost of American credibility.
You might be asking: only three? Raising taxes, defaulting, restructuring - every alternative is a sub-variant of one of the three above. Every move the Federal Reserve and the Treasury can make either creates dollars, destroys them, or removes the pressure, forcing the choice. There is no fourth door."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/the-fast-death-and-the-slow-death
25."Frederick Russell Burnham lived a life so extraordinary that it seems almost fictional. He was a frontiersman, soldier, explorer, spy, adventurer, oil tycoon, and one of the greatest scouts of his era. Over the course of his remarkable life, Burnham survived deadly campaigns in Africa, tracked enemies across deserts and wilderness, escaped captivity during war, dined with Queen Victoria, advised powerful world leaders, and helped inspire the creation of the Boy Scouts. At a time when much of the world was still wild and unexplored, Burnham seemed drawn toward hardship and adventure wherever they could be found.
Though largely forgotten today, Burnham was once internationally famous and admired for his courage, toughness, and unmatched fieldcraft. British newspapers called him “The King of Army Scouts,” while military leaders and explorers alike sought out his expertise. His life embodied many of the qualities that people still admire in great adventurers and gentlemen: resilience, competence, bravery, self-reliance, and humble confidence. Simply put, Frederick Russell Burnham lived the kind of life most men only read about in novels, and his story remains one of the most fascinating adventure tales of the modern age."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/frederick-russell-burnham-the-most
26."I’ve seen this firsthand in AI forward companies. They start with one LLM for their use cases and as inference costs rise they slowly setup task based endpoints - servers with a model specifically for a certain task. It saves money and time, and usually increases performance on that task.
The data center is no longer just a place for giants. It is becoming the home of the “Model Zoo,” where the smallest, most efficient models are the ones doing the real work. If you are building for the agentic future, don’t just look for the biggest model you can find. Look for the smallest model that can get the job done. That is where the true power of AI lies."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-secret-benefits-of-small-language
27.I've tracked Strauss Zelnick since the early 2000s. He is one of the top media, entertainment & gaming business execs around. An operator’s operator. Lots of great insights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZgUcrR0K7I&t=588s
28."If you build for the crowd, you will be judged by the crowd. Dictate the rules of your ecosystem and let the weak filter themselves out. Excellence is not a democracy."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-feedback-loop
29.Understanding inference and AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBAXUdygTqQ
30."And again therein we can learn from Turkiye, and how it has been able to get much more bang for limited buck but with streamlined defence procurement. Indeed, Turkiye, as shoecased at SAHA has managed to develop an incredibly innovative and potent defence industrial complex which has enabled Turkiye to punch way above its weight.
Why has Turkiye succeeded here despite much more significant financing constraints - partly as Western sanctions forced it to think outside the box, and develop technology which it had been precluded from buying but to go down the almost fully autonomous defence capability route.
We need to stop turning up our noses, and looking down our noses at Turkiye, putting racism and Islamophobia to one side and just learn and deepen cooperation. And one obvious quid pro quo is to include Turkiye in the EU safe programme, alongside the UK. It’s simply ridiculous to think both the UK and Turkiye are included. Indeed, if both remain excluded then it sends a clear message to our adversaries in Europe that Europe cannot defend itself and is not fit for purpose."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/europe-needs-to-learn-from-turkiye
31."If Hassabis’ philosophical view is that the constituent unit of the universe is information, then perhaps in turning sand and silicon into semiconductors and AI we are in fact repackaging atoms into more information-dense forms. Long past the evolutionary stage of simply building tools, we’re now taking low information-density inputs, and transforming them into radically information-rich outputs. Therefore in our harnessing of nature, perhaps we truly are already expanding the universe."
https://ideas.scotthartley.com/p/the-infinity-machine
32."If you’re building equity, you’re not worried about AI. In fact it is accelerating your business. While it is painful to constantly learn about a new tool/product, the competition is not doing any of that. They are busy doom scrolling and doing the classic “back in the good ole’ days” posting.
Any time there is a new technology, there are two options: 1) spend the time to learn it and 2) complain that it is a net negative for society. You can guess which one is most profitable. In fact, there are still people today who claim that the internet and smartphones were a net negative for society (cope squared)"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/taking-advantage-of-ai-market-update
33."The age of the human infantryman is rapidly drawing to a close. Simply surviving an FPV drone attack has become an almost impossible task for soldiers on the battlefield. The drone cordon has not yet become so airtight that territory can be held without humans, but these humans’ job is to hide out in dugouts for months at a time alone or in tiny groups, terrified of emerging above ground lest they be instantly droned. And ground robots are developing very quickly, to the point where assaults can sometimes be conducted without humans on the front line at all.
Drones are also slowly replacing bombers and missiles as a modern military’s primary tool for conducting long-range strikes. Russia has been pounding Ukrainian cities with Iranian-made “Shahed” drones for years, but Ukraine is now fighting back. Ukrainian drones regularly destroy Russia’s oil infrastructure and military supply lines. And Moscow was just hit by over 1000 Ukrainian drones, causing widespread damage and chaos.
My interview with Azhnyuk clarified exactly why drones are in the ascendant as the universal modern weapon of war. The reason is cost. Drones are simply so cheap to produce in huge numbers that they can overwhelm any more expensive system."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-non-drone-militaries-are-obsolete
34."Which means the edge in private markets is the edge Théo had. Not a better model of the shared inputs — a private input the process never ingested. The proprietary deal seen before the data room exists. The operating partner that has done 2 of these roll ups in the past and knows that market is more seasonal than the materials would imply. The context that tells you the consensus is mispricing the asset. The relationship that gets you the real number instead of the list price. Over the next five years you’re going to watch the Théo dynamic play out across the lower middle market, deal after deal, with gunslingers taking shots that look like luck from outside the room and like arithmetic from inside it, because the position that justified them was never in the data room to begin with.
Most people working in private markets today were trained to be analysts, IB for a couple years, MBA for three, Buy-side after that. Showing up means showing your work: the deck, the memo, the model, the comp set. The seat justifies itself through analytical output.
However, the seat is increasingly rewarding what you do with the company after close: the operating insight, the years of context, the relationships you bring to bear that nobody else can manufacture in a quarter."
https://conduitofvalue.substack.com/p/the-age-of-the-gunslinger
35.Lots of nuggets and heuristics for investing in early stage founders. I found this conversation helpful for my investing craft. Some good personal finance tips as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CtT6p2HaCI&t=2443s
36.SendCutSend is such an important manufacturing company in America. They are building the playbook for Reindustrialization right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sbOL5wGADo
37.Fixing the American defense industrial base.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pddFfZy4nZU
38."Time is the scarcest resource. Money can be multiplied. Time cannot.
That’s why wealthy people don’t sell their time. They sell their systems.
You write content once it gets read forever. You build a product once — it sells forever. You create a system once it runs forever.
“Making money while you sleep” sounds like a cliché. But behind that cliché is a very simple truth:
Once the right structure is built the money doesn’t stop."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-1-thing-wealthy-people-think
39."I want to make a specific and narrow distinction between a hard company and a grindslop company. Because from the outside, it’s easy to think these two things are the same. They both involve long hours. They both involve sacrifice. They both involve pushing people far past the point of comfort. But the difference is what the hours are for. In a hard company, the hours serve an output. The hours are the cost of the thing being built and no one is documenting the cost because the cost is not the product.
In a grindslop company, the hours are the output. The documentation of those hours and the performance of suffering is the product. The suffering is the thing being built and the company is, in some very real sense, a machine for converting human effort into the feeling of exerting human effort.
inventing new things. It only works for cog like scaling of mechanical processes. great work doesn’t happen after 100 hour weeks, it only appears in tiny fleeting random moments, embrace that.
You can assemble an iPhone with 996, but you could have never designed one.
Great work has always demanded sacrifice and often brutal hours and I’m not disputing this. What I’m disputing is the direction. These people, many of them friends, have more economic freedom than any class in history and they’ve chosen, freely, to simulate the conditions of a Chinese assembly line and call it virtue.
In a world in which automation will collapse the cost of everything to basically zero, the only question that matters is what do you actually want. What do you consume. What do you put in your body. What you put in your heart. This is the only constraint left and it’s a constraint placed squarely on your character and your own sense of what’s beautiful and worthwhile. If we approach this world with a generation whose entire preparation has been sleeping on office floors and giving themselves autoimmune disorders from working too hard, then what’s the point."
https://minutes.substack.com/p/on-grindslop
40."The first wave of global fintechs were often replications of US models into other markets. Many were built by US educated founders, or funded by US venture capital.
That is changing.
The most interesting fintechs being built today are originating in markets that have nothing to do with the US, are funded increasingly by local and regional capital. Brazil’s PIX has spawned a generation of payment fintechs applications that have no US analog. India’s UPI has done the same, and is now being exported as cross-border infrastructure to half a dozen countries. Kenya’s M-Pesa was a generation ahead of Apple Pay and remains the dominant rail in East Africa.
And in some cases, global companies may have advantages for IPO. India has built the most credible domestic listing path. PB Fintech, Paytm, MobiKwik, and most recently Groww have all listed on the NSE. Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul saw Rasan oversubscribed 129 times with $29 billion in orders for a $224 million raise, popping the maximum 30 percent on its first trading day. Local exchanges are not always at a discount to Nasdaq anymore for category-leading regional champions. Sometimes they offer better prices, deeper local demand, and an investor base that actually understands the model."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/the-private-market-is-now-the-real
41."This dynamic is actually nothing new — in fact, it’s very well understood in the world of finance. It’s referred to as alpha decay.
In finance, alpha refers to the ability of a strategy to outperform the market (VCs spend a lot of time in search of alpha). Over time, outperforming strategies become more widely known and practiced, leading their effectiveness to diminish (alpha decay). “Attention-grabbing” social media strategies worked because they were outliers — they had alpha — but now that AI defaults to using such approaches when crafting posts, their effectiveness has all but disappeared.
I suspect that we’re going to see this dynamic play out across a variety of AI-related activities in the very near future. As more people chase the efficiency gains offered by AI, the output will converge and the alpha will rapidly decline."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/stop-with-the-ai-slop
42.Good informed takes on Energy, AI and Semiconductors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmj_G9RlW-I
43."People will spend much more time staring at screens than in the real world. Don’t buy the cope of a return to the past. Alcohol is down, people are meeting online, online presence is more powerful than local presence and you will convert more sales from influencers than you think
When you start your small business it needs to: 1) have a high margin profile with an ideal 30% profit margin and 2) you want to focus heavily on social/influencers at this point as the youth is no longer interested in buying from all the boomers who told them to work hard and “things will work out”
Part of the looksmaxxing trend is due to economic strain. Countries like Russia and Ukraine teach women to be extremely attractive (looks max) because it is a survival mechanism. The same is happening in the USA where the number of people with money is thinning out and naturally… if someone doesn’t care about money the next thing they care about is how attractive their gf/bf is.
AI is going to create a new set of ultra rich entrepreneurs because they will start buying and integrating every old boring business they can find. We’ll have a shell out in June explaining this in more detail but the Lead Gen walk through makes it quite clear. You either use tech to compete, use tech to help others compete or you ask AI how to deal with loss of identity. Can assure you the first two are better options"
Emerson’s Self-Reliance: Words to Live By
I dip into random readings as you can tell. In the book “Raiders” I came across a passage by Ralph Waldo Emerson on Self Reliance. I had to read it several times. Maybe it just really made me think.
“The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word…..Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradicts everything you said today. ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood?’....Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?...To be great is to be misunderstood.”
I think this is what growing up is about. Consistency is important but if the data changes, if your environment changes, if the world changes, it might make sense to re-evaluate your beliefs.
I think back to how unreligious or even anti-religious I was growing up in Canada and through most of my 20-40’s in America. “Opium for the Masses” as it was called. But I was wrong. It’s a powerful and long standing & ancient belief system that helps people. A code of conduct for living well with others. Like many things, it took plenty of hardship and suffering to learn.
Consistency is important but so is change. Change is hard. It takes courage to make big changes in your life. So take action. Make the big changes required in your life to make things better. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in Self-Reliance: “God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.”
History Rhymes: People and Civilizations Don’t Change Very Much
Twitter aka X, has actually been a major source of alpha for me. I get opposing views, rage baited a lot. But I also get lots of inspiration, insights and ideas. It’s amazing if you know how to mine and use it.
I follow Calvin Froedge. An American based in Panama, entrepreneur but also private investor who is kind of a curmudgeon. Yet he is super sharp and thinks orthogonally. This is another way of saying, he has an original and different view of the world, which is why he is full of great takes and investing ideas. I don’t agree with all of his views (bit too libertarian for me) but I respect that he thinks for himself and puts his ideas out there.
Calvin is very good at extrapolating trends out from big events in the world. And consequent investment opportunities that come out of these situations. Something he stated right after the Israeli-American attacks on Iran in March and the havoc caused by the Iranian counterpunch across the GCC:
“ Why American chemical companies? Ok, let's imagine your three biggest competitors (Middle East, Europe, and Asia) go out of business overnight because they either lose feedstock access or can't export. That's what just happened in petrochemicals.”
He also wrote:
“Best performers in the 70s were oil, precious metals, and chemicals.
Study the 1970s as your blueprint for trading the next few years.”
It makes sense. What happened in the 1970s? War in the Middle East. Massive energy crises which caused economic challenges across the world. Stagflation: basically stagnating economy and massive inflation. Major change in Dollar system: basically Nixon took the US off the gold standard. Political gridlock and disillusionment. Literal riots, crime waves and disorder in many American cities.
History is a great teacher if you pay attention. And we see a movement in the world toward sovereignty which means rearming, reindustrialization and tighter control of supply chains. Things that countries took for granted in the previous decades of financialization and globalization. Well, not anymore. Back to the future it seems.
The Modern Deal Guy Part Deux: Financier for Chaotic Times
I am quite taken by the concept of the “Modern Deal Guy” as described by Jeffrey Giffon and Will Manidis. A concept whose time has arrived. I wrote about it previously but figured it’s worth exploring further. Will wrote a detailed description below:
“the modern deal guy has no permanent capital, no permanent loyalty, and no permanent location.
the modern deal guy is playing a repeated game, he doesn't care who he pisses off, there's going to be another hand.
the modern deal guy is much more a broker than a principal.
he has an ecosystem around him that identify as "his guys" the modern deal guy has 99% of his chips on the table at any given moment, the next hand will always be bigger.
the modern deal guy is reticent to monetize any given opportunity early, but when he decides its time to sell, he does so savagely and without concern for fallout.
the modern deal guy is only concerned about where he spends his time. he runs a schedule like a CAA agent
the modern deal guy is only constrained by sourcing talent to put behind ideas at scale, capital and opportunity sets are infinite
the modern deal guy either has an exhaustively curated public persona, or none at all, anything in the middle is a mess.
the modern deal guy has very little concern for whats "on the paper", he's playing a very different game of pressure and repetition
the modern deal guy is unusually concerned about studying history and learning from adjacencies.
the modern deal guy has a personal burn that would make your nose bleed.
all in service of maximum optionality the modern deal guy can be better thought of as a "franchise" rather than a firm.
the modern deal guy will generate dozens of lesser deal guys that will repeat the playbook in his stead.”
Source: https://x.com/WillManidis/status/1980644725427433546
To sum up, to be successful as a Modern Deal Guy, one needs to be self reliant & flexible, able to size up and handle risk well, is used to operating by himself and has the courage to make tough decisions. They are pattern recognizers supreme, who also understand and read people well. Probably also able to have a great understanding of various asset classes, geopolitics and global macro.
A Modern Deal Guy is the epitome of the term “live player” or in Silicon Valley parlance, has “high agency.” They are willing to get on that airplane to go where they need to go. Traveling to where the action is, to surface opportunities. And ultimately to meet and close the deal if necessary.
Will goes on to say: “the last decade of tech rewarded "investors"- as price discovery was so efficient/low dispersion in high growth internet co's that you just had to win and hold for a long time. the "deal guy era" is an era of traders, not investors. you all have no idea what’s coming.”
I think he is right. The Modern Deal Guy will be the right type of financier appropriate for the massive amounts of change and chaos of the roaring 2020s.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 26th, 2026
"In summer, the song sings itself." — William Carlos Williams
"Here’s what’s going on: The US actually has a glut of natural gas, as increased oil drilling creates more supply of natural gas, especially in the Permian.
The problem is that export capacity is near tapped out. The existing LNG export facilities that are based in the US, Mexico, and Canada cannot export much more than they already are.
This creates a situation where natural gas within the United States is cheap, while other countries have to pay drastically higher costs."
https://www.codyshirk.com/p/entangling-allies-and-choking-enemies
2. Solid discussion on AI and the ever growing tech lash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=138ne91NkiQ
3."Money is for buying freedom. That’s it. That’s the whole point.
And freedom is two things stacked on top of each other. It’s the expulsion of every annoying stressor that eats your day away (silent killers), and the amplification of everything that makes you feel alive, smile, and look around at your life with appreciation and fulfillment.
If you understand that one sentence, you’ll never confuse a stressful luxury with a real stressor again."
https://www.thefinalman.com/p/what-is-the-true-purpose-of-money
4."Every generation gets its “machines will take your job” panic. This one just comes with better PR and a bigger balance sheet. The AI job apocalypse isn’t data-driven — it’s narrative-driven, engineered by people who profit when you’re scared. Fear is the product. Capital is the outcome.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat
I believe that, similar to every other technological innovation in history, AI will inspire job destruction that will result in an increase in productivity, profits, reinvestment, and (wait for it) jobs. The relevant question isn’t how many jobs we’ll lose / gain, it’s whether the velocity of disruption will overwhelm that period of adaptation and recovery. There are three scenarios: The AI bubble bursts; AI delivers as promised, but on a slower timeline; and AI disruption comes faster than the market can adapt and respond."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/apocalypse-no
5."The low quality of the general discourse is nevertheless concerning, as it reflects a widespread inability to discuss the relationship between military force and political objectives in conflicts other than full-scale war. This follows two decades of GWOT, during which Western military establishments never developed a good working model for counterinsurgency; what few lessons were learned were left half-digested once attention abruptly shifted back to conventional war in 2022.
For a plethora of reasons, asymmetric and irregular conflicts are likely to remain the most common uses of military force. Without a good framework to think about these things, the same mistakes are likely to be repeated."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/the-iran-war-is-not-a-war-military
6."Saudi Arabia was the religious heart and demographic muscle; the UAE was the strategic brain and financial hub.
They were the “Simba and Mufasa” of the Arab world – distinct but aligned.
That era is dead. It died in the kill zones of Hadramout, in the gold smuggling routes of Sudan, and in the boardrooms of Riyadh where multinational CEOs were given a stark ultimatum: abandon Dubai or starve.
We are now witnessing a shadow war that stretches from the Horn of Africa to the Thar Desert.
It is a conflict defined by a bitter personal rift between Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), a divorce that has split the Islamic world into two emerging, hostile blocs.
And sitting at the center of this geopolitical chessboard, courted by both sides with desperation and billions of dollars, is the Republic of India."
https://issf.org.in/2026/01/brothers-in-blood-the-secret-war-between-saudi-and-the-uae/
7."This transformation altered more than production. When prosperity becomes common, people begin to assume that it will continue indefinitely. Economic downturns, once accepted as part of the natural rhythm of economic life, start to appear intolerable and governments come under pressure to preserve stability and sustain growth, even when economic conditions would normally demand adjustment.
In response to these expectations, policymakers increasingly turn to monetary and financial tools to maintain economic expansion. Credit is expanded, interest rates are adjusted, and financial systems are encouraged to sustain demand. These policies may support prosperity in the short run, but over time they can introduce new forms of instability—particularly in the value of money itself.
Herein lies the paradox of abundance. The success of industrial civilization creates expectations that encourage policies capable of weakening the very foundations of long-term stability. Prosperity, once achieved, generates pressures that make it increasingly difficult to preserve."
https://forumgeopolitica.com/article/the-paradox-of-abundance
8.Solid discussion on AI and how to build for large corporations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBMmK0NsUK0
9."Vague is the killer. Vague is how it happens. Gary is not the product of one bad decision. Gary is the product of ten thousand vague ones.
Look at your last week, properly. How many decisions did you make on autopilot? How many evenings did you spend doing something you actually wanted to do, versus scrolling because you were too tired to do anything else? When did you last have a conversation with your partner that wasn’t logistics? When did you last finish a book? When did you last do something that genuinely scared you in a good way?
If you can’t answer those questions cleanly, you are already on the road. The road doesn’t feel like anything. That’s the point. The road feels like a normal Tuesday. The road feels like a sensible thirty-something life. The road feels like adulthood. And then, somewhere around your thirty-fifth birthday, you look up and notice the lanyard around your neck and the mini fridge in the corner and the wife who’s stopped reaching for you, and you wonder — quietly, because you’d never say it out loud — how the hell you got here."
https://lifemaxxers.substack.com/p/the-man-you-dont-want-to-become-youre
10."To be clear, this trend is still around. It is just getting to a point that the chips are causing a new bottle neck. This means you do not sell all your SMH or all your NVDA or all your (insert chip stock up a ton). Instead, it means you start investing in the new bottle neck: the grid.
There will be a few individual stocks that do a 100x or 10x or (insert large multiple). Directionally? The demand for power, data centers, substations, cooling and general grid upgrades is massive (another 5-10 year trend in our opinion)"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/making-money-off-of-power-and-grid
11."My recommendation for entrepreneurs, especially as they achieve some level of success, is to spend time figuring out what truly gives them energy and fulfillment, and then become much more intentional about saying no to the things that are not the best use of their time."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/05/09/the-entrepreneurs-shift-from-yes-to-no/
12."It is absolutely striking that in a poll of different countries of who is the biggest world-wide threat, the USA is so dominant as the top threat to the world that EVEN AMERICANS nominated themselves as the biggest threat.
The optimistic interpretation is that Trump’s insane and destabilizing policys are hugely unpopular and the people of America will elect someone better in 2028. The most negative interpretation is that Americans are puffing out their chest a little, proud of how they are the “biggest threat” as they tick the box. The most ironic but likely interpretation is that both groups of Americans exist and they are both as American as the diametrically-opposed other."
https://taipology.substack.com/p/exporting-instability
13."having a truly independent central bank and monetary policy to boot would send a broader positive signal about the stage of development of UAE, and its capital markets. It would send a message of confidence, and would likely just further enhance UAE’s position as an international financial centre, alongside the likes of London, New York and Hong Kong. The AED would then advance its case to become a global reserve currency, with big reputational wins therein - and I would suggest global reserve currency status needs independent monetary policy.
And acknowledging the clear competition now between UAE and KSA, as the leading economic and financial economies or centres of the Gulf, UAE would steal a march on KSA, as taking that position as the pre-eminent Gulf financial centre. By depegging early UAE would take or assume the position as the reserve currency state of the region, and anchor its position as the leading financial centre of the region."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/could-uae-move-to-de-peg-early
14."There is a trend in modern filmmaking that often portrays masculinity as something undesirable or outdated. Men are frequently depicted as either weak and directionless or overbearing and aggressive, with very little space in between. Despite that trend, there are still films that remind us what true masculinity can look like.
Great films can teach us timeless lessons about courage and sacrifice. They can inspire us with examples of leadership, discipline, honor, endurance, and brotherhood. In many ways, they preserve ideals that modern culture too often neglects."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/10-films-that-teach-timeless-lessons
15."The TL;DR is exits in mining are historically poor, but the market will mirror the outcomes of those in defence tech. The industry will produce mining’s version of the neoprimes. Exits will come from three places: direct IPOs from startups that bring assets online faster/cheaper, acquisitions by majors redirecting their M&A spend away from traditional assets, or acquisitions by new buyers focused on supply chain security."
https://jackkennedy0.substack.com/p/where-will-the-exits-in-mining-come
16.Listening to this conversation, makes me more optimistic about America. Policies, geopolitics, technology and startups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyv9u1iy-c8&t=23s
17.Geopolitics and Geonomics. Good framework to understand the changes coming in the world & economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy85bpoEQX8&t=88s
18."A slowdown, when it comes, will not be a technology failure. It will be a market reaching the boundary of what its current shape can absorb. Capability will continue to grow. The constraint will move from supply to absorption—the speed at which humans, institutions, and verification systems can metabolize what models produce.
We are leaving what might be called the magic phase of AI, where every new capability feels like a gift that requires no engineering to deploy, and entering the maintenance phase. The work shifts from producing the next demo to building the boring scaffolding that makes the last demo trustworthy at scale.
For investors, this is not bad news. It is just different news. The next decade of AI value creation may belong less to those who train the largest model and more to those who build the unsexy machinery that turns model outputs into auditable, deployable, insurable products. The rocketship is not running out of fuel. It is approaching the part of the flight where you start to notice the air."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/friction-points-what-could-slow-the
19.First hand look at obsession, loyalty and how to win in business. I enjoyed this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35IY2ILCAio&t=2289s
20."So the UAE asked for a short-term loan, known as a currency swap line - an emergency credit facility that allows the U.S. Federal Reserve to lend dollars directly to a foreign central bank.
This is not a bailout of the UAE. It is a bailout of the Treasury market.
In that environment, swap lines do not get repaid in any meaningful sense.
They get rolled.
The Fed extends the maturity. The borrower draws a new swap to repay the old one. Each transaction shows as “repaid” on the books, but the aggregate balance never really goes down.
Wall Street has a name for this: Amend, extend, and pretend."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/the-first-domino-has-fallen
21."Founders often think international expansion is about translating products or adapting strategy. More often, it is about translating expectations between systems that were never designed to work together in the first place.
Scaling across borders is not replication. It is cultural code-switching."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/guest-post-five-lessons-from-50-founders
22.Convo on random business news. The boys brought it today. GameStop & Ebay, Spirit airlines & Zoom stake in Anthropic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te7iP_zpr4A
23.How to tap into heretics to go after hard problems. From the Palantir CTO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oCDpbMyugU
24."Think This Through: If people are constantly trading their currency for stable coins, that is essentially a bid on US tokens. Repeat this process for 5-10 more years and suddenly stable coins have increased US dollar dominance. Why would the US government want to stop that? Just explained why they are not going to shut it down any time soon.
As stable coin market cap goes up, the USA gets more control of financial transactions. Again. They can freeze any account they like with a single click. Essentially expanding their ability to Freeze and Seize as they please.
On An Individual Basis: Since the majority of you are not on the US watch list (guessing absolutely none of you are), then it actually expands your ability to pack up and leave if you need to. No government is going to care about an address with $50,000 in stable coins. Therefore if you have a large chunk of assets in crypto, say $1,000,000+, you could hold it in something decentralized (BTC/ETH) then simply swap to stables in 100 different addresses and live your life as a sovereign individual."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/stablecoin-update-ahead-of-clarity
25."Ukraine, meanwhile, was defending itself against conquest — a conquest that would have stripped away its national identity, brutalized its population, and kept it in poverty. That threat provided a powerful motivation for regular Ukrainians to sign up and risk their lives on the battlefield. Ukraine became a nation in arms, while Russia was still trying to fight a “special military operation”, because Ukraine had a compelling cause and Russia had an unconvincing one.
This lesson is useful in explaining why Trump’s war on Iran has failed. When Iran was the attacker — trying to control the Middle East through a network of armed proxies — its aggression provoked a backlash from people in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and elsewhere who didn’t want to be ruled by foreign powers. But when Trump attacked Iran without direct provocation, Iran’s cause suddenly shifted to the defense, and its fortunes improved.
The people of Iran have no love for their regime — it recently mowed down tens of thousands of protesters in the streets, and the country’s economy is in a state of protracted collapse. But even so, they refused to rise against their rulers when Trump’s bombs started falling. Meanwhile, most Americans disapprove of the Iran war, and have no desire to endure the economic hardship of high gas prices just to topple someone else’s dictator.
This provides us with an important lesson. Reality is not Star Wars — dividing warring sides into “good guys and bad guys” is never really accurate. But “invaders vs. defenders” is a lot less ambiguous. If America ditches Trumpism and goes back to the principle of upholding territorial integrity, we’ll see our military fortunes improve, because we’ll associate ourselves with causes that people want to fight for."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/tyrants-are-losing-wars
26. "For the US though the war has shown the limitations of US power. Therein after the successful 12 day war against Iran, the decapitation effort in Venezuela, the U.S. had appeared to have a huge technological superiority globally, appearing as the apex power, even perhaps over China.
But this war has shown the difficulty of waging a war without clearly defined goals, with poor planning, no exit strategy, and without listening to or involving allies. It also shows the limitations of US aerial and sea power, and that it is difficult to engineer regime change without being willing to commit boots on the ground. That was a political contraint imposed by past prior failed wars - Iraq, Afghanistan, et al. They say arrogance comes before a fall, and that perhaps should be the lasting lesson for the US in this conflict.
One hopes that Trump will have learned his lesson from this defeat and he will be more guarded in pulling the trigger next time around."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/bigger-geopolitical-take-outs-from
27. "There are two events that I believe will occur almost simultaneously and produce a change in opinion about the necessity of spending trillions of dollars on an AI build-out. The first is an IPO or mega merger in the US or China related to tech and AI that is so big and financially irresponsible that the market cannot digest it. This will snap the market out of its manic phase. Folks will finally start asking whether greater machine intelligence is worth the amount of money being spent developing it. Once enough humans ask questions, the jig is up.
The second event will be the rhetoric of the Team Blue Democrat challenger in the 2028 US presidential election. The inflation that this mega AI build-out causes in raw materials, labor, and most importantly electricity is not very popular in many parts of America. Also, 90% of Americans don’t own a lot of stocks, so they will not benefit from the surging share prices of AI and AI-adjacent companies. Politically, it is easy to run on an anti-AI platform focused on bringing back value to human labor and curtailing the inflationary impacts of the AI CAPEX build-out. Whether a Democrat wins is irrelevant; the popularity of this message will make capital allocators ponder a future where credit stops flowing to AI by government mandate and regulations on AI dampen the future profitability of companies in the space.
But in the here and now, dollar and yuan liquidity will continue to rise. And Bitcoin and crypto will benefit."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/the-butterfly-touch
28."We’re predicting a general identity crisis in the USA which is why we’re posting this now.
As tech continues to ramp up, the people who tied their identities to clocking in and clocking out will be in for a rough adjustment period.
The majority will find that career = rented identity. Not owned identity. No badge. No title. No weekly catch up meetings. No bi-weekly paycheck for excel work that can be done by Claude.
Then what?
The answer is they are forced to follow the same playbook we’ve had out for a decade. Building a niche asset. Investing in the choke points. Constantly testing demand for new trends. Investing in “You, Inc.” the only company where you’re the 100% owner. And. Making the process repeatable (finding another trend riding it)."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/how-to-deal-with-identity-crisis
29.Listening to any leader of Goldman Sachs, makes you realize why they are the best. This convo was no different.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qqLihL4AWk&t=922s
30.A fun new podcast show (Concept was originally done by Richard Cooper). Cars and capitalists episode with Sam Lessin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RykHeWcPx8
31.Enjoying this series: Will Obrien of Ulysses. Underwater Autonomous Vehicles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40EMM5Y-OP4
32.A bit of Alt-Geopolitics. This was hard to follow at first and not sure what to think. Entering a multipolar world.
https://burningbright.substack.com/p/the-multipolar-world
33."A good crisis is exactly what California needs to shock it back into the hard realities of physics. Local drilling, local refining, and overland pipelines connecting to America’s plentiful petroleum bounty are the cures to what has been ailing the state since it hurtled itself off the energy cliff. There’s still time to deploy the parachute. Really!
Whether or not that happens, there’s one thing this analysis should make abundantly clear: The rest of the US is an oil superpower, and no amount of hyperventilating by the media will change that anytime soon."
https://open.substack.com/pub/doomberg/p/remedial-math
34."So the fact that American tariffs are causing that assembly work to move out of China is significant. It doesn’t remove U.S. dependence on Chinese manufacturing, but it reduces it. China itself started out doing assembly but later moved into component manufacturing; there are some signs Vietnam may be starting to do the same. And if Vietnam can do it, so can India, Mexico, Indonesia, and so on. China doesn’t have some magic secret sauce that makes it the only country that can make physical objects; other countries can learn, just like China did.
A non-Chinese supply chain won’t be built quickly or easily, and it hasn’t been happening as fast as the headline numbers suggest. But we’ve made a promising start, and the tariffs on China were part of that. A lot of Trump’s protectionist policy has been haphazard, misdirected, stupid, and downright corrupt, but this one — which was continued by Biden and the Democrats — was actually starting to yield some results. It would be a shame if Trump throws that all away on this trip in exchange for the promise of a few soybean purchases or whatever."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/trump-actually-started-to-decouple
35."In this sense, what Operation Epic Fury has achieved so far is forcing the Islamic Republic to manage two fronts simultaneously, one facing outward toward protecting a mosaic military enterprise built on proxy funding, missile threats, and an unrelenting nuclear program, and one facing inward toward managing a population that has shown repeatedly, at the cost of its own lives, that there is a threshold the regime keeps pushing past.
Every available path undermines the very conditions the organization needs to survive. This exposes the central contradiction of what the Islamic Republic constructed over four decades: a parallel military state within the state, a regional empire of proxies, and a financial system shielded from accountability, all built for outward projection of power yet wholly unprepared for the mounting pressure now coming from both inside and outside."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/irans-economy-is-collapsing
36."Right now, a 62-year-old machinist-owner is thinking about retirement. His shop of 30 employees, tucked into an unassuming industrial park in the Midwest, makes a highly specialized component you’d never be able to pick out from a lineup of machine parts. But this component is critical to a defense system you’ve definitely heard of, and his is the only shop in the U.S. that makes it.
He doesn’t have a succession plan, and he’s having trouble finding a buyer.
This scenario is playing out across thousands of shops across the country, and it represents one of the most underappreciated vulnerabilities in the U.S. defense industrial base. There’s no adversary, no cyberattack, and no dramatic supply chain rupture that will bring this challenge to the headlines. There is just an aging owner locking the door for the last time, and a critical defense capability retiring with him."
https://thebenslens.substack.com/p/the-silent-succession-crisis
37."As your wealth changes relative to your desires, your capacity to take risk will change with it. The closer you are to being fully content, the less risk you should want to take. I call this the Risk-Wealth Paradox."
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-risk-wealth-paradox/
38."It is critical to think about creating a MOAT - long term sustainable advantage that increases over time.
Without a moat your business will have low margins and not be venture scale (and won’t be able to scale?).
Your business model is a key to the MOAT. Platforms/Marketplaces have the best moats!"
https://www.startuphacks.vc/blog/moats
39."So what is the Valinor model? Valinor is taking the lessons learned from successful corporate structures (see below) to create a new type of company in the defense and government technology space. We are a holding operating company focused on untapped problems in the defense and government markets.
With this hub-and-spoke structure, we have the ability to go after many small to medium-sized problems that are important, but aren’t seeking the attention of VC-backed companies. We will start by developing these products ourselves, but also have the ability to acquire other products when it makes sense."
https://valinorenterprises.substack.com/p/the-valinor-model
40.Another good episode with the NIA guys. Always fun & educational.
Selling the Thrill
The Yellowstone 1923 tv series is entertaining and holds so many nuggets of wisdom. I stumbled upon this segment that was insightful: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a1c12eyCSw8
The villain of the story, Donald Whitfield, a ruthless mining tycoon, is watching some people ski. After the skier explains the sport to him, his henchman says: “Seems a silly way to waste the day to me.”
Whitfield asks him: “How many gunfights have you been in?”
Henchman: “My fair share.”
Whitfield: “How many bar fights?”
Henchman: “More than I can count.”
Whitfield: “And after, how did you feel?”
Henchman: “Alive, which was the goal.”
Whitfield: “But you liked it? Tell the truth.You liked the danger of it.”
Henchman: “It gets your blood up, aye.”
Whitfield: “Aye. It’s a rich man’s world now. And everyone gets a taste. The paper man, the tradesman, the car salesman, the doctor, the lawyer. The one thing you can’t buy in a store, is the euphoria of peril, the exhilaration of danger. I can sell that. For a fortune.”
This is sales. Packaging something that is hard to get. Scarce even. When consumers have everything they want, they want something no one else has. Our human need for status & bragging rights. Tapping into our human need to be special. This is capitalism. A fascinating anecdote epitomizing this.
The Time is NOW: Chaos is a Ladder Part Deux
Every other day I see something or read something that jars me. @TheJackBly wrote on X:
“We live in the softest, weakest, & laziest society of all time.
This means less competition.
We live in the most abundant and technologically advanced society of all time.
This means more opportunity.
This won't last forever. You need to move now.”
No truer words were ever written. The world belongs to those who hustle and take action.
There is so much change happening on the technology side, geopolitics and it feels like everyone is just in wait and see mode. I get it, it’s chaotic. Sometimes you need to step back and get bearings. Sometimes you need to mope, and sometimes you need to mourn the past.
But not for too long. You better start positioning yourself and going on the offensive.
But like a glitch in the matrix. So what the heck are you waiting for? Go forth. Start building. Start stacking assets. Do something. Anything. Be aggressive. This time is a 3-5 year window that will close forever.
Kickstart Your Day Properly: My Perfect Morning Routine
How you start your day is important. I’ve learned this like everything, the hard way. Jumping right into a call or email is damaging to your brain. You need to ease into the day. I’ve had a morning routine for the last decade but I’ve learned and optimized this over the years.
I like seeing what other people do and of course this is very personal. But everyone should have some form of morning routine to set your day up right. This is one I’ve set up and I find if I don’t do it, I am somewhat off for the rest of the day. I follow it religiously, even when I travel. So here it goes.
1. The first thing I do is lie in bed and ease my way up for 5 min. I do my gratitude practice, about being grateful to have my health, my family, my business, my friends.
2. I have a drink of water (usually with LMNT), take some vitamins, lithium ororate & such.
3. I pray
4. Then I do 5-10 min of meditation. I usually don’t check email after, although I may do a glance through in case of any emergencies. I’ve gotten better at only looking at email after I finish the entire routine.
5. I do the Tony Robbins Priming Session which is about 15 min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faTGTgid8Uc
6. I review my Vision Board
7. I do a Self Compassion Meditation by Sean Fargo recommended to me by my therapist. It calms me.
8. To prepare myself for the inevitable challenges of the day, I listen to this vignette from Boss Advice: “Pain Equals Future Success”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaEkmvEuki4
9. Then to amp myself up for the day, I listen to music. 1 or all my hype songs. Example being “Bodies” by Drowning Pool, “Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of War Drums” by A Perfect Circle. I get really amped up by the last two songs particularly. I also love the new Dune 3 War Chant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLY5GFZumLE&list=RDnLY5GFZumLE&start_radio=1. Of course, it will be different for each person, so pick a song that gets you excited. Like an entry song on stage or arena.
And that it is. I do these and I can hit my to do list or calls with maximum energy. Whether war mode or monk mode, this sets up my day well. A morning routine is a must for kickstarting your brain and body. May you find as much value in a morning routine as I do.