Living in the Present & Living Fully: Landman Wisdom
Dark night of the soul. What a title. Season two, episode 6 of Landman. Apparently it’s from a Spanish poem of St John of the Cross. “It’s about finding comfort in a time of crisis.” Man, I feel like we all have been in crisis since 2020.
The main character Tommy spends the day with his father and his father gives him some great advice.
“What do you got? Ten years left? Before climbing on that barstool is a f—ing struggle like it is for me. Before the smoking, drinking and the rest of it slows you to a crawl. Your ‘making memory’ days is about behind you, son. Trust me, living off of memories ain’t no living at all. You gotta make em while you can. You hear me?”
A good reminder. Life is short. And while we are in the poly-crisis, we can find comfort, sometimes even moments of joy and happiness. There is no time like the present. Live, spend time with loved ones and friends. Have great hobbies and go on adventures. Travel. Go make great memories now.
I leave you with one more quote from the show: “Every day you gotta find a way to celebrate life. That’s the trick.”
History Rhymes: Learning from the 1970s
BowtiedBull formerly known as Wall Street Playboys has been a regular source of alpha and insight for me. I’ve written about how history is super helpful to understand what is happening in the present day. Technology and elements of society change but people do not. It feels like we continually live these cycles in civilization. This is why it’s helpful to have an understanding of history: the pattern recognition. Bowtied Bull, like Calvin Froedge have shown that the times we are going through right now have many parallels to the 1970s. You can read the full write up here: https://bowtiedbull.io/p/1970s-vs-today-another-chaos-opportunity
While history rhymes, it doesn’t always repeat. Some key differences of the 2020’s versus the 1970s.
“Income inequality is massive. The top 1% wealth in the USA is around $14,000,000. Even if they dumped everything into 5% bonds, they would never care about gas prices with a $700,000/year to spend. More realistically they can track the market which means a cool $1,000,000+ to spend assuming they don’t even work! (Hint vast majority still work for fun)
We unlikely get a wage/price spiral. Back in the 1970s, wages went up because inflation was high which caused companies to raise prices. Rinse and repeat. Today? Big difference is Tech. You don’t need as many workers to retain the same profit margins so instead of raising the wages, you replace the workers with more technology
Finally, the oil industry is nowhere near as big as it was in the 1970s as a percent of the economy. We have a lot more domestic production, electric vehicles are around and we have alternative energy sources for power beyond oil
Yet there are some lessons to draw on from the 70s, I found these to be interesting ideas on areas and assets of growth.
"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 it’s 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."
The point is to learn from history. These are some really good ideas to inform your investing strategy and help you build some assets to position for the future.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Oct 4th, 2026
"Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons"--Jim Bishop
"Ironically, AI is creating an absurd conundrum. If it creates significant revenue, that would mean mass layoffs. If AI does not create significant revenue, there is going to be a large slow down in Chip/AI Data Center spending as the Return on Invested Capital isn’t showing up.
Air Pocket: Once again, we’re extremely bullish on the long-term future of AI/Tech. That said, every single industry has air pockets and times where expectations far exceed reality. We don’t really see a way out of this one since you’re either going to hit the air pocket, create a lot of unemployment or see rapid slow down in debt based spending.
As you can see from that, there is no real ideal scenario built in.
Most Likely Case? Spending slows due to much higher debt terms, capital stack becomes a real conversation for the first time in mega cap history, live through a drawdown/airpocket and wait for AI to deliver some real use case and we go back to building.
How long this process takes is any guess, if you want the standard technology air-pocket it’s probably ~3 years before hype comes back."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/oil-and-fed-ai-debt-and-general-investing
2."What happens next may not be decided by Barron or any of the entrepreneurs who spent a decade trying to convince the world the ocean floor was worth developing. Rio Tinto, Glencore, and BHP — the companies with the capital and operational scale to run deep-sea mining at volume — have watched from a careful distance. If the executive orders succeed in validating the legal framework and de-risking the first commercial licenses, the likely outcome is that major industrial players absorb or displace the startups that proved the concept.
Who extracts these minerals, and under what legal framework, will determine more about the next century than most of the decisions being made in Washington right now. A CCZ developed under American legal frameworks produces a different world than one developed under Chinese state direction, with output flowing into Chinese refineries, Chinese battery factories, and Chinese defense supply chains.
The floor of the Pacific is the last great untapped resource extraction prize on Earth. Gerard Barron had to carry a rock to the Oval Office to make that case. China will be mining the sea floor next to Japan’s continental shelf later this year."
https://arenamag.com/articles/treasure-hunting
3.A quick dose of Peter Zeihan's latest geopolitical thinking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aOnMVrhTO0
4."Oil explains part of the outperformance but the real rotation from Tech went into industrials. It also lines up with the mandate. You can argue that industrials are “technology in heavy machinery form”. Much easier spin vs. saying you invested into natural gas and oil.
Major holdings here are: Caterpillar, GE Vernova, GE Aerospace, RTX, Eaton and Boeing. In fact, we’d argue that the Space related sell off probably went a bit into here.
This means? The same people who sold in June (the tech stuff) believe Industrials are the best place to park money."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/mega-cap-tech-sell-off-means-money
5."We certainly think it’s going to be a long-term secular shift. The world has changed. Regardless of which administration is in power in the US, what’s happened in the last year or two has been a real wake-up call for Europe. And it’s not just political — there’s a recognition that Europe has begun to fall behind in some really critical areas. The AI boom is another example, where so much of the innovation has been centered in the Bay Area. What’s happened geopolitically has created an urgency that I hope is going to persist for some time.
I also think this is a category where Europe really has a right to win. So many of the European resilience businesses that have gotten started here have unique capabilities that give them that right to win at home — and I don’t see comparable US competitors necessarily coming here to unseat them.
Another factor is the recognition of just how much dependence there is on the US. We see it everywhere — from our payment systems, where we depend on the Visa, American Express, and Mastercard networks, to certain areas of defense tech, which will always be the case. But there are subsectors where Europe really should build out its own capabilities. Also in space: space sovereignty is increasingly critical for national security, and there’s been a recognition that it’s an integral part of defense tech as well.
So the hope is that it will be long-term secular. And I’m hopeful that a lot of the innovations we’re seeing today around defense — and in some cases offensive capabilities — will be grounded in technologies with dual-use potential, and that much like we saw in the US in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, they’ll spawn additional technologies used in commercial industry rather than just defense."
https://defensebrief.substack.com/p/going-all-in-on-european-defense
6.The mega bull case for AI and American innovation. I hope he is right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agIvg0DkW50
7."Meanwhile, every month of debasement makes the treadmill faster. The maths only moves in one direction. This is the part people miss, a dying system doesn’t loosen its grip as it fails, it only tightens. It reaches for capital controls, for surveillance, for your savings, for your movement. The exit is open today precisely because the end hasn’t fully arrived. That is exactly why waiting is the most expensive decision you can make.
You don’t need to do everything at once. You need to redirect the flow. The next time extra income lands in your account, a bonus, a client payment, a windfall, run it through one filter before the consumer programming kicks in:
Does this purchase make me more free, or more comfortable in the cage?
Skills before status. Land before luxury. Optionality before ornaments. Community before consumption.
Make every spare dollar/euro/pound a brick in the wall of your exit, not theirs."
https://substack.com/@theparallelsovereign/p-205732892
8."As complex systems won’t survive the competence crisis, high trust societies continue to corrode in the era of mass diversity.
That is, the social fabric of high trust societies is being profoundly transformed as reciprocal bonds and once unspoken norms are trampled upon and begin to retreat from civic life.
The cause?
The cultural hostility and wide-ranging criminality arising from the embrace of mass migration and balkanising ethnic communities, a result of the governing political ideology of ‘diversity-at-any-cost’. This is a disastrous and rapidly escalating process, which we argue is best characterised and most accurately understood as hostile diversity.
Said in the most basic terms: people make the place.
Take the preparedness challenge: do just one action listed here every week for a year. Start wherever you are, using whatever you have. But do start. Preparedness compounds."
https://metropolized.substack.com/p/foundational-preparedness
9.AI & Bitcoin is the pair trade. I always enjoy Pomp's takes on investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZRvfZGpQZ4
10.Menlo has been crushing in the AI age. The venture world has changed. Multistage funds are dominating in this new world. Very few clear swim lanes now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIYWWDUKmUI&t=5s
11.Stratfor alumni reunion and discussion on geopolitics. Lots of interesting takes here. These guys are among the top geopolitical analysts on the market right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9zH8CJTPS8
12."So it’s not that you can’t raise a round of funding in the summer. But it is logistically harder:
It takes longer to schedule initial meetings with a VC
The time between meetings increases
The amount of time needed for a VC to complete their diligence takes longer (as analysts and others at the firm also take vacations)
The result is that running a fundraising process in the summer takes longer than at other times of the year. Not only that, if you are able to successfully raise a round, you will very likely end up with a lower valuation due to the lack of competition."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/should-i-fundraise-in-the-summer
13.Plenty of great topics is tech business here. I always get great insights from these guys. Agree that Tech PE is done IMHO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oWgE5ph9r4
14."Anyway, that’s the financial story. It’s a very old story — financial leverage plus unsophisticated new buyers plus a strong fundamental story often produces a bubble and crash, or exacerbates one that was already in progress. No wonder Korea is now moving — a little belatedly — to restrict leveraged ETFs.
But while financial factors affected the timing and the size of the stock price boom and bust, the fundamental story is more interesting. Fears of an AI bubble are quietly creeping back."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-did-south-korean-stocks-just
15. Love these Q&A sessions with Tim Ferriss. Lots of tips and good learnings to make your life healthier and better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRjgAC-EcsY
16. Jordi Visser is one of the best global macro dudes around. True bona fides but also has strong experience in tech too. A rare combo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yg1YzZU9X8
17."We’re not sure what game political leaders in Washington, London, and Brussels are playing as they navigate World War III, but nobody would confuse it with chess. On their board, opponents not only don’t matter, but how they might respond to a move seems a foreign thought, brushed aside as the stuff of so-called “panicans.”
For a crushing example, consider what could possibly have been going through the minds of European Union (EU) leaders when they decided to include 14 large Chinese businesses in the bloc’s 21st sanctions package against Russia, ostensibly for providing dual-use goods that feed Moscow’s war machine. It didn’t take long for Beijing to hit back where it hurts."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/geopolitical-checkers
18."You don’t build hard things without the right blend of mission alignment, seriousness, and fun."
https://www.alsoblogposts.com/p/building-the-thing-you-promised
19. "The pitch of the book, which you can tell from the title and first chapter, is to buy real things. Things that can’t go to zero. Things that humans must have to live. Things that are not part of a speculative boom.
It all makes sense, but it requires you to go against the herd. That’s something that most people don’t have the stomach for… Unless they are forced to."
https://www.codyshirk.com/p/the-next-new-thing-is-things
20."Mode push comes from Formula 1. There are moments you push, moments you preserve your tires, moments you cruise so you don’t burn yourself out. Push is the gear the pit wall calls for over the radio. The driver holds it for a few laps and backs off.
It’s a gear most people never reach in their lives. They push when something forces them to, then settle back down. Inertia.
For a long time I thought the difference was discipline. Some people force themselves and some don’t. I don’t believe that anymore. The people in that gear aren’t forcing anything. They just can’t sit still. They’re constantly tinkering, constantly making something, and nobody is making them.
My industry thinks it knows why. VCs secretly want to back founders with a troubled childhood or a chip on their shoulder. The pain supposedly keeps the foot on the gas.
The first people I ever saw in that gear had none of that."
https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/mode-push
21."Americans love a self-made success story. The operative word, however, is … story. In his book Born on Third Base, Chuck Collins analyzed the economic backgrounds of the people on the Forbes 400 list. He concluded that, while media accounts labeled 70% of the wealthiest Americans “self-made,” in reality only about one-third came from a poor, working-class, or middle-class family with no significant family capital. Two-thirds of the people on the list stood on the shoulders of a giant named generational wealth."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/shoulders-of-giants
22.Learning geopolitics and the “why geopolitics is critical” in this changing world. Learning from Stratfor alumni.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKXPHniBj2k
23.Super helpful discussion on how hedge funds actually work. Prestigious but awful business to be in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJdgh9eEZvw&t=890s
24."The ultimate status symbol in 2026 is not a busy calendar; it is an entirely blank one. It is the ability to show a dashboard that cleared $50,000 in a week alongside a screen time report that shows zero hours spent in the backend. It signals that your technical leverage is so absolute, your infrastructure is so flawless, that your presence is mathematically irrelevant to your cash flow. While others are “hustling,” the Sovereign is Living."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-hustle-delusion
25.The strong case still for Bitcoin. Big fan of Jordi Visser.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03S1ECNLBnA
26."The middle powers are caught in a contradiction. Their whole predicament comes from the fact that America is fading in power while China is gaining clout. But they can’t make the mental adjustment to take this into account. It’s hard to stand up to America, and perhaps equally hard to see China as anything more than a giant mall and ATM.
I wonder if the Europeans even thought to themselves…hmm…if China can go toe to toe with Trump after Liberation Day but we just got whacked with tariffs, what does that say about our ability to declare trade war on China?
I bet they didn’t think like that, because they are still Magic Pudding-brained. They remember when China was passive or impotent and they can rely on America for security basically for free. They had the best of both worlds. And now they find themselves the uncomfortable filling in a superpower sandwich."
https://taipology.substack.com/p/the-disappearing-magic-pudding-for
27."I would claim that what distinguishes the Mittelstand falls broadly into three causally related categories: (1) ownership structure, (2) values-based culture, and (3) industrial significance.
Within the Mittelstand, this structural separation is eliminated because shareholders and managers are often one and the same. Owners commonly remain involved in the day-to-day operations of the business as multi-generational managers. Decision-making is therefore not dictated by earnings reports or swayed by external market pressure, but exercised prudently by families that think in decades.
This mindset profoundly influences the internal character of the firm. Gantzel posited that the Mittelstand is driven not solely by bottom-line performance, but by fundamental values such as solidarity, stewardship, and trust. A proverb shared with me by one Geschäftsführer sums this up well: “Kultur ist der gute Geist im Haus”—roughly, “Culture is the guiding spirit of the house.”
Together, these principles underpin the extraordinary significance these companies have attained within the German economy. The Mittelstand accounts for roughly 55% of Germany’s GDP and 70% of its exports, with many firms generating revenues ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of euros. Their economic footprint is so substantial that, on a one-to-one basis, Mittelstand firms employ roughly twice as many people as Germany’s publicly listed, non-family corporations; when taken as a whole, they employ roughly five times as many.”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-194158756
28.The future of autonomous ground warfare.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LJyFyZrSls&list=PLaNJvIROC31rDHAkEIi0lg9XojhMVuDdy
29. Vertical Autonomy Group 3 drones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E5YaPvxpJI&list=PLaNJvIROC31rDHAkEIi0lg9XojhMVuDdy&index=3
30."And for Russians things are only going to get worse - a lot worse - as Ukraine not only has the innovation advantage in this war, but also now has unlimited European finance behind it and deepening integration into Europe’s now growing/fast track military industrial complex. This will give Ukraine scale. Russia’s $2 trillion, and declining economy, where finance is in short supply just cannot compete with Ukraine, backstopped by Europe’s $25 trillion economy even with Trump’s USA, literally MIA. And why has Europe now got Ukraine’s back? Because they realise Russia is the greatest existential threat to their survival, the U.S. cannot be trusted to support them, and Ukraine’s drones and defence tech are the key to moon shooting their own defence to be able to stop Russia.
It is not longer relevant for Ukraine whether they join NATO, NATO is not key to Ukraine’s defence, but Ukraine is now key to Europe’s defence. Ukraine has the leverage through its defence tech lead and advantage. Hence European countries are now queuing up to sign defence tech deals with Ukraine, to leverage up and lock in Ukrainian expertise for their own future defence. And they know that Russia is coming for them, unless Ukraine is given the tools - cash and scale - to defeat Russia. And it will.
The writing is on the wall for Russia. The recent imposition of social media bans in Russia means the authorities know a social and political exclusion is looming on the back of the looming defeat in war and a worsening economic situation."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/russia-the-war-is-coming-home-to
31.Investing and operating legend. Micky Malka of Ribbit Capital. Playing the infinite game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjLhd1WZwTE
32.The man behind the growth of one of the big 5 Mega VC Funds (aka Multistage VC) and how scaling works in this new environment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4PQ0GkkP7o
33.A splash of much needed skepticism and reality on the geopolitical news in the world. It is not looking good for the West if we don't get our act together soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYm60V_yXyg
34.Some of the best global macro from an international investor. Learned alot about non-US & Asian stock markets here. Beware Bondzilla from Japan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LskbCCyshdU
35."Be curious — sit at the stall, ask the real question, be interested in the human in front of you. Be present — bring all of yourself to the table you’re already at, and remember the evening because you were in it. Be kind to the people who can do nothing for you — because that, more than anything you’ll ever own, is what people feel and what they keep.
Bourdain didn’t have a richer life than you because he had a television show. He had a richer life than you because he was more curious, more present, and more decent to strangers than you’re currently being — and every one of those is available to you this week, at the caff on the corner, with the people already in your life.
You won’t be remembered for a single thing you own. You’ll be remembered for the tables you sat at and how awake you were while you sat there.
So go and sit at one. Properly. Tonight."
https://lifemaxxers.substack.com/p/lifemaxxing-icons-anthony-bourdain
36."Contrary to popular myths, the US only became a world leader after it unified our identity and slowed immigration to a crawl. Now, as that identity fractures and immigration hits unprecedented levels, the only thing preventing chaos and radicalism is the slowly degrading legacy of norms, trust, and cohesion of that Century."
https://substack.com/inbox/post/209516614
37."What unmanned systems can provide is acceptable losses and speed, and thereby solve the problems of ‘concentration of forces’ and ‘surprise’ on a highly visible battlefield. Concentration is not a problem if you are willing to sacrifice machines. Surprise on the other hand can only be achieved when you use these new technologies decisively, rather than deploying them piecemeal."
https://democura.substack.com/p/achtung-drones
38."The Spartans went on to subjugate Athens during the Peloponnesian War, but their hegemony was not to last. Sparta began a rapid decline after the city-state of Thebes inflicted a shocking defeat at the Battle of Leuctra.
But how did Sparta emerge into the power that it did? A curious group of geographical, social and political circumstances created the city-state’s legendary military culture and propelled its expansion around the 6th century B.C.
But its explosive growth—and oligarchical society—contained a hidden demographic time bomb which would contribute to its later eclipse.”
My Fuji and Happiness Code
What a cool title. As you figured out, it’s a Japanese movie. “After moving in with his grandmother. Yakima finds his late grandfather’s happiness equation.” Intriguing description to say the least.
Takuma is going to college and like many kids that age, kind of aimless. Living with his grandmother unexpectedly leads to him finding his way in life. His grandmother gains a new lease on life too. It strikes me that we are meant to live in inter-generational households. But back to the story.
Takuma finds out his grandfather had secretly enrolled his grandma in the same college he attends as a special 50th wedding anniversary present to help her “achieve the dreams of her youth.” Takuma tells his girlfriend about grandma: “She’s definitely having fun. She’s even sparkling. Maybe that’s what it’s like to live your dream.”
Takuma ends up attending the same classes as grandma which is awkward at first but ends up being a good experience for them both. Takuma is worried about his future but realizes it belongs to his deep interest and love of coffee. As his girlfriend tells him: “Your eyes sparkle when you talk about coffee.”
“Of course, it depends on the beans and the roast but coffee made with care is rich without any unpleasant flavors.” His grandma encourages him: “but you love coffee, right? Then you should give it a try. It’s fun doing what you love.”
It’s infused with great nuggets of Japanese life wisdom.
“The flavor depends on the process.”
“Books are great. They make you believe you’ve experienced something you never actually did.”
“The chances of finding something you love isn’t that high, so if you have something you know you love you’re already halfway there.”
“You’ll never get confidence without doing anything.”
“If you really want to do something, you have to find a way yourself.”
“A true journey is taken alone.”
“You should want more in life.”
The movie is a love letter to a long beautiful marriage, blissful domestic life and Mt Fuji representing Japan. A lovely and touching movie.
Solo Mio: Love in Italy and Love of Italy
Kevin James stars as Mat, an American dumped at the altar in Rome by his fiancé, “heartbroken in the world’s happiest city.” But hilarity ensues when he is adopted by two other couples also on the honeymoon package. More importantly, he also meets a local lady named Gia. They end up connecting unexpectedly. After seeing the trailer I knew I had to watch this.
What man hasn’t had heartbreak? This is the fundamental experience every person has. For most of us, it’s a searing, painful time. But it’s usually the moment most of us grow up. The end of our innocence.
It’s where we learn some of the hardest lessons:
“It’s okay to not be okay if you are not okay”.
“If it’s real, don’t give up on her.”
“Even if you get hurt, just try.”
“All you have to do is try.”
Man, I love Italy. It’s so beautiful. The architecture, the food and the lifestyle. It’s heaven on earth. It truly is. The eternal city of Rome and the amazing nature of Tuscany. The traditions of historic Sienna which I have yet to visit. The warmth of the people.
Spoiler alert: The scene of Kevin James singing Nessun Dorma with Andrea Bocelli, was truly magnificent.
What a fun movie. It’s true though: Love always finds a way.
It’s Time to Build: Your Reminder and Call to Action
This really is the year to be an entrepreneur if you aren’t already. Technology creates so much leverage for the individual. As Finn Mallery wrote & summarizes:
everyone's sleeping on how absurdly good 2026 is to start a company (even compared to 2024)
one person can now:
- ship full apps without engineers (cursor, replit)
- design without being a designer (v0, Claude Design)
- turn one video into 10 clips (opus, descript)
- push those clips to millions (X, Linkedin, TikTok)
- replace a support team (chatbase, intercom)
- literally watch exactly what their users do (Posthog)
- find + target perfect leads on autopilot (origami)
This is such a rare window. I just can’t imagine it being this easy ever again
Source: https://x.com/fin465/status/2064388327592058994
These tools are cheap and easy to use. And surprisingly not that well known outside of Silicon Valley. Seriously, what an amazing time to be alive. Take action now before it’s too late. You have a 3-4 year window to take advantage of this amazing opportunity in front of you.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Sept 27th, 2026
“What we fear of doing the most is usually what we most need to do”--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wide range of interesting takes here on venture and LP investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7dfKDmrbH4&t=2232s
2.This is an important presentation and discussion. Especially if you want to understand American geonomics for the rest of the Trump admin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Oz6IyDsSv8
3.Learning your leadership style and seizing luck. This was excellent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwY4bfZN8E8
4."The bigger problem is manufacturability. Whether it's a Tomahawk or an SM-6 or a PAC-3, these are multimillion-dollar weapon systems that take years to build at very low volumes. Right now our annual production capacity for Patriots is something like 685. Tomahawks were a few 100 per year, and we shot about 1,000 Tomahawks in the first few weeks of Epic Fury.
That's years of production, and the most recent orders that are coming in won't actually be supplied until 2030. We shot over 200 THAAD interceptors, over half of our inventory. We fired more than half of our Patriot interceptors. So when you burn through your inventory, the resupply on that inventory boxes out our international allies and partners because they get pushed to the bottom of the waiting list.
Even if we're doing resupply and we don't engage in any major conflicts over the next three years that would further burn down those very limited inventories, we've told Kuwait and Qatar and the Emirates and the Saudis: sorry, you're not getting any more Patriots. What does that mean for them? They have to make hard decisions. Do we go to China for munitions? If we do, does that mean that we need to tighten our partnership there? Does that put US interests at risk in the region? I would argue that it does. So we really need to fix the manufacturing and production side of the equation, in addition to increasing capability. Production is a huge shortfall right now."
https://arenamag.com/articles/principals-trae-stephens
5.I follow Jordi Visser as I also think he is one of the best macro strategists around. He has both the global macro background combined with deep understanding of technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3Tc9kGXyvc&t=3760s
6."on a 20+ year time horizon, betting against the USA is a failed proposition. At this point, we’d argue that a massive crash would cause huge money printing not just from the USA but the Globe. Reason? Foreigners from around the world do everything they can to dump their money into the USA.
The main competitive edge the USA has beyond controlling the money supply is controlling the global socio economic & cultural stage. Travel abroad and you quickly learn that foreigners listen to a ton of the same songs that you do. They just don’t understand them. They can recite it and sing along with zero knowledge of what it means.
While this is glossed over it is actually pretty important. As long as people believe the highest options will come from the USA, we’ll continue to poach the greats from other countries. We’re not even relevant in Soccer, yet Lionel Messi now lives in the USA (Fort Lauderdale).
If you look at the top CEOs in the USA, a large chunk are immigrants (Musk, Huang, Pichai, Nadella, Xu, Roman… the list goes on and on). They could have created companies outside the USA but as long as they think their chances of success are higher here (they are), they will continue to come in droves. ~12% of the S&P 500 CEOs are immigrants (also kills the whole idea that it’s impossible to make it in the USA if 88% are domestic).
On that note, if the USA is turning the S&P 500 into a savings account, we’re unsure how clear the message can get. Either learn to be an owner/operator and investor or join the crabs in a bucket chat around the company water cooler."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/is-the-usa-too-big-to-fail
7."The seat-license era let CEOs ignore marginal cost for fifteen years. That holiday is over. The operators who treat the token as a managed resource, budgeted, routed, cached, and measured, will run 20 points of gross margin ahead of the ones who treat it as a utility bill that just shows up."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-ceos-field-guide-to-strategy
8.This is the time to be a savage. Have agency and be optimistic. Alpha is at the weird edges.
What an excellent discussion: Investing and the next trillion dollar trade. Solid discussions: AI, defense & degen economy. Geoff and Antony are smart folks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjf-GBgkTIk&t=290s
9.Lessons for America from the Athenian empire. Arrogance and hubris, torching our alliances. History does rhyme.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQBCybgIyVI&t=120s
10."When global spend goes from two to three trillion dollars, you don’t see 30% increases in the size of militaries — you see a refresh in technology, platforms, and capability. So there’s a unique moment: Israel is beginning to produce the supply of next-generation solutions just as the world’s demand for them is surging. If you understand that intersection between supply and demand, and you can build a team that sits right at it, you stand to make a real difference. It’s a generational opportunity to start a new platform.
The United States woke up to this a few years earlier and is now reaping the rewards — the likes of Anduril and Saronic are winning hundred-million- and multi-billion-dollar US government contracts and future-proofing America’s capacity to fight a future war, whether with China or otherwise. We looked at this moment — and Europe got there slightly before we did — and said: now is the time when Israel can and will produce its own Saronics, Shield AIs, Helsings, and Epiruses."
https://defensebrief.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-israeli-defense-startups
11."Does this mean Bloom Energy’s stock is a compelling short? Not necessarily, not least because shorting stocks is the stuff of people who hate money—something we have learned the hard way over the years. As a reminder, we have an operative mental model that the US government is keenly interested in seeing stocks continue their journey up and to the right, and selling short in this environment is akin to going long oil in the middle of wars: the government doesn’t want you to win, will actively work to ensure you don’t, and might even throw you in jail for trying.
Instead, we would view the construction of a portfolio of stocks in the same way bond investors do—as a process of deselection. If we were in the market for new longs, there are plenty of better options."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/artificial-bloom
12.For anyone who is trying to figure out just what is happening in pre-seed (and seed) right now. For founders and investors trying to navigate this environment. Invaluable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waYD-9YVKEc
13."So my first 2036 call, the one I hold with most confidence: the tourist capital leaves around 2028-2030. Not because reindustrialization failed, but because it stopped photographing well. VC into manufacturing reverts to its historical trickle and the word “reindustrialization” retires the way “web3” did. What survives is three kinds of company:
-Whoever has a government check stapled to the balance sheet (the Tier 2 pattern from my last issue, where every serious rare-earth entrant carries a federal commitment)
-Whoever reached boring revenue before the window shut (parts, MRO, aftermarket, contract assembly)
-And whoever supplies the one hardware buildout that keeps its own money printer: robots.
And the “a big war will fix it” theory: I don’t buy it, especially as a plan. The next decade looks like this decade, regional conflicts where big powers test hardware through partners. Ukraine is on track to field 3 million FPV drones in 2025, and last week they confirmed testing underway on a US-Ukraine drone production venture valued at $35 to 50 billion, up to 200 Ukrainian companies, plus a track licensing Ukraine to build Patriot interceptors at home.
Look at the direction of flow: America buys battle-proofed drone designs from a partner at war, the partner gets a license to make American air defense domestically. Knowledge migrates to wherever production actually happens. The world stayed connected, logistics still work, and any 2036 scenario built on wartime autarky is fan fiction."
https://constiv.substack.com/p/what-survives-to-2036
14.Marko Papic is a top geopolitical analyst whose work I admire. He has very different takes that help you figure out the nuttiness around the world and how to trade on it.
We're all investors at the end of the day. Investors of our own time and money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGkkxbNxqOY
15.Drone Innovation in Ukraine versus Russian industrial scaling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVc-AMmhNwc
16."While it doesn’t take a lot of thinking to realize that Memory Chips sent from China to the USA are not safe, there is a large capacity there. Since it is possible to make memory chips without massive IP (China steals), in the long-term the industry just reverts back to normal profit margins.
Without getting too big into the weeds, think it is common knowledge that ASML and NVDA are basically monopolies since you can’t make high-end chips without ASML and you can’t do AI without an advanced NVDA GPU. Therefore, those two companies have more sustainable margins than the memory industry. Just because there are not a ton of major memory makers, doesn’t make it a monopoly.
Don’t get confused between extremely high demand for a few years vs. can’t do anything without it."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/memory-stocks-spacex-and-more-also
17.Michael Every is one of the best geopolitical analysts around. He has some solid frameworks to use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYnrGt7ypoY
18.One of the weekly and top educational conversations about Silicon Valley news. 3 generations of investor takes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoRaqNWKcpM
19."For most of the twentieth century, a relatively small number of institutions controlled which stories reached a mass audience. Movie studios decided which stories became films. Newspapers decided which events mattered and how those events should be interpreted.
BUT YOU ARE THE MEDIA NOW!
Take this role seriously because the system gave a small group of cultural gatekeepers enormous power. But the internet shattered much of that control.
Today, an ordinary person can publish an essay, record a podcast, build a newsletter, create a video, write a book, or develop an audience without first receiving permission from a Hollywood studio, publishing executive, television producer, or newspaper editor.
That is one of the greatest opportunities of our time. But it also comes with a responsibility. It is not enough to complain that Hollywood tells bad stories. We have to tell better ones.
It is not enough to complain that institutions misrepresent our values. We have to communicate those values ourselves. It is not enough to complain that the stories of our families, communities, faith, and civilization are being forgotten."
https://profitandpurpose247.substack.com/p/why-stories-matter
20.Ukraine Naval Strategy: wrecking the Russian shadow fleet with sea drones.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4y_bth79kI
21.I really enjoy this weekly perspective on global macro + tech trends. One of my favorite new regular shows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEnq13uJBD0
22."The amount of internal and external information now available to entrepreneurs is enormous. The ability to process, synthesize, and retrieve that information quickly is unparalleled. Entrepreneurs would do well to make their most important information not only accessible, but also intelligent and insightful."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/07/18/the-personal-ai-brain/
23."A weakening US dollar will allow countries like Brazil or Indonesia to sell their commodities at a higher price.
But that’s not going to happen any time in the immediate future. In the short term, the US dollar is acting like a wrecking ball to other economies, sending US equities higher and commodities lower.
And that’s the opportunity, even though it’ll feel painful in the short term.
Sell highly valued US equities to buy undervalued commodities. And in some cases, undervalued foreign equities.
Gold, silver, nickel, aluminum, and even oil are extremely interesting right now."
https://www.codyshirk.com/p/a-mexican-beach-a-16-year-old-warning
24.Hybrid war continues. Polish GROM are some of the best in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RBY1cY-GF8
25.A real masterclass in fundraising. Solid frameworks here for founders and investors raising money.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHvY9wzhjpA&t=418s
26."At the same time, American low-cost missile manufacturers are ramping up order intake on a scale their European competitors cannot yet match. Large orders across ERAM, LCCM, FAMM, and other programs already allow American manufacturers to spread development and tooling costs over thousands of units, while high production volumes drive down unit costs through learning and economies of scale.
Lower unit costs, in turn, improve their position in future competitions, a feedback loop that late entrants may find difficult to break, similarly to how American missile manufacturers were able to outcompete European ones. In addition, confirmed demand may also disincentivize private investment in European companies, as Anduril and Castelion can raise capital against confirmed demand signals that European manufacturers currently lack.
The advantage is, of course, not absolute, and in the European market, localization and national ownership may weigh more heavily than unit price — at least for now. But in third markets, and in the race to fund follow-on development, the American head start in orders is likely to compound."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/affordable-mass-the-low-cost-cruise
27."I believe all of this turmoil, change, and strategic upheaval in venture really comes down to one core question: In this AI era, is it really different this time? Some in the industry thought it was different in 2021, but that turned out not to be the case. Most of the core questions every early-stage firm I know is grappling with boil down to the following core beliefs:
Does entry ownership still matter, and is it worth holding the line on target ownership?
How important is entry price in the equation? To what degree does entry price matter?
Can I get into the top 15-25 companies that will become far outliers each year? If not, why am I in this business?
If I were to summarize the consensus view of the job of an early-stage venture capitalist today, it is fairly simple: do you have a model that’s going to give you a chance to win a spot on the cap table of the small number of companies that will end up driving the majority of returns per fund cycle? If the answer is no, I think you need to go back and look at your strategy, because you might not be competitive."
https://chudson.substack.com/p/its-all-pre-series-a-now
28."When you find yourself on this journey, you will find yourself in many many many stressful situations. You will have a ton of ups and downs. You will be tested. You will be drowned in work and upset. You will miss out on a lot of events for the sacrifice of a greater tomorrow.
Because I know this as fact I have amended my lifestyle to keep this in perspective in such a way that I’m rewarded for it now. Not tomorrow. Not next year. But today.
Or at least this week.
And here’s how the philosophy basically plays out.
Every Sunday I write out all my bottlenecks that I plan on defeating 1 by 1 this week.
My goal is at least 1 bottleneck a day, if not more, if time permits. And if it’s a major one then of course I work on it daily until it’s resolved.
Then what about lifestyle? What about reward? What about not being a good little rich hamster on a wheel?
Here’s the fun part.
I - a week out or sometimes even farther - set specific dates or events for myself so that that specific week has at least one event that makes this week sick."
https://www.thefinalman.com/p/lessons-on-achieving-the-perfect
29.This show is so fun. Two of the most interesting people on the planet just having a conversation on life, learnings, hobbies and cool products.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT7QpL4XRtw&t=760s
30.Another person who I would classify as one of the most interesting people in the world. Tyler Cowen has some good takes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unxcoZbnH_Q
31.A perspective from USV on AI & Agents. Rise of the Rebel Alliance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gfiIVfZAZ8
32.I think many of us take for granted all the natural gas flowing in America. This prediction is kind of terrifying but it's well thought thru. Big geopolitical implications domestically for USA and for our allies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d9tIgjf4_E
33."A terrifying game of hide-and-seek is playing out in this deadly corridor that snakes along the 1,200 km-long (750-mile) front line in Ukraine.
The war, well into its fifth year, has become the first major conflict to be dominated by unmanned aerial vehicles, with thousands of the cheap but deadly machines filling the skies.
Ukraine and invader Russia are constantly advancing the new technology, which is transforming modern warfare. Both sides have had to abandon age-old tactics of gathering troops, vehicles and artillery in a relatively compressed area along the front lines. Such visible targets are easy prey for drones.
Instead, teams as small as two to three soldiers hide in tiny dugouts hollowed under the ground, scattered across a huge kill zone extending many kilometres on either side of the line of contact between the two sides. Infantrymen often act as lookouts, avoiding direct engagement that could give away their position, instead calling in drones to do the killing, said an officer in leading Ukrainian drone brigade Madyar’s Birds, who goes by the callsign Silhouette."
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/UKRAINE-CRISIS/KILL-ZONE/znpnojmknvl/
34.My favorite weekly discussion on all big news Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwGTOmdbLQs&t=643s
35.One of the must watch weekly tech shows. Good takes on AI and Stripe & PayPal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=460NqsdQm5A&t=1491s
36.A masterclass in building and scaling hard & big businesses. So many insights here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6gH_v0buUc
37."Amateurs spend months preparing for a market that doesn’t care. Architects launch raw engines, gather instant data, and command the cash flow while others are still editing their outlines. Stop planning. Deploy."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-architecture-of-action
38."Ok, so am I saying early stage funds of modest size ($100m or less) should *never* follow on? NO, I’m saying you should minimize reserves so that you are not thinking about it as a second pool of dollars to only use for second checks. Instead evaluate any pro rata opportunity vs a net new investment, and assume you will not use a significant amount of your fund capital for follow-on. Get more shots on goal, so to speak, and see if you can catch more true outliers.
But HUNTER,
WHAT ABOUT DILUTION? If exits for winners are truly bigger than ever, your dilution won’t matter as much from a fund model perspective -AND- the wild growth in early stage valuations means you will be taking LESS dilution than has historically been."
39. "Many Americans still do not understand what Ukraine is. They do not understand why a Ukrainian who speaks Russian can still be a victim of Russian oppression—or why speaking Russian does not mean wanting to become Russian. Nobody assumes that Mexicans, Venezuelans, or Paraguayans want to belong to the Spanish Empire simply because they speak Spanish. People understand that language can be a legacy of imperial rule. Yet that same logic is often abandoned when Ukraine is discussed.
The war is ultimately about Ukrainian identity, culture, and the right to exist. I would encourage foreigners not to stop at battlefield headlines. Read the writers and historians explaining Ukrainian history, language, and culture. Support the organizations and media outlets doing that work. Once you understand the history, it becomes much easier to grasp why Ukrainians are so determined to escape Russian imperialism."
https://underfirenews.substack.com/p/i-had-seen-too-much-to-turn-my-back
40."The future of warfare is no secret in the Pentagon. The widespread use of relatively inexpensive Iranian Shahed drones in Ukraine and the Middle East is headline news. Meanwhile, China and Russia are adeptly fielding various higher-end, more capable systems. The United States isn’t sitting on its hands. We have several counter-UAS systems from both the traditional prime contractors and new entrants. The capabilities are a mix of kinetic interceptors and directed energy weapons.
The problem is, Private Snuffy on the ground doesn’t even know these technologies exist, let alone how to use them or how they will be used to augment battlefield tactics.
The leadership at the top of our military understands that much of the doctrine we still teach at the bottom is obsolete. Yet battalion-level and below units continue running decades-old drills and consulting outdated field manuals, which lead to dissonant experiences like the one above. Doctrine takes far too long to travel from those who write it to the soldiers on the ground who must live and die by it. That lag will cost us dearly in dollars and in lives if we don’t reform and accelerate the way we train."
https://www.firstbreakfast.com/p/drone-warfare-what-the-pentagon-knows
41.This week's global macro with Visser and Pomp. Helpful to understand what is going on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McKTuWYzXgg&t=414s
42."The market currently prices the US data center buildout on expected revenue from Western frontier labs. Call this scenario A. Reasonable assumptions, reasonable analysis, mostly what the bubble-versus-real debate is arguing about.
Scenario B is a Taiwan chip disruption of any severity over the next five years. Even at a 3% probability, the same GPUs command a scarcity premium of many multiples of their spot price. The West cannot produce equivalent volume domestically for years. Alperovitch, Recorded Future’s Insikt Group, and CSIS all argue the underlying risk is higher than 3%, and rising through the second half of this decade.
Even at 3%, the expected value of the compute stockpile is materially higher than what analysts are baking in. Move the probability to 10% and the math is not close. The overbuild stops looking like a bubble and starts looking like a call option the market gave away for free.
I laid out this argument in more detail on Marc Baumann’s 51 Insights podcast. Marc’s own summary was that “even at a 3% probability, those chips are worth gold.” That is the exact math the current bubble-versus-real debate does not include.
If you are an investor, a family office, a private equity firm, or a sovereign wealth allocator running the AI infrastructure trade, the geopolitical hedge is the piece missing from your model. It is asymmetric upside for capital that is currently priced on symmetric downside. The overbuild is a hedge. Whether it is also a bubble is almost a side question at that point."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/guest-post-the-trillion-dollar-trade
Modern Deal Guy as Gunslinger: Conduit of Value
I’ve written about the concept of Modern Deal Guy and the more I observe the rapidly changing world economy around me, the more important this concept is to understand. In a more dynamic world, financial organizations need to be more adaptive. Duncan Young who writes the Conduit of Value describes this change so very well: https://conduitofvalue.substack.com/p/the-age-of-the-gunslinger
A world from institutions, scale and deep analysis to something more fluid and fleeting. He states that the last 5 decades were an anomaly in the financial world and that we are going back to something old yet new.
“The era we're leaving wasn't the new normal. It was a brief window during which the analytical layer looked like it could substitute for the conditions layer, enabling new institutional scale due to the elegant story of MBAs in towers. It couldn't. It was just expensive enough to look like a moat. What it produced was institutional blandness, that needed to be quietly backfilled by the conditions the analytical layer claimed to have replaced.
The facade is fading as the cost of analysis falls, and the market is going back to the way it always was, an insider’s game.”
He goes further on this point:
"These conditions weren’t dormant the past five decades and they aren’t newly important now; they were always the real work. Even at the peak of the analytical era, the deals that closed were the ones where someone in the room had real conditions on the asset. The model didn’t win the deal, rather: the relationship got you in the room, the context told you what to underwrite, and the analysis was the formality you ran after you’d already decided.
The conditions always mattered, but up until now, they’ve been modeled over. We’re returning to an age where they are all that matter.
Relationships. Who picks up your call. Who returns your text on a Saturday. Who introduces you to the founder before the banker does. Relationships never went away during the analytical era. They quietly kept doing the work while the analytical layer got the credit. The shift now is that the spotlight is gone. Access lives here too: the room you can walk into, the deal you see before it becomes a process, the supplier who quotes you a real number instead of a list price.
Information. What you know that the model doesn’t. The conversation that hasn’t been transcribed. The pattern you saw three jobs ago that nobody else in the room saw. The supplier whisper, the customer churn signal that hasn’t shown up in the data yet, the regulatory rumor from someone two beers in at a conference in Vegas. Information that lives in a person, not a database.
Context. What you’ve already been through. The cycle you survived. The mistake you don’t have to make again because you made it in 2018. The deal that went sideways the way this one is starting to. It’s a library of pattern matches the model can’t borrow. The reason a customer in this niche behaves one way and a customer in the adjacent niche behaves the opposite way, even though the spreadsheet says they should be identical. The model can simulate context. It cannot live in one.
Resources. What you can deploy right now, not in three weeks after committee. Cash, team, attention, time. Capital plus the ability to act fast is a different instrument than capital alone. A check that lands on Tuesday is not the same instrument as a check that lands in February. A team that can do the work alongside management is the most impactful in this new era.
Together they constitute position — where you’re standing on the board. For twenty years the smart money invested in better models. The next decade rewards investing in better positions.”
Duncan’s nomenclature for style of investing in the new time. Gunslingers. Or my interpretation, another word for the “Modern Deal Guy” as per Jeremy Giffon and Will Manidis.
“The figure who operated this way before the analytical era arrived had a name. They knew to read the room, knew the terrain, kept his rolodex in his head, moved before consensus formed, and traded on context the institutional players hadn’t seen yet. They were The Gunslinger."
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.
Four moves to start executing on your conditions:
Take inventory. Most operators and allocators can’t actually list their own conditions. Spend an afternoon writing them down: relationships that pick up your call, information lives in your head, access that other people in your category can’t. What you’ve been through that others haven’t. The list is shorter than you think and more valuable than you’ve been pricing it.
Refuse the consensus trade. If everyone in the room has access to the same model and the model is producing the same answer, you’re not in a gunslinger seat. You’re in the crowd. Pass on those deals. Take the ones where your conditions tell you the consensus is wrong, or where the consensus hasn’t formed yet because the deal hasn’t entered the analytical funnel. This is harder than it sounds. It feels safer to be wrong with the crowd than right alone. Get over it. The analytical era rewarded crowd-rightness. The gunslinger era doesn’t.
Be in the room. Conditions compound through physical and temporal proximity. The deal flow that matters travels through dinners, not data rooms.
Move when the moment opens. Position is necessary but not sufficient. The gunslinger edge is position plus the ability to fire when the moment opens. Most analytical-era institutions are built to slow that down — committees, processes, diligence cycles, approvals. If you can structure yourself or your firm to act in days rather than weeks when a condition-driven opportunity appears, you’ve built an edge no model can match.”
Net net in Duncan’s words: “Institutionalized analysis is no longer an edge, creating opportunities for smaller teams to thrive in the market on their conditions.”
This is the world where modern deal guys and small organizations now have the advantage and can really thrive. It’s Go time for the Modern Deal Guy aka Gunslinger.
Framework for Work & Relevance in the Age of AI
I get the sense that all of us are trying to navigate the new age of AI and the deep implications of what its impact will be on work and society at large. There is a lot of hyperbole about AI replacing humans and ending white collar work. I am guilty of spreading this view. It’s the conclusion I’ve come to from all my reading and conversations. But thankfully there are many smart people thinking and writing about this. Alex Oppenheimer wrote a great essay on this and you should read the whole thing: https://alexoppenheimer.substack.com/p/sticks-stones-and-light-speed
But I pulled some key parts out of this:
"Here’s why this matters right now: AI just deleted the need for the fleet.
The path that looked safe for a century - build skills, climb the ladder, scale headcount, accumulate prestige - has quietly become the long short path for almost everyone. The path that looked slow - deep relationships, judgment, taste, contemplation - is now the short long path. If we do it right, I think we can have the best of both worlds, and more importantly stay in control of our own unique path.
The dangerous mistake of this era is going to be the people who put on the suit and never take it off. They’ll mistake constant orchestration for constant value creation. They’ll have 20 agents running, three Slack channels, two AI meeting summarizers, one personalized newsfeed, and zero quiet hours. They’ll be efficient and irrelevant. The output will be enormous. The judgment will be threadbare.”
He gives some specific recommendations on how to thrive here and it’s to embrace our human-ness and not over-optimize with technology. To focus on our creativity and judgement aka “taste”.
“The deepest competitive advantage of the next decade is going to be the willingness to take the suit off.
Sit on the dock without a goal. Take walks without earbuds. Have dinners where the phones stay in coats. Read books that have nothing to do with your job. Have conversations with people who can’t help you with anything. Be still long enough that judgment can actually form. Stop running away from your thoughts and dive into them.
Trust is built in those moments. Taste is built in those moments. The judgment that the AI cannot replicate, the divine spark that makes you uniquely you, is built in those moments. The orchestrator who never unplugs becomes a routing layer with a name. The orchestrator who knows when to unplug becomes irreplaceable.
That’s the real Iron Man lesson. Tony Stark wasn’t impressive because he had the suit. Plenty of people had suits in that universe. He was impressive because of the man inside it, and because he knew the man mattered more."
This gives me comfort that most of us will find a path in this new world of AI. A world where technology enhances, not replaces or destroys our humanity.
Life Ain’t Fair: Deal With It
I think many of us growing up were very much insulated from reality. Especially middle class (or in my case, lower middle class Canada). Not sure why but for some reason we are taught in school or by societal messages that life would be fair. Reality bites hard when you enter the real world. And I think that led to a bout of deep cynicism and blackpilling on my part. Thankfully I learned and grew out of it.
I stumbled upon an interview by Lenny Rachitsky of Ben Horowitz, cofounder of investing giant A16Z. The message is so helpful for all of us:
“The thing that I would say has had the biggest effect on me is something my father said to me years ago: ‘Life isn’t fair.’ That advice seems really simple, but the thing I’ve seen that defeats people more than any other thing in life is the expectation of some fairness.”
“There are all kinds of things that are going to happen to you that don’t happen to other people and are completely unfair. But it doesn’t matter because that’s the way it is. And as soon as you can get that idea out of your mind [that life should be fair], you can just deal with it… ‘What should I do now?’ is the real question — not ‘How do I go back and get people to be fair?’… Life’s not fair. That’s the nature of it. If you think about it more than five seconds, you’ll realize that… As an individual, do not expect anything to be fair. It will only defeat you.”
If you believe life is meant to be fair, you will only be disappointed. This is why you have to take responsibility and total personal ownership of everything in your life. This is something you can control: Your mindset, your attitude and your work ethic. The sooner you understand this, the sooner you can improve your life and increase your own impact on the world around you.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Sept 20th, 2026
“Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.” ~Elbert Hubbard
"My recommendation for entrepreneurs is not to get caught up in the hype around AI companies with unfathomable growth rates. Instead, focus on delivering real value to real customers in a way that is sustainable over a long period of time.
Most venture investors and venture-style investors are not looking for companies that can be worth a trillion dollars. Most are looking for companies that can deliver an incredible return within 5 – 10 years.
The AI growth rates and valuations are inspiring, but they are not the standard for the vast majority of venture investors. Focus on building a great business."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/07/04/the-real-return-standard-for-most-venture-investors/
2."It is also the foundation of our objections to the sanctioning of Russia, which—no matter how often British propagandists insist otherwise—is also a strong country. Here, the argument is even more straightforward, given that Russia’s all-important energy sector is the main target. Foolhardy attempts to restrain the volume of Russian oil and gas production were guaranteed to fail because of the higher global prices that invariably result, something we have been pointing out in vain since mid-2022. The world needs Russian energy more than Russia needs money, a conclusion the recent war in the Middle East made perfectly clear to all but the densest European Union (EU) leaders.
We close by noting ours is far from the “pro-Russian” position so many one-dimensional thinkers assume it must be. Had Brussels followed our advice—written consistently over dozens of articles over the past four years—things would have likely evolved like this: Western firms would have been encouraged to accelerate the buildout of Russian LNG assets, doing everything in their power to make it as easy as possible for such volumes to reach the market. Global LNG prices would have sunk due to an emerging glut, just as the EU badly needed the extra supply. Far from investing huge sums to become self-sufficient, Russian companies would have viewed incremental LNG development as unattractive, and a weakened Russia, still heavily reliant on advanced Western technology, would have resulted.
Instead, Moscow will soon have all the cards. Who is “pro-Russian,” again?"
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/treatment-resistant
3.Visser's global macro takes are super helpful to understand. One of the best to integrate technological trends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp9rfw1Iqw8&t=55s
4."America’s shipbuilding gap is not insurmountable. For privateers in particular, all that’s needed are ships fast enough to close on sanctioned tankers, large enough to carry a boarding team, and cheap enough to stand up a fleet with private capital alone.
A modernized letter of marque framework would do just that by authorizing vetted firms to identify and board vessels carrying sanctioned cargo. Congress would pass legislation specifying which categories of activity trigger the authority, declaring specific categories of activity to be within the bounds of authorized conduct, establishing verification protocols, and licensing the firms permitted to board and inspect suspect ships.
The challenge today is structurally similar to the one our founders faced. Western navies cannot police every sea lane. But American industry — with autonomous ships, AI-driven surveillance networks, and renewed shipbuilding capacity — is already assembling the toolkit to close the enforcement gap. Two hundred and fifty years after the Continental Congress first armed private citizens to defend American interests at sea, it is time to bring back the American privateer."
https://arenamag.com/articles/a-private-matter
5."Since then, Dino Mavrookas tells me, “There have only been five major paradigm shifts in naval power since the beginning of human history. First, there’s the invention of the ship. Then, in the 1500s, you have sails and gunpowder and cannonballs. Then in the 1800s, you have steam and the pre-WWII battleship. On December 7, 1941, the day of Pearl Harbor, carrier-based aviation became the center of naval power. And then, between December 7, 1941 and October 29, 2022, not too much happened.”
In those eighty-or-so years, he explained, “the ships became larger, more exquisite, more powerful, more capable, but nothing fundamentally changed. And in that process, they also became much more expensive, much harder to build.” What changed on October 29, 2022 was that Ukraine — a country without a navy and so forced to innovate — used an unmanned surface vessel (USV) to hit a Russian ship. “This was the first time an autonomous boat hit a naval ship — and you had the transition to maritime autonomy as that fifth paradigm shift in naval power.
Since human beings have had fleets at their disposal, Altekar tells me, naval supremacy has been defined by having “large ships, lots of ships, and a very skilled set of people that can operate those ships.” Navies are expensive: “they’re large, they’re complex, they’re built for humans and the supply chain.” Mavrookas agrees, telling me that “autonomous ships that don’t have to support people allow you to strip out 80 to 90 percent of the complexity of the platform.” There don’t need to be hallways, bathrooms, nor kitchens. Since much of the expense of shipbuilding comes from making them fit for human crew, autonomous ships are actually an economical option once the tech is sorted out. “Our ship,” Mavrookas says, “we can break down to seven major subcomponents,” compared to “thousands” on a naval destroyer.
Removing humans from the equation unlocks the possibility of what a boat or ship can do. Unlike autonomous cars, autonomous boats get to change the physics of the vehicle at hand. Waymos, Altekar explains, “don’t have increased fuel efficiency or energy efficiency because the car is self-driving — maybe a little bit, but the same amount that you get from cruise control.” Autonomous boats and ships, by contrast, are not floating hotels like their old-school counterparts; they don’t need gyms, bathrooms, kitchens, and so on, which allows more space for engineers and designers to reimagine what a boat or ship ought to look like. “When you design the ship for there to be no humans at all... suddenly you can take a sharp 90-degree turn, take three and a half lateral G’s, like an F1 car. And it doesn’t matter. You don’t need Lewis Hamilton in there.”
https://arenamag.com/articles/the-fifth-shift
6.Fascinating conversation with the brilliant Etched founders, building inference microchips faster than anyone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BagWrgPww1o
7.Another solid episode of NIA. Learning about cultural and creative business news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLXVVhaTOYI
8."For a proper war against Iran, you would probably need, at minimum, a year of preparation that includes moving tons of equipment, fortifying bases in the region, training and helping allies set up layered drone and missile defense, setting up proper deconfliction protocols and more. The US lacked so much coordination that Kuwait, a US partner, was shooting friendly US F-15s out of the sky. The planning was so bungled that during the opening move, something the US are masters at, we hit a school with children in it. The OPENING STRIKES. Were they using Claude for the targeting?
Operation Desert Storm, one of the cleanest wars and greatest displays of combined arms warfare in US military history, took about a year to plan, coordinate, and stage. What possessed the US administration to do something like this without proper preparation?
You can have the most competent military in the world, but if your politicians are not up to par, then you have nothing. As a military, if the goal you’re given to accomplish is stupid, no matter how brilliantly you go about it, the end result will always stupid."
https://www.globalhitman.com/p/the-disease-of-incompetence
9."None of this makes Starlink a bad business; it makes it a different one than the narrative sells. It is unbeatable at reach: high-ARPU rural and remote in rich countries, mobility across air, sea, rail, and RV, enterprise/government/defense, backup and resilience, and a thin long-haul latency niche where a vacuum beats glass. Tens of billions a year, a constellation worth hundreds of billions. But ~$11.4B of 2025 revenue against a telecom market in the trillions is the honest share of wallet — meaningful, premium, nowhere near a takeover. What it replaces is the bad and the absent: legacy GEO, rural DSL, the worst fixed wireless, the “no service” baseline. Not the good."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-203641377
10."The NATO summit is likely to be a huge win irrespective for Erdogan and Turkiye. Türkiye’s now considerable prowess in terms of its military and military industrial complex will be on show - seemingly everyone, but particularly Europe - wants to be friends with Turkiye.
For Europe, Turkiye offers solutions in terms of its bid to move quickly to autonomous defence capability. Turkiye has specific capabilities in drones, but can provide scale in producing tanks, planes and ships for Europe. Alongside that it has the largest army in European NATO, second now only to Ukraine and Russia in Europe. So Turkiye now appears key to any credible defence of Europe without the U.S. - arguably joined there by Ukraine, Finland and Poland."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/nato-summit-all-hail-to-trump
11."I believe two questions do most of the work here. One, if China cut this supply tomorrow, how bad is it, across how many sectors, how fast. Two, can the US actually compete, given our power costs, our labor, our patience with capital. Put those on a grid and you get four tiers. Most of the money is piling into the tier that already has money.
If you build one thing off this issue, build on-demand FATP. Most undercapitalized white space in US hardware, and whoever builds the Jabil-for-400-units owns the chokepoint every hardware startup hits on its first real run.
Rare earth processing is real too, but it’s an infrastructure play, not a startup: get the offtake or the price floor signed before you break ground, the way MP, Phoenix Tailings and Energy Fuels did.
And if you’re an operator in that roll call, or setting up to supply the Tier-1 primes, the gap map above is your addressable market.
Everything in the “leave it to China” box is a trap that burns capital to prove a point."
https://constiv.substack.com/p/closing-the-wrong-gaps
12.One of the most original thinkers in finance right now. Jeremy Giffon is brilliant and this discussion is thought provoking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y82q5Lw7_8E
13.Korean economy and stocks crushing it due to AI & DRAM microchips!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo5YM0QJqi0
14."Venture capital has spent three years funding the gold-miners, i.e. neoprimes that assemble and sell the weapon itself - from Anduril ($61B valuation) to Castelion and Helsing, at $12B and $18B. The picks and shovels are what all of them buy to build their products, namely rocket motors, jet engines, radios and thermal cameras.
These markets have attracted far less capital, for an understandable reason. A prime owns the program, the customer relationship and the pricing power, so it earns higher revenues and higher valuations than its suppliers, and in normal conditions the supplier holds the worse position. Current conditions are different. Munitions order books now stretch years beyond capacity, customers are investing in their own suppliers to secure allocation, and governments are paying for factories.
In a market so constrained, suppliers’ position improves considerably. It is driven by players scarcity (how many of them are capable to produce a part) and the size of the demand spike (how much of that part is suddenly needed)."
https://defensebrief.substack.com/p/who-is-building-the-picks-and-shovels
15."Bouaziz was referring to Mark Dyne, a South Africa–born jack-of-all-trades—part investor, part deal negotiator, part legal strategist—who caters to influential tech executives and investors with thorny business and personal problems to solve. The nickname some of his clients use for him, The Wolf, speaks to Dyne’s skills in cleaning up an array of legal and personal problems on their behalf. According to two of Dyne’s clients, it’s also a joking reference to the tuxedoed character in “Pulp Fiction” played by Harvey Keitel, who is called in to get rid of a dead body and clean up a blood-splattered car.
Dyne’s work is far less grisly. He gets called in to organize surveillance of rivals for his clients during high-stakes litigation and to serve as an intermediary in sensitive personal conflicts, according to people familiar with his services, including past clients. He also helps distressed companies shut down and organize rescue financing, and he reincorporates businesses offshore to protect clients from litigation, those people said. Dyne typically gets paid a retainer, sometimes with extra compensation if he successfully negotiates a deal, according to court records and a person who has heard Dyne describe his arrangement with a client.
“We are…professional fixers for complex situations,” it reads.
“The way we see the world, gone are the days when startups simply have a clear and linear path from Series A to unicorn,” Morpheus’ website continues. “Nowadays, something or someone will try to block their path—a competitor, regulator, customer, rogue employee, or attorney general. That’s where we come in.”
16.The global macro case for us being in an AI & tech supercycle. "No one stops this train". Hope he is right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n2UpyKETZw
17."Call it thick sovereignty.
The central premise of thick sovereignty is not that states should replace markets. Rather, it is that states must underwrite the critical coordination capacities upon which markets ultimately depend. Semiconductor manufacturing, electrical grids, ports, cyber defense, energy systems, defense industrial bases, strategic mineral supply chains, payment infrastructure, and domestic manufacturing capability are no longer viewed merely as sectors of the economy. They are treated as strategic coordination assets.
These investments often appear unattractive through the lens of traditional return-on-investment analysis. A semiconductor fabrication plant built for geopolitical resilience may never achieve the lowest production costs. Maintaining excess electricity generation capacity may appear inefficient. Building redundant logistics networks lowers measured productivity. Strategic reserves produce no quarterly earnings.
Yet these investments optimize a different objective function.
They are not expansionary investments.
They are option-preserving investments.
Their purpose is to buy adaptability under conditions of profound uncertainty. They resemble insurance, but only superficially. Insurance assumes known probabilities. Thick sovereignty operates under Knightian uncertainty, where the relevant risks cannot even be fully enumerated. The investment is not a wager that a particular crisis will occur. It is a wager that maintaining the capacity to respond to unforeseen futures has become more valuable than maximizing static efficiency."
https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/a-tale-of-two-theories-of-coordination
18."The lesson is not complicated, just inconvenient. When a great power abandons any credible link to hard money, the currency loses purchasing power over time, and the temptation to finance geopolitical ambitions through debt and debasement grows ever stronger.
The phrase “not worth a Continental” was once popular in the U.S. It wasn’t part of a Cadillac marketing campaign. It came about after the Continental Congress decided that printing its way out of a war was preferable to the messy and difficult business of collecting taxes.
As we’ve seen, the United States has lived through several episodes of this series. The only novelty today is the scale at which the experiment is being run and the amnesia with which it’s being conducted. Those who imagine the outcome will be any different this time around might usefully recall that the Continental Congress also believed its circumstances were unique—until the notes stopped buying anything at all."
https://frankgiustra.com/from-cash-to-trash-rinse-and-repeat/
19.The insights in this podcast every week are always helpful. You have to listen to this if you want to be on top of Silicon Valley & AI news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUkbZHSQIog&t=2158s
20."We've passed peak scale. The monoculture has fragmented. The celebrities are old. Global population is in decline. Brand loyalists are now brand victims. They turn to brand as a means of self-expression, something bigger than themselves that can help them connect with others. But the references fall on deaf ears.
It’s like expecting a Harvard student to be able to read Anthony Burgess. It’s all Greek to them."
https://www.8ball.report/p/brand-dead
21."The founders have gone global. So has the adoption, and so has the cheap compute that now lets a few engineers in Lagos or São Paulo build what once took a hundred in Mountain View. Capital is the last input still behaving as if geography were destiny. For the allocators who nodded along in multiple panels, the question is what, exactly, they are still waiting for."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/tech-is-globalizing-the-money-is
22."The pendulum has swung so far towards consensus today that I’m betting there will be a mean reversion back to contrarianism.
History has shown repeatedly that the hottest theme in any given year is not the same category as the most valuable company started that year. I have no reason to believe this time is different.
I’d rather back the outsider who has a chip on their shoulder all day over the insider who’s been prematurely anointed by VCs. I believe there is a huge blind spot of great founders outside the Silicon Valley groupthink bubble who are not pedigreed, are out of distribution, and are not legible to most VCs.
I’m optimistic that meritocracy will eventually win, and those who chase momentum playing the kingmaking game will be left licking their wounds.
Follow the herd, get slaughtered."
https://showerthoughts.substack.com/p/what-you-cant-say-in-silicon-valley
23.The art and science of venture investing from a former founder now GP at USV, one of the OG top tier VC funds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gjjnb8j69C0&t=2479s
24.This is the cooler and more younger version of All in Podcast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvaQuIz-VE4
25.Drone and Counter drone war and learnings from Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_Zqajl74XI
26."The top 1% now control a far larger share of net worth than they did 30–40 years ago. That concentration isn’t a talking point to “eat the rich”. It’s proof that the mechanisms of ownership (equity, businesses and outsized capital gains) are what create generational wealth.
If you want a real way out, not just a better salary to “invest $10K more per year”, build something that creates recurring cashflow and a real equity stake.
Control pricing, systematize the business, and let compounding do the rest. The risk is real; the upside is structural — and the difference between owner and worker is not moral. It’s permanent.
The same politicians claiming to be for the people, are playing this same game. Year after year after year. The figure head changes, the incentives don’t."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/start-a-business-the-only-real-way
27.This is a masterclass in sales management for growth startups. Brutal and direct, which is the way it should be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRPBhik_AXU&t=3s
28.Inside the mind of one of the most unique thinkers and top investors in Silicon Valley. She is truly one of the best angel investors and now VC on the planet.
Don't know her personally but just look at her track record. Plenty to learn here on how to think clearly and differently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=810VlN3lkqQ&t=260s
29.More updated geopolitical take from Zeihan on deglobalization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTciwXCkHt8
30."The old world trained you to measure business success by the size of your footprint. You were told that scaling means hiring more managers, leasing bigger offices, and adding layers of operational weight. This is a trap designed to bleed your margins. In 2026, mass is a liability. Every human you add to your payroll is a new node of misaligned incentives, emotional baggage, and communication friction.
The elite do not scale by adding people; they scale by expanding their technological leverage. If your infrastructure is built correctly, a single operator can command the distribution power of a mid-sized corporation without ever shaking a hand or signing a lease.
The ultimate status symbol in 2026 is a brand that clears millions in pure dividend distributions while maintaining a public headcount of exactly one operator. It is the ultimate flex of technical supremacy. It proves that your workflows are so perfectly automated that human labor has been completely rendered obsolete within your system. While others are hosting “quarterly performance reviews,” the Sovereign is Clearing Payouts."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-efficiency-monopoly
31."We’ve broken the social contract that binds America: Work hard, play by the rules, and you’ll be better off than your parents were. For the first time in our nation’s history, this is no longer true.
Today’s 25-year-olds make less than their parents and grandparents did at the same age, yet they carry student debt loads unimaginable to earlier generations. Neither the minimum nor median wage has kept pace with inflation or productivity gains, while housing costs have outpaced them. The statistics on children’s and young adults’ well-being are staggering."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/war-on-the-young
32.M&A tips from one of the best Buy and Build PE firms in the market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5M8xOwTvYY
33."I built my whole career that way. I was always defining strategy, figuring out systems, and building dashboards, products, and funnels to make it all work. And it did work for a long time. That skill set built everything I have in my business.
But watching Michael has forced me to think about something uncomfortable. That almost everything I got good at over the last twenty years is getting commoditized by AI.
But what Michael is doing can't be replicated. Because fun is a moat AI cannot cross."
https://justinwelsh.me/essays/fun
34.Global macro from a skeptic. Louis Gave always provides a cold, non-US & rational take on trends and investing. Good counterbalance to all the normal takes. Commodities are where the action is at.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIZjKqeVdck
35.Ken Griffin is one of most wired investors in America as he runs one of the most important financial market making companies in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZweef8LX7M
36.Visser is one of my favorite new global macro investors as he has one of the best understandings of tech trends around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP9AEulCw9g
37."As one of my favorite sayings goes, nothing happens until something is sold. Understanding the market, understanding the customer, and earning the business are among the founder’s most important responsibilities.
Entrepreneurs should absolutely build a repeatable sales model. But they should not stop talking to customers. Over time, they should develop a process that keeps them involved in sales without allowing it to consume the majority of their role.
Founder-led sales is an important part of the entrepreneurial journey, and the most successful founders continue to devote meaningful time to customers and prospects, even at scale."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/07/11/why-great-founders-keep-selling/
Dark Age Mindset: Embrace the Great Decline
Every so often I find something so useful I have to write about it. Especially now, when it feels like everything is falling apart. Or maybe this is just one of those days. When the lows are low. And I don’t mean just in my life and finances but in the world around me. American life. Western civilization at large.
Then I find and read something that inspires and steels me like what @aHomelyHouse wrote:
“I truly believe that the optimal way forward is embracing a Dark Age Mindset. This means:
- Embracing Decline as Opportunity. When the foundations of familiar institutions are shaken, it's a signal to us to stop investing so much effort and dependence on those things, and create new alternatives that actually serve us as people and communities.
-Cultivating Resilient Character and Faith. The folks who did this before were not weak, fragile, or wishy-washy. Get hard.
-Preserve and Transmit Knowledge. If institutions that have historically been responsible for this (looking at you, media and schools) are failing, then it's another opportunity for us to step into decentralized roles as stewards of cultural patrimony, preserving literacy, classical texts, and traditions and educating our own children with this heritage to ensure continuity in a potentially post-literate or tech-degraded world.
-Pursuing Self-Sufficiency and Simplicity. "Ora et labora" was the motto that drove that age forward and upward. But they showed us that simplicity needn't be minimalist or ugly; some of the most durable and beautiful things ever made came from these times.
-Reject Dooming and Be Proactive. No despair. Instead, simplify your processes, improve your skills, and meet your challenges vigorously.
-Foster Creativity in Adversity. Necessity is the mother of invention. But the human person is not merely mechanical; we need beauty, music, good stories, living rituals, significance... Cultivate these things especially in the face of monopolized artificiality.
-Focus on Local and Subsidiarist Action. Subsidiarity is handling matters at the smallest, most local level possible; create "schools for service" (as Benedict did) that prioritize family, home culture, nature, and education over distant, failing institutions. The more responsibility you take up over all the spheres of your living experience, the more you step into sovereignty.”
Source: https://x.com/AHomelyHouse/status/2062255360233086987
I find the words empowering. Become a local warlord (literally and figuratively). Make things better locally in your neighborhood. Decline is a choice and even if things around you are breaking, you can still find things you can control and affect. Never lose hope. You can still thrive during dark times. Be the candle in the dark.
IRL Versus URL: The New Scarcity
Andrew Yeung, known as the new Gatsby of the New York scene wrote something in April I found quite interesting. He said:
“We're going to see an explosion of in-person events in the next year. As our feeds and inboxes get sloppified by AI, we'll lose our ability to discern what's real and credible.
Which means more people will turn to the only real thing left: in-person. I'm seeing it already. For many of my partners, dinners are their MOST effective sales channel. Because, frankly, everyone is sick of automated AI outbound agents hitting you up on DMs, phone, email, etc. If you know how to put a room together, you won't just be a great community person. You'll be a great salesperson too.”
This makes sense as a counter-reaction to the ever encroaching digital world. One that took over our lives due to the pandemic lockdowns that started in 2020. Most of us did not see anyone for a year, sometimes even two. Just full on zoom calls at home. No human contact. IRL came back hard after 2022 but with the tidal wave of AI, the physical world has only gotten more important. And in demand.
Entrepreneur, creator & community builder Aleksandar Svetski wrote on this trend of more offline activities: "As a result, what I’ve been saying for over a while now, which I’m reiterating here is that over the next 5 years, social networking is going to increasingly move offline. And it’s all going to happen through events, experiences, social clubs and offline/hybrid communities.
This means anything from a dinner through to a retreat and up to a conference. Or a run club, a women’s social club, a private men’s club, or the hundreds of creator, entrepreneur and lifestyle clubs and communities popping up all over the world.
I don’t care if it’s existing event organisers, or creators or brands - they are all going to become increasingly “community” oriented, and look to build deeper relationships with and turn their audiences & their customers into real, IRL communities.
Even physical venues like retail shops & cafes will undergo a massive transformation (they already are) into spaces that people want to come to and hang out in. I saw this a couple months back, and it reflects what I saw in real life while I was traveling, and what I mentioned above about brands like Othership, Soho House and Equinox (not to mention the tens of thousands of others around the world).
As AI continues to eat the internet, more value, more people and more social activity will migrate offline. Events, experiences, social clubs, IRL Communities, curated trips, date nights, you name it. This is where the opportunity is. This is where the puck is going. This is where I am playing. This where you should go."
Source: https://remnantchronicles.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-experience-economy
So if you believe this thesis Jonas Willett takes this further and calls IRL the anti-Ai hedge.
“IRL is going to crush AI over the next 5 years. In the last 3 months, $750M+ in capital was deployed on "anti-AI" bets. Big players are doubling down on their investments in events, experiences and in-person connection.
@cornerapp, a social map app for Gen Z, has grown to 60K+ users helping people curate and share places to meet IRL—"Google Maps but social." Everyone ik in NYC loves them.
@partiful, @poshvip_, and @LumaHQ have raised a combined $60M and are exploding. Partiful hit 500K+ MAU, Posh hit 6 million registered users, and Luma has over 2 million users signing up for events.
Harvard alum @aidaxbaradari just launched @be_inaudible, the first smart device to stop unwanted audio recordings and keep IRL conversations private.
@mcuban made a massive bet, investing in Burwoodland, a NYC-based live-events company behind IRL experiences in the US, Canada, and Europe.
Former COO and CPO of Hinge officially launched Rodeo to help people spend more time IRL with friends.
@a16z keeps doubling down on IRL via investments and a16z Build — a dinner series and community for founders / operators figuring out their next move. @nazzari, @katiekirsch, @eriktorenberg.
Billion-dollar companies are paying $$$ for community and events leads:
-@AnthropicAI: Events Lead - $320k
- @Substack: Events Lead - $190k
- @VaynerMedia: Head of Experiential - $250k
- @Spotify: Global Experiential & Content
- $175k - @BiltRewards: Director of Events & Experiences - $150k
Investors are pouring billions of dollars into AI. But smart money is quietly deploying millions into IRL at the same time. a16z backs both OpenAI and Partiful. ElevenLabs and Substack.
The nuance is - it's not AI vs. IRL. It's that the more we live online, the more premium real-life connection becomes. They're not competing investments. They're a hedge on each other.”
Source: https://x.com/jonaswillett1/status/2029271728052920729
Dan Romero gives his take as well and this is further extension of the need for IRL in the gathering storm of AI:
“I'm long a permanent, significant increase in demand for meatspace proof-of-work and other AI-proof experiences
-nature / outdoor
-activities live sports, both watching and playing
-live entertainment, e.g. music, comedy, theater, ballet, debate)
-physical hobbies, e.g. woodworking, gardening, cooking
-board games and retro videogames, e.g. modretro”
Patrick O'Shaughnessy had interviewed Ari Emanuel, the Chairman of Endeavor/WWE & the TKO Group which owns the UFC, is easily one of the most savvy businessmen out there. He reports: “Ari's bet on live sports and events has been so right
-In a world of a 4-day work week and infinite content, the demand for live is only going up -Knicks Finals tickets are at all-time highs
-US Open tennis tickets broke last year's records
And the limit of what people will pay for premium experiences has essentially no ceiling.”
His bet is against over-reliance on easily replicable digital/IP while leaning into what's hard for AI to commoditize. Offline unique events at a bigger scale.
Net net: If I had to sum it up. IRL is truly the anti-AI hedge. Not as scalable as digital but just as valuable. Balaji Srinavasan said it well: “The digital divide has reversed. Digital is cheap, ubiquitous, often fake. Physical is the premium product now.” Makes absolute sense to me. So get offline, touch wood and go meet people and do stuff in IRL. Invest accordingly too.
The Era of Asymmetry: One Person Can Make a Difference
The world is changing and this is scary for most people. But in the gist of chaos is a ladder, there are many opportunities that rise if you can understand what is happening. See where the trend is going and get in front of it. That means you gotta figure out the new rules and where the power is going. Fortunately, the power is going to the individual with agency.
I found a long write up on One River Weekend Notes by Eric Peters:
“The distribution of power is crumbling,” said Sparks. investor, entrepreneur, iconoclast. “Nothing is defensible. The Houthi thing was a warning,” he continued. “Our latest technologies empower individuals and small bands of marauders.
A few AI programmers create something overnight that eviscerates a business that took 40yrs to build.” People see it clearly in software, but they don’t see it in everything. “You used to need a million-man army to win a war.” Not anymore. “You used to need 20k programmers to dominate a market.” Now it takes seven brilliant programmers and Claude.
“This shift is so profound, the consequences are extreme. People don’t yet realize what that means for the world, far beyond tech,” said Sparks. “Even the physical world is becoming easier to disrupt. To lift 3mm barrels a day from the ground requires an army like Exxon, but what good is all that oil if you can’t move it.” Hormuz. Suez. “In a decade we’ll look back and connect the Ukraine and Iran wars. This is the most important conflict in 5,000 years. How war is being waged is evolving at an utterly unprecedented pace, creating all sorts of non-linear potentialities,” said Sparks.
“The utilization of laptops, AI, and drones has created a true dystopia.” We ran this theater for years in Ukraine. “The Iranians come along and get attacked by the Americans, and their view is that if you’re going to take us down, we’re going to take you down – they have a fatalistic culture.” Suicide bombers, literally. “In Ukraine they take out $5mm tanks with $3k drones. It’s the parable of the Hormuz Strait. And how many drones do you now need to close a global chokepoint?” Not many. “You just need to cause chaos. This is the form of nihilism I fear most.
The small will become disproportionately more powerful over the coming decade.” Those with the least to lose will emerge as the most dangerous. “And the drones will play a central part. They will become cyber viruses manifested in the physical world.”
The point of all this? Yes, it’s scary stuff on the geopolitical and military side. But the real point to me is that the little guy (us) still has a big chance. Individuals really matter. Whether on the battlefield or in the business world, we will see the rise of individuals empowered by technology. Literal humans with our own Iron Man suits so to speak. In this case, AI and cheap technology.
All that we need to bring to the table is courage, creativity, ingenuity and a will to take action. Don’t believe the doomers or blackpillers, It’s an amazing time to be alive. So remember that life is what you make of it.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Sept 13th, 2026
"Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall." — F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Writing the same year Google was founded, Pine and Gilmore couldn’t have anticipated a society atomized by smartphones and social media. Digital technologies, supercharged by pandemic-era social distancing measures, rendered in-person experiences scarce, i.e., more valuable. In 2021, as the world began to lift Covid restrictions, consumers embraced “revenge travel.” The following year, a spokesperson for the American Society of Travel Advisors told CNN, “It’s another way of saying, ‘Life is short. I want to explore the world and seek experiences that make me feel alive.’”
The YOLO attitude persists, especially among young people. A 2026 American Express report found that 74% of millennials and Zoomers consider travel nonnegotiable, while two-thirds said they would take a job with fewer benefits if it gave them more flexibility to travel. That says a lot about the value young people place on experiences, but it also suggests that young people are spending money on what they can (experiences), as opposed to saving for purchases that are increasingly out of reach (homes)."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/world-cup-experience
2.Lots of Silicon Valley news: Meta glasses, AI talent wars & Prediction markets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbdH6dPMDxk
3.Ritardmaxxing is helpful. Too much introspection & thinking can be dangerous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWd9r_KnXG8
4."This is the central conundrum of any kind of governmental campaign to identify and promote what’s cool. Cool is at odds with official (or common-sense) narratives about what constitutes “good taste.” It was true about Elvis gyrating on TV in the Fifities. It was true about the anime-tentacles of La Blue Girl in the Nineties.
The Cool Japan campaign pretends that society never stigmatized pop culture, that all of this stuff is and always was perfectly acceptable, rather than the sort of thing that was consumed by the fringes of society, the outcasts and nerds and all the rest. It’s easy to go along with this, because the otaku won this societal battle and it’s “hip to be square” now. It’s a good thing creators and consumers of pop content aren’t stigmatized anymore. It’s a good thing the government is trying to support these industries. Yet obviously something is missing. Otherwise, the fate of the Cool Japan Fund wouldn’t be hanging by a thread of synthetic spider-silk."
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/make-japan-uncool-again
5.Building a new Permanent portfolio to survive economic challenges & volatility. Property and casualty insurance cos (WR Berkeley), Lindy stocks (cross section of economy with oldest cos like Texas Instruments, Merck etc), Hard currency: Gold bullion, Gold royalty cos, BTC & then cash for buying opportunities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwIUft5OIuQ
6."Your brain runs on a finite budget.
Every thought you entertain, every opinion you react to, costs you mental capital.
Spend it carelessly, and you end up broke not in your wallet, but in your focus.
Most people lose money because they lose attention.
They drown in digital clutter, chasing trends instead of building systems.
If your attention is scattered, your income will be too.
Because attention compounds exactly like money.
The most successful creators and entrepreneurs protect their attention like a secret bank account."
https://substack.com/@luxlifestylelab/p-178427879
7."So here is what I actually expect: not a crash, but a long intermission. The dollar slowly losing altitude, with gold held as the placeholder, until something new and concrete finally takes the stage.
For six hundred years, the question was always the same: which country is next? The strange thing we have to sit with is that this time, the honest answer might be none - at least not for a long while. No crown prince. No next flag. The throne simply stays empty, and gold is the name we give to an empty throne.
Which means the rising price of gold is not really a story about gold. It is a thermometer. And the temperature is climbing fast: gold has more than doubled since 2022, from about $1,800 an ounce to more than $4,000 today. That is not a metal becoming more useful. It is trust draining out of the system - and as long as that number keeps climbing, the world has not yet agreed on what comes next. That is the gauge to watch: not because gold is the destination, but because it tells you how far we still are from a real one."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/the-empty-throne
8.“The tactics remain the same,” The Commander Speaks wrote. “A single aircraft approaches aggressively, pulls up into a climb and releases its payload.” This low-to-high flight profile is typical of both Russian and Ukrainian jets trying to avoid enemy air defenses during ingress while still maximizing the kinetic energy, and thus range and impact, of their satellite-guided glide bombs at the moment of release."
https://www.trenchart.us/p/to-protect-the-glide-bombers-ukrainian
9.Always helpful perspective to understand global macro and investing in the AI world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkU3fhWnfxU&t=2s
10."The ultimate status symbol is an operator who runs a high-margin enterprise but has completely wiped his presence from professional networking platforms. He has no LinkedIn updates, no public speaking gigs, and no corporate synergy posts. He signals that his cash flow is so entirely independent of social validation that he doesn’t need to perform for the crowd. While others are “updating their titles,” the Sovereign is Enforcing the Monopoly."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-networking-mirage
11."Everything in life falls into two buckets: what’s up to you, and what isn’t. Your opinions, your choices, your responses: that’s up to you.
Everything else: markets, LP decisions, other people’s behavior, outcomes - not up to you.
Most people spend their lives trying to control the second bucket and ignoring the first.
Epictetus says flip that entirely. The moment you stop directing energy at things you can’t control, you get that energy back for the one thing you actually can."
https://metz.substack.com/p/amor-fati
12.Hope it never comes to this but at least it seems the US has a good plan to fight China if they invade Taiwan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIeeH0IJDo0
13."The modern entrepreneurship cult has romanticized friction. You have been trained to believe that the more complex your workflow is the more tools you pay for, the more people you manage, the more manual adjustments you make the more legitimate your business is. This is a severe architectural failure.
True elite design dictates that an enterprise should run with the absolute minimum number of moving parts. If a system requires your human intervention to survive a single week, you haven’t built an asset; you have built an unstable job where you are the bottleneck. In 2026, real power is measured by how much capital your system can process without you ever touching the keyboard."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-operational-cage
14."We are currently navigating one of the most chaotic investment environments in modern history. Hype and narratives, rather than true financial fundamentals, are driving the markets. As a result, investors are spinning in circles, chasing their own tails with increasing speed.
If you are going to head out and chase tail, just make sure you aren’t chasing your own."
https://www.codyshirk.com/p/what-type-of-tail-chasing-are-you
15."Three things have shifted in recent years, and they apply to the coast just as much as they did to the inland in part one.
Starlink solved bandwidth here too. Fishing villages that ran on 2 Mbps now run on 150+. The coast is no longer offline.
Autonomous driving solves the distance problem. 30 minutes you can work through is not a commute, it’s an extension of your office with a sea view. Everything half an hour out from a real city gets repriced the moment that lands. The market hasn’t done it yet.
The third shift is specific to the South. In April 2026 Italy raised the cap on its 7% flat tax to towns under 30,000 residents across eight southern and island regions. A foreign retiree who moves there pays 7% on ALL foreign income for ten years. Seven of the fourteen towns on this list now qualify.
So the same coast works in three directions. You can keep your business where it is and base from a harbor with Starlink. You can retire on the sea at a 7% rate. Or you can build the new thing from a fishing village while it’s still priced as one."
https://palombo.substack.com/p/where-to-actually-buy-a-house-on
16.Pretty interesting conversation here. Re-thinking a new enterprise structure and risk & entrepreneurship.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuKze21P-ZE
17."Entry Level Rich
Outside of rare events (significant meeting, doctor appointment etc.) you can wake up with no alarm clock
You can dedicate your best hours to what is most important to you. Someone else isn’t deciding when you work. You decide
Any time you need to take time off, you can do it without asking anyone
Any family friend event? You can decide if you want to go or not
You can say no to work without causing you an ounce of stress (if you don’t like the person, or the Company, rationale doesn’t matter)
You can decide where you live
Conceptually, if you have a high net worth but fail to answer yes to all of this… we don’t think you’re particularly rich. The exception to the rule is you absolutely love what you’re doing.
The smart New Money figured out a lot of the games in life.
They spend a lot more on once in a life time experiences in their 20s/30s because they know it’s a snapshot. The partying is definitely not the same in old age
They care a lot about how the money is made. The smart new money values $1 online at a premium to $1 in a brick and mortar. The location and time freedom is massive
The big picture difference is there is an acceptance of life stages. Assuming you will want to do the same things at 35 vs 55 is absurd. They build their life in anticipation of the next wave of interests
Higher acceptance of human psychology. New rich discuss correct trust fund set ups since they know tons of messed up rich kids who amounted to nothing (or worse, OD’d)"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/new-definition-of-rich-in-2026
18.Trying to understand the new world and rules of Venture capital in the age of AI. This was very helpful in thinking about how to invest. Venture capital vs. venture growth versus being alternative asset manager.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Dahcxwkn0&t=478s
19.A conversation between GPs of two of the best venture capital funds on the planet: Founders Fund & Benchmark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpUcRftC3k0&t=1149s
20."For startups that raise large rounds, it’s almost implied that an increasing proportion of the problems they face are Type 2 Money Problems. The assumption is that speed to scale and market position win, and that money solves that.
The challenge is being sure that’s the case and you’re not papering over another core deficiency of the company. No amount of money can paper over bad culture or leadership. No amount of money will fix hiring if the mission is uninspiring. And no amount of money can will materially accelerate the delivery of truly innovative technical solutions. Only talent and a culture of high iteration speed can do that."
https://www.alsoblogposts.com/p/money-problems
21."For the renationalization crowd, citizens capable of leveraging autonomy will become a new type of strategic asset. However, in practice, we’ll find that this loyalty can shift quickly if it isn’t rewarded with tangible benefits. Globalized countries, where disloyalty to the state is baked into the socioeconomic system, will be the most vulnerable to this. Renationalized states will fare better, since they can offer a tribal loyalty globalized states cannot — i.e., a historically rich shared identity, a prioritized citizenry, an aggressive intolerance of corruption (moral, financial, and familial), cohesive/coherent decision-making, etc. NOTE: Unfortunately for the West, China provides this.
Open-source agentic systems (like OpenClaw), combined with open-source AIs, are the wild card. They far less expensive to operate and only lag existing frontier AU models by 6 months to 1 year (in large part due to China’s state-sponsored support of open source). The longer this alternative remains available, the greater the chance we’ll see a socioeconomic autonomy breakout that challenges existing organizational and financial structures (i.e., all the wildest promises of bitcoin and crypto, but real and tangible).
What does this mean to you? Get yourself leveraged to the limits of your talent, or be close to someone with talent who is. Zoom forward (economically and socially), and when autonomy-friendly environments emerge (my bet is on AI-to-AI marketplaces in orbital data centers), go all in early. When that autonomous zone becomes 99% of the global economy, you’ll thank me."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/locking-down-autonomy
22."The lesson I’d offer anyone five years from their own leap: the comfortable detour is not a failure, but don’t mistake it for the answer. The job that “solves it” usually just reveals, more expensively and at risk of hurting relationships, what you already knew."
https://conduitofvalue.substack.com/p/the-weight-of-open-doors
23.“In games where the JASSM-ER has maritime strike capabilities, the abundance of U.S. munitions made U.S. strategy an almost uncomplicated exercise,” CSIS concluded. “With each squadron of 12 bombers carrying around 200 stealthy, standoff [anti-ship cruise missiles], the United States could rapidly cripple the Chinese fleet and leave the invasion force stranded.”
https://www.trenchart.us/p/americas-best-bomber-can-now-launch
24."Last Dispatch ended with the suggestion that effective counter-UAS defenses would allow ground forces to concentrate once more. But how likely is that? Will counter-drone defense ever become effective enough that it becomes uneconomical to employ FPVs in mass quantities without any complementary effort? As things stand now, they are inflicting roughly 60% of casualties in Ukraine, making them a significant—although far from the only—obstacle to more decisive offensive operations.
I believe the answer is undoubtedly yes. Small drones are slow-moving and fragile: from the perspective of physics, they are extremely vulnerable to any kind of kinetic fire. The biggest limitation on ground-based fires at present is accuracy. Sensors and predictive targeting are rapidly improving, however, and once they reach a certain point, AD guns will likely be an extremely effective means of defeating UAVs. With time, it is even possible that they will be effective against larger and faster Group 3 drones (such as the ones Ukraine is currently using against Russia’s operational depths)."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/can-the-small-drone-problem-be-solved
25. "In many ways, discipline is the foundation of masculinity. A man who can’t govern himself will struggle to lead his family or excel in his profession. Intelligence without discipline can become wasted potential. Ambition without discipline can become little more than wishful thinking.
If you study successful men, you’ll discover that they were disciplined. They often shared remarkably similar habits based on that discipline.
The difference between average men and exceptional men can be very small. It’s not really a matter of talent or luck. It’s the result of daily choices repeated over months and years. The disciplined man gets out of bed when he would rather sleep. He exercises when he would rather rest. He reads when others scroll on their phone. He keeps his word when it would be easier to make excuses. He chooses long-term growth over short-term comfort."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/the-habits-of-disciplined-men
26.The new battlefield: Sub-terra aka underground. A new category.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Av9v2u8y2o
27.Lots of implications from the recent Ukrainian missile strikes on the key Russian chip factory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL0ei7E44Ls
28.Louis Gave is one of the best global macro investors with some interesting ideas particularly on international markets and various asset classes. I won't ever buy any Chinese assets (bonds & some select cos) but its still interesting to learn they are doing well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OrRpcqoZBo&t=1537s
29."The fiber story has a happy ending for exactly one reason, and it isn’t vision. It’s that glass doesn’t spoil. The fiber that went dark in 2001 was still good fiber in 2008, so when YouTube and the cloud finally showed up, the infrastructure was sitting there to catch them. The asset’s life — twenty-five years, thirty — was longer than the lag before demand arrived. The cans were still good when the customer got hungry.
That’s the whole mechanism. Not optimism. Shelf life.
A GPU’s economic shelf life is twenty-four to thirty-six months — not because the chip stops working, but because Nvidia ships a new architecture roughly every eighteen months, each generation two to three times more efficient per watt. The moment the next one lands, running the old chip on frontline work stops penciling. It still computes. It just costs more to run than it earns — which, economically, is spoilage.
And the buildout is financing produce on canned-goods terms: multi-year debt, six-year depreciation schedules, underwriting that treats a thirty-month asset like a thirty-year one."
https://thebsmeter.substack.com/p/glass-keeps-silicon-doesnt
30.David Senra is the man. It's fun watching his evolution and learnings. So much wisdom and passion in this guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXsleu4-kd8
31.Always a great conversation about Silicon Valley news: AI AI AI. Good takes here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uINvYTxGCQE&t=865s
32.Lots of interesting discussion on Silicon Valley news. One of my weekly must watch shows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqmbW163QKQ
33.More harsh truth from Doomberg and all the implications of energy and geopolitics around the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tsGHhQKGRc
34."The good news is you don’t have to pick one country. You can structure yourself internationally, keep your assets outside any single government’s reach legally, and be genuinely international.
You build the legal structure yourself. You figure out what you are good at and what people will actually pay for. You invest and build income streams from scratch. You learn the bureaucracy of foreign countries. You fail at things, pay for it yourself, and try again.
It took me a couple of years to actually figure out how to make it work, leaning on my background as a geologist to figure out something real and meaningful. You get stressed. The honeymoon period of a new environment wears off faster than you expect, and suddenly you want cash flow and routine more than you want a new experience.
That is the real premium on the call option. The years of building from a cold start in a place where nobody knows your name, the language is not yours.
But here is the big thing. The local rules start working in your favour very quickly when you show up with a strong Western passport and strong dollars. The same drive that gets ground down in Australia by tax rates and cost of living goes a lot further here. That is what the payoff looks like on the other side of the premium."
https://www.geologotrader.com/p/my-leave-australia-call-option-is
35."The question isn’t whether China wants Taiwan—it does—but what it will risk for it. China is not willing to make the same mistake Russia made in Ukraine. Russia had a much easier path to victory against an inferior opponent and could not accomplish its goal. Taking Taiwan means an amphibious assault across the ~110-mile Taiwan Strait. Even with the ships, planes, and marines for the landing, occupying 23 million objectors who built their wealth on technological skill is strategic madness. And Ukraine has shown how much drones favor a motivated defender.
Russia’s fatal assumption was that Ukrainians would not, or would not be able to, fight. Would the Taiwanese? This is the genuinely hard question, and it cuts both ways. In its favor: A January 2026 Academia Sinica survey found 58.7% willing to resist at all costs even with no American help. Against it: That majority is shrinking, and Taiwanese faith that America would actually arrive has slid from 45% in 2021 to 34% today.
Will isn’t fixed—it can be drained, and draining it is part of China’s strategy. But every time China tries too hard, Taiwanese sentiment hardens. The percentage of Taiwanese that say they prefer the status quo but move toward independence has increased by almost 4X since 1994. And the support for independence isn’t linear; it’s marked by spikes in sentiment due to Chinese actions, like the 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis and China’s de-facto 2020 abolition of “One Country, Two Systems” in Hong Kong."
https://www.mauldineconomics.com/the-world-isnt-ending/china-is-not-going-to-invade-taiwan
36."Ukraine’s strategy since the beginning of the year has been to impose costs on the day-to-day lives of average Russians—and since the US-Iran war began, to also threaten Russian energy export infrastructure to keep allies onside.
The Russian economy is now in shambles. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it had built up a National Wealth Fund via profits from energy exports worth almost 7% of GDP. Today, the fund has liquid assets of just 1.8% of Russia’s GDP. At the beginning of the year, Russia predicted a government deficit of 3.8 trillion rubles. It exceeded that in Q1. Corporate debt is up 34 trillion rubles, roughly $500 billion. Oil and gas revenue is down ~45% year on year as of April. The hope of a reprieve from higher oil prices due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has not materialized.
Russia has run its economy on a wartime footing far longer than mainstream economists predicted, but it cannot outrun basic math forever. Moreover, Ukrainian strikes in Moscow, affecting the daily life of citizens in the imperial metropole, change the geography of this conflict. Zelenskyy isn’t just being a g when he threatens Moscow; he is essentially telling Putin that the more he fights in Ukraine, the greater Ukraine’s capacity and resolve to bring the fight to Moscow’s doorstep. Not Crimea’s, not Donbas’s, not Siberia’s, not Rostov-on-Don’s… but Moscow’s doorstep. If Putin cannot defend Moscow, then the emperor truly has no clothes."
https://www.mauldineconomics.com/the-world-isnt-ending/the-russian-economy-is-in-shambles
37."The sustainment model was a rational response to the cost of keeping a human alive inside the machine.
Take the human out and the entire cost structure collapses. An autonomous system has nothing to protect. No crew, no armor, no life support, no escape systems. It can be small, cheap, and fast to build. And once it is cheap and fast to build, it stops behaving like a fighter jet and starts behaving like a cell phone: largely similar across vendors, quickly aging, and expected to be replaced within two or three years. No serious military plans to fly the same attack drone in 2032 that it bought in 2026. The threat environment moves too fast, and the hardware is cheap enough that replacement beats sustainment.
When the product ages out every few years, the old model stops making sense. You do not marry a single contractor for a generation. You run a competition, you buy what works, and you run the competition again. That is exactly what the US, Germany, and Ukraine are now doing, each in their own way, at the same time."
https://lorenzmeier.substack.com/p/the-company-that-arms-the-warfighter
Advice from Anthony Deden: Surviving in the Nadir of Democracy & the West
It’s a strange time right now in the West. The feeling of malaise and decay. I travel everywhere, Europe, Asia, Middle East and Central Asia. There is a marked difference in energy. Lots of construction, newness and stuff in general works. But boy does it feel different showing up in America or Europe, especially the airports. Aging, crappy and just plain old and dirty.
Anthony Deden is one of the quiet giants of investing. He has written many articles from his extensive experience and observations.
“If democratic disintegration appears less a modern accident than part of a recurring historical pattern, then the task is not to wait for rescue through politics alone. Plato did not expect regimes to perfect themselves. He expected prudent individuals to adapt: to preserve independence where possible, to defend property as a condition of freedom, and to maintain long horizons under short-term rule. Collapse, in this sense, is not an end but a narrowing of illusions, guarantees, and collective promises. What remains is judgment, restraint, and the quiet work of endurance within imperfect orders.
History offers no assurance that democratic societies will rediscover their limits in time. But it offers something more durable: the knowledge that freedom has never depended primarily on political salvation, but on the capacity of individuals and communities to preserve capital—material, moral, and institutional—when the political institutions forget how.
History is clear about what follows when democratic custodianship collapses. In Athens, the erosion of restraint gave way not to renewal but to imperial overreach, factionalism, and eventual subjugation, first to the Spartan oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants and ultimately to the Macedonians. In the Roman Republic, the hollowing of republican institutions did not restore balance; it ended in personal rule, permanent emergency, and empire. In both cases, democratic forms lingered long after their substance had decayed—until they were replaced with rule justified not by consent, but by necessity.
The lesson is not that democracy inevitably ends in tyranny, but that when restraint is exhausted, freedom is not repaired—it is displaced. What follows is rule by administrators, generals, or crises; legitimacy shifts from law to order, from consent to survival. The real question for our Western world is not whether democracy will survive unchanged, but what will take its place once its capital is spent.”
Source: https://forumgeopolitica.com/article/democracy-and-the-consumption-of-its-foundations
As always, Radigan Carter, who is one of the most independent thinkers around, wrote about the lessons he took from Deden’s writing.
“First, retirement is dead. A man should put this completely out of his mind. He can transition careers, but he must always be working in some form from now on. For what individuals are up against, with politicians and electorates in every jurisdiction continuing to want to get more of a person's capital in order to offset the ever increasing deficits governments will run as this continues, a man must never stop trying to improve his position for his family and whoever comes next as a steward of the assets he leaves behind.
Second, if at all possible a man should not count on justice or fair treatment from his own country or government, and should not count on finding it in any other country that is a democracy, running deficits, or dependent on the dollar system, which is practically the entire world since most countries and peoples will do whatever they must and count themselves justified to avoid pain.
This means that a man has the responsibility to diversify his life to maximize his chances at remaining as free as he possibly can. Citizenship in one country, permanent residency in another, house in another jurisdiction. A pied-à-terre perhaps and citizenship in non-western aligned or neutral country if possible for additional optionality. Bearer assets like gold and in my case, bitcoin are assets I would never be without for this world. In fact, when looking at gold outperforming the S&P500 and Nasdaq since 2000 to 2025, this piece is the diagnosis for why that is happening.”
Your job is to become hard to kill. Part of that is managing your wealth and diversifying your assets as per the Five Flag strategy to be able to weather all the massive ups and downs that come with massive changes that happen in the world. Wars, economic recessions, pandemic, deglobalization. I’ve said many times before, surviving is thriving during times of chaos. Those who do are able to seize the massive opportunities that arise and create dynasties.
Even More Landman Wisdom: It’s All About People
That is easily one of the best shows on tv right now. Great drama but also a crash course on what is the most important industry in our modern world: the oil industry. One that we have long overlooked or ignored in our prosperity. The rough & tumble brutal life on the oil patch.
But “when oils booming, every night is like friday night.” But big money always comes with big problems. It’s a game like in any industry and “you got to know the rules of the game to bend ‘em. And you really gotta know to break them.”
Tommy also runs into his new partner Danny Salazar played by the legendary actor Andy Garcia at the Cattleman’s club.
Danny: “Tommy, you are surrounded by fierce women. Maybe that’s why you are so fierce. They make you fierce.”
Tommy: “I’m not fierce. I’m very protective.”
Danny: “Well, that’s what fierce means.”
Danny is not just a drug kingpin, he is trying to diversify his money into other asset classes like any wealthy person. He talks with the new owner of M-Tex Oil, Cami.
Danny: “You know what I do? I’m an investor.”
Cami: “In Oil?”
Danny: “In People. In people I believe in, and you’re a person to believe in.”
This reminds me of the core of venture investing. Investing in people. Find the right people at the right time, that’s where the money is.
At the end of the day, like all good shows it’s all about the people. About love, loss, hope, dreams and family. Having a code: “I don’t know about kind. I try to do what’s right, what’s decent. Don’t always do it, I try.”
A good show reflects real life. Maybe that is why I enjoy Landman so much. The importance of living. Truly living life. Treasuring the days and watching the sunsets. A good reminder to do this more often.
Chainsaw Man-The Movie Reze Arc: Wisdom from Mayhem
A long flight back from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan had me surfing different movies. Randomly decided to watch a Japanese anime movie, based on a popular comic around a band of young devil hunters in Tokyo who hunt strange monsters that embody human fears. Like I said before, SUPER weird. Also silly at times and dark and violent.
But like many Japanese movies there is a surprising amount of depth and wisdom:
“I only find one good movie for every ten movies that I watched. But one of those was a movie that changed my life.”
There is something to this. Life is a numbers game. I always get asked: what’s the best book for….copywriting or investing or whatever. I always answer, you have to read them all. You won’t know what’s good until you read something bad.
“The country mouse or the city mouse? Which one would you rather be? It’s one of Aesop’s fables. The country mouse has a safe life but doesn’t have delicious food that a city mouse has. The city mouse can find good food but he’s in danger of getting killed by a cat or human.”
Food for thought. Most people want to be the city mouse when they are young but yearn from country life when they get old. Personally, I still prefer city life. Just how I am wired I guess. The peaceful life is nice for a period of time but nothing beats the juice and excitement of the city. The risk and upside.
Something about Japanese anime brings me back to my teenage past. I still reminisce about the simple and innocent times then. Chainsaw Man was a strange movie but it gave me some things to think about. Goes to show you, you can get ideas or inspiration from anywhere.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Sept 6th, 2026
"There may be people that have more talent than you, but there's no excuse for anyone to work harder than you do." — Derek Jeter
Pretty interesting event here. Some investment pitch ideas. I favor the energy one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO5sC7qS04E
2."Thinking more about this approach, it really resonated with me. A national brand-name firm brings the prestige and macro resources, while a strong regional firm drives local execution and relationships."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/06/20/combine-a-national-vc-with-a-regional-vc/
3."That is the version of copycat advantage I believe in, and it is worth stating precisely, because the lazy version is genuinely wrong. Copying a model into a new market does not win on its own. A founder who ports a foreign playbook without absorbing the conditions of the new market just builds an inferior clone, the worse port that nobody remembers.
The advantage shows up only when three things hold at once: the underlying model genuinely transfers, the new market is meaningfully less contested than the one the original is fighting in, and the local conditions differ enough to force real adaptation rather than cheap imitation. When those line up, the replicator is not running behind the original. It is running a de-risked playbook in emptier territory and compounding local advantages the original can never reach back across the ocean to claim, and the terrace itself becomes the moat.
I find this clarifying as an investor, and a little dangerous, because it cuts against the romance of the wholly original idea.
The most globally durable products are often recombinations: a proven thing, carried somewhere new, reshaped by friction it would never have chosen for itself. The friction is not a tax the strategy pays on the way to working; it is the source of whatever ends up being worth copying in the first place."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/they-cook-the-wine-on-purpose
4.Jordi Visser is one of the best observers and explainers of global macro. He has a good sense of AI, technology and crypto in the economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qezOp08hwPQ&t=1389s
5."None of this means Europe can match the American frontier dollar for dollar. On today’s capital it cannot, and pretending otherwise only wastes the little it has. But the goal is not parity, it is leverage.
A country does not need the best model in the world to be sovereign; it needs a credible one of its own, on its own soil, good enough that being cut off is survivable rather than catastrophic. That is the difference between negotiating your access from dependence and negotiating it with an alternative in hand. The point is not to win the race. It is to make sure no one else can end it for you."
https://nathanbenaich.substack.com/p/europe-ai-sovereignty
6."Summer can either make you or break you. The world is full of men who are content to drift and disappear into mediocrity. Don’t be one of those men.!
Make this summer the one where everything shifted. Make this the one where you strengthened your habits and emerged stronger in every area of life. Be the man you were born to be!"
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/the-art-of-a-well-lived-summer-808
7.Lots of honest takes from one of the generational founders. Ryan at his most direct. This was really entertaining.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8u_7PPEzZE
8."If you’re an investor, those differences matter.
That’s why your very first mental model is a big one: treat AI as a collection of technologies, with very different properties, costs, and risks.
If you are going to invest in AI, you cannot afford to treat “AI” as a single monolithic thing that either works or does not."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/chapter-3-of-my-investing-in-ai-book
9."Cortisol is your body’s stress hormone. And before you switch off thinking “I’m not that stressed” — you probably are. You just don’t know it because you’ve been running on elevated cortisol for so long that it feels normal. It’s your baseline now. And that’s the dangerous part.
Your body was designed to spike cortisol in short bursts. A threat appears, cortisol floods your system, you deal with the threat, cortisol drops. That’s the system working properly. The problem is that modern life has turned that short burst into a permanent state. Work stress, financial pressure, relationship tension, overtraining, under-sleeping, six coffees a day, three hours of doomscrolling before bed — your body can’t tell the difference between a lion chasing you and your inbox piling up. It all triggers the same response. And that response never switches off."
https://lifemaxxers.substack.com/p/the-low-cortisol-lifestyle
10."Three things have shifted in recent years.
Starlink solved bandwidth. I own one, and being able to connect from anywhere is priceless.
Autonomous driving will redefine what distance means. “One hour from a city” will mean something completely different in a few years. Dozens of places nobody looks at today will suddenly open up. You’ll sip a coffee, work, or read while your car drives.
And there’s an economic shift, too. You can build from there on your own terms. Without leaning on UBI or anything like it, we’re no longer in the ancient Roman age when these places were just for summer relaxation.
But here’s a bolder claim, admittedly unsubstantiated for now: some of the first one-person billion-dollar companies will be built from places exactly like these. AI gives the leverage, the network lives online, and you fly when it matters.
High-performance teams no longer need an expensive zip code. They need focus. And if taste is becoming part of the moat, working from a beautiful place is an edge of its own."
https://palombo.substack.com/p/where-to-actually-buy-a-farm-in-italy
11."America as a whole is adopting AI rapidly. But if our educated progressive classes — our lawyers, academics, artists, and so on — turn up their noses, it could damage both their own cultural/political tribe and the country as a whole. In fact, by dismissing AI’s potential — by thinking that the most important technological revolution of the modern age can be waved away as a “bubble” or “fancy autocomplete” or IP theft or slop or whatever — they make it harder to think about the actual serious risks AI might pose.3
The coming of AI will definitely disrupt many of the relations of status and power in America. As Brad DeLong notes, educated professional types have had a long period of security, in which new innovations disrupted blue-collar work but not high-level white-collar work. That’s probably over now. But if educated progressive types don’t roll with the changes, and figure out how to use the new technology to their advantage, they could find themselves left behind by the tide of history"
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/pizza-wheels-are-bad-japanese-toilets
12.Always orthogonal thinking here. Helps me understand what is going on in the world & economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvmfQBPCmsM
13.The rules of new media. This is insightful for all founders who want to know how to thrive here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XROaLetSxg0
14.I hope to revisit China one day. Fascinating observations by Naval from his visit to China and implications for the West. Particularly America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcO2sGLtt0U
15.Don't sleep on these guys. Anti-Fund raising a $100M growth fund. One of the more differentiated funds out there. Big fan of these folks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfafpyhB-8E
16."Crypto is now a top-10 holder of US government debt. Stablecoin issuers hold $165b in US Treasury bills. That is 2.5% of the total $6.1t T-bill market.
To put that in perspective, stablecoin issuers now hold more T-bills than China, Norway, or Switzerland. They rank behind only Japan among foreign holders."
https://tomtunguz.com/crypto-is-the-quietest-part-of-the-vc-market/
17.One of the most interesting capital allocator conversations in a while. $120 Billie at Liberty Mutual. Good stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxHWFmFHnoc&t=190s
18."With just four items: 1) house, 2) bed, 3) gym and 4) your main hobby, at least 75% of your life is now covered with luxury/high quality. The other items in your life will look like rounding errors.
As long as you don’t sacrifice obvious items (health, kids education fund, food quality etc.)… it’s a no brainer.
Then you wake up and realize, the quality of life change after a paid off home and $4-5M liquid is basically nothing."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/increase-your-lifestyle-without-being
19.A very balanced take on Trump 2.0's battle with Iran and China. Short term loss but could be long term win.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmP3IIbxCKc
20.One of the best descriptions of how we have gotten to our present economic situation. And implications for the world economy and our investments and careers. This is very useful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7ivU-LTVkU
21."For the first time since I left in 2009, the outlook looked meaningfully different and more positive. Still uncertain, still messy — but no longer hopeless. I decided to study the opportunity more seriously. I looked at historical analogs: countries that opened up after decades of isolation or dysfunction, and what happened afterward to GDP growth, capital formation, stock-market returns, foreign investment, and private-equity outcomes. Vietnam. Russia. Poland. Peru. Panama.
My conclusion was simple: Venezuela was likely facing a once-in-a-generation opportunity — not only to rebuild, but to generate superior investment returns along the way for those best positioned. The only question was how to play it."
https://sleepwell.substack.com/p/from-the-ritz-to-the-rubble
22.Investing in thematic volatility. Pomp knows what he is talking about (I'm biased cuz he is buddy and I also share his themes, albeit I'm more bullish on commodity & hard assets).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs1hLLtJAv0
23."A federal guarantee stands in for the local banker who used to know them both. The newest tool is MARC, a manufacturing loan line from September 2025, built for the trap that kills these shops: a record order that pays NET 120 while the material bill lands next week. I believe the most boring agency in Washington is doing more for reindustrialization right now than DARPA or the Pentagon. And this is the layer everything above depends on, running on the least money of all."
https://constiv.substack.com/p/the-half-of-the-boom-nobodys-funding
24.Hubris is a terrible thing to see in startup land.
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/the-cost-of-hubris
25.Some global macro insights, Luke Gromen always gives some sharp non-consensus takes. Counterbalances all the mainstream views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB5rg3BjfQo
26.Naval's advice in preparing for the West's decline. Practical analysis and guidance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxmWIn6vU50
27.Probably one of the more honest conversations with Chamath. Lots of interesting thoughts on AI and his culpability with the SPAC mess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLY04q3L4hA
28."So, the deal can still get done. It just won’t be one of the “hot” ones. Which means even at $3 million in revenue, your post is somewhere between $50 and $100 million. And if you can get a Series A term sheet at all, that itself is a huge win.
Numbers show it. Graduation rates from seed to Series A were once as high as 33% (in year 3), and for newer cohorts they’re trending under 20%."
https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/the-series-a-squeeze
29."Until recently, “going to another startup” simply wasn’t possible for aero-astro engineers. For the early team at SpaceX, failure meant having to go work for a bloated corporate. Or worse, the government. There was no fallback plan.
This weekend, a number of those early SpaceX employees woke up to find themselves on the receiving end of generational wealth. Each and every one earned it in a way that few people in Startupland™ can relate to: a two decade-long grind that, for most part, was completely unglamorous. It’s the furthest thing from an overnight success that one can imagine and I am genuinely happy for each and every one of them.
At a time when AI is making it easier than ever for founders to pivot and early employees to jump ship, I’m reminded about what Silicon Valley used to be about: the weirdos in the corner quietly and unglamorously trying to change the world."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/on-resilience-and-ipos
30.It's a series of regular sprints, startup land is more intense than ever. This is a good thing. Pick your path.
Lots of great takes here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDBff24uaDQ
31."We don’t know when these longevity therapies will become available. Your goal is to be around when they come out. Buy yourself as much time as possible by looking after your body to the best of our scientific knowledge. Good diet, sleep, exercise will get you 80% of the results."
https://bryanjohns0n.substack.com/p/some-of-us-will-live-forever
32.Implications of the K-shaped economy. Getting to the ground truth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0JbBzhMpOM
33.Sarah Paine is one of my favorite historians. Helps us take lessons from history for guiding our future. Hope our leaders pay attention (not going to hold my breath here though)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1tQrW8EMDY
34."While the recent surge in US business formation is not reflected in high-propensity applications, the evidence points toward a structural increase in genuine small business activity over 2025 and 2026, driven by solopreneurs. Preliminary evidence of growth in AI tool usage and solopreneur growth in high-AI-adoption sectors suggests that advances in AI are responsible for a meaningful portion of this growth.
We believe AI is lowering barriers to business formation and growth by expanding the capabilities of solopreneurs, further improving tools and platforms that cater to new businesses, and creating a new set of opportunities for entrepreneurs to pursue. Whether the magnitude of this effect is as large as the most optimistic readings of the data suggest remains to be seen, but we believe we might be in the early innings of a fundamental acceleration in business formation—which could have ripple effects throughout the economy."
https://www.stripeeconomics.com/p/the-age-of-the-solopreneur
35.Even more Sarah Paine. Lessons from History. Long ignored.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyIIa8bUZbQ
36.The case for SpaceX and latest AI developments. This is a highly educational conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx9jT2c6e3U
37.This is bad but also reality. NATO is over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c1uWPc-DFc
38."The self-made billionaire greeted me at the door as if I was his long-lost friend. I felt as if I had known him all of my life, just hadn’t met him. I had bought two of his sweaters almost seven years ago, when I had lost a lot of weight (which I have since regained), but his clothes aren’t really part of my wardrobe. And yet I have admired them, as well as his stores and his ethics.
For example, he gives 20 percent of his company’s profits to his charitable foundation in the name of “human dignity” and pays his workers wages that are 20 percent higher than the industry standard, mostly because it allows his company to encourage and continue the Italian craftsman traditions. Cucinelli also pays for an artisan’s school in Solemeo: Young people are free to work either at his company or for another Italian company. The on-campus cafe is way more beautiful than Google Cafe or Facebook’s facilities. And the pasta is really heavenly.
The company, which trades on the Milan Stock Exchange, is doing well: about 356 million euros in revenues in 2014. Brunello is part businessman, part philosopher and part monk. He is not Jeff Bezos or Larry Page. He certainly isn’t chief executive of an oil company. He is the anti-LVMH, and that is what makes him interesting.
We were supposed to meet for 30 minutes but ended up spending a few hours talking about everything from Marcus Aurelius to Barack Obama to Steve Jobs to his father, a farmer."
https://om.co/2015/04/27/brunello-cucinelli-2/
39.Lots of good learnings in early stage defense investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwcaJ-eDxv0
40."But the cascade beneath the headline: fertilizer, food, emerging-market debt, the European gas-storage deficit, and the credit market’s stress memory is still fully loaded, and Iran keeps operational control of the chokepoint. This is de-escalation of the trigger, not closure of the rupture."
https://velinatchakarova.substack.com/p/the-supervised-pause
41.Havoc.AI and how maritime warfare has changed due to drones and autonomous boats.
Don’t Drift: Chasing Trends is Dumb
We all know that there is no overnight success. At least anyone who has a brain, been around and worked for a living knows. Results usually are not instantaneous in your career or in your business. Good stuff takes time. You need time to learn and go through as many iterations before something really starts to work.
Yet you see these people jump from trend to trend. Whether it is SaaS, then Crypto, the Metaverse, Gaming and now AI or Defense-tech. Whatever is the flavor of the month. And by the way, this is relevant for founders as much as VC investors who are infamous trend hoppers.
I’ve also learned that Top 20 MBAs are notorious for this and act as a good signal for the top of a trend. Just look at what industries and companies they want to work in. Going for the “sure thing”. Or another signal of the top is when it gets talked about in the business magazines or mainstream media at large. All these are signs that it’s already way too late.
But having been in startups and in investing for a while now, there is no sure thing. Especially when it’s consensus. When it’s consensus it’s too late because everyone already sees it. And thus you end up getting swarmed with competition.
The money is made before something becomes consensus. To do this, you have to be prepared to be seen as uncool, misunderstood and probably derided. Low status even. This is the acme of investing and startups. The acme of massive wealth creation.
The most successful people I know have a willingness to work on something for long periods of time, way ahead of everyone else. Years and sometimes decades. To gain knowledge and get really good at something before others jump on it. It’s what Peter Thiel famously referred to as your secret. Your edge.
So don’t trend hop. It’s the loser's way. Find something that personally interests you. That you can get obsessive about so you are willing to stick with for at least a decade. This is how you achieve greatness. This is how you win in business and in life. Focus and become a craftsman.
Trend hopping is for losers.