Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Aug 2nd, 2026
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.--Wallace Stevens
1.Vinod Khosla, not the nicest man but a great investor and operator. And he says what he thinks which is not common these days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ3IDtwqBc8
2.One of the most successful and biggest private companies in the world. Koch Industries. Creative destruction and principles driven company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIo3AuyvV84
3. The "It AI" company right now. Insight dense conversation with the CFO of Anthropic on scaling and compute. Lots of good stuff here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEEZPpx8qow&t=15s
4."The reality though is that the war in Iran might have boosted oil and energy prices in the short term, but that it has fractured OPEC, with the UAE opting to exit the organisation and promising to pump baby pump. From Moscow’s perspective this might well suggest a future oil price war, with more supply coming on stream a year or so out, just at the time when current short term higher oil prices will destroy demand as the global economy slows. For Russia this would be catastrophic as it could suggest a year out from now oil prices could be lower than at the start of the Iran war, and if Russia then suffers still from the one third Urals price discount from sanctions then that could suggest $30-40 a barrel price for Urals.
Meanwhile, if the outlook is for an oil supplier free for all, in terms of trying to take market share, Russia is in a terrible position, as a combination of sanctions and Ukrainian deep strike drone attacks means that Russia has not even been able to meet its existing OPEC production quota.
Combine that with years of underinvestment and Russia is in no position to make up for lower oil prices with increased production. Such an oil price/supply scenario would mean a melt down for the Russian economy - think 1998 style crash. Indeed, I think this is what Russian economists and advisers to Putin are telling him, hence his new found willingness to talk peace."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/putin-might-finally-need-to-find
5."The Beijing summit will produce deliverables. There will be purchase agreements, fentanyl enforcement announcements, and carefully calibrated language on Taiwan. Markets will react. Headlines will declare progress or failure. But the real measure of this summit is whether it moves the US-China relationship from transactional crisis management toward the kind of structural framework that the Fourth Systemic Crisis demands.
China’s decision to pressure Iran is the most significant signal so far that Beijing recognizes the Hormuz crisis as a threat to its own economic model. That recognition is necessary but not sufficient. What the world needs from Beijing this week is not a deal. It is the beginning of an architecture: a set of rules, mechanisms, and mutual restraints that allow the Triumvirate to manage the simultaneity of cascading crises without tipping into the abyss. The trillion-dollar entourage on Air Force One represents the commercial weight of the American economy. Whether it also represents the diplomatic imagination required to build a durable framework for great power coexistence is the question on which the stability of the international system now depends."
https://velinatchakarova.substack.com/p/the-beijing-summit-two-superpowers
6.Tesla (and SpaceX) are where many of the top industrial founders are coming from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnJaDj5zUhY
7."While the most important part is positioning yourself to launch a niche business based on youth trends, if you look at investing you could group up the items that will likely repeat vs. struggle:
We wouldn’t assume that oil/utilities end up being complete home runs like the 1970s. Domestic production is much higher, alternatives exist and its the easy scapegoat for the masses to say “go after the utilities/oil companies” to reduce the cost
Luxury Real Estate is probably the safest. Back in the late 1970s farmland did well but that is not something you can do without significant active effort
Stocks, unlike the late 1970s, we’d expect tech to actually do better and in a worst case buying something like the S&P would simply keep pace. A lot of companies would get crushed in another wave of inflation but you’ll be offset by the winners (a general wash)
Bonds are un-investable once again
Wages will unlikely keep pace with inflation. Tons of deflationary pressure from technology will make it hard to recreate the 1970s wage/price spiral. Once again more like the “modest stagflation” set up
Printing money is where the incentive is. Trump would prefer an asset boom vs. bust
We expect Dupes to be the new rebrand of “counterfeit”. Much like prediction markets were used to rebrand outright gambling"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/1970s-vs-today-another-chaos-opportunity
8.One of the best shows on Silicon Valley news. This week was no different. Awesome conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsqnQqhbSrU
9.Deal Team Six. Former Wall Streeters now investing on behalf of the Pentagon.
10.Geopolitics and energy. Global Macro discussion with Doomberg & James Lavish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3ZXBl-tXR0
11.I don't agree with his geopolitical takes: but Doomberg is rational & well informed but also isolationist American. But it's good to hear different takes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6z64C7aGmo
12."I’d argue that this is the first U.S.-China summit in history where the Chinese leader sits down with the stronger hand. I’ll also go back to the 1970s. When Richard Nixon visited China in 1972, U.S. GDP was roughly 11 times China’s. When Trump headed to China in 2017, the U.S. was unambiguously the more powerful of the two. In nominal terms, the U.S. economy remains larger. But adjusted for purchasing power parity, China has eclipsed the U.S. In manufacturing, China accounts for roughly a third of global output, compared with about a sixth for the U.S. And when the Liberation Day tariffs hit 145%, China’s threat to restrict critical mineral exports was enough to bring those tariffs down to around 47%. That episode showed who blinks first. Today, Trump’s hand is relatively weaker, and Xi’s is relatively stronger.
Both sides see each other as an implacable adversary, and suspicion runs deep. But the rhetoric in public will be positive. The U.S. and China need each other. Each side seeks stability. The U.S. realizes China can play a critical role in resolving the conflict in Iran and unblocking the Strait of Hormuz. China is focusing on Taiwan. What Xi wants exactly remains unclear, but he will push for something more concrete. China is playing for big stakes."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/coexistence-or-confrontation
13.Lots of good stuff today. AI Monks in Middle America. Worth a watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O3zyxR-wS0
14.Great title: Inside the Mind of a tech investor. Short but solid interview. Worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ryr95iiYNk
15.Some nuggets of insight re: investing in defensetech. This was fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=552p-kdoZ_g&t=1606s
16.The case for the Decline of American Power. Bruno Macaes has been a strong critic here and his case based on the lack of conclusive success in Iran. That and no organizational capability anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84438yW3skY
17."The key with entrepreneurs who have a hypomanic edge is that their energy and enthusiasm must be focused on the most important and pressing issues. Sometimes there is a tendency to try to do too many things, and an element of whiplash can be introduced inside the startup. Everyone is heading down one path, rallied and motivated, and then suddenly a different shiny object appears. Now everyone has to get aligned around this new direction. Then, as the team starts working on that new direction, yet another opportunity arises."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/05/16/the-hypomanic-edge-in-entrepreneurship/
18. The massive opportunities in Central Asia, specifically Uzbekistan. Very interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-yczbyJ7n8
19.A state of the Union on the private credit market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwfwskW6dQE
20.This interview shows why Orlando Bravo is one of the best in the business of Software PE investing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb84Ua4UDvs&t=
21.The most important discussion in geopolitics today. The Thucydides Trap of China and America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A29mlEodQTg
22.The complicated power politics in the New Middle East.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-R0R3Njmyg
23."The finding is this: between 2020 and 2025, the share of African VC-backed exits going to international buyers fell from 56% to 33% by event count. Domestic and regional buyers picked up the slack. The shift holds directionally whether read by count or by disclosed value, though disclosure gaps make the latter harder to read cleanly.
The argument of this piece, in one line: borrowed rails travel, but only to acquirers who already operate the rail. Built rails almost never travel, unless the target market is big enough to justify the acquirer creating a permanent separate operation. Africa hasn’t yet been big enough for the latter, and may not be for a while.
As argued before, African VC isn’t broken. But the dominant exit channels look different from what a Silicon Valley model would predict, probably more like what India, SE Asia, and LatAm went through at comparable stages, and may require us to adjust. We’re likely to see: domestic strategic roll-ups at modest valuations, regional strategics doing the larger built-rails deals, PE for the profitable middle, and a slow build of public-market liquidity for the largest infrastructure plays. Africa will produce companies and exits we can’t currently model, and AI may rewrite parts of the framework. What I’m reasonably confident about is the structural logic: acquirers buy what they can integrate, and integration capacity is a function of pre-existing rails."
https://idosum.substack.com/p/africa-exits-who-buys-what-and-why
24."Because Hormuz remains closed, oil and inflation are climbing, foreign creditors are walking away from American debt, and the swap-line band-aids will eventually run out, Warsh now faces a decision he cannot avoid.
He must walk the United States through one of three doors.
Door One - Save the dollar. Stop creating new dollars and raise interest rates to defend the currency, at the cost of crushing the bond market and the economy underneath it.
Door Two - Save the bond market. Create enough new dollars to absorb the bonds that no one else wants, at the cost of debasing the currency.
Door Three - End the war in Iran on Iran’s terms. Let oil come down and the pressure on the system release, at the cost of American credibility.
You might be asking: only three? Raising taxes, defaulting, restructuring - every alternative is a sub-variant of one of the three above. Every move the Federal Reserve and the Treasury can make either creates dollars, destroys them, or removes the pressure, forcing the choice. There is no fourth door."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/the-fast-death-and-the-slow-death
25."Frederick Russell Burnham lived a life so extraordinary that it seems almost fictional. He was a frontiersman, soldier, explorer, spy, adventurer, oil tycoon, and one of the greatest scouts of his era. Over the course of his remarkable life, Burnham survived deadly campaigns in Africa, tracked enemies across deserts and wilderness, escaped captivity during war, dined with Queen Victoria, advised powerful world leaders, and helped inspire the creation of the Boy Scouts. At a time when much of the world was still wild and unexplored, Burnham seemed drawn toward hardship and adventure wherever they could be found.
Though largely forgotten today, Burnham was once internationally famous and admired for his courage, toughness, and unmatched fieldcraft. British newspapers called him “The King of Army Scouts,” while military leaders and explorers alike sought out his expertise. His life embodied many of the qualities that people still admire in great adventurers and gentlemen: resilience, competence, bravery, self-reliance, and humble confidence. Simply put, Frederick Russell Burnham lived the kind of life most men only read about in novels, and his story remains one of the most fascinating adventure tales of the modern age."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/frederick-russell-burnham-the-most
26."I’ve seen this firsthand in AI forward companies. They start with one LLM for their use cases and as inference costs rise they slowly setup task based endpoints - servers with a model specifically for a certain task. It saves money and time, and usually increases performance on that task.
The data center is no longer just a place for giants. It is becoming the home of the “Model Zoo,” where the smallest, most efficient models are the ones doing the real work. If you are building for the agentic future, don’t just look for the biggest model you can find. Look for the smallest model that can get the job done. That is where the true power of AI lies."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-secret-benefits-of-small-language
27.I've tracked Strauss Zelnick since the early 2000s. He is one of the top media, entertainment & gaming business execs around. An operator’s operator. Lots of great insights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZgUcrR0K7I&t=588s
28."If you build for the crowd, you will be judged by the crowd. Dictate the rules of your ecosystem and let the weak filter themselves out. Excellence is not a democracy."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-feedback-loop
29.Understanding inference and AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBAXUdygTqQ
30."And again therein we can learn from Turkiye, and how it has been able to get much more bang for limited buck but with streamlined defence procurement. Indeed, Turkiye, as shoecased at SAHA has managed to develop an incredibly innovative and potent defence industrial complex which has enabled Turkiye to punch way above its weight.
Why has Turkiye succeeded here despite much more significant financing constraints - partly as Western sanctions forced it to think outside the box, and develop technology which it had been precluded from buying but to go down the almost fully autonomous defence capability route.
We need to stop turning up our noses, and looking down our noses at Turkiye, putting racism and Islamophobia to one side and just learn and deepen cooperation. And one obvious quid pro quo is to include Turkiye in the EU safe programme, alongside the UK. It’s simply ridiculous to think both the UK and Turkiye are included. Indeed, if both remain excluded then it sends a clear message to our adversaries in Europe that Europe cannot defend itself and is not fit for purpose."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/europe-needs-to-learn-from-turkiye
31."If Hassabis’ philosophical view is that the constituent unit of the universe is information, then perhaps in turning sand and silicon into semiconductors and AI we are in fact repackaging atoms into more information-dense forms. Long past the evolutionary stage of simply building tools, we’re now taking low information-density inputs, and transforming them into radically information-rich outputs. Therefore in our harnessing of nature, perhaps we truly are already expanding the universe."
https://ideas.scotthartley.com/p/the-infinity-machine
32."If you’re building equity, you’re not worried about AI. In fact it is accelerating your business. While it is painful to constantly learn about a new tool/product, the competition is not doing any of that. They are busy doom scrolling and doing the classic “back in the good ole’ days” posting.
Any time there is a new technology, there are two options: 1) spend the time to learn it and 2) complain that it is a net negative for society. You can guess which one is most profitable. In fact, there are still people today who claim that the internet and smartphones were a net negative for society (cope squared)"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/taking-advantage-of-ai-market-update
33."The age of the human infantryman is rapidly drawing to a close. Simply surviving an FPV drone attack has become an almost impossible task for soldiers on the battlefield. The drone cordon has not yet become so airtight that territory can be held without humans, but these humans’ job is to hide out in dugouts for months at a time alone or in tiny groups, terrified of emerging above ground lest they be instantly droned. And ground robots are developing very quickly, to the point where assaults can sometimes be conducted without humans on the front line at all.
Drones are also slowly replacing bombers and missiles as a modern military’s primary tool for conducting long-range strikes. Russia has been pounding Ukrainian cities with Iranian-made “Shahed” drones for years, but Ukraine is now fighting back. Ukrainian drones regularly destroy Russia’s oil infrastructure and military supply lines. And Moscow was just hit by over 1000 Ukrainian drones, causing widespread damage and chaos.
My interview with Azhnyuk clarified exactly why drones are in the ascendant as the universal modern weapon of war. The reason is cost. Drones are simply so cheap to produce in huge numbers that they can overwhelm any more expensive system."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-non-drone-militaries-are-obsolete
34."Which means the edge in private markets is the edge Théo had. Not a better model of the shared inputs — a private input the process never ingested. The proprietary deal seen before the data room exists. The operating partner that has done 2 of these roll ups in the past and knows that market is more seasonal than the materials would imply. The context that tells you the consensus is mispricing the asset. The relationship that gets you the real number instead of the list price. Over the next five years you’re going to watch the Théo dynamic play out across the lower middle market, deal after deal, with gunslingers taking shots that look like luck from outside the room and like arithmetic from inside it, because the position that justified them was never in the data room to begin with.
Most people working in private markets today were trained to be analysts, IB for a couple years, MBA for three, Buy-side after that. Showing up means showing your work: the deck, the memo, the model, the comp set. The seat justifies itself through analytical output.
However, the seat is increasingly rewarding what you do with the company after close: the operating insight, the years of context, the relationships you bring to bear that nobody else can manufacture in a quarter."
https://conduitofvalue.substack.com/p/the-age-of-the-gunslinger
35.Lots of nuggets and heuristics for investing in early stage founders. I found this conversation helpful for my investing craft. Some good personal finance tips as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CtT6p2HaCI&t=2443s
36.SendCutSend is such an important manufacturing company in America. They are building the playbook for Reindustrialization right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sbOL5wGADo
37.Fixing the American defense industrial base.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pddFfZy4nZU
38."Time is the scarcest resource. Money can be multiplied. Time cannot.
That’s why wealthy people don’t sell their time. They sell their systems.
You write content once it gets read forever. You build a product once — it sells forever. You create a system once it runs forever.
“Making money while you sleep” sounds like a cliché. But behind that cliché is a very simple truth:
Once the right structure is built the money doesn’t stop."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-1-thing-wealthy-people-think
39."I want to make a specific and narrow distinction between a hard company and a grindslop company. Because from the outside, it’s easy to think these two things are the same. They both involve long hours. They both involve sacrifice. They both involve pushing people far past the point of comfort. But the difference is what the hours are for. In a hard company, the hours serve an output. The hours are the cost of the thing being built and no one is documenting the cost because the cost is not the product.
In a grindslop company, the hours are the output. The documentation of those hours and the performance of suffering is the product. The suffering is the thing being built and the company is, in some very real sense, a machine for converting human effort into the feeling of exerting human effort.
inventing new things. It only works for cog like scaling of mechanical processes. great work doesn’t happen after 100 hour weeks, it only appears in tiny fleeting random moments, embrace that.
You can assemble an iPhone with 996, but you could have never designed one.
Great work has always demanded sacrifice and often brutal hours and I’m not disputing this. What I’m disputing is the direction. These people, many of them friends, have more economic freedom than any class in history and they’ve chosen, freely, to simulate the conditions of a Chinese assembly line and call it virtue.
In a world in which automation will collapse the cost of everything to basically zero, the only question that matters is what do you actually want. What do you consume. What do you put in your body. What you put in your heart. This is the only constraint left and it’s a constraint placed squarely on your character and your own sense of what’s beautiful and worthwhile. If we approach this world with a generation whose entire preparation has been sleeping on office floors and giving themselves autoimmune disorders from working too hard, then what’s the point."
https://minutes.substack.com/p/on-grindslop
40."The first wave of global fintechs were often replications of US models into other markets. Many were built by US educated founders, or funded by US venture capital.
That is changing.
The most interesting fintechs being built today are originating in markets that have nothing to do with the US, are funded increasingly by local and regional capital. Brazil’s PIX has spawned a generation of payment fintechs applications that have no US analog. India’s UPI has done the same, and is now being exported as cross-border infrastructure to half a dozen countries. Kenya’s M-Pesa was a generation ahead of Apple Pay and remains the dominant rail in East Africa.
And in some cases, global companies may have advantages for IPO. India has built the most credible domestic listing path. PB Fintech, Paytm, MobiKwik, and most recently Groww have all listed on the NSE. Saudi Arabia’s Tadawul saw Rasan oversubscribed 129 times with $29 billion in orders for a $224 million raise, popping the maximum 30 percent on its first trading day. Local exchanges are not always at a discount to Nasdaq anymore for category-leading regional champions. Sometimes they offer better prices, deeper local demand, and an investor base that actually understands the model."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/the-private-market-is-now-the-real
41."This dynamic is actually nothing new — in fact, it’s very well understood in the world of finance. It’s referred to as alpha decay.
In finance, alpha refers to the ability of a strategy to outperform the market (VCs spend a lot of time in search of alpha). Over time, outperforming strategies become more widely known and practiced, leading their effectiveness to diminish (alpha decay). “Attention-grabbing” social media strategies worked because they were outliers — they had alpha — but now that AI defaults to using such approaches when crafting posts, their effectiveness has all but disappeared.
I suspect that we’re going to see this dynamic play out across a variety of AI-related activities in the very near future. As more people chase the efficiency gains offered by AI, the output will converge and the alpha will rapidly decline."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/stop-with-the-ai-slop
42.Good informed takes on Energy, AI and Semiconductors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mmj_G9RlW-I
43."People will spend much more time staring at screens than in the real world. Don’t buy the cope of a return to the past. Alcohol is down, people are meeting online, online presence is more powerful than local presence and you will convert more sales from influencers than you think
When you start your small business it needs to: 1) have a high margin profile with an ideal 30% profit margin and 2) you want to focus heavily on social/influencers at this point as the youth is no longer interested in buying from all the boomers who told them to work hard and “things will work out”
Part of the looksmaxxing trend is due to economic strain. Countries like Russia and Ukraine teach women to be extremely attractive (looks max) because it is a survival mechanism. The same is happening in the USA where the number of people with money is thinning out and naturally… if someone doesn’t care about money the next thing they care about is how attractive their gf/bf is.
AI is going to create a new set of ultra rich entrepreneurs because they will start buying and integrating every old boring business they can find. We’ll have a shell out in June explaining this in more detail but the Lead Gen walk through makes it quite clear. You either use tech to compete, use tech to help others compete or you ask AI how to deal with loss of identity. Can assure you the first two are better options"