Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Feb 15th, 2026
"In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy" –William Blake
One of the more original thinkers in venture capital. A wide ranging discussion on investing & building frameworks with Chris Paik. Recommend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFA_iiEtm_8
2. "My fourth lesson of the year is that gambling is America’s favorite activity. We had an explosion of examples throughout the year. Zero day options are dominating the market. Levered ETFs with 3x or 5x leverage continue to be launched on single name stocks. Sports gambling has been sweeping the nation. And prediction markets have pulled off the greatest rebrand of all time by convincing people they are predicting the future rather than gambling on the weather, the color of someone’s tie, or whether an active shooter is going to be caught in the first 48 hours.
I don’t claim some moral high ground because I believe that all financial markets are speculation, which is just a fancy way to describe gambling. If you buy stocks, you are ultimately gambling. If you buy options, you are gambling. If you buy cryptocurrency, you are gambling. It is just that these investment related activities have much better odds of success than buying a lottery ticket, sitting at a blackjack table, or letting a triple parlay fly on NFL Sunday.
Lesson: America is addicted to gambling. Choose your form of gambling wisely."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/5-lessons-i-learned-in-2025
3. "If it were just a matter of maximizing shareholder value, most people could probably still make sense of it. But something stranger happens as the revolution fully unfolds: managers mysteriously stop caring about profits. The last decade offers countless examples of studios setting money on fire as they reboot beloved franchises in the image and likeness of social justice zealots—gender-swapping, race-swapping, and generally making expensive productions that nobody wants to see.
This too is tied to managerialism. As James Burnham observed, a defining feature of this system is the separation of ownership and control, which means the people making decisions want different things than the ones who actually have skin in the game. The rift between them grows over the years. Managerials ultimately aim to serve the interests of the managerial class, to signal virtue to other managerials, to get high on the resulting fumes of status and acclaim and applause. And they cover each other’s backs so well that their fellows rarely have to suffer consequences for disastrous decisions. Always remember that the woman who lost $1.4B for Anheuser-Busch by hiring the trans-icon Dylan Mulvaney landed on her feet quite nicely with a gig at LIV Golf. Just one example."
https://thechivalryguild.substack.com/p/why-heroic-movies-arent-happening
4. "Three years ago, I praised the new boss at Barnes & Noble—a man named James Daunt who actually loves books. Back then, he was already infusing new life in the struggling company, and I predicted good things to come.
They have now arrived in full force.
Barnes & Noble opened 57 new stores in 2024 and 58 in 2025. Plans are afoot to open 60 more stores in 2026, and list the company on the stock exchange.
This is a remarkable achievement. It’s happening in the face of eroding reading skills and the replacement of leisure reading with online distractions. Reading for pleasure is down 40% but Barnes & Noble is growing steadily. James Daunt must be some kind of culture superhero to succeed in this environment."
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-surprising-return-of-the-bookstore
5. Lots of great predictions in tech for 2026. Very good takes here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehO3wIio7Nw&list=PLI0_clHshGZctchZkfCXmz7SPyuBSOoq1
6. "OpenAI is promising Oracle $300 billion — money it doesn’t have — for infrastructure Oracle hasn’t built. We can’t see the actual contract, but this is BS. The greatest AI hallucination yet is the assumption that in the next few years we’re going to build anywhere near the required grid and power capacity.
OpenAI needs 20% of current U.S. electric capacity — equivalent to 250 nuclear power plants — at a cost of $10 trillion. There’s a five- to eight-year wait to connect a new data center to the grid. Meanwhile, China has more than twice America’s energy capacity at half the cost. Second greatest AI hallucination? Job creation. The average number of full-time employees at a data center is equivalent to the number of people working at two Applebee’s."
https://www.profgalloway.com/2026-predictions/
7. "RMP is a new acronym that entered my Love Language dictionary on December 10th, the day of the most recent Fed meeting.[1] Immediately, I recognized it, understood its meaning, and treasured it like my long-lost love, QE. I love QE because it means money printing, and thankfully I own financial assets like gold, gold/silver mining stocks, and Bitcoin that rise faster than the pace of fiat money creation. But it’s not all about me. If money printing in all its forms drives the price and adoption of Bitcoin and decentralized public blockchains higher, then hopefully one day we can discard this filthy fiat fractional reserve system and replace it with one powered by honest money.
We aren’t there yet. But the rapture quickens with every unit of fiat created.
Unfortunately, in the here and now for most of humanity, money printing destroys their dignity as productive humans. When the government intentionally debases the currency, it destroys the link between energy inputs and economic outputs. Knowing no fancy economic theories that explain why they feel like they are running in quicksand, those wage cucking plebes understand that money printing is no bueno. In democratic systems of one human, one vote, the plebes vote out the incumbent party when inflation surges. In autocratic systems, the plebes enter the streets and topple the regime.
Therefore, politicians know that ruling in an inflationary environment is a death sentence for their careers. However, the only politically palatable way to pay for the massive amount of global debt is to inflate it away. Given that inflation destroys political careers and dynasties, the skill is hoodwinking plebes into believing that the inflation they feel isn’t inflation at all. Therefore, central bankers and finance ministers roll out a cauldron of bubbling ghoulish acronyms to obfuscate the inflation they hoist upon the public in order to forestall the inevitable systemic deflationary collapse.
If you wanted to be rich in the age of Pax Americana QE, you needed to own financial assets."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/love-language
8. "Fifteen minutes from start to finish, after a couple of months of research, I had a complete, professional-looking slide deck that was consistent, visually engaging, and ready to present.
Try it yourself. You’ll be blown away. We’re entering a new era, and this simple workflow is just one example of how dramatically the way we work is changing."
9. Bitcoin Standard meets the Network States. Fascinating albeit pessimistic conversation on the West but optimistic on the future of decentralization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac_JRmIwnQI&t=114s
10. Choice over voice. Vote with your money and vote with your feet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CSAdQw3QHc
11. "To avoid any misunderstanding, here is what I am saying: The compute power that is being brought to market is beyond what the market currently needs.
This scenario is a textbook boom-bust example of supply and demand economics.
In this AI season, there have already been booms in multiple different tech companies… they’re still booming. Meanwhile, the busts have been everywhere as seen by the underperformance of nearly the entire market beyond the Mag 7 (or whatever they’re called now).
Companies and industries that have been historically bogged down in process and/or data minutiae are about to be completely transformed for the better. These are the same companies that have been recently underperforming."
https://codyshirk.com/ai-fantasy-season/
12. "What I see here though is a huge PR campaign against immobilisation by Russia, its friends and agents in the West, and the big business that made bad investment calls in Russia, have assets stranded and now wants a Western tax payer bailout. That’s the real rub. And where are these business interests strongest - Belgium, Austria, and Italy."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/ukraine-educating-the-ft
13. "For decades, roll-ups sat squarely in the domain of private equity and search funds. These strategies depended on predictable cash flows, margin expansion, and the disciplined application of an operating playbook—none of which fit neatly into the traditional venture toolbox. But a quiet shift is underway. AI is collapsing the cost structure of integration and making once-specialized operational capabilities accessible to lighter, faster teams.
This change opens a narrow—but meaningful—window for something new: venture-style roll-ups. The model isn’t for everyone. Most attempts will struggle under the weight of integration complexity and shifting incentives – and won’t turn out to be venture sized outcomes. Yet for the 1% that get the structure, timing, and strategy right, the return profile can be extraordinary."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/the-venture-case-for-some-ai-powered
14. "When Napoleon lost a battle, he immediately began rebuilding bridges, restoring logistics, and preparing his next move. He understood that a loss is only fatal if it compromises your ability to fight the next battle. The priority after defeat is to ensure that the vulnerability will not be exploited again.
You must be a fucking machine. You do not seek redemption. You do not seek revenge. You don’t cope or seethe. You repair and rebuild the infrastructure that prevent this mistake from happening ever again. Every defeat you survive becomes a moat in your system, one that new entrants will have to learn on their own terms.
Losses like this are what build a man. Be grateful for them. It happened for a reason. It is now your responsibility to ensure it never happens again.
These things are difficult because once you find the correct orientation, compounding to infinite wealth becomes inevitable."
https://www.scimitar.capital/p/dealing-with-loss
15. "Which brings us back to Sony’s acquisition of the Peanuts. The specific entities involved are Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony Music Entertainment, which are sort of like products in search of stories in their own right. Peanuts gives those stories to them.
We do not know what this portends for Sanrio, who has so carefully tended the franchise in Japan all of these decades. (Personally, I think Sony would be nuts to throw all that expertise out the window, but who knows.) The irony is that most of us consume Peanuts in a very Sanrio-esque way these days, which is to say bereft of narrative. I can’t recall the last time I read a Peanuts comic, but I see the characters everywhere on clothing and all sorts of products. Perhaps that’s exactly why Americans are greeting Sony’s acquisition of Peanuts with a collective shrug: it has already been Sanrio-ized. As have all of us, in a sense.
So what better steward of America’s cutest cast of characters than the Japanese?"
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/sony-goes-for-peanuts
16. "For the past year, I’ve been running a daily live talk show about technology and business called TBPN. It’s a bit of an outlier in the media world, as — it’s more like a daytime TV show than a weekly podcast. It’s three hours long, so in a single week I’m on-air for about 15 hours. It’s a lot of content, and it’s forced me to have a very consistent daily routine, which I thought I’d share with you today.
People often ask how I go live for three hours every day. The truth of it is that I just started doing it, built up the muscle memory, and got to a place where it’s become routine."
https://arenamag.com/articles/life-of-coogan
17. "These gains would be eclipsed the following year when the geopolitical fall out of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent commodity markets into another panic. European nations, fearing their people would be unable to heat their homes in winter and their economies would crater without Russian oil and gas, aggressively bought alternative supply from traders. A Financial Times analysis showed the commodity trading industry combined for $148 billion in profits in 2022.
A little over 10% of these profits went to Vitol alone, most of which was distributed to the company’s 400 partners. The boom continued into 2023, with the top five houses combining for $1.1 trillion in revenue, with the companies supplying ~24% of global oil supply and controlling 32% of global seaborne oil trade. For perspective, this figure would place the companies behind only China, the U.S., and Germany in a ranking of the world’s largest exporters.
Despite the scale of their operations, few people have heard of the trading houses. This is deliberate. The trading houses are mostly private opaque companies based in Switzerland and do not want their operations scrutinized.
The story of how a group of obscure companies came to play such an outsized role in the functioning of the global energy system dates back to the aftermath of World War II when the great powers became locked in a secret war for control of the world’s natural resources."
https://arenamag.com/articles/black-gold-and-grey-markets
18. So many lessons from the Cold War and why Russia lost. So worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdkpWrlR5zg&t=990s
19. Truebridge is on the top LPs in Venture, so this conversation was quite helpful. Brands matter in venture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzDcZ4HYBLQ
20. Lots of good pricing frameworks here for AI and software companies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtWnMuCtZH0
21. Costs of capital going up and hence, liquidity will go down. Impact on tech?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KFs-dxdRlw
22. The fractal frontier. Decentralization is here. An important conversation to understand what is happening in America and the world right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ca7vMbFjOk&t=1969s
23. Net net: own assets. The Gov't/Elites will not let the stock market go down. Wall Street over Main Street. Don't like it but here we are. Neo-Feudalism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRlUtcpDonU
24. Doing simple things obsessively forever. This is how you get great at something. Anything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4phnt497NQ
25. How to be a deep value investor. Bullish on energy (for the long run ie. more than a few years).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfYdVPtc5f0
26. The OG of seed investing: Jeff Clavier. This was incredibly instructive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiDVAbCMQ80
27. The best weekly show in tech right now. Lots of good predictions for 2026 and learnings from 2025 in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39uduGOufNA&t=3s
28. Lots of stuff going on in Europe. Nuclear coming back to the continent, Poland is well set for this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95dQrIcdCxk
29. Anyone who cares about the US economy and global macro in general, this is a helpful conversation to get a sense of what the future holds for investors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0GuHkUbuEY&t=9s
30. Louis Gave is based in HK so not surprised he is a China bull. But he makes a strong case for it though. Helps to get out of the America-centric cope bubble. We are really behind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRoG7wnEp4w
31. Former Army Pacific Chief. This was a very helpful and insightful conversation on what is the most critical region in the world and what the strategy is.
America's new policy will be: help those who help themselves (minus the diplomatic tone for better or worse).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VMn2GhOx1g
32. "The phrase was “sole-source.”
The Defense Logistics Agency, the Pentagon’s procurement arm responsible for ensuring American forces can fight and win wars, had just awarded a $245 million contract to supply antimony ingots for the National Defense Stockpile. The contract was not competitive. There was no bidding process. There were no alternative suppliers evaluated and rejected on merit. The contract went to United States Antimony Corporation because United States Antimony Corporation operates the only two antimony smelters in North America.
There are no others.
Read that again. The United States of America, which spends more on defense than the next ten nations combined, which maintains eleven carrier strike groups and 750 military bases across 80 countries, which projects power into every corner of the globe, cannot refine antimony without the facilities of a single company headquartered in Thompson Falls, Montana, population 1,319.
The strategic implications of this fact are so severe that they border on the classified. Antimony trisulfide is not optional for ammunition. It is not a performance enhancement that marginally improves reliability. It is the friction-sensitive compound that ignites when a firing pin strikes a primer. Without antimony, bullets do not fire. Artillery shells do not detonate. The primers in over 300 types of American munitions, from 5.56mm rifle rounds to 155mm howitzer shells, require this specific metalloid with this specific chemistry."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-182567987
33. "This year has been a "new dawn in defense stocks,” said James St. Aubin, chief investment officer at Ocean Park Asset Management. "Defense was defensive for a long time, and that’s still true to some degree, but it is taking a new turn.”
The upshot is that it’s been a good year to be an investor in military contractors and their suppliers. The S&P 1500 Aerospace and Defense group, home to 24 companies, is on its way to a 41% jump, the most since 2013, lifted also by strength in the commercial aerospace sector. That’s more than double the S&P 500’s advance, and some 16 percentage points ahead of the fabled Magnificent Seven tech behemoths."
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/12/21/markets/defense-stocks-growth/
34. Inflation is coming bigly. A good global macro discussion to help position for 2026. Commodities: metals, oil, uranium and energy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlLfuJc1e_Q
35. Interesting takes on AI Agents for 2026.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULszsXDyjMY&t=20s
36. From builder to investor. A fun conversation here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDCWJHzzLIc
37. Some great forecasts for AI going into 2026 from A16Z.