Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 19th, 2026
"Rest when you're weary. Refresh and renew yourself, your body, your mind, your spirit. Then get back to work." — Ralph Marston
"What I have shown you are three primary ways to attract high calibre men into your life, build relationships that compound over time, and construct a world that keeps getting more interesting without ever forcing the process.
Using the internet effectively to build a signal that pulls the right men toward you from anywhere in the world.
Pursuing genuine interests to put yourself in rooms where the connections form as a natural byproduct of doing something you actually love.
And tending to your local world until you move through it like Henry Hill through the Copacabana kitchen.
But you can amplify all three even further.
And that is by taking an online ecosystem and bringing it offline.
Imagine a group of men who share the same ambition, character and all refuse to settle for an average life, now standing at a trailhead in Nepal, or paddling out together in the same lineup, or shooting side by side on a range in Eastern Europe.
Men from different countries, different industries, different backgrounds, who have never met in person but feel like old friends within the first hour because the filter already did its work long before they shook hands."
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/stop-networking-build-a-global-syndicate
2.A list of some sweet Italian cities to check out. Mountains or Coast.
https://palombo.substack.com/p/the-two-italian-retirements-sea-or
3.A dose of reality. Commodities shortages will be massive but it's not priced in yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9TtihQuj-g
4."By making oil and gas expensive in Europe and Asia, the US force companies to choose between closing shop or moving to America.
This process was kickstarted during Ukraine, crippling many European industries from German steel to French glass, and will only intensify as the US complete the hostile takeover. Indeed, this strategy cannibalizes friend and foe alike, and Wall Street are fine with that.
This industrial exodus also results in a massive flight of capital. As factories and assets are physically transferred from Europe and Asia to the US, each company take their capital — cash, stocks, credit — out of their home country and dump it into the American economy. This shifts the global economy’s center of gravity toward America, reinforcing the Petrogas-dollar."
https://richardmedhurst.substack.com/p/how-the-us-pulled-off-an-armed-robbery
5.Masterclass in leadership and running a top performing public company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCBFXL_Sn44
6."The structural simultaneity continues to deepen. The Iran war raises energy prices, which increases Russian oil revenues, which funds Russia's war in Ukraine, which destroys Ukrainian energy infrastructure, which raises European energy vulnerability, which increases Europe's exposure to the Hormuz closure.
Each additional day of the Iran war extends Russia's fiscal runway in Ukraine. Each additional day of Ukraine's war sustains the DragonBear axis that shields Iran diplomatically. The two conflicts are not parallel. They are coupled."
https://velinatchakarova.substack.com/p/two-proxy-wars-one-system-the-simultaneity
7."Jordi goes on to propose that as AI continues to improve, the biggest moat will no longer relate to what you are building. It will be dictated by your ability to adapt. In other words, more than ever before, velocity will be the one metric that matters most."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/things-i-think-i-think-q1-2026
8.Lots of contrary takes on oil, rare earths and Fortress North America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd_jUfpvrxI
9."One such campaign unfolded in Canada nearly a decade ago, with far-reaching consequences that are now causing pain too sharp to ignore. Political action inspired by the ghosts of oil-covered birds, otters, and sea lions has cost Canada’s energy sector billions in lost profits, enriched its American neighbors by the difference, and stunted its geopolitical power—even as the war in Iran creates unprecedented demand for what the country could currently be offering.
It’s no exaggeration to say the fallout for the Canadian economy risks national unity, adding momentum to separatist movements in the Western provinces. With a fresh move afoot in Ottawa to undo the damage, and given the stakes involved, it’s time to assess where the political puck is headed next."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/sovereign-arbitrage
10."In our era of uncertain uncertainty, certainty will be the killer. In this era more downfalls will happen because of overconfidence than questioning. The key is to not get stuck on just one option. You have to become at ease holding multiple contradictory possibilities at once. (To prevent yourself from being swept away by the latest current and fashionable whim, this radical adaptability must be anchored on a steadfast set of unchangeable virtues, as corny as honesty, or as slick as generosity.) The strategy for prospering in prolonged uncertainty must be one of constant, agile recalibration.
In short, in our age of uncertainty, you have to get good at changing your mind."
https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/our-uncertain-uncertainties
11."Mega-funds and platform managers with the scale, brand, and track record to demand permanent capital should pursue the path that Sequoia has outlined. The companies they back stay private longer, grow larger, and justify the holding period. Here, the ten-year structure has become a fiction, and the honest response is to move on to more rational arrangements.
Small funds should head in the opposite direction. They should use the ten-year horizon to enforce discipline as a competitive feature that will be appreciated by their community of LPs. A fund that explicitly targets full or majority realisation by year ten, focuses on early stages where it has structural ownership advantages, and uses Series C or D secondary transactions as the default hand-off to larger investors.
The rationale for the small fund’s ten-year revival is the same that Bartlett and Ramella identify for the structural breakdown; modern private markets create more value, more slowly, in fewer companies. That logic supports very long horizons at the top, where the power-law winners are held. It also supports disciplined short horizons in early-stage, where capital efficiency and risk management are most critical."
https://blog.joinodin.com/p/the-disappearance-of-the-ten-year
12.Optimism with technology and the future. Albeit also rage at the stupidity & incompetence by California. An educational conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s2nO_hxbLA
13."It’s all part of the Paul brothers’ playbook: declare a bold ambition publicly, repeat it often, direct attention toward it, position themselves as the underdog, introduce just enough controversy — and, over time, the performance starts to tilt toward reality. By the time Jake was pitching his fund at the Aquarian office, he was reinforcing a brand he had been building for two decades.
Today, that Paul brothers brand shows up in some not-so-obvious places. Jake and Logan have each separately co-founded companies like sports drink brand Prime Hydration, boxing promotions company Most Valuable Promotions, personal care startup W, and sports betting platform Betr.
At the center of that strategy is Anti Fund, the venture firm Jake launched with Geoff Woo. Logan has since joined as a general partner, helping invest in and promote companies through their combined audience.
Anti Fund’s investment thesis is that capital is abundant, attention is not. At their scale, attention can act as leverage by bringing awareness, shaping a company’s narrative, and driving user growth. Traditional venture firms tend to specialize in a specific industry or sector, while Anti Fund’s portfolio spans everything from consumer brands to frontier AI and defense."
https://www.readtheprofile.com/p/jake-paul-logan-paul-billionaire-plan-investment
14.Fascinating & educational conversation on building an academy company from a manufacturing business. This is absolute gold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zajo84R1ckI
15."If robots drive down the cost of manufacturing, transportation, etc. This means they would be using a ton of energy/electricity. Therefore the cost of everything else goes down a bit, however, the cost of electricity goes up on a relative basis.
Last 50 Years: electrical cost thought of as flat. Everything else goes up in price
Next Few Decades? Electrical cost goes up. Prices of other items go down a bit since tech is deflationary by definition"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/internet-is-becoming-a-power-plant
16."Pessimism is a societal-level victim mentality. Our society grew more pessimistic, and pessimism is rewarded as high status. It is more respectable to be skeptical, highlighting the problems and the gloom. Unfortunately, unlike optimism, pessimism is always self-fulfilling. Solving problems, or in other words, employing creativity, is very difficult and rare."
https://wrongalot.substack.com/p/the-age-of-total-war
17. "The ultimate status symbol is being the person everyone knows of, but no one can find. No “Masterminds,” no “Inner Circles,” no “Coffee Chats.” It signals that you are so busy building the future that you don’t have time to talk about the present. While others are “building relationships,” the Sovereign is Building Reality."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-social-subsidy-1ad
18."Every time you post, ask: does this make me an industry leader?
Build your weekly system around the trinity of problem, solution, and authority.
Skip the empty motivation give your audience tools to win.
You don’t want likes; you want people to take action.
Your content shouldn’t feel salesy but should always generate demand.
LinkedIn, X, and other platforms reward those who create power-based influence.
If you want views, post anything; if you want cashflow, post strategically.
People who master this rule dominate the conversation week after week.
Follow these three rules and your personal brand becomes a wealth machine.
Those who create for power, not image, will always win the long game."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-168933272
19.Trying to understand the Looksmaxxing trend. Don't get it but hey whatever. It's a free world (for now).
https://time.com/article/2026/05/02/face-value-why-looksmaxxing-is-more-than-hope-and-mirrors/
20.Japan will become a drone and arms super power in a few years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk7uZi5Jae0
21."Being interesting is not a costume you put on. It is not a performance, and it is certainly not a trick. It is the natural result of how you choose to live each day.
If you read great books, build real skills, seek meaningful experiences, think for yourself, and carry yourself with quiet confidence, you will never need to chase attention. You won’t have to force conversations or try to impress others. Instead, you will have something far more valuable: a life that speaks for itself.
In a world filled with noise and surface-level living, that kind of life stands out. That kind of man is truly interesting."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/the-modern-mans-guide-to-being-interesting
22."For people that we can broadly called « Chinese liberals » the past ten years have been a terrible disaster. They are not just oppressed by the state, they’re harangued by their fellow Chinese for being syncophantic to the west and unpatriotic, and they also can’t deny that China undeniably glowed up in the time they insisted the government was going the wrong way: it is now stronger, more powerful and better able to stand up to a rogue United States.
« There is a dark side to the narrative of national rejuvenation, » he said, « it is narcissistic and isolating. I am not unpatriotic. I have a vision of China that is more expansive and globally connected. China does not need to be a fortress. »"
https://taipology.substack.com/p/fortress-china-and-its-discontents
23."Although even Huawei acknowledges that its AI chips trail Nvidia’s best offerings by approximately one generation, the company is closing the performance gap through innovative computing architectures and can now meet or even exceed Nvidia’s cluster-scale performance. This is akin to designing a car to have better overall performance through superior aerodynamics, lighter weight, a better transmission, and an optimized drivetrain, despite having a slightly inferior engine. Your engine might have more horsepower or sip less fuel in bench testing, but in the end, it is performance on the track that matters most.
If history is any guide, Huawei won’t have to brute-force things forever, and as it continues to catch up to Nvidia in chip-level performance, an entire domestic supply chain is being put in place to take maximum advantage. While Western experts continue to express confidence that China’s capabilities are, and will remain, far behind, we think this is flatly naïve. Ask Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, and Toyota what it is like to face Chinese competition now in the absence of protective tariffs."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/flipping-the-script
24."My conviction coming out of this trip is simple. The question for Ukraine’s defense industry is no longer whether it can build. It has answered that.
The question is which of these companies will make the leap from battlefield champion to global defense player. Some of them will. The ones that solve the export equation will be the next Ukrainian neoprimes and will reshape how the rest of the world thinks about where defense technology comes from."
https://defensebrief.substack.com/p/notes-from-kyiv-one-year-later
25.Two of the best global macro thinkers right now. A dose of reality in the age of narrative and propaganda.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tkKoMEiFDk&t=2904s
26."My friend Wyatt Sparks, from Sea Meadow Capital, proposed a possibly better description of what’s currently playing out: the lower case ‘j’ economy, where the dot of the ‘j’ represents the small minority of the world benefitting from rapidly appreciating tech assets."
https://www.codyshirk.com/p/the-j-shaped-economy-a-wall-of-worry
27."A 33-year old multibillionaire founder. Huge banks and funders. A 728-page prospectus filled with big promises and omissions. All raising a critical question: Does this Czech arms dealer actually have the capacity to mass-produce the ammunition that it calls its “principal driver of revenue and profitability” — or is CSG mostly refurbishing old ammo and running out of supply?"
28."America’s attention has shifted toward the Middle East, but even as the American war with Iran pulls Washington’s focus away from Europe, Kyiv is finding new sources of leverage. Volodymyr Zelensky, once accused by Donald Trump of having no cards to play, is suddenly finding several in his hand: long-range drone strikes against Russia’s oil industry, growing demand for Ukraine’s counter-drone expertise in the Gulf, and a more favorable political climate inside Europe."
https://underfirenews.substack.com/p/ukraines-hand-of-trump-cards
29.UAE-Israel versus the rest of the region. It's tough to really understand what is going on. This is a good start.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff-Kfy7SScY
30."One of the cornerstones of my elevator speech regulars here have heard over and over (as only when you are sick of saying something will people finally start to listen), is that the U.S. is a maritime and aerospace power. That is also our comparative advantage…a fact that the events of the last few years have only underlined.
That said, there are centers of power in our nation who not only refuse to see and act on that, they seem determined to weaken and dilute this foundational characteristic of our nation’s military power."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/robert-kaplan-returns-to-the-pier
31.""A lot of American investors are Ukraine-curious," he says. "They stay curious. They don't become committed."
Morgan argues that most institutional investors evaluate Ukraine the way they evaluate any frontier market—risk scores, talent-cost comparisons, assumptions about exit timelines—and those inputs, assembled at a distance, tend to converge on the same answer: too uncertain, too exposed, too hard to model. The problem is the inputs, built far from the realities they are trying to describe by people who have never watched how quickly a city rebuilds its routines after a missile strike, or seen how much an engineer's motivation changes when the product they are building is tested in a field where failure has a face.
When Morgan looks at the broader picture, he argues that the sustainability of what Ukraine is doing is not in question and that Russia is the strategically vulnerable side.
"They will realize it later,” he says. “But it will be too late to capture the upside."
32."AI is almost certainly a transformative technology on the scale of the printing press and the computer. The historical record cannot tell us what the timeline will be, or who specifically captures the gains, or which firms are the Gutenbergs and which are the forgotten printers. It does say that this kind of technology, when it arrives, reshapes the industries and institutions around it. The reshaping is usually larger than the people living through the early years of it expected.
There were naysayers in the 1450s, and there are naysayers now. The naysayers in the 1450s were wrong, and looking back it seems obvious that they were wrong. Of course, the world of today is different from the world of the printing press and even the computer. How property rights work and how the scaling economics run are both worth their own piece. But the basic claim still holds. AI is the kind of technology that changes the world. Acting as though it is not is the more obviously foolish position of the two available."
https://lukechen.substack.com/p/ai-is-going-to-change-everything
33.Lots of great insights from one of the most interesting investors in Silicon Valley. Dreaming about a utopian future and investing accordingly. Investing in Magical weirdos & Biz/Tiz/Riz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTnQ1VN0KLI&t=1818s
34."The reality is that its export controls on advanced chips are a major source of American leverage over the trajectory of China’s AI industry. They have forced China to absorb compounding costs during the most consequential window of the technology’s development. Chinese labs cannot yet purchase enough computational power to generate Mythos-class capabilities or serve them to large numbers of users — in China or elsewhere. This is a tremendous boon to both American national security and economic prosperity.
When American negotiators enter the room next week, they should understand that Washington is not bargaining from weakness; Beijing is. The chip controls are not a sunk cost the United States should “harvest” before they become “useless” — they are a rapidly appreciating asset. And trading them away in 2026 for the promise of dialogue would risk echoing the very same mistake with China that led the United States down a decade of broken promises stretching from the Rose Garden to the Delfines Hotel."
https://www.choosingvictory.com/p/ai-coordination-without-illusion
35.George Friedman has been often right in geopolitics. Some plausible forecasts for the future for Russia and the EU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-epIBCgHE4
36."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.
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."
https://alexoppenheimer.substack.com/p/sticks-stones-and-light-speed
37."Almost everyone inside the financial markets wants Japan to act more like America. Almost everyone outside the financial markets wants America to act more like Japan. Almost everyone inside the financial markets continues to see China as a risk diversifier. Almost everyone outside the financial markets sees China as a risk multiplier."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/lets-hear-us-elites-talk-about-japan
38.Best discussion and explanations of what is happening in the AI world & Silicon Valley.