Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 26th, 2026
"In summer, the song sings itself." — William Carlos Williams
"Here’s what’s going on: The US actually has a glut of natural gas, as increased oil drilling creates more supply of natural gas, especially in the Permian.
The problem is that export capacity is near tapped out. The existing LNG export facilities that are based in the US, Mexico, and Canada cannot export much more than they already are.
This creates a situation where natural gas within the United States is cheap, while other countries have to pay drastically higher costs."
https://www.codyshirk.com/p/entangling-allies-and-choking-enemies
2. Solid discussion on AI and the ever growing tech lash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=138ne91NkiQ
3."Money is for buying freedom. That’s it. That’s the whole point.
And freedom is two things stacked on top of each other. It’s the expulsion of every annoying stressor that eats your day away (silent killers), and the amplification of everything that makes you feel alive, smile, and look around at your life with appreciation and fulfillment.
If you understand that one sentence, you’ll never confuse a stressful luxury with a real stressor again."
https://www.thefinalman.com/p/what-is-the-true-purpose-of-money
4."Every generation gets its “machines will take your job” panic. This one just comes with better PR and a bigger balance sheet. The AI job apocalypse isn’t data-driven — it’s narrative-driven, engineered by people who profit when you’re scared. Fear is the product. Capital is the outcome.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat
I believe that, similar to every other technological innovation in history, AI will inspire job destruction that will result in an increase in productivity, profits, reinvestment, and (wait for it) jobs. The relevant question isn’t how many jobs we’ll lose / gain, it’s whether the velocity of disruption will overwhelm that period of adaptation and recovery. There are three scenarios: The AI bubble bursts; AI delivers as promised, but on a slower timeline; and AI disruption comes faster than the market can adapt and respond."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/apocalypse-no
5."The low quality of the general discourse is nevertheless concerning, as it reflects a widespread inability to discuss the relationship between military force and political objectives in conflicts other than full-scale war. This follows two decades of GWOT, during which Western military establishments never developed a good working model for counterinsurgency; what few lessons were learned were left half-digested once attention abruptly shifted back to conventional war in 2022.
For a plethora of reasons, asymmetric and irregular conflicts are likely to remain the most common uses of military force. Without a good framework to think about these things, the same mistakes are likely to be repeated."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/the-iran-war-is-not-a-war-military
6."Saudi Arabia was the religious heart and demographic muscle; the UAE was the strategic brain and financial hub.
They were the “Simba and Mufasa” of the Arab world – distinct but aligned.
That era is dead. It died in the kill zones of Hadramout, in the gold smuggling routes of Sudan, and in the boardrooms of Riyadh where multinational CEOs were given a stark ultimatum: abandon Dubai or starve.
We are now witnessing a shadow war that stretches from the Horn of Africa to the Thar Desert.
It is a conflict defined by a bitter personal rift between Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), a divorce that has split the Islamic world into two emerging, hostile blocs.
And sitting at the center of this geopolitical chessboard, courted by both sides with desperation and billions of dollars, is the Republic of India."
https://issf.org.in/2026/01/brothers-in-blood-the-secret-war-between-saudi-and-the-uae/
7."This transformation altered more than production. When prosperity becomes common, people begin to assume that it will continue indefinitely. Economic downturns, once accepted as part of the natural rhythm of economic life, start to appear intolerable and governments come under pressure to preserve stability and sustain growth, even when economic conditions would normally demand adjustment.
In response to these expectations, policymakers increasingly turn to monetary and financial tools to maintain economic expansion. Credit is expanded, interest rates are adjusted, and financial systems are encouraged to sustain demand. These policies may support prosperity in the short run, but over time they can introduce new forms of instability—particularly in the value of money itself.
Herein lies the paradox of abundance. The success of industrial civilization creates expectations that encourage policies capable of weakening the very foundations of long-term stability. Prosperity, once achieved, generates pressures that make it increasingly difficult to preserve."
https://forumgeopolitica.com/article/the-paradox-of-abundance
8.Solid discussion on AI and how to build for large corporations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBMmK0NsUK0
9."Vague is the killer. Vague is how it happens. Gary is not the product of one bad decision. Gary is the product of ten thousand vague ones.
Look at your last week, properly. How many decisions did you make on autopilot? How many evenings did you spend doing something you actually wanted to do, versus scrolling because you were too tired to do anything else? When did you last have a conversation with your partner that wasn’t logistics? When did you last finish a book? When did you last do something that genuinely scared you in a good way?
If you can’t answer those questions cleanly, you are already on the road. The road doesn’t feel like anything. That’s the point. The road feels like a normal Tuesday. The road feels like a sensible thirty-something life. The road feels like adulthood. And then, somewhere around your thirty-fifth birthday, you look up and notice the lanyard around your neck and the mini fridge in the corner and the wife who’s stopped reaching for you, and you wonder — quietly, because you’d never say it out loud — how the hell you got here."
https://lifemaxxers.substack.com/p/the-man-you-dont-want-to-become-youre
10."To be clear, this trend is still around. It is just getting to a point that the chips are causing a new bottle neck. This means you do not sell all your SMH or all your NVDA or all your (insert chip stock up a ton). Instead, it means you start investing in the new bottle neck: the grid.
There will be a few individual stocks that do a 100x or 10x or (insert large multiple). Directionally? The demand for power, data centers, substations, cooling and general grid upgrades is massive (another 5-10 year trend in our opinion)"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/making-money-off-of-power-and-grid
11."My recommendation for entrepreneurs, especially as they achieve some level of success, is to spend time figuring out what truly gives them energy and fulfillment, and then become much more intentional about saying no to the things that are not the best use of their time."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/05/09/the-entrepreneurs-shift-from-yes-to-no/
12."It is absolutely striking that in a poll of different countries of who is the biggest world-wide threat, the USA is so dominant as the top threat to the world that EVEN AMERICANS nominated themselves as the biggest threat.
The optimistic interpretation is that Trump’s insane and destabilizing policys are hugely unpopular and the people of America will elect someone better in 2028. The most negative interpretation is that Americans are puffing out their chest a little, proud of how they are the “biggest threat” as they tick the box. The most ironic but likely interpretation is that both groups of Americans exist and they are both as American as the diametrically-opposed other."
https://taipology.substack.com/p/exporting-instability
13."having a truly independent central bank and monetary policy to boot would send a broader positive signal about the stage of development of UAE, and its capital markets. It would send a message of confidence, and would likely just further enhance UAE’s position as an international financial centre, alongside the likes of London, New York and Hong Kong. The AED would then advance its case to become a global reserve currency, with big reputational wins therein - and I would suggest global reserve currency status needs independent monetary policy.
And acknowledging the clear competition now between UAE and KSA, as the leading economic and financial economies or centres of the Gulf, UAE would steal a march on KSA, as taking that position as the pre-eminent Gulf financial centre. By depegging early UAE would take or assume the position as the reserve currency state of the region, and anchor its position as the leading financial centre of the region."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/could-uae-move-to-de-peg-early
14."There is a trend in modern filmmaking that often portrays masculinity as something undesirable or outdated. Men are frequently depicted as either weak and directionless or overbearing and aggressive, with very little space in between. Despite that trend, there are still films that remind us what true masculinity can look like.
Great films can teach us timeless lessons about courage and sacrifice. They can inspire us with examples of leadership, discipline, honor, endurance, and brotherhood. In many ways, they preserve ideals that modern culture too often neglects."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/10-films-that-teach-timeless-lessons
15."The TL;DR is exits in mining are historically poor, but the market will mirror the outcomes of those in defence tech. The industry will produce mining’s version of the neoprimes. Exits will come from three places: direct IPOs from startups that bring assets online faster/cheaper, acquisitions by majors redirecting their M&A spend away from traditional assets, or acquisitions by new buyers focused on supply chain security."
https://jackkennedy0.substack.com/p/where-will-the-exits-in-mining-come
16.Listening to this conversation, makes me more optimistic about America. Policies, geopolitics, technology and startups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyv9u1iy-c8&t=23s
17.Geopolitics and Geonomics. Good framework to understand the changes coming in the world & economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy85bpoEQX8&t=88s
18."A slowdown, when it comes, will not be a technology failure. It will be a market reaching the boundary of what its current shape can absorb. Capability will continue to grow. The constraint will move from supply to absorption—the speed at which humans, institutions, and verification systems can metabolize what models produce.
We are leaving what might be called the magic phase of AI, where every new capability feels like a gift that requires no engineering to deploy, and entering the maintenance phase. The work shifts from producing the next demo to building the boring scaffolding that makes the last demo trustworthy at scale.
For investors, this is not bad news. It is just different news. The next decade of AI value creation may belong less to those who train the largest model and more to those who build the unsexy machinery that turns model outputs into auditable, deployable, insurable products. The rocketship is not running out of fuel. It is approaching the part of the flight where you start to notice the air."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/friction-points-what-could-slow-the
19.First hand look at obsession, loyalty and how to win in business. I enjoyed this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35IY2ILCAio&t=2289s
20."So the UAE asked for a short-term loan, known as a currency swap line - an emergency credit facility that allows the U.S. Federal Reserve to lend dollars directly to a foreign central bank.
This is not a bailout of the UAE. It is a bailout of the Treasury market.
In that environment, swap lines do not get repaid in any meaningful sense.
They get rolled.
The Fed extends the maturity. The borrower draws a new swap to repay the old one. Each transaction shows as “repaid” on the books, but the aggregate balance never really goes down.
Wall Street has a name for this: Amend, extend, and pretend."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/the-first-domino-has-fallen
21."Founders often think international expansion is about translating products or adapting strategy. More often, it is about translating expectations between systems that were never designed to work together in the first place.
Scaling across borders is not replication. It is cultural code-switching."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/guest-post-five-lessons-from-50-founders
22.Convo on random business news. The boys brought it today. GameStop & Ebay, Spirit airlines & Zoom stake in Anthropic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te7iP_zpr4A
23.How to tap into heretics to go after hard problems. From the Palantir CTO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oCDpbMyugU
24."Think This Through: If people are constantly trading their currency for stable coins, that is essentially a bid on US tokens. Repeat this process for 5-10 more years and suddenly stable coins have increased US dollar dominance. Why would the US government want to stop that? Just explained why they are not going to shut it down any time soon.
As stable coin market cap goes up, the USA gets more control of financial transactions. Again. They can freeze any account they like with a single click. Essentially expanding their ability to Freeze and Seize as they please.
On An Individual Basis: Since the majority of you are not on the US watch list (guessing absolutely none of you are), then it actually expands your ability to pack up and leave if you need to. No government is going to care about an address with $50,000 in stable coins. Therefore if you have a large chunk of assets in crypto, say $1,000,000+, you could hold it in something decentralized (BTC/ETH) then simply swap to stables in 100 different addresses and live your life as a sovereign individual."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/stablecoin-update-ahead-of-clarity
25."Ukraine, meanwhile, was defending itself against conquest — a conquest that would have stripped away its national identity, brutalized its population, and kept it in poverty. That threat provided a powerful motivation for regular Ukrainians to sign up and risk their lives on the battlefield. Ukraine became a nation in arms, while Russia was still trying to fight a “special military operation”, because Ukraine had a compelling cause and Russia had an unconvincing one.
This lesson is useful in explaining why Trump’s war on Iran has failed. When Iran was the attacker — trying to control the Middle East through a network of armed proxies — its aggression provoked a backlash from people in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and elsewhere who didn’t want to be ruled by foreign powers. But when Trump attacked Iran without direct provocation, Iran’s cause suddenly shifted to the defense, and its fortunes improved.
The people of Iran have no love for their regime — it recently mowed down tens of thousands of protesters in the streets, and the country’s economy is in a state of protracted collapse. But even so, they refused to rise against their rulers when Trump’s bombs started falling. Meanwhile, most Americans disapprove of the Iran war, and have no desire to endure the economic hardship of high gas prices just to topple someone else’s dictator.
This provides us with an important lesson. Reality is not Star Wars — dividing warring sides into “good guys and bad guys” is never really accurate. But “invaders vs. defenders” is a lot less ambiguous. If America ditches Trumpism and goes back to the principle of upholding territorial integrity, we’ll see our military fortunes improve, because we’ll associate ourselves with causes that people want to fight for."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/tyrants-are-losing-wars
26. "For the US though the war has shown the limitations of US power. Therein after the successful 12 day war against Iran, the decapitation effort in Venezuela, the U.S. had appeared to have a huge technological superiority globally, appearing as the apex power, even perhaps over China.
But this war has shown the difficulty of waging a war without clearly defined goals, with poor planning, no exit strategy, and without listening to or involving allies. It also shows the limitations of US aerial and sea power, and that it is difficult to engineer regime change without being willing to commit boots on the ground. That was a political contraint imposed by past prior failed wars - Iraq, Afghanistan, et al. They say arrogance comes before a fall, and that perhaps should be the lasting lesson for the US in this conflict.
One hopes that Trump will have learned his lesson from this defeat and he will be more guarded in pulling the trigger next time around."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/bigger-geopolitical-take-outs-from
27. "There are two events that I believe will occur almost simultaneously and produce a change in opinion about the necessity of spending trillions of dollars on an AI build-out. The first is an IPO or mega merger in the US or China related to tech and AI that is so big and financially irresponsible that the market cannot digest it. This will snap the market out of its manic phase. Folks will finally start asking whether greater machine intelligence is worth the amount of money being spent developing it. Once enough humans ask questions, the jig is up.
The second event will be the rhetoric of the Team Blue Democrat challenger in the 2028 US presidential election. The inflation that this mega AI build-out causes in raw materials, labor, and most importantly electricity is not very popular in many parts of America. Also, 90% of Americans don’t own a lot of stocks, so they will not benefit from the surging share prices of AI and AI-adjacent companies. Politically, it is easy to run on an anti-AI platform focused on bringing back value to human labor and curtailing the inflationary impacts of the AI CAPEX build-out. Whether a Democrat wins is irrelevant; the popularity of this message will make capital allocators ponder a future where credit stops flowing to AI by government mandate and regulations on AI dampen the future profitability of companies in the space.
But in the here and now, dollar and yuan liquidity will continue to rise. And Bitcoin and crypto will benefit."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/the-butterfly-touch
28."We’re predicting a general identity crisis in the USA which is why we’re posting this now.
As tech continues to ramp up, the people who tied their identities to clocking in and clocking out will be in for a rough adjustment period.
The majority will find that career = rented identity. Not owned identity. No badge. No title. No weekly catch up meetings. No bi-weekly paycheck for excel work that can be done by Claude.
Then what?
The answer is they are forced to follow the same playbook we’ve had out for a decade. Building a niche asset. Investing in the choke points. Constantly testing demand for new trends. Investing in “You, Inc.” the only company where you’re the 100% owner. And. Making the process repeatable (finding another trend riding it)."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/how-to-deal-with-identity-crisis
29.Listening to any leader of Goldman Sachs, makes you realize why they are the best. This convo was no different.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qqLihL4AWk&t=922s
30.A fun new podcast show (Concept was originally done by Richard Cooper). Cars and capitalists episode with Sam Lessin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RykHeWcPx8
31.Enjoying this series: Will Obrien of Ulysses. Underwater Autonomous Vehicles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40EMM5Y-OP4
32.A bit of Alt-Geopolitics. This was hard to follow at first and not sure what to think. Entering a multipolar world.
https://burningbright.substack.com/p/the-multipolar-world
33."A good crisis is exactly what California needs to shock it back into the hard realities of physics. Local drilling, local refining, and overland pipelines connecting to America’s plentiful petroleum bounty are the cures to what has been ailing the state since it hurtled itself off the energy cliff. There’s still time to deploy the parachute. Really!
Whether or not that happens, there’s one thing this analysis should make abundantly clear: The rest of the US is an oil superpower, and no amount of hyperventilating by the media will change that anytime soon."
https://open.substack.com/pub/doomberg/p/remedial-math
34."So the fact that American tariffs are causing that assembly work to move out of China is significant. It doesn’t remove U.S. dependence on Chinese manufacturing, but it reduces it. China itself started out doing assembly but later moved into component manufacturing; there are some signs Vietnam may be starting to do the same. And if Vietnam can do it, so can India, Mexico, Indonesia, and so on. China doesn’t have some magic secret sauce that makes it the only country that can make physical objects; other countries can learn, just like China did.
A non-Chinese supply chain won’t be built quickly or easily, and it hasn’t been happening as fast as the headline numbers suggest. But we’ve made a promising start, and the tariffs on China were part of that. A lot of Trump’s protectionist policy has been haphazard, misdirected, stupid, and downright corrupt, but this one — which was continued by Biden and the Democrats — was actually starting to yield some results. It would be a shame if Trump throws that all away on this trip in exchange for the promise of a few soybean purchases or whatever."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/trump-actually-started-to-decouple
35."In this sense, what Operation Epic Fury has achieved so far is forcing the Islamic Republic to manage two fronts simultaneously, one facing outward toward protecting a mosaic military enterprise built on proxy funding, missile threats, and an unrelenting nuclear program, and one facing inward toward managing a population that has shown repeatedly, at the cost of its own lives, that there is a threshold the regime keeps pushing past.
Every available path undermines the very conditions the organization needs to survive. This exposes the central contradiction of what the Islamic Republic constructed over four decades: a parallel military state within the state, a regional empire of proxies, and a financial system shielded from accountability, all built for outward projection of power yet wholly unprepared for the mounting pressure now coming from both inside and outside."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/irans-economy-is-collapsing
36."Right now, a 62-year-old machinist-owner is thinking about retirement. His shop of 30 employees, tucked into an unassuming industrial park in the Midwest, makes a highly specialized component you’d never be able to pick out from a lineup of machine parts. But this component is critical to a defense system you’ve definitely heard of, and his is the only shop in the U.S. that makes it.
He doesn’t have a succession plan, and he’s having trouble finding a buyer.
This scenario is playing out across thousands of shops across the country, and it represents one of the most underappreciated vulnerabilities in the U.S. defense industrial base. There’s no adversary, no cyberattack, and no dramatic supply chain rupture that will bring this challenge to the headlines. There is just an aging owner locking the door for the last time, and a critical defense capability retiring with him."
https://thebenslens.substack.com/p/the-silent-succession-crisis
37."As your wealth changes relative to your desires, your capacity to take risk will change with it. The closer you are to being fully content, the less risk you should want to take. I call this the Risk-Wealth Paradox."
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-risk-wealth-paradox/
38."It is critical to think about creating a MOAT - long term sustainable advantage that increases over time.
Without a moat your business will have low margins and not be venture scale (and won’t be able to scale?).
Your business model is a key to the MOAT. Platforms/Marketplaces have the best moats!"
https://www.startuphacks.vc/blog/moats
39."So what is the Valinor model? Valinor is taking the lessons learned from successful corporate structures (see below) to create a new type of company in the defense and government technology space. We are a holding operating company focused on untapped problems in the defense and government markets.
With this hub-and-spoke structure, we have the ability to go after many small to medium-sized problems that are important, but aren’t seeking the attention of VC-backed companies. We will start by developing these products ourselves, but also have the ability to acquire other products when it makes sense."
https://valinorenterprises.substack.com/p/the-valinor-model
40.Another good episode with the NIA guys. Always fun & educational.