Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 5th, 2026
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day……is by no means waste of time.”--John Lubbock
Love what these folks are working on. American Operator, making Main Street business accessible. Critical to the American local economy. The Operate to own model.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyWnKbOEqH4
2. A good primer on the ultra-hot sector of Defense-tech. Probably too hot in my view. Trend is your friend I guess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLJcFOWlmGE
3.The American naval blockade on Iran is about China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgIg8wMEez8
4. Great summary of the crazy AI developments right now. Funny takes too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6Uj8vzrjgQ
5.Another great episode. Some of the best and most informed views on Silicon Valley news. What it takes to thrive in the AI world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOY8hsBqjJo
6."The “let it kill you” part of the quote isn’t about self-destruction. It’s about the willingness to be consumed. To care about something enough that it inconveniences your life. That you’re still doing it when it isn’t going well, when it isn’t getting engagement, when nobody’s asking you about it at dinner.
Most self-improvement culture asks the exact opposite of you. It wants easy wins, visible metrics, shareable milestones. It is, structurally, allergic to the kind of deep commitment the quote is describing.
Meaning isn’t found. It’s built, through experimentation.
The people who end up with a genuinely purposeful relationship to what they do aren’t the ones who found the right answer quickly. They’re the ones who kept moving through enough experiences that eventually something stuck and then they committed to it seriously enough that they actually got good."
https://lifemaxxers.substack.com/p/the-case-for-treating-your-2030s
7. Leaned something new. Lots of good insights on manufacturing in America from an expert.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGQRe_HmpHU
8.The future in the eyes of one of the Big VCs. This was a good interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZDJ3jcO5UY
9.Allbirds pivot to AI and SpaceX IPO. Lots of strong opinions here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ5TEs_3Dq8
10."For entrepreneurs, the lesson is clear: even with a 10x better solution that is already working in customers’ hands, achieving mainstream adoption takes time. Self-driving cars are already on the road and performing at a high level, yet it may take a decade or more to reach widespread adoption.
Entrepreneurs would do well to keep this in mind as they work to change the world."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/04/18/self-driving-cars-and-changing-human-behavior/
11.Obsession and winning in the age of attention.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWn3KgO9Dvk
12."France’s long-range and deep-strike portfolio is, on paper, the most ambitious in Europe. Across all capability tiers, the French industry is developing or has recently contracted more distinct long-range strike systems than any other European state."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/french-long-range-and-deep-strike
13."One query I get often: “What class/skill would you suggest our kids take/learn to compete in the modern economy?” A: Storytelling. The flow of capital, like the trajectory of history, clots around compelling stories. Entrepreneurs, aka storytellers, deploy a narrative that captures imaginations and capital to pull the future forward. Before America was a nation, it was a story told by traitors who recast their rebellious colonies as bastions of liberty and themselves as patriots.
Mastery of narrative is humanity’s superpower, as the arc of evolution bends toward good storytellers. Communities with a larger share of skilled storytellers experience greater levels of cooperation and procreation. Storytelling reinforces their evolutionary resilience, efficiently transmitting survival-relevant information."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/moonshot
14.Good list of some good city options outside of the big 4 in Japan. Very helpful.
https://palombo.substack.com/p/the-7-japanese-cities-people-are
15."Yet for all that, it is difficult to tell just how much demographics are a constraining factor at the present moment. What would the fighting look like if 80% of soldiers in Ukraine were under 30? Would more effective infiltration operations enable one side to collapse the other’s lines? Could a much higher operational tempo create a true breakthrough? Or would the density of ranged weapons simply negate all the advantages of youthly vigor?
I strongly suspect most observers would lean heavily toward the latter answer; given the compounding effects of small advantages, I’m not so sure. It is precisely because we have not seen a successful operational breakthrough that we don’t have a standard whereby to judge the importance of troop quality. It remains one factor among many to keep an eye on."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/warfare-in-an-aging-world
16."Great Houses — as I call them — exist because they are the optimal social form for managing the long and largely illegible training process to produce low-time preference, high-character, high-trust people that can develop, use, and monetize ‘aristocratic’ technologies — those which are characterized by expensive, steep, long learning curves and a vast gulf in output between novice and master.
A family that does not have such a technology can take advantage of a temporary trend or opportunity to accumulate great wealth in a single generation, but can lose it in the next. A family that does have one can err for decades and still return, if the rare underlying capability remains."
https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/permanence-is-an-undervalued-asset
17."Effectively, the markets are pricing a binary outcome: a long war and the potential for catastrophic damage to priceless assets, or a sudden peace and the rush of supply it would bring. If one scenario implies $150 oil and the other $50, is a rough price of $90 all that far off? Yes, a few refiners in a couple of parts of the world feel the need to pay nosebleed prices now, and those make for great fodder on Twitter, but markets this significant are not to be disregarded.
Of course, each day that Hormuz remains closed, the global supply deficit grows. A broader population of oil-thirsty nations will dent the potential price impact of a sudden reopening. Oil prices that creep higher while the current pause in fighting holds are certainly consistent with this line of thinking. Additionally, if a full-blown attack on infrastructure occurs, or if the Houthis close the Red Sea, the lower end of the potential price range evaporates while the upper end expands. The price action in such a scenario would be unfathomably violent, especially at the front end of the curve."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/backwards-looking
18."If that is right, the rupture did not begin in 2016. Across geopolitics, energy, technology, and politics, the architecture of the present decade looks to have been largely in place by the end of 2014."
https://www.driftsignal.com/p/the-year-2014-and-the-origins-of
19."Focus is what determines what will or will not appear in your consciousness.
What does this have to do with creativity?
Everything.
Creativity is your ability to see what others can’t.
It is how you connect two seemingly unrelated topics and make them fit perfectly together.
It is how you articulate ideas that makes people go: “How the hell did this person say it?”
It is how you can create great products, start trends, and light up a movement.
Creativity is a skill you developed through focus and intentional practice."
https://hussainibarra.substack.com/p/how-to-become-disgustingly-creative
20."The man who eats alone, reads a book, orders a second glass, and doesn’t check his phone is the most interesting man in the restaurant. He doesn’t know it. Everyone else does. The waitress is glancing over. The couple at the next table have built an entire backstory for him in their heads. He’s simply sat there — but sat there with a stillness that no other man in the room is pulling off, because no other man in the room has learnt how.
A man at ease with his own company is instantly legible as a man who has things in his life that other people want to be near."
https://lifemaxxers.substack.com/p/the-lifemaxxers-guide-to-the-summer
21."The ultimate status symbol is having a career that looks like a series of lucky breaks to an outsider, but is actually a sequence of highly calculated Intensity Spikes. It signals that you don’t work for time; you work for Results. While the masses are proud of their “365-day streaks,” the Sovereign is proud of his 24-hour Dominance."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-consistency-myth
22."The project scope also increased dramatically. The Creatine supply chain is not a “nutrition” supply chain, but rather an industrial one. The two precursors are the roots of a massive product tree that spans into the billions of dollars across markets."
https://www.broscienceclub.com/p/disciplus-accelerator-and-the-future
23."There is no permanent business model on the internet. Forget about one method. One source of traffic or one business mechanism. Sooner or later, it will stop working. Or it will get saturated to a point where your method will no longer be efficient. It is the nature of the online business. Your ability to reinvent yourself and adapt what you do is what will keep you in the online money-making game."
https://www.beautyofsaas.com/p/the-online-business-advice-no-one-profits-from-telling-you
24."The strategic insight that separates the winners from the losers in this transition is not technical—it is architectural. The organizations and investors who understand that agentic AI is an organizational design problem as much as a technology problem will be positioned correctly.
The shift from Human-in-the-loop to Human-on-the-loop is not about removing humans from decisions. It is about moving humans up the abstraction stack—from approving individual actions to designing the policies, authority structures, and exception frameworks that govern thousands of autonomous actions. That shift requires new infrastructure, new governance frameworks, new liability structures, and new professional disciplines.
The companies building those foundations—governance tooling, vertical compliance infrastructure, outcome-delivery operations—are building the load-bearing walls of the next enterprise technology era. Everything else is interior decoration."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/blue-ocean-opportunities-in-the-agentic
25.US grand geopolitical strategy or the lack thereof.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hauSfd65lDM&t=899s
26."The standard model of industrial policy — temporary export subsidies — imagines these as being provided at taxpayer expense. But if financial intermediaries are important — and most rapidly industrializing countries rely heavily on banks rather than on markets for financing — then it’s not so simple. A wave of corporate failures may be healthy for margins, but could cause years of low growth as banks are paralyzed with fear and tethered to zombie companies. And it’s not clear that state ownership and control of the banking system is an effective remedy, because even in a communist system, middle managers are still probably afraid for their personal careers (or their lives) if their institutions perform poorly.
This means we shouldn’t hail the Chinese industrial policy experiment as a success until we wait a few years. More generally, I think discussions of industrial policy tend to downplay the role of financial systems, and banking systems in particular. "
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/updated-thoughts-on-industrial-policy
27.Probably one of the best and deepest interviews with Tim Ferriss I've listened to in a few years. It's really interesting and wide ranging.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6NYNOejPWc&t=2012s
28."To the Gundo bros, being alive in 2026 is spectacular: it’s the age of splitting atoms, turning sewage to fuel and catching rockets with chopsticks.
The best of American excellence is not locked in the past, buried alongside the Wright brothers and Manhattan Project engineers. It’s in the present, hunched over a piece of machinery in El Segundo, wrench in one hand, a Celsius in the other."
https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2026/04/21/el-segundo-hard-tech-hub-jakob-diepenbrock/
29."The cheap missiles could restore the U.S. military’s ability to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan. But there’s still a window of vulnerability between now and the end of 2027 as the JASSM inventory reaches a new low before large numbers of Rusty Daggers reach the bomber wings."
https://www.trenchart.us/p/this-cheap-cruise-missile-could-salvage
30."In other words, American youngsters idealizing China — without actually engaging with China or knowing much about it — is really about expressing their dissatisfaction with America.
Chinamaxxing is mostly just Americaminning.
That mirrors a larger global reaction. Donald Trump’s tariffs, threats against allies, and reckless wars have turned most of the world against America. Traditionally, confidence in U.S. leadership was higher than in Chinese leadership, but this has reversed since Trump’s election.
So in fact, I do see some real signs of China’s soft power growing organically — finding ways to flow around the walls of censorship and official marketing campaigns, exposing outsiders to a more real, raw, authentic China. It would be astonishing if a newly developed country of 1.4 billion people didn’t have plenty of natural, organic appeal. Now, despite the best efforts of the country’s masters, that appeal is starting to show itself."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/is-chinas-soft-power-really-rising
31."Omar Haroun, CEO at Eudia, talks about a “Pareto Compression,” where the old adage of 20% of inputs driving 80% of outputs is being compressed. In this new world, expertise is rewarded exponentially, with perhaps 5% of inputs driving 95% of outputs. This doesn’t mean we’re all doomed. What it means that in every role, every job function, humans will be pushed into that zone of genius, that 5% where what they do truly counts. In the case of radiologists, it’s the interpretation of non-routine cases, more patient engagement, an expansion in the need for soft skills, coordination, and communication.
Pareto Compression does not mean a compression in the number of people to do the job; it means a compression in the task-sets within every job, pushing every performer to higher, more satisfactory marginal work, on top of AI. Like the radiologists, it can expand demand, and push the role to the frontier of accretive human capability. In other cases, it doesn’t mean everyone must become an expert; on the contrary, it broadens the base of who can do the job, and opens doors.
In a competitive environment the choice of Strong vs Skinny is not an ultimatum, or a zero-sum choice; it is the requirement of every organization to dive deep into jobs, identify tasks, and choose where to apply “Skinny” and where to apply “Strong.” Most organizations will have to do both by trimming non-routine tasks with robotics and AI, and by amplifying non-routine tasks with these extraordinary new tools. The world of AI adoption is one of rote task elimination, a broadened base of who can do the work, and a Pareto Compression of expert work amplified significantly."
https://ideas.scotthartley.com/p/ai-strong-vs-skinny-leadership-tradeoffs
32."The geographical layout driving this is straightforward. Aerial drone saturation has pushed the effective kill zone out to 20-25 kilometers from the front. Any infantry movement in that corridor is hopeless. FPV drones that cost less than a decent laptop will intercept armored vehicles on the way to evacuate a position. Ukraine faces a manpower crisis compounded by a physics problem: the most important ground on the battlefield is also the most lethally inaccessible to human beings. UGVs dissolve that constraint. Lose one, absorb the cost, send another.
What is changing is the threshold for when and where human beings need to be present. The first line is becoming robotic. Humans are moving back.
The manpower dimension matters beyond Ukraine. Ukraine is fighting an adversary with three to four times its available manpower pool, and UGVs are directly softening that asymmetry — each robot that holds a position or runs a logistics route is a soldier who doesn’t need to be recruited, trained, or replaced.
The implications for Europe are significant. Rebuilding credible standing armies across the continent has stalled politically for a decade, in part because reinstating conscription is both deeply unpopular and arguably misaligned with how modern warfare actually works — what militaries need are professionals who can operate complex networked systems, not mass infantry. A robotized frontline changes that calculation. Smaller professional forces, augmented by large fleets of expendable machines, may be able to generate the combat mass that European governments cannot generate through recruitment alone."
https://defensebrief.substack.com/p/the-first-robotized-war
33."Two men. Same cancer. Same strange, impossible gratitude. The suffering didn’t create their faith. It incinerated everything that was competing with it. The noise finally stopped, and in the silence they could hear God more clearly than they ever had. I’ve noticed this pattern in my own life on a much smaller scale.
The seasons that reshaped me most were never the wins. They were the losses, the failures, the stretches where I had no move left except to pray, mean it, and need it. Suffering has a way of clearing the room. The question is whether there’s anything left when it does."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-195260819
34.Lots of big news in Silicon Valley and some of the best takes here too. Always makes me think and you get the zeitgeist of the moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s61XVZAt5ns
35."The commoditization flywheel : both companies give away complements to drive usage of the core.
The risk of this strategy to the ecosystem is that it makes previously attractive categories no longer viable. Commoditizing the complement does not demand a best-in-class replacement. A free, good-enough product is enough to change market dynamics."
https://tomtunguz.com/competitive-strategy-in-ai/
36."The nightmare scenario isn’t worldwide toll booths or even simultaneous blockades. We can tolerate higher prices and more frequent disruptions. What we shouldn’t tolerate is a descent into gangsterism. In the U.S., Donald Trump has undermined capitalism and the rule of law. (See: TikTok, tariffs, deploying prosecutions to attack Fed independence and political opponents, etc.)
Trump’s strategic incompetence in Iran is exporting gangsterism to the world. In effect, we’re trading in our world policeman badge for regional protection rackets. That’s not the art of the deal, but the illusion of the steal. The question isn’t whether America has the economic and military firepower to prosper in Trump’s gangster paradise, but what we lose when we abandon the rules-based order we helped create. A: Everything."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/freedom-of-navigation
37. Lots of good discussion on the latest Silicon Valley news. Apple CEO shakeup. Musk vs OpenAI. Cursor (60Billy!?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjePLXg64n0&t=223s
38."Zelensky is already pointing toward the reality that follows a ceasefire and it is a reality that most Western capitals have not begun to internalize.
A ceasefire does not mean the end of confrontation. It means the transformation of confrontation into a new phase of Cold War 2.0, in which Russia remains a revanchist power with unresolved territorial claims, undiminished nuclear capability, and a leadership class that views the current international order as a threat to be dismantled.
The question is not whether a ceasefire is coming. The trajectory of 2026 is making that increasingly clear, once again contrary to the mainstream opinion that insists on stalemate as the default setting. The question is whether the West will use the breathing space a ceasefire provides to prepare for what comes after — or whether it will repeat the mistake of the post-2014 period, when a Minsk process that everyone knew was failing was treated as a substitute for strategic readiness.
The ceasefire is coming. What follows it will be the test that matters."
https://velinatchakarova.substack.com/p/the-ceasefire-is-coming-putins-strongest