Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 14th, 2026
“Don’t Count the Days. Make the Days Count” –Muhammad Ali
"The market rewards this shift. Goldman Sachs found that low-labor-cost stocks outperformed high-labor-cost stocks by 8 percentage points in 2025.4 Labor’s share of GDP hit a record low of 53.8% in Q3 2025.5 The implication : every dollar shifted from labor to software improves margins & stock performance.
Across the S&P 500, labor costs represent about 12% of revenues on average.6 Software costs sit around 1-3%. As agents absorb labor, that ratio inverts. Labor shrinks. Software expands. The total addressable market for software grows at labor’s expense, while profitability grows."
https://tomtunguz.com/observations-about-agent-pricing/
2.Inside Palantir: empowering heretics and driving innovation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LcH4lP9XbA&t=496s
3. "But even if China did beat America in a limited war, that wouldn’t change any of their fundamental problems. War production might give their economy a temporary boost, but the incentives for overproduction and over-loaning would still be there, along with all of those bad debts. Sinking some of America’s carriers or destroying some of America’s bases wouldn’t change the trajectory of AI. Nor would a war allow Xi to feel secure enough on his throne to stop his purges — if anything, war empowers generals and weakens civilian leaders, which would put Xi even more on edge.
In other words, although some Chinese nationalists might believe they need to seize Taiwan and drive U.S. power out of the Pacific before the “deadline” imposed by China’s long-term vulnerabilities, this is actually just a fantasy. As Putin and Trump are now both discovering, wars don’t revitalize declining countries — in fact, they often simply accelerate the decline.
China, of course, is not currently in decline. It is arguably the world’s leading civilization and nation-state at this point, and it is at its peak. But I’m starting to suspect it won’t occupy that peak for as long as the U.S. did, in its day. It’s not yet time to declare that “the sun also sets” on China, but I think there’s reason to be more skeptical of the long-term success story compared to a year ago."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/china-is-quietly-looking-weaker
4."Taiwan’s future. If the ships are turned away—or worse still, boarded and seized—it would not only represent a serious escalation against a nuclear superpower, but also a direct precedent the Chinese would be sure to seize on. Under what rationale could US diplomats object to China implementing a similarly complete blockade of Taiwan?
Let’s remember, Taiwan is uniquely vulnerable to such a blockade. As we and countless others have documented, the island relies exclusively on imports to meet its domestic hydrocarbon needs, which account for 93% of its primary energy expenditures. Worse still, Taiwan has precious little in the way of alternatives to natural gas, which arrives exclusively via liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports and on which it relies for more than 40% of its electricity generation.
Since Taiwan is known to have just 11 days of natural gas demand in storage, a blockade of the island by China would bring the situation to a full breaking point in far less time than the Strait of Hormuz has already been closed. If our Australian readers think they have it bad, is it perhaps small solace for us to point out that it could be worse?"
https://substack.com/home/post/p-191615703
5.I'm not a UAE fan at all. I can't stand Dubai but there is still a strong case for what they are trying to build.
"For another, talent. “Abu Dubai” today is a Miami to many Latin Americans: Westerners are familiar with the rich setting up shop in the two cities. But beyond them, Central Asians, Africans, South Asians, Southeast Asians, Arabs, and Iranians call the UAE home (or, perhaps, a second home) as well as a primary base for business. Rivals — Indians and Pakistanis, Armenians and Azeris, Russians and Ukrainians — coexist, even if begrudgingly. In a sense the UAE is not a melting pot but a tossed salad — beyond leaving one’s politics at the door, there are no expectations of social conformity.
Why do they come and why do they stay? Because the UAE offers something that is in short supply globally — competent, predictable governance by a country courting migrants. What skeptics of the Emirates don’t understand is how rare this is. Faced with the prospect of an anti-immigrant West and a non-functioning rest, there are few places for the world’s population to go. Beyond Abu Dhabi’s museums and Dubai’s skyscrapers, what makes the UAE truly singular is that it works."
https://www.semafor.com/article/03/16/2026/how-about-them-emiratis
6.Catchy title: "How to trade the end of the world." Froedge is a pretty good commodities investor despite his bombastic angle at times. Learning from the 1970s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dwc8JSSFHc
7.The man driving much of the AI wave. Learning a bunch from this conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwW8GKwHB3I&t=375s
8."When thinking about these eight moats, one approach is to assign a point or partial credit for each category and then total the score. Moats are a critical component of building a sustainable business, especially for software companies.
Entrepreneurs would do well to evaluate their ideas through this lens, recognizing that most of these moats take significant time, effort, and success to build. Achieving one or two is difficult. Achieving three or four is rare. Companies that reach four or more are best positioned for long-term, durable success.
That said, entrepreneurs should not limit themselves only to ideas that check multiple moats upfront. Instead, they should understand how software is evolving in the age of AI, where barriers to entry are falling, and be intentional about how they build defensibility over time."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/03/21/8-moats-for-sustainable-software-companies/
9."But my north star is simpler and more structural: you want to own things that will not let you become someone else’s exit liquidity. In that framework, the last things you want to own, in order, are housing, bonds, and U.S. equities. These are duration manipulation instruments engineered, whether intentionally or not, as the greatest generational wealth heist in history.
What you want to own instead should satisfy the three conditions simultaneously, in reverse.
First, what is demographically least-owned today with the greatest potential to be owned more tomorrow
Second, what is most likely to serve as a jurisdictionless safe haven when capital mobility becomes severely taxed, restricted, or seized entirely
Third, what most closely resembles the form of capital that an autonomous, agentic world will actually use seamlessly without intermediaries to perform the productivity functions that will replace the cost of human labor
When the Ottoman Empire breached the walls of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, the Byzantine merchant class lost everything denominated in imperial trust: land, titles, treasury bonds. You name it, everything was gone. But the young ambitious scholars and the young enterprising traders who had moved their portable wealth, such as manuscripts, gold, knowledge westward into Florence, ultimately ignited what would be later known as the Renaissance.
What you want to own is nomadic capital. Capital that is portable across the demographics of time, political borders, and AI-native ecosystems. Capital that can bypass the monetary Strait of Hormuz. Nomadic in the 21st century means digital. The specific instruments may vary as reasonably high agency people will each arrive at different conclusions; the Radical Portfolio Theory provides one such viable framework across owning 60% compliance assets and 40% resistance assets. But if you follow the three conditions with disciplined deliberation—to own what the young will eventually need, to own what no government can easily reach, to own what the autonomous economy will actually transact in—the destination becomes less a prediction and more an outcome. The uncertainty becomes the inevitability."
https://dgt10011.substack.com/p/the-generational-prisoners-dilemma
10."Continuing on the current oil theme for a moment, the main concerns for market participants relate to how long we’ll have an oil crisis. How long will the Strait be closed?
The data is clear: The longer oil prices stay high, the more devastating the results.
Investing is often a game of musical chairs. When one opportunity disappears, you have to find a new one quickly to keep your capital hard at work. Not deploying your capital - as in, not finding a chair to sit in - means you’re out of the game.
By the logic of many investors, including my mentor, you always need to be in the game. Even long term data shows that staying in the market always pays off."
https://www.codyshirk.com/p/going-almost-all-cash
11."Since we try to weave in human nature into our writing, within a month or two you will see a new trend of people blaming the war in Iran for the crypto downturn/stocks/insert everything. It won’t matter that crypto entered into a bear at the end of 2025, the new scary headline will explain the present (despite the timelines not adding up).
We already see this today with job numbers as well. Trump is being blamed as a bad jobs president while Biden is being seen as a hero. This is only because people have poor memories and Biden numbers are being compared to COVID (when practically everyone was unemployed).
When you see this pattern pick up, it’ll help you prevent narrative creep in the future. Look at what happened 1-2 years ago (no different than cumulative inflation). There is no way Biden would have fixed AI layoffs (see being politically neutral with a positive Trump note in there as well).
Action Step: For now continue to accumulate and wait until summer. By then spending patterns will shift. We have high conviction in that and will say the same “90%+ chance spending shifts”. At this point you’ll have a new window for e-com sales, other wifi business and of course investment options.
Until then, don’t drink the kool-aid. Wait for a real resolution instead of 48 hour flip flops."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/the-iran-war-emotional-map-and-update
12.Harsh reality and facts of the energy and implications of the Iran War.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnw_0M3kUnU&t=1135s
13.Trying to get a sense of the Iran War and implications from the eyes of the Dollar Milkshake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjUIudopgKs
14.Listening to this makes me more optimistic on AI, energy and reindustrialization in America. It will be challenging but it's possible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4QVoht3YsI
15."There are guys who make great money and live like they’re still in their first place out of college. Not because they’re saving aggressively toward something. Because they’ve never given themselves permission to want a life that looks different than the one they fell into. They could afford the better house, the better car, the trip that changes their perspective. But they’d have to admit that they want those things. And wanting things, for some reason, feels dangerous to them.
It’s not dangerous. What’s dangerous is spending your only life in a holding pattern because you’re afraid of what people might think if you started living like you actually cared.
I still feel the knot every time I reach. It doesn’t go away. You just learn to recognize it as the RIGHT feeling instead of a warning. The day it stops showing up is the day you’ve stopped moving."
https://hayescarrera.substack.com/p/the-things-you-own-should-scare-you
16.The Defense-tech wave was really driven by Anduril. So better to listen and learn from the leader.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc6hjJ9Zze0
17. "Open source is how startups compete with giants. The next Cursor will be built on the best open-source foundation available. The question is whether that foundation will be American."
https://tomtunguz.com/cursor-kimi-open-source-ai-imperative/
18."It is not an easy exercise to determine where we are in the war on Iran. A weekend of endless commentary and analysis from all directions tells you either that either the regime in Tehran is about to collapse, or that we are about to enter another bloody slow grinding Ukraine-type war. And everything in between.
With it come the macro-economic assessments and they are almost all negative, even a ceasefire and a resumption of oil and gas exports will apparently not quickly address the damage done to energy markets so far. And you are no doubt feeling it, inflation across the board is getting another unwanted boost."
https://pieterdorsman.substack.com/p/fog-of-war
19.Lots of really interesting suggestions on how to think about investing in tech. I say this a lot, but this really is a masterclass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G1st54tRBI
20."Preparation is a ritual for those who are afraid to win. Stop sharpening your tools and start cutting. The world belongs to the fast, not the ready."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-preparation-trap
21.Processing, not just knowledge. A wise discussion here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et9fifanm3g&t=2475s
22."The short answer is this: the toolkit most professional investors are using to manage tail risk was built for a world that is disappearing. Long volatility strategies, options, VIX products, variance swaps, these instruments are calibrated to a fundamental assumption that almost nobody states out loud because almost nobody has needed to question it until now. The assumption is that things mean-revert. That a shock, however severe, eventually resolves back toward a prior equilibrium. That the institutional architecture, the Federal Reserve, the dollar system, and multilateral trade agreements, provides a durable floor beneath which things do not permanently fall.
That assumption held from 1945 to roughly 2020. It is not obviously true today."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-191933695
23.Always very topical news from Silicon Valley with great educated takes. This is the weekly must watch to stay on top of the tech business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLmM3M7d9v8
24."To put it bluntly, the second- and third-derivative effects of an extended closure of the Strait of Hormuz (the prices of diesel, jet fuel, and petrochemicals surge as supply chains get reengineered, and food and political stress rises) would have far-reaching negative consequences for the global economy. Nearly every path leads toward extraordinary fiscal and monetary easing as policymakers attempt to support growth in the face of commodity inflation, an increasingly multipolar global monetary order, and the rising friction and costs of deglobalization as more countries put up walls.
Gold is no longer just a trade; it is an essential asset."
https://robertsinn.substack.com/p/luke-gromen-succinctly-explains-the
25."If you’re preparing to raise a Seed round, keep the following in mind as you fine-tune your pitch: in addition to analyzing the usual details on problem, solution, traction, etc., many Seed VCs are now asking themselves the following question as part of their investment process:
Can this team win (generate a return) even if one or more of their core assumptions is disrupted by AI? (In other words, can they still win if their market hypothesis gets disrupted?)
Unfortunately, it’s not at all clear yet how Seed VCs are testing for this. As a result, I suspect that we’re going to see a significant “crunch” at the Seed stage in the next few quarters. Startups that historically could raise funding based on a clear market hypothesis and reasonable early traction will struggle, especially if they can’t convince investors that the market hypothesis is viable over a long-term horizon.
Most Seed VCs don’t know what the future is going to look like, so they’re increasingly betting on founders who they believe can figure-it-out."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/whats-going-on-with-seed-rounds
26."Naturally, industries have formed to monetize this nihlism through promising solutions. But the solutions never arrive, because the nihilism, the giving up, must persist in order for these products to survive. It’s a version of Ivan Illich’s Limits to Medicine, where he argues that the medical establishment itself produces illness by making people dependent on professional intervention rather than building health.
That effect carries across all these optimization tools, creating dependency on the fix rather than addressing the cause. The optimization economy can't deliver control, because the desperation is the market condition, and the pursuit of control through optimization is itself a loss of control."
https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-ozempicization-of-the-economy
27.Listen to this guy. OG of Silicon Valley and one of the best operator and investors around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcQD7ZCtDQQ
28."The western system of public finance has been testing whether sovereign debt can be issued without limit and held without consequence. The data already shows it. Yields must rise for the market to absorb the supply, currencies weaken when they should strengthen, and fiscal buffers are eliminated by the yield moves they were designed to survive.
Gold at $4,200 prices a belief that this time the rules will hold and that western money is being restored rather than transferred away from those who hold it. That belief may be right for weeks or months. It will not hold indefinitely, because every major western government in the current cycle has demonstrated, when tested, that the spending comes before the rules. Gold is priced by investors who think the experiment is still working. The fiscal data is accumulating on the other side of that argument, one gilt auction at a time."
https://polemicpaine.substack.com/p/gold-gilts-and-the-wrong-kind-of
29."The key takeaway is that timing, experience, and persistence compound. The first company builds the foundation, including market insight, scar tissue, and relationships. The second company is where those inputs often translate into sharper execution and better results."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/03/28/the-second-time-around-why-founders-come-back/
30."Acrimony has become the national mood, not a symptom but a diagnosis. The country hums at a higher emotional frequency: outrage serves as background radiation, bitterness as civic glue—each a heaping pile of dry powder ready to explode with the faintest spark.
The headlines change, the hatred stays. Welcome to the United States of Acrimony, where the three Gs—Gerontocracy, Generational Conflict, and Gambling—together form the invisible architecture of decline.
We are the United States of Acrimony: addicted to outrage, risk, and the faint hope that one lucky spin can rewrite a lifetime of loss.
The gerontocracy hoards time; the youth gamble what little they have left.
One side clings. The other spins. Both are terrified to stop.
There’s no policy fix for a spiritual vacancy.
We’ve lost faith in patience, in compounding, in slow building. The only cure for acrimony is renewal, but renewal requires surrender, and nobody wants to fold.
Sadly, Max Planck’s principle comes to mind: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
As with science, so too society.
Until then, we’ll keep rolling the dice—burning down institutions, tearing down statues, and immolating both our future and our faith—hoping against hope in our youthful naïveté that this time is different; that somehow, someway, the old, grey croupier’s throw lands in our favor."
https://www.whitenoise.email/p/the-three-gs-of-global-decline-gerontocracy
31."Society has weaponized “Loyalty” to keep you tied to inefficient systems and people. It’s an emotional anchor. In the age of Hyper-Volatility, loyalty to anything other than the Mission and the System is a suicide pact. When you keep a person, a tool, or a location out of “loyalty,” you are paying a Stagnation Tax. You are subsidizing their inability to evolve with your own potential. Real loyalty isn’t staying together while you rot; it’s staying together as long as you both Compounded."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-loyalty-debt-140
32."The gangster operates in a world with real stakes, real consequences, and real rewards. A world where your reputation is built through action, not optics. Where loyalty is tested under actual pressure. Where the hierarchy is earned, not assigned by a committee.
It is the photographic negative of the milquetoast existence modern civilisation has engineered for men.
The hunger hasn’t disappeared. It’s just got nowhere legitimate to go.
That’s the crisis. And the gangster film is the pressure valve."
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/why-do-men-love-gangsters
33."Because the deepest lesson of the Opium Wars is not about Britain, or China, or opium. It is about the nature of consequences in complex systems. Every actor in the story — the East India Company, Lin Zexu, Palmerston, the Qing court, Gladstone — acted on intentions that were coherent within their own frameworks. And every single one of them produced consequences that dwarfed their intentions, consequences that cascaded across decades and continents, consequences that are still arriving now, in places and currencies and chokepoints that the original actors could not have conceived.
A trade deficit produced a drug epidemic. A drug epidemic produced a war. A war produced a treaty. A treaty produced a rebellion that killed twenty million people. A rebellion weakened a dynasty. A weakened dynasty fell. A fallen dynasty produced a century of fragmentation. Fragmentation produced revolution. Revolution produced a nuclear power. A nuclear power now offers its currency as the alternative to the system the West built — in corridors and straits where the world’s energy passes through spaces so narrow a captain can see both shores from his bridge.
That chain is not a metaphor. It is a mechanism. And mechanisms, once understood, carry an obligation: to ask, before the next force is applied to the next chokepoint, whether anyone in the room has truly traced the consequences to their end. Whether the men making decisions about narrow waterways and precious commodities today have studied what happened the last time men made decisions about narrow waterways and critical commodities — and whether they have the honesty to admit that the forces they are acting upon are wilder than any strategy document can contain."
https://nazem.substack.com/p/what-lin-zexu-started
34."Now that you have your list of who has leverage, now you can move to asking a simple question. “What does this create long-term”. If your goal is to make big strides over the next 5-10 years related to wealth, you have to remove all activities that will decline in value.
Here is a simple yes ladder. Does This:
Increase long-term equity
Improve sales/marketing skills
Improve skills related to leading edge tech
Increase visibility
Create a cash flow for you that occurs while you sleep
If it is a yes to any of those? Continue. If it is a no to all of them. Best to move on.
You know where the dividing line is going to be. Copy pasting numbers from a computer to another spreadsheet isn’t a useful skill. Learn things that the older generation won’t process as fast and where demand will be highest. Most are doing the opposite, holding onto tasks they know are going to be automated away."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/white-collar-recession-starts-before
35."The regime has proven to be far more robust than the polls indicate. Furthermore, historical experience (WW2) suggests that a country at war, suffering strategic bombardment, becomes more cohesive rather than less. Forcing a political collapse will be very difficult.
Iran’s drones are still far more effective than the US military concedes. Specifically, it allows Iran to exchange damage with the US on a tit-for-tat basis. If an electrical grid is hit, it will do the same to the Saudi’s, the UAE, and Israel. If upstream oil/gas infrastructure is hit, sites like Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar (the world’s largest oil facility) become targets. This makes it costly to damage Iran’s economic infrastructure. Furthermore, if Gulf oil infrastructure is destroyed, the damage will require a multi-year rebuilding effort to bring it back online.
This path will likely be a slow process that could last many months. Even without accounting for the additional damage this path causes, the system disruption already inflicted by the war is actively harming developing countries, draining their budgets, and increasing the risk of collapse. Soon, this disruption will reach developed nations, increasing inflation, causing economic slowdowns, and increasing default risk, among other effects."