Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 28th, 2026
“In summer, the song sings itself”--William Carlos Williams
Energy and the Middle East in light of the Iran war. Another good analytical discussion on what is going on and implications for the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W6cVMRDdyQ
2.This is an excellent interview. Very insightful and surprisingly introspective and thoughtful. Also good description of Ritardmaxxing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4tvVKDhpiY
3.An optimistic view of AI and its impacts. Jordi Visser approaches tech and AI via a global macro lens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2Mf3OotGrQ
4."Most men misunderstand respect. It is not given freely, nor is it earned through words. It is revealed in our conduct and built through consistent actions over time.
Being a gentleman is not about perfection, but it is about discipline. It is the daily decision to carry yourself in a way that reflects not only who you are, but who you want to be in life. In a world where standards have been lowered, the man who holds the line will always stand apart."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/ten-things-a-gentleman-never-does
5."Our strategy can be summed up as defense in depth plus diversification across multiple sovereigns (governments). The goal is that no single government, corporation, or policy can significantly disrupt your operations."
https://defieducation.substack.com/p/intro-to-decentralized-tech-and-why
6."Wars involve a process akin to price discovery in finance: they make clear what the underlying realities actually are. The Crimean War, for example, simply demonstrated that the British Army and state were not modern and not fit for purpose. The regimental system as it then was, where commissions could be purchased, the life of an officer was primarily social, and there was little training and no doctrine, could be and was defended before the War: Wellington, Waterloo, aristocracy as the backbone of the nation etc. After the War, such defences were simply not possible.
And much the same was true of Ukraine. It suddenly became obvious to all that the US already had little military power in Europe and was no longer a major player in the region, that much western weaponry was poorly adapted to modern war, that western ammunition stocks were inadequate and that the quality and quantity of Russian military power had been greatly underestimated. And in some ways the most worrying realisation was that there was nothing practical the West could do about any of these problems in the short or medium term. This could be denied before 2022: it could not be denied afterwards.
The fact is that the ability of the defender to damage and destroy very expensive weapons platforms is already prohibitive, and can only increase. The other is that western ability to even sustain, let alone operate, its armed forces, requires a constant supply of strategic commodities. One of the things that has been “discovered” over the last few years is that modern western “just in time” militaries are optimised for peacetime, not for fighting. Such problems as limited quantities of equipment and even more limited spares and ordnance are not accidents, but the product of a system which prioritised “management,” in the commercial sense of keeping the minimum inventory to save money. It was assumed that any conflicts would be sufficiently short and low-intensity that this would not matter.
But even if by some miracle western forces could be expanded and defence industries relaunched, globalisation has ensured that components for western defence equipment and materials for manufacture are now sourced from all over the world. In the past this has not been a problem, but I expect that more than one nation is watching the Iranians use the economic weapon with interest.
We are going to see a substantial change in the terms of political trade, as component suppliers and producers of primary products start to realise the power that they could potentially wield over Western governments, and by extension on their military capabilities. But that’s how it is."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/how-it-is
7."Modern culture equates accessibility with success. We are told to be responsive, to network, and to be “available for a quick chat.” This is a trap. In the economy of 2026, Scarcity is the only real currency. When you are easy to reach, your time has no value. You become a resource that others use to solve their problems, rather than a Sovereign who solves his own. If your door is always open, any idiot can walk in and steal your focus."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/why-your-open-door-policy-is-a-death
8.What an excellent episode and discussion on Silicon Valley news. Lots of good insights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUngseNueP8&t=3820s
9."The most likely scenario ahead is neither full peace nor open war. Instead, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is expected to maintain de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz, supported by a broad consensus across Iran’s political spectrum, including both hardliners and reformists. Transit will remain restricted for vessels linked to the U.S., Israel, or their allies, while other ships — already including those from China, Russia, Iraq, Turkey, Thailand, Pakistan, and India — are permitted passage under an informal framework.
Trump has miscalculated again. He is trying to win the battle; Iran is focused on winning the war. In Tehran’s plan, the strait is not a tool to end the war, but a permanent fixture for its aftermath."
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/strait-of-hormuz-and-iran/
10."The hard problem is not holding heretical ideas. Anyone can do that. The hard problem is designing selection mechanisms that filter for productive unorthodoxy without filtering for conformity. This is what Prometheus attempts: presenting heretical ideas openly as a way of breaking social barriers. These are experiments in selection mechanism design.
The ideas that matter most are often the ones the machinery is designed to suppress. Not because suppression is evidence of truth, but because the machinery does not distinguish between the heretic and the crank. The ratio of world-changing insights among the uncomfortable ideas is higher than zero."
https://svrgn.substack.com/p/promethean-progress
11.This is pretty grim listening. Zeihan is always provocative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EJ-L534fXE
12."Tracking competitors used to make sense. Who shipped the feature first. Who priced lower. Who hired the sales rep you wanted. Execution was hard, the race was about execution, and watching was a legitimate part of the playbook.
AI killed that logic. Forty minutes vs. six weeks. Anyone can build the obvious thing now, the market map, the landing page, the MVP that does what the customer said they wanted. When execution is free, there’s nothing left worth copying. The surface is drowning in adequate, and the playbook everyone’s studying is already a commodity.
What wins in the near term are secrets. Things you can only learn by going somewhere nobody else thought to look, a distribution channel that only works because you understand a specific buyer’s workflow, a technical decision that seems wrong until you’ve spent months inside the problem."
https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/your-only-competition-is-you
13."It’s an Iron Law of the Universe. No one can be achieve success without earning it for themselves.
You have to climb to the top yourself, rung by rung.
And once you’re there you’ll learn the truth: successful people don’t want to meet anyone new because every time you do all you get is: weird desperate energy; not-so-subtle attempts suss out how successful you are so they can see if you’re ‘worth their valuable time’; and pathetic attempts to get you to invest in some harebrained bullshit or, worse, become their partner in a business where you do all the work and they just kick back and tell you about their ‘valuable ideas’ "
https://www.tetramarketing.io/p/lies-that-normal-people-believe
14."Willpower is a finite resource. You wake up with a full tank and every decision you make throughout the day drains it. By 7 PM your brain is running on fumes. That is why the midnight scrolling and the junk food orders happen at night, not at 8 AM. Your defenses are down. The Sleepwalker comes out when your willpower tank hits empty.
So the Sovereign Architect builds around it.
Front-load the important actions into the morning when your tank is full. Remove decisions from your evening by pre-committing earlier in the day. Design your week so the right things happen on autopilot and the wrong things require actual effort to access. This is how the men you admire actually operate (I can tell you from experience, every sharp man I’ve met who seems “disciplined” really just has a schedule that seemingly “does” the work for him). You are building that system this month."
https://www.thefinalman.com/p/the-blueprint-that-builds-you-while
15."If you are taking your life seriously, you will recognize that your time is extremely limited. The standard path sold to you doesn’t work in excel. Go ahead and plug it in (only works under perfect conditions of no lay offs + star performer straight to hedge fund manager/Managing director/Partner etc.)
While you need that W-2 to just pay bills, its really funding the correct “Funnel” which is: 1) any recurring revenue business, 2) asymmetric investments, 3) skill stack that will be useful in 5-10 years - such as sales and 4) consistent purchase of new cash flowing assets (or building them)
If you follow the tea leaves from step one, it means that you need to become self sovereign. This means avoiding a single point of failure. You do not want: 1) one boss deciding your worth, 2) one source of income, 3) one industry determining your future and 4) one skill to pay for everything.
What usually happens? People figure out they can earn money on skill A. That’s great. Then they ignore skill B, C and D. All three of these could be new revenue streams but it is just too “painful” to get started.
Psychologically if you are earning $200K from skill A, it doesn’t make sense to earn $50K from skill B. This is how NPCs think.
A person who understands cycles? They will realize, if A plummets by 50%? Skill B may go up to $100K+. Think that through. Who is in a better position to survive the future. One guy who makes $250K from one task or a person who makes $150K from business A and $100K from business B (with neither business being in the same industry?). It’s clear as day."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/how-to-escape-the-rigged-system
16. "Hormuz has always been a chokepoint, going back thousands of years. Using it as a weapon for trade and military has been used MORE than once, as we’ll soon see.
The answer is in short:
Geography is destiny.
Chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz alter the balance of power and economics in a region. They determine the rise and fall of empires, century after century."
https://pplsartofwar.substack.com/p/the-thousand-year-chokepoint
17."What most cannot realize is that the only way you will win in this attention economy is by promoting yourself (selling + distribution). Selling yourself. Selling your work. Selling your ideas. Thinking that because you have made something, you deserve to be noticed is wrong. Producing the output has never been easier, and the barrier to entry has entirely disappeared.
Everyone is fighting for others attention. Important part? Back in the day, fighting for attention simply was not part of the game. It didn’t matter the way it does now. Simply because the world went full-on digital and now you are competing with everyone. Especially when it comes to getting someone’s attention and holding it.
Your parents were taught to blend in and not be different from each other. Why? Because it would make them look like fools. Different. Not part of the norm. The whole goal was not to stand out or do anything differently. That is not how the game is being played today, and things won’t work out in your favor if you do so.
When we say sell ourselves, we mean:
When you know how to do storytelling (sell your work and your story) and position yourself in a way that you are someone who can be trusted and counted on.
When we say distribution, we mean:
When you know how to drive traffic and hold the attention of the masses (attention hacking) in a way that makes you someone who can be trusted and counted on.
Lesson: Being humble has nothing to do with promoting yourself. The self-promotion part is mandatory, and the only way you will move forward is by doing it. Not by waiting to be recognized and rewarded accordingly.
For those who have no idea where to start with this one. Just pick one relevant platform (YouTube, Twitter…) and start posting on it. Documenting. Don’t worry about selling or marketing. Just make sure you are putting something out there for the world to see. This should help you get out of your head and overthinking phase."
https://www.beautyofsaas.com/p/get-a-degree-get-a-job-buy-a-house
18. "A student asked whether we invest in “AI companies.” The honest answer: for most companies, that is the wrong question.
Nobody introduces themselves as a “cloud company” today. Nobody says they are an “internet company.” Those became horizontal platforms that every business uses. For companies not providing core infrastructure in AI, I believe the world is going the same direction. It is not a category to invest in, but rather it is infrastructure that every company will build on. And if you’re not building with this infrastructure, you are building for the past."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/never-a-good-moment
19.Understanding where the AI agentic world is going. Lots of interesting takes and predictions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f43JCxhKLEg
20.Lots of good ideas here on how to have a better life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdxhkwLERaM
21.Learning from Elon Musk. Model the traits, not the person. Good stuff here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad2owphPILY&t=144s
22.The man exemplifying founder mode. New CEO of Opendoor. Or refounding mode. I was super impressed by this conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZlmsA4Bzk0
23."Important I think though is Europe understanding the specific prime threat - Russia - and the likes of the U.K., France, Italy perhaps not getting sidelined by broader defence ambitions. Russia is the threat and the question is how do we defend the U.K.’s shores and Europe against that specific threat. Surely with a population four times the size of Russia, and a combined GDP perhaps fifteen times, Europe can get its act together and fill the void left by the U.S.
But critically I think we need to cast off the feint hopes still that the U.S. still shares the same interests or values, or if not now will mean revert very shortly. No, what happens if it does not? We have to assume the worst, and plan for that now. If we don’t then the U.K. and Europe will be on the menu in the Great Power World seemingly craved now by Trump, Putin and Xi."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/daddy-killed-nato
24."Despite a global bull market in energy and a shortage of liquefied natural gas (LNG) caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s attacks on Qatar’s LNG export facilities, spot prices for natural gas in the Permian Basin traded at deeply negative levels throughout the war.
Front-month prices at the more commonly cited Henry Hub also ground lower as the war dragged on, and currently fetch an energy-equivalent price of approximately $16 per barrel of oil. Why? Because globally elevated oil prices spur more drilling, which produces more associated natural gas than the market can handle."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/price-discovery
25."The disconnect between the epicenter of AI (San Francisco, and. more broadly, a certain subsection of Twitter) and the rest of the world is just wild. The former truly believes we’re on the verge of a world-changing paradigm shift. The latter just doesn’t care. Perception doesn’t just shape reality; it is reality. And, really, I think both can be true. In a world that lives and dies by the power of bits, well, yeah, an automatic bit generator certainly changes everything, doesn’t it?
But in a world that just wants its Uber to arrive on time, (or, even better, a Waymo with no mystery man behind the wheel), which is most of the “real world,” by the way, some super-powered coding assistant is just, like, irrelevant. And that’s what’s funny about this whole AI boom: most people don’t care. And, hysterically, they don’t have to care. I mean, like, yes, they could, hypothetically, get a lot of leverage from all of this stuff. But does it “really” matter? I’m honestly not sure."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-189218441
26.Wide ranging conversation and wisdom here. How to think and live better. By Naval: The philosopher king of Silicon Valley. (outside of Peter Thiel).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TafDme-GCc
27."Let’s recap. Most early-stage innovation comes from biotechs. But the primary exit strategy for biotechs is to sell to pharma, rather than to incur the costs of late-stage development and commercialization themselves.
This is arguably a good setup for both parties. Biotechs can have a laser focus on R&D. And there are less duplicative efforts to build massive sales forces for every company. Pharma can amortize these costs, putting “multiple products in the bag of sales reps” in a way that single-product drug companies cannot.
But there are consequences. One major issue is that the preferences and risk tolerance of big pharma can bound the set of ideas that biotech companies pursue. In other words, taste can be top down rather than bottom up."
https://centuryofbio.com/p/eroom
28."The strike campaign alone does not win Ukraine the war, nor does it eliminate Russia’s economic potential. Russia’s refining capacity remains among the largest in the world, with excess capacity to buffer the domestic fuel supply. Gasoline prices have risen, and export bans have been imposed intermittently, but fuel availability has not collapsed. Some manufacturing and processing capacity is also being dispersed eastward, beyond the reach of Ukrainian long-range drones and cruise missiles.
These points are valid, but these efforts cannot shield Russia’s war-industrial system from the blow. Dispersal is slow, costly, and logistically inefficient; it does not restore destroyed capacity and introduces supply chain friction that compounds production shortfalls. Capital expenditure on new facilities also reduces fiscal resources available for the primary war effort. Surplus capacity was already being drawn down before the deep-strike campaign intensified in 2026. Most critically, export infrastructure cannot be relocated. Primorsk, Ust-Luga, and Novorossiysk are fixed assets that will remain as vulnerable as they are central to Russia’s economy.
The cumulative effects of these constraints are real, bearing meaningfully on Russia’s budget and planning even if they fall short of collapsing its capacity to wage war. In this regard, the analogy to the Allied strategic bombing campaign against the Nazi German war economy in World War II, which I have drawn previously, remains as valid as ever.
The success of Ukraine’s effort cannot be judged solely by the absolute reduction in output achieved. It must be judged against what remains of Russian capacity relative to where it would be without the campaign. Nazi German war-industrial output continued to rise through mid-1944, yet remained significantly below what it would have been absent Allied bombing. Similarly, Russian oil-related revenues have not collapsed, but are measurably lower than they would otherwise be, and the Russian state’s fiscal planning around oil income has been materially undermined."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/ukraines-deep-strike-drone-campaign
29."Here’s the thing that doesn’t get talked about enough. The downstream effect of having real hobbies isn’t just personal wellbeing or evolutionary signalling. It’s that it makes you a fundamentally more interesting person to be around and to talk to.
The most magnetic people you’ve ever met weren’t necessarily the most successful or the best looking or the most conventionally impressive. They had texture. They’d done things and made things and tried things. They’d failed at things publicly and kept going. And when they talked you wanted to listen because every story they told was connected to something they’d actually lived rather than something they’d consumed.
Hobbies give you material. Not in a calculated, strategic way. In the natural way that a life actually lived produces things worth saying."
https://lifemaxxers.substack.com/p/no-hobbies-no-stories-to-tell
30.What an interesting list of European cities for families.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-193981261?source=queue
31."From 2023 to 2025, the dominant logic of the AI industry was simple: whoever controls the most compute wins. Companies raced to stockpile H100s. Hyperscalers poured hundreds of billions into data centers. The implicit assumption was that the biggest model, trained on the most data, on the most hardware, would capture most of the value.
That assumption is now wrong.
In mid 2026, the ratio of inference spend to training spend is approaching 10:1. The models exist. The question now is who gets paid to run them—and at what margin. We’ve moved from a scarcity of compute to a scarcity of margin. The strategic competition has migrated from who can build the biggest brain to who can deliver intelligence at the lowest marginal cost and highest reliability."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-3-year-inference-landscape-a
32."The Creator Economy is actually the trust economy.
The person who has the most trust wins.
You build trust, nurture relationships, and sell your products through long-form content.
Podcasts, newsletters, guides, and YouTube long-form.
You get to show people you actually know what you’re saying (because a beginner won’t be able to be so persuasive and demonstrate such high understanding of the topic like you).
You also get to build trust because you also share personal perspectives with your audience. This will repel a few people, but it will attract a lot more people.
Create a genuinely helpful product (one that you wish had existed before in your life) and ask your audience, those who have the same problem as you, to support you and your work by buying your products.
You’ll make more money and have more control over your income and lifestyle than relying on a platform that doesn’t care about you.
Productize yourself."
https://hussainibarra.substack.com/p/the-world-economy-is-fcked-right
33.What a refreshing conversation. Very interesting and alternative take on building a massive company. This is a must watch. I'll be rewatching this a few times. It's the anti-Silicon Valley VC approach and I love it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFIvttHf0oo&t=67s
34.This seems to be an optimistic take. Hope it's the case.
"Washington enters the cease-fire holding all the cards: military dominance, financial strangulation and a regional architecture that has isolated Tehran from the Arab world it once sought to mobilize.
Iran’s response has been to threaten the Strait of Hormuz, the final lever a regime reaches for when it has exhausted all others. That threat is a measure of desperation, not strength.
The operation has not concluded, but the conditions for Iranian defeat are in place.
The entity that emerges from what comes next will bear little resemblance to the Islamic Republic that launched its doctrine of resistance four decades ago. What remains depends entirely on whether Tehran meets Trump’s terms."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/how-irans-mosaic-doctrine-is-fracturing
35.Basic etiquette for founders in Silicon Valley. Basic but surprisingly not common. Fun convo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp2xAwDUIB4
36.Ukraine as a winner coming out of the Iran war right now.