Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 7th, 2026
“Success isn't always about greatness. It's about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.”— Dwayne Johnson
American Icon Alex Karp. Always outspoken and quotable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wj6ttdIeBnE&t=67s
2.Inspiring and insightful. CTO of Palantir. AI, Reindustrialization and war.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB9V8d3ZYbc&t=8s
3.Trying to understand Trump 2.0's geo-strategic goals. Crazy like the fox?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3iqJQP8Y6w
4."One technique we have used to cut through disinformation and psych-ops is to navigate social media sites like Twitter/X using curated lists, segmented by political bent or point of view. To gain entry onto one of these lists, an account must regularly post interesting and relevant information, even if we wildly disagree with it. To remain on the list is simple: resist the temptation to create or propagate clearly fake information. What is the pro-renewables crowd telling itself today? The oil industry? The European elite? The Make America Great Again crew? As a tool of analysis, this approach is truly invaluable.
Another useful truth-finding method is inspecting how the same event is covered by various international outlets, especially useful during times when a single topic—like a terrorist attack or the snatching of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro—is dominating the global news cycle. Historically, our approach has been limited to reading English-language versions of major media periodicals in foreign countries—especially adversarial ones. Doing so provides insights missed or purposely minimized in legacy Western media."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/digital-fog
5."I believe Sam Altman is broken and, worse, could break us. In life there are “tells,” moments and behaviors that provide insight into a person’s character: How they treat their pets; if they make eye contact with service staff; how they talk about their ex. Responding to a question re the energy needs of AI, Sam highlighted how much energy and effort is required to raise a human capable of critical thinking. This is the tell. He embodies what I believe is most concerning about the virus that’s infected Big Tech: For them, ROI supersedes humanity.
The whole shooting match in life is to find people and causes who will let you love and invest in them, who require and accept a great deal from you — possibly more than you’ll ever get back. For me, it’s raising children with a partner, and the reward is the absence of any ROI. It’s the opportunity to invest without the expectation of any return other than that they, someday, become agents of care and comfort for others. AI, GDP, and shareholder value are just the means. The ends are being in a position to give more than you can ever get."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/the-resistance-comes-for-openai
6."The irony of the American supply chain is we have everything we need to vertically integrate, be cost competitive, and serve our domestic and international markets.
America has all the feedstocks for nitrogen chemistry. We have cheap electricity. We have limestone. We have coal. We have natural gas. We have next generation processes to make chemicals with greater efficiency, purity, and output. We have the best scientists and engineers in the world.
This is not a rewind to the past. We can build modernized, automated, high throughput factories that are platforms for massive GDP growth for the rest of the century.
This requires capital, chemistry, and the will to build."
https://www.broscienceclub.com/p/why-creatine-supply-is-essential
7. "When entrepreneurs ask whether they should prioritize product value or revenue growth in the early days, my answer is almost always product value. If the cofounding team is exceptionally strong and financial resources are deep, pursuing both at the same time may be possible. For most entrepreneurs, however, the better path is to go deep on product value while keeping distribution lighter, maintaining enough customers to iterate quickly.
Once the switch flips and it becomes clear that the product delivers tremendous, must-have value to customers, that is the moment to go all in on product distribution."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/03/14/product-value-vs-product-distribution-in-the-early-days/
8."Modern culture often celebrates comfort and convenience. We are told to seek out pleasure and be true to ourselves. Roosevelt’s life reminds us that a meaningful life requires something far more demanding.
He believed that men should strive to build strength, discipline, and courage in all of our actions. This is not for wealth or personal glory, but for the benefit of the communities they serve. Roosevelt once wrote:
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much.”
In a society that often discourages ambition and discipline, Roosevelt’s message remains extremely relevant to us today. We must dare mighty things, even if we might fail. Not just for us, but for our friends, our families, and our communities."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/what-theodore-roosevelt-can-teach
9.Terrifying view of drones and war in the future. Unfortunately the future is here. Lots of takes here also from the frontlines of Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se4wi2-quaM
10."First, the market adopted the narrative that AI capex results in value creation — bidding up all layers in the AI stack. But the jury is still out on whether this massive capex spend will result in lasting value creation for every layer.
Second, the market is adopting the narrative that the “Cost of Intelligence” is deflating fast — soon to be worth zero. The adoption of this narrative by the market is the stock crash of every company considered to be under threat from AI proliferation."
https://www.philoinvestor.com/p/laas-layoffs-as-a-service
11.A cold hard look at the venture capital & the PE business right now. Worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPaWW0IDurI
12. This movie looks good. The story of Tamerlane.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVP-1XjTSmY
13.Dollar endgame debate. Fascinating conversation on where the USD is going and what is going on with the global reset.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-ZHu5IW_p8&t=2497s
14."Humans evolved to adapt to change over generations, not months or weeks.
Our psychological system is wildly adaptable but it evolved to digest these shifts when we have gradual technological change, stable communities, predictable life paths and clear cultural narratives.
That’s not the world we live in today. And it’s left many of us feeling shell-shocked."
https://thewakeupcallnewsletter.substack.com/p/the-psychological-cost-of-acceleration
15."Here’s what nobody tells you about developing taste: it doesn’t stay in its lane.
Once your pattern recognition sharpens, it starts applying itself everywhere. Not because you decided to apply it. Because the algorithm generalizes.
People. You start seeing who has substance versus who has performance. The same eye that recognizes a well-proportioned car starts recognizing a well-built character. You stop being impressed by volume and start being drawn to signal quality. The people you spend time with change. Not because you’re being elitist, but because you can see more clearly.
Work and business. You start seeing which companies are structurally excellent versus which ones are marketing shells propped up by narrative. Which products have a real floor versus which ones are hype cycles. Taste in business is the ability to see through positioning and evaluate the thing itself. It’s a better filter than any framework you’ll learn in a classroom.
How you spend your time. This is the big one. Taste applied to your own life is the willingness to look at the default path, the one that says defer everything, optimize for security, save the living for later, and recognize that it’s badly designed. It lacks the same qualities you’d reject in a car: balance, proportion, intentionality.
Taste becomes the filter for everything. And the sharper that filter gets, the better every decision that passes through it becomes."
https://hayescarrera.substack.com/p/taste-is-a-skill
16. "In my work with founders and CEOs, one of the most common patterns I see is the same one I know well in myself: an identification with pushing through, taking the hard way, and getting the job done no matter the cost.
It shows up as a willingness to white-knuckle our way through things. To sacrifice ourselves for the good of the company, the good of others, or the good of our families.
For many of the leaders I meet, this pattern has historically served them well. It helped them stay safe in their families of origin. It helped them contribute in ways that kept the family system steady. It helped them earn their way into great schools and early jobs where they achieved outsized things.
This was true for me, too.
But many of these same people eventually reach a moment when this white-knuckled, self-sacrificing approach begins to drive their lives, or their companies, into the ground."
https://www.mattmunson.me/white-knuckling/
17."In any case, there is no future for any AI company that uses a subscription-based approach, at least not one where they don’t directly pass on the cost of compute.
This is a huge problem for both Anthropic and OpenAI, as their scurrilous growth-lust means that they’ve done everything they can to get customers used to paying a single monthly cost that directly obfuscates the cost of doing business.
I need to be very direct about what this means, because it’s very important and rarely if ever discussed.
A user of ChatGPT or Claude Code is only thinking of “tokens” or “compute” in the most indirect sense — a vague awareness of the model using something to do something else, totally unmoored from the customer’s use of the product. All they see is the monthly subscription cost ($20, $100, or $200-a-month) and rate limits that vaguely say you have X% of your five-hour allowance left. Users are not educated in (nor are they thinking about) their “token burn” or burden on the company, because software has basically never made them do so in the past.
This means it will be very, very difficult to increase subscription costs on users, and near-impossible to convince them to pay the cost of the API. It’s like if Uber, which had charged $20-a-month for unlimited rides, suddenly started charging users their drivers’ gas costs, and gas was at around $250 a gallon.
That might not even do the price disparity justice. This theoretical example still involves users being in the back of a car and being driven a distance, and that said driving costs gas. Token burn is an obtuse, irregular process involving a per-million input and output tokens, with the latter increasing when you use reasoning models, which use output tokens to break down how it might handle a task. "
https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-are-we-still-doing-this/
18.Lightning interview: a fun yet fascinating look into a brilliant industrialist’s brain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZfW3YTJ5Eg
19.This conversation makes me much more confident in the DoW and our Neo-Primes. We need to get our mojo back. It's a will & morale problem, not a capability issue in America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itdv5IKN2P4
20."This is, fundamentally, the work of venture capital. At its best, investing is not the allocation of capital to known outcomes—it is the identification of individuals and ideas operating at the boundary of the map. Great investors are not simply pattern matchers; they are frontier detectors. They look for the non-consensus, the contrarian, the ideas that do not yet fit cleanly within existing frameworks precisely because those frameworks lag reality. The goal is not to fund what is already legible, but to recognize what will become legible. The goal is not to be contrarian for its own sake, but to back explorers pushing the frontiers of new territory, building the map of where humanity is perhaps already going, but more importantly, desires to go.
In an AI-driven world, this role becomes even more critical. If AI excels at navigating and optimizing within the known map, then the highest-leverage human activity shifts toward expanding that map. The entrepreneur becomes an explorer—someone who ventures into domains that are under-explored, misunderstood, or entirely new. And the investor becomes a backer of expeditions, placing bets not on certainty, but on the possibility that the territory itself is larger than we currently understand."
https://ideas.scotthartley.com/p/investing-at-the-edge-of-the-map
21.This was fascinating. Don't agree with everything said but this was an encyclopedic review of the technology business and history. Lots to learn here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBVe3M2g_SA&t=3590s
22.Special Ops will be very busy in Latam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOF1etsAGxI
23."I know. You want to get rich as fast as possible. You want to live your dream life with total freedom and never worry about problems again.
But I’ll tell you the truth: Life is going to test you with absolute intensity. You will have to overcome massive challenges and face your deepest fears.
Is that fair?
It doesn’t matter.
That is how life works. These are the rules of nature, and we must respect them."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-191252641
24."The ultimate status symbol is being known as the person who is “impossible to read” but “always delivers.” It signals that you have successfully decoupled your Internal Fortress from the external noise. While others are busy being “relatable,” the Sovereign is busy being Indisputable."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-empathy-debt
25.Two generational founder legends. TK & Michael Dell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y7TTU1jIvk&t=2609s
26.What a week. Lots of crazy news in Silicon Valley and some of the best takes too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTuS7Ns8cZg
27."I believe Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka each have the potential to be patient zero. Among European banks, HSBC and Standard Chartered are most exposed. The Middle East accounts for 9% of HSBC’s revenue and 12% of Standard Chartered’s profit before tax — different metrics, same direction of risk. Barclays, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, ING, and Société Générale have limited exposure, at less than 1% of revenue. The danger, however, is one the markets can’t see.
The IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report, published just months before the war began, warned explicitly about “limited visibility into balance sheets and the interconnectedness of nonbank financial institutions.” Debt crises share a common feature: The threat isn’t the institution or nation that defaults first, but the opaque financial instruments that make everyone else an unwitting co-signer. The unknown unknowns aren’t the emerging economies, they’re derivatives in Zurich, London, or New York that nobody stress-tested for $110 oil."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/patients-zero
28."Analysts warn that the longer the Strait stays closed, the more Asia's supply shortage becomes everyone's problem. Supply chains don't respect national borders. The factories making your phone, the ships bringing your goods, the airlines pricing your flights - they all run on Brent-priced oil."
https://tradinglessons.beehiiv.com/p/why-more-u-s-oil-cheaper-gas
29."The same forces that enabled American dominance—globalization, digitization, commercial innovation, and networked systems—are now enabling its competitors.
And, increasingly, opportunistic adversaries.
This is the central tension shaping the future of warfare:
Innovation creates advantage. Proliferation destroys exclusivity.
The United States is still operating as if technological superiority can be sustained.
Its adversaries are operating under a different assumption:
That parity is inevitable—and asymmetry is the path to victory.
This is the essence of national security arbitrage.
And it suggests that the future of warfare will not be decided by who builds the most advanced systems but by who best adapts to a world where advanced technology is no longer an advantage—only a baseline."
https://buildingourfuture.substack.com/p/the-end-of-technological-overmatch
30."The lasting lesson of this war should be that drones, decentralization and the proximity to vulnerable systems, can allow a weaker adversary to achieve a level of deterrence against larger foes that is similar to building nuclear weapons.
PS: Drone deterrence is something Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and S. Korea should seriously consider. A conventional alternative to developing nuclear weapons."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/drone-deterrence
31."On a revenue per employee basis, the AI native companies are crushing. This is doubly impressive when you consider that every single one of their legacy competitors is frantically adding as many AI features as they can, and it isn’t slowing down the startups.
So the top-line story is clear: AI native companies are more efficient, and they’re winning despite every incumbent scrambling to catch up. But here’s what keeps me up at night, and why I worry more for the readers of this publication than for anyone else in the ecosystem.
If these investors and founders are wrong about AI native, the bubble pops with an unholy level of force, and tech careers take years to recover. If they are right, then betting correctly on the right AI startup, repositioning your investment portfolio, and timing your next career move could make this the most lucrative decade of your life."
https://www.gettheleverage.com/p/ai-native-or-death-choose
32."I think most men are walking around with a version of themselves they’ve never met. The version that would exist if they stopped making decisions based on what’s expected and started making them based on what they actually want. That version is more interesting, more confident, and more alive. Not because he owns different stuff. Because he stopped outsourcing his choices to other people’s opinions.
Cary Grant said it better than anyone. He was a poor kid from Bristol who decided to become the most sophisticated man in Hollywood. His method was simple: he pretended he was already that man until one day, he was. “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person,” he said. “Or he became me.”
People hear that and think it sounds fake. It’s the opposite. It’s the most honest thing you can do. You decide who you want to be and you start making choices as that person. The alternative is what most people do, which is never decide at all. They wait for some external signal that they’ve earned the right to upgrade their own life. That signal never comes. So they stay the same. They stay safe. They stay boring. For decades."
https://hayescarrera.substack.com/p/why-owning-an-exotic-car-will-change
33."An antidote to this conformist establishmentarian- ism is to build right at the edge of science fiction, in earnestness, in the name of the family, the nation, and even God—and preferably to do it in the Gundo. “There is a natural pendulum swing,” Doricko tells me. “Kids are always going to be rebellious. And my cohort have been told for our whole lives, ‘You will own nothing, and you will be happy. You will have a remote, e-mail job. You will not see any meaningful technological progress in your lifetime. You will eat bugs.’ A lot of the Gundo is about bringing together high-agency, assertive guys who are rebelling against the narrative we’ve been fed for so long.
Such a small place, and with so few people. Does it have a chance to survive the colossal forces sapping California of its vitality: the debt, the taxes, and the bureaucratic barbarism of the state’s dysfunctional, regulation-obsessed government? Don’t they know that history is determined by forces beyond their control? I fear that the Gundo may be California’s last gasp of creative energy. “We’re just a couple kids in El Segundo,” says Taylor. “But it’s always a small group of people that make history. It was decisions that individuals made that led to America’s decline, so why not the turnaround? It’s just people making those decisions.”
https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-next-arsenal-of-democracy
34."El Segundo is one of many towns that make up the suburban sprawl of the region, and it has a history even more industrial than most. Chevron has a refinery there. Major defense contractors have had facilities there for decades.
Entrepreneurs love El Segundo too.
The founders there, as I’ve engaged with them directly and watched them on social media, are not like the founders I see daily in Silicon Valley, or San Francisco, or on university campuses across America.
They have a distinct “type”.
https://aaronpickard.substack.com/p/moral-hazard-is-good-for-founders
35.Big week in Silicon Valley. Lots of cool stuff happening on the tech side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYJawV55QcU&t=158s
36.The Defense space through the eye of a growth stage investor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlwFBsBxbWg
37."You have a choice. You can keep moving through this world reacting to things, chasing approval, surrounded by people who’d forget your name if you stopped being convenient. Or you can start building something that makes every room you walk into shift in your direction. Something that earns loyalty so deep that men would go to war for you. Something that makes your woman feel so safe and so proud that losing you becomes the most terrifying thought she carries.
Vito Corleone is fiction. But the philosophy he represents has been running the world since men first organized into tribes. Give before you take. Control your emotions when everyone around you is losing theirs. Say no when the whole room says yes. Build your power through warmth, through loyalty, through the kind of calculated patience that most men will never have the discipline to practice.
That man isn’t born.
He’s built.
One decision at a time.
Starting this week.
Get to Vito Corleonemaxxing."
https://www.thefinalman.com/p/you-need-to-be-vito-corleonemaxxing
38."Because oil and gas supplies for international markets have been significantly disrupted, those 15,000 US chemical facilities have become incredibly strategic. That’s especially true when you consider that the United States is a net oil and gas exporter. In other words, it’s possible that the final products that specialty chemical companies in the US produce could have massive margins when selling their products in to the world market. Cheaper US oil and gas inputs with more expensive specialty chemical outputs.
The war in Iran has created massive volatility, but it might also be making a structural advantage for American manufacturers. Cheaper domestic energy means fatter margins on the output side, especially when global competitors in the Middle East are offline.
It’s simple alchemy: low-cost feedstock in, premium-priced specialty chemicals out, sold into a world that suddenly has a shortage.
But not every name will capture this opportunity. The winners will be the ones with integrated US plants, strong balance sheets, and exposure to end-markets that stay resilient no matter how crazy energy prices get (think agriculture, autos, electronics, and infrastructure). That’s where the real opportunity sits right now."
https://mailchi.mp/f767f98a5949/ais-fantasy-season-13945134?e=cd1ba0eb1a
39. Lots of geopolitics and defense-tech stuff but also lots of random things. It’s fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-qhcM6EZOY&t=118s
40."The principle is the same at every scale: the space in which you live should reflect and reinforce what you believe. One’s home should speak with you.
The particular danger of our age is that comfort itself has become an enemy of conviction. The American case is instructive. The American character was forged in confrontation with the land — the frontier, the homestead, the church as the first building raised in a new settlement. The harshness of the environment demanded a response, and that response was saturated with faith because faith was the only thing adequate to the demand."