Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 10th, 2026
“Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.”-- Kahil Gibran
"We are conditioned to seek “External Validation” for our ideas. If people like it, we think it’s good. If they ignore it, we think it’s a failure. This is a Strategic Error. When you rely on the crowd to tell you what is valuable, you are outsourcing your Taste to the average. And the average is, by definition, mediocre. Praise is a cage that forces you to repeat your past successes; criticism is a wall that prevents your future ones. Both are noise."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-validation-trap
2.US Navy forward positioning in Australia as plan B ie. when the breakdown of globalization is in full effect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UeDdWm-8-s
3.Klarna CEO is on the bleeding edge of adopting AI. Klarna has been leading the charge of AI in his company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7vIRAFSXmk&t=2169s
4."Scarcity generates pleasure, anxiety, and purpose. But a world that is post-scarcity in the sense that there is more than enough material resources for everyone will still have another form of scarcity—people’s respect, admiration, attention, desire, and love.
The bad news about a post-scarcity utopia is that we will still be unhappy much of the time. The good news is that our lives will still have meaning."
https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/assistant-to-the-regional-manager
5.Managing the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund. Learning from the best investors & how to thrive in the age of AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyvuM3J9QqQ
6. Fun convo this week. Openclaw, Ferrari & Jony Ives & Winter Olympics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x43XMee7-Kk
7.Lots of implications of India and others taking apart the Oil Shadow fleet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJdFi0rvj8M
8."It’s easy to sneer at the folly of billionaires and tyrants surrounded by yes-men stumbling into preventable catastrophes.
Harder to acknowledge that we ourselves are vulnerable to the same forces which blind us from our own self-authored missteps, surrounded by those who see our flaws clearly but chose silence over uncomfortable conversations.
Now pause and turn the mirror inward one more level.
Consider not just the times you stayed silent about someone else’s unforced error higher up the gradient - but the times you committed a preventable error, perhaps years ago, that only became clear in hindsight through delayed consequences, external events, or someone finally letting slip what they’d long observed."
https://kaichang.substack.com/p/the-distortion-field-why-power-makes
9.The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (+ Pakistan-Turkey-Egypt) versus UAE (+Israel-Ethiopia, maybe India?). Growing rivalry in the MENA region.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3G6tDycuz8
10.Some good takes on investing in AI by the 8 VC team.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aETqFYCrIoA
11.Lots of great frameworks and perspectives on how to do comms right for founders. We are in the age of narrative and founders have a huge advantage if they do this right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Njb8Lw5Xc
12."One of the most overlooked lessons from If Russia Wins is that deterrence in the 21st century is as much an industrial and financial challenge as a military one. Masala’s scenario does not hinge on technological surprise, but on speed, scale, and endurance: Russia rebuilds its military capacity faster than Western policymakers expect, while Europe’s defence ecosystem remains fragmented, under-capitalised, and slow to adapt.
The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that modern deterrence depends not only on traditional military hardware but on technological innovations: unmanned systems, AI-enabled targeting, secure communications, cyber defence, satellite intelligence, and agile manufacturing. These are domains where startups and private capital can outperform traditional defence contractors."
https://resiliencemedia.co/if-russia-wins-lessons-for-the-uk-and-europe/
13.Some good insights on geopolitics right now. From one of top analysts from BCA Research.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYrdjsOKqO8
14.Geopolitical uncertainty. Some diversification outside of the USA is probably a good idea, particularly in Emerging markets like Latam, India & Eastern Europe and SE Asia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYrdjsOKqO8
15.Kind of dark but a cold hard look at the world. The leadership of Canada, the UK and EU are a "tornado of incompetence."
In the US, our leadership is just ultra corrupt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMkxlJfIb4
16.All things AI, energy & Semiconductor chips. This was a fascinating convo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqBMzuzxZog
17.This show helps you make sense of the crazy news in Silicon Valley. Always worth watching every week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVfDfse13es
18."If you can get the same objective results from hitting the gym 3 times per week, why would you want to get that same outcome training twice a day, 7 days a week?
When you start to think in this lens, it allows you to think more about output over how many hours you clock in.
It’s time to start admiring the man who gets what he wants as effortlessly as possible.
Who surgically works to build results.
Who doesn’t waste years, ‘doing it his way’, but instead learns from world class mentors & practitioners who can speed up their development.
If you’re in a phase of your life now where all you feel you’re doing is grinding, sit back & really analyse…. Is this mode of operating really giving me results?"
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/why-grinding-is-overrated
19."But for many who outwardly appear successful and agentic, their agency is actually narrowly contained within psychological ‘hidden walls’. Other domains and challenges which are patently important are never even considered as targets of action because there has been no subconscious reification of personal efficacy in these domains.
Wealthy and powerful men will live their whole lives in ugly places which need beautification, sterile communities which need family formation, and social groups with declining standards which need to be reversed. But in these domains, they self-conceptualize as object, rather than agent. They don’t even think about changing them, let alone mounting a head-on attack.
Whatever your views on them, true agency is exemplified in our age by figures like Trump and Elon. In 2015, Trump presented a vision of America’s future which was completely at odds with orthodoxy, and the execution of which alienated him from polite society. He wasn’t even a politician—but he did it.
Pretty much all of Elon’s enterprises are characterized by attempting radical breakthroughs in languishing domains—most of which he is not a personal expert in before he gets involved; and yet he consistently finds tremendous success. Buying Twitter to personally guarantee free speech is high agency.
Most of us will not be the next Trump or Elon. But we can calibrate ambitions accordingly."
https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/our-low-agency-elite
20.Was an educational conversation on the economy. Good for global macro investors. “The world is run by thieves.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC3eM69jn0Y
21."When does life change drastically?
The general answer is that it happens once you escape "survival mode". Those with a tougher upbringing will have a harder time getting out of it than those who had it easier. To explain our point further, if your parents always had to think about how they would put food on the table. There is a good chance that you were consistently operating in survival mode.
On the other hand if you grew up in more comfortable surroundings where you went skiing once a year or always had a travel abroad… There is a good chance your parents didn’t operate fully in survival mode. To get back to our point. Once you get out of survival mode, you finally have time to think about the things you never considered before. This is where mental, mindset and other woo-woo stuff make sense. Why? Because you finally have time to think about them instead of worrying about whether you can pay the bills."
https://www.beautyofsaas.com/p/faq-how-to-escape-the-mediocrity-and-rise-above-the-average
22."Skills are for interactive conversations. Code is for agents. Skills are easier to debug. When a skill fails, you know exactly where to look. When an agent chains ten function calls & the output is wrong, you’re hunting through logs."
https://tomtunguz.com/9-observations-using-ai-agents/
23."Nothing ever happens unless you cause it to.
Nothing good ever just falls into your lap.
You have to make your own luck.
You have to take ownership of your own life."
https://substack.com/@colejaczko/p-188521648
24.I always get energized when I listen to David Senra. "The Hard way is the Right way."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PBgbS0N86I
25. "In the end, the real threat to taste isn’t AI - it’s the way content keeps trying to package it. The more we polish it for virality, the more we strip it of what made it powerful in the first place.
Developing taste means actively resisting the gravitational pull of popular consensus and algorithmic predictability. It means allowing yourself to be guided by intuition and curiosity rather than the expectation of external validation. It means being conscious and careful about the clothes you buy, the books you read, the music you listen to. Above all, it means learning.
Taste doesn’t just come from liking things.
It comes from disliking things - and knowing why."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-169036769
26."I am talking, of course, about the status game.
This game is inside us. We can’t help but play it. For millions of years, high status meant better mates, more food, greater security. Low status meant genetic extinction, inceldom, zero hoes.
Status-seeking is hardwired into our brains. It is universal, but its expression is context-dependent. What codes as high status varies by ecological niche. In the Stone Age, Cro-Magnon man would stomp, yell, and flex in front of women. This was scarcely more sophisticated than a silverback gorilla thumping his chest. Me strong. Me loud. Me get woman.
Suffice to say, this ooga booga behavior wouldn’t be appreciated by members of the Royal Sydney Yacht Club. In rarefied environments, displays of raw strength are vulgar. They signal an unfortunate proximity to the brutish classes. But in other ecological niches, chest-thumping codes as ‘alpha’ rather than apish. El monstruo Texano drives around in a RAM and injects steroids. Like his paleolithic ancestors, he signals status through physical dominance. In the American south, this is an adaptive strategy. In America’s coastal regions, it is uncouth, proleish, and irredeemably low status.
In short, status is contextual. What’s considered high-status in one environment can be irredeemably low-status in another. There isn’t a singular way to be high status. To quote W. David Marx, ‘There is a Hollywood entertainment mogul way of being high status that is distinct from that of Texan oil magnates.’"
https://substack.com/home/post/p-174511393
27.I know there is a negative slant from loser mainstream media on the tech industry. But I also get the reason people hate the tech bros. This article exemplifies both leanings. FTR as long time SV guy: Roy Lee and his ilk are awful POSs.
"What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before.
For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.
The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley"
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/
28."Fortunately for the Taiwanese, there’s a possible workaround for the ammo problem. Taiwan may be struggling to stash enough artillery rounds, but there’s nothing stopping it from stockpiling a new alternative: tiny explosive drones. Taiwan’s high-tech industry could produce these in huge numbers and without outside help.
These drones would be even more important in the alarming scenario where Taiwan fought alone—even if it only temporarily fought alone. But a pivot to drones should begin now."
29."Every mistake above is actually the same mistake: confusing access to the commodity with a competitive advantage.
Intelligence is the commodity. I want that to land, so I’ll say it one more time as plainly as I can: the thing everyone is racing to adopt is the thing that will differentiate absolutely no one.
What won’t be commoditized:
distribution
domain knowledge
customer trust
brand, and
the ability to aim intelligence at exactly the right problem in a specific market.
That’s it. That’s the whole list. And it’s a short one."
https://vikrantduggal.substack.com/p/intelligence-is-cheap-now
30."But what is Project Vault, precisely? Think of it less as a government program and more as a structured insurance product for American industry. Participating manufacturers pay upfront commitment fees, essentially a security premium, in exchange for guaranteed access to stockpiled raw materials during defined market disruptions. They cover storage costs. They can draw down inventory for normal operations, provided they replenish it. The architecture borrows from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but the ambition is considerably broader: all 60 minerals on the U.S. Geological Survey’s Critical Minerals List, covering everything from lithium to rare earths, the inputs that underpin modern manufacturing, defense systems, and the clean energy transition.
Critically, and this is a distinction worth understanding, Project Vault is not the National Defense Stockpile. It is not, primarily, a military program. It is demand-led, built around civilian and commercial industry, a point made plain by the roster of initial participants: Boeing, GE Vernova, Clarios, and Western Digital. General Motors, Stellantis, Corning, and Google have reportedly expressed interest. With the exception of Boeing’s defense arm, this is, at its core, a commercial play dressed in the language of national security.
The private capital in the deal flows from three trading houses — Hartree Partners, Mercuria Energy Americas, and Traxys — firms whose core competency is exactly the kind of global commodity logistics that a program of this complexity demands. They will serve as the procurement engine, sourcing and moving raw materials through supply chains that the federal government has historically shown little aptitude for managing directly."
https://matthewbernard776320.substack.com/p/project-vault
31.Lots of good takes this week. The continuing AI wars in Silicon Valley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CewrGGMjRI
32.I've had my issues with Chamath but this is pretty wise stuff. You can learn from anyone, even if you dislike them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-LAT4HjWPo
33."For the European services that failed to foresee the invasion, a period of soul-searching followed. One European intelligence officer said they were furious over the failure and had pushed internally for an inquiry into what could have been done better. “The whole raison d’etre of an intelligence service is to predict when the next war will come,” said the officer. “And we completely messed it up.”
Huw Dylan, a historian of intelligence at King’s College London, said there was a long history of intelligence analysts being unwilling to predict that future events will create a dramatic break with the past. People could not imagine what a major European land war would look like in the 21st century, so assumed it was unlikely to happen. Additionally, scepticism is usually the safer option. “If you’re predicting something that has massive implications, you’ve got more to answer for if you get it wrong,” he said.
The Ukraine failure has started to change that. As one German official put it: “The main thing we took away from all of this was that we need to work with worst-case scenarios much more than we did before.”
Now, as the world has entered a new era of uncertainty, there are more worst-case scenarios to ponder. Recent European military exercises have focused on how to maintain order after massive attacks on power and communications infrastructure that cause civil unrest. For the first time in a century, Canada is modelling potential responses to a US invasion.
For many, the key intelligence lesson from Ukraine was stark: do not rule things out, just because they might once have seemed impossible."
34.Michael Every is one of the best geopolitical analysts around. This was pretty helpful to figure out where Europe may be going. The likelihood of fragmentation is high. Trump doing reverse Perestroika in the USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlklWpxw7zo
35.Helping to decipher Trump's moves globally and at home. Lots of huge implications and various scenarios via "reverse Perestroika". This is a must to watch for global macro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JHrddtDqbA
36."What happens when the skill you spent your life learning can be done at 80% proficiency by a novice in a matter of minutes. We’re already there across most disciplines. AI and robotics will eventually flatten all surface-level skills.
The skills that will matter in the future will be things like judgement, taste, the ability to make connections across disciplines, story telling and moral/ethical reasoning. Going back to the car example, the skills you will need will more closely mirror a navigator than that of the actual driver.
Taste, judgement, cross-disciplinary connections, story-telling and moral reasoning are much harder to foster. These require life experience, failures, interests in many different areas and a lot of time spent in contemplation. It will require you to understand how you actually view the world, what you stand for and who you are."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-188351223
37."The future is a fiction. The past is a graveyard. The only reality is the current system. Build for the kill, not for the history books."