Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 17th, 2026
“When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.”--Willie Nelson
"Startup activity itself remains strong. It has never been cheaper to build a product. The tools available to founders, especially AI-driven tools, dramatically lower the cost of experimentation and iteration. Robotics and intelligent hardware are also emerging as significant long-term trends.
We are at the beginning of another innovation cycle. Venture capital plays a role in a small fraction of startup formation. While VC is still digesting the excesses of the COVID-era bubble and concentrating capital in AI, particularly in large foundation model companies, entrepreneurship more broadly is alive and well.
The number of newly VC-backed startups may be down. The number of new startups, however, is not. The long-term outlook for builders remains bright."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/02/21/o-startup-where-are-thou-vc/
2. A masterclass in investing. Andrew Reed shares lots of learnings and experience working at Sequoia Capital.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JReNZ9X2IE0
3."maintain good posture. stand tall. get up from your desk and walk around, stretch, do light exercises.
do these things to reclaim your self respect. be a sovereign person. do not be owned by evil companies or influence. do not listen to the critics. build your life systems. make them habits. don’t let yourself talk you out of it. as you gain strength, it will require less energy to maintain."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-183942857
4."Real status - as it always has - comes from separating yourself from the masses and doing things they do not and ideally cannot do.
In the near future, that will increasingly mean being OFFLINE as much as possible.
Invisibility and ignorance will become not only luxury items, but virtues — noble and holy ones — acquired and refined through offline living.
Those who have no idea what’s happening online, or in the world for that matter, will be truly alive and elite.
Now, arguably this has always been the case with the upper upper echelons (as argued by Russel above), but in the last couple decades, the classes just below the absolute upper elite have been deriving status through online fame and ‘followings’
But…now that everyone is online…things are changing..
And the beautiful thing about value is that it always migrates to the zone of greatest scarcity."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-184949077
5."You are the genetically upgraded version of both your parents combined. Their best traits are alive in you, stacked on top of tools they never got to touch. The internet alone hands you more knowledge than the entire library system they grew up next to. You have AI, global reach, remote income, mentors you’ll never shake hands with but who can reroute your entire life with a single piece of advice. You have options that would’ve made your parents’ heads spin at your age.
The question is whether you keep running their outdated software or start writing your own code. Fulfilling your own upgraded and Dynastic Destiny.
And writing your own starts with the most uncomfortable thing a grown man can do.
Killing the boy inside him who still needs to hear his mother say it’s okay or his father approve before he makes a single move."
https://www.thefinalman.com/p/you-must-kill-the-boy-parents-edition
6."We keep hearing that AI will make execution easy. Code generation, content creation, workflow automation — the cost of building and shipping is collapsing toward zero. Great. But if execution becomes trivially cheap, the entire game shifts to prediction. Knowing what to build becomes the only competitive advantage. And what if the things most worth predicting are exactly the things that can’t be predicted?
This has practical implications. Companies banking on AI to replace strategic judgment are likely to be disappointed. The organizations that win won’t be the ones with the best prediction models. They’ll be the ones that combine cheap execution with rapid iteration — running the irreducible computation faster than their competitors by actually doing things and learning from what happens.
In other words, the future might not belong to those who predict best. It might belong to those who experiment fastest.
AI makes the experiments cheaper. But nobody gets to skip them."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/ais-dirty-secret-some-things-cant
7."Which game you play is obviously important and, often, the answer to many of your problems lies in finding a new game. Join a new team, find a new mountain to climb. Stop wasting time trying to fit your square ass into a circular hole. But more often than not, it’s how you play the game, and your approach, that matters more.
Psychology trumps strategy 80% of the time. Or in other words, knowing what to do is easy, especially in the age of free, infinite information: the hard part is doing it. That’s why fat people have bookshelves full of health, diet and fitness books or programs and courses that they signed up for but never followed through on. The hardest part is always the psychology and your outlook."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-151502957
8.Another OG and insider of insiders of Silicon Valley. Bret Taylor is at the center of all things enterprise and AI in SV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJwiP0zqVp4
9.A wide ranging conversation to understand global macro. The USD, Reindustrialization and the growing importance of the Office of Strategic Capital.
Put this together with Michael Every and you will have a good sense of the future of the world economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcaycr8iMKs&t=221s
10."The fear of the future is directly proportional to how small your ambitions are. If your plan is to keep doing exactly what you’re doing, any change is terrifying. If your plan is dramatically bigger, change is the best news you’ve ever gotten.
Red Robin just proved it in the public markets. Their stock collapsed 96% because management chose the spreadsheet over the customer. That’s what happens when you optimize for the 1.05x present instead of the 10x future you could be building."
https://garryslist.org/posts/red-robin-died-by-spreadsheet-don-t-make-the-same-mistake
11."When my partner and I were watching the Gala last night, he said it felt too tech-infused—it reminded him of The Jetsons, the 1960s cartoon with its relentless, cheerful obsession with a technological utopia. I think he's underselling it. What I see in China right now is closer to Victorian Britain: a society exuding moral seriousness and deep belief in modernization and technological uplift.
What connects these stories is what they reveal about disposition. The Chinese society, from a world-renowned auteur to the hundreds of millions watching the Gala, is broadly, strikingly optimistic about AI. The reflexive existential dread so pervasive in Western discourse is largely absent."
https://afraw.substack.com/p/an-ai-maxi-new-year
12. "If you want to inherit (or want your heirs or favored philanthropic causes to inherit) a non-negligible share of the pie—that is, if you are concerned with your place in the future distribution, rather than your absolute future budget—the broad implications of this section are straightforward. While you are not among the world’s richest actors, start accumulating capital as early as possible.
Get into (or start) those private firms with the AI intangibles. Invest unusually risk-tolerantly: you will probably go bust, but it is your only hope of catching up. Especially among illiquid investments, prioritize those in which the capital is mobile and not quickly bottlenecked by natural resources, if there is a risk that some shock or tax will hit the country where it is located. And if you do make it to the top, save almost everything; invest it in the precise way that balances the need to keep growing with the need to avoid going bust; and try hard to tie your hands and the hands of your inheritors."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-182789127
13.More Michael Every geopolitics and global macro. Understanding the world we are in. Lots of wars, lots of chaos, Neo mercantilism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RHH5feN3iM
14."The Gundo has a vibe. It’s young, testosterone-rich, patriotic and somewhat Christian. Some of this feels like theater to me, and, frankly, The Gundo receives too much attention. It’s not really the thing.
The thing is Los Angeles and its mass of interconnected cities."
https://www.corememory.com/p/los-angeles-is-fantastic-america-manufacturing
15."I guess I’m neither a short term investor or a long-term investor, maybe call it being a mid-term investor that sometime does long-term investing.
Ideally, these would be in under-followed businesses with strong leadership in it’s niche if you’re willing to look under the hood. I like to think of Japanese companies as Dennis Rodman, seemingly doing crazy Sh*t, but often just very misunderstood and INSANELY good at what they do. There are many Dennis Rodmans.
Typically, I’m looking for decent growth with a catalyst. My general belief is that investing is about investing in change and getting that right. This change is important here because it invites a new class of incremental investors. Which I’ve learnt to appreciate it to be crucial to the discovery process of undervalued (and underfollowed) businesses. More on this later. I like companies where there is no ‘consensus’ to begin with, and my favourite opportunity is when a company with no consensus ends up having some kind of consensus - which implies increased following on the company."
https://madeinjapan.substack.com/p/how-japanese-investors-think
16."If you can’t draft 18-year-olds in mass to fight overseas, you use technology and companies (like Palantir) to narrow the decision loop and kill chain to increase your force projection.
For tech investors, this makes Japan the ultimate structural bull case for military AI, robotics, and edge computing.
A Japanese rearmament is going to look very different. And much different than a post-Meiji Restoration style build up. Its largely tech based. But it also needs specialized resources too.
The political mandate for this revision is stronger than at any point since 1947. Takaichi is popular, her coalition partner is hawkish, and the opposition remains fragmented.
It's a big opportunity to get changes rolling. Great alpha for business and political analysis if you watch how the government funds, scales, and justifies this."
https://pplsartofwar.substack.com/p/ghosts-of-the-rising-sun
17."Not meditate more. Not journal. Not optimise your morning routine.
Raise. The. Stakes.
You likely haven’t pushed yourself hard physically for years, even decades.
And a hard gym session is a good start, but it doesn’t hold a candle to when you give your brain no choice but to lock in.
Martial Arts
Adventure & Expedition
Pushing your body to physical exhaustion
Each of these can also be tools to take your mind away from a gruelling business week, a nagging boss or just allow you to get out of your head for once in your life…
In a world where it’s pre-frontal cortex dominant, we need to maintain the ability to get out of our logical brain & into the primitive side of it."
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/how-to-enter-flow-state
18."A great many Westerners regard AI (or perhaps more accurately, the billionaires who control it) with a mixture of deep suspicion and open hostility. A third of Americans surveyed believe the technology has the potential to end life on Earth. Contrast this to a Nikkei BP survey conducted at the end of 2025. “Japan is optimistic about AI, with 44% believing it is not a threat, unusual for a developed country.” (Apparently they missed the survey where 87% (!) of Chinese claimed to trust AI.) Whatever the case, if Japan is really more upbeat about AI than citizens of the English-speaking world, why might that be?
And I suspect that the fact Japan isn’t on the bleeding edge is the real answer to the question. Being behind the curve gives Japan a freedom to experiment with AI in ways that the disrupted West can’t. I’ve written about how Japan is a “super Galapagos,” meaning that having fallen behind other advanced nations is proving a kind of secret superpower; this is another facet of that thesis. Because of it, AI hasn’t disrupted Japanese society in the way it has the US. With no domestic Japanese AI mega-companies, there simply isn’t anyone capable of forcing the technology down throats, as is happening in the US. In 2025, six out of ten Americans surveyed said they wanted more control over how AI was used in their lives."
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/japans-ai-affinity
19.A different narrative of geopolitics and global macro. Valuable to balance the pro-US narrative. Truth is usually somewhere in the middle. Reality is China is a fearsome competitor which the West created partially thru pure hubris, greed and incompetence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zlCVj6f27k
20."If you’re following the traditional path — going through the career center at your university, signing up on a list, waiting for a recruiter to sit through 30 people in 20-minute slots — you look like a cog. You look mass-produced. For that group, AI looks frightening, and maybe it should.
But if you are blazing your own trail, using the techniques in the book, becoming what I call a candidate of one — someone whose path looks completely unique because you’ve built it intentionally — then every tool in this book is amplified by AI. Learning has never been easier than right now, in the entire history of the world. If you’re running toward it, if you’re becoming the most AI-aware person in your field, this thing is nothing but a superpower."
21.“In the meantime, Palantir as a whole, which began as a mix between the brainchild of Thiel, the creation of Cohen, and the cult of Karp, had started more and more to become the culture of Shyam, who’d slipped off the chain of a boy scout personality. Teams of engineers working on a new product got used to him stopping by to use it, build a demo, break it, and write a report on what was wrong with it. Ten-thousand-word critiques of products or ideas, which came to be known as “Shyam Bombs,” would get emailed to every person in the company in the middle of the night, on weekend afternoons, or when everyone thought he was at a dinner he’d apparently decided to skip.
Fatwas” were new Shyam-issued rules or ideas followed by an invitation to argue with him about it with the whole company cc’d. To prove the “flatness” of the organization, he began a practice of prompting junior hires to tell him, with his face inches away, to go fuck himself. “Save the Shire,” “Metabolize pain, excrete product,” “There are no silver bullets, just millions of lead ones,” and other enduring Palantir memes began as Shyam-isms. He had each of the company’s lawyers officially retitled “Legal Ninja.” He started wearing the blazer with the hoodie sewn in.
“Shyam’s personality is very much built into the culture of the brutality with which we look at problems, which is what made the FDE structure actually scalable,” Karp told me. “His ability to understand what a product looks like, the way in which he intuits, and just as importantly anti-intuits what’s working and what’s not, and being very honest about it—I’ve seen people really struggle with that, but it’s just not something Shyam struggles with.”
“Shyam invented the term Forward Deployed Engineer and all the nomenclature that goes with it, but also the principles that outlined what it meant to be one,” Jain said. “He just poured his heart and soul into what users were trying to do in the field to identify what we actually needed to build to win, and then worked closely with Bob and me to figure out how to turn that into bigger product movements. And then all the other byproducts of that, like the real radical transparency in our culture, the spirit of building from the front line back to the product, the freedom for junior engineers and senior leadership to get in substantive fights with each other in front of everyone. Those were all things Shyam developed.”
“If you don’t know him, it seems like he’s being a little brash or aggressive,” said Ted Mabrey. “But the reason he can do it is because it’s not personal at all. He completely depersonalizes it.”
https://colossus.com/article/the-patriot-shyam-sankar-palantir/
22."As companies invest more in storytelling, I’m excited to see a shift from traditional marketing to light-hearted entertainment. Silly stunts. Celebrity collabs. Experiences and activations.
Whether you’re thinking outside of the box as a scrappy early stage company with little funding or have raised a monster round with lots of cash to spend, it’s time to think bigger and more creatively."
https://brianne.substack.com/p/films-and-stunts-are-the-future-of
23.The future of AI directly from one of the top people driving it forward. Dario of Anthropic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1E9IZfvGMA
24.This was my summer in Europe last year!
"It is important not to feel guilty. Wasting a morning only works when done with conviction. If you find yourself fretting about “shoulds” or “to-dos,” find the nearest cafe and order another coffee and stay exactly where you are. You are not being lazy, you are investing in the leisure. In the mental space where new ideas happen to wander in, wearing a linen shirt and asking if this seat is taken."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-170344327
25.The bull case for emerging markets. Re-allocation away from America due to capricious American economic and foreign policy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y73GC21dVhA&t=2s
26."Humans are inputting more and more information. Spawning more AI. The AI then gets better and better. And. Spawns more AI. Sam Altman, later stated (paraphrased) “how much energy does a human need to perform as well as an AI - food etc”
All of this is telling you the same. We’re spawning mini computer people who are able to do tasks better than a 15 year old. Soon better than a 25 year old. Soon better than PHDs and working 24/7/365 with no 1099, no feelings, no complaints and at a fraction of the cost.
How to Insulate: There is no way to fully insulate from AI. Looking at X it has become a bunch of AI slop. People plug in all this long form garbage, change some words and hit send. This will work on 95% of the population because they cannot discern the difference. The remaining 5% will simply hang out with each other and there is your “have vs. have not” separation.
Easiest for Majority: If you’re just looking to make money and “survive” (not thrive) you want to follow the red tape. This means you want to work in an industry that is extremely regulated. The safest one is probably healthcare. People do not want to talk to a robot when they learn about a death, cancer diagnosis and other emotionally charged events. If you want to live a “normal” life, health care is probably your best bet
Autist Note: The theme is hardest to get to with a computer. If you wanted other examples it would be air traffic controller, electrician, heavy machinery operator, therapist/psychologist etc. Things that require human interaction + can’t be done with a screen. The problem with a lot of these is that it makes it extremely hard to spin up a business if you are working on an airplane engine or confined to a hospital wing
Second Easiest: If your goal is to get rich + find a W-2 to pay the bills, we would go into sales. This is getting trickier by the day but is one of the only options for people who are serious about making it.
In a real sales role, you are required to transfer emotion.
Ideally you are selling an expensive item: 1) a car, 2) a house, 3) servers and 4) anything else with an average selling price of $25,000+. When people buy expensive items, they do not want to listen to some computer opinion. They want to speak with someone who has tangible experience beyond boiler plate comparisons in a table. Hint: you better know a lot more than the standard info spit out by AI! This typically means you need to sell the latest and greatest version at all times - since AI won’t know the specs.
Third - Difficult Decision Maker: Some have asked us what we mean by judgement/social trends. This is a big leap from where AI currently is. AI has a hard time predicting “what will land”. AI is great at giving you a billion options (say 20 amazing ad copy/creatives). It does a terrible job deciding where those creatives should go, who to target and why/when.
You’re actually seeing this live with all the AI trading bots. They don’t work and are constantly losing money.
Think about it. The only reason you’re reading this website in the first place is to think about tomorrow not yesterday. The vast majority of stuff out there is based on yesterday and automated forecasts about tomorrow… based on yesterday (using AI garbage in/garbage out material).
Look at your industry and practice becoming the decision maker in it. Are you able to predict who gets laid off next? Are you able to forecast who the most talented junior is? Hone this skill now. It will make or break you in about 5 years or so."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/macro-update-insulation-from-ai-and
27."In the R&D phase you have a large problem with an unbounded solution space, it takes incredible creativity to constantly re-frame, re-design, and re-think every approach and proposed solution. That creativity requires space to think, and a long leash to run at problems, break things, and fix them. As Zuck says: “Move fast and break things”.
The unavoidable yet unintended consequences are that timelines are squishy, end requirements fluctuate, and little effort is put into documenting anything because ‘its going to change next week anyways’. This is healthy; this is good; this is necessary.
However, it is in direct opposition with what makes manufacturing businesses successful. Manufacturing hates change, loves process, and lives on reliability of every portion of the business between the customer and the delivery. When supply chains are 6months long, and production plans bring it to 10months, reliability and predicability of every process is key to hitting deliverables. Discipline is needed to hold each team accountable to their due date on the 1000+ line Gantt chart."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-175456610
28.Direct takes on the world from Doomberg: AI, Canada & US tussle, energy and politics. Blue collar is gold collar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-BVZDwCnxY&t=117s
29.Trying to understand Stablecoins and its new role in re-establishing USD hegemony.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzTPVr_Xk3k
30. "Silicon Valley is a fast-moving ecosystem, but relationships still take time to develop. Many founders come to San Francisco for a weekend or a week, hoping to “tap into the magic.” But a week isn’t long enough.
Because San Francisco serendipity works in hops."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/tapping-into-the-serendipity-of-silicon-valley
31."This is why for a man, one of the most freeing thresholds he can cross is the point at which his survival no longer depends on people he does not like, trust, or respect.
To be financially self-reliant - to know that your bills, groceries and fundamental necessities are secured by money you generate on your own terms without dependence on bullshit workplace and institutional cultures is a profound behavioural self-affirmation that gives a man a type of confidence and natural swagger that simply cannot be counterfeited.
The true man then, in his fullest expression, does not work from within the system: but from outside of it."
https://thesovereigncitadel.com/p/the-price-of-a-paycheque
32."Ukraine? This is an existential fight. Either they stay in until they can recapture most if not all that was lost, or if they are lucky, they will be forced into a peace as a rump state centered on former Austro-Hungarian Galicia and a vassal of Russia like Belarus.
How long could they stay in? Ukraine has a history of sacrifice few in the west understand…except for 19th century Paraguay.
By the end of the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1871), a war that lasted five years, three months, two weeks, and two days. Estimates vary, but the conservative modern estimate is that somewhere around 40-60% of the Paraguayan population was killed. After the war, there were 4 women for every 1 man, 20 to 1 in some areas where the fighting was the worst.
Ukraine in 2026 has a population of 39.5 million. 40% of that population is 15.8 million.
Loss figures are all over the place, but are generally in the mid-six figures. There is A LOT more killing that could be done if the national will to fight is there, and if the weapons and money continue to flow.
Do the European nations have the will to continue supporting Ukraine’s fight? Will the U.S.? Will the BRICS and North Korea continue to support Russia?"
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/the-russo-ukrainian-war-hits-four
33. "But even Alibaba at $231b was a fifth to a tenth the size of SpaceX’s target. The market has never absorbed a trillion-dollar IPO where liquidity was the goal."
https://tomtunguz.com/largest-ipos-market-cap-and-float/
34."In other words, the new war strategy is clear: minimize your own losses and maximize those of your opponent, even if that means trading territory to do it. And while this strategy has in theory been emerging for well over a year, it is only now moving from a theoretical concept that often did not consistently appear in practice, into something that is clearly becoming an utmost priority.
That doesn’t mean a miraculous turn in the war, nor an end to Ukraine’s struggles with insufficient manpower. But it very clearly shifts the focus toward making it possible for Ukraine to survive a much longer war that could go on for several more years - and making it harder for Russia to do the same."
https://stationzero.substack.com/p/three-shifts-that-are-redefining
35."Taipei is spending billions of dollars to reinforce the military’s existing inventory of locally-made Hsiung Feng anti-ship missiles with American-made Harpoon anti-ship missiles. Both missiles are subsonic, boast tiny radars for terminal guidance and hug the wavetops to avoid interception as they range between 75 and 160 miles in search of enemy ships.
Both can be launched from the surface or from the air.
As part of a $2-billion deal the Taiwanese inked with the Americans in 2020, Taiwan is getting 400 Harpoon Block II missiles along with 100 truck-mounted launchers and 25 mobile radars.
The first of the new missiles arrived in late September. The last should reach the island country in 2028. The Taiwanese army is spending millions of dollars building new bases to house the Harpoon batteries, but in wartime the batteries would disperse to fortified positions peppering the coast—some of them built by occupying Japanese forces during World War II.
This traditional air power—warplanes and missiles—would factor heavily in the counterlanding effort. But a new kind of air power could bolster the main effort. Two years ago, the Taiwanese defense ministry issued its first-ever tender for an aerial drone swarm. It asked local tech firms to produce an initial 3,000 small, single-use drones for $159 million.
That’s a lot of money for just a few thousand drones, but it’s worth noting what Taipei is trying to do with the tender. The country isn’t just trying to buy a batch of drones—it’s also trying to encourage the expansion of the local drone industry, so that the industry will be ready to build a lot more drones fast if a Chinese invasion force begins massing.
Ukraine is building a virtual wall of tiny explosive drones to defend against invading Russian forces. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian drones take flight every month, and now account for the majority of Russian losses. Taiwan clearly intends to copy that strategy—but for maritime defense.
The drone swarm could buy time for heavier firepower to come to bear. Heavier American firepower."
https://www.trenchart.us/p/can-taiwan-hold-out-long-enough
36.One of the greats when it comes to investing. Dan Sundheim previously CIO at Viking, now running D1. Lots of great insights and perspectives for a crossover investor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBtmTmCC0ZM&t=1396s
37. Crazy week in Silicon Valley. Good discussion on AI vs. physical world. Anthropic growth and good take on the Citrini report.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBE_9vGJBUM&t=497s
38."The mistake most people make is believing stability is the norm. It isn’t. Chaos is the default state of the world. Your ability to survive and thrive - depends on how well you move through it.
You don’t need to know what comes next, only that you have the ability to handle it when it arrives. That’s confidence and determination to use chaotic times to your advantage. Even to your benefit.
Confidence is not knowing the future - it is knowing that no future will arrive without you adapting to meet it."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-174662273
39.Lots of great takes on Silicon Valley news especially Saaspocalypse, investing in software & the Upfront Summit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff4-vkt5rYQ
40.A must watch. Druck, the best global macro investor on the planet. Insightful takes.
-some ai exposure but less than before
- long Japan & Korea equities
- bearish on US dollar
- long copper
- long gold as geopolitical trade (not monetary)
- short bonds