Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Oct 11th, 2026
"Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do." —Pelé
Understanding the oil market from Doomberg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M27s7B4-uRY
2."Deep strike used to be the business of a very small club - at roughly $2 million apiece, bought by the dozen and treated like platforms: precious, slowly replaced, rarely expended. That weapon is now becoming ammunition, bought by the thousand, judged on cost per destroyed target, and fully expected to run out. These deep strike capabilities can be both drone or missile-based - the line between the two being blurred by the fact that these drones are now powered by jet engines and mimic cruise missiles.
The arithmetic generalizes. At the tempo of an actual war, deep-strike munitions are consumed like artillery shells, and an arsenal replaced over years cannot sustain a campaign measured in weeks. What decides how long a country can keep striking is not the quality of its best missile but the output of its production lines — a manufacturing problem before it is a military one."
https://defensebrief.substack.com/p/the-deep-strike-gold-rush
3.Harsh reality. Listening to Luke Gromen who is one of the top global macro guys. He calls out the issues with the American economy vis a vis China.
Both sides have lots of problems but it seems like the US is foolishly wrecking ourselves via Iran war & an inability to take the necessary pain to fix our economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-Vopzt_m5g&t=2210s
4."So, to come back to the question I started with. Is hustle culture antithetical to productivity in the modern economy? I’d say yes. It focuses on the wrong metrics. It focuses on hard work in a vacuum. Just listen to the way the hustle bros talk, it’s all pain, suffering, discomfort. There’s no nuance in any of it, and no room for discovery or spontaneity.
So go and read something completely unrelated to your day job, and let yourself go down the rabbit hole. Life can be full and productive at the same time, and that hasn’t always been true.
Working extremely hard in the wrong direction is the most expensive mistake people make with their careers, and hardly anybody gets any help avoiding it. Good careers guidance has always existed, and it has always sat behind money or the right networks. Everybody else gets a leaflet at eighteen and a lot of guesswork."
https://thestillwandering.substack.com/p/the-death-of-hustle-culture
5. "What you can do is watch the right number. This whole essay comes down to one lesson: the headline numbers will look wonderful right up to the end. House prices were at record highs while the loans underneath them were dying. So don’t watch the records. Watch the speed. Does OpenAI’s next raise price above the last one, and by how much? Do the backlogs keep growing, or just stay large? And watch for one moment in particular: the first time a tech giant announces it is cutting its construction spending - and its stock goes up on the news. The day the market rewards a company for leaving the race is the day the race is over.
Next, know what you actually own. Roughly forty percent of the S&P 500 is ten companies. If your retirement sits in an index fund, you are not spread across five hundred businesses - nearly half of your savings is a bet on one single belief, the same belief this entire essay has been about. That’s not a reason to panic. It is a reason to know it. Most people don’t.
Then ask the question this essay has been circling the whole way through. Everything in it - the mortgage, the funding round, the backlog, the bond - is the same object: a promise that only holds if a bigger promise arrives behind it. So look at each thing you own and ask: does this depend on somebody else’s promise staying believed? Some things do. Some things don’t. There’s a reason that in every era where paper promises came under question - the 1970s, 2008, today - the world’s savings drifted toward things that are nobody’s IOU. I’ll let you draw your own conclusion there.
And finally - manage your mind, because this is where most people actually fail. Not in the analysis. In the waiting. If the structure holds for another year of record highs, the crowd will tell you that you were wrong, that this time is different, that the skeptics missed the greatest boom in history. That pressure breaks more investors than any crash does. The people who came through 2008 intact were not the ones who predicted Lehman’s date. They were the ones who understood the machine, positioned themselves so its breaking wouldn’t break them, and then had the discipline to look wrong until they were right."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/china-doesnt-need-to-win-the-ai-race
6."Anyone who is claiming that the American industrial base has been hallowed out over the last few decades has a strong argument. But I don’t think we should spend time looking in the rear-view mirror, instead we have a lot of positive things to look forward to. We have public and private companies race to reindustrialize our nation.
We have many of the leading investment firms pouring tens of billions of dollars of capital into this effort. And we have some of the country’s best entrepreneurs leading the charge.
I wouldn’t bet against America. We are going to reindustrialize, which means invstors who can get allocated to this trend are going to do very well over the next 10-20 years."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-reindustrialization-of-america
7."Every tool the US Federal Reserve now reaches for, Japan reached for first - zero rates, money printing, a central bank buying its own government’s debt to keep the lights on. America did not invent that playbook. It imported it from Tokyo, a decade late.
And look where thirty years of that playbook has left them. A government buried under debt worth two and a half times the entire economy - so deep it can never raise interest rates again without blowing itself up. A generation of savers who earned almost nothing on their money for three decades. An economy that has barely grown since the 1990s. And now the final stage: a currency sliding to forty-year lows, and a central bank trapped, unable to defend it.
That is the destination. Here is America’s odometer: past 125% debt-to-GDP and climbing, $39 trillion and counting, the same zero rates and money printing already run, an interest bill that alone now tops a trillion dollars a year. America is not standing at the start of this road. It is halfway down it.
So when you want to know what the back half feels like - a government that can never stop printing because stopping would break it, savers with nowhere safe to earn a real return, a currency leaking value while the price of everything imported creeps up, the people who own hard assets pulling away from the people who don’t - you do not have to imagine it. You can watch it, live, in Tokyo.
And do not take comfort in being different. Japan thought it was exceptional too - in 1989, when its market was the envy of the world and the dirt under its palace was worth more than California. Exceptional is what every country believes, right up until the gas reaches it.
Japan is the canary. Same shaft, same gas, faster metabolism. It is absorbing the poison the rest of us cannot feel yet - and it is showing the symptoms first."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/watch-tokyo
8."As such, the best defensive effort Ukraine can likely make in the short term is to strengthen its passive defenses. This means improving the resilience of high-value targets by dispersing and hardening them against attack, including by accelerating efforts to move critical infrastructure underground. Ordering and stockpiling spare parts to rapidly restore destroyed infrastructure will similarly be crucial.
Beyond that, Ukraine can only continue to expand and advance its own deep-strike efforts, focusing on destroying critical targets inside Russia to keep attrition mutual rather than unilateral. Wherever possible, Ukraine will continue to target Russian production capacity, but it is unlikely that any single strike, or succession of strikes, will fundamentally disrupt Russian production of ballistic missiles."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/ukraines-missile-defense-crisis-causes
9.The bull case for AI in America. Learned me a lot on what to look for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGsi2PC4y68&t=1114s
10.Good stuff. This week in Silicon Valley news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6kDZJ0xdSw
11.Lots of latest Silicon Valley news: always a good way to get zeitgeist in the valley this summer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c6YMVs1JJ0
12."For AI-pilled entrepreneurs, this should be encouraging. The future is becoming even more oriented toward high-agency people. People who do not need to be told what to do. People who enjoy going above and beyond. People who find new opportunities and get after them.
At the same time, as intelligence becomes abundant, the things AI cannot do autonomously, or the situations that still require an expert human in the loop, will place an even greater premium on soft skills, people skills, and social skills.
Entrepreneurs would do well to invest in both sides of the equation: increase their agency and deliberately improve their ability to work with people."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/08/08/agency-and-soft-skills-in-the-ai-era/
13.This week's global macro. BTC is well positioned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsONy3IizCU
14."Bending Spoons has busy since its founding, gobbling up all sorts of troubled software characterized by long tails of entrenched users. Evernote, Meetup, Vimeo, AOL, and now Airtable. Their pattern is to buy a company, lay nearly everyone off, and manage what remains with Bending Spoons staff in Europe.
How many other fissurings like this will we see, in the coming years?"
https://www.workings.co/p/airtable-acquired-by-bending-spoons
15.The OG of seed investing. Lots to absorb here. The art and science of seed VC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDaGwInqbbQ&t=37s
16.Watching this as I travel the island nation of Taiwan. It's a geographically tough place to invade.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iHPVsyv4GU
17."Remember that spreadsheet ranking 100 manufacturing processes? It’s a treasure map. Casting was just the first X. Rangeview’s mission is to build the foundry system that reindustrializes America.
Ten years from now Cyber Foundries will hum across the plains. A submarine pulls into port needing a part, which is poured the same day. Data centers have all the turbines they need. America’s fighter fleets fly again… all because a kid who decided the country that built the Space Shuttle wasn’t finished.
When I asked Cameron what motivates him, he summed up the whole Rational Optimist project in eight words:
“Save the West. Do it for our kids.”
https://rationaloptimistsociety.substack.com/p/make-america-manufacture-again
18."Europe has not been deindustrialised. It must be said. The EU still has world class industry. Its machinery sector is still world class. Its chemicals and pharmaceutical industries are still among the largest and most significant in the world. Its aerospace sector is crucial. Its automotive engineering is still cutting edge. European companies still lead many niche industrial segments.
And the EU was still in a €128 billion overall goods trade surplus in 2025, mainly driven by chemicals, machinery and vehicles. Europe is not a defeated economy. However, Europe has a much more serious problem: industrial hollowing-out. It still maintains incredible industrial strengths at the top of the value chain, but now has huge external dependencies below it. That was a great way to operate in the old economy. In the new economy, it’s dangerous.
It is here that the argument of self-inflicted decline becomes much more powerful. Europe allowed itself to become dependent on Russia for energy, on China for manufacturing and key inputs, on America for security, and increasingly on America for digital infrastructure. Each of these dependencies made sense on economic grounds individually. Taken together, however, they created strategic weakness. That is the European model’s great paradox: it optimised itself for a world in which geopolitics did not matter very much, and then geopolitics came back."
https://velinatchakarova.substack.com/p/europes-suicide-note-the-industrial
19."The AI narrative is shifting from text generation (”what can the model say”) to physical interaction (”what can the model do”). World models act as the core operational engine for the next decade of technology investment. Allocators should look beyond text LLM hype and position capital toward entities building simulation physics engines, capturing real-world spatial datasets, and deploying custom inference silicon at the edge."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/world-models-and-the-companies-that
20."The result is a market run by questionable incremental metrics stacked on top of other questionable incremental metrics. From LPs, through GPs, down to founders, the incentives are warped to produce and fund short-term opportunism rather than durable, important companies.
This problem is rooted in the fact that founders are spending money (that isn’t theirs) deployed by venture capitalists (not theirs either) who got allocation from some institutional money manager (also not really theirs).
The principals are separated from the agents by an ocean of obfuscation, complicated by competing financial incentives and career concerns."
https://blog.joinodin.com/p/a-quarter-mile-at-a-time
21.The Skeleton Coast of Western Africa. Fascinating stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0opxCXlJgvw
22.Isaiah is a smart cookie. Masterclass of Building in Hardtech. Make energy 10X cheaper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZiM3Xfp-eY
23."This side of the web is basically focused on finding asymmetric opportunities. This is where your upside is substantial and your downside is typically in the -50-60% range (big difference from -95%). The way to find these set ups? You need a clean and congruent view of the next 10-20 years or so.
If you have no long-term view of where the world is heading you’ll constantly invest into assets that have more downside than you thought. This is actually proven out by Morgan Stanley which shows that ~54% of stocks never recover to par after a large ~80-85% drawdown.
In addition to that the study shows that “60 percent of the sample failed to match the returns of Treasury bills, destroying $10.1 trillion in value through December 2024.
Decide what is going to drive all the value in the future. Is oil going to suddenly become a new industry? How about financial services? How about restaurants? As you can see, the chances of saying yes to any of those is extremely slim. There is always going to be a new popular apparel brand or food chain. However. Compare that to the number of new restaurants and you’ll see an uglier number
More likely case? People will use more technology, drive operational costs down with software/AI and spend 90%+ of their time staring at some sort of screen (computer, smartphone, VR/AR, etc.)
This alone is going to help you avoid concentrated investments in the wrong sectors. If you simply follow what is hot, you might have gotten burned on legalized marijuana which was a long-term commodity product with no defensible moat."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/risk-management-you-can-be-right
24."It’s not that they all run successful 9 figure brands.
It’s not that their companies are collectively worth a billion dollars.
And it’s not the fact they all have strong personal brands & are role models for up & coming businessmen…
It’s that these men live like professional athletes.
Their training, nutrition & recovery are all dialled no differently to someone like Cristiano Ronaldo.
They understand health is their billion dollar asset that should be protected as viciously as their profit margins.
They understand that building their bodies isn’t just about having a six-pack, but to build a durable body that can handle pressure, stress & the unpredictability of building a legitimate company.
We’ve seen this same approach taken by Jeff Bezos, from pencil neck to jacked billionaire.
And Mark Zuckerberg, from awkward tech nerd to someone who trains martial arts, surfs & appreciates the importance of elite health.
If some of the most successful men on the planet are prioritising this, then shouldn’t you?"
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/why-businessmen-and-entrepreneurs
25."While a weak, weaker, and weakest yen propelled global asset markets higher over the past decade, like all good things for wealthy financial asset holders, it must end. The yen is the most undervalued currency globally, and it is a bone of contention for both major powers, the US and China, and critically, the ordinary Japanese voters.
When I read the headline about Bessent’s call for the FIMA program’s reform, I immediately got that bullish feeling. Every one of the macro analysts I follow believes this heralds a momentous change in the dollar-yen’s direction. You must pre-position because they ain’t fucking around. Money printing is a political decision to solve an untenable economic reality. Politics is very messy, but in this case the Trump administration wants you to log in to your online broker and buy financial assets. That is why Bessent is clearly telegraphing to all who will listen exactly from where the printed money shall metastasize. I’m listening, and will do my duty … buy financial assets."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/yen-quake
26."Here is the part our industry likely will resist the most. The strongest signal a model finds is a named human explaining the work in public, repeatedly. Not a brand account posting spec sheets. But a person.
Look at who already runs this play. Chris Power narrates Hadrian on every podcast that will have him, and the transcripts of those podcasts are now training data. Palmer Luckey’s interviews get written up by five outlets each, and every writeup is a citation. In our corner of the industry, Jim Belosic turned SendCutSend’s shop floor into daily content years ago, and OSHCut’s Caleb Chamberlain writes like an engineer talking to engineers. When a model composes an answer about laser cutting or defense machining, these are the voices it has read. That is not an accident of charisma (but there is a component of that ofc). It is volume of public text.
The capital side already treats this as infrastructure and not a vanity. Harry Stebbings is telling founders that not posting daily is “a massive mistake”.
For a manufacturer planning a public presence, that has a practical meaning. Post only on X and you are training exactly one model, the one your defense-tech buyer might use, and none of the others. Post only on LinkedIn and you are betting on Microsoft’s stack. The one corpus every model still reads is the open web: your own site, a blog, a Substack, podcast transcripts, trade press.
So write it once on a domain you own, then let the platforms carry copies. Whichever model your buyer asks, at least one route to your writing stays open."
https://constiv.substack.com/p/30-years-of-skipped-marketing-came
27.Neros is crushing it, building drone deterrence. This team is tops. Not an investor, just a fan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSuhuQpzli8
28.The Toyota of defense drones. Neros: super impressive & emerging American defensetech Neo-prime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8sFzL-E948
29.Super educational look at a top VC's mind. This was a worthwhile listen, especially about investing in the age of AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e7aG_MIHlQ&t=1115s
30.This is one of the top shows on weekly Silicon Valley news. They have the best takes to understand what's up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uq9zxtwBrk
31."The creator economy has brainwashed you into believing that follower count equals business value. It doesn’t. Followers are a vanity metric controlled entirely by platform executives who can and will change the algorithm, suppress your reach, or ban your account on a whim. If your entire revenue pipeline relies on social media platforms graciously showing your content to “your” audience, you own nothing.
In 2026, real power is not about how many people press “Follow.” It is about how many people you can force through a first-party transaction gate where you own the checkout, the customer record, and the cash flow."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-audience-ownership-myth
32."Hype in itself isn’t a problem. But 9 times out of 10, the money it unlocks that was supposed to buy you options ends up buying you obligations.
Trae Stephens dubbed this the kamikaze round and warned of what can go wrong for most founders: “early promise; the huge check; eager founders with glory in their eyes; issues of profitability that go ignored under the huge pressure to expand; lackluster growth; down rounds; layoffs; and then, often, insolvency.”
He also aptly noted why many founders fall victim to this. Anyone with the ego to will an idea or movement into existence, will naturally assume the odds don’t apply to them.
(They do).
Ego isn’t the whole story. The kamikaze round is a product of something more macro: the herd behavior that sets prices in SF. Founders get caught believing they need to raise at their competitor’s valuation, or their friend’s, and that anything less is a failure. It’s also why we start to see companies in a similar space raise at the same time – nobody wants to be the less valuable company in a hot market.
But follow the herd to a number you haven’t earned, and you start closing your own exits. You become too expensive for most strategic acquirers. Private equity will still take you (at a discount), but often to strip you for parts and sell off the pieces for margin. The IPO window, if it’s open at all, wants profitable and growing companies with a moat. You can Hail Mary and SPAC (which has become its own version of defeat), or you can stay private as long as possible and hope that you figure something out, all while watching key talent walk out the door as momentum fades."
https://michellevolz1.substack.com/p/to-be-or-to-do
33."The key overlapping items that benefit from all of this: 1) internet/technology usage is up only. Online clout is more important than offline, 2) offline world largely remains social in the rich areas - go to a luxury shopping area and it’ll look like a packed day at Six Flags, 3) looksmaxxing/vanity continues its meteoric rise - hilariously we suggested some 4-5 years ago men would wear makeup and that happened and 4) obsession with longevity a la Brian Johnson.
Those four spaces are the best for a forever business. HealthSpas/Botox/Filler type businesses are amazing. Anything technology is amazing if you can carve out a real niche. Anything deriving income online is amazing. And. Anything that captures people in the rich area or falling off the socio-economic ladder will print.
We realize some of this sounds dystopian. This is only if you view it with a negative lens. The long-term picture is right in front of you, it is simply up to you to seize the opportunity."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/bonus-post-on-cultural-trends
34."It's not entirely surprising that many hold the geopolitical analysis in rather low regard. In the past, attempts to gain an investment edge through geopolitics have all too often come hand in hand with doom-mongering predictions. It's difficult not to notice that listening to professional Cassandras talk about geopolitical threats generates many more false alarms than genuinely valuable signals. Keep in mind that many of the channels presenting themselves as experts in this field make their living from clicks rather than from performance fees for managing money.
In a world where even Alan Greenspan couldn't predict interest rates one or two years ahead, what realistic chance does anyone have of correctly – and consistently – predicting the multitude of potential outcomes inherent in the broad and complex subject of geopolitics?
At the same time, there can be no denying that the world isn't the same as it was during the 1990s and 2000s. Geopolitical earthquakes and tail risks are, without doubt, a much more prominent influence on investments today than they were back then.
Besides, there are now new ways to benefit from them financially. Betting markets famously offer potentially life-changing payoffs if you correctly predict a major geopolitical event or outcome. Likewise, as this website has shown over the years, there is a multitude of investments that allow investors to benefit in ways that few knew even existed. For example, there are numerous unusual stocks that could benefit from an end of the Ukraine war, and often based around complex legal issues."
35."But then you buy a share of a business, and every trading day someone throws fresh numbers at you. And what happens? We start acting funny.
We open our brokerage app twelve times before 11 a.m. We panic when a stock falls 7%, even when nothing has changed in the business. We buy because the price is rising and sell because it is falling.
Nobody behaves this way with a farm or a house. Why should stocks be any different?
Thinking like an owner refocuses your attention where it should be.
In that same 2013 shareholder letter (which I highly recommend reading), Buffett makes the point that “games are won by players who focus on the playing field, not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard.”
The owner asks what the asset produces: the cash, the return on every retained dollar, the durability of its advantage, and the honesty of the people running it.
The speculator asks what the next person will pay, which is a much more difficult question to answer.
Of course, having liquid markets can come in handy. The daily quote is a privilege.
The skill lies in keeping that privilege without letting it affect your thinking. Use the quote when it offers you something foolishly in your favor. Ignore it the rest of the time.
Easier said than done."
https://www.polymathinvestor.com/p/think-like-an-owner
36.This was quite a fun conversation: unusual set up, 6 VCs discussing random news and trends.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XySpdJ6UPkQ
37.Global macro weekly on AI, Tech & Crypto. Valuable ideas for investing.