Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Oct 18th, 2026
“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” — L.M. Montgomery
TK returns (he never left) building for a new Industrial Age. One of the most relentless entrepreneurs on the planet. Masterclass on OG Founder Mode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8qKNFeBPXE
2."My recommendation for entrepreneurs is simple: stop spending so much time hand-typing pretty prompts.
Hit the voice button and mind meld with the AI. Talk through anything and everything that comes to mind, then go from there.
The results are incredible.
Voice is the most natural interface for AI, and AI is finally the technology that makes voice truly powerful."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/08/15/stop-writing-prompts-start-talking/
3."Three of the world’s great powers have the same problem: they don’t know how to defeat a drone hedgehog that threatens their interests. What is a drone hedgehog?
It’s a country with a large drone-fueled arsenal (from aerial to ballistic to land to sea)
capable of fighting a major power to a standstill or
making attacks so costly, they deter a major power from acting.
The pairing for each power is;
Russia vs. Ukraine
United States vs. Iran
China vs. Taiwan"
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/the-great-powers-respond
4.DHH: what a fun conversation here. One of the most interesting business people who is not shy about sharing his opinions. Focusing on Independence & freedom. So refreshing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76rR68ktQvo
5."As you can see, based on current projections, we aren’t overbuilding data centers but, its not out of the question that we could find ourselves with an inference glut if our current estimates are off a bit. Now you know what to watch for, and when to exit the data center trade, or plan to buy up the glut capacity, if the world shifts in that direction."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/is-there-an-inference-glut-coming
6."Excellence is the capacity to take pain." I would hate to compete against TK & his team. The OG of Founder Mode. Doing hard things and doing what's massively hard yet valuable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVnU5lGlKE8
7.Heroes. Western Volunteers in the Ukrainian army.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLUaCHIb1wY
8."Peter Thiel argued that competition is for losers. His take is that lasting value comes from building monopolies. This has become Silicon Valley gospel - despite many similar AI companies getting funded anyways.
The good news: escape has a geography.
The US, and particularly the Bay Area, dominates access to venture capital. The United States captured 57% of global venture funding in 2025, and the Bay Area alone took 60% of global AI funding. AI is radically lowering the barriers to build and scale startups.
The same strategies applied in other geographies may just be more interesting. Two structural advantages of building fintech (and startups more broadly) outside the SF-NY axis are about to be amplified by the AI rebuild moment. The first is less competition, and the second is product breadth."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/competition-is-for-losers-in-the
9."AI is profoundly changing human society. In this new era, how should capital markets evolve?
The challenge in the age of AI is not simply to make evaluation even more efficient. We must also ask what kinds of creation society needs, entrust Capital to those efforts, and build an environment in which creation can emerge and grow.
Capital markets must preserve their role as markets for evaluation while shifting their center of gravity increasingly toward their role as markets that support creation."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/capital-markets-and-ai-from-evaluation
10."The question of minimum viable force is therefore fundamental to how the major militaries of the world will restructure as they absorb the lessons of Ukraine. For the largest, this must guide how they design their higher-echelon formations, constructing them around both operational survivability and tactical balance. For the larger NATO militaries in Europe, it sets a floor on what is needed to maintain a credible ground force. And for smaller militaries, it sets hard parameters on the conditions by which they can support allies."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/minimum-viable-force-operational
11.Hope he is right. Did the Israel-American attack in Iran deter China?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvi-k2b6UCE
12."The chain of events is pretty simple: 1) oil shock, 2) fertilizer price up, 3) farm costs up, 4) pass on cost to consumer and 5) headline inflation inclusive of food is up. While the Fed claims that food and energy should be excluded due to volatility (PCE), don’t think this will fly politically for a long period of time. Food costs and energy costs would hit the middle again to make this comment untenable.
1970s was Similar: During the 70s we had a huge spike in inflation. This led to a slowdown then another re-ramp. It looks oddly familiar. We had the 2021 blow up, then the rates go up, now we’re seeing another global event causing prices to rise again.
The difference here is that it is incredibly unlikely that we get even higher inflation than 2021. While you can’t say never, it looks like we’re getting a mini wave of inflation. 2021 roughly peaked out at 7% or so and if we got another wave, anything around 4-5% would be fire alarms going off to raise back to 4-5%."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/potential-inflation-wave-interest
13.Lots of hard truths. It's like the 1970s again and Hard Assets are a must.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgvHzcrY5AA
14.The gents really give great context and views on this week’s B2B and Silicon Valley news. SpaceX Buys Cursor!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_3EjW0dyeI&t=882s
15."The more obsessed you are with the acquisition of finances, the less available you become in other domains of your life.
I’ve also seen significant diminishing returns in living a life purely for the acquisition of capital.
So for this reason, the modern renaissance man’s focus when it comes to business is having it serve him and not being a slave to the dollar.
I say this as someone who has spoken with so many successful men in business who hate their station in life, who are just as miserable as they would have been had they stayed at their job that they hated.
For that reason, in the context of this article, the businessman is someone who uses money as a vehicle to get what he wants out of life."
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/the-athlete-artist-and-businessman
16."If you’re not using voice multiple times per day to interface with your phone and laptop, you’re missing out on one of the best productivity gains AI has created."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/08/22/voice-is-the-new-keyboard/
17."When I first discovered Peter Ortiz, I thought I had found a man who seemed to have lived a dozen lives in one. After reading Ortiz’s War, I think I underestimated him. More importantly, Sanders and Reynolds helped me better understand the man behind those adventures. Ortiz was certainly restless and daring, but when the moments came that demanded real courage, he repeatedly placed himself in danger for others. That is what separates the adventurer from the hero."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/the-remarkable-life-of-peter-ortiz
18."So yes, rage when you need to. Fight for what you believe in. Use your voice. Show up prepared with facts and conviction.
But don’t forget that the person across from you — whether across the Thanksgiving table or across the cable news split screen — is a person. Flawed, complicated, sometimes infuriating, but still human."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/i-disagree
19.Lots of interesting thoughts: AI sucks yet there is so much money being made right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwzl-Ihyyr0
20.Geo-economics update with Michael Every.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMuIvIZf4l8
21.A strong case for Bitcoin. Jordi Visser gives his thought process. I'm a believer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhZiG-Uzs1c&t=82s
22."At the zenith of the social media era, influencers got clout from flexing expensive cars, handbags, and houses, but the sheen of those possessions (yes, even the Birkin bag) has tarnished. The new clout is conspicuous leisure — niche hobbies, exotic travel, creative output, ideas, Substacks written, and things made “because I had the space to think.“
Just as philosopher-aristocrats had the luxury of contemplation and the leisure to produce great works, their present-day counterparts will have the freedom of time and the challenge of filling it.
Productivity technology let’s us do more. Time-back technology let’s us do less.
That distinction determines whether AI keeps us on the productivity treadmill or lays the foundation for conspicuous leisure.
The time-filled economy
If time-back technology gives us more discretionary hours, a new question arises: what will we do with the extra time?
The time-filled economy is the ecosystem of products, services, and experiences that will compete for our newly liberated attention. Travel, dining, fitness, hobbies, learning, entertainment, culture, and both online and offline socialization will all rise."
https://cakemix.substack.com/p/conspicuous-leisure-gutenberg-birkin
23."Leaving the ballistic missile defense wonderland Western states have made themselves comfortable in begins with accepting that the status quo is untenable. From there, decisionmakers have two options.
The first is to live with the offense-defense imbalance and draw the natural consequence. In a world where the attacker can produce ballistic missiles faster and more cheaply than the defender can produce interceptors, a credible counterstrike capability may be the best available tool for upholding deterrence. Ballistic missile defense still has a role under this approach, but a narrower one: protecting critical assets for limited periods instead of serving as a long-term solution for area defense.
The second is to work thrice as hard to reverse the imbalance by funding capabilities with a realistic chance of bending the cost curve in the defender's favor: interceptor programs designed for mass production at a fraction of the unit cost of legacy systems. Such programs exist in Ukraine and other European states but remain unproven. Still, betting on them is the only plausible way if denial is to remain central to Western ballistic missile defense doctrine.
Decisionmakers can pick one option or, ideally, combine both. The most important thing is to get moving."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/running-twice-as-fast-to-stand-still
24.More war and instability in Africa, which one can argue is the new great game between all the major powers. A fight for influence, security and natural resources.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5OHks6dNVk
25.Discussion on global macro and the economic singularity driven by AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzoyaoYKUns&t=726s
26."I’d rather be wrong about this. A benevolent oracle would be wonderful.
But planning around one is a kind of learned helplessness dressed up as optimism. If intelligence has a ceiling — and if we’re closer to it than the narrative admits — then the hard problems stay hard, and they stay ours. Climate gets solved through unglamorous decades of policy, deployment, and negotiation. Aging yields slowly, one mechanism at a time. Better institutions get built the way they’ve always been built: badly at first, then iterated.
Intelligence is a lever, not a wish. And levers still require someone willing to lean on them."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-speed-of-thought-what-if-intelligence
27."I think the thing is that most people don’t really need to get things done at all. They get things done because they have to get things done because they have no other choice but given infinite freedom they would do nothing. I can’t imagine doing nothing.
The people getting crazy absurd leverage from them today are not necessarily the smartest people in the room. But they do have a brilliantly burning desire to do things and a massive backlog of things they’ve always wanted to do. And they’re the people with taste, unfinished plans, and an almost pathological need to make something happen.
And until AI goes from a 1980s era computer that you have to set up and wire yourself to the iPhone where all you have to do is take it out of the sleek little box and touch it and it does all the work for you and abstracts away all the pain and complexity, then we aren’t crossing the chasm to the next phase of AI adoption and the Singularity is not near."
https://danieljeffries.substack.com/p/the-infinite-canvas-and-the-agency
28."As people spend more time talking to AI coding agents or assistants, their disconnect from reality could grow. While Manchun Wong still checks X frequently for “chatter” and general sentiment, she’s also changed things up by using her account to post new restaurants local to her in the Bay Area (what she sees as influencer-free, grassroots promotion) while prioritizing more in-person meetups.
When Ding calls herself a “psycho,” it’s hard to know how much she’s joking. But Rechtman seems prescient when he warns that too much time on Tech Twitter – much like in ChatGPT or Claude – could be dangerous.
“It is increasingly important to have an actively maintained cognitive security and cognitive hygiene,” he says. “Because the meme cycle and the feverish breaking news coming out of startup land right now will truly break your brain.”
https://www.upstartsmedia.com/p/column-tech-twitter-is-too-online
29.Such an instructive conversation if you want to understand what's happening with the AI bubble we are in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-0NZ-oIjlk
30.How to keep Europe & America engaged in Ukraine. This is the question. Important discussion on what is happening with the war right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgOTxkNm4D0&t=61s
31.Interregnum: Deglobalization as the US pulls back or declines or isolates itself, just depends on how you interpret what is happening. Latest Peter Zeihan's view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQCMsNIYjEA
32.Borderless founders ie. founders from outside of the USA coming the Silicon Valley but who are building global empires. A16Z is arguably one of the best platforms to execute this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t3TpJXa5-A
33.Peter Zeihan takes. He is controversial but here is some of his latest thinking on geopolitics: Ukraine, Iran, China, Taiwan etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLdUnQNYePk&t=422s
34.Some Alt-Geopolitics. Simon Dixon is a conspiracy theorist but some of it rings true. Doomberg is a skeptic and has good takes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0P0X7j_kcA
35."Despite the political chaos going on in the Philippines, the country itself is actually very well set up for a dramatic acceleration forward.
The Philippines has the youngest population of the top 40 global economies and could be perfectly positioned to exploit AI in the coming years.
What all three of these examples share in common is a partnership with the world’s most powerful military and economy, the United States.
And that’s the exact scenario that is unfolding in the Philippines right now."
https://www.codyshirk.com/p/how-the-worlds-most-undervalued-country
36."Post COVID: This turned into a new nihilistic view “nothing matters, everything is too expensive”. Six figure salaries are not leading to a nice home + car anymore (after expenses, the savings rate is too low).
Result is max degeneracy, sports betting, 0 DTE options, meme pumps etc.
The lotto ticket mentality is just a way of purchasing hope. The majority don’t even expect to win, they just want a reason to think there is a chance.
The New World: This largely consists of 1) significant increase in housing costs, 2) much more student debt, 3) tech monopolies eating into profit margins of brick and mortar and 4) wild changes in new tech that results in a B-line to wealth or a B-line to irrelevancy. All of this encourages more risk taking because the reward for being responsible got delayed by years (perhaps decades in some cases).
Simplistically, if their income isn’t rising faster than asset prices, they feel like they are falling behind.
We’re in a wild self fulfilling prophecy type stage. If someone is ultra rich or below the median, they are hyper gambling to increase their wealth. This creates immense long-term demand for risk assets. The only catch is the swings become much much more volatile. People say they can remain calm on an up 20% or down 20% day however the reality says otherwise (every year levered positions being blown up - short or long - get worse). In fact, every single year we get a wild event such as the Situational Awareness blow up.
This means you only really need a few things: 1) avoid leverage since the swings become much worse, 2) only care about increasing equity/ownership vs. dollars in a bank and 3) smile and nod when a random person tells you about their huge sports/prediction win."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/gambling-is-the-new-investing-and
37."So here is my honest picture of the end state, and it is neither Shenzhen nor the fortress. It is groups of narrow, productized, software-front specialists that plug into each other: parts companies feeding assembly companies, catalogs a founder can design from, manufacturability checked by software at upload before a bad design ever reaches a machine. AI design tools are already racing toward that last layer (Autodesk ships AI DFM reports in Fusion, startups are putting manufacturability inside CAD), and whoever encodes real manufacturability decides what AI is allowed to design.
Industrial legos as an ecosystem of specialists and not one company that ate them. The missing pieces are the five the builders named: an asset class for pre-revenue machines, the engineers, a computable liability system, interfaces that answer, and cheap enough automation.
One thing my issue does not argue: that imports are the enemy. America needs to be able to do much more at home, and keep cooperating with the world at the same time. I strongly believe normal trade with China will continue in any future I can imagine. The gap that matters is narrower: whole categories of components where no domestic option exists at any price, at any lead time, from anyone. The goal is having the option, not making everything ourselves."
https://constiv.substack.com/p/industrial-legos
38.Arthur Hayes is one of the best thinkers on Crypto due to his background as global macro trader. Money printer go brrr......so it's BTC, gold and land.