Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Sept 13th, 2026
"Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall." — F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Writing the same year Google was founded, Pine and Gilmore couldn’t have anticipated a society atomized by smartphones and social media. Digital technologies, supercharged by pandemic-era social distancing measures, rendered in-person experiences scarce, i.e., more valuable. In 2021, as the world began to lift Covid restrictions, consumers embraced “revenge travel.” The following year, a spokesperson for the American Society of Travel Advisors told CNN, “It’s another way of saying, ‘Life is short. I want to explore the world and seek experiences that make me feel alive.’”
The YOLO attitude persists, especially among young people. A 2026 American Express report found that 74% of millennials and Zoomers consider travel nonnegotiable, while two-thirds said they would take a job with fewer benefits if it gave them more flexibility to travel. That says a lot about the value young people place on experiences, but it also suggests that young people are spending money on what they can (experiences), as opposed to saving for purchases that are increasingly out of reach (homes)."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/world-cup-experience
2.Lots of Silicon Valley news: Meta glasses, AI talent wars & Prediction markets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbdH6dPMDxk
3.Ritardmaxxing is helpful. Too much introspection & thinking can be dangerous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWd9r_KnXG8
4."This is the central conundrum of any kind of governmental campaign to identify and promote what’s cool. Cool is at odds with official (or common-sense) narratives about what constitutes “good taste.” It was true about Elvis gyrating on TV in the Fifities. It was true about the anime-tentacles of La Blue Girl in the Nineties.
The Cool Japan campaign pretends that society never stigmatized pop culture, that all of this stuff is and always was perfectly acceptable, rather than the sort of thing that was consumed by the fringes of society, the outcasts and nerds and all the rest. It’s easy to go along with this, because the otaku won this societal battle and it’s “hip to be square” now. It’s a good thing creators and consumers of pop content aren’t stigmatized anymore. It’s a good thing the government is trying to support these industries. Yet obviously something is missing. Otherwise, the fate of the Cool Japan Fund wouldn’t be hanging by a thread of synthetic spider-silk."
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/make-japan-uncool-again
5.Building a new Permanent portfolio to survive economic challenges & volatility. Property and casualty insurance cos (WR Berkeley), Lindy stocks (cross section of economy with oldest cos like Texas Instruments, Merck etc), Hard currency: Gold bullion, Gold royalty cos, BTC & then cash for buying opportunities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwIUft5OIuQ
6."Your brain runs on a finite budget.
Every thought you entertain, every opinion you react to, costs you mental capital.
Spend it carelessly, and you end up broke not in your wallet, but in your focus.
Most people lose money because they lose attention.
They drown in digital clutter, chasing trends instead of building systems.
If your attention is scattered, your income will be too.
Because attention compounds exactly like money.
The most successful creators and entrepreneurs protect their attention like a secret bank account."
https://substack.com/@luxlifestylelab/p-178427879
7."So here is what I actually expect: not a crash, but a long intermission. The dollar slowly losing altitude, with gold held as the placeholder, until something new and concrete finally takes the stage.
For six hundred years, the question was always the same: which country is next? The strange thing we have to sit with is that this time, the honest answer might be none - at least not for a long while. No crown prince. No next flag. The throne simply stays empty, and gold is the name we give to an empty throne.
Which means the rising price of gold is not really a story about gold. It is a thermometer. And the temperature is climbing fast: gold has more than doubled since 2022, from about $1,800 an ounce to more than $4,000 today. That is not a metal becoming more useful. It is trust draining out of the system - and as long as that number keeps climbing, the world has not yet agreed on what comes next. That is the gauge to watch: not because gold is the destination, but because it tells you how far we still are from a real one."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/the-empty-throne
8.“The tactics remain the same,” The Commander Speaks wrote. “A single aircraft approaches aggressively, pulls up into a climb and releases its payload.” This low-to-high flight profile is typical of both Russian and Ukrainian jets trying to avoid enemy air defenses during ingress while still maximizing the kinetic energy, and thus range and impact, of their satellite-guided glide bombs at the moment of release."
https://www.trenchart.us/p/to-protect-the-glide-bombers-ukrainian
9.Always helpful perspective to understand global macro and investing in the AI world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkU3fhWnfxU&t=2s
10."The ultimate status symbol is an operator who runs a high-margin enterprise but has completely wiped his presence from professional networking platforms. He has no LinkedIn updates, no public speaking gigs, and no corporate synergy posts. He signals that his cash flow is so entirely independent of social validation that he doesn’t need to perform for the crowd. While others are “updating their titles,” the Sovereign is Enforcing the Monopoly."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-networking-mirage
11."Everything in life falls into two buckets: what’s up to you, and what isn’t. Your opinions, your choices, your responses: that’s up to you.
Everything else: markets, LP decisions, other people’s behavior, outcomes - not up to you.
Most people spend their lives trying to control the second bucket and ignoring the first.
Epictetus says flip that entirely. The moment you stop directing energy at things you can’t control, you get that energy back for the one thing you actually can."
https://metz.substack.com/p/amor-fati
12.Hope it never comes to this but at least it seems the US has a good plan to fight China if they invade Taiwan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIeeH0IJDo0
13."The modern entrepreneurship cult has romanticized friction. You have been trained to believe that the more complex your workflow is the more tools you pay for, the more people you manage, the more manual adjustments you make the more legitimate your business is. This is a severe architectural failure.
True elite design dictates that an enterprise should run with the absolute minimum number of moving parts. If a system requires your human intervention to survive a single week, you haven’t built an asset; you have built an unstable job where you are the bottleneck. In 2026, real power is measured by how much capital your system can process without you ever touching the keyboard."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-operational-cage
14."We are currently navigating one of the most chaotic investment environments in modern history. Hype and narratives, rather than true financial fundamentals, are driving the markets. As a result, investors are spinning in circles, chasing their own tails with increasing speed.
If you are going to head out and chase tail, just make sure you aren’t chasing your own."
https://www.codyshirk.com/p/what-type-of-tail-chasing-are-you
15."Three things have shifted in recent years, and they apply to the coast just as much as they did to the inland in part one.
Starlink solved bandwidth here too. Fishing villages that ran on 2 Mbps now run on 150+. The coast is no longer offline.
Autonomous driving solves the distance problem. 30 minutes you can work through is not a commute, it’s an extension of your office with a sea view. Everything half an hour out from a real city gets repriced the moment that lands. The market hasn’t done it yet.
The third shift is specific to the South. In April 2026 Italy raised the cap on its 7% flat tax to towns under 30,000 residents across eight southern and island regions. A foreign retiree who moves there pays 7% on ALL foreign income for ten years. Seven of the fourteen towns on this list now qualify.
So the same coast works in three directions. You can keep your business where it is and base from a harbor with Starlink. You can retire on the sea at a 7% rate. Or you can build the new thing from a fishing village while it’s still priced as one."
https://palombo.substack.com/p/where-to-actually-buy-a-house-on
16.Pretty interesting conversation here. Re-thinking a new enterprise structure and risk & entrepreneurship.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuKze21P-ZE
17."Entry Level Rich
Outside of rare events (significant meeting, doctor appointment etc.) you can wake up with no alarm clock
You can dedicate your best hours to what is most important to you. Someone else isn’t deciding when you work. You decide
Any time you need to take time off, you can do it without asking anyone
Any family friend event? You can decide if you want to go or not
You can say no to work without causing you an ounce of stress (if you don’t like the person, or the Company, rationale doesn’t matter)
You can decide where you live
Conceptually, if you have a high net worth but fail to answer yes to all of this… we don’t think you’re particularly rich. The exception to the rule is you absolutely love what you’re doing.
The smart New Money figured out a lot of the games in life.
They spend a lot more on once in a life time experiences in their 20s/30s because they know it’s a snapshot. The partying is definitely not the same in old age
They care a lot about how the money is made. The smart new money values $1 online at a premium to $1 in a brick and mortar. The location and time freedom is massive
The big picture difference is there is an acceptance of life stages. Assuming you will want to do the same things at 35 vs 55 is absurd. They build their life in anticipation of the next wave of interests
Higher acceptance of human psychology. New rich discuss correct trust fund set ups since they know tons of messed up rich kids who amounted to nothing (or worse, OD’d)"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/new-definition-of-rich-in-2026
18.Trying to understand the new world and rules of Venture capital in the age of AI. This was very helpful in thinking about how to invest. Venture capital vs. venture growth versus being alternative asset manager.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6Dahcxwkn0&t=478s
19.A conversation between GPs of two of the best venture capital funds on the planet: Founders Fund & Benchmark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpUcRftC3k0&t=1149s
20."For startups that raise large rounds, it’s almost implied that an increasing proportion of the problems they face are Type 2 Money Problems. The assumption is that speed to scale and market position win, and that money solves that.
The challenge is being sure that’s the case and you’re not papering over another core deficiency of the company. No amount of money can paper over bad culture or leadership. No amount of money will fix hiring if the mission is uninspiring. And no amount of money can will materially accelerate the delivery of truly innovative technical solutions. Only talent and a culture of high iteration speed can do that."
https://www.alsoblogposts.com/p/money-problems
21."For the renationalization crowd, citizens capable of leveraging autonomy will become a new type of strategic asset. However, in practice, we’ll find that this loyalty can shift quickly if it isn’t rewarded with tangible benefits. Globalized countries, where disloyalty to the state is baked into the socioeconomic system, will be the most vulnerable to this. Renationalized states will fare better, since they can offer a tribal loyalty globalized states cannot — i.e., a historically rich shared identity, a prioritized citizenry, an aggressive intolerance of corruption (moral, financial, and familial), cohesive/coherent decision-making, etc. NOTE: Unfortunately for the West, China provides this.
Open-source agentic systems (like OpenClaw), combined with open-source AIs, are the wild card. They far less expensive to operate and only lag existing frontier AU models by 6 months to 1 year (in large part due to China’s state-sponsored support of open source). The longer this alternative remains available, the greater the chance we’ll see a socioeconomic autonomy breakout that challenges existing organizational and financial structures (i.e., all the wildest promises of bitcoin and crypto, but real and tangible).
What does this mean to you? Get yourself leveraged to the limits of your talent, or be close to someone with talent who is. Zoom forward (economically and socially), and when autonomy-friendly environments emerge (my bet is on AI-to-AI marketplaces in orbital data centers), go all in early. When that autonomous zone becomes 99% of the global economy, you’ll thank me."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/locking-down-autonomy
22."The lesson I’d offer anyone five years from their own leap: the comfortable detour is not a failure, but don’t mistake it for the answer. The job that “solves it” usually just reveals, more expensively and at risk of hurting relationships, what you already knew."
https://conduitofvalue.substack.com/p/the-weight-of-open-doors
23.“In games where the JASSM-ER has maritime strike capabilities, the abundance of U.S. munitions made U.S. strategy an almost uncomplicated exercise,” CSIS concluded. “With each squadron of 12 bombers carrying around 200 stealthy, standoff [anti-ship cruise missiles], the United States could rapidly cripple the Chinese fleet and leave the invasion force stranded.”
https://www.trenchart.us/p/americas-best-bomber-can-now-launch
24."Last Dispatch ended with the suggestion that effective counter-UAS defenses would allow ground forces to concentrate once more. But how likely is that? Will counter-drone defense ever become effective enough that it becomes uneconomical to employ FPVs in mass quantities without any complementary effort? As things stand now, they are inflicting roughly 60% of casualties in Ukraine, making them a significant—although far from the only—obstacle to more decisive offensive operations.
I believe the answer is undoubtedly yes. Small drones are slow-moving and fragile: from the perspective of physics, they are extremely vulnerable to any kind of kinetic fire. The biggest limitation on ground-based fires at present is accuracy. Sensors and predictive targeting are rapidly improving, however, and once they reach a certain point, AD guns will likely be an extremely effective means of defeating UAVs. With time, it is even possible that they will be effective against larger and faster Group 3 drones (such as the ones Ukraine is currently using against Russia’s operational depths)."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/can-the-small-drone-problem-be-solved
25. "In many ways, discipline is the foundation of masculinity. A man who can’t govern himself will struggle to lead his family or excel in his profession. Intelligence without discipline can become wasted potential. Ambition without discipline can become little more than wishful thinking.
If you study successful men, you’ll discover that they were disciplined. They often shared remarkably similar habits based on that discipline.
The difference between average men and exceptional men can be very small. It’s not really a matter of talent or luck. It’s the result of daily choices repeated over months and years. The disciplined man gets out of bed when he would rather sleep. He exercises when he would rather rest. He reads when others scroll on their phone. He keeps his word when it would be easier to make excuses. He chooses long-term growth over short-term comfort."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/the-habits-of-disciplined-men
26.The new battlefield: Sub-terra aka underground. A new category.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Av9v2u8y2o
27.Lots of implications from the recent Ukrainian missile strikes on the key Russian chip factory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL0ei7E44Ls
28.Louis Gave is one of the best global macro investors with some interesting ideas particularly on international markets and various asset classes. I won't ever buy any Chinese assets (bonds & some select cos) but its still interesting to learn they are doing well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OrRpcqoZBo&t=1537s
29."The fiber story has a happy ending for exactly one reason, and it isn’t vision. It’s that glass doesn’t spoil. The fiber that went dark in 2001 was still good fiber in 2008, so when YouTube and the cloud finally showed up, the infrastructure was sitting there to catch them. The asset’s life — twenty-five years, thirty — was longer than the lag before demand arrived. The cans were still good when the customer got hungry.
That’s the whole mechanism. Not optimism. Shelf life.
A GPU’s economic shelf life is twenty-four to thirty-six months — not because the chip stops working, but because Nvidia ships a new architecture roughly every eighteen months, each generation two to three times more efficient per watt. The moment the next one lands, running the old chip on frontline work stops penciling. It still computes. It just costs more to run than it earns — which, economically, is spoilage.
And the buildout is financing produce on canned-goods terms: multi-year debt, six-year depreciation schedules, underwriting that treats a thirty-month asset like a thirty-year one."
https://thebsmeter.substack.com/p/glass-keeps-silicon-doesnt
30.David Senra is the man. It's fun watching his evolution and learnings. So much wisdom and passion in this guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXsleu4-kd8
31.Always a great conversation about Silicon Valley news: AI AI AI. Good takes here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uINvYTxGCQE&t=865s
32.Lots of interesting discussion on Silicon Valley news. One of my weekly must watch shows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqmbW163QKQ
33.More harsh truth from Doomberg and all the implications of energy and geopolitics around the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tsGHhQKGRc
34."The good news is you don’t have to pick one country. You can structure yourself internationally, keep your assets outside any single government’s reach legally, and be genuinely international.
You build the legal structure yourself. You figure out what you are good at and what people will actually pay for. You invest and build income streams from scratch. You learn the bureaucracy of foreign countries. You fail at things, pay for it yourself, and try again.
It took me a couple of years to actually figure out how to make it work, leaning on my background as a geologist to figure out something real and meaningful. You get stressed. The honeymoon period of a new environment wears off faster than you expect, and suddenly you want cash flow and routine more than you want a new experience.
That is the real premium on the call option. The years of building from a cold start in a place where nobody knows your name, the language is not yours.
But here is the big thing. The local rules start working in your favour very quickly when you show up with a strong Western passport and strong dollars. The same drive that gets ground down in Australia by tax rates and cost of living goes a lot further here. That is what the payoff looks like on the other side of the premium."
https://www.geologotrader.com/p/my-leave-australia-call-option-is
35."The question isn’t whether China wants Taiwan—it does—but what it will risk for it. China is not willing to make the same mistake Russia made in Ukraine. Russia had a much easier path to victory against an inferior opponent and could not accomplish its goal. Taking Taiwan means an amphibious assault across the ~110-mile Taiwan Strait. Even with the ships, planes, and marines for the landing, occupying 23 million objectors who built their wealth on technological skill is strategic madness. And Ukraine has shown how much drones favor a motivated defender.
Russia’s fatal assumption was that Ukrainians would not, or would not be able to, fight. Would the Taiwanese? This is the genuinely hard question, and it cuts both ways. In its favor: A January 2026 Academia Sinica survey found 58.7% willing to resist at all costs even with no American help. Against it: That majority is shrinking, and Taiwanese faith that America would actually arrive has slid from 45% in 2021 to 34% today.
Will isn’t fixed—it can be drained, and draining it is part of China’s strategy. But every time China tries too hard, Taiwanese sentiment hardens. The percentage of Taiwanese that say they prefer the status quo but move toward independence has increased by almost 4X since 1994. And the support for independence isn’t linear; it’s marked by spikes in sentiment due to Chinese actions, like the 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis and China’s de-facto 2020 abolition of “One Country, Two Systems” in Hong Kong."
https://www.mauldineconomics.com/the-world-isnt-ending/china-is-not-going-to-invade-taiwan
36."Ukraine’s strategy since the beginning of the year has been to impose costs on the day-to-day lives of average Russians—and since the US-Iran war began, to also threaten Russian energy export infrastructure to keep allies onside.
The Russian economy is now in shambles. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it had built up a National Wealth Fund via profits from energy exports worth almost 7% of GDP. Today, the fund has liquid assets of just 1.8% of Russia’s GDP. At the beginning of the year, Russia predicted a government deficit of 3.8 trillion rubles. It exceeded that in Q1. Corporate debt is up 34 trillion rubles, roughly $500 billion. Oil and gas revenue is down ~45% year on year as of April. The hope of a reprieve from higher oil prices due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has not materialized.
Russia has run its economy on a wartime footing far longer than mainstream economists predicted, but it cannot outrun basic math forever. Moreover, Ukrainian strikes in Moscow, affecting the daily life of citizens in the imperial metropole, change the geography of this conflict. Zelenskyy isn’t just being a g when he threatens Moscow; he is essentially telling Putin that the more he fights in Ukraine, the greater Ukraine’s capacity and resolve to bring the fight to Moscow’s doorstep. Not Crimea’s, not Donbas’s, not Siberia’s, not Rostov-on-Don’s… but Moscow’s doorstep. If Putin cannot defend Moscow, then the emperor truly has no clothes."
https://www.mauldineconomics.com/the-world-isnt-ending/the-russian-economy-is-in-shambles
37."The sustainment model was a rational response to the cost of keeping a human alive inside the machine.
Take the human out and the entire cost structure collapses. An autonomous system has nothing to protect. No crew, no armor, no life support, no escape systems. It can be small, cheap, and fast to build. And once it is cheap and fast to build, it stops behaving like a fighter jet and starts behaving like a cell phone: largely similar across vendors, quickly aging, and expected to be replaced within two or three years. No serious military plans to fly the same attack drone in 2032 that it bought in 2026. The threat environment moves too fast, and the hardware is cheap enough that replacement beats sustainment.
When the product ages out every few years, the old model stops making sense. You do not marry a single contractor for a generation. You run a competition, you buy what works, and you run the competition again. That is exactly what the US, Germany, and Ukraine are now doing, each in their own way, at the same time."
https://lorenzmeier.substack.com/p/the-company-that-arms-the-warfighter