A New Age of Venture Capital: Investing in Hard Stuff

Something changed in Silicon Valley in 2023. I’ve definitely felt a vibe shift. It took me a while to figure out what it was. Basically AI has changed everything and made software a commodity in all its negative connotations. For all intents and purposes, software is dead. But most Silicon Valley investors don’t know it yet. They are following and investing in stuff that is DOA. While software is still great for building bootstrapped lifestyle businesses, for venture style returns, I suspect this will not be the cornucopia we once had. 

There are harsh implications now for software founders and their investors as Steve Yegge writes. "If you do nothing, you’re almost certainly going to get overrun. If you have an Atom Moat, then you stand a pretty good chance of weathering the storm, if you execute well. Just a chance, mind you: It’s a moat, not a force field. But atoms are a pretty good moat. If you make beer, or work with humans, or ship stuff, say, then you’ve got a bit more time to work with, maybe, to find your feet in the AI era.

If you have a strictly online or SaaS software presence, with no atoms in your product whatsoever, just electrons, then you are, candidly, pretty screwed if you don’t pivot. I don’t think there are any recipes for pivoting yet; this is all new, and it’s all happening very fast."

Source: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-anthropic-hive-mind-d01f768f3d7b

BuccoCapital states my conclusion better than I could: “For 50 yrs we treated the supremacy of asset-light businesses as a permanent economic law But if AI commoditizes asset-light businesses, we’d just be reverting to the historical mean where value accrued to atoms, infrastructure, energy It would be a 50 year blip. An anomaly.”

Stefan Cohen further elaborates: “The most important businesses will be regulated, capex intensive, operating in the physical world, or have substantial network effects.”

I started moving away from pure software businesses in 2023 on instinct as I started doing defense-tech which by its nature encapsulates both hardware and software combined. And with the discovery of the Reindustrialization movement in America in 2024, it’s pretty clear what the future is. Back to the future that is. 

Anand Iyer tweeted something that sums up everything pretty good. 

“2011-2025: 

Software is eating the world 

Hardware is hard 

Bits not atoms 

2025-?:

AI is eating software 

Hardware is the moat 

Physics over software”

I think it’s spot on. And I have and will be investing accordingly.

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 31st, 2026

“Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August”--Jenny Han

1. "The Strait of Hormuz is not a chokepoint. It is a civilizational lever. Its closure — even partial, even temporary — does not merely raise prices. It fractures supply chains, paralyses monetary policy, triggers food crises months downstream, cascades through metals and industrial production, and hands the DragonBear axis a structural competitive advantage at the precise moment when the Cold War 2.0 contest over global economic architecture is entering its decisive phase.

Any instability in this important maritime route could rattle economic stability worldwide. The shock would reverberate far beyond energy markets — tightening financial conditions, fuelling inflation, and pushing fragile economies closer to recession in a matter of weeks.

The blood vessels of globalization are being compressed in real time. The world is watching whether the defenders of the existing order have the strategic coherence to reopen them — or whether the chokepoint of the 21st century becomes the pressure point through which Cold War 2.0 is ultimately decided."

https://velinatchakarova.substack.com/p/the-arteries-of-power-global-chokepoints

2."The truly vicious part of Beijing’s situation is that Iran’s entire playbook for retaliation was designed to punish Washington, but the geography and economics of each weapon mean the damage lands on China instead. Iranian missiles aimed at Gulf states threaten the very oil infrastructure and port facilities that Chinese companies have spent billions investing in across the region.

Xi bet a decade of foreign policy on Khamenei’s ability to withstand American pressure, and the bet did not pay off. Operation Epic Fury was designed to break the Islamic Republic, but it may also have exposed the uncomfortable truth that Chinese influence in the Middle East was only as durable as the assumption that no one would ever call it into question, and in Zhongnanhai, they know it."

https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/china-is-scrambling

3."Presence is not something that appears overnight. It is has to be cultivated through small, consistent habits that we practice every day. Regardless of how busy we might be or how tired we are, we must always be cognizant of our presence and how we present ourselves to the world.

How we stand, how we speak, how we dress, and how we treat the people around us all matter. While these things may seem subtle, the effects are significant. In a society that encourages men to be casual, a disciplined presence becomes a form of leadership. It reminds others, and the world, that order, dignity, and self-respect still have a place in modern life."

https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/the-way-a-man-carries-himself-still

4."The love of the picturesque, a feature present in many cultures, isn’t simply a collective psychological curiosity but a spiritual one. In traditional Western and especially Protestant cultures—take the Netherlands as an example—the love of beauty emerges only once a certain level of material stability is reached.

If you aren’t well off, you don’t think about beauty, you don’t care about it. In times of crisis, the Dutch peasant historically finds himself in the middle of an existential hardship. In contrast, in Southeastern Europe, such a context doesn’t carry the same consequences. Their devotion to beauty isn’t dependent on a high level of economic standard at all. "

https://vizi.substack.com/p/the-power-of-beauty-in-times-of-crisis

5."The latest Pentagon news reinforces that critical minerals are becoming a defense asset class.

Drivers:

-U.S.–China resource competition

-AI / semiconductor supply chains

-missile & weapons production

-geopolitical conflict

In practical terms:

-strategic metals valuations could rerate

-government funding will accelerate project timelines

-Western supply chains will be subsidized

-Copper and gold are great, but defense metals are now coming into focus"

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertsinn/p/pentagon-signals-that-us-is-entering

6. A good rundown on energy in America, what he saw in China and running a foundation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1nMi7t-uo

7.Dalio has an interesting framework. I am not sure I agree with his conclusions but it's good to get a differing global macro view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-vMNzHgSHI

8."I’ve been a generalist my entire career. Never picked a lane. At every company I just found the most important problem and went after it, regardless of whose job it was supposed to be. For most of my career that felt like swimming against the current.

Not anymore. No fast-growing startup I know hires just a PM or just a marketer anymore. They want tinkerers. That marketer? She’s in Claude figuring out what the last deploy changed, building the landing page herself, writing ad copy, and launching the campaign before she goes home. No tickets. No handoffs. The engineer ships the feature, creates the launch video, spins up agents to review the PR, and owns what happens after it goes live. Nobody told them to work this way. There was just a problem and they went after it.

Early startups always operated like this. No boundaries, just outcomes. The difference now is that AI lets you keep that scrappiness at 50, 100, 200 people. The gaps that forced specialization at scale are gone. These teams pay more in tokens than they’d spend on new hires."

https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/become-a-tinkerer

9."You mix the old school, with the new school.

You run a global operations, you have men of your ilk sprinkled across the globe, but you also know the importance of being a presence locally.

You don’t just build online, you have the offline ecosystem built to match…

You appreciate the importance of a handshake, business conducted over an eye fillet, back of the napkin deals, wheeling & dealing for the sport of it.

This is truly the rarest breed of man…

A man who is athletic, who appreciates his physical vessel & knows his body is a billion dollar asset.

And equally, a man who can take care of business, who is an elite operator & has balanced both disciplines with the same engineering brilliance you see at Le Mans."

https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/how-to-be-an-athletic-businessman

10.Some of the best takes on b2b software in Silicon Valley. Always worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RHwE_M68BY

11.Lots of lessons from history. Analogy is the decades prior to 1914. A parallel in the dangerous alliances with declining power. (ie. Germany and Austro-Hungarian empire=Russia as example)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMmcRz8gxk0

12.I've followed these two for a while. Been helpful to understand the changes in the world economy via the lens of economic statecraft and geopolitics. It's a really good lens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKzsjvRVkik

13."When you’re in a high-velocity social media culture, relevance is everything. The pressure to be first creates bad incentives. Mix in monetization and dopamine, and even careful people start pushing things they haven’t fully verified. You end up following geopol astrologers. 

In many ways, I think the military intelligence and intelligence agencies have found a solution to those pesky online randos noticing things. It's just to simply bury them alive.

There’s an older deception principle at work here: hiding a tree in a forest.You don’t need to hide a secret if you can surround it with ten thousand high-fidelity fakes. By the time an analyst spots the real signal, it’s been buried by the algorithm or drowned out by a million people arguing about the wrong thing."

https://pplsartofwar.substack.com/p/6-observations-about-infowar

14.Another great summary of this week's big news in Silicon Valley: latest AI battle between Anthropic and OpenAI, China vs USA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIdKqkNCymQ

15. "Taken together, speech, posture, composure, grooming, dress, and attentiveness form the outward structure of presence. None of them are difficult or require extraordinary talent. However, when practiced consistently they create a man who moves through the world with authority and influence.

Others trust him more readily and they listen when he speaks. His steadiness influences the tone of the room and calms others during difficult times. For men with families, this influence carries even greater weight. Children observe how their fathers conduct themselves in public, how they greet others, how they respond to challenges, and how they carry responsibility as a husband and father."

https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/five-ways-a-man-can-strengthen-his

16."Macro pressure. Commoditization. Competition. AI. Each blade cuts differently. The bottom quartile will see accelerating losses. Some may tip into outright contraction. The sword of Damocles hangs by a single horsehair. For simpler products in competitive categories, that horsehair is fraying."

https://tomtunguz.com/software-ndr-decline-2026/

17."Being an entrepreneur really is one of life’s great challenges. Getting a business off the ground, signing the first customers, and building the product all require leaps of faith. But like anything important in life, every bit of effort helps.

As the founder of Southwest Airlines, Herb Kelleher, once said: “I have a strategic plan. It’s called getting things done.” Turn effort into results, and results into startup success."

https://davidcummings.org/2026/03/07/every-bit-of-effort-helps/

18. "One also cannot quibble with the results in Franklin’s case: he became one of the most accomplished men in American history, and maybe Western history too—absurdly distinguished in fields as diverse as writing, diplomacy, invention, practical science, and business.

But the question is how well his virtue-techniques can be replicated by lesser spirits, how well his model works for others. Mark Twain suggested that Franklin doomed countless boys born in the century that followed, boys who would be expected to dedicate themselves to getting ahead with the same dull fanaticism. Put another way: Ben Franklin as a dynamo, inventor, newspaperman, and virtual founder of a great city is far superior to Ben Franklin as self-help guru.

The authors of this volume on manliness didn’t seem to realize that more is required than guys rocking red flannel shirts, suspenders, and meticulously kempt beards while cultivating the shopkeeper virtues. It was a sign of my own cluelessness that I expected anything more substantial from this book on manliness, and a sign of the larger strangeness of the times that such a book would be turned to.

As an alternative to the shopkeeper virtues and the manosphere, I recommend the theological, cardinal, and chivalric virtues."

https://thechivalryguild.substack.com/p/you-too-could-have-been-a-lumberjack

19."As a result, what I’ve been saying for over a while now, which I’m reiterating here is that over the next 5 years, social networking is going to increasingly move offline. And it’s all going to happen through events, experiences, social clubs and offline/hybrid communities.

This means anything from a dinner through to a retreat and up to a conference. Or a run club, a women’s social club, a private men’s club, or the hundreds of creator, entrepreneur and lifestyle clubs and communities popping up all over the world.

I don’t care if it’s existing event organisers, or creators or brands - they are all going to become increasingly “community” oriented, and look to build deeper relationships with and turn their audiences & their customers into real, IRL communities.

Even physical venues like retail shops & cafes will undergo a massive transformation (they already are) into spaces that people want to come to and hang out in. I saw this a couple months back, and it reflects what I saw in real life while I was traveling, and what I mentioned above about brands like Othership, Soho House and Equinox (not to mention the tens of thousands of others around the world).

As AI continues to eat the internet, more value, more people and more social activity will migrate offline. Events, experiences, social clubs, IRL Communities, curated trips, date nights, you name it. This is where the opportunity is. This is where the puck is going. This is where I am playing. This where you should go."

https://remnantchronicles.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-experience-economy

20.Helpful framework on Trump 2.0's geopolitical plan. Hard power is back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA5POz9bVhE

21."At his core, Bond embodies something many modern men sense is missing today and that is presence. Presence is not just a matter of style, nor is it arrogance or bravado. What makes Bond compelling to us is the way he carries himself. He moves through the world with composure and confidence. Unfortunately, these qualities are becoming increasingly rare in a society that often derides masculinity as toxic while encouraging men to adopt traits that dilute the strength traditionally associated with manhood.

While few of us will find ourselves as international men of mystery navigating intrigue in distant lands, the principles that give Bond his presence are relevant to ordinary life. By examining some of the qualities that define this iconic fictional character, we may discover habits and disciplines that can be cultivated in our own lives."

https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/what-james-bond-gets-right-about

22."So far, for me at least, the arrival of Intelligence Age isn’t a story about having more time. It’s a story about having more capability and becoming obsessed with using it. In the end, this feels a continuation of an ongoing trend. The internet changed the way we work, but no one thinks it helped us to work less hard. Phones certainly didn’t.

Perhaps this is what it means to be a creature wired by evolution to strive, now equipped with weird new superpowers. The technologies change; the restlessness remains. New world, same humans."

https://www.newworldsamehumans.xyz/p/me-my-work-and-i

23."AI is not a tool we use. It is an environment we are moving into. The first wave was about efficiency — doing the same things faster, cheaper, at scale. This wave is structural. It is reorganizing the architecture of professional life: how we develop talent, how we manage organizations, how we price expertise, and ultimately how we define what makes a professional valuable.

To survive the massive structural change of the white-collar economy, professionals cannot continue to function as operators of tasks. They must become orchestrators of outcomes. The question is no longer “Can I do this faster with AI?” It is “Can I design a system that produces better results than my competitors’ systems?” The future of work is not about competing with the machine. It is about owning the intent behind the machine — the strategy, the values, the judgment that determine what the machine is even trying to accomplish. That is the only moat left. And it is more defensible than anything a title or a credential ever provided."

https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-new-white-collar-moat-in-ai

24."If your life feels flat right now, consider that the solution probably isn’t another system. It’s a decision.

What is the thing you keep not doing because the timing isn’t right, the justification isn’t airtight, the risk feels slightly too large? That’s usually the thing. Not always. But usually.

The interesting men I know made the call when it wasn’t fully safe. They bought the car, took the trip, started the company, made the move. Not carelessly — but without waiting for a certainty that was never going to arrive.

And then they had something the optimizers don’t: a life with actual evidence in it. A story with weight. A self that has been tested against reality rather than just theorized about in a journal.

The goal was never a better routine. The goal was a life that made the routine irrelevant.

That’s the version worth building toward.

Not optimized. Lived."

https://hayescarrera.substack.com/p/nobody-is-coming-to-make-your-life

25."You have the right to choose your circle. You are free to do this. Surround yourself with people who lift you up. People who accept you, fully. People who don’t judge you, who don’t throw little barbs to make themselves feel bigger. People who see the best in you and want to help you set it free.

They are out there. Find them.

And let the little monster starve."

https://2lr.substack.com/p/the-little-monster

26. "What you have right now is an amazing opportunity, especially if you’re between the ages of 25 and 45, especially if your living situation is stable, especially if you are more than helpless with a computer. You have an amazing opportunity to do useful things as every other smart person is getting extremely distracted, intensely more distracted by the day, from doing anything useful.

Tomorrow is Monday; do something useful and remunerative this week."

https://indianbronson.substack.com/p/stop-monitoring-the-situation

27."In all of warfare, the leap from operational art to strategy is the hardest to make. Whereas operational art is in many ways an extension of tactics, dealing with the same sorts of considerations, strategy is different in both kind and scale.

The problems it seeks to address are of a fundamentally different nature, as are the tools to effect it—yet by the very nature of the problem, it is almost impossible to train anyone to practice good strategy."

https://substack.com/home/post/p-190343719

28.One of the top seed investors in Silicon Valley. This was really insightful. Chad Byers of Susa VC.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2dEkmnOWwI

29.Lots of stuff here: AI, Defense and Space. The future is bright in America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zNKcH3uZec

30."We have been conditioned to believe that “Knowledge is Power.” This is a 20th-century lie. In 2026, Selection is Power. Information is now a commodity with a price of zero. If you spend your morning “catching up” on the news, you are allowing the world’s chaos to set your internal tempo. You are a Consumer of Garbage, filling your mental palace with junk that will be irrelevant by sunset. To “know everything” is to understand nothing."

https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-information-glutton

31."When it comes to your career, you have two choices:

–become really good at a skill, and sell that skill to a company in exchange for wages

–Or, start the company and employ the people who are really good at the skills you need

Those who choose option 1 have capped upside.

They can be the BEST in the world at what they do, and even make millions of dollars (cameraman). But, those who employ them are the one’s who have the *chance* to make billions because they own the equity (studios)

If you want to make money, go after the main man.

Get in the business of making money, not trading your time/skills for wages."

https://colejaczko.substack.com/p/have-you-ever-seen-a-billionaire

32."It's far from a positive development that the country with the biggest military and a highly improvisational foreign policy is also the one that bears the smallest relative share of the economic consequences of its actions. The economic story of the last decade and a half has been that the world grows, and the US grows faster.

It would be tempting to think that the US is levered to growth, and would decline faster, too. That might be true in terms of initial equity price reactions, but over longer periods the US will probably hold up better."

https://www.thediff.co/archive/america-has-a-comparative-advantage-in-handling-global-disorder/

33."In general, you should limit exposure to airline, transportation and auto related companies (ex-Tesla since they are electric). If you’re in the camp that this is solved quickly you’d take a derivative out on oil prices. No we won’t do this since we have no idea how long this takes.

If you’re in the long-term pain camp, you’d continue to sit in cash/build up a cash position or leave it in ultra-boring need to have stocks like utilities. You already know we’re going to be sitting in the same stance of waiting for crypto to bottom and investing in some long-term tech companies.

We’ll say it a billion times. You’re better off learning how to read emotions/psychology than worthless P/E ratios and Discounted Cash Flow valuations. The numbers in excel are fictional. The ratios mean nothing if everyone is clicking the green buy button or the red sell button.

Would you rather know if more money clicks buy or sell for the next year or if the company makes more money next year? You know the answer."

https://bowtiedbull.io/p/worried-about-oil-just-survive-the

34. "Having spent time working at Palantir, Volz is deeply knowledgeable about the defense tech sector but she’s making investments in all sorts of startups that are trying to reinvent America’s industrial base.

“I bet on people more than anything — people who want to work on the hardest, most important problems and actually have a mission underlying what they’re working on,” Volz said. “There are a lot of ways to make money. I want to make money on people actually doing important things rather than AI slop.”

https://www.newcomer.co/p/exclusive-ex-a16z-partner-michelle

35.A crash course on geopolitics and what the new world order could look like. Michael Every provides some great frameworks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLchr__I-0Y&t=1513s

36.Good dissection of the Sphere's business model.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2BCXdeHD18

37.Food for thought on the direction of AI & implications on society writ large.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8YC8OCnDxM

38.One of my favorite tech biz blog posts. You really get the bleeding edge of Silicon Valley.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXguv0zxxCQ&t=36s

The 4Fs: Code for a Good Life

The Manosphere aka Redpill world is something of a cesspool. But sometimes you can find treasure in a cesspool. Joules Sullivan and Richard Cooper are like the older and wiser experienced brothers you wish you had. They had a great discussion together here focusing on the big 4 in a man’s life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITZkdc2yrnU

I highly recommend it as they share their life experience & extensive wisdom as Joules is an ex-soldier and intelligence agent turned businessman/tailor and Richard Cooper as both a business man and philosopher author.  

Joules: “Family, faith, fitness, freedom is the goal. Well, I think the phases of a man, I think we all want to get that money and the stuff first. And then once we got the money and the stuff, then we want the status. At a certain point, I think you see through it and you just want no hassle and nonsense. You want a good living. I value going to the gym and getting a good lift in more than I do the buzz from a new supercar at this point. Like actually, in terms of measuring the endorphins in my system. 

What I've gone through now is all of that stuff at a certain point becomes more hassle than it is to return. Once you know hedonistic adaptation, you get used to having all the stuff. They tend to own you really. Especially with a bunch of cars. I think two cars are good. More than that, you get it becomes a hassle and then you're involving different people. And the buzz of ownership for me isn't what it used to be cuz now that I've got you know businesses, families, it's just another work item I need to manage.  Even if you outsource it to people they can mess it up so I'm scaling back and going for simplicity and for me, what I've discovered my custommade reality to be where my fulfillment comes from is the four Fs, so it's faith, family, fitness and freedom. 

Now, within family, I'll put close brothers. I think brotherhood is a real form of wealth. 

Within fitness, I'll put in not just being physically fit, but being combat ready. You know, knowing how to shoot, move, communicate like a professional, having competency when it comes to the hand-to-hand stuff. So, the fitness piece for me is that applicable violence when required and ideally not required. 

So following those four Fs and and trying to simplify my life accordingly,

I'm hitting new levels of fulfillment as a result. As opposed to what I think the machine tells you, which is get more cars, you'll be happier. Get more watches, you'll feel better. At a certain point, it's like, what is all this stuff?

It stopped bringing me fulfillment. And I think faith was a big part of that as well.” 

Joules talks about the role that Islam has had on him. And as someone late to the Catholic church I understand. I only discovered religion in the dark times of pandemic lockdowns which lead to a frayed family life.

Joules: For me to go full spectrum and then take the shahada and accept Islam was a very long process. I would say I was actively considering it for 5 years before I took that step cuz I wanted to be sure. I think the key reason that I accepted the faith was that again it protects traditional values. It protects men like us and women who are still feminine and reject feminism and under God says this is how things should be which I think is quite sacred, quite important. The men I respect most are very devout, very strict Muslims because they have massive self accountability. 

Can you imagine how you conduct yourself if you felt every day, every decision, every business deal, every interaction, you were being watched and you would be judged? Strict Muslims really believe that. They believe they are accountable in everything that they do. Only good things can come from that. 

Now look, as with every religion, people will abuse it. People will pretend to be devout when not really. They'll use it for their own purposes. But those who really believe in Islam have to be good people because they believe the consequences are eternal. Should they not? They have to conduct themselves with very high standards. 

And Islam has clear guidance on every area of life from leading troops into combat to how you manage your wives, how you manage kids, your business dealings. There's sayings within Islam that you should pay the laborer, the worker, before the sweat dries on his face. But even they get into business specifics within something written 1400 years ago that still applied today as to how you should conduct yourself ethically. So for me it's a life code. It's a code of honor and conduct that has been largely forgotten in the west. 

And I think as humans we need guidance from somewhere. You're going to get it from faith or you're going to get it from modern day culture or you're going to get it from politicians. I think humans need guidance and they need self accountability. And Islam to me is the closest, perfect way that you should conduct yourself as a man. 

I'll just cover the faith thing a little bit more. For me, having studied Islam for years, you don't fully understand the genuine fulfillment that you get when you practice it. I'll hit higher levels of inner calm and deep fulfillment in prayer in the mosque more than any other realm of life. I had no idea of the emotional benefits. I chose it because of logic and because of my values being protected within it and just it seemed to be through research again and again the truth and the best sort of guidance a man can have in life. But the inner fulfillment benefits are so strong that I don't even wear fancy watches as much. I've lost the need for fancy cars and fancy lifestyle stuff cuz I can get more fulfillment by walking across the road and putting my head on the ground. That to me is pretty remarkable. I didn't know that benefit existed.” 

While I am not Muslim, I can appreciate everything he says. Religion as a key part of your life, a code. Accountability beyond yourself. To others and your community. This is something we are missing in America. 

Which leads to the next part of the 4 Fs: Freedom.

“I think freedom, everyone understands the idea of financial freedom, everyone understands the idea of time freedom and location freedom. For example, if we talk about true day-to-day custom-made reality freedom, I don't put up with anything that I don't want or welcome in my day-to-day, you know, my custom-made reality, my perfect days. I'm having to learn to be still at this point less giving and less trusting towards people in investments or in business. I'm at 43 years of age, I'm still learning how to be fully free of the hassle factor that comes with, for example, being an overly giving person. So I think I don't want to sound too metaphysical here. 

People talk about F-U money, what about a F-U  worldview?

There's a level of freedom whether we call it energetic freedom or just day to day perfect reality freedom that transcends all. Because I really do believe this expression of custom-made reality.

Everyone writes KPIs for their businesses. Although they write plans they want to achieve for their finances. What about plans for what your custom-made reality looks like? For me, one of the things I'm focusing on now is full people-freedom. I don't want to have anything to do with people I don't want to interact with. So it's time, location, money, and people and day-to-day freedom from hassle. Freedom. 

Rich: Yeah. I find the older I get, the less I find myself interested in dealing with certain types of people. You know, I have some barriers now. It's like I don't want to deal with losers and I don't want to deal with people that work with losers. You know what I mean? And the elite understand this. 

Joules: “This is why they fly private. It's to be away from everyone.  First class is more comfortable than 90% of private jets.

But I mean, there's also people with money that are still losers. So I mean like you've got to be really, really careful about who you spend time with and who you choose to work with. And I think that you know the other element of life that I've also thought a lot about when it comes to the notion of freedom as you sort of frame it.” 

Rich: “There's this condition of anti-fragility where you know you have things that are fragile that when chaos hits, it’s then they become worse. They break glass for example. They have this notion of robustness where when chaos hits something that's robust, it doesn't improve. It doesn't get worse. It doesn't break. It doesn't improve. 

And then there's a notion of anti-fragility where you apply chaos to something and it improves. And I think it's rare for people to find ways to improve when chaos comes at their life. And I think as a man, if you can find ways to implement anti-fragility metrics and components into your life so that when chaos comes, how do I improve from this? How can I take ownership from this? What's the silver lining in this BS that  came at me that tried to kill me? 

You know, one of the things I often say about my scars is that people often ask what happened….I'll say, well, that was just proof that I was stronger than whatever tried to kill me, right? Like that's what scar scars are to me.” 

Last but not least, there is fitness. Fitness of the body and fitness of the mind. I have to warn you it’s a long section. But arguably fitness is the foundation that all the other F’s rest on. 

Joules: “I'll do the fitness piece. Years ago, I thought if someone had a lot of money, they must have value. And so, you know, I structure my life with lots of very high money people. Now, I don't need to be around high money people cuz a lot of times they're just money nerds. Value as a man comes from experience, from challenge, from having every area of your life in order, not just focusing on money and typically being born to money and then amplifying it into billions. And I think that's another area of freedom there.

Like I'm going to free myself from losers, even if they're losers with a bunch of money. That's something that a lot of people don't realize. So I think it's a very valid point you raised on anti-fragility. To me, what's the point of having time and financial independence if you still have attack vectors or vulnerabilities in your character or for example some days you have mood swings? You got to have yourself level and excuse my language, unfuckwithable in every area to really feel free.  It's not just about having a certain amount of money in the bank.”

Rich: “Yeah. I don't know why that's such a difficult concept for people to understand is that life will test you, government will test you, women will test you, your mates, you know, business partnerships that you get involved in will test you and are you better than the sh-t test that's going to come at you and will it improve you? 

 And will you find a way to improve from it? And that's a fundamental basic skill that I think a lot of guys should start with as young as possible. And I think a lot of them don't even conceptualize it.” 

Joules: “And I'm not surprised why the system wants men weak and easily messed with. They don't want men to be free thinking and fragile. So onto the fitness piece. I get more endorphins and more of a buzz from a proper lift than I do a new watch or a fancy resort or so. I've just realized like going to the gym every morning then eating clean steak straight away afterwards is my form of luxury. More than any fancy resort or fancy car or fancy you know I've flown Emirates first hundreds of times. It doesn't blip in my head at all. I'll take a compulsory little video for Instagram stories, you know, social proof, but I do not care. Whereas getting in a proper lift with some mates and then getting that clean steak in afterwards, that to me is absolute bliss. 

I've dialed in my training…. I paid tens of thousands of dollars to a very professional programming guy who does all the biomarkers and everything as well as nutrition and training. And I think you need to train differently at different ages. I do a lot less reps and sets now. A lot slower, a lot more controlled. I put more of a focus on steady state cardio than I'd like to cuz I find it really boring. I put a lot more focus into core strength and rehab, even though it's boring, but I need to do that to be able to get my good lifts in. And I found that the perfect approach for who I am and the injuries I carry and my age for training, again, guided by a professional. And to me that brings massive returns. Massive return. More than any high status or fancy toy or anything.” 

Rich: “You can buy a nice watch. You know, you can make money, you can buy a nice watch, but you can't buy a nice body. You can't buy optimal health and energy that comes from it, right? Well, you know, it's a great feeling. 

What about combat? Like do you put emphasis on combat, you know, capability for violence? I mean, you're a war veteran.” 

Joules: “I don't maintain as much as I used to for years, especially within the military. The hand to hand stuff was my whole thing. A lot of time in Muay Thai camps in Thailand. Took the ground fighting pretty seriously, too, with the jiu-jitsu for a while. I don't maintain it as much because I'm just not in those situations. Occasionally I'll just run through the fundamentals to make sure that it's still there. Like whenever I'm in public and things are tense, I got my phone in my hand.

I'm not going to hit someone in the face. I'm just going to put my phone in the neck before they see it coming. I think as I've gotten older, I've just gotten more prepared to be nastier than most people and that's enough for me to feel secure, especially when I'm either in Dubai, which is super safe, or I'm in typically, you know, third world countries where I'll have security or I'll be moving around with the police or with the Secret Service or, you know, with my network, my professional network. 

So, I'm very rarely in a position where I'd need to go hand to hand. If I was going to get back into that line of work, I'd definitely put the hours in to get really sharp again. But  I'm comfortable with what comes before the violence to protect myself. the situational awareness piece, the risk avoidance piece, having a solid understanding of every threat environment that I walk into, getting briefed by senior police if I'm going to a new city and having a phone number to call so that the quick response that pretty much every either police service or counterterrorism service or secret service, domestic intelligence service has, I can tap into that with a phone call. So, I have layers of protection and also contingency planning wherever I go cuz I spent a fair bit of time in, you know, tricky places, especially with my former career that I'm quite secure without anybody. 

And situational awareness isn't just watching people's hands or watching our expressions or noticing if a fighting age male comes in and sits in a certain area that you would have chosen also as a professional. In the situational awareness, is getting properly briefed on a city. What are the criminal elements here? You know, when do the muggings happen? What are the streets I need to avoid? Having that awareness of a city and then even you mentioned sitting in a restaurant. Not only are you sitting down and what's known as dominating a room so you have eyes on you understand here's the primary exit. There's probably a secondary exit through the kitchen or a staff exit out that way. 

I understand the difference between concealment and cover, especially if I'm in an environment where in the US I'm running this all the time cuz there is gun crime there. If things kick off, where do I move to? Is that a concrete pillar or is it just plywood that rounds would go through? Is that marble bar real marble? In which case, that's where I'm going to get behind if things start getting loud. It’s having that complete awareness of your environment of concealment versus cover around you, what your exfil routes would be. 

And just as a habit, as you said, sitting facing the room and watching for things that don't make sense. Why does that person got the fast eyes when they're in a high, you know, just in a restaurant and they're not relaxed? Why have those two fighting age males who are wearing baggy jackets, perhaps their concealed carry, come in and both sat on a table facing inwards? Like, why? 

You know, it's that complete awareness all the time as a habit as a man is a lot more of a risk reduction measure than knowing how to punch people. Really, so many different mistakes have or you've missed so many opportunities to identify and mitigate risk and take evasive action before you have to hit somebody.” 

So there you have it. The 4 Fs of Men. Family, Faith, Freedom and Fitness. A great framework for your life. Four areas every one of us needs to be working on all the time. The Four F’s for a great life. Simple but not easy. 

Western Cowboy Wisdom: Life on the Frontier

I grew up reading all the western classics by Louis L’amour. No one wrote like him and I am always on the look out for new authors. One of my new favorite modern western authors is John Deacon who writes in a similar way to L’amour. Sparse, direct with a clear love of the wild west, interspersed with chaste love interests, lots of action and surprising nuggets of wisdom. 

I’ve read his Provider and Kip series, which were excellent. But his new series Conn shows his development as an author. Conn is the badman gunfighter twin who comes to town to avenge his fallen brother. Trying to turn a new leaf and having experienced a tough life he is quite wise. A man whose promise actually counts for something. He does what he says, he says what he does. So rare in modern times but something that was valued on the frontier. A place of great opportunity but intense danger from bandits, Indians, wild animals and harsh weather. And few people, so you had to be able to count on one another. 

He had rode the trails as they say and he gives some wise advice to the wayward son of a friend: 

“I’m gonna say something now and I know you aren’t gonna listen, but I’m gonna say it anyway. I have to say it because your daddy isn’t here to say it himself….you just keep in mind that every day, you’re making choices. Every one of them either helps or hurts you. Every friend you make, every word you speak, every dollar you spend….. It’s all leading you further out one trail or another. You gotta stop staring at your nose and start watching the horizon.

Look to the future. Figure out what you want. Figure out what you want to be. Then live your life in a way that will get you there. Everything you do, make it a step toward becoming the man you want to be.”

When the boy says: “I’ll try, sir”, Conn responds with: “Don’t try, Do it. The world’s full of men who fool themselves, saying they’ll try. That’s how they stay right where they are, making the same old mistakes and never getting where they want to go.

That’s the way of the world, son. Trick is, once you realize you’re riding the wrong trail, to turn around and hunt a better one.”

This is good advice for all young men. I’d say I take this to heart too. I’ve made so many mistakes in my life, personal finance, career and maybe more damning in my family life. But that’s life. You made decisions and you fix it as soon as you realize it. Move forward and make things better. Just like Conn. 

Nobu: Building an Empire

I think many of us have watched “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” about the sushi master who exemplifies manic obsession & craftsmanship. A documentary which shows what it takes to be the best at whatever it is you do. It’s inspiring to say the least. 

So when I saw that Nobu had a documentary I had to see it. Not just a sushi chef but a business man who has built a literal culinary empire and who has reshaped global cuisine through it. Nobuyuki Matsuhisa is a legend. He is one of the great chefs in the world. 

“I started thinking food is like fashion.”

But he has not only built a luxury food brand, he has built a hospitality empire too. “In this life, I want to make everybody around me as happy as I possibly can.”

He shows the obsession and attention to detail that only the Japanese can do. He spends 10 months of the year traveling the world, checking out all the restaurants and making sure things are up to his high standards. Doing it his way. Trying to maintain and keep up the culture. 

It’s a reminder that if you run a business or large organization, you have to visit the frontline all the time. To see what is truly happening far away from HQ. The coal face as they say. That is where the reality lies. 

We also learn he lost his father when he was very young and this trauma led to him growing up fast. His brother said: “Since Nobu is very sensitive it must have left a mark in his heart.”

It also made him adventurous, as he said: “so traveling and going to another country has always been one of my dreams.”

“Being young is like feeling completely fearless and filled with so much hope.”

“He always was a free spirit.” He got in a driving accident, got put on probation, and got kicked out of school. But he never gave up his dream to be a sushi chef and he started working at a sushi restaurant around 17 or 18 years old. 3 years later he started learning how to make sushi as an apprentice. He even takes a job as sushi chef in Lima, Peru where he gets exposed to other ingredients and kinds of food.  

“I realized “Oh, there are different ways of doing things. From then on, my cooking ideas became a lot more open minded. My cooking started to change because they meet the different cultures of food combined.” Peru, Japan, Alaska, then Los Angeles. The rest is history. 

“He explored the perspectives of the whole world, using Peru as the starting point.” 

The documentary is worth watching. Overcoming many setbacks & failures in his business, even losing his best friend to suicide. Yet, still cooking with his heart to catch his dream. 

“Nobu created his own world, just like Picasso created his own style of painting.”

Total food porn. I kind of want to eat some good sushi now! 

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 24th, 2026

“Hard work without talent is a shame, but talent without hard work is a tragedy.”--Robert Hall

1. Building off grid energy sources & energy capacity as well in America. This is the critical path for reindustrialization and AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llELdnwlki4

2."If your community is “free” or easy to join, it will be filled with low-value noise. Real leverage is found in Small, High-Net-Worth Phalanxes. If they aren’t paying a “Tax of Entry” (either in capital or high-level proof of work), they are just spectators."

https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-community-cult

3."Reflecting on his story, I’m sure he’s not alone. I’m certain there are many others who have made that many angel investments and seen them all fail. We know that the vast majority of startups fail. We know that 99% of startups never achieve $1 million in revenue. With those kinds of statistics, it makes sense that there’s a meaningful probability that 15 angel investments could produce zero winners."

https://davidcummings.org/2026/02/28/15-angel-investments-and-all-failures/

4.USA vs China in manufacturing and how to reindustrialize America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRcvUUMaBcA

5. Every founder should watch this. How to manage and hire people in a high growth startup. Incredibly instructive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFT4xj57D7U

6."It bears repeating: the Iran question was never about Iran. Remove the Islamic Republic from the equation and China loses its pawns for a Taiwan contingency. Leave it in place and the Middle East remains what Beijing designed it to be: a second front that Washington can never afford to leave and can never afford to stay in. Trump's strikes are the first move by an American president who appears to understand that the road to the Pacific runs through Tehran."

https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/the-iran-question-is-all-about-china

7."All the economic predictions we make today about AI are based on the economics of training frontier models. They ignore the fact that these frontier models will be a minority of AI use cases as the industry matures.

Wall Street is looking at mainframes and trying to extrapolate what that means for computing’s future. They’re missing the fact that PCs are right around the corner — and PCs changed everything.

When you look out 5 years, The economics of AI won’t mirror the economics of today. If there’s a bubble, it’s a small one, and it will have a soft pop. The real story is what comes next."

https://investinginai.substack.com/p/what-the-ai-bubble-talk-misses-the

8."All of the prohibitions against decapitations or other catastrophic, disruptive attacks against opposition networks have evaporated. Everyone is now free to do it, and in most cases, there won’t be a response. Not only that, it’s not hard to do, so nearly everyone can (which is the reason this prohibition was put in place).

Furthermore, the arrival of inexpensive, autonomous drones manufactured at scale will make system disruption from a distance very, very easy. Drone assassinations will become commonplace as this becomes an accepted method of resolving disputes, and if the country is capable enough, the nearly simultaneous decapitation of an entire ruling elite or the catastrophic disruption of its critical infrastructure is not out of the question. Brave New War has arrived."

https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/kinetic-decapitations

9."The goal is not actually to achieve anything strategically important or even tangible - it’s to create the appearance that something was achieved. If an actual, tangible change or an outcome - like a regime change - happens as well, that’s a welcome bonus - but it’s not the primary goal nor the requirement.

And that in my eyes, explains what the strike on Iran is meant to achieve. A quick, devastating strike might not alter the strategic balance, but it will allow Trump to exit the whole situation of drawing red lines and flexing muscles without looking like he backed down. In other words, saving face - especially as more people have started to read his foreign policy instincts through the lens of the “TACO” (Trump Always Chickens Out) narrative - is likely the ultimate goal here."

https://stationzero.substack.com/p/the-real-reason-why-trump-struck

10."Which brings me to the final, and perhaps most important, reason to be optimistic on Japan: the new geoeconomic realities are now forcing an awakening of the inclinations and ambitions of the Japanese people.

As America and China become more ensnared in their rivalry, the risks are rising that Japan will become less relevant to the ambitions of the two superpowers. The only way to safeguard against this is for Japan to become more sovereign, more stronger, and more self-sufficient. This new `Gai-Atsu` foreign pressure is a very powerful wake-up call to `awaken the inclinations of mankind`.

So I am very optimistic on Japan precisely because the government has no more choice and now has to do what former Prime Minister Koizumi Yunichiro advocated almost two decades ago."

https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/catalysts-for-japan-optimism

11. "Since January 9, I've been mapping chokepoints across global supply chains. Companies controlling bottleneck positions where demand is surging and alternatives don't exist. The thesis has been simple: find the supply chain node everyone depends on, see if there’s any alternatives, check if anyone is paying attention, and if not, figure out why.

Something is clearly happening here. The market is waking up to these bottleneck positions. More investors are starting to look past the large-cap integrators and ask the question I’ve been asking all along: who actually makes the stuff that makes the stuff?"

https://www.polymathinvestor.com/p/i-looked-for-aerospaces-hidden-chokepoints

12."At its core, sprezzatura is not meant to deceive others. Rather, it creates the impression that one’s expertise is natural and easy. The gentleman exercising sprezzatura is not to be a showman, but a statesman. He is not a peacock spreading his feathers to show off his talents and charm. Instead, he is a swan who appears to glide effortlessly across the water, but is actually paddling beneath the surface.

In Castiglione’s own words, here is his definition of sprezzatura:

“To practice in all things a certain nonchalance, which conceals all art and presents everything said and done as something brought about without effort and almost without giving thought to it... this is true art.”

To live with sprezzatura is to live with grace under pressure and humility in success.

A gentleman should never be too rigid or frantic. He must never appear desperate to be noticed. Instead, he should be known for his cool presence, his ease, and the quiet mastery that speaks even when he says nothing at all."

https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/sprezzatura-the-gentlemans-art-of-bbb

13. "Nothing about Operation Epic Fury occurred within a thousand miles of Tokyo. Yet no capital in the world stands to gain more from the wreckage of Khamenei’s regime than the one sitting across the East China Sea from Shanghai.

Japan is China's principal strategic rival in the Western Pacific: the two compete for military dominance in the East and South China Seas, for economic influence across Southeast Asia, for secure energy supply chains, and for the allegiance of every mid-sized Pacific power now deciding whether its future runs through Washington or Beijing.

The gains Operation Epic Fury delivered to Tokyo are structural and extend across every dimension of that rivalry."

https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/japan-is-the-big-winner

14.Can't wait to read this book. An incredible guide for your career. Finding your path.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1CV25WA5bk

15.Legend in the investing space. Cofounder of Insight Partners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Uzi0OvFixw&t=16s

16.NIA this week: solid takes and discussion on the Citrini Doomer report and implications of AI Agent world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBGcvKAiuiU

17.Mind blowing insights on where AI is going and its crazy good capabilities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIzdKxEVL08

18."Erdogan's genius always lay in his capacity to maintain contradictory positions simultaneously. He condemned Israel while preserving deconfliction channels, armed Ukraine while purchasing Russian energy, championed the Islamic world while expanding NATO engagements, and criticized American interventionism while hosting American bases. Operation Epic Fury does not end this hedging. It raises the stakes. The post-Iranian Middle East offers Turkey more room to maneuver, but also more pressure to choose. Choices that could be deferred when Iran absorbed the attention of every regional actor will now demand resolution.

For Washington, the strategic imperative is to treat Turkey as what it is: not an easy partner, not a submissive ally, but an indispensable one.

Erdogan’s relationships with Trump, with al-Sharaa, with Putin, and with the leaders of the Turkic world give him a connective capacity that no other leader in the region possesses. The United States should use the post-Epic Fury environment to press for a Turkey-Israel settlement on Syria, positioning Ankara as a stabilizer rather than a spoiler in the Levant. It should engage the Organization of Turkic States as a serious element of Central Asian strategy. And it should coordinate with Turkey on African engagement where interests converge, especially in countering terrorism and stabilizing the Horn.

The alternative is neglecting Turkey’s potential while Erdogan hedges between competing poles, squandering the most significant realignment of Middle Eastern power since the end of the Cold War.

Erdogan will, as always, calculate. The question is whether Washington will calculate with equal precision."

https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/the-erdogan-calculation

19. "AI makes code cheap. It does not make chemicals, metals, or materials.

And AI has immense material needs of its own. Data centers are enormous physical undertakings, requiring space, power, cooling, construction, and the chips that every nation on Earth is competing for. They are a perfect example that the constraints on the future of abundance have become physical."

My deep dive into this problem led to a simple realization.

America does not have an innovation problem. What we have is a production problem. An enormous one.

But not unsolvable.

The United States leads the world in R&D spending, accounting for roughly 30% of global investment, but we have lost the production of the very technologies we once invented, and continue to invent.

This gap is what I deemed the Missing Middle. It is the space between raw materials and precursors, and finished products and production. It spans capital, the workforce, and technology adoption.

Rebuilding in this space is the precondition for everything else the industrialization movement is trying to achieve.

Closing it will become the defining industrial challenge of our era."

https://www.broscienceclub.com/p/the-missing-middle-of-industrialization

20."Sitting here today, we do not know how long Trump will remain interested in spending billions, if not trillions, of dollars reshaping Iran’s politics to his liking, nor how much geopolitical and financial markets pain he can politically tolerate before he cuts and runs.

The prudent action is to wait and see. The time to back up the truck and buy Bitcoin and high-quality shitcoins like $HYPE is immediately after the Fed cuts rates and or prints money to support the government’s goals in Iran."

https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/ios-warfare

21. "The supplement industry will keep selling you the fantasy.

New compounds, new stacks, new influencers with new brand deals and the same underlying playbook. The products change. The lie stays the same.

Elite operator’s don’t buy into the bullshit.

Build your nutrition from premium food first.

Identify the gaps you’re not getting from food, and only ever take a stack you can consistently take (in my experience, this will fall into the 3-5 supplement zone).

Magnesium. Omega-3. Vitamin D3. Whey where the protein target demands it. B-complex where diet, training load, or lifestyle creates a genuine shortfall.

That’s the list for general health."

https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/the-dark-truth-about-the-supplement

22."During Operation Epic Fury — the coordinated U.S.-Israeli strikes targeting IRGC C2 facilities, air defense nodes, and missile launch sites across Iran — a new weapon system saw its combat debut. Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System (LUCAS).

The irony is almost too rich to write without smiling.

LUCAS is a reverse-engineered copy of Iran’s own Shahed-136 kamikaze drone — the same platform Russia has fired by the thousands into Ukrainian cities, the same design Iran has distributed to Houthi proxies in Yemen, the same weapon that has humiliated Western air defense systems by sheer volume and cheapness. The DoW captured a damaged Shahed airframe, handed it to an Arizona startup SpektreWorks, and said: build us a better version of this, fast.

They did. And now it’s been used in combat — against Iran."

https://defenseacquisition.substack.com/p/lucas-rapid-warfighting-acquisition

23.How to build in the Age of AI. It's an incredible time to be a founder. Learning from one of the top founders around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8y0ftEmbkY

24."Pax Americana actually restrained American power, and the people who wanted a multipolar world may come to regret that wish.

But what they all failed to realize is that Pax Americana bound and restrained the United States. In order to uphold the rules-based order it created, America accepted many limitations on its hegemony. It restrained its use of military force in many cases, eschewed territorial conquest, and treated smaller and poorer countries as its equals in many international bodies.

That’s all gone now. Without rules and norms to bind him, Trump is free to threaten conquest of Greenland, take out Russia’s allies, and generally throw America’s still-considerable weight around much more freely and aggressively than during his first term."

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-shape-of-the-multipolar-world

25."Issue with climbing the corporate ladder is you sell your soul - the cost is spiritual.

You lose the essence of who you are. Your light. Your zest for life.

You can’t even just eat a burger, have a beer, or take off the business casual.

Whatever you do the next 40 years is who you become.

You spend the bulk of your waking adult life at your job.

40 hours a week for the next 40 years.

Is there anything else in your life that you dedicate that much time to?

You think there’s all this risk leaving your cushy job…but you’re looking at it the wrong way

Look at the bigger picture. Look at the person you are becoming to get this cushy salary.

A rule taker.

“Sounds good, will do” type."

https://colejaczko.substack.com/p/why-staying-on-the-safe-path-is-actually

26."The Ciceronian response is a structural one, not a moral one. It is not that any of these individual events are historically unique. It is that the perception of guaranteed safety is a binary good. In the same way that a Roman citizen could walk from Britain to Syria, not because every legionnaire in every province was personally committed to his safety, but because the universal expectation of retribution made the question irrelevant, the American guarantee worked because no one thought to test it. The moment Verres demonstrated that a governor could crucify a citizen and survive, the question was no longer moot. It was open.

What has been opened in the last 18 months is exactly this question. Can violence reach you if you are a net American taxpayer? Until recently, the answer was understood to be no. The answer is now visibly and publicly yes. And unlike the rest of the class architecture that absorbs this cost because they have nowhere to go, the wealthy have options. They can move their capital. They can move their families. They can move their tax residency. And some of them already are.

When the guarantee itself becomes a scarce good, scarce goods command a premium. The states and systems that can credibly provide what America is ceasing to provide -- genuinely reliable security for its citizens and their capital -- will command extraordinary willingness to pay.

When protection fails for immobile citizens, a state decays slowly. When it fails for mobile capital, the repricing is sudden. The question for the next decade is which sovereigns can offer what Rome once offered -- the cloak, the words, the guarantee that your person and property are inviolable, backed by a credible threat that makes violence against you and your property unthinkable."

https://minutes.substack.com/p/civis-romanus-sum

27. I actually didn't know very much about Logan Paul (knew more about his boxer influencer brother Jake). This was interesting to me: life as an influencer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nuea3ejCPI0

28.There is a great framework on portfolio construction and investing. The Alpha is when most people disagree with you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAgqDdPgA3g

29."However, there has been a lucrative wrinkle that I didn’t quite foresee. To understand it, you need to understand my three laws of AI:

-AI dramatically decreases creation costs, thus increasing distribution costs.

-Knowing what to build is more important than knowing how to build, rewarding people with taste.

-Most people do not have taste, and as such, will have their brains turned into slopified goo.

In the context of these laws, the ideal founder is someone who has a unique way to distribute their product, the taste to know what to build, and the trust of their target customers. They can then use that combination of factors to bundle products that would previously have been too expensive to make relative to the labor costs and size of the market.

I call these people “hyper-creators.” A hyper-creator business is one where a bundle of digital goods is invented and distributed by an individual, but are created and maintained by an AI agent. They flood their target customer with software, information products, dropshipped physical goods, and recommendations for everything they don’t produce themselves.

I cringe as I write this, and may God have mercy on my soul for saying it, but think of it as Vertical SaaS for a vibe. (Sorry.) A hyper-creator’s job is to curate a nuanced view of the world, and then pull every monetization lever known to man that is associated with said vibe, tying it all together with their own distribution. That is an exceptionally silly company that could never scale to billions of dollars without adding staff, but it is a delightfully profitable company to build for yourself."

https://www.gettheleverage.com/p/the-rise-of-hyper-creators

30."To move faster, the U.S. can’t go it alone. It needs a partner — a place where it can manufacture defense equipment while it ramps up its own industrial base. That partner needs three essential characteristics in order to get started producing right away: industrial depth, political stability, and speed.

Taiwan, under threat of invasion, is increasingly risky as a manufacturing base. Europe is fragmented and geographically distant from the Indo-Pacific, and has Russia to occupy its energies. Canada lacks high-throughput manufacturing scale, while Mexico lacks the precision and complexity that modern defense systems require. India is still early in its technological catch-up phase.

That leaves Japan and Korea — of which Japan is far larger. Fortunately, over the next two years, Japan plans to increase defense and industrial capacity more than at any point since World War II.

Japan possesses world-class manufacturing capability, elite engineering talent, and strong IP protection. And for the first time in decades, it has a political mandate to move fast - especially given Prime Minister Takaichi’s recent landslide victory. Projects like Rapidus and TSMC’s advanced fabs in Kumamoto aren’t isolated investments. They’re signals that US-Japan industrial integration is becoming a strategic necessity.

A deeper industrial partnership between the U.S. and Japan is such a huge opportunity that in retrospect it will seem inevitable. American defense companies that understand how to build with Japan will win."

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/japan-can-be-americas-arsenal

31.A take from local experts on the American-Israeli attack on Iran. Just trying to understand what's going on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aof0gLnpX6E

32."Here is the critical framing that most analysis misses. Venezuela and Iran are not separate stories. They are two prongs of a single strategic pivot: the United States is not withdrawing from the world. It’s reorganizing the world around bilateral power relationships where commodities and the dollar are the levers. The “rules-based order” still exists; it’s just that the rules are being rewritten in real-time by the country that wrote the original ones.

The freezing of approximately $300 billion in Russian Central Bank reserves in February 2022 was the Rubicon moment. Not because of what it did to Russia (Moscow had already been building buffers since 2014, and pivoted quickly to a shadow fleet of 350 tankers and Chinese yuan settlement). The real damage was epistemic: every non-aligned central banker on the planet watched the world’s “risk-free” reserve asset get confiscated because of a political disagreement, and recalculated.

The postwar order that enabled frictionless global trade, just-in-time supply chains, and the suppression of commodity prices through financialization is over. We are entering a period where physical possession of critical resources matters more than contractual claims on them. Where central banks buy gold not for “diversification” but for sovereign survival.

The world is fracturing along geopolitical lines, and the fractures run right through the commodity supply chains that the global economy depends on. Every fracture is inflationary. Every inflationary impulse forces the central banks deeper into the trap.

And every step deeper into the trap makes hard assets more valuable in relative terms."

https://dollarendgame.substack.com/p/the-fracture

33. Latest Silicon Valley news with some good perspective. Anthropic vs DoW, Block layoffs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-on0j69st8&t=95s

34.A great conversation with an OG venture capitalist. 25 years in the business at a firm that has been around for 115 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOUskWl6XzY

35."VCs can generate returns from almost any combination of hunting and farming. Which makes it essential to think in advance about what your ideal investor looks like.

Do you want a hands-on investor that will coach and mentor you through the next stage?

Do you feel confident in how to get from A to B, but need help with introductions?

There’s no right or wrong answer here, which makes diligencing a potential investor so important."

https://chrisneumann.com/archives/hunters-vs-farmers

Revisiting The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: Be A Traveler & Adventurer

Man, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”  is a great movie. I’ve written about it before. Starring & directed by Ben Stiller, the synopsis is “A timid magazine photo manager lives life vicariously through daydreams, embarking on a true life adventure.” He visits Greenland, Iceland, Yemen, Afghanistan and climbs the Himalayas. The scenery is amazing, truly breathtaking.  He rides a helicopter, fights off a shark, skateboards across wild landscapes, escapes an erupting volcano, meets Afghan Warlords. 

No surprise his daydreams disappear. He is “Indiana Jones becomes the lead singer of the Strokes.” And we all come along for the ride as we witness his transformation from a boring meek man to a confident, cool adventurer traveler. His posture literally changes. 

I think the reason I really enjoyed this movie was that he reminded me of myself when I was growing up. I felt trapped in Vancouver, bored and helpless. So what do you do? You daydream. Like a lot. And like Walter Mitty as I left my comfortable environment and really started to see the world and actually do stuff, these silly daydreams disappeared. By traveling, doing, experiencing, I manifested things into my life. I made my daydreams reality just like Water Mitty. 

I’m so glad this movie exists. It came out in 2013 which was such a different time in the world. When we were probably at peak globalization, the world was our oyster and the future seemed bright and endless.  It’s like a time capsule for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. 

So I highly recommend it. And for those who want to change their lives. Who wants to be better just like Walter Mitty, do as he does. Get out into the world. Travel and have some grand adventures. You won’t regret it.

The Rise of the new Renaissance Man

I don’t think anyone can disagree that we are in the midst of rapid change in all aspects of society. And it’s only going to get more intense. That is why specialists are toast. We will see the rise of super generalists. 

Hispanic Nomad gives a great take on X for this. Actually a great guide on some initial skills to work on: https://x.com/hispanicnomad/status/2018456652882854070.

“The modern world rewards specialists.  

But difficult times demand renaissance men. 

Here are the skills you need to master in 2026: 

• Combat sports - discipline, confidence, and the ability to protect yourself 

• Digital income - build location-independent revenue streams 

• Gardening - produce your own food when supply chains fail 

• Multiple languages - access opportunities across borders 

• International tax optimization - keep what you earn 

• Basic medical knowledge - treat yourself when doctors aren't available 

• Cooking - nutrition and self-sufficiency in any country 

• Technical repair skills - fix things instead of depending on others 

• Navigation without GPS - survive when technology fails 

• Financial literacy - protect your wealth through economic chaos 

The jack-of-all-trades loses to the specialist in stable times.

But when systems collapse, the renaissance man survives while specialists starve”

Net net: Renaissance men rule in times of chaos. It’s gonna be a nutty time, so go build and stack some skills. 

The Modern Deal Guy: The New Finance Solopreneur

The phrase "modern deal guy" ties directly to Jeremy Giffon, "We're firmly in the “deal guy” era. You can raise venture to make deals, you can do foreign policy via deals, build frontier tech via deals." It’s been popularized by him and Will Manidis, two guys, who I consider some of the smartest private investors around. 

This reflects a broader cultural/trend observation in tech, finance, and even geopolitics: success increasingly comes from deal-making, networks, structuring transactions, and leveraging connections rather than just building from scratch or traditional VC paths. A related post from another user captures the vibe: "the modern deal guy traffics first in arcane networks and only secondarily in capital... only a few can find you the best tailor north of 44th, the best loan workout guy in SF, the perfect pdf for your current crisis."

Basically you are a solopreneur but one who tracks in deal flow. A one person merchant bank leveraging the technology at one’s fingertips now. It’s a fascinating concept that  only comes to the fore in times of massive technological, economic and geopolitical change. The brave, insightful and connected takes advantage of this potential short term disequilibrium aka opportunity in the market. The modern deal guy is perfectly set up to take advantage of any glitch in the matrix.They have no institutional baggage or bureaucracy holding them back, so they can move quickly.    

For example, I have a friend of a friend who is an ex-supply chain guy working with a Central Asian country to build out a local auto manufacturing industry. He gets a cut of all the income generated from each of these factories he sets up. Imagine getting a percentage of this. This could net billions of dollars to him. Literal billions. 

Or the many individuals getting stock or secondaries allocation of hot companies like SpaceX, Stripe, Anduril or Anthropic and raising $$ via SPVs to invest. You sometimes get management fees but most of the time, you only get paid carry. Basically where you share the upside returns. I’m a bit concerned at the wild west nature of SPVs in 2025 & 2026 but it’s illustrative of the modern deal guy concept.

I know people who have made a crap ton of money sending potential candidate companies to PE firms for possible acquisition. A kind of affiliate referral fee play but with much bigger percentages and numbers. 

All of these examples are outcome driven. You don’t get paid until the deal happens. It’s literally eating what you kill. This is the ultimate edge of capitalism. Asymmetric risk at its finest. You can just do things! :)

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 17th, 2026

“When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.”--Willie Nelson

1. "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."

https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/22/bill-gurley-says-that-right-now-the-worst-thing-you-can-do-for-your-career-is-play-it-safe/

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_pk4eBDaLA

Living in a High Trust Society

I saw a Tweet that made me think: 

“I was in Tokyo recently on a business trip. 

I accidentally left my brand new MacBook on a park bench in Tokyo. I realized it 3 hours later. I sprinted back, panic mode fully engaged, assuming it was gone forever. It wasn't there. 

I asked a nearby shopkeeper. He pointed to the bench. Someone had placed my laptop inside a plastic grocery bag and taped it to the bench so it wouldn't get wet in the drizzle. They didn't take it. They protected it. Culture is what you do when no one is watching. 

What do you think would happen in your country if the same thing happened?”

Source: https://x.com/MrPitbull07/status/2018064416668029082

Well I can tell with certainty if this laptop would be gone if it was in America. The phenomenon described above could only happen in high trust societies. I would argue America and most of Western societies like Canada, UK and Western European countries are not high trust societies. Maybe they used to be but not anymore. 

All you have to do is visit a place like Japan, Taiwan or South Korea and you will realize this truth very quickly. Perhaps it’s due to the homogeneity of the place, the “we are all in it together” feeling. Of a great community. Or maybe these countries just actually enforce laws and punish criminals like they do in Singapore or UAE. Or are basically a police surveillance state like in China. 

You can walk around without worrying about the watch you are wearing or being open with your mobile phone. Leaving your computer on the table when you go to the bathroom. Or leaving your stuff in your car without it getting broken into. Things you can’t ever do in any major city in America, UK or Canada. I’m naturally paranoid and untrusting so maybe I thrive in these low trust societies. But you would think with all the wealth and opportunities we could do better. Or hope we can do better for the sake of our kids.  

This is why it seems clear the West is going down. It’s because people have stopped caring. Or they have just gone all out for themselves now, acting in survival mode. Decline is a choice. I, for one, choose to fight the decline all around us. It’s almost always just a matter of will. 

Gratitude is the Cure

I get so caught up in life sometimes. Business challenges, financial challenges, plenty of home life challenges. Couple this with the large amount of travel I need to do for business, which I might add I really love. But it can be tiring. I’m usually jetlagged, running around to meetings, overly caffeinated and sleeping odd hours.

My initial thought is to complain and do my own pity party. But then I remember, no one likes a complainer. Besides, what do I have to complain about? I GET to do this. I don’t HAVE to do this (most of the time at least). What I have are firstworld problems. Champagne problems even.

So I remind myself to be grateful. Grateful for all that I have. Grateful to have a family despite its challenges. Grateful to be fit, healthy and mobile. Grateful to travel. Grateful to earn money doing what I enjoy, working with people I love and respect. Grateful to be learning. Grateful to be alive to have problems to overcome. It doesn’t get better than this. It’s really as simple as that.

So be grateful. We are luckier than we realize.

Power of Novelty in Anti-Aging

I spent a lot of time on the road for my business. It’s tiring sometimes but overall, this is an amazing life and one I am addicted to. I think this is one of the factors for me that have enabled me to keep myself on top of the ever changing world of technology and business. 

GritCult said this best: 

“As I get older. I realise how important it is to be around novelty stimuli. New music, new movies. New places. 

Constantly exploring and never stopping is I think the key to staying creating and the key to staying mentally young. 

As people age. They become stiff physically and mentally. It requires actual effort to go out of your way to keep exploring and keeping up that adventure spirit. Because it is extremely easy to fall into a pattern and have the years zoom past.”

Source: https://x.com/GRITCULT/status/2007516352962277717

Probably why I love traveling so much. Or maybe why I need it. SF is awesome and it is good to have family time and a routine. But after 4 weeks on the ground I feel like I am rotting. Even if I am busy, meeting people, reading, listening to podcasts, I find my mind slipping into remote control. I need a new environment to jar me out of it.

So if you find yourself slowing down physically or mentally. Or just need new ideas. Travel. Go to another city. Go to another state or another country. It’s a quick & very effective boost for your brain. Travel is a cheat code. 

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 10th, 2026

“Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.”-- Kahil Gibran

1. "We are conditioned to seek “External Validation” for our ideas. If people like it, we think it’s good. If they ignore it, we think it’s a failure. This is a Strategic Error. When you rely on the crowd to tell you what is valuable, you are outsourcing your Taste to the average. And the average is, by definition, mediocre. Praise is a cage that forces you to repeat your past successes; criticism is a wall that prevents your future ones. Both are noise."

https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-validation-trap

2.US Navy forward positioning in Australia as plan B ie. when the breakdown of globalization is in full effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UeDdWm-8-s

3.Klarna CEO is on the bleeding edge of adopting AI. Klarna has been leading the charge of AI in his company.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7vIRAFSXmk&t=2169s

4."Scarcity generates pleasure, anxiety, and purpose. But a world that is post-scarcity in the sense that there is more than enough material resources for everyone will still have another form of scarcity—people’s respect, admiration, attention, desire, and love.

The bad news about a post-scarcity utopia is that we will still be unhappy much of the time. The good news is that our lives will still have meaning."

https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/assistant-to-the-regional-manager

5.Managing the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund. Learning from the best investors & how to thrive in the age of AI.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyvuM3J9QqQ

6. Fun convo this week. Openclaw, Ferrari & Jony Ives & Winter Olympics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x43XMee7-Kk

7.Lots of implications of India and others taking apart the Oil Shadow fleet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJdFi0rvj8M

8."It’s easy to sneer at the folly of billionaires and tyrants surrounded by yes-men stumbling into preventable catastrophes.

Harder to acknowledge that we ourselves are vulnerable to the same forces which blind us from our own self-authored missteps, surrounded by those who see our flaws clearly but chose silence over uncomfortable conversations.

Now pause and turn the mirror inward one more level.

Consider not just the times you stayed silent about someone else’s unforced error higher up the gradient - but the times you committed a preventable error, perhaps years ago, that only became clear in hindsight through delayed consequences, external events, or someone finally letting slip what they’d long observed."

https://kaichang.substack.com/p/the-distortion-field-why-power-makes

9.The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (+ Pakistan-Turkey-Egypt) versus UAE (+Israel-Ethiopia, maybe India?). Growing rivalry in the MENA region.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3G6tDycuz8

10.Some good takes on investing in AI by the 8 VC team.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aETqFYCrIoA

11.Lots of great frameworks and perspectives on how to do comms right for founders. We are in the age of narrative and founders have a huge advantage if they do this right.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Njb8Lw5Xc

12."One of the most overlooked lessons from If Russia Wins is that deterrence in the 21st century is as much an industrial and financial challenge as a military one. Masala’s scenario does not hinge on technological surprise, but on speed, scale, and endurance: Russia rebuilds its military capacity faster than Western policymakers expect, while Europe’s defence ecosystem remains fragmented, under-capitalised, and slow to adapt.

The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that modern deterrence depends not only on traditional military hardware but on technological innovations: unmanned systems, AI-enabled targeting, secure communications, cyber defence, satellite intelligence, and agile manufacturing. These are domains where startups and private capital can outperform traditional defence contractors."

https://resiliencemedia.co/if-russia-wins-lessons-for-the-uk-and-europe/

13.Some good insights on geopolitics right now. From one of top analysts from BCA Research.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYrdjsOKqO8

14.Geopolitical uncertainty. Some diversification outside of the USA is probably a good idea, particularly in Emerging markets like Latam, India & Eastern Europe and SE Asia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYrdjsOKqO8

15.Kind of dark but a cold hard look at the world. The leadership of Canada, the UK and EU are a "tornado of incompetence."

In the US, our leadership is just ultra corrupt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMkxlJfIb4

16.All things AI, energy & Semiconductor chips. This was a fascinating convo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqBMzuzxZog

17.This show helps you make sense of the crazy news in Silicon Valley. Always worth watching every week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVfDfse13es

18."If you can get the same objective results from hitting the gym 3 times per week, why would you want to get that same outcome training twice a day, 7 days a week?

When you start to think in this lens, it allows you to think more about output over how many hours you clock in.

It’s time to start admiring the man who gets what he wants as effortlessly as possible.

Who surgically works to build results.

Who doesn’t waste years, ‘doing it his way’, but instead learns from world class mentors & practitioners who can speed up their development.

If you’re in a phase of your life now where all you feel you’re doing is grinding, sit back & really analyse…. Is this mode of operating really giving me results?"

https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/why-grinding-is-overrated

19."But for many who outwardly appear successful and agentic, their agency is actually narrowly contained within psychological ‘hidden walls’. Other domains and challenges which are patently important are never even considered as targets of action because there has been no subconscious reification of personal efficacy in these domains.

Wealthy and powerful men will live their whole lives in ugly places which need beautification, sterile communities which need family formation, and social groups with declining standards which need to be reversed. But in these domains, they self-conceptualize as object, rather than agent. They don’t even think about changing them, let alone mounting a head-on attack.

Whatever your views on them, true agency is exemplified in our age by figures like Trump and Elon. In 2015, Trump presented a vision of America’s future which was completely at odds with orthodoxy, and the execution of which alienated him from polite society. He wasn’t even a politician—but he did it.

Pretty much all of Elon’s enterprises are characterized by attempting radical breakthroughs in languishing domains—most of which he is not a personal expert in before he gets involved; and yet he consistently finds tremendous success. Buying Twitter to personally guarantee free speech is high agency.

Most of us will not be the next Trump or Elon. But we can calibrate ambitions accordingly."

https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/our-low-agency-elite

20.Was an educational conversation on the economy. Good for global macro investors. “The world is run by thieves.” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC3eM69jn0Y

21."When does life change drastically?

The general answer is that it happens once you escape "survival mode". Those with a tougher upbringing will have a harder time getting out of it than those who had it easier. To explain our point further, if your parents always had to think about how they would put food on the table. There is a good chance that you were consistently operating in survival mode.

On the other hand if you grew up in more comfortable surroundings where you went skiing once a year or always had a travel abroad… There is a good chance your parents didn’t operate fully in survival mode. To get back to our point. Once you get out of survival mode, you finally have time to think about the things you never considered before. This is where mental, mindset and other woo-woo stuff make sense. Why? Because you finally have time to think about them instead of worrying about whether you can pay the bills."

https://www.beautyofsaas.com/p/faq-how-to-escape-the-mediocrity-and-rise-above-the-average

22."Skills are for interactive conversations. Code is for agents. Skills are easier to debug. When a skill fails, you know exactly where to look. When an agent chains ten function calls & the output is wrong, you’re hunting through logs."

https://tomtunguz.com/9-observations-using-ai-agents/

23."Nothing ever happens unless you cause it to.

Nothing good ever just falls into your lap.

You have to make your own luck.

You have to take ownership of your own life."

https://substack.com/@colejaczko/p-188521648

24.I always get energized when I listen to David Senra. "The Hard way is the Right way."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PBgbS0N86I

25. "In the end, the real threat to taste isn’t AI - it’s the way content keeps trying to package it. The more we polish it for virality, the more we strip it of what made it powerful in the first place.

Developing taste means actively resisting the gravitational pull of popular consensus and algorithmic predictability. It means allowing yourself to be guided by intuition and curiosity rather than the expectation of external validation. It means being conscious and careful about the clothes you buy, the books you read, the music you listen to. Above all, it means learning.

Taste doesn’t just come from liking things.

It comes from disliking things - and knowing why."

https://substack.com/home/post/p-169036769

26."I am talking, of course, about the status game.

This game is inside us. We can’t help but play it. For millions of years, high status meant better mates, more food, greater security. Low status meant genetic extinction, inceldom, zero hoes.

Status-seeking is hardwired into our brains. It is universal, but its expression is context-dependent. What codes as high status varies by ecological niche. In the Stone Age, Cro-Magnon man would stomp, yell, and flex in front of women. This was scarcely more sophisticated than a silverback gorilla thumping his chest. Me strong. Me loud. Me get woman.

Suffice to say, this ooga booga behavior wouldn’t be appreciated by members of the Royal Sydney Yacht Club. In rarefied environments, displays of raw strength are vulgar. They signal an unfortunate proximity to the brutish classes. But in other ecological niches, chest-thumping codes as ‘alpha’ rather than apish. El monstruo Texano drives around in a RAM and injects steroids. Like his paleolithic ancestors, he signals status through physical dominance. In the American south, this is an adaptive strategy. In America’s coastal regions, it is uncouth, proleish, and irredeemably low status.

In short, status is contextual. What’s considered high-status in one environment can be irredeemably low-status in another. There isn’t a singular way to be high status. To quote W. David Marx, ‘There is a Hollywood entertainment mogul way of being high status that is distinct from that of Texan oil magnates.’"

https://substack.com/home/post/p-174511393

27.I know there is a negative slant from loser mainstream media on the tech industry. But I also get the reason people hate the tech bros. This article exemplifies both leanings. FTR as long time SV guy: Roy Lee and his ilk are awful POSs.

"What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before.

For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.

The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses.  An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley"

https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/

28."Fortunately for the Taiwanese, there’s a possible workaround for the ammo problem. Taiwan may be struggling to stash enough artillery rounds, but there’s nothing stopping it from stockpiling a new alternative: tiny explosive drones. Taiwan’s high-tech industry could produce these in huge numbers and without outside help.

These drones would be even more important in the alarming scenario where Taiwan fought alone—even if it only temporarily fought alone. But a pivot to drones should begin now."

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/holding-out-for-domestic-munitions-supply-taiwan-needs-drones-millions-of-drones/

29."Every mistake above is actually the same mistake: confusing access to the commodity with a competitive advantage.

Intelligence is the commodity. I want that to land, so I’ll say it one more time as plainly as I can: the thing everyone is racing to adopt is the thing that will differentiate absolutely no one.

What won’t be commoditized:

distribution

domain knowledge

customer trust

brand, and

the ability to aim intelligence at exactly the right problem in a specific market.

That’s it. That’s the whole list. And it’s a short one."

https://vikrantduggal.substack.com/p/intelligence-is-cheap-now

30."But what is Project Vault, precisely? Think of it less as a government program and more as a structured insurance product for American industry. Participating manufacturers pay upfront commitment fees, essentially a security premium, in exchange for guaranteed access to stockpiled raw materials during defined market disruptions. They cover storage costs. They can draw down inventory for normal operations, provided they replenish it. The architecture borrows from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but the ambition is considerably broader: all 60 minerals on the U.S. Geological Survey’s Critical Minerals List, covering everything from lithium to rare earths, the inputs that underpin modern manufacturing, defense systems, and the clean energy transition.

Critically, and this is a distinction worth understanding, Project Vault is not the National Defense Stockpile. It is not, primarily, a military program. It is demand-led, built around civilian and commercial industry, a point made plain by the roster of initial participants: Boeing, GE Vernova, Clarios, and Western Digital. General Motors, Stellantis, Corning, and Google have reportedly expressed interest. With the exception of Boeing’s defense arm, this is, at its core, a commercial play dressed in the language of national security.

The private capital in the deal flows from three trading houses — Hartree Partners, Mercuria Energy Americas, and Traxys — firms whose core competency is exactly the kind of global commodity logistics that a program of this complexity demands. They will serve as the procurement engine, sourcing and moving raw materials through supply chains that the federal government has historically shown little aptitude for managing directly."

https://matthewbernard776320.substack.com/p/project-vault

31.Lots of good takes this week. The continuing AI wars in Silicon Valley.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CewrGGMjRI

32.I've had my issues with Chamath but this is pretty wise stuff. You can learn from anyone, even if you dislike them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-LAT4HjWPo

33."For the European services that failed to foresee the invasion, a period of soul-searching followed. One European intelligence officer said they were furious over the failure and had pushed internally for an inquiry into what could have been done better. “The whole raison d’etre of an intelligence service is to predict when the next war will come,” said the officer. “And we completely messed it up.”

Huw Dylan, a historian of intelligence at King’s College London, said there was a long history of intelligence analysts being unwilling to predict that future events will create a dramatic break with the past. People could not imagine what a major European land war would look like in the 21st century, so assumed it was unlikely to happen. Additionally, scepticism is usually the safer option. “If you’re predicting something that has massive implications, you’ve got more to answer for if you get it wrong,” he said.

The Ukraine failure has started to change that. As one German official put it: “The main thing we took away from all of this was that we need to work with worst-case scenarios much more than we did before.”

Now, as the world has entered a new era of uncertainty, there are more worst-case scenarios to ponder. Recent European military exercises have focused on how to maintain order after massive attacks on power and communications infrastructure that cause civil unrest. For the first time in a century, Canada is modelling potential responses to a US invasion.

For many, the key intelligence lesson from Ukraine was stark: do not rule things out, just because they might once have seemed impossible."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/feb/20/a-war-foretold-cia-mi6-putin-ukraine-plans-russia

34.Michael Every is one of the best geopolitical analysts around. This was pretty helpful to figure out where Europe may be going. The likelihood of fragmentation is high. Trump doing reverse Perestroika in the USA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlklWpxw7zo

35.Helping to decipher Trump's moves globally and at home. Lots of huge implications and various scenarios via "reverse Perestroika". This is a must to watch for global macro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JHrddtDqbA

36."What happens when the skill you spent your life learning can be done at 80% proficiency by a novice in a matter of minutes. We’re already there across most disciplines. AI and robotics will eventually flatten all surface-level skills.

The skills that will matter in the future will be things like judgement, taste, the ability to make connections across disciplines, story telling and moral/ethical reasoning. Going back to the car example, the skills you will need will more closely mirror a navigator than that of the actual driver.

Taste, judgement, cross-disciplinary connections, story-telling and moral reasoning are much harder to foster. These require life experience, failures, interests in many different areas and a lot of time spent in contemplation. It will require you to understand how you actually view the world, what you stand for and who you are."

https://substack.com/home/post/p-188351223

37."The future is a fiction. The past is a graveyard. The only reality is the current system. Build for the kill, not for the history books."

https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-legacy-delusion

Mountainhead

I decided to watch the HBO movie so you don’t need to. It was made by the creators of “Succession”. This time it’s a story about the weekend getaway between 3 tech multi-billionaire friends & their near billionaire host while the world burns down around them due to the products they released. Yet ironically their wealth and net-worth continues to grow. Troddling around the world like giants. 

And like in “Succession”, you pretty much end up hating all the characters who are just awful people. Insecure, self-righteous, callous & surprising catty too. Maybe even with a lot of sociopathy & megalomania. Self serving for sure.  All plotting against each other.  Caricatures of what bored, rich douchebags with infinite resources would do. “I know everyone and I can do everything” is literally one of the lines. 

It’s just a movie but it seems to reflect all the animus that Hollywood and media seems to hold toward the tech industry, especially Silicon Valley elites. The movie's dialogue include well-used Silicon Valley terms like decel, first principles, disintermediation, decentralization, AI doomerism or transhumanism. Mockingly I might add. 

And I get it. I’ve been in Silicon Valley for a long time. It’s a literal bubble, filled with brilliant, ambitious and somewhat deluded people. People who think they can create something from nothing. The amount of wealth creation here is ridiculous. Unfortunately this rise has led to incredible insularity and a lack of understanding of the rest of the American populace. There is such a focus on technology and wealth that there is little thinking about the negative impacts across society of the tech being created. 

Add the arrogance from the incredible wealth and it seems to explain the anger and hatred that the rest of America and people from other industries feel. It started happening with mobile phones and social media. It’s only coming to the head with AI. No one wants to be disrupted. This disruption that is coming for white collar jobs will match the pain that globalization & outsourcing brought to manufacturing. 

No wonder most major AI Labs CEOs are not doing any public appearances anymore. They see the techlash coming as one of the billionaires says: “because really we are in a moment of tremendous creative destruction….A great turning…..nations are teetering and I think we play a role.”

Watching Mountainhead reminded me that unless we start going back to basics: doing good, building great products, not the gambling and Enshittification of products for a quick buck, we will probably deserve everything coming for us. Mobs with pitchforks. This movie is a not so subtle warning. “Winners take all, loser takes a fall.”

Purehearted

“Based on a true story. Majimu, an office worker in Naha City, embarks on a journey to make a new type of rum using Okinawan sugarcane.”

I mean with a description like this, how can you not be intrigued. Basically it’s a dramatized “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” but for rum. Super random and something I’d ONLY trust the Japanese to do right. Why is it that the Japanese are able to take a concept and turn it into the ultimate apex of the craft. Making something as close to perfection as humanly possible: whether sushi, sake, French pastries, wine, tofu, green tea or whatever. It’s incredible. The care. The craftsmanship. 

Majimu decides to apply for her company’s in-house ventures competition after trying a foreign rum. She realized there is no local rum. She gets inspired to make it. Okinawan rum using freshly squeezed sugarcane: in a style called Rhum Agricole. “Why does delicious alcohol make you feel so happy?”

Her entrepreneurial journey begins and like all journeys it’s a rough start. She is discouraged by her family: “it ain’t an easy thing to do, making stuff for people’s mouths.” But she makes it past the first round and starts to learn about the details of rum and figure out where to find the top ingredients around Okinawa. An example of “You can just do things.”

Like many Japanese people, Majimu goes all in on her dream. Detailed research and plans. As they said in the movie: “it’s not a pipe dream if you take action.” 

She crushes it and makes it past phase 2 but as usual runs into challenges. Reality. She needs to figure out a distiller, suppliers and a license. Convincing a stubborn village headman on her idea.

But she is determined: “I know nothing about making alcohol. I don’t know how hard it is to create a product but I’m determined to make one Okinawa can be proud of…..All I want is to make Okinawan rum.” She gathers believers along the way. Early believers. No startup ever succeeds without this happening. 

She draws inspiration from her family’s tofu business. “You need to know the face of the person making it. Make sure you get the most important things right.” The basics: The founder matters. Founder driven sales and founder driven customer support. Founder driven product. The founder is everything. 

We are entering a world where people are tired of buying from big faceless corporations. Small & personal is better. And customers will pay a premium for it. Especially if there is a personal touch and relationship with the founder. One of the overlooked advantages of early stage startups. The best founders are purists. They really care and it shows. They are obsessive and relentless like Majimu. 

“We need more than knowledge. We need someone who is with us all of the way. I’m sure now.” You need to create a movement. A religion. A cult even. This is how you manifest ideas into reality. She even finds a distiller that shares her same values & love of the product. 

“Making alcohol is like raising a child. It changes and develops every day so you’ve got to give it love and attention. That’s my duty as a parent…..a winemaker can only produce a limited amount during their lifetime so I want my wine to be loved and shared by everyone. That’s why with every bottle, I put my heart into it….and I always will.”

This mindset is why Japanese products rock. This is why startups rock. What an inspiration. 

“If you try to do something. You can do anything. If you don’t try something, you’ll never be anything. Those who are purehearted, without fail, through whatever, they’ll have their wishes granted. And flourish forever.”

F1: The Movie

Damn that was a great movie. I’ve always liked Brad Pitt and have a passing interest in F1 as a cultural phenomenon. This movie really captured it well. The thrill of being a modern day gladiator in modern form. Competing against others and yourself at the dangerous edge of extreme speed. I also get why ownership of F1 teams are the sport of billionaires and big PE funds. It is expensive to run a team. 

Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a former Formula 1 driver that never fulfilled his great promise but ends up driving at racing championships like Le Mans, NASCAR and even was a NYC taxi driver. He is literally a modern day knight errant traveling around the world but driving, not fighting.  

But 30 years later he is recruited back to an F1 team run by his old friend Ruben as a Hail Mary. Ruben sells him: 

“I’m offering you an open seat on Formula One. The only place you can say one day if you win, you are the absolute best in the world.”

Hayes is intrigued and asks his waitress: 

“Hey, let me ask you something. Close friend of yours made you an offer that was 100%, positively too good to be true. What do you do?”

The waitress asks: “Well, how much we talking about?”

He responds: “Not about the money.”

She says: “So what is it about?”

He responds: “Hmmmmm.”

It took the rest of the movie to figure it out. It’s about ego. But also self worth. Pride. Proving beyond a doubt you are the top of the top. That you are beyond a doubt the best. 

He also talks about Flow states: 

“It’s rare. But sometimes, there’s this moment, in the car where everything goes quiet, my heartbeat slows, it’s peaceful. And I can see everything and no one…..no one can touch me. And I am chasing that moment every time I get in the car. I don’t know when I’ll find it again. But man, I want to. I want to. Cause in that moment, I’m flying.” Probably one of the best descriptions of finding flow. 

And if you want to get a view into peak single masculine life, this movie is it. 

“What the hell you smiling about man? Did you win something? There’s 20 other drivers still out on that track and you’re in here posing for that nonsense. Do you think any one of them respect us? Do you? They need to learn that no one gets past us without a fight. No one.”

“Plan C is for combat. Combat! Combat! Combat!”

He has to pull the team together, a younger hard charging driver Joshua Pearce who is troubled by the financial issues of the team, his future and the competition of the new driver. 

His mom gives Joshua good advice: “Don’t mind that. Focus on you. You can spend your whole life worrying about other people but your time is right now.”

His mom asks him: “you still love it?”

He responds: “Of course I still love it.”

She says: “Remember what your father used to say: Put your head down and drive.”

Seems like great advice for all of us right now. Get focused. It’s Q2 and there is work to be done. And watch F1 and be inspired. It’s never too late to make a comeback. 

As Sonny Hayes says: “Create your own breaks. Hope is not a strategy.”

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 3rd, 2026

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." — George Orwell

1. "frontier-tech corridors are the next great American economic engine - and the time to shape who benefits from that engine is right now, whether we are ready or not. As AI, and great-power competition reorder the global economy, the United States is already sliding into a new epoch; if we do not deliberately connect our people and our states to that future of work, we risk locking in a generation of under-prepared workers, stranded regions, and justified malaise about what comes next.

The frontier-tech corridor is a model meant to solve that problem of economic disconnect: to give states and regions a concrete way to align their industrial base, their talent pipelines, and accordingly their governance models with the frontier technologies that will define the next sixty years.

In the United States, services now account for roughly four‑fifths of GDP; finance, insurance, and real estate alone contribute about 21 percent, health care nearly 18 percent, while manufacturing has fallen into the single digits. For reference, China and Korea went the other way. China’s secondary industry - manufacturing plus construction - still makes up around 38 percent of its economy, with manufacturing by itself in the high‑20s as a share of GDP, even as services rise toward the mid‑50s. South Korea keeps roughly 30 percent of its GDP in manufacturing value‑added, the second‑highest share in the OECD, with services closer to the low‑60s. On the defense side, as mentioned the United States spends a little under 3 percent of GDP on its military, China has hovered below 2 percent (speculated), and Korea around 2.6 percent - but both Asian competitors are stacking that defense effort on top of far more muscular industrial bases.

Over the last three decades, our neo‑liberal model encouraged U.S. firms to offshore a large share of the hard work of making things - electronics, ships, machine tools - while we deepened our specializations in finance, software, and health care; China and Korea treated manufacturing and dual‑use industry as national projects. Wright’s Law takes an institutional form here: the nations that actually build at scale accumulate line workers, technicians, and engineers who get better with every unit shipped, and they now over‑index not just in exports but in engineering-intensive research, and patents across the very technologies that will define the next fifty years."

https://innoblepursuit.substack.com/p/frontier-tech-corridor-southeast

2."The strong man is not the one who fights every battle. It’s the one who waits until the fight is worth his time. He doesn't throw himself into martyrdom to prove he has a spine. He survives. He grows. He watches. And when it's time to collect the debt, he does it with interest.

You don’t have to stand your ground every single time it’s challenged. Sometimes the wisest option is letting things go, only to attack when your boundaries are truly crossed and broken.

If you were to fight every battle every time available, you’d constantly be in war. Battle-torn, cortisol-maxxed to the roof. Zero enjoyment for anything beautiful in this world. But you absolutely cannot avoid conflict. You must be conflict-ready."

https://substack.com/@finalman/p-161414752

3.Whatever you think of Elon Musk, he has built an incredible business machine in Tesla and SpaceX and Xai.

Lots of insights on how he runs his businesses and shows his first principles engineering thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXbuik3dgA

4."If your time isn’t yours, your money isn’t either.

True wealth is:

– Building in the shadows

– Growing without noise

– Owning your hours, minute by minute

Money’s just the key.

The door is time."

https://substack.com/@luxlifestylelab/p-170072842

5."Let’s be real: Burnout doesn’t discriminate by net worth. Today’s top business owners know that health isn’t a luxury. it’s leverage.

From boardrooms to beachside workcations, the modern entrepreneur is optimizing not just for profits, but for peace. Because the real flex? Feeling sharp, focused, and calm no matter what the day throws at you."

https://substack.com/@luxlifestylelab/p-170303236

6."The ultimate signal of elite status is the ability to run a multi-million dollar empire from a single high-end backpack. It signals that your Intelligence and your Systems are your only real assets. While the “new rich” show off their mansions, the Sovereign shows off their Zero-Anchor Lifestyle."

https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-ownership-trap

7."The bet has risks. Energy at 21x P/E isn’t cheap by historical standards, it’s expensive. The sector typically trades at 10-15x. Grid buildouts face 3-year transformer lead times & 10-year permitting cycles. If AI monetization disappoints, hyperscalers will cut capex as fast as they deployed it. Ask anyone who held fiber stocks in 2001.

In 2026, the market is betting on hard infrastructure."

https://tomtunguz.com/rotation-software-energy-materials/

8."In the Army, soldiers undergo rigorous training to instill discipline and a strong work ethic that transcends individual interests. In civilian life, that same focus can drive you to excel in school, work, or personal goals.

When you develop discipline, you set high standards for yourself, hold yourself accountable, and get stuff done even when you’re not feeling it. Over time, you’ll notice you feel more confident walking into any situation, because you’ve trained yourself to handle challenges—much like a well-trained unit ready for any mission."

https://gbnt1952.substack.com/p/boot-camp-for-life

9."Saizeriya is the people's champ, supporting Japanese families, students, anyone really, for decades. You won't be able to find food of this quality for $2-3 USD a plate in any other developed economy. Yet they're profitable and continuing to grow double digits. There's really 2 elements: Cost advantage + Quality.

The cost advantage isn't just one thing, like Amazon or Costco. it's doing a thousand small things right to operate a restaurant chain with an industrial level of efficiency without compromising on quality. They've really thought in first principles and really went up the supply chain to rethink cost AND quality. The extent they are going to do this is impressive."

https://madeinjapan.substack.com/p/saizeriyans-at-the-gate

10.Excellent discussion this week, particularly on the impact of AI and what you can do to prepare. That and global macro & getting hard assets. This reminds me of these guys at their best during pandemic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnaegIpkenA

11.This speech was excellent. Direct but hopeful. A call to action for unity, ramping defense & reindustrialization for Western Civilization. Decline is a choice. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HtGx-GWgZU

12."Entrepreneurs should deeply integrate advanced AI tools into the workflow of every team member. If someone isn’t willing to adopt them, that’s a real issue. The companies that fully embrace these tools will move faster, learn faster, and compound progress more quickly.

It may feel uncomfortable at first. But over time, founders and teams who put AI at the center of their workflow will increase their velocity and accelerate progress toward their vision.

Don’t wait. Make AI foundational—personally and across your startup."

https://davidcummings.org/2026/02/14/ai-is-a-super-power-start-treating-it-like-one/

13."True elegance is a lifestyle, not a performance.

It’s about aligning appearance, behavior, and communication in a way that feels natural.never forced.

When mastered, elegance becomes your silent business card, working for you long before you say a word.

Elegance is the most powerful form of quiet influence."

https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-7-rules-of-true-elegance-a-complete

14."In a world obsessed with luxury consumption, quiet intellectualism offers a compelling alternative, focusing on depth and meaning over superficiality. This path is not about flashy logos or extravagant possessions, but about the profound satisfaction of getting lost in a book, unraveling a complex idea, or mastering a new skill. True wealth is not a public image you project, but a personal fortress you build within yourself."

https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-allure-of-quiet-intellectualism

15."These past couple of years have taught me a lot about how to build a life outside a high tax country and I want to lay out what I think is the best way to go about it all. If you’re sitting in Australia or any Western country feeling squeezed by taxes, cost of living, and that growing sense that the harder you work and the more successful you become, the more headwind you cop.

What is a Sovereign Individual?

A sovereign individual is someone who structures their life across borders, legally, to reduce dependency on any single government, minimise taxation through jurisdictional choice, and increase personal freedom, mobility, and economic opportunity.

South America is the answer to start building something freer, and, quite frankly, a lot more fun, in 2026 (although it’s certainly not for everyone)."

https://www.geologotrader.com/p/how-to-become-a-sovereign-individual

16.Everything is about energy and cheap energy at that. This is leading geopolitical de-risking and diversification. Massive investment into infrastructure and hard assets is happening in the West.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piXBXRXHiQA

17.Everything that worked in the last 50 years for investing will not work going forward. Hard assets aka industrials, energy & commodities. Hard power is sovereignty in a “might is right” world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VdSlnBxhUM

18."The ultimate signal of elite status is a massive change in business direction or lifestyle that is never announced only observed. You don’t post a “rebranding” thread. You don’t explain the “new vision.” You simply start operating at the new level. Those who are meant to be in your Phalanx will see the result; the rest don’t matter."

https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-feedback-loop-of-silence

19."The Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) taught me that there is always a recovery, despite the prognosis at the time. And by focusing purely on a company’s fundamentals I could distance myself from the noise. For well-managed, cash-rich companies, crises throw up many opportunities. There will always be crises so one needs to be positioned to get through them and emerge stronger. The best managements will do that for you."

https://www.readideabrunch.com/p/idea-brunch-with-james-hay-of-pangolin

20."To make these substrates rigid, heat-resistant, and electrically stable, manufacturers use woven glass fiber fabric (T-Glass) as the structural reinforcement material, similar to how rebar reinforces concrete. This gets combined with resin to create the layers of the substrate.

For the most advanced AI chips, you need the highest-grade glass fiber because these chips run extremely hot, need ultra-precise signal routing, and can’t tolerate any warping or electrical interference.

Nittobo’s T-Glass is apparently the only material meeting these extreme specifications at scale.

So when you control 90% of this specialized glass fiber, you effectively control a critical choke point in the entire AI chip supply chain; the structural foundation every advanced chip needs to actually function."

https://www.polymathinvestor.com/p/investing-in-the-antipodes-of-the

21."Yes, intelligent machines will soon supersede us in a whole range of ways. But we are still the creatures who created, and listen to, the Brandenburg Concertos. Who read Shakespeare. Who marvel at nature. Who can say to one another: I know how you feel.

Perhaps in time, and via the new machine lifeforms we seem to be creating now, the world in which all that happens may indeed pass into history. But we don’t have to embrace that outcome, or hasten it. We can fight for the human way of seeing. And if we fight, I think we’ll find a way through."

https://www.newworldsamehumans.xyz/p/what-you-are-that-machines-are-not

22."From 2020 to 2025, there were 5,700 AI & ML acquisitions. Only 21% disclosed a deal value. The remaining 4,500 share a pattern : small teams absorbed into larger companies. No fanfare. No valuation headlines. Just talent migrating from startup to incumbent.

It’s cheaper to buy a team than to compete for hires or build from scratch."

https://tomtunguz.com/ai-acqui-hire-wave/

23."This is the new literacy. Not prompt engineering. Not learning to code. The essential skill of the AI era is probabilistic thinking — the ability to assess confidence levels, estimate expected value, and make decisions under uncertainty. It’s knowing when to fold a losing hand and when to push your chips in.

The people who will struggle are the ones who demand certainty before acting. They’ll wait for AI to be “perfect” and miss the window. The people who will win are the ones who understand that perfection isn’t the standard — positive expected value is. They’ll make more bets, lose some, win more, and compound those gains over time.

So if you want to prepare for an AI-driven future, don’t just learn how the technology works. Learn how to think in probabilities. Read about Bayesian reasoning. Study decision theory. Or, frankly, just go play some poker. The table has more to teach you about the next economy than most business books ever will."

https://investinginai.substack.com/p/if-you-want-to-win-in-an-ai-world

24."In a frontier‑tech economy, most of the work that matters will not be happening in conference rooms. As Elon Musk likes to remind his own engineers, the factory (the machine that builds the machine) is harder than the product itself, and it demands more smart people, not fewer. Shipfitters and composite technicians, mechatronics operators and depot maintainers may never need a bachelor’s degree, but they will need to read digital work orders, interpret schematics, and troubleshoot software‑enabled equipment.

Start with K‑12 performance and not with factories: if the South’s children cannot read and do basic math, they will never be able to claim the blue‑collar frontier‑tech jobs coming to their backyards. The irony, and the opportunity is that states like Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Tennessee are now leading the country in early‑grade literacy recovery, quietly building the foundations of a technically capable workforce. 

If they can sustain this turn and pair it with real pathways into apprenticeships and technical colleges, then within a decade the corridor will graduate a much larger share of working‑class kids who are actually capable of doing frontier‑tech work, right when the nation most needs them. The rest of this section is about that foundation: the Southern surge in literacy, and what it means for the blue‑collar reservoir that sits beneath the corridor."

https://innoblepursuit.substack.com/p/two-pipelines-three-theaters-one

25.Optimistic for the future based on this convo. Dispatches from the Munich Security Conference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD3lWdWDMgA

26.How to build an effective sales culture. Lots of good points here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXGLftcRHAE

27."The US is the most attractive market for new high-end technologies and has the best innovation ecosystem. The market wants to create these technologies; the barrier is activation energy.

It seems clear that hardware entrepreneurs have (re)learned that iteration speed and hardware-rich development are a more effective way to create new things. Vertical integration is now the dominant solution in mind share. The downside is that it requires tens of millions of dollars and numerous highly skilled employees to kick off. It works for Elon, but not everyone has that skill set.

Amazon Web Services enabled software startups to begin without having to set up on-premises servers, lowering the activation energy. Instant quote, short lead time manufacturing companies and services can do the same for many hardware startups and tinkerers.

The emphasis on speed is because the model only works if the latency is low. The gravity model for frontier technology is much stronger than for existing products. Leading engineers become more productive, iteration cycles shorten, and new ideas become reality faster. Not only does fast service and lightning logistics help convert existing customers, but it also helps create the downstream manufacturers of tomorrow."

https://www.austinvernon.site/blog/manufacturing.html

28.Italy is winning. Milan particularly as an international city.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67KqRfgyP7M

29.Zurich is the epitome of stealth wealth. Quiet money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw1KzQ_9V0Q

30.This is a really cool & important company. Metal Manufacturing with Machina Labs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQpwOkDUHvg

31."Beyond That The Common Thread? Data, energy, computing. These three things are needed to power AI/robots in the future. Therefore you should calculate how much data, energy and computing you own. Being negative on tech over the next decade is insane to us. Owning those three things = owning the new workforce.

If you want a set and forget stock portfolio it probably looks like this: QQQ, SMH, AI/Data stocks (META, GOOGL etc.) and Data Center/Solar/Nuclear exposure.

If you have anything in those three categories we’re not going to debate with you. The big picture is what you need.

On the W-2 Side: Since we’re in the first stage of this “junior co-worker” vibe, this means you’re going to slowly thin out middle roles (fancy for not generating revenue or making decisions). Your job is to position yourself for accountability and judgement. Use all the advanced AI tools you can find to appear capable of future judgement/accountability. Being fast at filling in excel sheets is no longer valuable."

https://bowtiedbull.io/p/indicators-for-the-bottom-aie-com

32."As the capabilities improve, it is inevitable that every company will have the ability to automate most functions. For now, there are levels, and a set of companies are pushing the frontier of what’s possible. Human taste and decision-making will be more important than ever as AI does more of the grunt work."

https://nbt.substack.com/p/automate-the-entire-company

33."At this point, I don’t think we will hire another human for at least a year or two at our firm, but our efficiency will increase by at least 10% a month – the equivalent of two new full-timers.

Why?

Because it’s easier, faster, and more cost-efficient to set up replicants.

The replicants burn $1,000 in tokens a month (but never ask for a raise).

The replicants don’t make mistakes.

The replicants will get 10% better at their jobs each week, which typically takes humans about a year.

The replicants don’t complain, they train."

https://jcalfromallin.substack.com/p/openclaw-and-the-great-hiring-hiatus

34."If you find yourself entering a category with dozens of nearly identical competitors, pause. The problem may already be solved. You may be refining.If you find yourself confronting a bottleneck that others avoid because it is slow, complex, or governed by hard science, pay attention. That is where leverage hides.

Innovation, at its finest, is not aesthetic restlessness. It is structural defiance.

We must not build AI for the sake of AI, but build where a constraint dies, a category is created or an industry is transformed."

https://droninghead.substack.com/p/constraint-is-the-real-frontier

35.This was incredibly helpful for founder CEOs, lots of great management and leadership insights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UyitfSbY6c

36.A reality check for us in the West. Emerging Markets are booming and China has lots of advantages now. A global macro perspective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqsuQuVthjs

No Apologies

I noticed I say “sorry” a lot. When I run into someone or do something wrong. Or even when someone runs into me or it’s someone else’s fault. WTF? It led me down a long thought chain to understand where this is coming from. I think it’s the weak overly polite Canadian in me. I grew up in Canada and lived there for 21+ years. 

I also think it’s from the last decade or two where the Western culture for some reason started to promote weak, inoffensive apologetic men. Or even the ridiculous woke cancel culture, where you had to go on some apology tour if a tweet or something you said 10 years ago offended some rando or set of randos. 

This is the system that the matrix propagates. It keeps the populace in check. It’s a pernicious form of societal control. Keeps you docile. You have wide swathes of weaklings now in the UK and Canada. America too. Every Western country. Rudderless passengers in their own meaningless lives. It’s harsh but it’s true. 

Language is programming. Specific language leads to specific behavior. Talk like the weak, you are weak. The reverse is true too. You have to “act as if.”

However, if you observe the real world, everyone you know who has accomplished anything or done anything of impact was not afraid of ruffling feathers. I mean you don’t have to be a complete dick all the time as I see in Silicon Valley or Wall Street but sometimes you have to break some eggs to make an omelette. Fortune favors the bold as they say. 

Going forward I’ll always be polite but no more “I’m sorry”. The only people I’ll ever apologize to are my family, my friends and business partners. I owe them my best and I also know I sometimes am not at that level or there when I am needed. But for anyone else, no more. If you don’t like it, I don’t care, F—k off! 

I’ve finally realized weak behavior and apologizing does not serve me well. Not in the past. Definitely not now. You are just signaling to the predators you are the prey. And as we are operating in a world where it’s the law of the jungle, as prey you are now more likely to get eaten. It is what it is. 

So no more apologies anymore. This is what I think is critical reprogramming. No more slave mindset. Onwards and upwards. 

Aristocrat Hours: Work Like a Lion Part Deux

I’m a big believer of 996 and crazy work hours. Especially if you are in your twenties and thirties. 

When I hear a twenty-something talk about work-life balance, I think they are stupid, probably deluded and maybe even retarded. WTF? You have the energy and the whole life ahead of you. 

You literally don’t know anything about how the world works and you have to prove yourself. Prove yourself to yourself and to others. These are foundational: the skills, the reputation and relationships. So you have to grind when you are younger. That is the way the world works. 

But this is different when you get into your mid-late 40s. At least it was for me. You probably know more. You have less energy, despite biohacking, exercise and other things. So you have to be more strategic and focused. I heard the term “Aristocrat Hours” from my friend Arjun. Basically 10 am to 3 pm. Hours where you work. The rest of the time it’s yours to spend on whatever you want to do. Reading, writing, family time, exercise, walks in nature. It’s about sustainability. It makes sense to me. I want to work till the end of my life. My retirement plan is death. That means I need to be able to do this for at least another 40 years. I might add you can’t do this as an employee, only if you are self employed or run a business.

In my business it’s about staying relevant and understanding what is happening in technology, startups and geopolitics and global macro. That means like investors of old, you have lots of downtime to read, write and think. To parse the signal from the noise as they say. Finding the reality. This is critical to stay on top of things and get new ideas. Or at minimum understand what is going on and how to position yourself and business accordingly.  

That doesn’t mean I don’t grind or turn it on when I need to. You work like a lion as I wrote about before. There are days and weeks (sometimes even months, like in the summer) of relatively low activity, followed by periods of intense activity and work weeks. Like 100-120 hour work weeks, just like in my good old days. Aristocrat hours enable this, slow pace for a while as you build knowledge and energy that gets expended on the right activities in a short period of time. Rinse and repeat. 

I’ve learned a lot of this mindset and tips from Lux Life Style Labs: https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/. I highly recommend them. As they wrote, it’s about effectiveness, not efficiency. 

“We have been sold the lie of “Productivity.” We are obsessed with doing things faster, better, and cheaper. But if you are moving at 200 mph in the wrong direction, your efficiency is just accelerating your failure. Most people spend their lives optimizing tasks that shouldn’t exist in the first place. This is “Busy-Work” dressed in high-end software.

The Thesis in One Line: It is better to do the right thing slowly than the wrong thing at the speed of light.

The curator doesn’t manage time; they manage Leverage. They refuse to participate in the “Efficiency Race.”

The concept of Aristocrat Hours helps you sustain and become more effective in life.