Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 14th, 2026

“Don’t Count the Days. Make the Days Count” –Muhammad Ali

1. "The market rewards this shift. Goldman Sachs found that low-labor-cost stocks outperformed high-labor-cost stocks by 8 percentage points in 2025.4 Labor’s share of GDP hit a record low of 53.8% in Q3 2025.5 The implication : every dollar shifted from labor to software improves margins & stock performance.

Across the S&P 500, labor costs represent about 12% of revenues on average.6 Software costs sit around 1-3%. As agents absorb labor, that ratio inverts. Labor shrinks. Software expands. The total addressable market for software grows at labor’s expense, while profitability grows."

https://tomtunguz.com/observations-about-agent-pricing/

2.Inside Palantir: empowering heretics and driving innovation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LcH4lP9XbA&t=496s

3. "But even if China did beat America in a limited war, that wouldn’t change any of their fundamental problems. War production might give their economy a temporary boost, but the incentives for overproduction and over-loaning would still be there, along with all of those bad debts. Sinking some of America’s carriers or destroying some of America’s bases wouldn’t change the trajectory of AI. Nor would a war allow Xi to feel secure enough on his throne to stop his purges — if anything, war empowers generals and weakens civilian leaders, which would put Xi even more on edge.

In other words, although some Chinese nationalists might believe they need to seize Taiwan and drive U.S. power out of the Pacific before the “deadline” imposed by China’s long-term vulnerabilities, this is actually just a fantasy. As Putin and Trump are now both discovering, wars don’t revitalize declining countries — in fact, they often simply accelerate the decline.

China, of course, is not currently in decline. It is arguably the world’s leading civilization and nation-state at this point, and it is at its peak. But I’m starting to suspect it won’t occupy that peak for as long as the U.S. did, in its day. It’s not yet time to declare that “the sun also sets” on China, but I think there’s reason to be more skeptical of the long-term success story compared to a year ago."

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/china-is-quietly-looking-weaker

4."Taiwan’s future. If the ships are turned away—or worse still, boarded and seized—it would not only represent a serious escalation against a nuclear superpower, but also a direct precedent the Chinese would be sure to seize on. Under what rationale could US diplomats object to China implementing a similarly complete blockade of Taiwan?

Let’s remember, Taiwan is uniquely vulnerable to such a blockade. As we and countless others have documented, the island relies exclusively on imports to meet its domestic hydrocarbon needs, which account for 93% of its primary energy expenditures. Worse still, Taiwan has precious little in the way of alternatives to natural gas, which arrives exclusively via liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports and on which it relies for more than 40% of its electricity generation.

Since Taiwan is known to have just 11 days of natural gas demand in storage, a blockade of the island by China would bring the situation to a full breaking point in far less time than the Strait of Hormuz has already been closed. If our Australian readers think they have it bad, is it perhaps small solace for us to point out that it could be worse?"

https://substack.com/home/post/p-191615703

5.I'm not a UAE fan at all. I can't stand Dubai but there is still a strong case for what they are trying to build.

"For another, talent. “Abu Dubai” today is a Miami to many Latin Americans: Westerners are familiar with the rich setting up shop in the two cities. But beyond them, Central Asians, Africans, South Asians, Southeast Asians, Arabs, and Iranians call the UAE home (or, perhaps, a second home) as well as a primary base for business. Rivals — Indians and Pakistanis, Armenians and Azeris, Russians and Ukrainians — coexist, even if begrudgingly. In a sense the UAE is not a melting pot but a tossed salad — beyond leaving one’s politics at the door, there are no expectations of social conformity.

Why do they come and why do they stay? Because the UAE offers something that is in short supply globally — competent, predictable governance by a country courting migrants. What skeptics of the Emirates don’t understand is how rare this is. Faced with the prospect of an anti-immigrant West and a non-functioning rest, there are few places for the world’s population to go. Beyond Abu Dhabi’s museums and Dubai’s skyscrapers, what makes the UAE truly singular is that it works."

https://www.semafor.com/article/03/16/2026/how-about-them-emiratis

6.Catchy title: "How to trade the end of the world." Froedge is a pretty good commodities investor despite his bombastic angle at times. Learning from the 1970s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dwc8JSSFHc

7.The man driving much of the AI wave. Learning a bunch from this conversation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwW8GKwHB3I&t=375s

8."When thinking about these eight moats, one approach is to assign a point or partial credit for each category and then total the score. Moats are a critical component of building a sustainable business, especially for software companies.

Entrepreneurs would do well to evaluate their ideas through this lens, recognizing that most of these moats take significant time, effort, and success to build. Achieving one or two is difficult. Achieving three or four is rare. Companies that reach four or more are best positioned for long-term, durable success.

That said, entrepreneurs should not limit themselves only to ideas that check multiple moats upfront. Instead, they should understand how software is evolving in the age of AI, where barriers to entry are falling, and be intentional about how they build defensibility over time."

https://davidcummings.org/2026/03/21/8-moats-for-sustainable-software-companies/

9."But my north star is simpler and more structural: you want to own things that will not let you become someone else’s exit liquidity. In that framework, the last things you want to own, in order, are housing, bonds, and U.S. equities. These are duration manipulation instruments engineered, whether intentionally or not, as the greatest generational wealth heist in history.

What you want to own instead should satisfy the three conditions simultaneously, in reverse.

First, what is demographically least-owned today with the greatest potential to be owned more tomorrow

Second, what is most likely to serve as a jurisdictionless safe haven when capital mobility becomes severely taxed, restricted, or seized entirely

Third, what most closely resembles the form of capital that an autonomous, agentic world will actually use seamlessly without intermediaries to perform the productivity functions that will replace the cost of human labor

When the Ottoman Empire breached the walls of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, the Byzantine merchant class lost everything denominated in imperial trust: land, titles, treasury bonds. You name it, everything was gone. But the young ambitious scholars and the young enterprising traders who had moved their portable wealth, such as manuscripts, gold, knowledge westward into Florence, ultimately ignited what would be later known as the Renaissance.

What you want to own is nomadic capital. Capital that is portable across the demographics of time, political borders, and AI-native ecosystems. Capital that can bypass the monetary Strait of Hormuz. Nomadic in the 21st century means digital. The specific instruments may vary as reasonably high agency people will each arrive at different conclusions; the Radical Portfolio Theory provides one such viable framework across owning 60% compliance assets and 40% resistance assets. But if you follow the three conditions with disciplined deliberation—to own what the young will eventually need, to own what no government can easily reach, to own what the autonomous economy will actually transact in—the destination becomes less a prediction and more an outcome. The uncertainty becomes the inevitability."

https://dgt10011.substack.com/p/the-generational-prisoners-dilemma

10."Continuing on the current oil theme for a moment, the main concerns for market participants relate to how long we’ll have an oil crisis. How long will the Strait be closed?

The data is clear: The longer oil prices stay high, the more devastating the results.

Investing is often a game of musical chairs. When one opportunity disappears, you have to find a new one quickly to keep your capital hard at work. Not deploying your capital - as in, not finding a chair to sit in - means you’re out of the game.

By the logic of many investors, including my mentor, you always need to be in the game. Even long term data shows that staying in the market always pays off."

https://www.codyshirk.com/p/going-almost-all-cash

11."Since we try to weave in human nature into our writing, within a month or two you will see a new trend of people blaming the war in Iran for the crypto downturn/stocks/insert everything. It won’t matter that crypto entered into a bear at the end of 2025, the new scary headline will explain the present (despite the timelines not adding up).

We already see this today with job numbers as well. Trump is being blamed as a bad jobs president while Biden is being seen as a hero. This is only because people have poor memories and Biden numbers are being compared to COVID (when practically everyone was unemployed).

When you see this pattern pick up, it’ll help you prevent narrative creep in the future. Look at what happened 1-2 years ago (no different than cumulative inflation). There is no way Biden would have fixed AI layoffs (see being politically neutral with a positive Trump note in there as well).

Action Step: For now continue to accumulate and wait until summer. By then spending patterns will shift. We have high conviction in that and will say the same “90%+ chance spending shifts”. At this point you’ll have a new window for e-com sales, other wifi business and of course investment options.

Until then, don’t drink the kool-aid. Wait for a real resolution instead of 48 hour flip flops."

https://bowtiedbull.io/p/the-iran-war-emotional-map-and-update

12.Harsh reality and facts of the energy and implications of the Iran War.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnw_0M3kUnU&t=1135s

13.Trying to get a sense of the Iran War and implications from the eyes of the Dollar Milkshake.

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

14.Listening to this makes me more optimistic on AI, energy and reindustrialization in America. It will be challenging but it's possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4QVoht3YsI

15."There are guys who make great money and live like they’re still in their first place out of college. Not because they’re saving aggressively toward something. Because they’ve never given themselves permission to want a life that looks different than the one they fell into. They could afford the better house, the better car, the trip that changes their perspective. But they’d have to admit that they want those things. And wanting things, for some reason, feels dangerous to them.

It’s not dangerous. What’s dangerous is spending your only life in a holding pattern because you’re afraid of what people might think if you started living like you actually cared.

I still feel the knot every time I reach. It doesn’t go away. You just learn to recognize it as the RIGHT feeling instead of a warning. The day it stops showing up is the day you’ve stopped moving."

https://hayescarrera.substack.com/p/the-things-you-own-should-scare-you

16.The Defense-tech wave was really driven by Anduril. So better to listen and learn from the leader.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc6hjJ9Zze0

17. "Open source is how startups compete with giants. The next Cursor will be built on the best open-source foundation available. The question is whether that foundation will be American."

https://tomtunguz.com/cursor-kimi-open-source-ai-imperative/

18."It is not an easy exercise to determine where we are in the war on Iran. A weekend of endless commentary and analysis from all directions tells you either that either the regime in Tehran is about to collapse, or that we are about to enter another bloody slow grinding Ukraine-type war. And everything in between.

With it come the macro-economic assessments and they are almost all negative, even a ceasefire and a resumption of oil and gas exports will apparently not quickly address the damage done to energy markets so far. And you are no doubt feeling it, inflation across the board is getting another unwanted boost."

https://pieterdorsman.substack.com/p/fog-of-war

19.Lots of really interesting suggestions on how to think about investing in tech. I say this a lot, but this really is a masterclass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G1st54tRBI

20."Preparation is a ritual for those who are afraid to win. Stop sharpening your tools and start cutting. The world belongs to the fast, not the ready."

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

21.Processing, not just knowledge. A wise discussion here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et9fifanm3g&t=2475s

22."The short answer is this: the toolkit most professional investors are using to manage tail risk was built for a world that is disappearing. Long volatility strategies, options, VIX products, variance swaps, these instruments are calibrated to a fundamental assumption that almost nobody states out loud because almost nobody has needed to question it until now. The assumption is that things mean-revert. That a shock, however severe, eventually resolves back toward a prior equilibrium. That the institutional architecture, the Federal Reserve, the dollar system, and multilateral trade agreements, provides a durable floor beneath which things do not permanently fall.

That assumption held from 1945 to roughly 2020. It is not obviously true today."

https://substack.com/home/post/p-191933695

23.Always very topical news from Silicon Valley with great educated takes. This is the weekly must watch to stay on top of the tech business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLmM3M7d9v8

24."To put it bluntly, the second- and third-derivative effects of an extended closure of the Strait of Hormuz (the prices of diesel, jet fuel, and petrochemicals surge as supply chains get reengineered, and food and political stress rises) would have far-reaching negative consequences for the global economy. Nearly every path leads toward extraordinary fiscal and monetary easing as policymakers attempt to support growth in the face of commodity inflation, an increasingly multipolar global monetary order, and the rising friction and costs of deglobalization as more countries put up walls.

Gold is no longer just a trade; it is an essential asset."

https://robertsinn.substack.com/p/luke-gromen-succinctly-explains-the

25."If you’re preparing to raise a Seed round, keep the following in mind as you fine-tune your pitch: in addition to analyzing the usual details on problem, solution, traction, etc., many Seed VCs are now asking themselves the following question as part of their investment process:

Can this team win (generate a return) even if one or more of their core assumptions is disrupted by AI? (In other words, can they still win if their market hypothesis gets disrupted?)

Unfortunately, it’s not at all clear yet how Seed VCs are testing for this. As a result, I suspect that we’re going to see a significant “crunch” at the Seed stage in the next few quarters. Startups that historically could raise funding based on a clear market hypothesis and reasonable early traction will struggle, especially if they can’t convince investors that the market hypothesis is viable over a long-term horizon.

Most Seed VCs don’t know what the future is going to look like, so they’re increasingly betting on founders who they believe can figure-it-out."

https://chrisneumann.com/archives/whats-going-on-with-seed-rounds

26."Naturally, industries have formed to monetize this nihlism through promising solutions. But the solutions never arrive, because the nihilism, the giving up, must persist in order for these products to survive. It’s a version of Ivan Illich’s Limits to Medicine, where he argues that the medical establishment itself produces illness by making people dependent on professional intervention rather than building health.

That effect carries across all these optimization tools, creating dependency on the fix rather than addressing the cause. The optimization economy can't deliver control, because the desperation is the market condition, and the pursuit of control through optimization is itself a loss of control."

https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-ozempicization-of-the-economy

27.Listen to this guy. OG of Silicon Valley and one of the best operator and investors around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcQD7ZCtDQQ

28."The western system of public finance has been testing whether sovereign debt can be issued without limit and held without consequence. The data already shows it. Yields must rise for the market to absorb the supply, currencies weaken when they should strengthen, and fiscal buffers are eliminated by the yield moves they were designed to survive.

Gold at $4,200 prices a belief that this time the rules will hold and that western money is being restored rather than transferred away from those who hold it. That belief may be right for weeks or months. It will not hold indefinitely, because every major western government in the current cycle has demonstrated, when tested, that the spending comes before the rules. Gold is priced by investors who think the experiment is still working. The fiscal data is accumulating on the other side of that argument, one gilt auction at a time."

https://polemicpaine.substack.com/p/gold-gilts-and-the-wrong-kind-of

29."The key takeaway is that timing, experience, and persistence compound. The first company builds the foundation, including market insight, scar tissue, and relationships. The second company is where those inputs often translate into sharper execution and better results."

https://davidcummings.org/2026/03/28/the-second-time-around-why-founders-come-back/

30."Acrimony has become the national mood, not a symptom but a diagnosis. The country hums at a higher emotional frequency: outrage serves as background radiation, bitterness as civic glue—each a heaping pile of dry powder ready to explode with the faintest spark.

The headlines change, the hatred stays. Welcome to the United States of Acrimony, where the three Gs—Gerontocracy, Generational Conflict, and Gambling—together form the invisible architecture of decline.

We are the United States of Acrimony: addicted to outrage, risk, and the faint hope that one lucky spin can rewrite a lifetime of loss.

The gerontocracy hoards time; the youth gamble what little they have left.

One side clings. The other spins. Both are terrified to stop.

There’s no policy fix for a spiritual vacancy.

We’ve lost faith in patience, in compounding, in slow building. The only cure for acrimony is renewal, but renewal requires surrender, and nobody wants to fold.

Sadly, Max Planck’s principle comes to mind: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”

As with science, so too society.

Until then, we’ll keep rolling the dice—burning down institutions, tearing down statues, and immolating both our future and our faith—hoping against hope in our youthful naïveté that this time is different; that somehow, someway, the old, grey croupier’s throw lands in our favor."

https://www.whitenoise.email/p/the-three-gs-of-global-decline-gerontocracy

31."Society has weaponized “Loyalty” to keep you tied to inefficient systems and people. It’s an emotional anchor. In the age of Hyper-Volatility, loyalty to anything other than the Mission and the System is a suicide pact. When you keep a person, a tool, or a location out of “loyalty,” you are paying a Stagnation Tax. You are subsidizing their inability to evolve with your own potential. Real loyalty isn’t staying together while you rot; it’s staying together as long as you both Compounded."

https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-loyalty-debt-140

32."The gangster operates in a world with real stakes, real consequences, and real rewards. A world where your reputation is built through action, not optics. Where loyalty is tested under actual pressure. Where the hierarchy is earned, not assigned by a committee.

It is the photographic negative of the milquetoast existence modern civilisation has engineered for men.

The hunger hasn’t disappeared. It’s just got nowhere legitimate to go.

That’s the crisis. And the gangster film is the pressure valve."

https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/why-do-men-love-gangsters

33."Because the deepest lesson of the Opium Wars is not about Britain, or China, or opium. It is about the nature of consequences in complex systems. Every actor in the story — the East India Company, Lin Zexu, Palmerston, the Qing court, Gladstone — acted on intentions that were coherent within their own frameworks. And every single one of them produced consequences that dwarfed their intentions, consequences that cascaded across decades and continents, consequences that are still arriving now, in places and currencies and chokepoints that the original actors could not have conceived.

A trade deficit produced a drug epidemic. A drug epidemic produced a war. A war produced a treaty. A treaty produced a rebellion that killed twenty million people. A rebellion weakened a dynasty. A weakened dynasty fell. A fallen dynasty produced a century of fragmentation. Fragmentation produced revolution. Revolution produced a nuclear power. A nuclear power now offers its currency as the alternative to the system the West built — in corridors and straits where the world’s energy passes through spaces so narrow a captain can see both shores from his bridge.

That chain is not a metaphor. It is a mechanism. And mechanisms, once understood, carry an obligation: to ask, before the next force is applied to the next chokepoint, whether anyone in the room has truly traced the consequences to their end. Whether the men making decisions about narrow waterways and precious commodities today have studied what happened the last time men made decisions about narrow waterways and critical commodities — and whether they have the honesty to admit that the forces they are acting upon are wilder than any strategy document can contain."

https://nazem.substack.com/p/what-lin-zexu-started

34."Now that you have your list of who has leverage, now you can move to asking a simple question. “What does this create long-term”. If your goal is to make big strides over the next 5-10 years related to wealth, you have to remove all activities that will decline in value.

Here is a simple yes ladder. Does This:

Increase long-term equity

Improve sales/marketing skills

Improve skills related to leading edge tech

Increase visibility

Create a cash flow for you that occurs while you sleep

If it is a yes to any of those? Continue. If it is a no to all of them. Best to move on.

You know where the dividing line is going to be. Copy pasting numbers from a computer to another spreadsheet isn’t a useful skill. Learn things that the older generation won’t process as fast and where demand will be highest. Most are doing the opposite, holding onto tasks they know are going to be automated away."

https://bowtiedbull.io/p/white-collar-recession-starts-before

35."The regime has proven to be far more robust than the polls indicate. Furthermore, historical experience (WW2) suggests that a country at war, suffering strategic bombardment, becomes more cohesive rather than less. Forcing a political collapse will be very difficult.

Iran’s drones are still far more effective than the US military concedes. Specifically, it allows Iran to exchange damage with the US on a tit-for-tat basis. If an electrical grid is hit, it will do the same to the Saudi’s, the UAE, and Israel. If upstream oil/gas infrastructure is hit, sites like Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar (the world’s largest oil facility) become targets. This makes it costly to damage Iran’s economic infrastructure. Furthermore, if Gulf oil infrastructure is destroyed, the damage will require a multi-year rebuilding effort to bring it back online.

This path will likely be a slow process that could last many months. Even without accounting for the additional damage this path causes, the system disruption already inflicted by the war is actively harming developing countries, draining their budgets, and increasing the risk of collapse. Soon, this disruption will reach developed nations, increasing inflation, causing economic slowdowns, and increasing default risk, among other effects."

https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/reorienting-the-iran-war

Surviving in the AI Age & Age of Chaos: Learning from Hispanic Nomad

This is one of the best descriptions of how many of us feel right now. Hispanic Nomad does a great job going through the details: failing democracy, growing populism, trust failing in financial institutions & growing white collar job destruction by AI. These are hard trends and indisputable.

It’s worth reading the whole thing here: https://x.com/hispanicnomad/status/2021590879685795886 

“I don't know exactly what the world looks like in five years. Nobody does. But I know what kind of person lives well in uncertain times: someone who doesn't depend on any single system, who trusts themselves more than they trust institutions, who has options instead of obligations, and who treats adaptability as the most important skill they can build.

The old world is dying. You can see it if you're willing to look. The institutions, the career paths, the financial assumptions, the political structures... they're all under more stress than they were designed to handle, all at the same time.

Something new is coming. And the people who build their lives around flexibility, self-reliance, and diversification won't just survive the transition. They'll be the ones who define what comes next. The ground is shifting. You can feel it.”

No one is coming to save you. And the sooner you realize this, the better. Hispanic Nomad talks about one of the most important things to work on. Emotional resilience.

"You can have the perfect Flag Theory setup. Multiple residencies, diversified income, international bank accounts, optimized taxes. And if you don't have your inner world sorted out, all of it will crumble the first time things get hard. Because things are going to get hard. 

The people I've seen navigate massive disruption successfully all share something that has nothing to do with strategy. They have emotional resilience. They know themselves. They can sit with uncertainty without panicking. They can make decisions under pressure without spiraling. They have a relationship with discomfort that allows them to keep moving when everything around them is shifting. 

This is the unsexy part. The part that doesn't go viral. But it's the foundation everything else is built on."

Figuring out the inner game is key. Maybe it’s always been the key. I learned this late in my life. When the inevitable crisis happened, I just did not have the mental wherewithal to handle it properly. Which then leads to the very tactical and practical things that Hispanic Nomad suggests:

“There's a difference between surviving disruption and benefiting from it. Resilience means you can take a hit and recover. Antifragility means you've positioned yourself so that volatility actually makes you stronger. Here's what that looks like in practice:

Build location-independent income. Not because remote work is trendy, but because tying your income to one physical location in one economy is the modern equivalent of keeping all your gold in one vault. If you're reading this and your income depends entirely on showing up to one office in one city in one country... that's your most urgent vulnerability. Start building skills and income streams that work from anywhere. This doesn't happen overnight. But every step in that direction reduces your exposure.

Learn AI. Now. Not because you need to become a technologist. Because AI is the single most powerful tool available to an individual right now, and the gap between people who can use it and people who can't is going to become the most important economic divide of the next decade. Spend an hour a day with it. Not reading about it. Using it. Push it into your actual work. The people who get fluent now will have an enormous advantage. The ones who wait will be competing against both AI and the people who know how to use it.

Diversify everything. Income streams. Currencies. Jurisdictions. Skills. Relationships. Networks. The principle is the same everywhere: concentration is risk, diversification is resilience. This applies to your money, your career, your social circle, and your geography.

Lower your fixed costs ruthlessly. The people who get crushed by disruption are almost always the ones with high fixed costs: big mortgages, car payments, lifestyle obligations that require a specific income to maintain... On the other hand, the people who navigate it well are the ones who can downshift quickly. Give yourself room to maneuver. That room might be the most valuable thing you own in three years.

Get a second residency. Just keep it as a practical option. There are countries where the cost of living is a fraction of what it is in the West, where the quality of life is high, and where the legal and tax structures are genuinely favorable. Some of these places will give you residency in weeks. Having legal status in a second country is like having a spare key to a second house. You hope you never need it. But if you do, you'll be very glad it's in your pocket.”

It’s a nutty time here in the Fourth Turning. So you need to start prepping and position yourself. A reminder: The best day to start was a decade ago, the next best is today. So start taking some action. We may be a bit early here but better to be a year early than be a day too late. 

Surviving the AI Jobpocalypse: Learning From Matt Shumer

We are not only getting bracketed by crazy geopolitical changes, the biggest driver in my opinion is technology. And as a participant in the tech industry for over 26 years now, you ain’t seen nothing yet. And this will have major shocks to our society. AI is like nothing we have ever seen before and the impacts on white collar jobs will be what technology and globalization did to blue collar jobs and our industrial base since the 1980s. Communities across America have never recovered from this. 

AI is the new automation. 

This time technology is coming for college educated white collar jobs: lawyers, accountants, analysts, programmers, roles previously seen as safe. The cognition class is in deep trouble. I’m not saying there won’t be white collar jobs.There will still be need for lawyers and accountants, just a lot less of them. Only the top 10-20%. With AI, the bar will be so much higher that only the best of the best will have these jobs. Anyone average or mediocre, which is most people sadly, will be in deep doo doo. It’s gonna be bad. The CEO of Anthropic has even publicly stated that he believes that 50% of entry level white collar jobs will be eliminated by AI in the next 5 years. He is well placed to know.

Gavin Purcell mentioned a term called AI Takeoff. “AI takeoff is the moment (or period of time) where AI models begin to improve much faster than ever before, mostly because they can work on themselves.” Basically this thing is gonna grow to levels we will not expect. Not sure if we are there yet but we could be close.  There is a good write up here: https://x.com/gavinpurcell/status/2021292314291999182

Matt Shumer, who is an investor and operator in the AI space wrote a long X article on AI too and it’s excellent: https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/202125698987610940

Basically, he writes that AI development and effectiveness is growing at an exponential rate. Society and most people have no idea what’s coming and how fast it is coming. But it's not too late to prepare. Ignoring it will not help you and your family. Panic doesn’t help either. I preach: control the controllables. You can take action to prepare for the Age of AI. I took some recommendations from him and recapped the most important ones I found here:

“1. Get your financial house in order. I'm not a financial advisor, and I'm not trying to scare you into anything drastic. But if you believe, even partially, that the next few years could bring real disruption to your industry, then basic financial resilience matters more than it did a year ago. Build up savings if you can. Be cautious about taking on new debt that assumes your current income is guaranteed. Think about whether your fixed expenses give you flexibility or lock you in. Give yourself options if things move faster than you expect.

2. Think about where you stand, and lean into what's hardest to replace. Some things will take longer for AI to displace. Relationships and trust built over years. Work that requires physical presence. Roles with licensed accountability: roles where someone still has to sign off, take legal responsibility, stand in a courtroom. Industries with heavy regulatory hurdles, where adoption will be slowed by compliance, liability, and institutional inertia. None of these are permanent shields. But they buy time. And time, right now, is the most valuable thing you can have, as long as you use it to adapt, not to pretend this isn't happening.

3. Your dreams just got a lot closer. I've spent most of this section talking about threats, so let me talk about the other side, because it's just as real. If you've ever wanted to build something but didn't have the technical skills or the money to hire someone, that barrier is largely gone. You can describe an app to AI and have a working version in an hour. I'm not exaggerating. I do this regularly. If you've always wanted to write a book but couldn't find the time or struggled with the writing, you can work with AI to get it done. Want to learn a new skill? The best tutor in the world is now available to anyone for $20 a month... one that's infinitely patient, available 24/7, and can explain anything at whatever level you need. 

Knowledge is essentially free now. The tools to build things are extremely cheap now. Whatever you've been putting off because it felt too hard or too expensive or too far outside your expertise: try it. Pursue the things you're passionate about. You never know where they'll lead. And in a world where the old career paths are getting disrupted, the person who spent a year building something they love might end up better positioned than the person who spent that year clinging to a job description.

4. Build the habit of adapting. This is maybe the most important one. The specific tools don't matter as much as the muscle of learning new ones quickly. AI is going to keep changing, and fast. The models that exist today will be obsolete in a year. The workflows people build now will need to be rebuilt. The people who come out of this well won't be the ones who mastered one tool. They'll be the ones who got comfortable with the pace of change itself. Make a habit of experimenting. Try new things even when the current thing is working. Get comfortable being a beginner repeatedly. That adaptability is the closest thing to a durable advantage that exists right now.”

More importantly, this affects what you teach your kid if you are a parent. If you thought your parent’s career advice was bad, well, the advice you are giving now probably is too. My folks were way off. (they meant well though). Matt has a good take here too. 

“Rethink what you're telling your kids. The standard playbook: get good grades, go to a good college, land a stable professional job. It points directly at the roles that are most exposed. I'm not saying education doesn't matter. But the thing that will matter most for the next generation is learning how to work with these tools, and pursuing things they're genuinely passionate about. Nobody knows exactly what the job market looks like in ten years. But the people most likely to thrive are the ones who are deeply curious, adaptable, and effective at using AI to do things they actually care about. Teach your kids to be builders and learners, not to optimize for a career path that might not exist by the time they graduate.”

Basically, invest in yourself, invest in your community and learn the tools. We are in the early innings of the Age of AI. So embrace it. You still have a chance to get ahead of it. It will mean the difference between barely surviving to thriving in the new world we are entering. 

Surviving the Fourth Turning

Ray Dalio, is one of the top global macro hedge fund guys in the world. He has been on the podcast and media interview circuit all first quarter of 2026. I especially enjoyed his conversation with Tucker Carlon (who I dislike to say the least). And what they talk about is grim. That basically we are at stage 5 out of stage 6, progressing to monetary and societal breakdown in America. Hence why he has moved to Dubai.  

As Chet wrote on X: “Every time I hear Ray Dalio speak, my brain starts drafting blueprints for a bunker in the mountains stocked with canned food & gold bars.” (Source:https://x.com/NoCapCapitalLLC/status/2021034322820727055). 

Dalio is like a modern day Cassandra, and it’s pretty dark when you think through the implications. He says we all have a few choices in this situation: 

“One of three things: 1) You have to pick a side and fight for it , 2) or you keep your head down and hope you don't get shot, or 3) flee.”

I’m in the school of trying 1 first, then 3 if things get really bad. 

Robert Sinn wrote about this interview and helped couch this in Fourth Turning terms and its really helpful to understand why all of this chaos is happening: https://robertsinn.substack.com/p/ray-dalio-how-to-survive-the-coming. 

"In the final years of the Fourth Turning, according to the The Fourth Turning framework, societies enter a period of intensifying stress in which long-standing institutions lose legitimacy faster than they can be reformed. Political systems polarize, financial structures strain, and public trust in elites collapses. 

What begins as diffuse anxiety hardens into decisive confrontation—often triggered by a catalyzing crisis such as war, financial collapse, or systemic failure. Compromise becomes rare; history accelerates. The defining feature of this phase is not chaos for its own sake, but forced choice: societies must decide what is worth preserving, what must be dismantled, and what new rules will govern collective life.”

So now that we know why it’s happening, we should have a model of what will happen so we can prepare for it. Who is best positioned to win coming out of this massive change? 

“The beneficiaries are highly asymmetric. Those tied to the existing order—financialized elites, bureaucratic institutions, over-leveraged systems, and cultural gatekeepers—tend to lose power, credibility, and wealth. The Fourth Turning is hostile to rent-seeking and abstraction; it punishes systems that grew detached from productive reality. In contrast, people and entities aligned with real assets, national cohesion, and practical competence often gain. 

This includes builders rather than financiers, producers rather than speculators, and actors capable of operating amid volatility—whether that means industrial capacity, energy, food, metals, defense, or social leadership rooted in tangible outcomes. Younger generations, especially those forced to mature quickly under crisis conditions, often rise into leadership faster than in prior eras."

As we learned during any crisis, those that survive and position themselves correct, can really get ahead. We didn’t cause this polycrisis, let alone be able to prevent this. Position yourself well & take action. Focus on what you can control and you will be alright.

Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 7th, 2026

“Success isn't always about greatness. It's about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.”— Dwayne Johnson

1. American Icon Alex Karp. Always outspoken and quotable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wj6ttdIeBnE&t=67s

2.Inspiring and insightful. CTO of Palantir. AI, Reindustrialization and war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB9V8d3ZYbc&t=8s

3.Trying to understand Trump 2.0's geo-strategic goals. Crazy like the fox?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3iqJQP8Y6w

4."One technique we have used to cut through disinformation and psych-ops is to navigate social media sites like Twitter/X using curated lists, segmented by political bent or point of view. To gain entry onto one of these lists, an account must regularly post interesting and relevant information, even if we wildly disagree with it. To remain on the list is simple: resist the temptation to create or propagate clearly fake information. What is the pro-renewables crowd telling itself today? The oil industry? The European elite? The Make America Great Again crew? As a tool of analysis, this approach is truly invaluable.

Another useful truth-finding method is inspecting how the same event is covered by various international outlets, especially useful during times when a single topic—like a terrorist attack or the snatching of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro—is dominating the global news cycle. Historically, our approach has been limited to reading English-language versions of major media periodicals in foreign countries—especially adversarial ones. Doing so provides insights missed or purposely minimized in legacy Western media."

https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/digital-fog

5."I believe Sam Altman is broken and, worse, could break us. In life there are “tells,” moments and behaviors that provide insight into a person’s character: How they treat their pets; if they make eye contact with service staff; how they talk about their ex. Responding to a question re the energy needs of AI, Sam highlighted how much energy and effort is required to raise a human capable of critical thinking. This is the tell. He embodies what I believe is most concerning about the virus that’s infected Big Tech: For them, ROI supersedes humanity.

The whole shooting match in life is to find people and causes who will let you love and invest in them, who require and accept a great deal from you — possibly more than you’ll ever get back. For me, it’s raising children with a partner, and the reward is the absence of any ROI. It’s the opportunity to invest without the expectation of any return other than that they, someday, become agents of care and comfort for others. AI, GDP, and shareholder value are just the means. The ends are being in a position to give more than you can ever get."

https://www.profgmedia.com/p/the-resistance-comes-for-openai

6."The irony of the American supply chain is we have everything we need to vertically integrate, be cost competitive, and serve our domestic and international markets.

America has all the feedstocks for nitrogen chemistry. We have cheap electricity. We have limestone. We have coal. We have natural gas. We have next generation processes to make chemicals with greater efficiency, purity, and output. We have the best scientists and engineers in the world.

This is not a rewind to the past. We can build modernized, automated, high throughput factories that are platforms for massive GDP growth for the rest of the century.

This requires capital, chemistry, and the will to build."

https://www.broscienceclub.com/p/why-creatine-supply-is-essential

7. "When entrepreneurs ask whether they should prioritize product value or revenue growth in the early days, my answer is almost always product value. If the cofounding team is exceptionally strong and financial resources are deep, pursuing both at the same time may be possible. For most entrepreneurs, however, the better path is to go deep on product value while keeping distribution lighter, maintaining enough customers to iterate quickly.

Once the switch flips and it becomes clear that the product delivers tremendous, must-have value to customers, that is the moment to go all in on product distribution."

https://davidcummings.org/2026/03/14/product-value-vs-product-distribution-in-the-early-days/

8."Modern culture often celebrates comfort and convenience. We are told to seek out pleasure and be true to ourselves. Roosevelt’s life reminds us that a meaningful life requires something far more demanding.

He believed that men should strive to build strength, discipline, and courage in all of our actions. This is not for wealth or personal glory, but for the benefit of the communities they serve. Roosevelt once wrote:

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much.”

In a society that often discourages ambition and discipline, Roosevelt’s message remains extremely relevant to us today. We must dare mighty things, even if we might fail. Not just for us, but for our friends, our families, and our communities."

https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/what-theodore-roosevelt-can-teach

9.Terrifying view of drones and war in the future. Unfortunately the future is here. Lots of takes here also from the frontlines of Ukraine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se4wi2-quaM

10."First, the market adopted the narrative that AI capex results in value creation — bidding up all layers in the AI stack. But the jury is still out on whether this massive capex spend will result in lasting value creation for every layer.

Second, the market is adopting the narrative that the “Cost of Intelligence” is deflating fast — soon to be worth zero. The adoption of this narrative by the market is the stock crash of every company considered to be under threat from AI proliferation."

https://www.philoinvestor.com/p/laas-layoffs-as-a-service

11.A cold hard look at the venture capital & the PE business right now. Worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPaWW0IDurI

12. This movie looks good. The story of Tamerlane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVP-1XjTSmY

13.Dollar endgame debate. Fascinating conversation on where the USD is going and what is going on with the global reset.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-ZHu5IW_p8&t=2497s

14."Humans evolved to adapt to change over generations, not months or weeks.

Our psychological system is wildly adaptable but it evolved to digest these shifts when we have gradual technological change, stable communities, predictable life paths and clear cultural narratives.

That’s not the world we live in today. And it’s left many of us feeling shell-shocked."

https://thewakeupcallnewsletter.substack.com/p/the-psychological-cost-of-acceleration

15."Here’s what nobody tells you about developing taste: it doesn’t stay in its lane.

Once your pattern recognition sharpens, it starts applying itself everywhere. Not because you decided to apply it. Because the algorithm generalizes.

People. You start seeing who has substance versus who has performance. The same eye that recognizes a well-proportioned car starts recognizing a well-built character. You stop being impressed by volume and start being drawn to signal quality. The people you spend time with change. Not because you’re being elitist, but because you can see more clearly.

Work and business. You start seeing which companies are structurally excellent versus which ones are marketing shells propped up by narrative. Which products have a real floor versus which ones are hype cycles. Taste in business is the ability to see through positioning and evaluate the thing itself. It’s a better filter than any framework you’ll learn in a classroom.

How you spend your time. This is the big one. Taste applied to your own life is the willingness to look at the default path, the one that says defer everything, optimize for security, save the living for later, and recognize that it’s badly designed. It lacks the same qualities you’d reject in a car: balance, proportion, intentionality.

Taste becomes the filter for everything. And the sharper that filter gets, the better every decision that passes through it becomes."

https://hayescarrera.substack.com/p/taste-is-a-skill

16. "In my work with founders and CEOs, one of the most common patterns I see is the same one I know well in myself: an identification with pushing through, taking the hard way, and getting the job done no matter the cost.

It shows up as a willingness to white-knuckle our way through things. To sacrifice ourselves for the good of the company, the good of others, or the good of our families.

For many of the leaders I meet, this pattern has historically served them well. It helped them stay safe in their families of origin. It helped them contribute in ways that kept the family system steady. It helped them earn their way into great schools and early jobs where they achieved outsized things.

This was true for me, too.

But many of these same people eventually reach a moment when this white-knuckled, self-sacrificing approach begins to drive their lives, or their companies, into the ground."

https://www.mattmunson.me/white-knuckling/

17."In any case, there is no future for any AI company that uses a subscription-based approach, at least not one where they don’t directly pass on the cost of compute.

This is a huge problem for both Anthropic and OpenAI, as their scurrilous growth-lust means that they’ve done everything they can to get customers used to paying a single monthly cost that directly obfuscates the cost of doing business.

I need to be very direct about what this means, because it’s very important and rarely if ever discussed.

A user of ChatGPT or Claude Code is only thinking of “tokens” or “compute” in the most indirect sense — a vague awareness of the model using something to do something else, totally unmoored from the customer’s use of the product. All they see is the monthly subscription cost ($20, $100, or $200-a-month) and rate limits that vaguely say you have X% of your five-hour allowance left. Users are not educated in (nor are they thinking about) their “token burn” or burden on the company, because software has basically never made them do so in the past.

This means it will be very, very difficult to increase subscription costs on users, and near-impossible to convince them to pay the cost of the API. It’s like if Uber, which had charged $20-a-month for unlimited rides, suddenly started charging users their drivers’ gas costs, and gas was at around $250 a gallon.

That might not even do the price disparity justice. This theoretical example still involves users being in the back of a car and being driven a distance, and that said driving costs gas. Token burn is an obtuse, irregular process involving a per-million input and output tokens, with the latter increasing when you use reasoning models, which use output tokens to break down how it might handle a task. "

https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-are-we-still-doing-this/

18.Lightning interview: a fun yet fascinating look into a brilliant industrialist’s brain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZfW3YTJ5Eg

19.This conversation makes me much more confident in the DoW and our Neo-Primes. We need to get our mojo back. It's a will & morale problem, not a capability issue in America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itdv5IKN2P4

20."This is, fundamentally, the work of venture capital. At its best, investing is not the allocation of capital to known outcomes—it is the identification of individuals and ideas operating at the boundary of the map. Great investors are not simply pattern matchers; they are frontier detectors. They look for the non-consensus, the contrarian, the ideas that do not yet fit cleanly within existing frameworks precisely because those frameworks lag reality. The goal is not to fund what is already legible, but to recognize what will become legible. The goal is not to be contrarian for its own sake, but to back explorers pushing the frontiers of new territory, building the map of where humanity is perhaps already going, but more importantly, desires to go.

In an AI-driven world, this role becomes even more critical. If AI excels at navigating and optimizing within the known map, then the highest-leverage human activity shifts toward expanding that map. The entrepreneur becomes an explorer—someone who ventures into domains that are under-explored, misunderstood, or entirely new. And the investor becomes a backer of expeditions, placing bets not on certainty, but on the possibility that the territory itself is larger than we currently understand."

https://ideas.scotthartley.com/p/investing-at-the-edge-of-the-map

21.This was fascinating. Don't agree with everything said but this was an encyclopedic review of the technology business and history. Lots to learn here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBVe3M2g_SA&t=3590s

22.Special Ops will be very busy in Latam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOF1etsAGxI

23."I know. You want to get rich as fast as possible. You want to live your dream life with total freedom and never worry about problems again.

But I’ll tell you the truth: Life is going to test you with absolute intensity. You will have to overcome massive challenges and face your deepest fears.

Is that fair?

It doesn’t matter.

That is how life works. These are the rules of nature, and we must respect them."

https://substack.com/home/post/p-191252641

24."The ultimate status symbol is being known as the person who is “impossible to read” but “always delivers.” It signals that you have successfully decoupled your Internal Fortress from the external noise. While others are busy being “relatable,” the Sovereign is busy being Indisputable."

https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-empathy-debt

25.Two generational founder legends. TK & Michael Dell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y7TTU1jIvk&t=2609s

26.What a week. Lots of crazy news in Silicon Valley and some of the best takes too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTuS7Ns8cZg

27."I believe Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka each have the potential to be patient zero. Among European banks, HSBC and Standard Chartered are most exposed. The Middle East accounts for 9% of HSBC’s revenue and 12% of Standard Chartered’s profit before tax — different metrics, same direction of risk. Barclays, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, ING, and Société Générale have limited exposure, at less than 1% of revenue. The danger, however, is one the markets can’t see.

The IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report, published just months before the war began, warned explicitly about “limited visibility into balance sheets and the interconnectedness of nonbank financial institutions.” Debt crises share a common feature: The threat isn’t the institution or nation that defaults first, but the opaque financial instruments that make everyone else an unwitting co-signer. The unknown unknowns aren’t the emerging economies, they’re derivatives in Zurich, London, or New York that nobody stress-tested for $110 oil."

https://www.profgmedia.com/p/patients-zero

28."Analysts warn that the longer the Strait stays closed, the more Asia's supply shortage becomes everyone's problem. Supply chains don't respect national borders. The factories making your phone, the ships bringing your goods, the airlines pricing your flights - they all run on Brent-priced oil."

https://tradinglessons.beehiiv.com/p/why-more-u-s-oil-cheaper-gas

29."The same forces that enabled American dominance—globalization, digitization, commercial innovation, and networked systems—are now enabling its competitors.

And, increasingly, opportunistic adversaries.

This is the central tension shaping the future of warfare:

Innovation creates advantage. Proliferation destroys exclusivity.

The United States is still operating as if technological superiority can be sustained.

Its adversaries are operating under a different assumption:

That parity is inevitable—and asymmetry is the path to victory.

This is the essence of national security arbitrage.

And it suggests that the future of warfare will not be decided by who builds the most advanced systems but by who best adapts to a world where advanced technology is no longer an advantage—only a baseline."

https://buildingourfuture.substack.com/p/the-end-of-technological-overmatch

30."The lasting lesson of this war should be that drones, decentralization and the proximity to vulnerable systems, can allow a weaker adversary to achieve a level of deterrence against larger foes that is similar to building nuclear weapons.

PS: Drone deterrence is something Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and S. Korea should seriously consider. A conventional alternative to developing nuclear weapons."

https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/drone-deterrence

31."On a revenue per employee basis, the AI native companies are crushing. This is doubly impressive when you consider that every single one of their legacy competitors is frantically adding as many AI features as they can, and it isn’t slowing down the startups.

So the top-line story is clear: AI native companies are more efficient, and they’re winning despite every incumbent scrambling to catch up. But here’s what keeps me up at night, and why I worry more for the readers of this publication than for anyone else in the ecosystem.

If these investors and founders are wrong about AI native, the bubble pops with an unholy level of force, and tech careers take years to recover. If they are right, then betting correctly on the right AI startup, repositioning your investment portfolio, and timing your next career move could make this the most lucrative decade of your life."

https://www.gettheleverage.com/p/ai-native-or-death-choose

32."I think most men are walking around with a version of themselves they’ve never met. The version that would exist if they stopped making decisions based on what’s expected and started making them based on what they actually want. That version is more interesting, more confident, and more alive. Not because he owns different stuff. Because he stopped outsourcing his choices to other people’s opinions.

Cary Grant said it better than anyone. He was a poor kid from Bristol who decided to become the most sophisticated man in Hollywood. His method was simple: he pretended he was already that man until one day, he was. “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person,” he said. “Or he became me.”

People hear that and think it sounds fake. It’s the opposite. It’s the most honest thing you can do. You decide who you want to be and you start making choices as that person. The alternative is what most people do, which is never decide at all. They wait for some external signal that they’ve earned the right to upgrade their own life. That signal never comes. So they stay the same. They stay safe. They stay boring. For decades."

https://hayescarrera.substack.com/p/why-owning-an-exotic-car-will-change

33."An antidote to this conformist establishmentarian- ism is to build right at the edge of science fiction, in earnestness, in the name of the family, the nation, and even God—and preferably to do it in the Gundo. “There is a natural pendulum swing,” Doricko tells me. “Kids are always going to be rebellious. And my cohort have been told for our whole lives, ‘You will own nothing, and you will be happy. You will have a remote, e-mail job. You will not see any meaningful technological progress in your lifetime. You will eat bugs.’ A lot of the Gundo is about bringing together high-agency, assertive guys who are rebelling against the narrative we’ve been fed for so long.

Such a small place, and with so few people. Does it have a chance to survive the colossal forces sapping California of its vitality: the debt, the taxes, and the bureaucratic barbarism of the state’s dysfunctional, regulation-obsessed government? Don’t they know that history is determined by forces beyond their control? I fear that the Gundo may be California’s last gasp of creative energy. “We’re just a couple kids in El Segundo,” says Taylor. “But it’s always a small group of people that make history. It was decisions that individuals made that led to America’s decline, so why not the turnaround? It’s just people making those decisions.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-next-arsenal-of-democracy

34."El Segundo is one of many towns that make up the suburban sprawl of the region, and it has a history even more industrial than most. Chevron has a refinery there. Major defense contractors have had facilities there for decades.

Entrepreneurs love El Segundo too.

The founders there, as I’ve engaged with them directly and watched them on social media, are not like the founders I see daily in Silicon Valley, or San Francisco, or on university campuses across America.

They have a distinct “type”.

https://aaronpickard.substack.com/p/moral-hazard-is-good-for-founders

35.Big week in Silicon Valley. Lots of cool stuff happening on the tech side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYJawV55QcU&t=158s

36.The Defense space through the eye of a growth stage investor.

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

37."You have a choice. You can keep moving through this world reacting to things, chasing approval, surrounded by people who’d forget your name if you stopped being convenient. Or you can start building something that makes every room you walk into shift in your direction. Something that earns loyalty so deep that men would go to war for you. Something that makes your woman feel so safe and so proud that losing you becomes the most terrifying thought she carries.

Vito Corleone is fiction. But the philosophy he represents has been running the world since men first organized into tribes. Give before you take. Control your emotions when everyone around you is losing theirs. Say no when the whole room says yes. Build your power through warmth, through loyalty, through the kind of calculated patience that most men will never have the discipline to practice.

That man isn’t born.

He’s built.

One decision at a time.

Starting this week.

Get to Vito Corleonemaxxing."

https://www.thefinalman.com/p/you-need-to-be-vito-corleonemaxxing

38."Because oil and gas supplies for international markets have been significantly disrupted, those 15,000 US chemical facilities have become incredibly strategic. That’s especially true when you consider that the United States is a net oil and gas exporter. In other words, it’s possible that the final products that specialty chemical companies in the US produce could have massive margins when selling their products in to the world market. Cheaper US oil and gas inputs with more expensive specialty chemical outputs.

The war in Iran has created massive volatility, but it might also be making a structural advantage for American manufacturers. Cheaper domestic energy means fatter margins on the output side, especially when global competitors in the Middle East are offline.

It’s simple alchemy: low-cost feedstock in, premium-priced specialty chemicals out, sold into a world that suddenly has a shortage.

But not every name will capture this opportunity. The winners will be the ones with integrated US plants, strong balance sheets, and exposure to end-markets that stay resilient no matter how crazy energy prices get (think agriculture, autos, electronics, and infrastructure). That’s where the real opportunity sits right now."

https://mailchi.mp/f767f98a5949/ais-fantasy-season-13945134?e=cd1ba0eb1a

39. Lots of geopolitics and defense-tech stuff but also lots of random things. It’s fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-qhcM6EZOY&t=118s

40."The principle is the same at every scale: the space in which you live should reflect and reinforce what you believe. One’s home should speak with you.

The particular danger of our age is that comfort itself has become an enemy of conviction. The American case is instructive. The American character was forged in confrontation with the land — the frontier, the homestead, the church as the first building raised in a new settlement. The harshness of the environment demanded a response, and that response was saturated with faith because faith was the only thing adequate to the demand."

https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/the-furnished-soul

Leave the World Behind

It was a movie that came out in 2023, so I was late to this. So the description on Wikipedia:

“Leave the World Behind" is an American apocalyptic psychological thriller film written and directed by Sam Esmail. It is based on the 2020 novel of the same name by Rumaan Alam. The film stars Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, Myha'la, and Kevin Bacon as they attempt to make sense of the gradual breakdown in phones, television, and other regularly used technology which points to a potential cataclysm.”

It starts off very innocuously, a family out on a well deserved holiday outside the city. Then everything starts to break down. But having watched this, it’s terrifying. If this movie does not turn you into a prepper, not sure what will. It shows how fragile civilization is due to our interconnectedness and dependence on technology. Maybe even worse, our deep division in our now low trust society. Obviously not as bad as in many countries in the world but I can definitely say things have degraded over the last 2 decades here in America. 

It all starts to come together near the end as one of the main characters explains. 

"I had a sneaking suspicion, but I wanted more information first.

All signs were there, sure, but I… I didn’t want to scare anyone.

You’d have called me crazy because it is crazy.

It would have made more sense if we were on the brink of an all-out invasion, but this… I didn’t think we’d actually let something like this happen.

I thought we were smarter than that.

Because my primary client works in the defense sector, I spend a lot of time studying the cost-benefit analysis of military campaigns.

There was one program in particular that terrified my client the most.

A simple three-stage maneuver that could topple a country’s government from within.

The first stage is isolation.

Disable their communication and transportation.

Make the target as deaf, dumb and paralyzed as possible, setting them up for the second stage.

Synchronized chaos.

Terrorize them with covert attacks and misinformation, overwhelming their defense capabilities leaving their weapon systems vulnerable to extremists and their own military.

Without a clear enemy or motive, people would start turning on each other.

If done successfully, the third stage would happen on its own.

What’s the third stage?

Coup d’état.

Civil war.

Collapse.

This program was considered the most cost-effective way to destabilize a country.

Because if the target nation was dysfunctional enough, it would, in essence, do the work for you.

Whoever started this wants us to finish it."

It ends with a horrifying scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHqRYAI72uM. Basically New York City being bombed and the sound of gunfire. 

So yes, this is fiction, near fiction. But considering the direction America is moving, not totally out of the realm of possibility. A divided society both politically and socio-economically, lots of guns, incompetent elites plus plenty of powerful and crafty enemies out there like China, Russia or Iran who would benefit from our collapse. 

It’s a reminder that charity starts at home. Fixing all this starts with your: getting your Sh-t together and making sure you make a strong family. Helping your friends and business partners & customers. Then followed by helping and backing your neighbors. Extending your network and building real relationships. Being smarter, richer, healthier, kinder & better armed. These little ripples matter. If enough people do this, we will ensure that “Leave the world behind” stays a fictional, entertaining movie and NOT become reality.

The Three Body Problem: Insights into A Culture & the Future

I love reading science fiction. It’s like a cheat code to thinking about the future and building a vision of what it will look like. Western science fiction is canon but I love reading Russian, Korean, and Japanese science fiction. But top of the top is Chinese scifi. Especially Liu Cixin. Wow. Mindblowing. 

For those who have not read his trilogy. DO IT NOW. But to summarize his first book which sets up the rest of series well, I pulled this from Gemini: 

“The Three-Body Problem is the first book in Liu Cixin's Hugo Award-winning Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, a hard science fiction novel that begins during China's Cultural Revolution when a secret military project sends signals into space, leading to contact with an alien civilization facing extinction. The aliens plan to invade Earth, causing humanity to split into factions that either welcome or oppose the invasion, while the story explores complex themes of physics, politics, and human nature through a virtual reality game based on the chaotic three-body problem in orbital mechanics.”

What I loved about The Three-Body Problem as well as the rest of the trilogy is like all good science fiction stories, it really makes you think. But it also provides insight into the culture it comes from. In this case, the modern day CCP-run China. 

Dan Wang wrote in his book Breakneck: 

“The trilogy is a celebration of humanity’s ingenuity in an existential struggle. To defeat the alien threat, Liu depicts humanity’s total subordination to technocratic authorities. Scientists and engineers are the ultimate decisionmakers, leaving no room for humanists, the faint of heart, or sentimentalists. Governments are made to submit to the will of select geniuses who do not hesitate to sacrifice millions. 

The prevailing idea in Liu’s trilogy is that the only hard truth is survival, where opposing civilizations resemble “blood drenched pyramids lit by insidious fires seen through dark forests.” Again and again, Liu resolves the plot in favor of the party that is willing to be the most brutal in its will to survive.”

Yikes, when you read this. And realize that this is a good description of the modern day Chinese Communist Party and their Russian, North Korean and Iranian allies. The CRINK. This is who we are fighting against. 

The sooner the West wakes up, the sooner we might be able to compete again. 

We are on the speedrun to the future which is up for grabs now. 

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.