History Rhymes: People and Civilizations Don’t Change Very Much
Twitter aka X, has actually been a major source of alpha for me. I get opposing views, rage baited a lot. But I also get lots of inspiration, insights and ideas. It’s amazing if you know how to mine and use it.
I follow Calvin Froedge. An American based in Panama, entrepreneur but also private investor who is kind of a curmudgeon. Yet he is super sharp and thinks orthogonally. This is another way of saying, he has an original and different view of the world, which is why he is full of great takes and investing ideas. I don’t agree with all of his views (bit too libertarian for me) but I respect that he thinks for himself and puts his ideas out there.
Calvin is very good at extrapolating trends out from big events in the world. And consequent investment opportunities that come out of these situations. Something he stated right after the Israeli-American attacks on Iran in March and the havoc caused by the Iranian counterpunch across the GCC:
“ Why American chemical companies? Ok, let's imagine your three biggest competitors (Middle East, Europe, and Asia) go out of business overnight because they either lose feedstock access or can't export. That's what just happened in petrochemicals.”
He also wrote:
“Best performers in the 70s were oil, precious metals, and chemicals.
Study the 1970s as your blueprint for trading the next few years.”
It makes sense. What happened in the 1970s? War in the Middle East. Massive energy crises which caused economic challenges across the world. Stagflation: basically stagnating economy and massive inflation. Major change in Dollar system: basically Nixon took the US off the gold standard. Political gridlock and disillusionment. Literal riots, crime waves and disorder in many American cities.
History is a great teacher if you pay attention. And we see a movement in the world toward sovereignty which means rearming, reindustrialization and tighter control of supply chains. Things that countries took for granted in the previous decades of financialization and globalization. Well, not anymore. Back to the future it seems.
The Modern Deal Guy Part Deux: Financier for Chaotic Times
I am quite taken by the concept of the “Modern Deal Guy” as described by Jeffrey Giffon and Will Manidis. A concept whose time has arrived. I wrote about it previously but figured it’s worth exploring further. Will wrote a detailed description below:
“the modern deal guy has no permanent capital, no permanent loyalty, and no permanent location.
the modern deal guy is playing a repeated game, he doesn't care who he pisses off, there's going to be another hand.
the modern deal guy is much more a broker than a principal.
he has an ecosystem around him that identify as "his guys" the modern deal guy has 99% of his chips on the table at any given moment, the next hand will always be bigger.
the modern deal guy is reticent to monetize any given opportunity early, but when he decides its time to sell, he does so savagely and without concern for fallout.
the modern deal guy is only concerned about where he spends his time. he runs a schedule like a CAA agent
the modern deal guy is only constrained by sourcing talent to put behind ideas at scale, capital and opportunity sets are infinite
the modern deal guy either has an exhaustively curated public persona, or none at all, anything in the middle is a mess.
the modern deal guy has very little concern for whats "on the paper", he's playing a very different game of pressure and repetition
the modern deal guy is unusually concerned about studying history and learning from adjacencies.
the modern deal guy has a personal burn that would make your nose bleed.
all in service of maximum optionality the modern deal guy can be better thought of as a "franchise" rather than a firm.
the modern deal guy will generate dozens of lesser deal guys that will repeat the playbook in his stead.”
Source: https://x.com/WillManidis/status/1980644725427433546
To sum up, to be successful as a Modern Deal Guy, one needs to be self reliant & flexible, able to size up and handle risk well, is used to operating by himself and has the courage to make tough decisions. They are pattern recognizers supreme, who also understand and read people well. Probably also able to have a great understanding of various asset classes, geopolitics and global macro.
A Modern Deal Guy is the epitome of the term “live player” or in Silicon Valley parlance, has “high agency.” They are willing to get on that airplane to go where they need to go. Traveling to where the action is, to surface opportunities. And ultimately to meet and close the deal if necessary.
Will goes on to say: “the last decade of tech rewarded "investors"- as price discovery was so efficient/low dispersion in high growth internet co's that you just had to win and hold for a long time. the "deal guy era" is an era of traders, not investors. you all have no idea what’s coming.”
I think he is right. The Modern Deal Guy will be the right type of financier appropriate for the massive amounts of change and chaos of the roaring 2020s.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 26th, 2026
"In summer, the song sings itself." — William Carlos Williams
"Here’s what’s going on: The US actually has a glut of natural gas, as increased oil drilling creates more supply of natural gas, especially in the Permian.
The problem is that export capacity is near tapped out. The existing LNG export facilities that are based in the US, Mexico, and Canada cannot export much more than they already are.
This creates a situation where natural gas within the United States is cheap, while other countries have to pay drastically higher costs."
https://www.codyshirk.com/p/entangling-allies-and-choking-enemies
2. Solid discussion on AI and the ever growing tech lash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=138ne91NkiQ
3."Money is for buying freedom. That’s it. That’s the whole point.
And freedom is two things stacked on top of each other. It’s the expulsion of every annoying stressor that eats your day away (silent killers), and the amplification of everything that makes you feel alive, smile, and look around at your life with appreciation and fulfillment.
If you understand that one sentence, you’ll never confuse a stressful luxury with a real stressor again."
https://www.thefinalman.com/p/what-is-the-true-purpose-of-money
4."Every generation gets its “machines will take your job” panic. This one just comes with better PR and a bigger balance sheet. The AI job apocalypse isn’t data-driven — it’s narrative-driven, engineered by people who profit when you’re scared. Fear is the product. Capital is the outcome.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat
I believe that, similar to every other technological innovation in history, AI will inspire job destruction that will result in an increase in productivity, profits, reinvestment, and (wait for it) jobs. The relevant question isn’t how many jobs we’ll lose / gain, it’s whether the velocity of disruption will overwhelm that period of adaptation and recovery. There are three scenarios: The AI bubble bursts; AI delivers as promised, but on a slower timeline; and AI disruption comes faster than the market can adapt and respond."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/apocalypse-no
5."The low quality of the general discourse is nevertheless concerning, as it reflects a widespread inability to discuss the relationship between military force and political objectives in conflicts other than full-scale war. This follows two decades of GWOT, during which Western military establishments never developed a good working model for counterinsurgency; what few lessons were learned were left half-digested once attention abruptly shifted back to conventional war in 2022.
For a plethora of reasons, asymmetric and irregular conflicts are likely to remain the most common uses of military force. Without a good framework to think about these things, the same mistakes are likely to be repeated."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/the-iran-war-is-not-a-war-military
6."Saudi Arabia was the religious heart and demographic muscle; the UAE was the strategic brain and financial hub.
They were the “Simba and Mufasa” of the Arab world – distinct but aligned.
That era is dead. It died in the kill zones of Hadramout, in the gold smuggling routes of Sudan, and in the boardrooms of Riyadh where multinational CEOs were given a stark ultimatum: abandon Dubai or starve.
We are now witnessing a shadow war that stretches from the Horn of Africa to the Thar Desert.
It is a conflict defined by a bitter personal rift between Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), a divorce that has split the Islamic world into two emerging, hostile blocs.
And sitting at the center of this geopolitical chessboard, courted by both sides with desperation and billions of dollars, is the Republic of India."
https://issf.org.in/2026/01/brothers-in-blood-the-secret-war-between-saudi-and-the-uae/
7."This transformation altered more than production. When prosperity becomes common, people begin to assume that it will continue indefinitely. Economic downturns, once accepted as part of the natural rhythm of economic life, start to appear intolerable and governments come under pressure to preserve stability and sustain growth, even when economic conditions would normally demand adjustment.
In response to these expectations, policymakers increasingly turn to monetary and financial tools to maintain economic expansion. Credit is expanded, interest rates are adjusted, and financial systems are encouraged to sustain demand. These policies may support prosperity in the short run, but over time they can introduce new forms of instability—particularly in the value of money itself.
Herein lies the paradox of abundance. The success of industrial civilization creates expectations that encourage policies capable of weakening the very foundations of long-term stability. Prosperity, once achieved, generates pressures that make it increasingly difficult to preserve."
https://forumgeopolitica.com/article/the-paradox-of-abundance
8.Solid discussion on AI and how to build for large corporations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBMmK0NsUK0
9."Vague is the killer. Vague is how it happens. Gary is not the product of one bad decision. Gary is the product of ten thousand vague ones.
Look at your last week, properly. How many decisions did you make on autopilot? How many evenings did you spend doing something you actually wanted to do, versus scrolling because you were too tired to do anything else? When did you last have a conversation with your partner that wasn’t logistics? When did you last finish a book? When did you last do something that genuinely scared you in a good way?
If you can’t answer those questions cleanly, you are already on the road. The road doesn’t feel like anything. That’s the point. The road feels like a normal Tuesday. The road feels like a sensible thirty-something life. The road feels like adulthood. And then, somewhere around your thirty-fifth birthday, you look up and notice the lanyard around your neck and the mini fridge in the corner and the wife who’s stopped reaching for you, and you wonder — quietly, because you’d never say it out loud — how the hell you got here."
https://lifemaxxers.substack.com/p/the-man-you-dont-want-to-become-youre
10."To be clear, this trend is still around. It is just getting to a point that the chips are causing a new bottle neck. This means you do not sell all your SMH or all your NVDA or all your (insert chip stock up a ton). Instead, it means you start investing in the new bottle neck: the grid.
There will be a few individual stocks that do a 100x or 10x or (insert large multiple). Directionally? The demand for power, data centers, substations, cooling and general grid upgrades is massive (another 5-10 year trend in our opinion)"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/making-money-off-of-power-and-grid
11."My recommendation for entrepreneurs, especially as they achieve some level of success, is to spend time figuring out what truly gives them energy and fulfillment, and then become much more intentional about saying no to the things that are not the best use of their time."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/05/09/the-entrepreneurs-shift-from-yes-to-no/
12."It is absolutely striking that in a poll of different countries of who is the biggest world-wide threat, the USA is so dominant as the top threat to the world that EVEN AMERICANS nominated themselves as the biggest threat.
The optimistic interpretation is that Trump’s insane and destabilizing policys are hugely unpopular and the people of America will elect someone better in 2028. The most negative interpretation is that Americans are puffing out their chest a little, proud of how they are the “biggest threat” as they tick the box. The most ironic but likely interpretation is that both groups of Americans exist and they are both as American as the diametrically-opposed other."
https://taipology.substack.com/p/exporting-instability
13."having a truly independent central bank and monetary policy to boot would send a broader positive signal about the stage of development of UAE, and its capital markets. It would send a message of confidence, and would likely just further enhance UAE’s position as an international financial centre, alongside the likes of London, New York and Hong Kong. The AED would then advance its case to become a global reserve currency, with big reputational wins therein - and I would suggest global reserve currency status needs independent monetary policy.
And acknowledging the clear competition now between UAE and KSA, as the leading economic and financial economies or centres of the Gulf, UAE would steal a march on KSA, as taking that position as the pre-eminent Gulf financial centre. By depegging early UAE would take or assume the position as the reserve currency state of the region, and anchor its position as the leading financial centre of the region."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/could-uae-move-to-de-peg-early
14."There is a trend in modern filmmaking that often portrays masculinity as something undesirable or outdated. Men are frequently depicted as either weak and directionless or overbearing and aggressive, with very little space in between. Despite that trend, there are still films that remind us what true masculinity can look like.
Great films can teach us timeless lessons about courage and sacrifice. They can inspire us with examples of leadership, discipline, honor, endurance, and brotherhood. In many ways, they preserve ideals that modern culture too often neglects."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/10-films-that-teach-timeless-lessons
15."The TL;DR is exits in mining are historically poor, but the market will mirror the outcomes of those in defence tech. The industry will produce mining’s version of the neoprimes. Exits will come from three places: direct IPOs from startups that bring assets online faster/cheaper, acquisitions by majors redirecting their M&A spend away from traditional assets, or acquisitions by new buyers focused on supply chain security."
https://jackkennedy0.substack.com/p/where-will-the-exits-in-mining-come
16.Listening to this conversation, makes me more optimistic about America. Policies, geopolitics, technology and startups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyv9u1iy-c8&t=23s
17.Geopolitics and Geonomics. Good framework to understand the changes coming in the world & economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy85bpoEQX8&t=88s
18."A slowdown, when it comes, will not be a technology failure. It will be a market reaching the boundary of what its current shape can absorb. Capability will continue to grow. The constraint will move from supply to absorption—the speed at which humans, institutions, and verification systems can metabolize what models produce.
We are leaving what might be called the magic phase of AI, where every new capability feels like a gift that requires no engineering to deploy, and entering the maintenance phase. The work shifts from producing the next demo to building the boring scaffolding that makes the last demo trustworthy at scale.
For investors, this is not bad news. It is just different news. The next decade of AI value creation may belong less to those who train the largest model and more to those who build the unsexy machinery that turns model outputs into auditable, deployable, insurable products. The rocketship is not running out of fuel. It is approaching the part of the flight where you start to notice the air."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/friction-points-what-could-slow-the
19.First hand look at obsession, loyalty and how to win in business. I enjoyed this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35IY2ILCAio&t=2289s
20."So the UAE asked for a short-term loan, known as a currency swap line - an emergency credit facility that allows the U.S. Federal Reserve to lend dollars directly to a foreign central bank.
This is not a bailout of the UAE. It is a bailout of the Treasury market.
In that environment, swap lines do not get repaid in any meaningful sense.
They get rolled.
The Fed extends the maturity. The borrower draws a new swap to repay the old one. Each transaction shows as “repaid” on the books, but the aggregate balance never really goes down.
Wall Street has a name for this: Amend, extend, and pretend."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/the-first-domino-has-fallen
21."Founders often think international expansion is about translating products or adapting strategy. More often, it is about translating expectations between systems that were never designed to work together in the first place.
Scaling across borders is not replication. It is cultural code-switching."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/guest-post-five-lessons-from-50-founders
22.Convo on random business news. The boys brought it today. GameStop & Ebay, Spirit airlines & Zoom stake in Anthropic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te7iP_zpr4A
23.How to tap into heretics to go after hard problems. From the Palantir CTO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oCDpbMyugU
24."Think This Through: If people are constantly trading their currency for stable coins, that is essentially a bid on US tokens. Repeat this process for 5-10 more years and suddenly stable coins have increased US dollar dominance. Why would the US government want to stop that? Just explained why they are not going to shut it down any time soon.
As stable coin market cap goes up, the USA gets more control of financial transactions. Again. They can freeze any account they like with a single click. Essentially expanding their ability to Freeze and Seize as they please.
On An Individual Basis: Since the majority of you are not on the US watch list (guessing absolutely none of you are), then it actually expands your ability to pack up and leave if you need to. No government is going to care about an address with $50,000 in stable coins. Therefore if you have a large chunk of assets in crypto, say $1,000,000+, you could hold it in something decentralized (BTC/ETH) then simply swap to stables in 100 different addresses and live your life as a sovereign individual."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/stablecoin-update-ahead-of-clarity
25."Ukraine, meanwhile, was defending itself against conquest — a conquest that would have stripped away its national identity, brutalized its population, and kept it in poverty. That threat provided a powerful motivation for regular Ukrainians to sign up and risk their lives on the battlefield. Ukraine became a nation in arms, while Russia was still trying to fight a “special military operation”, because Ukraine had a compelling cause and Russia had an unconvincing one.
This lesson is useful in explaining why Trump’s war on Iran has failed. When Iran was the attacker — trying to control the Middle East through a network of armed proxies — its aggression provoked a backlash from people in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and elsewhere who didn’t want to be ruled by foreign powers. But when Trump attacked Iran without direct provocation, Iran’s cause suddenly shifted to the defense, and its fortunes improved.
The people of Iran have no love for their regime — it recently mowed down tens of thousands of protesters in the streets, and the country’s economy is in a state of protracted collapse. But even so, they refused to rise against their rulers when Trump’s bombs started falling. Meanwhile, most Americans disapprove of the Iran war, and have no desire to endure the economic hardship of high gas prices just to topple someone else’s dictator.
This provides us with an important lesson. Reality is not Star Wars — dividing warring sides into “good guys and bad guys” is never really accurate. But “invaders vs. defenders” is a lot less ambiguous. If America ditches Trumpism and goes back to the principle of upholding territorial integrity, we’ll see our military fortunes improve, because we’ll associate ourselves with causes that people want to fight for."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/tyrants-are-losing-wars
26. "For the US though the war has shown the limitations of US power. Therein after the successful 12 day war against Iran, the decapitation effort in Venezuela, the U.S. had appeared to have a huge technological superiority globally, appearing as the apex power, even perhaps over China.
But this war has shown the difficulty of waging a war without clearly defined goals, with poor planning, no exit strategy, and without listening to or involving allies. It also shows the limitations of US aerial and sea power, and that it is difficult to engineer regime change without being willing to commit boots on the ground. That was a political contraint imposed by past prior failed wars - Iraq, Afghanistan, et al. They say arrogance comes before a fall, and that perhaps should be the lasting lesson for the US in this conflict.
One hopes that Trump will have learned his lesson from this defeat and he will be more guarded in pulling the trigger next time around."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/bigger-geopolitical-take-outs-from
27. "There are two events that I believe will occur almost simultaneously and produce a change in opinion about the necessity of spending trillions of dollars on an AI build-out. The first is an IPO or mega merger in the US or China related to tech and AI that is so big and financially irresponsible that the market cannot digest it. This will snap the market out of its manic phase. Folks will finally start asking whether greater machine intelligence is worth the amount of money being spent developing it. Once enough humans ask questions, the jig is up.
The second event will be the rhetoric of the Team Blue Democrat challenger in the 2028 US presidential election. The inflation that this mega AI build-out causes in raw materials, labor, and most importantly electricity is not very popular in many parts of America. Also, 90% of Americans don’t own a lot of stocks, so they will not benefit from the surging share prices of AI and AI-adjacent companies. Politically, it is easy to run on an anti-AI platform focused on bringing back value to human labor and curtailing the inflationary impacts of the AI CAPEX build-out. Whether a Democrat wins is irrelevant; the popularity of this message will make capital allocators ponder a future where credit stops flowing to AI by government mandate and regulations on AI dampen the future profitability of companies in the space.
But in the here and now, dollar and yuan liquidity will continue to rise. And Bitcoin and crypto will benefit."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/the-butterfly-touch
28."We’re predicting a general identity crisis in the USA which is why we’re posting this now.
As tech continues to ramp up, the people who tied their identities to clocking in and clocking out will be in for a rough adjustment period.
The majority will find that career = rented identity. Not owned identity. No badge. No title. No weekly catch up meetings. No bi-weekly paycheck for excel work that can be done by Claude.
Then what?
The answer is they are forced to follow the same playbook we’ve had out for a decade. Building a niche asset. Investing in the choke points. Constantly testing demand for new trends. Investing in “You, Inc.” the only company where you’re the 100% owner. And. Making the process repeatable (finding another trend riding it)."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/how-to-deal-with-identity-crisis
29.Listening to any leader of Goldman Sachs, makes you realize why they are the best. This convo was no different.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qqLihL4AWk&t=922s
30.A fun new podcast show (Concept was originally done by Richard Cooper). Cars and capitalists episode with Sam Lessin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RykHeWcPx8
31.Enjoying this series: Will Obrien of Ulysses. Underwater Autonomous Vehicles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40EMM5Y-OP4
32.A bit of Alt-Geopolitics. This was hard to follow at first and not sure what to think. Entering a multipolar world.
https://burningbright.substack.com/p/the-multipolar-world
33."A good crisis is exactly what California needs to shock it back into the hard realities of physics. Local drilling, local refining, and overland pipelines connecting to America’s plentiful petroleum bounty are the cures to what has been ailing the state since it hurtled itself off the energy cliff. There’s still time to deploy the parachute. Really!
Whether or not that happens, there’s one thing this analysis should make abundantly clear: The rest of the US is an oil superpower, and no amount of hyperventilating by the media will change that anytime soon."
https://open.substack.com/pub/doomberg/p/remedial-math
34."So the fact that American tariffs are causing that assembly work to move out of China is significant. It doesn’t remove U.S. dependence on Chinese manufacturing, but it reduces it. China itself started out doing assembly but later moved into component manufacturing; there are some signs Vietnam may be starting to do the same. And if Vietnam can do it, so can India, Mexico, Indonesia, and so on. China doesn’t have some magic secret sauce that makes it the only country that can make physical objects; other countries can learn, just like China did.
A non-Chinese supply chain won’t be built quickly or easily, and it hasn’t been happening as fast as the headline numbers suggest. But we’ve made a promising start, and the tariffs on China were part of that. A lot of Trump’s protectionist policy has been haphazard, misdirected, stupid, and downright corrupt, but this one — which was continued by Biden and the Democrats — was actually starting to yield some results. It would be a shame if Trump throws that all away on this trip in exchange for the promise of a few soybean purchases or whatever."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/trump-actually-started-to-decouple
35."In this sense, what Operation Epic Fury has achieved so far is forcing the Islamic Republic to manage two fronts simultaneously, one facing outward toward protecting a mosaic military enterprise built on proxy funding, missile threats, and an unrelenting nuclear program, and one facing inward toward managing a population that has shown repeatedly, at the cost of its own lives, that there is a threshold the regime keeps pushing past.
Every available path undermines the very conditions the organization needs to survive. This exposes the central contradiction of what the Islamic Republic constructed over four decades: a parallel military state within the state, a regional empire of proxies, and a financial system shielded from accountability, all built for outward projection of power yet wholly unprepared for the mounting pressure now coming from both inside and outside."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/irans-economy-is-collapsing
36."Right now, a 62-year-old machinist-owner is thinking about retirement. His shop of 30 employees, tucked into an unassuming industrial park in the Midwest, makes a highly specialized component you’d never be able to pick out from a lineup of machine parts. But this component is critical to a defense system you’ve definitely heard of, and his is the only shop in the U.S. that makes it.
He doesn’t have a succession plan, and he’s having trouble finding a buyer.
This scenario is playing out across thousands of shops across the country, and it represents one of the most underappreciated vulnerabilities in the U.S. defense industrial base. There’s no adversary, no cyberattack, and no dramatic supply chain rupture that will bring this challenge to the headlines. There is just an aging owner locking the door for the last time, and a critical defense capability retiring with him."
https://thebenslens.substack.com/p/the-silent-succession-crisis
37."As your wealth changes relative to your desires, your capacity to take risk will change with it. The closer you are to being fully content, the less risk you should want to take. I call this the Risk-Wealth Paradox."
https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-risk-wealth-paradox/
38."It is critical to think about creating a MOAT - long term sustainable advantage that increases over time.
Without a moat your business will have low margins and not be venture scale (and won’t be able to scale?).
Your business model is a key to the MOAT. Platforms/Marketplaces have the best moats!"
https://www.startuphacks.vc/blog/moats
39."So what is the Valinor model? Valinor is taking the lessons learned from successful corporate structures (see below) to create a new type of company in the defense and government technology space. We are a holding operating company focused on untapped problems in the defense and government markets.
With this hub-and-spoke structure, we have the ability to go after many small to medium-sized problems that are important, but aren’t seeking the attention of VC-backed companies. We will start by developing these products ourselves, but also have the ability to acquire other products when it makes sense."
https://valinorenterprises.substack.com/p/the-valinor-model
40.Another good episode with the NIA guys. Always fun & educational.
Selling the Thrill
The Yellowstone 1923 tv series is entertaining and holds so many nuggets of wisdom. I stumbled upon this segment that was insightful: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a1c12eyCSw8
The villain of the story, Donald Whitfield, a ruthless mining tycoon, is watching some people ski. After the skier explains the sport to him, his henchman says: “Seems a silly way to waste the day to me.”
Whitfield asks him: “How many gunfights have you been in?”
Henchman: “My fair share.”
Whitfield: “How many bar fights?”
Henchman: “More than I can count.”
Whitfield: “And after, how did you feel?”
Henchman: “Alive, which was the goal.”
Whitfield: “But you liked it? Tell the truth.You liked the danger of it.”
Henchman: “It gets your blood up, aye.”
Whitfield: “Aye. It’s a rich man’s world now. And everyone gets a taste. The paper man, the tradesman, the car salesman, the doctor, the lawyer. The one thing you can’t buy in a store, is the euphoria of peril, the exhilaration of danger. I can sell that. For a fortune.”
This is sales. Packaging something that is hard to get. Scarce even. When consumers have everything they want, they want something no one else has. Our human need for status & bragging rights. Tapping into our human need to be special. This is capitalism. A fascinating anecdote epitomizing this.
The Time is NOW: Chaos is a Ladder Part Deux
Every other day I see something or read something that jars me. @TheJackBly wrote on X:
“We live in the softest, weakest, & laziest society of all time.
This means less competition.
We live in the most abundant and technologically advanced society of all time.
This means more opportunity.
This won't last forever. You need to move now.”
No truer words were ever written. The world belongs to those who hustle and take action.
There is so much change happening on the technology side, geopolitics and it feels like everyone is just in wait and see mode. I get it, it’s chaotic. Sometimes you need to step back and get bearings. Sometimes you need to mope, and sometimes you need to mourn the past.
But not for too long. You better start positioning yourself and going on the offensive.
But like a glitch in the matrix. So what the heck are you waiting for? Go forth. Start building. Start stacking assets. Do something. Anything. Be aggressive. This time is a 3-5 year window that will close forever.
Kickstart Your Day Properly: My Perfect Morning Routine
How you start your day is important. I’ve learned this like everything, the hard way. Jumping right into a call or email is damaging to your brain. You need to ease into the day. I’ve had a morning routine for the last decade but I’ve learned and optimized this over the years.
I like seeing what other people do and of course this is very personal. But everyone should have some form of morning routine to set your day up right. This is one I’ve set up and I find if I don’t do it, I am somewhat off for the rest of the day. I follow it religiously, even when I travel. So here it goes.
1. The first thing I do is lie in bed and ease my way up for 5 min. I do my gratitude practice, about being grateful to have my health, my family, my business, my friends.
2. I have a drink of water (usually with LMNT), take some vitamins, lithium ororate & such.
3. I pray
4. Then I do 5-10 min of meditation. I usually don’t check email after, although I may do a glance through in case of any emergencies. I’ve gotten better at only looking at email after I finish the entire routine.
5. I do the Tony Robbins Priming Session which is about 15 min: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faTGTgid8Uc
6. I review my Vision Board
7. I do a Self Compassion Meditation by Sean Fargo recommended to me by my therapist. It calms me.
8. To prepare myself for the inevitable challenges of the day, I listen to this vignette from Boss Advice: “Pain Equals Future Success”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaEkmvEuki4
9. Then to amp myself up for the day, I listen to music. 1 or all my hype songs. Example being “Bodies” by Drowning Pool, “Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of War Drums” by A Perfect Circle. I get really amped up by the last two songs particularly. I also love the new Dune 3 War Chant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLY5GFZumLE&list=RDnLY5GFZumLE&start_radio=1. Of course, it will be different for each person, so pick a song that gets you excited. Like an entry song on stage or arena.
And that it is. I do these and I can hit my to do list or calls with maximum energy. Whether war mode or monk mode, this sets up my day well. A morning routine is a must for kickstarting your brain and body. May you find as much value in a morning routine as I do.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 19th, 2026
"Rest when you're weary. Refresh and renew yourself, your body, your mind, your spirit. Then get back to work." — Ralph Marston
"What I have shown you are three primary ways to attract high calibre men into your life, build relationships that compound over time, and construct a world that keeps getting more interesting without ever forcing the process.
Using the internet effectively to build a signal that pulls the right men toward you from anywhere in the world.
Pursuing genuine interests to put yourself in rooms where the connections form as a natural byproduct of doing something you actually love.
And tending to your local world until you move through it like Henry Hill through the Copacabana kitchen.
But you can amplify all three even further.
And that is by taking an online ecosystem and bringing it offline.
Imagine a group of men who share the same ambition, character and all refuse to settle for an average life, now standing at a trailhead in Nepal, or paddling out together in the same lineup, or shooting side by side on a range in Eastern Europe.
Men from different countries, different industries, different backgrounds, who have never met in person but feel like old friends within the first hour because the filter already did its work long before they shook hands."
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/stop-networking-build-a-global-syndicate
2.A list of some sweet Italian cities to check out. Mountains or Coast.
https://palombo.substack.com/p/the-two-italian-retirements-sea-or
3.A dose of reality. Commodities shortages will be massive but it's not priced in yet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9TtihQuj-g
4."By making oil and gas expensive in Europe and Asia, the US force companies to choose between closing shop or moving to America.
This process was kickstarted during Ukraine, crippling many European industries from German steel to French glass, and will only intensify as the US complete the hostile takeover. Indeed, this strategy cannibalizes friend and foe alike, and Wall Street are fine with that.
This industrial exodus also results in a massive flight of capital. As factories and assets are physically transferred from Europe and Asia to the US, each company take their capital — cash, stocks, credit — out of their home country and dump it into the American economy. This shifts the global economy’s center of gravity toward America, reinforcing the Petrogas-dollar."
https://richardmedhurst.substack.com/p/how-the-us-pulled-off-an-armed-robbery
5.Masterclass in leadership and running a top performing public company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCBFXL_Sn44
6."The structural simultaneity continues to deepen. The Iran war raises energy prices, which increases Russian oil revenues, which funds Russia's war in Ukraine, which destroys Ukrainian energy infrastructure, which raises European energy vulnerability, which increases Europe's exposure to the Hormuz closure.
Each additional day of the Iran war extends Russia's fiscal runway in Ukraine. Each additional day of Ukraine's war sustains the DragonBear axis that shields Iran diplomatically. The two conflicts are not parallel. They are coupled."
https://velinatchakarova.substack.com/p/two-proxy-wars-one-system-the-simultaneity
7."Jordi goes on to propose that as AI continues to improve, the biggest moat will no longer relate to what you are building. It will be dictated by your ability to adapt. In other words, more than ever before, velocity will be the one metric that matters most."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/things-i-think-i-think-q1-2026
8.Lots of contrary takes on oil, rare earths and Fortress North America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd_jUfpvrxI
9."One such campaign unfolded in Canada nearly a decade ago, with far-reaching consequences that are now causing pain too sharp to ignore. Political action inspired by the ghosts of oil-covered birds, otters, and sea lions has cost Canada’s energy sector billions in lost profits, enriched its American neighbors by the difference, and stunted its geopolitical power—even as the war in Iran creates unprecedented demand for what the country could currently be offering.
It’s no exaggeration to say the fallout for the Canadian economy risks national unity, adding momentum to separatist movements in the Western provinces. With a fresh move afoot in Ottawa to undo the damage, and given the stakes involved, it’s time to assess where the political puck is headed next."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/sovereign-arbitrage
10."In our era of uncertain uncertainty, certainty will be the killer. In this era more downfalls will happen because of overconfidence than questioning. The key is to not get stuck on just one option. You have to become at ease holding multiple contradictory possibilities at once. (To prevent yourself from being swept away by the latest current and fashionable whim, this radical adaptability must be anchored on a steadfast set of unchangeable virtues, as corny as honesty, or as slick as generosity.) The strategy for prospering in prolonged uncertainty must be one of constant, agile recalibration.
In short, in our age of uncertainty, you have to get good at changing your mind."
https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/our-uncertain-uncertainties
11."Mega-funds and platform managers with the scale, brand, and track record to demand permanent capital should pursue the path that Sequoia has outlined. The companies they back stay private longer, grow larger, and justify the holding period. Here, the ten-year structure has become a fiction, and the honest response is to move on to more rational arrangements.
Small funds should head in the opposite direction. They should use the ten-year horizon to enforce discipline as a competitive feature that will be appreciated by their community of LPs. A fund that explicitly targets full or majority realisation by year ten, focuses on early stages where it has structural ownership advantages, and uses Series C or D secondary transactions as the default hand-off to larger investors.
The rationale for the small fund’s ten-year revival is the same that Bartlett and Ramella identify for the structural breakdown; modern private markets create more value, more slowly, in fewer companies. That logic supports very long horizons at the top, where the power-law winners are held. It also supports disciplined short horizons in early-stage, where capital efficiency and risk management are most critical."
https://blog.joinodin.com/p/the-disappearance-of-the-ten-year
12.Optimism with technology and the future. Albeit also rage at the stupidity & incompetence by California. An educational conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s2nO_hxbLA
13."It’s all part of the Paul brothers’ playbook: declare a bold ambition publicly, repeat it often, direct attention toward it, position themselves as the underdog, introduce just enough controversy — and, over time, the performance starts to tilt toward reality. By the time Jake was pitching his fund at the Aquarian office, he was reinforcing a brand he had been building for two decades.
Today, that Paul brothers brand shows up in some not-so-obvious places. Jake and Logan have each separately co-founded companies like sports drink brand Prime Hydration, boxing promotions company Most Valuable Promotions, personal care startup W, and sports betting platform Betr.
At the center of that strategy is Anti Fund, the venture firm Jake launched with Geoff Woo. Logan has since joined as a general partner, helping invest in and promote companies through their combined audience.
Anti Fund’s investment thesis is that capital is abundant, attention is not. At their scale, attention can act as leverage by bringing awareness, shaping a company’s narrative, and driving user growth. Traditional venture firms tend to specialize in a specific industry or sector, while Anti Fund’s portfolio spans everything from consumer brands to frontier AI and defense."
https://www.readtheprofile.com/p/jake-paul-logan-paul-billionaire-plan-investment
14.Fascinating & educational conversation on building an academy company from a manufacturing business. This is absolute gold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zajo84R1ckI
15."If robots drive down the cost of manufacturing, transportation, etc. This means they would be using a ton of energy/electricity. Therefore the cost of everything else goes down a bit, however, the cost of electricity goes up on a relative basis.
Last 50 Years: electrical cost thought of as flat. Everything else goes up in price
Next Few Decades? Electrical cost goes up. Prices of other items go down a bit since tech is deflationary by definition"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/internet-is-becoming-a-power-plant
16."Pessimism is a societal-level victim mentality. Our society grew more pessimistic, and pessimism is rewarded as high status. It is more respectable to be skeptical, highlighting the problems and the gloom. Unfortunately, unlike optimism, pessimism is always self-fulfilling. Solving problems, or in other words, employing creativity, is very difficult and rare."
https://wrongalot.substack.com/p/the-age-of-total-war
17. "The ultimate status symbol is being the person everyone knows of, but no one can find. No “Masterminds,” no “Inner Circles,” no “Coffee Chats.” It signals that you are so busy building the future that you don’t have time to talk about the present. While others are “building relationships,” the Sovereign is Building Reality."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-social-subsidy-1ad
18."Every time you post, ask: does this make me an industry leader?
Build your weekly system around the trinity of problem, solution, and authority.
Skip the empty motivation give your audience tools to win.
You don’t want likes; you want people to take action.
Your content shouldn’t feel salesy but should always generate demand.
LinkedIn, X, and other platforms reward those who create power-based influence.
If you want views, post anything; if you want cashflow, post strategically.
People who master this rule dominate the conversation week after week.
Follow these three rules and your personal brand becomes a wealth machine.
Those who create for power, not image, will always win the long game."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-168933272
19.Trying to understand the Looksmaxxing trend. Don't get it but hey whatever. It's a free world (for now).
https://time.com/article/2026/05/02/face-value-why-looksmaxxing-is-more-than-hope-and-mirrors/
20.Japan will become a drone and arms super power in a few years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk7uZi5Jae0
21."Being interesting is not a costume you put on. It is not a performance, and it is certainly not a trick. It is the natural result of how you choose to live each day.
If you read great books, build real skills, seek meaningful experiences, think for yourself, and carry yourself with quiet confidence, you will never need to chase attention. You won’t have to force conversations or try to impress others. Instead, you will have something far more valuable: a life that speaks for itself.
In a world filled with noise and surface-level living, that kind of life stands out. That kind of man is truly interesting."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/the-modern-mans-guide-to-being-interesting
22."For people that we can broadly called « Chinese liberals » the past ten years have been a terrible disaster. They are not just oppressed by the state, they’re harangued by their fellow Chinese for being syncophantic to the west and unpatriotic, and they also can’t deny that China undeniably glowed up in the time they insisted the government was going the wrong way: it is now stronger, more powerful and better able to stand up to a rogue United States.
« There is a dark side to the narrative of national rejuvenation, » he said, « it is narcissistic and isolating. I am not unpatriotic. I have a vision of China that is more expansive and globally connected. China does not need to be a fortress. »"
https://taipology.substack.com/p/fortress-china-and-its-discontents
23."Although even Huawei acknowledges that its AI chips trail Nvidia’s best offerings by approximately one generation, the company is closing the performance gap through innovative computing architectures and can now meet or even exceed Nvidia’s cluster-scale performance. This is akin to designing a car to have better overall performance through superior aerodynamics, lighter weight, a better transmission, and an optimized drivetrain, despite having a slightly inferior engine. Your engine might have more horsepower or sip less fuel in bench testing, but in the end, it is performance on the track that matters most.
If history is any guide, Huawei won’t have to brute-force things forever, and as it continues to catch up to Nvidia in chip-level performance, an entire domestic supply chain is being put in place to take maximum advantage. While Western experts continue to express confidence that China’s capabilities are, and will remain, far behind, we think this is flatly naïve. Ask Ford, General Motors, Volkswagen, and Toyota what it is like to face Chinese competition now in the absence of protective tariffs."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/flipping-the-script
24."My conviction coming out of this trip is simple. The question for Ukraine’s defense industry is no longer whether it can build. It has answered that.
The question is which of these companies will make the leap from battlefield champion to global defense player. Some of them will. The ones that solve the export equation will be the next Ukrainian neoprimes and will reshape how the rest of the world thinks about where defense technology comes from."
https://defensebrief.substack.com/p/notes-from-kyiv-one-year-later
25.Two of the best global macro thinkers right now. A dose of reality in the age of narrative and propaganda.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tkKoMEiFDk&t=2904s
26."My friend Wyatt Sparks, from Sea Meadow Capital, proposed a possibly better description of what’s currently playing out: the lower case ‘j’ economy, where the dot of the ‘j’ represents the small minority of the world benefitting from rapidly appreciating tech assets."
https://www.codyshirk.com/p/the-j-shaped-economy-a-wall-of-worry
27."A 33-year old multibillionaire founder. Huge banks and funders. A 728-page prospectus filled with big promises and omissions. All raising a critical question: Does this Czech arms dealer actually have the capacity to mass-produce the ammunition that it calls its “principal driver of revenue and profitability” — or is CSG mostly refurbishing old ammo and running out of supply?"
28."America’s attention has shifted toward the Middle East, but even as the American war with Iran pulls Washington’s focus away from Europe, Kyiv is finding new sources of leverage. Volodymyr Zelensky, once accused by Donald Trump of having no cards to play, is suddenly finding several in his hand: long-range drone strikes against Russia’s oil industry, growing demand for Ukraine’s counter-drone expertise in the Gulf, and a more favorable political climate inside Europe."
https://underfirenews.substack.com/p/ukraines-hand-of-trump-cards
29.UAE-Israel versus the rest of the region. It's tough to really understand what is going on. This is a good start.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff-Kfy7SScY
30."One of the cornerstones of my elevator speech regulars here have heard over and over (as only when you are sick of saying something will people finally start to listen), is that the U.S. is a maritime and aerospace power. That is also our comparative advantage…a fact that the events of the last few years have only underlined.
That said, there are centers of power in our nation who not only refuse to see and act on that, they seem determined to weaken and dilute this foundational characteristic of our nation’s military power."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/robert-kaplan-returns-to-the-pier
31.""A lot of American investors are Ukraine-curious," he says. "They stay curious. They don't become committed."
Morgan argues that most institutional investors evaluate Ukraine the way they evaluate any frontier market—risk scores, talent-cost comparisons, assumptions about exit timelines—and those inputs, assembled at a distance, tend to converge on the same answer: too uncertain, too exposed, too hard to model. The problem is the inputs, built far from the realities they are trying to describe by people who have never watched how quickly a city rebuilds its routines after a missile strike, or seen how much an engineer's motivation changes when the product they are building is tested in a field where failure has a face.
When Morgan looks at the broader picture, he argues that the sustainability of what Ukraine is doing is not in question and that Russia is the strategically vulnerable side.
"They will realize it later,” he says. “But it will be too late to capture the upside."
32."AI is almost certainly a transformative technology on the scale of the printing press and the computer. The historical record cannot tell us what the timeline will be, or who specifically captures the gains, or which firms are the Gutenbergs and which are the forgotten printers. It does say that this kind of technology, when it arrives, reshapes the industries and institutions around it. The reshaping is usually larger than the people living through the early years of it expected.
There were naysayers in the 1450s, and there are naysayers now. The naysayers in the 1450s were wrong, and looking back it seems obvious that they were wrong. Of course, the world of today is different from the world of the printing press and even the computer. How property rights work and how the scaling economics run are both worth their own piece. But the basic claim still holds. AI is the kind of technology that changes the world. Acting as though it is not is the more obviously foolish position of the two available."
https://lukechen.substack.com/p/ai-is-going-to-change-everything
33.Lots of great insights from one of the most interesting investors in Silicon Valley. Dreaming about a utopian future and investing accordingly. Investing in Magical weirdos & Biz/Tiz/Riz.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTnQ1VN0KLI&t=1818s
34."The reality is that its export controls on advanced chips are a major source of American leverage over the trajectory of China’s AI industry. They have forced China to absorb compounding costs during the most consequential window of the technology’s development. Chinese labs cannot yet purchase enough computational power to generate Mythos-class capabilities or serve them to large numbers of users — in China or elsewhere. This is a tremendous boon to both American national security and economic prosperity.
When American negotiators enter the room next week, they should understand that Washington is not bargaining from weakness; Beijing is. The chip controls are not a sunk cost the United States should “harvest” before they become “useless” — they are a rapidly appreciating asset. And trading them away in 2026 for the promise of dialogue would risk echoing the very same mistake with China that led the United States down a decade of broken promises stretching from the Rose Garden to the Delfines Hotel."
https://www.choosingvictory.com/p/ai-coordination-without-illusion
35.George Friedman has been often right in geopolitics. Some plausible forecasts for the future for Russia and the EU.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-epIBCgHE4
36."Here’s why this matters right now: AI just deleted the need for the fleet.
The path that looked safe for a century - build skills, climb the ladder, scale headcount, accumulate prestige - has quietly become the long short path for almost everyone. The path that looked slow - deep relationships, judgment, taste, contemplation - is now the short long path. If we do it right, I think we can have the best of both worlds, and more importantly stay in control of our own unique path.
The dangerous mistake of this era is going to be the people who put on the suit and never take it off. They’ll mistake constant orchestration for constant value creation. They’ll have 20 agents running, three Slack channels, two AI meeting summarizers, one personalized newsfeed, and zero quiet hours. They’ll be efficient and irrelevant. The output will be enormous. The judgment will be threadbare.
The deepest competitive advantage of the next decade is going to be the willingness to take the suit off.
Sit on the dock without a goal. Take walks without earbuds. Have dinners where the phones stay in coats. Read books that have nothing to do with your job. Have conversations with people who can’t help you with anything. Be still long enough that judgment can actually form. Stop running away from your thoughts and dive into them.
Trust is built in those moments. Taste is built in those moments. The judgment that the AI cannot replicate, the divine spark that makes you uniquely you, is built in those moments. The orchestrator who never unplugs becomes a routing layer with a name. The orchestrator who knows when to unplug becomes irreplaceable.
That’s the real Iron Man lesson. Tony Stark wasn’t impressive because he had the suit. Plenty of people had suits in that universe. He was impressive because of the man inside it, and because he knew the man mattered more."
https://alexoppenheimer.substack.com/p/sticks-stones-and-light-speed
37."Almost everyone inside the financial markets wants Japan to act more like America. Almost everyone outside the financial markets wants America to act more like Japan. Almost everyone inside the financial markets continues to see China as a risk diversifier. Almost everyone outside the financial markets sees China as a risk multiplier."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/lets-hear-us-elites-talk-about-japan
38.Best discussion and explanations of what is happening in the AI world & Silicon Valley.
Be Grateful: Health is Wealth
I’ve already written previously that Q1, this year was a relatively quiet start to the year. Lots of small setbacks and the usual challenges on the personal finance side. Incredibly frustrating to say the least. Anyone who tells you real estate investing is great passive income is lying to you. But the reality is this is the nature of the beast. There are always setbacks and challenges in whatever you do. That’s life and you just gotta deal with it. I’m told challenges build your character.
However, every time I start moping and feeling “woe is me”, I just need to look out the window. I have a neighbor across from me who is my age, who suffers from obesity and severe diabetes. To the point she can’t walk at all, completely immobile and needs to have people in a special van pick her up and bring her to the doctors almost every other day. I pray all the time at mass that she gets better but it seems to be getting worse.
And it’s a reminder that you should be grateful for what you have. Health and mobility. A brain, resources/ assets, a network who can help you. As the excellent Naval quote goes: “A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one”. It can always be worse. So take care of yourself. Exercise, sleep well, have a good diet, take supplements, do the biohacking basics.
Health is actual wealth. It allows you to play at your best in the game of life. Whatever challenges you have they can be overcome. It might take some time and work but you will conquer it as long as you keep trying. Blessed are the healthy. Remember this.
Changing Your Mood: Do a Brain Reboot
I look back to the last week of February this year and it was kind of rough. Rainy and dark. A change in call schedule with my business partners in MENA & Europe, led to very little sleep which always affects my mood poorly.
I also had lots of trips and projects delayed. A continuing cash bleed from our cursed real estate investments which caused some cash flow issues. So no surprise I got the deep and dark feeling of failure. Yet it seems like everyone else around you is crushing it. So it’s hard not to feel down.
Having been through this before I knew what I had to do. A big part is DO NOT make any big decisions or do anything. Your brain is on tilt. Take a nap. Meditate. Go to church. Then I went to the gym and did a hard workout. All these taken together constitute a very effective cocktail. It acts as a factory reboot for my brain. It really works.
I also realized I have not been taking my Lithium Orotate which really helps your mood too. Additionally to avoid doom spiralling, you focus on the day ahead of you and that’s it. Don’t look beyond that. I also re-watch this short video “Pain Equals Future Success”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaEkmvEuki4
The other thing is to build a “to do” list. Start doing stuff. Write more, post more. Reach out to friends and colleagues and mentees. Reach out to say hello and genuinely offer help. Being of service to others makes you feel more useful, maybe even valuable. The more you do, the more you increase your surface area of luck.
All these taken together constitute a very effective cure to personal doldrums. It acts as a factory reboot for my brain. You feel like you are taking control of your life back. It really works. So next time you are feeling down or feeling stuck, try these steps to reset your mindset and mood. It worked for me.
The Next Super Cycle of AI, Culture and Markets
I read a Tweet from Signull that really clarified things for me.
“there are two kinds of people:
the ones who understand how the internet + technology + culture actually move.
& the ones who are about to get dragged behind it like a tin can tied to a tesla.”
Source: https://x.com/signulll/status/2023468242493415518:
Adapt or Die. I think this has always been true. When you look at successful people no matter what the industry they are in, it’s the ones who get the zeitgeist of the times who do well. They understand the market they are in. I might add those who have the foresight and have the courage to take some action, will do well.
Jesse Walden wrote about Crypto but I believe it applies to almost everything. Especially in the Age of AI where you have access to literally the world’s best thinking machine. Coupled with your special cultural knowledge, it gives the high agency aka Live player even more power and leverage.
He wrote: "The adage “invest in what you know” is increasingly possible today. As a result, market participation is no longer a specialized profession. It's a mass-participation culture with its own status games, memes, heroes, villains, subcultures and language. Because of their newfound expressivity and accessibility, financial markets are increasingly intertwined with culture. And culture, from trends to events to political outcomes, is increasingly expressed through markets."
Source: https://x.com/jessewldn/status/2022291132080644339
If you understand the trends around you, it acts as a road map for where to go. This is why I’ve gotten so deeply into geopolitics, global macro and tech trends. And as the old saying goes: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”, it pays to study history. Use pattern recognition and you get a sense of how people will act. Humans have changed, but at the same time, not really.
Staying relevant is a challenge these days. It’s really true. Our habits can aid or hinder us. But, all you need to do is pay attention to what is around you. Really pay attention. Have a thirst for knowledge, a true curiosity. Position yourself in front of the wave. Combine all of this with courage and agency, you will probably be okay. More than okay I believe.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 12th, 2026
“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”--Albert Camus
"My recommendation for entrepreneurs is to push hard on AI transformation now. The longer you wait, the more difficult it becomes to shift mindsets, workflows, and operating models around AI tools and agents.
Workforce reductions will likely be part of this transition. But over time, AI-enhanced employees will become the standard, and overall productivity and output will rise significantly."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/04/25/the-shift-to-ai-enhanced-employees/
2. "We live in the Vibes Era.
Charisma can be monetized easier now than at any other point in the history of humanity.
Meaning: people will buy from you if they think you’re a cool guy.
It sounds insane, but people are building multimillion-dollar businesses where their entire marketing strategy is centered around the founder being likable."
https://www.tetramarketing.io/p/the-rise-of-founder-marketing
3."The DoD’s 2027 budget request reflects this change in orientation. Here are the risks.
The big increase in funding for Autonomous Warfare may not survive the budget allocation process despite hundreds of billions of new dollars being allocated to existing conventional weapon programs as a payoff to those who would normally oppose it. The bureaucracy may prove too corrupt and ossified to complete this reorientation.
The existing conventional command structure of the US military may gut this capability, forcing autonomous weapons into a support role. This action would be similar to how France and the UK treated tanks at the start of WW2. Despite having more and better aircraft and tanks than Germany before the invasion of France, the Allies used these vehicles as infantry support rather than combining and concentrating them to unlock new capabilities.
The third risk is that the US military may be unwilling to develop the new military theories needed to turn this new technology into a truly transformative military capability that will provide the US with military dominance for years. Based on decades of experience with the US military, almost all of the people doing this theoretical work are doing it on their own dime, outside the military bureaucracy."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/embracing-autonomy
4."In essence, the disintegration of authority in Mali should be seen as the leading edge of a wider process that threatens to destabilize the entire central Sahel and export its consequences directly into Europe."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/mali-is-russias-new-afghanistan-and
5.Latest and greatest on drone warfare and tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nhpVezGGEo&t=146s
6."There is a lot of work to do first. Like many areas of the economy, the industry has suffered from chronic underinvestment. For years, the only customer was the government, which until recently capped spending on defense at 1% of gross domestic product. Even after that changed, the bulk of investment went on US technology. With onerous supply-chain demands, security was seen as high-cost and low-profit; government contracts capped profit margins, and ESG funds shied away from investing in firms that built arms. All that led multiple players, who for decades were unable to access the market in the rest of the world, to drop out of the industry.
There is a global boom in demand for arms as democracies feel increasingly under threat, while capacity at existing manufacturers is constrained by the need to replace stockpiles depleted by the wars in Iran and Ukraine. A new supplier, from a state increasingly viewed as the defender of Asia’s rules-based order and a leading figure in both heavy engineering and precision technology, is exactly what much of the world wants to see. Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi said this week that several countries had already approached Tokyo with expressions of interest."
7. "Harborne is, his lawyers say, an “intensely private person”. He has given no public explanation of his reasons for donating. Asked in December about his donations, Farage said, “Does he want anything from me? No. Absolutely nothing in return at all. He just happens to think that we’ve not made the most of Brexit, that we’re not getting into the 21st-century technologies.”
One 21st-century technology in particular has turbocharged Harborne’s wealth: cryptocurrency. He was an early buyer of digital tokens that have soared in value. And he is one of half a dozen enigmatic tech types who own Tether, the company that issues the most widely traded cryptocurrency.
Registered in the Central American dictatorship of El Salvador, with a tiny staff, Tether has been described as the most profitable company per employee in history. It has issued $184bn in digital cash known as stablecoins. They have grown popular as a way to move money across borders, and in places where inflation erodes the value of local currency. But billions of Tether’s stablecoins are also known to have been put to illicit purposes by gangsters, scammers, Russian sanctions-busters, North Korean hackers and others who would rather avoid the scrutiny of moving money via a bank.
Yet Farage champions Tether. “Tether is a stablecoin,” Farage said on LBC radio in September, the month after Harborne’s record donation. “Stablecoins are the way which money goes from conventional currencies through into cryptocurrencies and back again. Tether is about to be valued as a $500bn company.”
8."The companies that win the next decade will look less like hierarchies and more like platforms for builders. They will make it easier to spin up a new product line, run a small P&L, or launch a sub-brand inside the firm than it is to leave and do it alone.
This shift is bigger than any one company. I have argued elsewhere (see HumanScale) that a more interesting economy is one with more owner-operators, fewer unicorn lottery tickets, and capital that gives a damn about what it builds. The AI cost curve is what makes that argument operational rather than romantic.
Venture math does not fit $1M to $10M ARR durable businesses. However, in this new environment where traditional economies of scale are compressed, those businesses become some of the most durable assets an investor can own. Their moat is speed, specificity, and proximity to the customer, all of which widen as AI commodifies the capabilities once reserved for scale. Direct investment, family-office equity, and community capital are all structured to underwrite that profile. The capital category is opening up at exactly the same moment the builder category is."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-194824803
9.What a great list of relatively unknown Italian cities to check out and maybe live in.
https://palombo.substack.com/p/the-8-hidden-cities-of-italy
10."We built conversion funnels and A/B tested button colors. We hired armies of UX researchers to agonize over empty states, loading spinners, and onboarding flows. The art of reducing friction between a human and a software action became one of the most commercially valuable disciplines in technology.
That era is ending — not gradually, but structurally.
The reason is agents. Not chatbots, not copilots, but fully autonomous AI systems that take action on your behalf: booking travel, executing research, filing contracts, managing workflows. When an AI agent books your flight, it doesn’t load the homepage. It doesn’t hover over the “flexible dates” toggle. It hits an API, cross-references your calendar, checks your preference history, and returns a ranked shortlist — bypassing every carefully crafted UX screen entirely.
The funnel isn’t just broken. It’s irrelevant.
This creates a design crisis that is also, for attentive investors, a significant commercial opportunity. The discipline that emerges to fill the gap has a name: HX — Harness Experience."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-funnel-why-hx-is-the
11. "There are two things an investor can mean when they say that they invest in people.
The first is the belief that attributes such as pedigree, biography, charisma, and past fundraising success carry more signal than what a founder has chosen to dedicate their time to. Essentially, that founders are a fungible commodity that can be stack-ranked. This is the version that Davenport’s data most directly contradicts.
The second, much rarer version is the belief that the subject being evaluated is a unique alchemical mix of people and ideas. It is the investor’s job to assemble a complete picture; the choice of problem, the form of the solution, and the character of the team. Only then, can they fully perceive the opportunity in front of them.
The two are easily confused because they use the same vocabulary. Both are expressed in the language of backing people and celebrating human potential. The first is lazy and well-rewarded by the norms of the industry. The second is hard, and often misunderstood, but it is clearly the path to better quality investments.
The argument is not that investors should abandon qualitative team analysis and return to Perkins and Valentine. The conclusion is simply that the team cannot be usefully assessed without the context of what they are working on, and the attempt to do so is where investors fall into problematic pattern matching.
This is why the atomic unit of entrepreneurship is not the founder nor the idea, but the unity of both. The venture capitalist must stand far enough back to see both at the same time, and to assess them as a single entity.
Rather than the tired question of jockey or horse, the investor’s job is to recognise the centaur."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-195376695
12.How to think about your career. This is a great conversation that will help you. A new framework for finding the thing that drives you and finding your path.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy659EQA2k4
13."For the last decade, the market has rewarded software, financial engineering, and asset-light business models. Billionaire entrepreneur Robert Friedland is arguing that the next decade may reward the opposite: copper, silver, gold, power, grid infrastructure, critical minerals, smelting, refining, and the companies capable of finding and building new mines.
The key line of thinking is simple: AI, electrification, defense, and deglobalization are all converging on the same bottleneck — the physical world. And the physical world cannot be coded into existence. It must be drilled, mined, permitted, processed, financed, and built.
The growing number of global wars in combination with the transition from a “just in-time” global economy to a “just in-case” global economy tremendously favors a “revenge of the miners”.
https://robertsinn.substack.com/p/robert-friedland-the-next-decade
14.This is always educational and fun. Q&A with Tim Ferriss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw1-tGkT9K8&t=1731s
15.Investing legend Paul Tudor Jones. Lots of nuggets of insights. Big lesson: You retire, you die.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S31J5ACsOqU
16."The similarities between athletics and entrepreneurship abound. Markets change. Talents evolve. Networks grow and shift. But if you want to stay relevant, one needs to love the process and consistently evolve their edge."
https://www.alsoblogposts.com/p/staying-relevant
17."There is a reason why we say around late 30s/early 40s a cliff appears. By this general age band, you know who is going to take the leap and who isn’t. The results start pouring in and you basically know who is going to be in corporate forever and who isn’t. There are always exceptions but this is a good guideline. We’re aware of all the cope people throw out.
“Tons of business success starts at 40”.
Not really. The success stories at 40 were planted about 5 years ago. While their first successful business was started past 40, we’d bet practically everything we have they were already tinkering before that (running some sort of Ebay business, affiliate marketing, trying to flip a house, etc). Chances are slim that someone is making $400,000 in a corporate gig, quits and spins up some random website that knocks it out the park. That person has a history of tinkering in the dark before that happened."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/changing-strategies-to-reach-various
18."Humanity keeps evolving. Yet, humans keep resisting change. The question is who a leopard, a lion, a jackal, a hyena or a sheep. The sheep, by the way, will continue to have absolutely no idea what I am talking about.
Elon Musk put the situation starkly. The only way we can outrun a $35T deficit is to adopt a whole new operating system for society. We are not just talking about upgrading to AI and robotics. We are talking about moving from linear to exponential, from control to contributor architecture.
Today, those same bureaucratic rent-seeking Jackals and Hyenas (Bureaucracy Mandarins) are now being replaced by code. Trump’s rhetoric invokes a “Lion under siege” by scavenger “Jackals and Hyenas.” What is it the jackals and hyenas are trying to protect? What is their equivalent of the Donnafugata Villa? It’s the cash flows from oil and gas, from the pharma industry, from the world of healthcare, from the military industrial complex companies that make weapons and which will have nothing to do if there are no wars. If code decides which ventures get funded, then the market makes its own choices. The Mandarins don’t get to control who gets money anymore.
The Mandarins logic is simple. Scarcity is the only thing they know. Abundance threatens their whole power structure. Free energy threatens the oil/gas/petroleum byproduct cash flows. Abundance of health through preventative healthcare threatens big pharma and big healthcare and even big food. It certainly threatens the energy and military industrial complexes."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/the-leopard-jackals-cole-tomas-allen
19."Style is not about impressing others, it is about demonstrating discipline. A well-dressed man shows that he respects himself and that he can be counted on.
Unfortunately, a lot of men will continue to overlook these basics. That’s why mastering them will set you apart from the crowd."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/the-five-style-mistakes-most-men
20."The version of the next decade I’d most like to see is the one where more capital flows back toward the local, the patient, and the productive, and away from the abstracted financial machinery that has absorbed most of it. More owner-operated businesses across more communities, building real wealth for more families. Fewer unicorns and more durable five-million-dollar companies that employ thirty people for thirty years and pay back every neighbor who put twenty-five thousand dollars into them at the start.
This would be a renaissance of community-level capital relationships that the financial industry doesn’t notice until it’s too late, because the financial industry was built to bypass it. However, it requires a generation of builders who learn that a focus on patience and value creation (run on a system) will rather than speed and exit (run on hope).
That isn’t a fantasy. It’s how most economies were built before the venture narrative captured the imagination of every ambitious twenty-something with a laptop. The mechanics didn’t stop working, but they went out of style since the people doing didn’t need to be in the press releases.The capital is there. The opportunities are there. The product without a problem doesn’t need to exist, and the builder who finds that out cheaply, who designs the system that validates whatever should exist instead, and raises the right capital from the right people on the right terms, is exactly who the next decade is going to reward. That builder is probably already in your community. Possibly you if you design something worth funding."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-195575961
21.Probably one of the most honest conversations with a public tech company. This was quite illuminating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlPCz8Jwypw&t=49s
22.This is a must watch. What the future holds when you have an insane level of change happening. Disruptor or disrupted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b90cx-o1M3I&t=648s
23."That is what “one nation’s shortage is everybody’s problem” looks like in practice.
A war in the Persian Gulf becomes a sulphur shortage in China. A sulphur shortage in China becomes a chemical shortage in the Congo. A chemical shortage in the Congo becomes a copper and cobalt shortage everywhere. And a metals shortage everywhere means higher prices for the battery in your phone, the copper wiring behind the drywall in your house, and the data centers running your favourite AI tool.
That is the cascade.
And we are barely into it.
The shortages are already baked in the cake. You cannot wish them out. You cannot slogan them out. You cannot print them out.
You can only prepare for what comes out of the oven.
Every great economic transition in history has had casualties. The casualties were the people who refused to see the transition coming. The survivors were the ones who looked the change in the eye and adjusted."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/the-boring-industrial-shortage-thats
24."Founders in SF have always benefited from high-value networks, but over the past couple of years they’ve become far more aggressive in how they leverage them. Have a bug? Reach out to the CEO. Want early access to the next release? Get your VC to connect you to the CEO. Trying to get into that invite only party with the who’s who of your sector? Reach out to the party organizer (aka the CEO).
These days, founders up and down Silicon Valley unapologetically search for and leverage “ladders” in order to skip steps. They’ve become far more aggressive at this than I’ve ever seen before — going into social debt to a degree that would have been considered inappropriate (and, frankly, cringe-worthy) only a few years ago. But these days, it’s increasingly perceived as a socially-acceptable form of ambition.
These founders are sprinting and scrambling as fast as they possibly can up each and every ladder they find. Occasionally, they screw up and slide back down a “snake”. But no one in the valley bats an eyelash. There are no negative social implications. Meanwhile, founders everywhere else in the world are dutifully running back and forth along the left-to-right game squares. Some of them are trying to go faster (aka 996), but all of them continue to follow the linear, back-and-forth path.
Have you ever heard of anyone winning a game of snakes and ladders without climbing a ladder? Me neither.” https://chrisneumann.com/archives/snakes-and-ladders
25.Solid dissection into the brilliant mind of top tier investor and entrepreneur legend Elad Gil. This was awesome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HutNi2cNsCg
26. Bit of a grim episode but lots to think about in the present tech environment. Exits & growth bigger than ever, but boy is the competition insane right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXToQKc430c
27."The game industry will almost certainly grow over the next decade. Humanity’s desperate need for entertainment and escape is, if anything, accelerating. But how much responsibility can the Japanese government claim for it? Even if the numbers hit the official targets, I suspect that will be due less to subsidies than to unforeseen X-factors — such as how Japan’s tourism boom is less due to the government’s promotional schemes than it is a super-weak yen.
One thing is for sure: game makers no longer have to worry about a government driving customers away from their businesses. And Kagemasa Kozuki, who hid the fact he worked in games from his own children? He’s worth $3.2 billion today, the seventeenth wealthiest person in Japan — and a symbol of how video games transformed from a moral panic into a pillar of Japanese society."
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/press-any-button-to-continue
28."Network tribalism, amplified by the chaos generated by globalization, accelerates the hollowing out of the nation-state. This tribalism makes political reform efforts impossible by turning minor decisions into contentious fights and every option into a choice between good and evil."
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/tribal-terrorism
29."If the executive branch is the monster, Congress is Dr. Frankenstein. Since World War II, the legislative branch has slowly delegated its powers, acquiescing in the face of presidential expansion — washing its hands of wars, scaling back oversight, outsourcing rules and regulations, and weakening its authority to tax and spend. Meanwhile, a seat in Congress has become the ultimate get-rich-quick scheme, as lawmakers are effectively immune from insider trading prosecutions. In 2024, Republicans David Rouzer and Susan Collins registered returns on their investments of 149% and 77%, respectively; Democrats Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Nancy Pelosi performed slightly worse, at 142% and 71%. The S&P, a decent proxy for your retirement portfolio, returned 25% that year.
The question isn’t why Congress’ approval rating is so low, at 10%, but why it’s that high. Fourteen of the past 20 national election cycles have been “change elections,” with the out-party retaking the White House or at least one chamber of Congress. But the only real change since 2000 has been a 3x increase in the share of Americans who say the government is the most important problem facing … America. In a recent interview, former Senator Ben Sasse said government is a tool of the people. Imagine a power drill becoming sentient and coming for our eyes.
The question isn’t whether the U.S. can renew itself. History says yes. Americans yearn for better leadership. But this misses the point — the people running the country aren’t stupid, they’ve been incentivized to continue to engage in corruption, demonization, and the trampling of institutions and norms. We don’t have a leadership crisis but a consequence deficit."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/the-reckoning
30.A solid discussion on the venture capital industry and where it is going. Also a great retrospective on one of the most storied VC funds in the world. Union Square Ventures. Fun jaunt in NYC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNDyKQXjVbU&t=1507s
31.Lots of juicy news in Silicon Valley today. Solid episode this week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkpYTFmS4Ak&t=749s
32."My recommendation for a multi-startup founder is straightforward. Focus on one startup exclusively. Capture ideas for future ventures, but do not spend time building them until your current company has achieved a level of success, predictability, and scale.
At that point, if another idea is stronger or you are motivated by starting from zero, pursue it with a new team. Trying to build two startups from scratch at the same time is a recipe for failure. Pick one idea, go deep, make it work, ensure you have a team that can sustain and grow it, and only then begin building your next company."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/05/02/the-multi-startup-founder-conundrum/
33.Actually a solid episode this week. Lots of interesting takes on Silicon Valley news. The Peptides discussion was interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpC4sbawSzQ&t=661s
34.I thoroughly enjoyed this. What are the traits of the top .01%
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWqB9eAKMx0
35."It is well established that, despite significant import substitution efforts, Russia has failed to effectively replace advanced Western components in its long-range strike weapons, including their guidance systems, which continue to rely heavily on Western electronics typically imported through third countries.
If sanctions enforcement has tightened, further curtailing Western supply and forcing Russia to resort to domestic or lower-quality foreign components, Russian IMUs could become progressively less accurate, while GNSS receivers may grow more vulnerable to Ukrainian jamming. In theory, this could greatly enhance the chances of success for Ukrainian electronic warfare efforts."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/can-ukraine-jam-russian-ballistic
36.Geonomics and what is happening in the world. Who wants what. In a world of deglobalization aka The One world economy is over.
Why is Everything Broken?: The Decline of a High Trust Society
I’ve lived in America now for over 26+ years. It is a really different place now to say the least. I remember a high functioning, high trust and optimistic society.A place despite some slight dysfunction at the edges, stuff just worked. Boy, has that changed. Especially the high trust piece. I read a great piece by Adam Butler on the importance of trust and probably one of the reasons the West rose: https://thechoiceengine.substack.com/p/the-strip-mining-of-trust
"Trust is lubricant. It is the grease that lets the gears turn without grinding, the oil that prevents the machinery of cooperation from seizing. And because it is lubricant, it is invisible when it works. No one notices the oil until the engine burns out.
What does the market see? Trust does work markets might otherwise intermediate. Friction creates demand for products. When trust disappears, someone must sell its replacement. The lawyer who drafts the contract the handshake didn’t need. The compliance software that monitors the worker who was once trusted to do her job. The credentialing body that certifies the competence that reputation once established. The background check that investigates the neighbor who was once known. The audit that verifies the books that were once taken on faith. Each of these is a profitable service, and each becomes more profitable as trust erodes. There is now an entire industry—call it the friction industry—whose revenues depend on the continued destruction of the commons it has learned to replace.
Trust does not appear in GDP. Its absence does. When neighbors watch each other’s houses, no transaction occurs; when they install surveillance systems, GDP rises. When a handshake closes a deal, no lawyer bills; when contracts replace handshakes, the legal industry grows. The successful destruction of trust registers as economic growth—more services sold, more professionals employed, more activity to measure. A high-trust society looks, to the econometrician, poorer than a low-trust society frantically purchasing substitutes for what it has lost. We have built our measure of prosperity around what can be counted, and trust cannot be counted—only its expensive replacements can. This is how a civilization can impoverish itself while every metric shows it getting richer.
The economists call trust “social capital,” but the name obscures the crucial asymmetry. Trust is not like money. It is more like topsoil—built up over generations through countless small depositions, easily washed away in a single season of careless extraction, and once gone, recoverable only on timescales that mock human planning. The farmer who strip-mines his soil for a decade of bumper harvests will leave his children a desert. The society that strip-mines its trust for a generation of efficiency gains will leave its children something worse: institutions that still stand in their accustomed places but have been hollowed out from within, and a friction industry selling services to navigate the rubble.”
Basically there is a whole new industry that has built up around verification and adopting to the new low trust world we are in. This and continual overfinancialization and PE-ization of the US economy has really been damaging to Americans. The low trust society we have is the result.
“This is the race to the bottom that market fundamentalism calls “competition.” Each firm that defects from trust-preserving practices gains a temporary advantage. Each defection degrades the commons. The tragedy plays out not in a shared pasture but in a shared reservoir of social capital that no one owns and everyone draws down—until nothing remains to draw. And in the aftermath, the friction industry collects its rents: compliance consultants to manage the workforce that is no longer trusted, HR software to monitor the employees who are no longer known, legal teams to paper the relationships that used to operate on a handshake.
Private equity has refined this extraction into a playbook called brand arbitrage. Acquire an institution that has accumulated reputational capital over generations—a regional hospital, a beloved newspaper, a century-old consumer brand. Extract value by cutting the quality that built the reputation while riding the residual trust. The brand will carry the degraded product for years before anyone notices. By the time trust has fully eroded, the fund has exited, returns secured. The shell remains. The commons has been enclosed.
The extraction also triggers arms races that consume what trust would have conserved. Surveillance begets gaming begets more surveillance; credentials that can be gamed demand more credentials; fraud that exploits low trust demands detection that sophisticated actors learn to evade. Each cycle forces greater investment in verification, compliance, and enforcement—resources a high-trust society would have devoted to cooperation and production.
But these resources do not disappear. They flow to the industries that sell verification, compliance, and enforcement. The arms race is not merely overhead; it is revenue—and because it is revenue, it registers as growth. The econometrician sees prosperity where a society sees decay. An entire sector of the economy now depends on the perpetuation of distrust, and that sector has every incentive to ensure the arms race continues. The extraction machine doesn’t merely deplete trust; it creates the incentives for its own metastasis."
I get it. What Butler describes is at macro economic level. At the political level the same erosion in trust happened too. First, we had Iraq War 2 where we went to war and accomplished what? All due to Bush Jr & his NeoCon moron advisors. Then the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 where Wall Street was bailed out but regular folks were not. Followed by the cultural wars & rise of Woke & DEI garbage. Then add on top the gross incompetence we saw of almost all the global and national institutions in 2020 Covid pandemic lockdowns. The disastrous presidency of Biden (who I voted for embarrassingly enough). No wonder we have so little faith in our institutions. Our corporate and political elites failed us. They have proven to be grossly incompetent and venal. I know the Clintons, Obama & Biden were all corrupt but at least pretended not to be. Congress is full of crooks. Under Trump 2, the corruption and self dealing has become so open that people call it GAG=The Golden Age of Grifting. It is so obscene. There are some days I feel like BIATFD aka “Burn It All The F-ck Down”, but my pragmatic dad mind takes over and I get back on track.
Add on top the impending AI wave that is coming where there will be many white collar jobs wiped out. Yet Silicon Valley folks say “trust us” AI will be good for you. No surprise most Americans and most regular people don’t buy it. The tech we have built has both lifted and hurt them.
Understanding the history and how we got here is the first step to fixing our low trust society. Not sure it’s possible but we have to try. I remember it could be worse, despite everything it always can be worse. And there is always hope.
It starts with getting yourself and home in order first. Get strong. Understand where the world is going and how the economy will look in the Age of AI. Position yourself properly. Get rich by actually making and building stuff, not just by pure financial methods. Build your network. Help others. Build trust. We all need each other in the upcoming storm.
To sum this up even simpler and better, David Mattin wrote:
“But I know what I'm doing:
— Own hard assets.
— Find meaning through people and nature.
— Make your family a place of stability.
A harsh wind is coming. You're going to need each other.”
Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
Damn, this was good. Not as dark as Game of Thrones but a prequel to GoT.
According to Grok: “Set in the same Westeros universe but on a much smaller, more intimate scale, it focuses on the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall (Dunk) and his squire Egg (a young Aegon Targaryen), drawing from George R.R. Martin's beloved Dunk and Egg novellas.”
One of the most important scenes was that of the Trial by Seven in episode 5 of the series.
Sir Duncan steps in to protect a puppeteer who is being attacked by prince Aerion. He does what is right despite the high price. He gets arrested and is put on trial for attacking someone from the royal family. Sir Duncan asks for trial by combat and the prince escalates to the rare Trial by 7. Seven fighters from both sides. Sir Duncan can only assemble 6 fighters on his side, so is missing one fighter.
This was an amazing scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIr5B_6E-Dk
Dunk (appealing to the crowd): M’lords! I know none of you remember Ser Arlan of Pennytree. But I was his squire. We served many of you. Ate at your tables. Slept in your halls. He was a good man. And he taught me how to be a knight. Not just sword and lance, but honor. A knight defends the innocent. That’s-that’s all I did. I was not Ser Arlan’s blood, but I have followed his example. As your sons will follow yours. Who will stand and fight with me?
Dunk: Has courage deserted the noble houses of Westeros? I will not believe it is so! Are there no true knights among you?!
[Loud banging; dramatic music swells as Prince Baelor rides forward.]
Baelor: I will take Ser Duncan’s side.
Maekar: Have you taken leave of your senses? This man attacked my son.
Baelor: This man protected the innocent. As every true knight must. Let the gods decide if he was right or wrong.
For those who did not keep up with the show, Sir Baelor is the uncle of prince Aerion & brother to Prince Maekor who is challenging Sir Duncan on the other side. What a scene.
It’s an amazing series that exemplifies knightly honor. This is what chivalry is. Protecting the innocent. Doing the right thing no matter the cost. Even if it means standing against your family.
This show came at the right time. “Good people striving to do right.”
Let’s make honor a thing again, even though we are in the Golden Age of Grifters. Be a good man AND a great man.
As Stannis Baratheon in GoT said: “Honor is not won in the clash of steel, but in the quiet choice to stand when all others kneel.” Be a hero. God is watching.
Company Golden Ages: The Magic 5 Years
There was this write up that came out in february about the “It” company of 2026, Anthropic. One of the leading AI companies that is growing like mad: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-anthropic-hive-mind-d01f768f3d7b
As of February 2026, it’s reported that their ARR is $40 billion dollars and they recently raised $30B dollars at a post money valuation of $380B usd. Incredible. I don’t think we have seen companies grow like this. And this fast. I guess we will see how long this lasts but it’s hard to argue that Anthropic is not in its magic era.
"A Golden Age is a period of intense innovation, category creation, velocity, and productivity that lasts typically several years. Golden Ages at companies have the property of attracting all the greatest talent in the industry, very quickly. That’s happening at Anthropic right now.
So now you see how the magic starts and ends. During Golden Ages, there is more work than people. And when they crash, it is because there are more people than work.
As soon as there wasn’t enough work, people began to fight over the work that was left. It kicked off a wave of empire building, territoriality, politicking, land grabs, and, as Lydia Ash taught me, Cookie Licking–a phrase folks at Microsoft had invented to accuse people of claiming work that they will never actually get around to doing."
I was lucky to experience a 5 year golden period at Yahoo!, roughly 2002-2008, where we had tremendous growth and a hothouse of talent. I caught a 4 year magical window at 500 Startups as well where the alumni have gone on to bigger and better things after.
Alas, these golden ages don’t last forever. We saw this happen at Ebay, Paypal, Google, Facebook aka META, even Coinbase. I’d say Stripe and Ramp are probably in the midst of their Golden Age right now. Golden Ages are magical times to be at these companies where you learn immensely and meet awesome people. These company mafias are invaluable for your career. So if you find yourself at one of these hot companies during their magical period, count yourself very lucky. It’s not that common, even in Silicon Valley.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads July 5th, 2026
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day……is by no means waste of time.”--John Lubbock
Love what these folks are working on. American Operator, making Main Street business accessible. Critical to the American local economy. The Operate to own model.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyWnKbOEqH4
2. A good primer on the ultra-hot sector of Defense-tech. Probably too hot in my view. Trend is your friend I guess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLJcFOWlmGE
3.The American naval blockade on Iran is about China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgIg8wMEez8
4. Great summary of the crazy AI developments right now. Funny takes too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6Uj8vzrjgQ
5.Another great episode. Some of the best and most informed views on Silicon Valley news. What it takes to thrive in the AI world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOY8hsBqjJo
6."The “let it kill you” part of the quote isn’t about self-destruction. It’s about the willingness to be consumed. To care about something enough that it inconveniences your life. That you’re still doing it when it isn’t going well, when it isn’t getting engagement, when nobody’s asking you about it at dinner.
Most self-improvement culture asks the exact opposite of you. It wants easy wins, visible metrics, shareable milestones. It is, structurally, allergic to the kind of deep commitment the quote is describing.
Meaning isn’t found. It’s built, through experimentation.
The people who end up with a genuinely purposeful relationship to what they do aren’t the ones who found the right answer quickly. They’re the ones who kept moving through enough experiences that eventually something stuck and then they committed to it seriously enough that they actually got good."
https://lifemaxxers.substack.com/p/the-case-for-treating-your-2030s
7. Leaned something new. Lots of good insights on manufacturing in America from an expert.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGQRe_HmpHU
8.The future in the eyes of one of the Big VCs. This was a good interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZDJ3jcO5UY
9.Allbirds pivot to AI and SpaceX IPO. Lots of strong opinions here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ5TEs_3Dq8
10."For entrepreneurs, the lesson is clear: even with a 10x better solution that is already working in customers’ hands, achieving mainstream adoption takes time. Self-driving cars are already on the road and performing at a high level, yet it may take a decade or more to reach widespread adoption.
Entrepreneurs would do well to keep this in mind as they work to change the world."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/04/18/self-driving-cars-and-changing-human-behavior/
11.Obsession and winning in the age of attention.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWn3KgO9Dvk
12."France’s long-range and deep-strike portfolio is, on paper, the most ambitious in Europe. Across all capability tiers, the French industry is developing or has recently contracted more distinct long-range strike systems than any other European state."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/french-long-range-and-deep-strike
13."One query I get often: “What class/skill would you suggest our kids take/learn to compete in the modern economy?” A: Storytelling. The flow of capital, like the trajectory of history, clots around compelling stories. Entrepreneurs, aka storytellers, deploy a narrative that captures imaginations and capital to pull the future forward. Before America was a nation, it was a story told by traitors who recast their rebellious colonies as bastions of liberty and themselves as patriots.
Mastery of narrative is humanity’s superpower, as the arc of evolution bends toward good storytellers. Communities with a larger share of skilled storytellers experience greater levels of cooperation and procreation. Storytelling reinforces their evolutionary resilience, efficiently transmitting survival-relevant information."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/moonshot
14.Good list of some good city options outside of the big 4 in Japan. Very helpful.
https://palombo.substack.com/p/the-7-japanese-cities-people-are
15."Yet for all that, it is difficult to tell just how much demographics are a constraining factor at the present moment. What would the fighting look like if 80% of soldiers in Ukraine were under 30? Would more effective infiltration operations enable one side to collapse the other’s lines? Could a much higher operational tempo create a true breakthrough? Or would the density of ranged weapons simply negate all the advantages of youthly vigor?
I strongly suspect most observers would lean heavily toward the latter answer; given the compounding effects of small advantages, I’m not so sure. It is precisely because we have not seen a successful operational breakthrough that we don’t have a standard whereby to judge the importance of troop quality. It remains one factor among many to keep an eye on."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/warfare-in-an-aging-world
16."Great Houses — as I call them — exist because they are the optimal social form for managing the long and largely illegible training process to produce low-time preference, high-character, high-trust people that can develop, use, and monetize ‘aristocratic’ technologies — those which are characterized by expensive, steep, long learning curves and a vast gulf in output between novice and master.
A family that does not have such a technology can take advantage of a temporary trend or opportunity to accumulate great wealth in a single generation, but can lose it in the next. A family that does have one can err for decades and still return, if the rare underlying capability remains."
https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/permanence-is-an-undervalued-asset
17."Effectively, the markets are pricing a binary outcome: a long war and the potential for catastrophic damage to priceless assets, or a sudden peace and the rush of supply it would bring. If one scenario implies $150 oil and the other $50, is a rough price of $90 all that far off? Yes, a few refiners in a couple of parts of the world feel the need to pay nosebleed prices now, and those make for great fodder on Twitter, but markets this significant are not to be disregarded.
Of course, each day that Hormuz remains closed, the global supply deficit grows. A broader population of oil-thirsty nations will dent the potential price impact of a sudden reopening. Oil prices that creep higher while the current pause in fighting holds are certainly consistent with this line of thinking. Additionally, if a full-blown attack on infrastructure occurs, or if the Houthis close the Red Sea, the lower end of the potential price range evaporates while the upper end expands. The price action in such a scenario would be unfathomably violent, especially at the front end of the curve."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/backwards-looking
18."If that is right, the rupture did not begin in 2016. Across geopolitics, energy, technology, and politics, the architecture of the present decade looks to have been largely in place by the end of 2014."
https://www.driftsignal.com/p/the-year-2014-and-the-origins-of
19."Focus is what determines what will or will not appear in your consciousness.
What does this have to do with creativity?
Everything.
Creativity is your ability to see what others can’t.
It is how you connect two seemingly unrelated topics and make them fit perfectly together.
It is how you articulate ideas that makes people go: “How the hell did this person say it?”
It is how you can create great products, start trends, and light up a movement.
Creativity is a skill you developed through focus and intentional practice."
https://hussainibarra.substack.com/p/how-to-become-disgustingly-creative
20."The man who eats alone, reads a book, orders a second glass, and doesn’t check his phone is the most interesting man in the restaurant. He doesn’t know it. Everyone else does. The waitress is glancing over. The couple at the next table have built an entire backstory for him in their heads. He’s simply sat there — but sat there with a stillness that no other man in the room is pulling off, because no other man in the room has learnt how.
A man at ease with his own company is instantly legible as a man who has things in his life that other people want to be near."
https://lifemaxxers.substack.com/p/the-lifemaxxers-guide-to-the-summer
21."The ultimate status symbol is having a career that looks like a series of lucky breaks to an outsider, but is actually a sequence of highly calculated Intensity Spikes. It signals that you don’t work for time; you work for Results. While the masses are proud of their “365-day streaks,” the Sovereign is proud of his 24-hour Dominance."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-consistency-myth
22."The project scope also increased dramatically. The Creatine supply chain is not a “nutrition” supply chain, but rather an industrial one. The two precursors are the roots of a massive product tree that spans into the billions of dollars across markets."
https://www.broscienceclub.com/p/disciplus-accelerator-and-the-future
23."There is no permanent business model on the internet. Forget about one method. One source of traffic or one business mechanism. Sooner or later, it will stop working. Or it will get saturated to a point where your method will no longer be efficient. It is the nature of the online business. Your ability to reinvent yourself and adapt what you do is what will keep you in the online money-making game."
https://www.beautyofsaas.com/p/the-online-business-advice-no-one-profits-from-telling-you
24."The strategic insight that separates the winners from the losers in this transition is not technical—it is architectural. The organizations and investors who understand that agentic AI is an organizational design problem as much as a technology problem will be positioned correctly.
The shift from Human-in-the-loop to Human-on-the-loop is not about removing humans from decisions. It is about moving humans up the abstraction stack—from approving individual actions to designing the policies, authority structures, and exception frameworks that govern thousands of autonomous actions. That shift requires new infrastructure, new governance frameworks, new liability structures, and new professional disciplines.
The companies building those foundations—governance tooling, vertical compliance infrastructure, outcome-delivery operations—are building the load-bearing walls of the next enterprise technology era. Everything else is interior decoration."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/blue-ocean-opportunities-in-the-agentic
25.US grand geopolitical strategy or the lack thereof.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hauSfd65lDM&t=899s
26."The standard model of industrial policy — temporary export subsidies — imagines these as being provided at taxpayer expense. But if financial intermediaries are important — and most rapidly industrializing countries rely heavily on banks rather than on markets for financing — then it’s not so simple. A wave of corporate failures may be healthy for margins, but could cause years of low growth as banks are paralyzed with fear and tethered to zombie companies. And it’s not clear that state ownership and control of the banking system is an effective remedy, because even in a communist system, middle managers are still probably afraid for their personal careers (or their lives) if their institutions perform poorly.
This means we shouldn’t hail the Chinese industrial policy experiment as a success until we wait a few years. More generally, I think discussions of industrial policy tend to downplay the role of financial systems, and banking systems in particular. "
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/updated-thoughts-on-industrial-policy
27.Probably one of the best and deepest interviews with Tim Ferriss I've listened to in a few years. It's really interesting and wide ranging.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6NYNOejPWc&t=2012s
28."To the Gundo bros, being alive in 2026 is spectacular: it’s the age of splitting atoms, turning sewage to fuel and catching rockets with chopsticks.
The best of American excellence is not locked in the past, buried alongside the Wright brothers and Manhattan Project engineers. It’s in the present, hunched over a piece of machinery in El Segundo, wrench in one hand, a Celsius in the other."
https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2026/04/21/el-segundo-hard-tech-hub-jakob-diepenbrock/
29."The cheap missiles could restore the U.S. military’s ability to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan. But there’s still a window of vulnerability between now and the end of 2027 as the JASSM inventory reaches a new low before large numbers of Rusty Daggers reach the bomber wings."
https://www.trenchart.us/p/this-cheap-cruise-missile-could-salvage
30."In other words, American youngsters idealizing China — without actually engaging with China or knowing much about it — is really about expressing their dissatisfaction with America.
Chinamaxxing is mostly just Americaminning.
That mirrors a larger global reaction. Donald Trump’s tariffs, threats against allies, and reckless wars have turned most of the world against America. Traditionally, confidence in U.S. leadership was higher than in Chinese leadership, but this has reversed since Trump’s election.
So in fact, I do see some real signs of China’s soft power growing organically — finding ways to flow around the walls of censorship and official marketing campaigns, exposing outsiders to a more real, raw, authentic China. It would be astonishing if a newly developed country of 1.4 billion people didn’t have plenty of natural, organic appeal. Now, despite the best efforts of the country’s masters, that appeal is starting to show itself."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/is-chinas-soft-power-really-rising
31."Omar Haroun, CEO at Eudia, talks about a “Pareto Compression,” where the old adage of 20% of inputs driving 80% of outputs is being compressed. In this new world, expertise is rewarded exponentially, with perhaps 5% of inputs driving 95% of outputs. This doesn’t mean we’re all doomed. What it means that in every role, every job function, humans will be pushed into that zone of genius, that 5% where what they do truly counts. In the case of radiologists, it’s the interpretation of non-routine cases, more patient engagement, an expansion in the need for soft skills, coordination, and communication.
Pareto Compression does not mean a compression in the number of people to do the job; it means a compression in the task-sets within every job, pushing every performer to higher, more satisfactory marginal work, on top of AI. Like the radiologists, it can expand demand, and push the role to the frontier of accretive human capability. In other cases, it doesn’t mean everyone must become an expert; on the contrary, it broadens the base of who can do the job, and opens doors.
In a competitive environment the choice of Strong vs Skinny is not an ultimatum, or a zero-sum choice; it is the requirement of every organization to dive deep into jobs, identify tasks, and choose where to apply “Skinny” and where to apply “Strong.” Most organizations will have to do both by trimming non-routine tasks with robotics and AI, and by amplifying non-routine tasks with these extraordinary new tools. The world of AI adoption is one of rote task elimination, a broadened base of who can do the work, and a Pareto Compression of expert work amplified significantly."
https://ideas.scotthartley.com/p/ai-strong-vs-skinny-leadership-tradeoffs
32."The geographical layout driving this is straightforward. Aerial drone saturation has pushed the effective kill zone out to 20-25 kilometers from the front. Any infantry movement in that corridor is hopeless. FPV drones that cost less than a decent laptop will intercept armored vehicles on the way to evacuate a position. Ukraine faces a manpower crisis compounded by a physics problem: the most important ground on the battlefield is also the most lethally inaccessible to human beings. UGVs dissolve that constraint. Lose one, absorb the cost, send another.
What is changing is the threshold for when and where human beings need to be present. The first line is becoming robotic. Humans are moving back.
The manpower dimension matters beyond Ukraine. Ukraine is fighting an adversary with three to four times its available manpower pool, and UGVs are directly softening that asymmetry — each robot that holds a position or runs a logistics route is a soldier who doesn’t need to be recruited, trained, or replaced.
The implications for Europe are significant. Rebuilding credible standing armies across the continent has stalled politically for a decade, in part because reinstating conscription is both deeply unpopular and arguably misaligned with how modern warfare actually works — what militaries need are professionals who can operate complex networked systems, not mass infantry. A robotized frontline changes that calculation. Smaller professional forces, augmented by large fleets of expendable machines, may be able to generate the combat mass that European governments cannot generate through recruitment alone."
https://defensebrief.substack.com/p/the-first-robotized-war
33."Two men. Same cancer. Same strange, impossible gratitude. The suffering didn’t create their faith. It incinerated everything that was competing with it. The noise finally stopped, and in the silence they could hear God more clearly than they ever had. I’ve noticed this pattern in my own life on a much smaller scale.
The seasons that reshaped me most were never the wins. They were the losses, the failures, the stretches where I had no move left except to pray, mean it, and need it. Suffering has a way of clearing the room. The question is whether there’s anything left when it does."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-195260819
34.Lots of big news in Silicon Valley and some of the best takes here too. Always makes me think and you get the zeitgeist of the moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s61XVZAt5ns
35."The commoditization flywheel : both companies give away complements to drive usage of the core.
The risk of this strategy to the ecosystem is that it makes previously attractive categories no longer viable. Commoditizing the complement does not demand a best-in-class replacement. A free, good-enough product is enough to change market dynamics."
https://tomtunguz.com/competitive-strategy-in-ai/
36."The nightmare scenario isn’t worldwide toll booths or even simultaneous blockades. We can tolerate higher prices and more frequent disruptions. What we shouldn’t tolerate is a descent into gangsterism. In the U.S., Donald Trump has undermined capitalism and the rule of law. (See: TikTok, tariffs, deploying prosecutions to attack Fed independence and political opponents, etc.)
Trump’s strategic incompetence in Iran is exporting gangsterism to the world. In effect, we’re trading in our world policeman badge for regional protection rackets. That’s not the art of the deal, but the illusion of the steal. The question isn’t whether America has the economic and military firepower to prosper in Trump’s gangster paradise, but what we lose when we abandon the rules-based order we helped create. A: Everything."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/freedom-of-navigation
37. Lots of good discussion on the latest Silicon Valley news. Apple CEO shakeup. Musk vs OpenAI. Cursor (60Billy!?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjePLXg64n0&t=223s
38."Zelensky is already pointing toward the reality that follows a ceasefire and it is a reality that most Western capitals have not begun to internalize.
A ceasefire does not mean the end of confrontation. It means the transformation of confrontation into a new phase of Cold War 2.0, in which Russia remains a revanchist power with unresolved territorial claims, undiminished nuclear capability, and a leadership class that views the current international order as a threat to be dismantled.
The question is not whether a ceasefire is coming. The trajectory of 2026 is making that increasingly clear, once again contrary to the mainstream opinion that insists on stalemate as the default setting. The question is whether the West will use the breathing space a ceasefire provides to prepare for what comes after — or whether it will repeat the mistake of the post-2014 period, when a Minsk process that everyone knew was failing was treated as a substitute for strategic readiness.
The ceasefire is coming. What follows it will be the test that matters."
https://velinatchakarova.substack.com/p/the-ceasefire-is-coming-putins-strongest
Rental Family: Finding Your Place
That movie was so delightful. The description of the movie: starring Brendan Fraser as the main character Phillip is as follows:
“Struggling to find purpose, an American actor lands an unusual gig with a Japanese agency to play stand-in roles for strangers. As he immerses himself in his clients' worlds, he begins to form genuine bonds that blur the lines between performance and reality. Confronting the moral complexities of his work, he soon rediscovers purpose, belonging, and the quiet beauty of human connection.”
The Tokyo city landscapes are lovely but it also shows how isolating life can be in a big city. About how complicated Japanese culture can be for foreigners. And probably for the Japanese themselves. As Shinji, the company boss says: "You could live in this country for 100 years and there will still be things you won't understand."
The work is important. When he asks his colleague why they do this work, she responds:
"These people look at you like they've been waiting for you their whole lives." The job helps fill the emotional hole in their clients.
He makes friends and real relationships along the way. He feels meaning for the first time in 7 years living in Japan. It transforms his life for the better too. He even goes to some beautiful Japanese countryside and ocean landscapes. My god, these views were beautiful.
Some great quotes and insights that I took from the movie:
“Sometimes the story we tell ourselves becomes the truth.”
“Sometimes, it’s okay to pretend”
“Sometimes all we need is for someone to look us in the eye to let us know we exist.”
There is an emotional toll that the job takes: Building relationships and feelings and cutting them off. Yet there are lighthearted moments like when he has challenges with one of his clients kids:
“She hates me.” His boss replies: “that’s what being a parent is about.” It’s funny and so real as a parent of a teen right now.
There is also a scene where the child Mia asks: “Why do adults always lie?”
Phillip responds: “It’s because it’s a lot easier than telling the truth. Sometimes they lie to protect the people they care about…..” Very real.
There is also a discussion with Kikuo-san, one of the clients on religion. He says it’s about:
“Becoming more than yourself” and “God exists in all things, God exists inside us too.”
I really believe this is true.
Ultimately it is a movie about relationships, friendship and being human. Finding closure. Finding your voice. Finding yourself. Finding family. Finding your home & belonging. Sometimes in places you don’t expect. You will love it. And if you love Japan like I do, you will enjoy this movie even more. So go watch it!
I Don’t Want To
I remember when my daughter was like 4 or 5 years old, there was this period of time, when she was in this “I don’t want to” stage. Anything or everything we asked her, she would respond in her cute voice: “I don’t want to!” It was a pain back then but I look back to this time with fondness.
“I don’t want to.” Simple words. Yet it gets drummed out of us as we grow up by our families, school, friends, work and society at large. To survive and grow up you have to do things you don’t want to do. This is normal. Most of us mindlessly do this.
You go to school and take requisite classes because you have to, like French (I grew up in Canada), math, biology, or whatever even if you didn’t enjoy the subject. I played violin and viola even though I didn’t enjoy it because my mom made me. I had to work part time jobs, go to University because I grew up in an Asian immigrant household. It literally was not NOT an option.
All of which probably caused me to rebel. I don’t like anyone telling me what to do. It’s why I went backpacking in Europe. It’s why I moved to Taiwan and taught English despite my parents' misgivings. It’s also why I ended up in SF. I wanted to chart my own path.
Yet the irony is I ended up doing a bunch of stuff I didn’t want to. An example being working for someone else. Looking back I am glad I did as I learned a lot but it cost me a lot too.
As you get older, you learn to understand the different types of “I don’t want to.” The type that is good for you and the type that is not so good for you. The good stuff: going to the gym. I hate going to the gym. But it’s so good for you. Managing your diet and having more bland protein power and veggies, all good for you. Doing the stuff on your TO DO list or having that difficult conversation with a colleague or founder or partner. It sucks but it’s better to do it. Eat the frog. Getting up early in the morning so you can steal a march on the day, yet those first five minutes up are painful.
The bad stuff for me: working for someone else. Man, that just kills my soul, being at someone’s beck and call, having to ask if I can go on vacation. Awful. Social obligations to go to events or meet someone I dislike or don’t respect. So many examples of this in Silicon Valley.
This is probably why I focus so much on optimizing my social network, optimizing for financial and time freedom. I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. And only do things I don’t want to do that are actually good for me. You should only do a select few “I don’t want to,” not all of them. As you do them over and over again, these become “I want to” and this is the secret of longevity, effectiveness and relevance.
Life is hard. It’s supposed to be. But a good life is one where you get to pick your hard.
Learning from Chamath: One of the Most Polarizing Men in Silicon Valley
I admit during the 2010s, I was a fanboy of Chamath Palihapitiya. A fellow Canuck, but from a very poor & troubled family life, he made it to Silicon Valley. Chamath really made it big as an executive at Facebook. He parlayed his fortune there into VERY successful investments in the Golden State Warriors, Slack, Groq. He was critical, outspoken, passionate, called things as he saw it and people loved it.
Until he did the SPAC thing in 2020 & 2021. Leveraging his fame and reputation to dump these stocks onto retail, with zero contrition till now btw, except to say “No crying in the casino.” That and his growing hubris due to All in Podcast fame. But he seems to have settled down. I particularly enjoyed an interview he did recently with his 2nd wife, a lovely lady entrepreneur from an Italian pharma dynasty. It humanized him. Whatever you think of him, he is damn smart and an excellent investor.
He put out a video in February that was excellent. 30 Years of Business Advice in 13 Minutes. It’s very wise.I strongly recommend you watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-LAT4HjWPo
I pulled out some key points from this video.
Thoughts on longevity and playing the infinite game. This is what the best people do. You can’t let your brain rot from longevity. We all know of people who literally dropped dead weeks into their retirement. You gotta have a mission. Longer term goal. As David Senra says: “my retirement plan is death.” Chamath gives his take on this.
“It took me 30 years to realize what I'm about to tell you in the next few minutes. You can just never stop. And that seems like a really odd thing to say, but I think people frame their life as these objectives. And the problem with having objectives is that at some point you'll meet enough of them and you'll think, "I've made it."
I think what I've learned is that there are no objectives that are worthy enough for you to say, "It's time to stop. As I keep going, I'm getting into my 50s. There are all these people that I really used to look up to who've just stopped. They're not in the arena anymore. And I just think it's insane. Why would they do that?
Then you look at somebody like Buffett and he goes and goes and goes and he's 95 and he's finally taking a half step back. Munger basically died doing the job. There are so many examples of those kinds of people and really what are they? They're not committed to a set of objectives. They're committed to learning, putting themselves at risk, surrounding themselves with people that know interesting things. And it's kept them sharp, and it's kept them vibrant.”
But it’s not just infinite games. It’s about playing the right game. The right metrics. The right priorities. I personally made the same mistakes and due to my risk aversion and lack of courage, didn’t even hit maximal money goals either unlike Chamath.
“And I think as I get older, that's really the most important goal. And if someone had told me that that was a goal, I would have made slightly different decisions. I would have
optimized less for money. I would have made some very specific decisions very
differently. I would have taken more risk, even more than I did when I was younger.”
He gives great advice on how to go after the life you want. Basically avoid debt early in your career. And not going after short term optimization. Fight the hedonic treadmill. This is what continually gets me into trouble, especially during my Yahoo! & pre-parent days. I was ridiculously wasteful and not just jumped on the hedonic treadmill with abandon but ran on it too.
“If you're going to live a life without objectives and you're actually going to live a life of process, you have to create some really good boundary conditions. What is an example of one?
You cannot have debt. Debt is one of these very simple and practical things that when and if you have it will cause you to stop. It can cause you to stop learning. It can cause you to stop taking risks. It'll cause you to seek objectives. The most obvious one being money.
And all of those short-term optimizations have huge repercussions and consequences for the next 20 and 30 and 40 years of your life. Having no debt is critical. And being able to have the discipline to not choose the things that cause you to be in debt.”
Chamath also says: Don’t believe social media and the influencers with their curated photogenic lives. You get the wrong idea of what is real. Or compare yourself to their fake life.
“And what's hard, especially for younger generations, is you spend all of this time rotting your brain with worthless social media of all of these people who are essentially lying to you about their fake life. And too many people get tricked into that life being the actual life that those people have and then as a result the life that you should be living. All of those things are oriented around money. All of them.
There's never a person that really is celebrated for a lifelong commitment to process.
Maybe Kobe Bryant and unfortunately he's not with us anymore.”
It’s funny coming from Chamath who is not known for his humility at least until recently. But humility is important if you want to thrive in this ever fast changing world. You will be wrong all the time. And it’s okay. From my own experience and data sample set, I have never met an arrogant “know it all” succeed in life.
“Number two, you need to manage your life with humility. That's something that took me a really long time to learn as well. What does that mean? It means that you have to be extremely truthful about the way that things are today because it allows you to see how things are. It allows you to share the truth with other people that allows them to actually find incredible solidarity with you.”
Your circle matters. I follow the Tai Lopez framework. Spend a third of your time with older and more experienced folks. A third of your time with peers. A third of your time with folks younger but up and coming. Chamath believes younger people give you a window into the future. I definitely agree with this. Watch what younger people are doing or the hobbies they pick up. I also continue to learn so much from my teenage daughter. And again pick the right goals.
“Three, you have to surround yourself with people that are younger than you. The
way that they see the world is just completely different. Their biases are different. Their frameworks are different. And it's hard because a lot of the time I believe that I've
learned enough where I don't have to be told I'm wrong. But that's not true. In
fact, the opposite is totally true. The more time I'm with younger people, the more I realize that everything I know is stuck in a moment in time. And while it's relevant, it'll decay in relevance.
And at some point, the way in which I think things should work will be completely and diametrically the opposite of how things will actually work. And so all these young people end up as an early warning system for the future, which is just another way of
learning.”
So, those are three practical things that somebody can do to not riddle yourself with superficial dumb objectives that'll bog you down. I was littered with dumb objectives. I
was a director, become a vice president. I was a vice president, become a senior vice president. I was a senior vice president, become a principal at a venture firm, then become a general partner. I was at Facebook, I was part of the management team. I
wanted more equity.
It's all these dumb objectives. And these dumb objectives took me away from the core 100% version of me. And it made me caricatures of myself. And it make it made me amplify small facets of myself to represent a much larger part of who I was. Not just to myself, but to the people around me.
And I don't think that that's a successful way to live one's life. Again, I think the problem with what I'm telling you is it can only be learned over time. Now, you can choose to listen to it because everybody else when they get to their late 40s, early 50s will nod their head when they listen to what I have to say. Everybody in their 20s and 30s will be like, "This is BS, This is not for me."
So, you have two choices, which is you're going to get there the easy way or the hard way. The easy way is just do these couple of simple things. The most important one is give yourself complete optionality. Preserve optionality at all costs. I try to preserve optionality in business. I try to preserve optionality when I'm negotiating. Find the space where there can be win-wins. It's a hugely powerful thing that's helped me. And what that does and how it manifests is it preserves relationships. It preserves other people's egos. It preserves other people's emotions. It forces me to be more subdued, to listen more, to talk less.
And it turns out that there are so many opportunities for people to just blow themselves up and self- emulate by doing something stupid. And for me, that framework has helped me minimize that a lot. And then the second thing is just a more philosophical one which is just to realize that if we are actually in a simulation there's a there's a level of the game
which is actually about showing you that these secrets exist and it gives you a chance and I feel like I find this now in my late 40s about to turn 50 that they're exposed to me and I'm like wow this is an incredible thing.
I didn't realize this when I was younger and as much as somebody would have tried to tell me when I was younger I ignored them. So, I only offer it up as you know, most of you will ignore it, too, but you're going to go through it.
For most of us, the biggest and most important decision is who you marry. And also how you maintain that relationship. I picked well but frankly completely screwed up the relationship. Something I’m still in the process of fixing. You will all learn quickly that peace at home leads to peace of mind. If you don’t fix this, it will bleed into the rest of your life, especially your business life.
“The most important relationship lesson I've learned is that it is really, really crucial to be married to somebody that 100% has your back. And the only way you get that is by
being completely completely honest. And that is really hard for a lot of people.
I didn't know how to be honest. I shared most things. I didn't share everything.
And that was sort of part of how I was taught just living in my family. But if
you don't learn that lesson, it comes back to bite you in the ass. In relationships,
it is so important to have your co-founder there beside you, your wife, my wife.
And you know, having gone through a divorce, which is almost like a death in the family, what I will tell you is what was missing. What was missing was just complete raw, unfiltered, unadulterated honesty. So that when things were good, we could celebrate that. But when things were bad, you could call it out and point to it and name it. And we
didn't do that. Second time around, it's completely different. And I think it's been a blessing to find that.”
Location, location, location. You have to curate and choose your environment. I would not be where I am if I did not make it to San Francisco 26+ years ago. Go to the center of the network. The middle of the action. Opportunities will abound and come your way.
“If you're young and you're ambitious, the first and most important thing is you have to be on Broadway. So depending on what it is that you want to do, if you're into politics, you need to be in Washington DC. Now, it may take you one or two turns to get there. Maybe you need to be in a state capital. That's fine, but start there. Get to Washington. If you want to be in finance, you need to get to New York or London. If you want to be in crypto, you probably need to be in Abu Dhabi. And if you want to be in tech, simply put, you just need to be in Silicon Valley.
There is no shortcut for any of these decisions. So that's number one. You
have to be where the fish are. And then the second is you should not be optimizing for compensation. This is why again you need to live humbly. You need to optimize for opportunity. When an opportunity opens itself to work with people that are smarter than you in a thing that feels like it could be a rocket ship, you just jump on and hold on. And when you don't do that and you put all this other nonsense in front of it, you will fail and ultimately you will look back and you will be miserable.”
Commit. Go hard. Stop being so weak. Build some grit and resilience. This is the biggest predictor of success in every avenue in life.
“But it's because you let all of this other stupid indirection get in the way. The number of young people I encounter who talk about all of these idiotic things like work life balance. I don't even understand what that means. When you're in a vibe state and in a flow state, what that means is that you are working in a way that gives you purpose and you're living your life in a way that gives you purpose and you blend them together. That is what you want. Where you're in a constant process where you are adding things to make your life better.
There was this incredible experiment where they took these big jugs of water and they would drop mice into the water and they would measure how long it took these mice to drown and on average, let's say it was four 4 and 1/2 minutes. Then they reran the experiment. They would drop the mice in about 30 seconds before they thought the mice would drown, they would pluck it out. They would dry it off. They would comfort it, but then they would drop the mice back in. And then that same mouse was able to survive in that water for on average 60 hours.
Now, what is the difference between a mouse that drowns in 4 minutes and a mouse that survives 60 hours? Nobody knows except what we can speculate, which is it's the brain.
And it's the brain that is unlocking and that's just in the mouse of levels of resilience and survival. That is what everybody deserves to find a place where they can go into the deep inner recesses of their mind and unlock levels that you didn't think you were capable of. Navy Seals talk about it. Athletes talk about it.
But I can tell you in business the great thing is there is no shelf life to us feeling that because unlike a Navy Seal or an athlete where you have a physical shelf life of 10 or 15 years, you can be in this game forever. So, you got to get to a place that will put you
in a position where you can be one of those mice that treads water for 60 hours because it will profoundly change you in a way that you will not appreciate except until
you've gone through it. And then you'll look at everybody else and you just won't understand why nobody else gets it.”
Avoid status games. I’ve learned that you want to do things that are authentic to you regardless of what the rest of the world or the cool kids think. You want to work on things for a long time. Chase your curiosity and interests. I’ve never gone wrong when I did this. When I chased something that truly interested me and not because it was cool or monetizable right away.
.
“The most important thing around status is that it's completely manufactured and
irrelevant. It is what people do to trick other people into wasting their precious time. And if you know that, one of the most powerful things that you can do is just to ignore all of the ways in which society tries to give you status. Because what it is actually doing is
putting a small little hook into you that it can use to pull you back.
Because if you start to buy into these things, these are things that are externally validated by somebody else. It is then somebody being able to hold some amount of judgment. It could be small, it could be large over you. And when you chase enough of these things and you chase enough status, you will be completely beholden to people who do not have your best interest at heart.
And I have learned this the hard way because there are all of these things that I've always wanted because I thought they were important. To be on this list, to be in that club, to be invited to this thing. But all of these things don't matter because they are completely contrived and you contort yourself and sometimes you'll even bend your expectations and your behaviors to be a part of it or to be acknowledged and then you're just less of a person.
Status is a completely manufactured corrupting thing that society does to hold you back. And the more that you can divorce yourself from it, it's a superpower.”
Man, this is powerful advice and insight. You can learn from anyone and should learn from everyone. Learn from your heroes. Learn from your enemies. Learn from anti-heroes. Just continue to learn.
But as usual regarding advice, most of you will probably not pay attention. People usually only learn these lessons the hard way. But as the eminently quotable David Senra says:“The hard way is the right way.” Probably because it then actually sticks.I admit during the 2010s, I was a fanboy of Chamath Palihapitiya. A fellow Canuck, but from a very poor & troubled family life, he made it to Silicon Valley. Chamath really made it big as an executive at Facebook. He parlayed his fortune there into VERY successful investments in the Golden State Warriors, Slack, Groq. He was critical, outspoken, passionate, called things as he saw it and people loved it.
Until he did the SPAC thing in 2020 & 2021. Leveraging his fame and reputation to dump these stocks onto retail, with zero contrition till now btw, except to say “No crying in the casino.” That and his growing hubris due to All in Podcast fame. But he seems to have settled down. I particularly enjoyed an interview he did recently with his 2nd wife, a lovely lady entrepreneur from an Italian pharma dynasty. It humanized him. Whatever you think of him, he is damn smart and an excellent investor.
He put out a video in February that was excellent. 30 Years of Business Advice in 13 Minutes. It’s very wise.I strongly recommend you watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-LAT4HjWPo
I pulled out some key points from this video.
Thoughts on longevity and playing the infinite game. This is what the best people do. You can’t let your brain rot from longevity. We all know of people who literally dropped dead weeks into their retirement. You gotta have a mission. Longer term goal. As David Senra says: “my retirement plan is death.” Chamath gives his take on this.
“It took me 30 years to realize what I'm about to tell you in the next few minutes. You can just never stop. And that seems like a really odd thing to say, but I think people frame their life as these objectives. And the problem with having objectives is that at some point you'll meet enough of them and you'll think, "I've made it."
I think what I've learned is that there are no objectives that are worthy enough for you to say, "It's time to stop. As I keep going, I'm getting into my 50s. There are all these people that I really used to look up to who've just stopped. They're not in the arena anymore. And I just think it's insane. Why would they do that?
Then you look at somebody like Buffett and he goes and goes and goes and he's 95 and he's finally taking a half step back. Munger basically died doing the job. There are so many examples of those kinds of people and really what are they? They're not committed to a set of objectives. They're committed to learning, putting themselves at risk, surrounding themselves with people that know interesting things. And it's kept them sharp, and it's kept them vibrant.”
But it’s not just infinite games. It’s about playing the right game. The right metrics. The right priorities. I personally made the same mistakes and due to my risk aversion and lack of courage, didn’t even hit maximal money goals either unlike Chamath.
“And I think as I get older, that's really the most important goal. And if someone had told me that that was a goal, I would have made slightly different decisions. I would have optimized less for money. I would have made some very specific decisions very differently. I would have taken more risk, even more than I did when I was younger.”
He gives great advice on how to go after the life you want. Basically avoid debt early in your career. And not going after short term optimization. Fight the hedonic treadmill. This is what continually gets me into trouble, especially during my Yahoo! & pre-parent days. I was ridiculously wasteful and not just jumped on the hedonic treadmill with abandon but ran on it too.
“If you're going to live a life without objectives and you're actually going to live a life of process, you have to create some really good boundary conditions. What is an example of one?
You cannot have debt. Debt is one of these very simple and practical things that when and if you have it will cause you to stop. It can cause you to stop learning. It can cause you to stop taking risks. It'll cause you to seek objectives. The most obvious one being money.
And all of those short-term optimizations have huge repercussions and consequences for the next 20 and 30 and 40 years of your life. Having no debt is critical. And being able to have the discipline to not choose the things that cause you to be in debt.”
Chamath also says: Don’t believe social media and the influencers with their curated photogenic lives. You get the wrong idea of what is real. Or compare yourself to their fake life.
“And what's hard, especially for younger generations, is you spend all of this time rotting your brain with worthless social media of all of these people who are essentially lying to you about their fake life. And too many people get tricked into that life being the actual life that those people have and then as a result the life that you should be living. All of those things are oriented around money. All of them.
There's never a person that really is celebrated for a lifelong commitment to process.
Maybe Kobe Bryant and unfortunately he's not with us anymore.”
It’s funny coming from Chamath who is not known for his humility at least until recently. But humility is important if you want to thrive in this ever fast changing world. You will be wrong all the time. And it’s okay. From my own experience and data sample set, I have never met an arrogant “know it all” succeed in life.
“Number two, you need to manage your life with humility. That's something that took me a really long time to learn as well. What does that mean? It means that you have to be extremely truthful about the way that things are today because it allows you to see how things are. It allows you to share the truth with other people that allows them to actually find incredible solidarity with you.”
Your circle matters. I follow the Tai Lopez framework. Spend a third of your time with older and more experienced folks. A third of your time with peers. A third of your time with folks younger but up and coming. Chamath believes younger people give you a window into the future. I definitely agree with this. Watch what younger people are doing or the hobbies they pick up. I also continue to learn so much from my teenage daughter. And again pick the right goals.
“Three, you have to surround yourself with people that are younger than you. The way that they see the world is just completely different. Their biases are different. Their frameworks are different. And it's hard because a lot of the time I believe that I've learned enough where I don't have to be told I'm wrong. But that's not true. In fact, the opposite is totally true. The more time I'm with younger people, the more I realize that everything I know is stuck in a moment in time. And while it's relevant, it'll decay in relevance.
And at some point, the way in which I think things should work will be completely and diametrically the opposite of how things will actually work. And so all these young people end up as an early warning system for the future, which is just another way of learning.”
So, those are three practical things that somebody can do to not riddle yourself with superficial dumb objectives that'll bog you down. I was littered with dumb objectives. I was a director, become a vice president. I was a vice president, become a senior vice president. I was a senior vice president, become a principal at a venture firm, then become a general partner. I was at Facebook, I was part of the management team. I wanted more equity.
It's all these dumb objectives. And these dumb objectives took me away from the core 100% version of me. And it made me caricatures of myself. And it make it made me amplify small facets of myself to represent a much larger part of who I was. Not just to myself, but to the people around me.
And I don't think that that's a successful way to live one's life. Again, I think the problem with what I'm telling you is it can only be learned over time. Now, you can choose to listen to it because everybody else when they get to their late 40s, early 50s will nod their head when they listen to what I have to say. Everybody in their 20s and 30s will be like, "This is BS, This is not for me."
So, you have two choices, which is you're going to get there the easy way or the hard way. The easy way is just do these couple of simple things. The most important one is give yourself complete optionality. Preserve optionality at all costs. I try to preserve optionality in business. I try to preserve optionality when I'm negotiating. Find the space where there can be win-wins. It's a hugely powerful thing that's helped me. And what that does and how it manifests is it preserves relationships. It preserves other people's egos. It preserves other people's emotions. It forces me to be more subdued, to listen more, to talk less.
And it turns out that there are so many opportunities for people to just blow themselves up and self- emulate by doing something stupid. And for me, that framework has helped me minimize that a lot. And then the second thing is just a more philosophical one which is just to realize that if we are actually in a simulation there's a there's a level of the game which is actually about showing you that these secrets exist and it gives you a chance and I feel like I find this now in my late 40s about to turn 50 that they're exposed to me and I'm like wow this is an incredible thing.
I didn't realize this when I was younger and as much as somebody would have tried to tell me when I was younger I ignored them. So, I only offer it up as you know, most of you will ignore it, too, but you're going to go through it.”
For most of us, the biggest and most important decision is who you marry. And also how you maintain that relationship. I picked well but frankly completely screwed up the relationship. Something I’m still in the process of fixing. You will all learn quickly that peace at home leads to peace of mind. If you don’t fix this, it will bleed into the rest of your life, especially your business life.
“The most important relationship lesson I've learned is that it is really, really crucial to be married to somebody that 100% has your back. And the only way you get that is by being completely completely honest. And that is really hard for a lot of people.
I didn't know how to be honest. I shared most things. I didn't share everything. And that was sort of part of how I was taught just living in my family. But if you don't learn that lesson, it comes back to bite you in the ass. In relationships, it is so important to have your co-founder there beside you, your wife, my wife.
And you know, having gone through a divorce, which is almost like a death in the family, what I will tell you is what was missing. What was missing was just complete raw, unfiltered, unadulterated honesty. So that when things were good, we could celebrate that. But when things were bad, you could call it out and point to it and name it. And we didn't do that. Second time around, it's completely different. And I think it's been a blessing to find that.”
Location, location, location. You have to curate and choose your environment. I would not be where I am if I did not make it to San Francisco 26+ years ago. Go to the center of the network. The middle of the action. Opportunities will abound and come your way.
“If you're young and you're ambitious, the first and most important thing is you have to be on Broadway. So depending on what it is that you want to do, if you're into politics, you need to be in Washington DC. Now, it may take you one or two turns to get there. Maybe you need to be in a state capital. That's fine, but start there. Get to Washington. If you want to be in finance, you need to get to New York or London. If you want to be in crypto, you probably need to be in Abu Dhabi. And if you want to be in tech, simply put, you just need to be in Silicon Valley.
There is no shortcut for any of these decisions. So that's number one. You have to be where the fish are. And then the second is you should not be optimizing for compensation. This is why again you need to live humbly. You need to optimize for opportunity. When an opportunity opens itself to work with people that are smarter than you in a thing that feels like it could be a rocket ship, you just jump on and hold on. And when you don't do that and you put all this other nonsense in front of it, you will fail and ultimately you will look back and you will be miserable.”
Commit. Go hard. Stop being so weak. Build some grit and resilience. This is the biggest predictor of success in every avenue in life.
“But it's because you let all of this other stupid indirection get in the way. The number of young people I encounter who talk about all of these idiotic things like work life balance. I don't even understand what that means. When you're in a vibe state and in a flow state, what that means is that you are working in a way that gives you purpose and you're living your life in a way that gives you purpose and you blend them together. That is what you want. Where you're in a constant process where you are adding things to make your life better.
There was this incredible experiment where they took these big jugs of water and they would drop mice into the water and they would measure how long it took these mice to drown and on average, let's say it was four 4 and 1/2 minutes. Then they reran the experiment. They would drop the mice in about 30 seconds before they thought the mice would drown, they would pluck it out. They would dry it off. They would comfort it, but then they would drop the mice back in. And then that same mouse was able to survive in that water for on average 60 hours.
Now, what is the difference between a mouse that drowns in 4 minutes and a mouse that survives 60 hours? Nobody knows except what we can speculate, which is it's the brain.
And it's the brain that is unlocking and that's just in the mouse of levels of resilience and survival. That is what everybody deserves to find a place where they can go into the deep inner recesses of their mind and unlock levels that you didn't think you were capable of. Navy Seals talk about it. Athletes talk about it.
But I can tell you in business the great thing is there is no shelf life to us feeling that because unlike a Navy Seal or an athlete where you have a physical shelf life of 10 or 15 years, you can be in this game forever. So, you got to get to a place that will put you in a position where you can be one of those mice that treads water for 60 hours because it will profoundly change you in a way that you will not appreciate except until you've gone through it. And then you'll look at everybody else and you just won't understand why nobody else gets it.”
Avoid status games. I’ve learned that you want to do things that are authentic to you regardless of what the rest of the world or the cool kids think. You want to work on things for a long time. Chase your curiosity and interests. I’ve never gone wrong when I did this. When I chased something that truly interested me and not because it was cool or monetizable right away.
“The most important thing around status is that it's completely manufactured and
irrelevant. It is what people do to trick other people into wasting their precious time. And if you know that, one of the most powerful things that you can do is just to ignore all of the ways in which society tries to give you status. Because what it is actually doing is putting a small little hook into you that it can use to pull you back.
Because if you start to buy into these things, these are things that are externally validated by somebody else. It is then somebody being able to hold some amount of judgment. It could be small, it could be large over you. And when you chase enough of these things and you chase enough status, you will be completely beholden to people who do not have your best interest at heart.
And I have learned this the hard way because there are all of these things that I've always wanted because I thought they were important. To be on this list, to be in that club, to be invited to this thing. But all of these things don't matter because they are completely contrived and you contort yourself and sometimes you'll even bend your expectations and your behaviors to be a part of it or to be acknowledged and then you're just less of a person.
Status is a completely manufactured corrupting thing that society does to hold you back. And the more that you can divorce yourself from it, it's a superpower.”
Man, this is powerful advice and insight. You can learn from anyone and should learn from everyone. Learn from your heroes. Learn from your enemies. Learn from anti-heroes. Just continue to learn.
But as usual regarding advice, most of you will probably not pay attention. People usually only learn these lessons the hard way. But as the eminently quotable David Senra says:“The hard way is the right way.” Probably because it then actually sticks.
Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 28th, 2026
“In summer, the song sings itself”--William Carlos Williams
Energy and the Middle East in light of the Iran war. Another good analytical discussion on what is going on and implications for the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W6cVMRDdyQ
2.This is an excellent interview. Very insightful and surprisingly introspective and thoughtful. Also good description of Ritardmaxxing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4tvVKDhpiY
3.An optimistic view of AI and its impacts. Jordi Visser approaches tech and AI via a global macro lens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2Mf3OotGrQ
4."Most men misunderstand respect. It is not given freely, nor is it earned through words. It is revealed in our conduct and built through consistent actions over time.
Being a gentleman is not about perfection, but it is about discipline. It is the daily decision to carry yourself in a way that reflects not only who you are, but who you want to be in life. In a world where standards have been lowered, the man who holds the line will always stand apart."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/ten-things-a-gentleman-never-does
5."Our strategy can be summed up as defense in depth plus diversification across multiple sovereigns (governments). The goal is that no single government, corporation, or policy can significantly disrupt your operations."
https://defieducation.substack.com/p/intro-to-decentralized-tech-and-why
6."Wars involve a process akin to price discovery in finance: they make clear what the underlying realities actually are. The Crimean War, for example, simply demonstrated that the British Army and state were not modern and not fit for purpose. The regimental system as it then was, where commissions could be purchased, the life of an officer was primarily social, and there was little training and no doctrine, could be and was defended before the War: Wellington, Waterloo, aristocracy as the backbone of the nation etc. After the War, such defences were simply not possible.
And much the same was true of Ukraine. It suddenly became obvious to all that the US already had little military power in Europe and was no longer a major player in the region, that much western weaponry was poorly adapted to modern war, that western ammunition stocks were inadequate and that the quality and quantity of Russian military power had been greatly underestimated. And in some ways the most worrying realisation was that there was nothing practical the West could do about any of these problems in the short or medium term. This could be denied before 2022: it could not be denied afterwards.
The fact is that the ability of the defender to damage and destroy very expensive weapons platforms is already prohibitive, and can only increase. The other is that western ability to even sustain, let alone operate, its armed forces, requires a constant supply of strategic commodities. One of the things that has been “discovered” over the last few years is that modern western “just in time” militaries are optimised for peacetime, not for fighting. Such problems as limited quantities of equipment and even more limited spares and ordnance are not accidents, but the product of a system which prioritised “management,” in the commercial sense of keeping the minimum inventory to save money. It was assumed that any conflicts would be sufficiently short and low-intensity that this would not matter.
But even if by some miracle western forces could be expanded and defence industries relaunched, globalisation has ensured that components for western defence equipment and materials for manufacture are now sourced from all over the world. In the past this has not been a problem, but I expect that more than one nation is watching the Iranians use the economic weapon with interest.
We are going to see a substantial change in the terms of political trade, as component suppliers and producers of primary products start to realise the power that they could potentially wield over Western governments, and by extension on their military capabilities. But that’s how it is."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/how-it-is
7."Modern culture equates accessibility with success. We are told to be responsive, to network, and to be “available for a quick chat.” This is a trap. In the economy of 2026, Scarcity is the only real currency. When you are easy to reach, your time has no value. You become a resource that others use to solve their problems, rather than a Sovereign who solves his own. If your door is always open, any idiot can walk in and steal your focus."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/why-your-open-door-policy-is-a-death
8.What an excellent episode and discussion on Silicon Valley news. Lots of good insights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUngseNueP8&t=3820s
9."The most likely scenario ahead is neither full peace nor open war. Instead, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is expected to maintain de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz, supported by a broad consensus across Iran’s political spectrum, including both hardliners and reformists. Transit will remain restricted for vessels linked to the U.S., Israel, or their allies, while other ships — already including those from China, Russia, Iraq, Turkey, Thailand, Pakistan, and India — are permitted passage under an informal framework.
Trump has miscalculated again. He is trying to win the battle; Iran is focused on winning the war. In Tehran’s plan, the strait is not a tool to end the war, but a permanent fixture for its aftermath."
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/strait-of-hormuz-and-iran/
10."The hard problem is not holding heretical ideas. Anyone can do that. The hard problem is designing selection mechanisms that filter for productive unorthodoxy without filtering for conformity. This is what Prometheus attempts: presenting heretical ideas openly as a way of breaking social barriers. These are experiments in selection mechanism design.
The ideas that matter most are often the ones the machinery is designed to suppress. Not because suppression is evidence of truth, but because the machinery does not distinguish between the heretic and the crank. The ratio of world-changing insights among the uncomfortable ideas is higher than zero."
https://svrgn.substack.com/p/promethean-progress
11.This is pretty grim listening. Zeihan is always provocative.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EJ-L534fXE
12."Tracking competitors used to make sense. Who shipped the feature first. Who priced lower. Who hired the sales rep you wanted. Execution was hard, the race was about execution, and watching was a legitimate part of the playbook.
AI killed that logic. Forty minutes vs. six weeks. Anyone can build the obvious thing now, the market map, the landing page, the MVP that does what the customer said they wanted. When execution is free, there’s nothing left worth copying. The surface is drowning in adequate, and the playbook everyone’s studying is already a commodity.
What wins in the near term are secrets. Things you can only learn by going somewhere nobody else thought to look, a distribution channel that only works because you understand a specific buyer’s workflow, a technical decision that seems wrong until you’ve spent months inside the problem."
https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/your-only-competition-is-you
13."It’s an Iron Law of the Universe. No one can be achieve success without earning it for themselves.
You have to climb to the top yourself, rung by rung.
And once you’re there you’ll learn the truth: successful people don’t want to meet anyone new because every time you do all you get is: weird desperate energy; not-so-subtle attempts suss out how successful you are so they can see if you’re ‘worth their valuable time’; and pathetic attempts to get you to invest in some harebrained bullshit or, worse, become their partner in a business where you do all the work and they just kick back and tell you about their ‘valuable ideas’ "
https://www.tetramarketing.io/p/lies-that-normal-people-believe
14."Willpower is a finite resource. You wake up with a full tank and every decision you make throughout the day drains it. By 7 PM your brain is running on fumes. That is why the midnight scrolling and the junk food orders happen at night, not at 8 AM. Your defenses are down. The Sleepwalker comes out when your willpower tank hits empty.
So the Sovereign Architect builds around it.
Front-load the important actions into the morning when your tank is full. Remove decisions from your evening by pre-committing earlier in the day. Design your week so the right things happen on autopilot and the wrong things require actual effort to access. This is how the men you admire actually operate (I can tell you from experience, every sharp man I’ve met who seems “disciplined” really just has a schedule that seemingly “does” the work for him). You are building that system this month."
https://www.thefinalman.com/p/the-blueprint-that-builds-you-while
15."If you are taking your life seriously, you will recognize that your time is extremely limited. The standard path sold to you doesn’t work in excel. Go ahead and plug it in (only works under perfect conditions of no lay offs + star performer straight to hedge fund manager/Managing director/Partner etc.)
While you need that W-2 to just pay bills, its really funding the correct “Funnel” which is: 1) any recurring revenue business, 2) asymmetric investments, 3) skill stack that will be useful in 5-10 years - such as sales and 4) consistent purchase of new cash flowing assets (or building them)
If you follow the tea leaves from step one, it means that you need to become self sovereign. This means avoiding a single point of failure. You do not want: 1) one boss deciding your worth, 2) one source of income, 3) one industry determining your future and 4) one skill to pay for everything.
What usually happens? People figure out they can earn money on skill A. That’s great. Then they ignore skill B, C and D. All three of these could be new revenue streams but it is just too “painful” to get started.
Psychologically if you are earning $200K from skill A, it doesn’t make sense to earn $50K from skill B. This is how NPCs think.
A person who understands cycles? They will realize, if A plummets by 50%? Skill B may go up to $100K+. Think that through. Who is in a better position to survive the future. One guy who makes $250K from one task or a person who makes $150K from business A and $100K from business B (with neither business being in the same industry?). It’s clear as day."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/how-to-escape-the-rigged-system
16. "Hormuz has always been a chokepoint, going back thousands of years. Using it as a weapon for trade and military has been used MORE than once, as we’ll soon see.
The answer is in short:
Geography is destiny.
Chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz alter the balance of power and economics in a region. They determine the rise and fall of empires, century after century."
https://pplsartofwar.substack.com/p/the-thousand-year-chokepoint
17."What most cannot realize is that the only way you will win in this attention economy is by promoting yourself (selling + distribution). Selling yourself. Selling your work. Selling your ideas. Thinking that because you have made something, you deserve to be noticed is wrong. Producing the output has never been easier, and the barrier to entry has entirely disappeared.
Everyone is fighting for others attention. Important part? Back in the day, fighting for attention simply was not part of the game. It didn’t matter the way it does now. Simply because the world went full-on digital and now you are competing with everyone. Especially when it comes to getting someone’s attention and holding it.
Your parents were taught to blend in and not be different from each other. Why? Because it would make them look like fools. Different. Not part of the norm. The whole goal was not to stand out or do anything differently. That is not how the game is being played today, and things won’t work out in your favor if you do so.
When we say sell ourselves, we mean:
When you know how to do storytelling (sell your work and your story) and position yourself in a way that you are someone who can be trusted and counted on.
When we say distribution, we mean:
When you know how to drive traffic and hold the attention of the masses (attention hacking) in a way that makes you someone who can be trusted and counted on.
Lesson: Being humble has nothing to do with promoting yourself. The self-promotion part is mandatory, and the only way you will move forward is by doing it. Not by waiting to be recognized and rewarded accordingly.
For those who have no idea where to start with this one. Just pick one relevant platform (YouTube, Twitter…) and start posting on it. Documenting. Don’t worry about selling or marketing. Just make sure you are putting something out there for the world to see. This should help you get out of your head and overthinking phase."
https://www.beautyofsaas.com/p/get-a-degree-get-a-job-buy-a-house
18. "A student asked whether we invest in “AI companies.” The honest answer: for most companies, that is the wrong question.
Nobody introduces themselves as a “cloud company” today. Nobody says they are an “internet company.” Those became horizontal platforms that every business uses. For companies not providing core infrastructure in AI, I believe the world is going the same direction. It is not a category to invest in, but rather it is infrastructure that every company will build on. And if you’re not building with this infrastructure, you are building for the past."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/never-a-good-moment
19.Understanding where the AI agentic world is going. Lots of interesting takes and predictions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f43JCxhKLEg
20.Lots of good ideas here on how to have a better life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdxhkwLERaM
21.Learning from Elon Musk. Model the traits, not the person. Good stuff here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad2owphPILY&t=144s
22.The man exemplifying founder mode. New CEO of Opendoor. Or refounding mode. I was super impressed by this conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZlmsA4Bzk0
23."Important I think though is Europe understanding the specific prime threat - Russia - and the likes of the U.K., France, Italy perhaps not getting sidelined by broader defence ambitions. Russia is the threat and the question is how do we defend the U.K.’s shores and Europe against that specific threat. Surely with a population four times the size of Russia, and a combined GDP perhaps fifteen times, Europe can get its act together and fill the void left by the U.S.
But critically I think we need to cast off the feint hopes still that the U.S. still shares the same interests or values, or if not now will mean revert very shortly. No, what happens if it does not? We have to assume the worst, and plan for that now. If we don’t then the U.K. and Europe will be on the menu in the Great Power World seemingly craved now by Trump, Putin and Xi."
https://timothyash.substack.com/p/daddy-killed-nato
24."Despite a global bull market in energy and a shortage of liquefied natural gas (LNG) caused by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s attacks on Qatar’s LNG export facilities, spot prices for natural gas in the Permian Basin traded at deeply negative levels throughout the war.
Front-month prices at the more commonly cited Henry Hub also ground lower as the war dragged on, and currently fetch an energy-equivalent price of approximately $16 per barrel of oil. Why? Because globally elevated oil prices spur more drilling, which produces more associated natural gas than the market can handle."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/price-discovery
25."The disconnect between the epicenter of AI (San Francisco, and. more broadly, a certain subsection of Twitter) and the rest of the world is just wild. The former truly believes we’re on the verge of a world-changing paradigm shift. The latter just doesn’t care. Perception doesn’t just shape reality; it is reality. And, really, I think both can be true. In a world that lives and dies by the power of bits, well, yeah, an automatic bit generator certainly changes everything, doesn’t it?
But in a world that just wants its Uber to arrive on time, (or, even better, a Waymo with no mystery man behind the wheel), which is most of the “real world,” by the way, some super-powered coding assistant is just, like, irrelevant. And that’s what’s funny about this whole AI boom: most people don’t care. And, hysterically, they don’t have to care. I mean, like, yes, they could, hypothetically, get a lot of leverage from all of this stuff. But does it “really” matter? I’m honestly not sure."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-189218441
26.Wide ranging conversation and wisdom here. How to think and live better. By Naval: The philosopher king of Silicon Valley. (outside of Peter Thiel).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TafDme-GCc
27."Let’s recap. Most early-stage innovation comes from biotechs. But the primary exit strategy for biotechs is to sell to pharma, rather than to incur the costs of late-stage development and commercialization themselves.
This is arguably a good setup for both parties. Biotechs can have a laser focus on R&D. And there are less duplicative efforts to build massive sales forces for every company. Pharma can amortize these costs, putting “multiple products in the bag of sales reps” in a way that single-product drug companies cannot.
But there are consequences. One major issue is that the preferences and risk tolerance of big pharma can bound the set of ideas that biotech companies pursue. In other words, taste can be top down rather than bottom up."
https://centuryofbio.com/p/eroom
28."The strike campaign alone does not win Ukraine the war, nor does it eliminate Russia’s economic potential. Russia’s refining capacity remains among the largest in the world, with excess capacity to buffer the domestic fuel supply. Gasoline prices have risen, and export bans have been imposed intermittently, but fuel availability has not collapsed. Some manufacturing and processing capacity is also being dispersed eastward, beyond the reach of Ukrainian long-range drones and cruise missiles.
These points are valid, but these efforts cannot shield Russia’s war-industrial system from the blow. Dispersal is slow, costly, and logistically inefficient; it does not restore destroyed capacity and introduces supply chain friction that compounds production shortfalls. Capital expenditure on new facilities also reduces fiscal resources available for the primary war effort. Surplus capacity was already being drawn down before the deep-strike campaign intensified in 2026. Most critically, export infrastructure cannot be relocated. Primorsk, Ust-Luga, and Novorossiysk are fixed assets that will remain as vulnerable as they are central to Russia’s economy.
The cumulative effects of these constraints are real, bearing meaningfully on Russia’s budget and planning even if they fall short of collapsing its capacity to wage war. In this regard, the analogy to the Allied strategic bombing campaign against the Nazi German war economy in World War II, which I have drawn previously, remains as valid as ever.
The success of Ukraine’s effort cannot be judged solely by the absolute reduction in output achieved. It must be judged against what remains of Russian capacity relative to where it would be without the campaign. Nazi German war-industrial output continued to rise through mid-1944, yet remained significantly below what it would have been absent Allied bombing. Similarly, Russian oil-related revenues have not collapsed, but are measurably lower than they would otherwise be, and the Russian state’s fiscal planning around oil income has been materially undermined."
https://missilematters.substack.com/p/ukraines-deep-strike-drone-campaign
29."Here’s the thing that doesn’t get talked about enough. The downstream effect of having real hobbies isn’t just personal wellbeing or evolutionary signalling. It’s that it makes you a fundamentally more interesting person to be around and to talk to.
The most magnetic people you’ve ever met weren’t necessarily the most successful or the best looking or the most conventionally impressive. They had texture. They’d done things and made things and tried things. They’d failed at things publicly and kept going. And when they talked you wanted to listen because every story they told was connected to something they’d actually lived rather than something they’d consumed.
Hobbies give you material. Not in a calculated, strategic way. In the natural way that a life actually lived produces things worth saying."
https://lifemaxxers.substack.com/p/no-hobbies-no-stories-to-tell
30.What an interesting list of European cities for families.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-193981261?source=queue
31."From 2023 to 2025, the dominant logic of the AI industry was simple: whoever controls the most compute wins. Companies raced to stockpile H100s. Hyperscalers poured hundreds of billions into data centers. The implicit assumption was that the biggest model, trained on the most data, on the most hardware, would capture most of the value.
That assumption is now wrong.
In mid 2026, the ratio of inference spend to training spend is approaching 10:1. The models exist. The question now is who gets paid to run them—and at what margin. We’ve moved from a scarcity of compute to a scarcity of margin. The strategic competition has migrated from who can build the biggest brain to who can deliver intelligence at the lowest marginal cost and highest reliability."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-3-year-inference-landscape-a
32."The Creator Economy is actually the trust economy.
The person who has the most trust wins.
You build trust, nurture relationships, and sell your products through long-form content.
Podcasts, newsletters, guides, and YouTube long-form.
You get to show people you actually know what you’re saying (because a beginner won’t be able to be so persuasive and demonstrate such high understanding of the topic like you).
You also get to build trust because you also share personal perspectives with your audience. This will repel a few people, but it will attract a lot more people.
Create a genuinely helpful product (one that you wish had existed before in your life) and ask your audience, those who have the same problem as you, to support you and your work by buying your products.
You’ll make more money and have more control over your income and lifestyle than relying on a platform that doesn’t care about you.
Productize yourself."
https://hussainibarra.substack.com/p/the-world-economy-is-fcked-right
33.What a refreshing conversation. Very interesting and alternative take on building a massive company. This is a must watch. I'll be rewatching this a few times. It's the anti-Silicon Valley VC approach and I love it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFIvttHf0oo&t=67s
34.This seems to be an optimistic take. Hope it's the case.
"Washington enters the cease-fire holding all the cards: military dominance, financial strangulation and a regional architecture that has isolated Tehran from the Arab world it once sought to mobilize.
Iran’s response has been to threaten the Strait of Hormuz, the final lever a regime reaches for when it has exhausted all others. That threat is a measure of desperation, not strength.
The operation has not concluded, but the conditions for Iranian defeat are in place.
The entity that emerges from what comes next will bear little resemblance to the Islamic Republic that launched its doctrine of resistance four decades ago. What remains depends entirely on whether Tehran meets Trump’s terms."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/how-irans-mosaic-doctrine-is-fracturing
35.Basic etiquette for founders in Silicon Valley. Basic but surprisingly not common. Fun convo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp2xAwDUIB4
36.Ukraine as a winner coming out of the Iran war right now.
Be Like Joules Sullivan: “The Secret to Power, Wealth & Freedom”
I stole the subtitle from the London Real interview with Joules Sullivan. Every young man needs to watch this: https://londonreal.tv/joule-sullivan-modern-men-are-failures-ex-soldier-turned-tailor-explains-the-secret-to-power-wealth-freedom/
I’ve written about Joules Sullivan before, he was an Australian soldier, turned intelligence agent before he joined the corporate world in the protection agency space. Since then he has gone on to build several businesses & become financially independent. He is best known now as a close friend of the Tates and runs one of the top tailor shops in Dubai. He is a wise man having been on the battlefield and traveled the world. He is the epitome of “Have gun, will travel”. So there is plenty to learn from him. He is one of the few folks out there who can back up what he says.
I mined a lot of insights from the talk. He talks about preparedness. Prepper is more of an American thing but his philosophy is similar.
“Humans, like any animal, need to stay combat-ready. Most animals are always aware of predators, but modern society encourages men to be passive and unprepared.”
Basically it’s all on you and your fate in life is in your hands. You have to:
“Master a valuable skill
Outwork the competition
Take full responsibility for his life
Whether in business, relationships, or personal security, his message is clear: be the guy who’s ready for anything.
“It’s not about using those skills – it’s about having them so you don’t have to.”
“Don’t rely on others for your security or success. Be the guy who’s ready for anything – whether that’s in business, relationships, or life in general.”
To be a capable man you need to master a few things. The Big Four:
-Financial literacy
-Physical fitness
-Situational awareness
-The Softening of Men: Rejecting Modern Weakness
Especially number four. We are fed so much propaganda and slop. He believes it’s for the purpose of weakening men. And if you step back it makes sense. Most governments want control, who is hardest to control? Young men. Hence, which positive male role model have you seen in mainstream tv shows or movies in the recent decade. Maybe F1, HBO Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Top Gun 2? Otherwise, I struggle to come up with anything else. In most shows, the male is dumb, hapless, browbeaten and outsmarted by their wives and girlfriends. The narrative of sensitive men is pushed and it’s pretty damaging when you look at how weak many young men are right now in the West.
Joules: “If your dog dies, sure, cry. But if you’re breaking down over a tough day at work, you need to re-evaluate.”
As London Real wrote: “He champions stoicism, discipline, and traditional values, urging men to embrace struggle, not avoid it." I discovered this late in my life to my detriment. Well it’s never too late.
“Joule’s message is simple:
-Master a skill
-Outwork everyone
-Surround yourself with high-value people
-Reject weak societal narratives”
A good reminder for myself and others to get my Sh-t together. Singularity and chaos is coming and you have to be your own cavalry. Your family, your family line, your neighbors and your country are relying on you. So go embrace the challenges and conquer.