Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Feb 1st, 2026
"The beginning is always today." – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
"What makes Delian distinct is the path that led to it. Before Ukraine, before defense drew the attention it has today, Kottas left Apple’s Special Projects Group and moved back to Athens — applying many of the learnings from Silicon Valley’s culture of rapid iteration, integration, and product discipline to a four-year-old defense startup now deploying systems across Europe." https://louiseboucher.substack.com/p/from-apple-to-deterrence-the-rise
2. Zeihan has some strong views on China and geopolitics in general, still worth thinking on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiT0bF3brHw&t=909s
3. "For entrepreneurs, my recommendation is to regularly ask yourself where you are on the comfort scale and when you last got truly uncomfortable in a healthy way. It is easy to coast once things are working and push only a little, but it is worth questioning whether you are pushing hard enough and whether there is an opportunity to get uncomfortable in a smart, productive way."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/12/06/uncomfortable-as-an-entrepreneur/
4. SaaS is like Japan, it’s a great market but the population is shrinking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_P-Zf8mDsk&t=280s
5. "Whether out of preemptive preparedness or simple paranoia, China’s stockpiling of energy, food, and metal supplies is at a breadth and scale that should ring global alarm bells. As a recent study from Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy points out, “energy production and storage trends are an important signal that a country may be preparing to engage in warfare,” and “such data often hide in plain sight.”
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/war-rations
6. "There's this default expectation in business that once you hit a certain revenue number, the next step is obvious. You scale. You hire. You build systems. You go from $1 million to $5 million to $10 million and more!
But there’s a lot more nuance to scaling outside of your revenue going up. Everything else gets bigger too. Your team size. Your business overhead. Your stress levels. The quantity of meetings. The new problems you have to solve and the constant fires you fight suddenly have nothing to do with the work you wanted to do in the first place.
You go from being someone who does the work to someone who manages people who do the work. And if you're anything like me, you didn't start your business to spend your days in Slack and on Zoom calls about HR issues."
https://www.justinwelsh.me/newsletter/anti-scale
7. "Marcus Aurelius never considered himself a hero. He saw himself simply as a man striving to do right in a difficult world. It is precisely that humility and discipline that make him a powerful model for the modern gentleman.
His life shows that being a gentleman is not about wealth or privilege, it is about self-mastery and virtue. Even in hardship, Marcus remained steady and principled.
If a man who commanded an empire could be good, patient, just, and kind, then surely we can do the same. We must not merely admire Marcus Aurelius, we must do our best to imitate him. In doing so, we follow the path of the true gentleman, defined not by our circumstances, but by our character."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/lessons-we-can-learn-from-marcus
8. "If Europe manages to unify more and to build up its military power, it will increase the number of great powers in the world by one. A planet with a strong Europe, America, China, Russia, and India is a better planet than one where only the last four of those are strong. If Europe shows it can act with unity and purpose, and that it has military power to be reckoned with, America and China — both countries whose leaders tend to respect raw power — may lose their disdain for the region, and return to a more diplomatic, conciliatory posture.
Ultimately, European weakness and division are the reasons the region is getting bullied by so many other powers. Reversing that weakness and division would make the bullies go away. But Europe’s people, and especially Europe’s elites, have to want it."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/europe-is-under-siege
9. This show helps me keep up with the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley. Strongly recommend this week's episode as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11AF3xb27os&t=346s
10. "This doesn’t mean people won’t keep using frontier models. It just means they will use more different types of models as AI continues to mature. When I talk to VCs they still seem mostly hung up on the “open AI will do everything and we will all use one giant model” thesis. And it’s a highly uninformed AI thesis. It violates pretty much every experience I’ve had as a technologist and business person. But the evidence they offer is “but most companies are building on just one model.”
Yeah, that’s like saying most startups only use one server with no load balancing - it isn’t a thesis on AI architecture it’s a description of what early stage looks like. It’s an AI maturity thing. 100% of the companies I know who have had an AI product in market using real intelligence in the product for any decent amount of time have moved beyond single model usage. And I know there is at least one publicly traded company that has built NeuroMetric internally to manage their own systems of models for various tasks, way before we even thought of the idea.
Systems of smaller more efficient models help ease the power and data center crisis. They make AI respond faster. They help protect corporate IP. This will have to happen for the ecosystem to advance. The next opportunities, if you are an investor, are thinking about what systems of models look like over the next 5 years. That’s where the innovation is, and that’s where the money will come from."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-biggest-ai-idea-that-most-people
11. "Indeed the obvious risk is that if Japan does not agree to Trump’s tariff agenda, the US president will demand that Japan pays more for its defence.
About 53,000 US troops are still stationed in the country.
On this point, it is the case that this writer has always viewed the relationship between the US and Japan post-1945 as that of older brother and younger brother.
And older brothers tend to like to bully younger brothers."
https://research.grizzle.com/p/whats-going-on-in-japan
12. "One of the dinner guests, a veteran of multiple Silicon Valley cycles, reframed the conversation entirely. She argued for thinking of this moment as a wildfire rather than a bubble. The metaphor landed immediately. Wildfires don’t just destroy; they’re essential to ecosystem health. They clear the dense underbrush that chokes out new growth, return nutrients to the soil, and create the conditions for the next generation of forest to thrive.
As I reflected on the wildfire metaphor, a framework emerged that revealed something deeper, built on her reframing. It offered a taxonomy for understanding who survives, who burns, and why, with specific metrics that separate the fire-resistant from the flammable.
The first web cycle burned through dot-com exuberance and left behind Google, Amazon, eBay, and PayPal: the hardy survivors of Web 1.0. The next cycle, driven by social and mobile, burned again in 2008–2009, clearing the underbrush for Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, and the offspring of Y Combinator. Both fires followed the same pattern: excessive growth, sudden correction, then renaissance.
Now, with AI, we are once again surrounded by dry brush.
The coming correction will manifest as a wildfire rather than a bubble burst. Understanding that distinction changes everything about how to survive and thrive in what comes next."
https://ceodinner.substack.com/p/the-ai-wildfire-is-coming-its-going
13. "All industries have somewhere that’s the “center of the action” and then everywhere else: New York for finance, Texas for energy, Vancouver for junior mining promoters, and obviously the Bay Area for anything to do with software and startups. But there have also always been local ecosystems and scenes, which are interesting little kingdoms in their own right, and must compete as viable career options for talented builders deciding where to preferentially attach themselves.
I think one of the most under-discussed second-order consequences of AI is that AI has changed the relationship between local tech scenes and SF. Today I want to share a few of my observations as to why:
A decade ago (relative to other times in tech history), the opportunity cost of being outside Silicon Valley was at a local low: local tech scenes were comparatively attractive.
The primary purpose of local tech scenes in that time was facilitating preferential attachment between local A-player talent and local A-tier startups.
AI has changed things in two important ways:
The opportunity cost of being anywhere other than SF is back to all-time highs.
It’s now much easier for an A-player who wants to stay local to simply start a one-person business and grow it themselves.
As a result, we should expect local tech scenes to produce promising startups and select for promising talent in a very different way than they used to."
https://www.a16z.news/p/local-tech-scenes-have-changed
14. "But what’s ailing Vegas might be harder to quantify than any material factor—closer to spiritual rot than pure economic tumult. Multiple generations of Americans have been socialized to believe that a mecca of cheap, dirty pleasures awaits in the wastelands of southern Nevada. And for a long time, that was basically true. The mythology of Las Vegas is all-day buffet counters as big as football fields, of David Copperfield tickets that cost the same as a cup of coffee, of indoor cigarettes and comped drinks and the irresponsible ideas those forces can summon in tandem.
Las Vegas took your money with gracious respect for your degeneracy, gouging you sweetly and slowly. The magnitude of excess saturated time itself. Somehow, no matter how much you lost at the casino—and you will lose at the casino—it always felt as if you got your money’s worth.
These days, though, that dream is in tatters. Millions of people seem to have determined that Las Vegas has become corroded—its joys less accessible, its humiliations too dire."
https://slate.com/business/2025/11/las-vegas-travel-sphere-hotel-donald-trump.html
15. "So where does that leave the industry when it comes to feasible, sustainable models in the world we now live in?
Those able to raise mega funds should clearly keep doing so. It may not be the traditional notion of venture but it pays off.
Those who are able to raise enough money to have a diversified portfolio and real ownership and do all of the work the fund requires without needing more than $1-$1.5 million in annual fees (per fund) should do so. That can be lucrative and the job, at its core, is still about building individual great technology companies.
Those who can get equity in sought after startups without having to write a check should do so.7 It’s a better model.
But if you can’t run a fund on a shoestring and you can’t raise billions of institutional capital and if you can’t get equity in return for your expertise? Then it’s unclear to me whether the current venture model still makes sense."
https://bradleytusk.substack.com/p/does-the-current-venture-model-still
16. This show is not just fun but it's incredibly educational. Topics are random and that is what makes this fun. Business, biohacking and lots of random Xmas gifts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxBgplN5eHg&t=3111s
17. Be curious, take risks, be an owner and be an industrialist. Do your homework. Learning from one of the pioneers of Private equity. Great conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVVcyEEess0&t=180s
18. "You have the freedom to choose where you want to live and how you want to structure your life.
It means that you do not belong to any single country’s rules and regulations by moving to places that offer greater flexibility and opportunities for personal and financial freedom.
Ungovernable doesn’t mean anti-government or rebellious for the sake of rebellion. It means:
You’re not overly dependent on one system/country
You’re not exposed to a single point of failure
Your life isn’t geographically or politically locked.
Every business builds infrastructure - backups, servers, failover systems.
But people rarely do.
Ungovernability is personal global mobility infrastructure."
https://freedomceo.substack.com/p/plan-b-the-modern-life-strategy
19. "We’re seeing more tools like Signa, Harmonic, Landscape, Tracxn, and others (including internal systems many VCs have built) use public data to surface newly minted founders and potential investment opportunities. These will only get better.
In other words, there’s no edge in sourcing and picking in the near future. All that matters is winning."
https://www.ryanhoover.me/post/all-that-matters-is-winning
20. "By choosing The Pursuit of Happiness, Jefferson prioritized future potential over past accumulation. He chose the worker over the rentier. He chose the builder over the squatter.
For much of the last 40 years, the United States has drifted into a nightmare. We have built an economy optimized for Property, not Pursuit. We tax wages (pursuit) heavily, while subsidizing debt and capital gains (property). We protect incumbents with regulatory moats while starving new entrants. We have let the “Property” of the Baby Boomers cannibalize the “Pursuit” of the Millennials and Gen Z.
We have valued the preservation of asset prices above the creation of national wealth."
https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-3-the-pursuit-of-happiness?r=50i4x
21. America's next crisis. George Friedman has been pretty accurate in his predictions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za8J12S4Kjw
22. "But the people who actually build things know: the mess is the point. The wrong turns teach you the terrain. The failed attempts reveal what the tutorials skip.
Every framework gets you to a local maximum. Someone else’s local maximum. The global maximum requires going off-road, getting lost, getting your hands dirty with problems no one’s mapped yet.
In a world where AI handles the predictable, agency plus curiosity is all that’s left. The willingness to tinker without a guide. To build without permission. To get dirty without knowing if it’ll work."
https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/get-your-hands-dirty
23. "Whether at a university, a company, or some new-fangled way of collectivizing and organizing human potential, to be futuristic is to see an expanse rather than a narrow path; to value exploration over rote answers; and to embrace curiosity over compliance."
https://nearfuturelaboratory.com/newsletters/2025/w50-y25/
24. "Let's be clear, I'm certainly not claiming that Sicily is about to undergo a boom. I am simply observing that real estate is very affordable, that you can squeeze some decent rental yields and enjoy a superb lifestyle.
Restaurants, food, etc are of amazing quality and among the most affordable in Europe and in the world.
Catania and Palermo international airports have hundreds of daily flights to everywhere in Europe and as far as NYC.
Sicily could be used as a main base in Europe seeing how accessible, affordable, and well-connected its airports are.
Combine this with special tax regimes for retirees and freelancers, and it's no wonder people are increasingly making Southern Italy their home."
https://mailchi.mp/fe55acbc45c6/southern-europe-is-the-new-eastern-europe
25. "Meanwhile, over the same period, the US did absolutely nothing to de-Sinify its own supply chain. While China hit the gym, the US partied. And partied hard: US budget deficits expanded, but pretty much just funded expansions in social benefits—social security, Medicare and Medicaid. Between 2018 and 2025, US government debt increased from US$21trn to US$38.4trn. However, none of the US$17trn or so increase in debt went into building new Hoover dams, new Tennessee Valley Authorities, new interstate highways or new railroads.
As a result, to stay with the fisticuffs analogy, seven years into the trade/tech war it increasingly looks like China played “rope-a-dope.” Like Muhammad Ali in the Rumble in the Jungle, China took the punches from her much bigger, much stronger opponent. This gave China’s opponent a false sense of security. A false sense of security which was reinforced by the very impressive relative performance of US equities against China (and everyone else) and by the strength of the US dollar."
https://research.gavekal.com/article/us-exceptionalism-versus-chinese-uninvestibility-part-i/
26. A must watch if you want to understand the economics of AI, growing compute and its implications. Incredibly instructive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmUo4841KQw&t=3219s
27. "The point here is that history suggests there is a balance to be had with vertical integration: too much leads to over capacity and dilutes returns, too little risks disappointing customers during supply shortages."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-176116253
28. One of the best weekly shows on B2B and Silicon Valley news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XkOqWdiHP0
29. Alt-Geopolitics, lots of this stuff is crazy but there are some insights on what's happening in the world (20-30%). Get out of your bubble, even if you don't agree with most of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC5TxCXh4Wc
30. "Meanwhile, even if China hold to their pledge and restrain themselves from actively exporting their system or punishing others for choosing a completely different system, they are getting to be too big to be a part of the international system not to BECOME the international system in some way. Their very success will see to it that their model is copied, and if unbalanced by a third force, the China playbook could allow authoritarian regimes to construct comfortable padded cells of their nations that can be very stable.
Crypto and the Internet could be an alternative way of human organization that beats China in hyper efficiency and so provides a roadmap for progress.
That may well be so, but I think we shouldn’t be so fast to fast forward to the future. This present moment is a rich and chaotic window of potential future outcomes that deserves our full attention. We must take the next steps very carefully wherever we are in the world as we might be living with the consequences of those choices for a long time.
The future, I believe, is not yet written. We are the skier coming down a double black diamond hill of history. Yes, we will get to the bottom one way or another pretty soon. But how we manage the process is everything."
https://taipology.substack.com/p/balaji-the-network-state-and-mark
31. How to thrive in the Age of AI, the next 3 years are critical.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KK9cpiehEU&t=1784s
32. A fun and insightful conversation on Silicon Valley news this week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiKVJD_3ziM&list=PLI0_clHshGZctchZkfCXmz7SPyuBSOoq1
33. "With the information sorted and the catalysts identified, Singh moves on to hypothesis generation. He starts asking himself: What products become possible because of these shifts? How do distribution dynamics change? What new value stacks start to form?
While doing this, Singh puts his founder hat on, using the analysis to earn credibility with the founders worth building alongside, instead of focusing on being “right” all the time. This exercise helps him turn his research into a sharper point of view—especially important in venture investing, when “everything is up and to the right.”
https://every.to/thesis/how-this-venture-capitalist-sees-into-the-post-software-future
34. "The pursuit of Warner Bros. is more than just a transaction. It’s a microcosm of a wider emergency. We can’t complain about surging costs while ignoring the factors behind them. We need to have an adult conversation, saying no to harmful deals and yes to policies that spur competition and rein in health, housing, and education costs.
It’s telling that the loudest objection to this nascent monopoly comes from a Hollywood mogul who’s never lived outside one. But we should listen to him. Consolidation is a tax on the young and the poor, levied to protect the old and the rich. Affordability begins with a simple idea: more firms, more competition, more oxygen."
https://www.profgalloway.com/the-streaming-wars-and-affordability/
35. If you understand energy, you understand geopolitics. The edge of understanding physics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0AdDGrEvrM
36. "In promotional materials, Próspera markets itself to “21st-century pioneers” craving not just laissez-faire policies but also “good times and Caribbean vibes.” Direct flights from Miami and Houston can transport these digital nomads to Roatán in less than three hours. Then, from a chaise longue on the beach, they can register a business with the tap of a button. Although only one residential building has been built so far, a forthcoming eco-condo was during my visit courting buyers seeking “more personal freedom” and less “political drama.” Próspera’s original investment plan projected that by 2030 the city would be home to 38,000 residents, and that foreign direct investment in the country would top $500 million by next year.
There are about three dozen charter cities currently operating in the world, according to an estimate from the Adrianople Group, an advisory firm that concentrates on special economic zones. Several others are under development, including the East Solano Plan, run by a real estate corporation that has spent the last seven years buying up $900 million of ranch land in the Bay Area to build a privatized alternative to San Francisco; Praxis, a forthcoming “cryptostate” on the Mediterranean; and the Free Republic of Liberland, a three-square-mile stretch of unclaimed floodplain between Serbia and Croatia. Many of the same ideologically aligned names — Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Friedman — recur as financial backers; Patrik Schumacher, principal of Zaha Hadid Architects and a critic of public housing, is behind several of their urban (or metaversal) designs.
Srinivasan, the former Coinbase chief technology officer and now an adviser to Pronomos Capital, Friedman’s fund to build start-up cities, argued in his 2022 book “The Network State” that these new business-friendly hubs would soon compete with nation-states and, one day, replace them. “The Network State” was inspired, he said, by the state of Israel. “That country was started by a book,” he tweeted in 2022, referring to Theodor Herzl’s 1896 manifesto, “The Jewish State.” “You can found a tribe,” Srinivasan said on a podcast. “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism — when a community forms online and then gathers in physical space to form a ‘reverse diaspora.’”
37. An explanation behind the new National Security Strategy. George Friedman is one of the best geopolitical analysts around.