Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Jan 4th, 2026
"Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right" –Oprah Winfrey
A real American immigrant story. A Navy SEAL turned Defense-tech founder. Learned a lot here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8DjGa16PQM&t=2889s
2. "Read that again. The Netherlands seized a company. China responded by requiring RMB settlement and making European customers negotiate directly with Chinese entities while accepting they’ll get chips only after Chinese domestic demand is satisfied.
This isn’t just retaliation. This is weaponized supply chains advancing RMB internationalization while teaching Europe exactly where they sit in the global manufacturing hierarchy. The Dutch played stupid games with geopolitical theater. Europe’s automotive industry gets to win stupid prizes.
The sanctions boomerang isn’t coming back—it’s already embedded in Europe’s skull. The question isn’t whether it hits. It’s how many more times Western policymakers need to get smacked before they understand that leverage only works when you control what matters. The Dutch controlled a corporate entity. China controls the chips, controls the production, and now controls the currency those chips trade in.
That’s what leverage actually looks like."
https://no01.substack.com/p/play-stupid-games-win-stupid-prices
3. Impressive folks here. Hard tech renaissance and atoms over bits. We need to Million X the El Segundo movement in America. Mission and satisfaction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ1kHP_TRF0
4. "Even if you are a government, there are only two ways to pay for stuff, using savings or debt. For a government, savings equates to taxes. Taxes are not very popular, but spending is. Therefore, when handing out goodies to the plebes and patricians, politicians prefer to issue debt. Politicians will always favor borrowing from the future to get re-elected in the present, because when the bill comes due, they won’t be in office.
If all governments, because of the incentives of its officers, are hard wired to prefer issuing debt rather than raising taxes to hand out goodies, then the next question is how do buyers of government debt fund these purchases? Do they spend their savings/equity or finance purchases by borrowing money?"
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/hallelujah
5. "What If I started late?” You get to work harder and longer. That’s how life works. You can turn around your life at any time. Expecting to magically skip steps doesn’t exist though.
“Kids?” You cannot blame them for your failures. You brought them into the world not the other way around. Also causing psychological trauma to someone decades younger than you. Weak.
“I’m Not Risk Taking.” Cool. It is more dangerous to rely just on your W-2. The days of being at one company forever are gone. Only works at 5-10 companies on the planet. If you work at those 5-10 you already know it.
“I Don’t Have Time”: Utter nonsense. Coinbase was started on off hours after work. Go look it up. You can start a e-com business from your smartphone at this point if you’re talented. What you’re really saying is you lack priorities. Or you don’t care. Neither answer is good."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/no-non-sense-age-by-age-making-it
6. Caught up with this last week's best VC conversation on Silicon Valley online now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PNd9qV5FzA&t=2058s
7. Live Like a King in Buenos Aires. One of my favorite cities in the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DfKLar4zCw
8. "We in the west used to play dirty – and during the cold war, we were good at it. Nowadays, we leave grey-zone tactics and hybrid warfare to Russia, which is winning the disinformation war. Europe’s pride in playing by the rules might just be democracy’s achilles heel."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/04/west-moscow-berlin-airlift-cold-war-civilians
9. A spicy episode this week, but it's always educational and plenty of excellent takes on recent big tech news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MftJZXDzPpw&t=1133s
10. Lots of interesting perspectives on Silicon Valley news. Etiquette is back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv4VdtKpQQk
11. What a fascinating conversation about the new form of PE. Bending Spoons, buying digital businesses and owning them forever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLSXhmRHpFU
12. The geopolitical view of Asia Pacific & the critical importance of Australia and Japan and Taiwan for America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RxBUpHqnME&t=1s
13. "Why is NYC a great place to invest in and build companies? As I reflect on my own experiences with NYC companies, the through-line is their focus on the fundamentals. These companies aren’t (or weren’t, in the case of the ones that have exited) exciting because of hype driven by media or by massive fundraising rounds. They worked, or are working, because they look like great businesses. The teams are executing such that the P&L tells the story.
I do believe that San Francisco and Silicon Valley continue to have the highest concentration of the most ambitious founders, and likely always will. But NYC has plenty of founders with world class ambition, and most let their businesses speak for themselves, which feels different from a lot of what we see in SF.
Perhaps one of the keys is that NYC has many people, not just startup founders with world class ambition — arguably the highest concentration of any city anywhere. You may be a great founder, but you’re around great artists, bankers, chefs, lawyers, and more. When everyone around you is reaching for the top, it can’t help but raise the collective ceiling. Everyone honing their craft, finding their footwork in every field, in the city that never sleeps. Just as in San Francisco, I don’t believe elections affect this spirit; there’ll be ups and downs but NYC will always attract many of the best."
https://nbt.substack.com/p/nyc
14. "I was already a published author; a content manager for two companies, one for a big Series D fintech startup in New York City; I’d worked in broadcast journalism; I had a 7-year career in financial services.
I took those skills and created a profitable business doing what I knew and felt the market needed: someone to take complex financial content and turn it into stuff that everyone could understand and want to read.
Which brings me to today, where I have the absolute, luxurious privilege of picking what I do and who I work with to make money on my terms.
The de rigueur term is “portfolio career,” where you generate income by wearing different hats, similar to how a portfolio showcases an artist’s many mediums, or the components inside an investor’s portfolio (stocks, bonds, alternatives)."
https://shindy.substack.com/p/rituals-portfolio-career
15. "If your goal is a great lifestyle, there are countless opportunities to build a business that supports that. If your goal is to create something transformative with a major impact on your city or industry, the idea needs to be correspondingly more ambitious and scalable.
The best part is that none of this is fixed. Some entrepreneurs start with an idea that grows far beyond anything they could have imagined, and that’s the beauty of putting yourself in the arena."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/11/08/align-ambition-with-startup-idea/
16. "Post–high school, the social contract that binds America — work hard, play by the rules, and you’ll be better off than your parents were — has been severed. Seventy-year-old Americans today are, on average, 72% wealthier than they were forty years ago.
People under the age of forty are 24% less wealthy. The deliberate transfer of wealth from the young to the old in the United States over the past century has led to unaffordable and indefensible costs for education and housing and skyrocketing student debt, all of which directly affect young men. It’s why twenty-five-year-olds today make less than their parents and grandparents did at the same age, while carrying debt loads unimaginable to earlier generations.
Neither the minimum nor the median wage has kept pace with inflation or productivity gains, while housing costs have outpaced both. As the costs of college have soared beyond the reach of most families, many of the manufacturing jobs that didn’t require a college degree and were often a ticket to the middle class for (mostly) men have been offshored. A prohibitive real estate market is a contributing factor to why 60% of young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four live with their parents and 1 in 5 still live with their parents at age thirty.
Stuck and unable to afford greater economic opportunities in nearby cities, they find the same crush and collision of density, stimulation, humanity, creativity, eroticism, and conversation that urban areas offer on their phones instead. In Manhattan, a four-hundred-square-foot apartment costs $3,000 a month. In its stead is a seventeen-square-inch mobile studio apartment costing roughly $42 a month, served up by AT&T, T- Mobile, or Verizon."
https://www.profgalloway.com/notes-on-being-a-man/
17. Michael Every: Geoeconomics and some important terms: what is GDP for and the rise of Neo-Mercantilism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOF59C62G9Q
18. This is a great primer to understand stablecoins and how this is becoming the money rails of the world. Important to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FsGlsfIIkc
19. Understand your enemies. A detailed discussion on Russia and China's "complicated" historical relationship.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH_ycZYH8-s
20. Excellent episode from NIA. Some good takes on the latest news and topics on the internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DdJjs_WtIM
21. A strong case being made here that we are NOT in an AI bubble right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ze3ZNvOdRY
22. Doomberg living up to his name. Energy is life & there are huge implications of this for the EU, USA & the world at large. Don't always agree with all the takes but worth listening to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTBFzJDiWsc&t=3176s
23. An insight dense conversation on AI and its impact on the labor market and economy at large. Build your network, stack assets, learn tech & AI agents, build a personal brand and become your own business ie. portfolio career.
Economic singularity coming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aonr8aJfKb8&t=5s
24. Update take on what's happening in Ukraine right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucuMc4nxlto
25. Always insightful and fun to listen to Alex Karp of Palantir.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RG9fdLzxTaw
26. I am always happy listening to this. Even though I haven't done any B2B startups investments since Q2 2024, I still learn tons from this conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Euj5TAon_Q0&t=292s
27. "Confidence can belong to everyone who chooses to build it. It grows when we are disciplined and when we keep showing up. As we do so, we will build our skills and abilities. As our confidence grows, it will be manifested in our actions. A confident person will speak clearly, stand tall, and believe in themselves.
Whether you’re a man or a woman, confidence is not found in approval from others. Rather, it is found in the personal conviction that who you are is enough, and you are working hard to be even better."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/the-quiet-power-of-confidence
28. “Europe speaks the language of progress but thinks in the language of comfort,” Krotevych writes.
Every buzzword—”game-changer,” “AI,” “drone revolution”—creates an opiate sense of control, replacing actual preparation for war."
https://underfirenews.substack.com/p/the-drone-wall-is-a-european-myth
29. "The secretary announced two changes that address this imperative. The first is the creation of “Portfolio Acquisition Executives,” or PAEs, who “will be the single accountable official for portfolio outcomes, and will have the authority to act without running through months or even years of approval chains.” The Pentagon is putting the pebble in the right shoe, ensuring that authority and accountability for program success flow to a single person with a face and a nameplate on the door.
The second is the creation of “four-year minimum terms with two year extensions” for key program and portfolio leaders, with “incentives to competition, capability delivery time, and mission outcomes.” No more two-years-and-out. No more musical chairs. Leaders should stay with a program long enough for their career—and yes, their reputation—to be linked to the success or failure of that program.
Secretary Hegseth’s speech was a battle cry for the heretical heroes in defense."
https://www.firstbreakfast.com/p/war-footing
30. "Being right in isolation, insofar as it ever was actually true, is a dead strategy. If you have an insight but cannot coordinate follow-on capital, you lose. If the state floods your sector with subsidies favouring different players, you lose. If megafunds deploy $500 million rounds and dilute your position to irrelevance, you lose. The era of the lone wolf VC who finds the overlooked founder and waits for the world to catch up has largely passed.
Success today is all about coordination. Sam raised $6.6 billion for OpenAI by assembling Microsoft, SoftBank, Nvidia, and a consortium of megafunds. Elon built SpaceX and Tesla by coordinating NASA contracts, state subsidies, and public market capital and crypto manipulation. Jensen turned Nvidia into a 5+ trillion-dollar company by becoming the essential supplier to every AI lab and every hyperscaler simultaneously. These are the new industrialists. Like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan before them, they understand that controlling capital flows matters as much as controlling production. They coordinate capital across institutions and align coalitions around a shared vision. Financing is the key to success.
Questions.
Can you and your founders access megafunds that write $100 million checks?
Can you coordinate with corporate strategics who bring procurement and distribution?
Can you navigate policy and plug into subsidy regimes?
Can you build relationships with sovereign funds that provide patient capital at scale?
If not, you are operating in a different game than the one being played at the frontier.
The best founder today assembles coalitions of capital across VCs, corporates, and government, then aligns them around a shared vision.
The best VC today is not the one who sees the future first. Or writes the best blog. It is the one who convenes the consortium that funds it. The future that is, not the blog."
https://stateofthefuture.substack.com/p/consensus-capital
31. "Most people are used to simpler forms of investing, such as using a Robinhood account to buy a share of Google. Angel investing is a hundred times harder to do well, and those willing to put in the effort will do much better."
https://davidcummings.org/2025/11/15/where-to-start-evaluating-an-angel-investment/
32. "Men are builders. Creators. We’re designed to impose our will on the world through action—not sit at home watching other men talk about being hard.
Watching Goggins scream about staying hard doesn’t make you hard. Reading about manifestation doesn’t manifest results. Listening to a podcast about discipline doesn’t create discipline.
Action does.
Aggressive, relentless, systematic action applied until your mind rewires itself for success."
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/how-to-build-a-lethal-mindset
33. "These past couple of years have taught me a lot about how to build a life outside a high tax country and I want to lay out what I think is the best way to go about it all. If you’re sitting in Australia or any Western country feeling squeezed by taxes, cost of living, and that growing sense that the harder you work and the more successful you become, the more headwind you cop.
South America is the answer to start building something freer, and, quite frankly, a lot more fun, in 2026 (although it’s certainly not for everyone)."
https://www.geologotrader.com/p/how-to-become-a-sovereign-individual
34. "These negative shocks would be brutal for any country. But for China, which has known nothing but skyrocketing living standards for over three decades, it’s especially galling to be suddenly thrust into a world where you have to run flat-out just to stay in place.
Ten years ago, Chinese people worked hard because they knew that tomorrow would be much better than today; now, they work hard because they know that if they don’t, tomorrow will be much worse than today. Their dream has suddenly flipped from aspiration to survival."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/chinas-people-are-on-a-treadmill
35. "National service benefits everyone who serves, but the benefits are likely more profound for boys — a cohort that’s fallen farther and faster than any other group in recent memory. For boys, physical development progresses more rapidly than intellectual or emotional maturity. My friend Richard Reeves has argued in favor of “red-shirting” boys, just as we hold back college athletes for a year so they can develop further on the field. A structured period of one or two years after high school would give boys the opportunity to mature without the pressures of college or a career. It would also give some a second chance.
Former IDF boss General Aviv Kochavi called national service a “societal take two” for young Israelis. “It doesn’t matter where you came from or what your background is,” he wrote. “A mediocre pupil or youth with a criminal past who dropped out of school can leave the past behind and become an outstanding leader.” We should give the same opportunity to every young person in America.
If we want our youth to feel invested in their country, then America needs to invest in its youth."
https://www.profgalloway.com/national-service/
36. "Switching between tools incurs costs. The tools, the workflow, the prompts that I’ve optimized for Claude code must all be ported (at my expense!) to other tools.
As the capabilities of these models begin to plateau, the costs to shift increase."