Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads June 21st, 2026
“The summer night is like a perfection of thought.”--Wallace Stevens
The New Startup Stack: Founders in the Age of AI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5ybaEqOEsU&t=2s
2. "What comes next is harsher because it is more intelligent. The next repricing is not about software as a category. It is about where each company actually sits once AI agents start reorganizing the stack.
That is the real divide now.
In an agentic world, being useful is not enough. The question is whether the product owns the workflow, the data, the permissions, or the control surface the agent has to pass through. Software that governs those layers gets stronger. Software that merely helps at the edge gets compressed, bundled, or subordinated.
That is the shift."
https://sightbringer.substack.com/p/the-saas-fragility-map
3."Jump is successful. It has a huge audience who is locked-in to their favorite series. Yet it has never enshittified. Why?
One of the biggest reasons, I believe, is that Shueisha is privately held. It is not beholden to shareholders who demand profits quarter over quarter. This allows them to take a longer-term view to nurturing talent.
The point here isn’t that taking investment or going public is bad. Whether individual creator, entrepreneur, or business, everyone has their own situation, their own calculus for what’s necessary at the moment. The point is that making something truly great requires time. Do you as an individual, or as an organization, have the courage to provide it?
The same might be said about Weekly Shonen Jump as a publication. In its fifty-eight years of existence, it has launched many hits — but even more failures, at least from a black-and-white, “did it become a megahit or not?” standpoint. Yet it more than endures. It continues to evolve and thrive. That isn’t thanks to money, or algorithms, or pursuing efficiency. It’s thanks to people. And perhaps that’s the most important principle of all."
https://blog.pureinventionbook.com/p/so-you-want-to-be-a-manga-millionaire
4.Lots of good takes on Silicon Valley news: OpenAI + Anthropic & AI implications in general.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMTrd9Hn3e8
5."For over a century, Iran has been a major source of capital and talent for Dubai. When Persian ports raised taxes in the early 20th century, Dubai moved in the opposite direction, establishing itself as a free port and attracting hundreds of Persian merchants. Since then, repeated policy missteps — tariffs in the 1970s, the Islamic Revolution, and ongoing restrictions — have pushed wave after wave of Iranians across the Gulf. Some 40–60% of the Emirati population may have Persian roots. Each time, people voted with their feet for a more open system — at considerable cost to the Iranian economy. Of course, the ayatollahs are not happy, to put it mildly.
And this is a lesson for all aspiring Free Cities. The world, sadly, is not becoming freer or more peaceful. To win the competition for talent and capital, your place does not have to be 100% safe — after all, there are fewer and fewer places like that. It simply has to offer more safety than alternatives.
Dubai’s experience under attack is a real-time stress test of the Free City model. The early results suggest that small, autonomous, business-oriented jurisdictions can hold their ground — by combining innovation, institutional design, and a certain refusal to panic. But the greatest test is not whether they can intercept missiles, but whether they can resist the far more familiar impulse to undermine themselves. In times of crisis, governments are tempted to overreact, overregulate, and abandon the very policies that made them successful in the first place."
https://free-cities.org/can-startup-cities-defend-themselves-ask-dubai/
6.Investing in culture, tech and youth. Anti-Fund.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0kBhGCP9Sk&t=4s
7."There’s a moment - and you won’t know exactly when it happens - where you stop asking “Will this go okay?” and start asking “What do I actually want here?”
That shift is quiet. From the outside it looks like confidence. From the inside it feels more like ease. Like something that used to cost you a lot of energy now just takes a decision.
You’re not becoming confident. You’re becoming someone who acts despite discomfort. Someone who has enough evidence to know they’ll survive whatever comes next.
That person naturally handles more. Opens more doors. Gets more out of life. Every decision you make in your courage zone expands your courage zone.
This is the actual cheat code. Not a personality trait you were born with or without. A skill. A relationship with failure that you build one uncomfortable decision at a time."
https://conductlab.substack.com/p/how-to-become-dangerously-confident
8."Is China the Don King of the Persian Gulf?
If the Strait reopens on American terms and Western commerce resumes, China will remain America’s indispensable manufacturing partner. The supply chains don’t change. The rare earth dependencies don’t change. America still can’t build the next generation of weapons systems without Chinese inputs. China keeps the contract.
If Iran wins — if the Americans withdraw and Iran maintains sovereign control of the Strait — China stays Iran’s primary weapons supplier, its largest oil customer, and its most important trading partner. Iranian crude flows to Chinese refineries at a discount. Chinese cargo flows into Iranian ports unopposed. China keeps the contract.
Show me a conflict where one country supplies both sides, and I’ll show you the country that’s actually “winning”.
The question the world should be asking is not whether America can defeat Iran. The question is whether America can afford to fight a war in which its primary economic competitor is bankrolling both corners of the ring."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/the-don-king-strategy
9."Identify one recurring expense or one helper in your business that is there to manage “complexity” rather than generate revenue. Cut them today. If the system breaks, it was built on sand. Fix the Architecture, not the symptoms. Stop being a Boss and start being an Architect.
Size is a vanity metric for those who lack leverage. Don’t build a giant; build a ghost. Ghosts are harder to kill and much more profitable."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-growth-fetish
10."America’s greatest competitive advantage isn’t its manufacturing capacity. There is no moat there; other nations can replicate that over time. It’s the US dollar’s reserve status, the depth and liquidity of American capital markets, and the sophistication of our financial risk infrastructure. These aren’t just downstream benefits of a strong economy. They are the fuel that powers American exceptionalism and dollar hegemony. A manufacturing renaissance that doesn’t leverage the depth of American capital markets is incomplete.
We need to embrace capital markets maximalism. The age of the Financial Engineer is upon us.
Every great industrial buildout in American history — oil production, railroads, the internet — was unlocked by breakthroughs in technical engineering coupled with novel financial engineering. The builders who understood both didn’t just participate in the transformation. They shaped it and profited most from it."
https://cruciblecapital.substack.com/p/capital-markets-maximalism
11."And so both industries have landed at the same destination via different roads: F1 as a taste proxy. A cultural object that is genuinely difficult to fake engagement with. You cannot simply show up to a race and absorb its credibility the way Zuckerberg tried to absorb Prada’s by sitting in the front row. The sport resists that. It’s too technical, too historical, too specific. True taste is stubbornly individualistic - it emerges gradually, through personal choices that might seem puzzling or eccentric to others but make perfect sense internally. It’s not sexy to build. It’s slow, frustrating, and sometimes embarrassing. F1 fandom, at its core, works the same way. What I’m trying to say is that I think we are going to see a rise of tastemakers and curators of taste in Formula 1, just like we saw the rise of educational content creators in sports over the past few years.
What tech and fashion are both discovering - somewhat to their discomfort - is that F1 offers something their own industries have been struggling to protect: the feeling that you earned your place in it. Fashion’s power needs to be coaxed out like a flame in the damp. You can’t do that with a wad of cash. Neither can you do it with a title sponsorship or a branded trophy trunk.
And the irony - rich and appropriate - is that the people who’ve spent the least time trying to own it understand it best."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-192686441
12."The Strait of Hormuz. One man’s satellite network. An autocracy cosplaying as a government. Three cloud providers. One island. We didn’t stumble into these chokepoints, we built them. The invisible, bipartisan hand of the market has been wrapping itself around our throat this whole time. We mistook shareholder value and purity tests for resilience, finding welcome distractions in Big Tech earnings calls and arguments over pronouns."
https://www.profgmedia.com/p/chokepoints
13."Looksmaxxing crowd is 100% correct in their current youth/dating/culture assessment. The suggestion that it is new? Not so much. Has just gotten more extreme due to massive spam related to social media. Men and women now have visual access to what the truly wealthy can and will do.
You’ll see all of these trends pick up, lots of money will be made and it’ll be up to you to adapt or not!"
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/the-looksmaxxing-trend-much-of-the
14.AI Agents in Silicon Valley and Japan! Lots of news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv-VUTGVNT8
15."Speaking with entrepreneurs and hearing their stories is an incredible gift. Entrepreneurship remains one of the most impactful ways to move society forward through innovation and invention. After hearing a pitch, I enjoy asking these questions to better understand the “why” behind the massive undertaking of building a startup. The next time you meet an entrepreneur, consider asking a few of these questions and listen closely for the story behind the story."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/04/04/the-first-five-questions-to-ask-after-a-startup-pitch/
16.Listening to this makes me very concerned about the upcoming negative impact of higher oil prices & larger geopolitical issues from the Hormuz closures. Different scenarios as of early April.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmMxtNHxHi8
17."Just as SWIFT displaced the Telex machines of my youth, digital currency innovations are changing the SWIFT settlement game. But these innovations don’t address another global problem. If the U.S. were a company, it would be seeking bankruptcy protection. All the while, its debt keeps growing and it will continue the regular printing of dollars to pay the interest and growing deficits. Over time, debasement—whether it’s the ancient Romans using less silver in their coins, or the U.S. churning out more greenbacks— destroys the value of a currency.
The only lasting solution is to back all currencies — including digital ones — with something solid and scarce: gold.
In the meantime, the world will keep refining and inventing ways to bypass SWIFT and move away from the U.S. dollar system. This trend is unstoppable, and it will have profound, worrisome, unpredictable implications for the global balance of power."
https://frankgiustra.com/posts/the-end-of-swift-dominance/
18."The coming era won’t just be about stability, but also about energy independence, food security, currency credibility, military exposure, and demographic sustainability.
Very few jurisdictions score well across all.
The real question to ask isn’t: “Where can I grow fastest?”
It is: “Where will my capital still feel boring in 15 years?”
In a world of fragmentation, currency debasement, and geopolitical stress, stability becomes the new hard currency.
Capital has already started re-pricing. Wealth is flowing to jurisdictions that offer predictability over leverage. The UAE attracted thousands of millionaires not because it was exciting, but because it was boring in the right ways – until recently.
Singapore continues to draw family offices because institutions deliver year after year. Uruguay quietly accumulates expats from unstable neighbors because nothing dramatic ever happens there.
Switzerland remains the benchmark not because it’s perfect, but because it’s been reliably perfect/imperfect in the same ways for centuries.
That’s the test."
https://palombo.substack.com/p/the-switzerlands-of-the-world
19.Understanding American maritime strategy and the infrastructure underlying the shipping industry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG5Ui05_2wE
20."Across the country, there are idle shipyards, underutilized land, dormant industrial sites, and generations of people connected to them whose skills are more transferable than anyone has told them. Communities like St. Mary Parish, LA, Cherokee, AL, and Carey, ID, ready to contribute. And beyond them, millions more Americans who can either be shown a future they can help build, or be shut out of it and left to distrust the people doing the building.
The companies above, whether they know it or not, are offering the unifying vision that politicians and the tech community have so far failed to provide. They’re not just building products. They’re making an argument, with their hiring decisions and their site selections and their community partnerships, that the future is for everyone.
That’s the call to arms that can actually move people. Not “Beat China” — but build something worth fighting for, in places worth fighting for, with people who’ve been waiting for the invitation."
https://michellevolz1.substack.com/p/beating-china-isnt-enough
21."Part of investing in the tails is that firms operate on conviction. Generally to do something truly out of the box, one partner on the team has to feel it viscerally, be unable to sleep, keep bringing up the idea at partner meetings until the rest of the team eye rolls and says “ok fine, if you love it so much you should just do it!”
Every deal requires a “burden of proof” to get done. Diligence. Calls with customers. Reference checks on the team, the cap table, the co-investors. But when one partner is going farther out into the tail, that burden of proof has to go up. You have to prove with unreasonable conviction that you want to make the investment anyway. Despite convention, despite disagreement, despite consensus opposition. Great deals are not lukewarm, they are polarizing. And if you’re an entrepreneur and some people don’t absolutely hate your idea, or think you’re crazy, you’re not swinging big enough."
https://ideas.scotthartley.com/p/alpha-lives-in-the-tails
22."When Jaswa and Katzenberg found each other through Berdakin’s introduction, they both saw an obviously complementary relationship. Katzenberg brought a lifetime of storytelling instinct, a network spanning Hollywood, Washington, and the Fortune 500, and a work ethic that borders on the superhuman (he sleeps five hours and fifteen minutes a night, a genetic trait he has had since adolescence). Jaswa brought deep product sensibility, operational experience at scale, and a first-principles approach to talent assessment inherited from his mentors at NEA, Dick Kramlich and Scott Sandell.
The holding company model gives WndrCo an unusual advantage in a world where most venture firms are dependent on management fees and carried interest. The cash generated by the Build portfolio offers the firm a degree of financial independence that most of its peers lack, and allows the partners to be patient with their venture investments in ways that the typical fund lifecycle does not permit.
What distinguishes WndrCo from other firms with operator backgrounds, and there are many, is the specificity of the value it offers founders. Every venture firm in Silicon Valley claims to be more than capital, but few can articulate exactly what that means.
Katzenberg’s contribution is perhaps the most unusual. He functions, in effect, as a storytelling consultant and an enterprise sales weapon for the companies he backs. He will sit down with a founder, go through their sales deck, and help them frame their narrative with the precision of someone who has spent forty-five years constructing stories for mass audiences."
https://blog.joinodin.com/p/the-storytellers
23."The competition with China is different. Not in its structure, but in its substrate. Great power rivalry is not new. What is new is the degree to which technology has become load-bearing in that competition. The Cold War was primarily an ideological, economic, and military fight, with technology as an important enabler. Wars we fight today may well be determined by technology, and the pace at which the underlying stack is evolving is unprecedented. What’s more, the technologies that matter today are too tightly coupled to focus on winning just one. Quantum computing requires advanced semiconductors. Those chips increasingly rely on AI to design them. AI demands far more cheap, reliable energy than the U.S. currently produces.
Technologies no longer enable competition. They are the competition, and they are compounding faster than any single offset strategy can track. That’s why the next offset strategy must look different.
Founders — not technologies — are the answer. A single bet on a single breakthrough won’t suffice. We must place thousands of bets across thousands of founders, unleashing America’s entrepreneurial ecosystem across every critical frontier simultaneously—energy, AI, space, defense, biotech, advanced manufacturing. Founders are the only organizational unit capable of keeping pace with the rate of technological change. Institutions optimize for known problems. Founders are structurally built for unknown ones. Let the best of them surprise us with solutions central planners could never predict.
Call it the Founders Offset."
https://www.firstbreakfast.com/p/the-founders-offset-why-entrepreneurs
24."As unlikely as such pondering might sound now, like all mental models, it does lead to a series of milestones to watch for in the weeks and months ahead. If we see regime-change revolutions in any of Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, or the United Arab Emirates; if any of these countries asks the US military to leave; or if Western countries cut individual deals with Iran, any or all would be signs that events are evolving in a favorable direction for China.
And if we don’t? If the US somehow manages to open the Strait of Hormuz via military means? Or achieves regime change in Iran? Or the US has enough munitions to bomb Iran “into the Stone Age”? Then perhaps the Chinese miscalculated.
Somebody certainly did. We’ll find out who soon enough."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-193353109
25."Seen from a distance, those Halloween crowds could almost make Shibuya still look like a “youth town.” But once disorder loses its boundaries, it starts feeling dangerous. In his view, that kind of atmosphere may also have helped push more ordinary visitors away.
For Osaka, the deeper problem is not just redevelopment or tourism, but the slow erosion of identity. Shibuya was once valued as a place where you could encounter a side of Tokyo that felt vivid, unpredictable, and unmistakably local. Now, he wonders where the district’s old pull
has gone."
https://www.tokyoscope.blog/p/why-shibuya-no-longer-feels-like
26."Selling your time means you get paid last. Government gets paid first, then living expense and you take what is left
Asset owners get paid first. Revenue hits owner figures out what can be expensed and how the rest gets paid out. (Dividends, salaries… you get the idea it matters a lot)
People always talk about Gross Salary when you should look at Net. If someone runs a business with $250K and another guy lives in NYC with $300K, you can easily take the $250K person and get them a high net income number ($250K just assumes pre tax income)
There is no limit to business growth, there is a pyramid and pecking order in corporate. Unless you’ve got your degree in nepotism or blackmail, the chances are slim of bypassing the entire game
By building assets you’re putting yourself into the drivers seat. You control where the car is going. And. At what pace. If you’re above average, this is a dream come true. If you believe in the old 40 year career path… well its “scary”
Control + Judgement. Build these two and you will make it. Not might. Will."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/asset-builders-vs-time-sellers-new
27."The truth of the matter is that the United States has never been as isolated as it is today. Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, has made some supportive noises in the current crisis, but that was done out of cynical calculation. No sane European leader can think that support for the United States today will be reciprocated by a Trumpist United States down the road. And while American actions have greatly benefited rivals like Russia and China, they can hardly delude themselves that the United States will reliably serve their interests in the future.
Donald Trump has claimed that the United States has never been as respected as it has been under his presidency. Of the very many untrue things he has said in his career, this is among the most absurd. There has never been a time when the United States was more distrusted, by both traditional friends and by rivals, as at the present. A successful dealmaker needs to generate a minimal amount of trust that he will uphold his end of the bargain. But reciprocity is a virtue that Trump has never understood or practiced."
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-world-simply-does-not-trust-america
28."You want to understand what The Final Man philosophy looks like in practice? Study this man. He was far from perfect. But he cracked the code on something 99% of men never will: your presence, your taste, and how you operate in a room will always outperform your genetics and your inheritance. Always.
Most men hear that and nod along. They think they understand it. But they don’t. Because they still spend their energy on the wrong shit. Still chasing the 99th percentile physique instead of the lifestyle. Still scrolling instead of building the social architecture that actually changes your life.
Onassis didn’t come from money. Greek immigrant kid. Family fled Turkey with nothing. Started in Argentina working at the telephone company, saved his pennies, and began buying old cargo ships that nobody wanted during the Depression. Twenties. By his thirties the man had a shipping fleet. By his forties, world leaders on speed dial and a 325-foot yacht that Winston Churchill vacationed on regularly.
And the craziest part? The money was his fuel. What made him a legend was how he spent it. How he moved. How he locked down every room, every restaurant, every island he walked onto."
https://www.thefinalman.com/p/how-to-live-like-playboy-mogul-aristotle
29."Taste is knowing what you like and why you like it. That’s the whole definition. A man with taste has thought about the things in his life and chosen them on purpose. The watch, the car, the glass he drinks from, the chair he sits in, the cologne if there is one. He picked all of it, and the picking itself is what gives his life a point of view.
Most men have never done this exercise. They wear what’s normal, drive what’s practical, eat what’s convenient, and drink beer because thats what men are supposed to like. Their lives are the cumulative result of a thousand tiny defaults."
https://hayescarrera.substack.com/p/the-refusal-to-be-generic
30."Walking along Japan’s Kumano Kodo trail, I found a quiet and a spiritual journey of renewal. A phrase I learned traveling the Kii Peninsula is “borrowing scenery.” When you look at a landscape, you don’t own it. You’re simply borrowing the view. It belongs to everyone and to nature itself.
Rebirth in Japan means emptying the worries from your mind, sitting in stillness, and being present in nature. Wellness here doesn’t shout. It’s quiet. And if you’re quiet long enough, you can find peace where the mountains are gods."
https://matadornetwork.com/read/kii-peninsula-japan-wellness-kumano-kodo-trail/
31."To get more insights about how such a FARP would be set up and operated, we reached out to Kyle Rempfer, a former Special Tactics Squadron (STS) airman who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. STS units are an elite cadre of operators who work to control aircraft in the air, including from airfields they establish deep inside contested territory, and direct airpower onto the enemy, among other duties, including rescuing personnel trapped behind enemy lines. They are often paired with special operations units, such as SEALs, Delta Force and Rangers, to bring their unique skills to their missions."
32."I want to explain why America’s innovation economy is not a cultural phenomenon, not a regulatory one, and not simply a matter of having more capital or talent than everyone else. Instead, it is the product of two forces: deliberate state engineering over three decades of genuine urgency, and a macroeconomic structure that continuously floods the US with foreign capital. When those two forces combined, in the 1980s and 1990s, they created something no other country has been able to replicate.
I call the mechanism at the heart of it the overflow mechanism: the process by which foreign capital, flooding into US Treasuries and blue-chip stocks, displaces domestic institutional capital up the risk curve and into venture, financing innovation at a scale that no deliberate policy could produce. Understanding it also explains why China took a radically different path, why Europe spent thirty years competing on the wrong terrain, and why that may be about to change."
https://www.driftsignal.com/p/the-overflow-mechanism
33.I read this guys' takes to get out of my bubble, even though he is pro-Russia a-hole. But sometimes he gets it right.
"Trump is one of those classic big-thinkers who is all vision and no completion, all ambition, no follow-through. Psychologically, such a profile typically develops in people with highly entitled lives who had never had to deal with the consequences of their failures due to being endowed with infinite padding for ‘soft landings’ in the form of monetary safety nets to the tune of billions of dollars. Such people develop extravagance of vision and taste, but little in the way of mental capacity for critical evaluation of the attendant costs and consequences.
In fact, it’s difficult to imagine how any deal can possibly work with a hostile third party that will openly sabotage it at every turn. How can Iran keep Hormuz open and cease all attacks if Israel simply ignores the US and continues hitting Iranian infrastructure? Will Trump stew in his ‘impotent anger’ at Bibi again?"
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/from-dire-straits-to-done-deal-triumphant
34.This was a solid interview to understand the view from top leaders & pioneers in the Defense-tech space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjNP5IOzCbA&t=2s
35.Asia-Maxxing session. This was so good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO3y5RgO-c0
36.Probably one of the most rational and sober assessments of the Iran war right now. It helps you make sense of what is happening and possible scenarios forward.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-GhCi2nYXc
37.This is a must watch to understand what's happening in the investment business and financial system at large. How we got here in 3 phases. Will be watching this a few times.