Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads March 15th, 2026
“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow." – Audrey Hepburn
"The year-old show, at first called the Technology Brothers Podcast, is part CNBC Squawk Box, part Joe Rogan, part Daily Show. It’s available on YouTube, Spotify, and other podcasting platforms, but its spiritual home is X. “We turned the X timeline into an audiovisual show where we provide insider commentary and analysis,” says Hays.
In March, the show was rebranded to its new name, TBPN. They refined their brand kit: mahogany (“the official wood of business”), shades of green (the color of money), racing livery jackets and hats, and a hint of sci-fi. They also moved into a barrel-vaulted studio in the heart of LA with a meticulously curated back office: Glass cases of neatly stacked merch sit next to a library of leather-bound Great Books of the Western World beneath a huge American flag and black-and-white portraits of iconic investors like Peter Lynch and Charlie Munger.
As the show climbs the charts, an appearance on TBPN has become a status marker for the tech elite. Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, and Sam Altman stop by to gab. When OpenAI released its hotly anticipated GPT-5 model in August, executives from the company offered up the kind of exclusive interviews tech journalists have spent years begging for. (I should know—I’m one of them.) Yet their biggest guests are sometimes the most niche—like Soham Parekh, an Indian software engineer who became X’s main character for a day after he was caught working for multiple start-ups at the same time.
Their guests are capitalizing on the clout economy, where the line between influencer and entrepreneur is blurred and attention is the most valuable asset. The mix of A-listers and memes captures something essential about TBPN’s appeal: Through their approachable lens, fans can access a parasocial relationship with the tech elite."
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/the-technology-brothers-have-silicon-valley-in-their-thrall
2. A Deep dive into the tech media phenomenon of TBPN. If you want to keep up with building a high growth media company in the 2020s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIaXSQOHrmU
3. "In 2026 we will be watching the investors and companies bringing tech sector approaches to the core of defence, building missiles, shell factories, and integrating AI into defence technologies. This is the heart of a new arms race in which adversaries with no regard for the ethics of defence are racing ahead. If we cannot match the pace of innovation, we are exposed."
https://resiliencemedia.co/resilience-medias-predictions-for-2026/
4. "When I was at the Department of Energy working on industrial policy, I can tell you, for many of the manufacturing and critical mineral projects — projects with outcomes of $10 billion plus — decisions were made on the basis of the three or four people we had in the department who had real industry background. If those three or four people hadn’t come in, who knows where those billions of dollars would have flowed. I think that’s true of every kind of industrial policy program we’ve seen.
The pipeline of talent for people with actual industrial experience is very small. Frankly, it doesn’t exist. I was also inspired by a lot of the tech policy fellowships that have now sprung up and have been very successful in shaping AI policy and tech policy more broadly and bringing in technical talent, software engineers, AI practitioners into government. I was like, “Well, where is that for industrial policy?” It didn’t exist, so we made it."
https://www.riskgaming.com/p/the-long-game-of-american-reindustrialization
5. Balaji is smart and he really has some good points but I am not as pessimistic about America and West as he is.
But I give him credit, he is putting money where his mouth is. He is setting up a "Foundation" as per Asimov books series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDHtc2R-cIo&t=17s
6. Geopolitics in the Middle East is incredibly complicated. A deep dive into UAE as the chaos agent in the region and Africa. MBZ & the Emiratis have been quite successful projecting power up until recently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au8rfmdUGvo
7. Developments in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. EU backing UA, China backing Russia. America is now behind on key innovations in war technology driven by the Ukrainians.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhDg-tRkxIA
8. My deep dive into the complicated geopolitics of the Middle East. UAE is a pocket power and their strategies, usually at cross purposes with the rest of GCC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BmCF05sZs4&t=1s
9. The dark side of the UAE and the proxy wars and networks they have developed to project power regionally. + Incredible PR and influencer power. Money + Gold smuggling & Realpolitik at work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHwFNlNzUz4&t=2s
10. MBZ and his quest to build geopolitical power via proxy's like in Libya, Sudan, Yemen and other strategic places for them. Power grabs are always messy and bloody.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2m4Ot0HOe4
11. "Here’s my take: Firing juniors (or not hiring them in the first place) will cut financial costs at first, but it enables a long-term hidden cost, a kind of tacit debt that replaces the learning curve with a curve of shortsightedness, waste, and eventual demise. This is a suicide model.
When you replace kids who would eventually learn the know-how of any role with AI models that lack continual learning, embodiment, or a way to internalize those things you can’t read in a book, you’re signing your own death sentence. That’s a strong assertion, however, so let me make my case first before telling you the solution. You have the data, now hear the story."
https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/the-managers-apprentice
12. An interview with a legend in Silicon Valley and where A16Z is going. In light of their recent $15B Fund raise this year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8_2CSpcmls
13. This was immensely educational. A history and future of venture capital from an endowment manager’s eyes. How to stay relevant in the business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ou6D9PLSBI
14. Lots of good insights on the business of venture capital. This seems to be a A16Z week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5fTnZRsuhI&t=1s
15. "The ultimate status signal is controlling the timing of your responses.
Not wealth. Not title. Not follower count.
Temporal sovereignty."
https://substack.com/inbox/post/184415646
16. "In this regard, character is usually not destroyed, but is dissolved over time. It is worn down by tolerating what we once resisted, by lowering our standards, and putting our comforts above everything and everyone else. The temptation to take what we want for our own comfort is a dangerous thing.
Perhaps the most dangerous force of all is not temptation, but drift. Drift is what happens when no standard is consciously held. When a man stops asking himself who he is becoming. When he ceases to examine his own habits. When he allows his environment to shape him rather than choosing his environment deliberately. Because this is the truth we rarely like to admit, no man is immune to influence."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/the-quiet-work-of-becoming-a-better
17. "Doing your homework before arriving in the Bay Area and looking up people you want to meet from the same city, school or former employer can give you a leg up when landing in Silicon Valley."
https://chrisneumann.com/archives/how-to-build-a-silicon-valley-network
18. "I’ve written about this idea of founder authenticity before, through a founder diligence lens and one about founder opportunity cost. It’s an idea that recurs. Time and again, we’ve seen authentic founders push through seemingly overwhelming odds, and inauthentic ones give up or take shortcuts when things don’t go their way. It seems to be one of the best bright line tests for whether a company will be successful in the long run."
https://www.alsoblogposts.com/p/k-pop-startup-hunters
19. "Your goal? Get to a point where your investments/assets make more than your capability to earn. Once you are here the game is over.
The problem? Most people sell their time and buy distractions/status objects.
Trade time for money → rent, materials → repeat
No assets = no leverage = no future exit
No matter how old you are. 15 years old or 30. You know that your entire goal is to buy assets. Period. Become an owner with equity in something at all times with all disposable income. You’re throwing as much coal as possible into that flame as early as possible.
At a young age you might thing “okay worthless since i don’t have assets”. Well. Abilities are assets.
You must learn to sell. This is no longer negotiable. The doomers will say it can be replaced by AI. It won’t. No CEO is going to talk to Gemini or ChatGPT to decide if it should sell/buy a new company. Period.
You must build niche knowledge. This could be anything from peptides to toothpaste to pre-sleep formulas as we’ve seen in the jungle. Choose one niche and be ahead of AI (which just scrapes consensus garbage and spits it out)
Learn to create attention. Don’t care how you do it. While OnlyFans gets a lot of hate, there is something to learn from it. If you can gather a bunch of attention you will be rich.
Take a step back. If you can sell then you can build equity (you can sell a product for someone with a stake in the company OR you could sell your own product). Opens a boatload of doors. If you have niche knowledge that is ahead of masses, you are by definition an owner of a valuable asset.
“Is this going to increase my abilities or attract customers?” If the answer is no? Move on. You don’t have time to waste."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/if-starting-over-as-a-teenager-to
20. Some global macro and how to survive the global reset. A bit of libertarian bent but good to understand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVROsNCUoLs
21. "Those who believe that the debt is unsustainable believe that the government will eventually be forced to choose between outright default and “debasement” that would cheapen nominal yen claims relative to assets in other currencies as well as relative to real assets. For those who have spent decades warning—or scaremongering—about Japanese public indebtedness, the persistent (nominal) weakness of the yen in the face of rising (nominal) interest rates over the past few years therefore seems like vindication that this process is finally starting.
As of now, however, there is a more benign explanation: Japan may have finally exited its post-bubble stagnation.
The return of modest inflation alongside persistently faster wage and income growth should align with higher interest rates than those that prevailed when the economy experienced essentially no growth in yen terms between 1997 and 2019. Moreover, if the recent growth in nominal incomes is sustained, Japanese government borrowing costs would still be lower, relative to expected revenue increases, than in much of the past few decades. (That helps explains why the yen has not appreciated recently despite the apparent convergence of nominal yields with the U.S. and other G10 economies.) Far from indicating trouble, Japanese bond prices are implying that Japan has converged, in at least one important way, with the rest of the rich world."
https://theovershoot.co/p/is-japan-normal-again
22. "That means you need to make a conscious decision about whether you want to participate in the ongoing metals and mining bull market. If the answer is yes, the next step is to construct a portfolio that aligns with your risk tolerance and investment time frame.
If you feel an overwhelming urge to chase stocks on a day when everything on your screen is green, I would urge you to take a cold shower and instead channel that energy into building a watch list. Follow the stocks on your list and learn as much as you can about them over the next month. By the end of that period, I suspect you’ll have learned a great deal—and you’ll likely have a much clearer sense of when, and at what price, you’d like to buy.
Who knows? You may even get a fat-pitch buying opportunity in the meantime.
For those with a high risk tolerance, junior miners may be the right fit. For investors with a much lower tolerance for volatility, it likely makes more sense to stick with large producers or gold royalty companies such as Franco-Nevada (NYSE: FNV) or Barrick (NYSE: B)."
https://robertsinn.substack.com/p/the-psychology-of-bull-markets-greed
23. "In my view, the uncomfortable reality is that there is no coherent, well-thought out logical and rational case for why the United States needs Greenland in the way Trump describes. Neither was there a similar logical reason for Trump’s Liberation Day and the global tariff war, for capturing Maduro or for many other Trump decisions. Trump doesn’t have and doesn't really need one: he just wants Greenland because he wants it.
At some point in his life, Trump just came to like the idea of the United States having Greenland. Maybe because it looks big on a map, maybe because he wants to leave a mark on history for expanding U.S. territory, maybe because it makes so many people so angry, maybe because it’s a great distraction, maybe because of something else or maybe because of all of the above.
I would bet that people in his admin have no idea what the real reason for taking Greenland is either, just like they struggled to explain the reason behind Trump’s tariff Liberation Day. And I think that Trump probably couldn’t give one either - apart from feeling like it’s a good idea.
The bottom line is that there’s no logic behind this and there’s no point in looking for it."
https://substack.com/inbox/post/184536902
24. "I recently listened to an audiobook about the Napoleonic Wars. Overall, the book wasn’t very good, but there was one interesting part where it described Napoleon’s ruling style as being mafia-like. His insistence that other European countries buy French exports, his attempts to shut Britain out of European trade, and a bunch of his other economic policies were fundamentally gangster-ish — they were ad hoc impositions of personal power, often with an eye toward taking revenge on personal enemies and entrenching his own authority.
I immediately recognized this as Donald Trump’s style of governance. Like Napoleon, Trump’s top priority isn’t creating durable institutions that will outlive him — indeed, he regards any such institutions as threats to his own personal power. Many observers have labeled this approach “personalism” or “patrimonialism”, but it’s really just gangsterism. Trump treats America like a mafia organization, and himself as the godfather.
This is the problem with running economic policy like a gangster. In the short term, bullying people into going against their economic self-interest might get you what you want. But in the long term, it just makes the economy less efficient, while the ad-hoc nature of policymaking causes instability and uncertainty. For a few years, everyone bends the knee, but eventually things start to break."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/gangster-affordability
25. Learning from our enemies.
"Rubikon’s formation marks a departure from the ad hoc, volunteer-driven drone initiatives that characterized much of the early war effort.
Instead of bottom-up improvisation, Rubikon reflects deliberate institutional design: centralized recruitment, direct state backing, and a mandate to professionalize drone warfare within Russia’s armed forces. This top-down construction distinguishes it sharply from traditional Russian military units and from the informal structures that preceded it.
Rubikon is often described as the decisive element that pushed Ukrainian Forces out of the Kursk Region in Russia, and they maintain extensive combat experience in Pokrovsk (Donbas) and Kupiansk (Kharkiv Oblast).
With over 5,000 personnel at its disposal, Rubikon can rotate units between frontlines with deliberate frequency. This rotation generates an asymmetric information advantage: Rubikon does not become locked into a single-terrain doctrine and does not face the same Ukrainian brigades long enough for systematic counter-adaptation.
Whether this consistently translates into tactical superiority remains unclear, but the mobility itself works in Rubikon’s favor."
26. A masterclass in doing M&A and building a high growth company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yco9JP0PyLM
27. "We are drowning in “Fast Information.” We consume endless threads, bite-sized “hacks,” and reactionary op-eds under the guise of staying informed. This is a delusion. You aren’t learning; you are just renting other people’s opinions.
This constant input creates a “Mental Friction” that prevents original synthesis. If you consume the same feed as everyone else, you will inevitably think exactly like everyone else. You lose your edge because your brain has become a mirror, not a prism."
https://substack.com/inbox/post/184579968
28. "Which brings us back to that line from Three Days of the Condor. The analyst who “just reads books” isn’t a fantasy. He’s a reminder that imagination, narrative, and interpretation sit closer to the center of power than we like to admit.
The Intelligence Community and the entertainment industry are both meaning-making systems operating under scarcity—information in one case, attention in the other. One conceals reality; the other stylizes it. But both decide which stories are told, which are softened, and which never reach the public at all.
Different missions. Different aesthetics.
Same underlying logic.
And once you see it, it’s hard to unsee."
https://www.insidecyberwarfare.com/p/the-agency-and-the-industry-two-worlds
29. "This is not simply “resource imperialism.” It is not a budgetary appropriation masquerading as strategy. It is not a throwback to classical mercantilism. The evidence — from market reactions to institutional choices — points toward something more complex:
A strategy built on financial engineering and multilateral cover, designed to realign a state in the Western Hemisphere without the political costs of taxpayer-funded reconstruction.
In other words, Venezuela is a pilot — not in the old Monroe Doctrine sense of direct colonial resource control, but in a new, financially mediated model of influence where institutions, markets, and legal authority interact in place of traditional foreign aid.
If this framework succeeds, it will shape how great powers engage distressed states in the decades ahead. And if it fails, it will offer a cautionary lesson about the limits of financialized geoeconomics."
https://tanviratna.substack.com/p/us-strategy-in-venezuela-what-it
30. "President Trump is winning enough of the Monopoly board that he can confidently bring almost his entire cabinet to the upcoming WEF meeting to effectively read the Riot Act to his opponents. Opponents mean the Europeans and Canada at this point, because Russia and China are both increasingly subdued as Trump cuts off their cash and energy supply lines. Trump’s biggest opponent to the peace process now are the EU and its member states and Canada who oppose his various peace plans and actions and who continue to work with his internal opponents - The Blob as some like to call it - meaning the coalition of those who continue to try and undermine his Presidency in their effort to preserve a system that provides reliable (but often illicit) cash flows and dependable (though, bought) voter outcomes.
I’m going to argue that what we are witnessing is not WWIII. It’s also not a proxy war between the superpowers. It’s an internecine war. It’s an interstitial war. It’s something more like an American Civil War played out on the global geopolitical Monopoly Board. The divide is not over geography or even ideology. It’s more like the fight over slavery. It’s a fight over cash flows and who gets to control them. It’s not a matter of whether those cash flows are morally right or wrong. It’s just about control. I am suggesting that the situation is not a straightforward old-fashioned superpower confrontation but rather a more intricate internal power struggle."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/the-geopolitical-monopoly-board-venezuela
31. "Trump’s strategy is to limit the Blob’s influence at home and abroad, creating a showdown that manifests in voting booths across Europe, Greenland, Ukraine, Iran, and Pakistan. He hopes that voters will eject their Blob leaders, which might explain his heightened rhetoric about Greenland. The U.S. already has access to its military facilities—it’s not about taking Greenland but removing the Blob from crucial regions.
This isn’t a proxy war; it’s an interstitial and internecine conflict—not WWIII, but an American Civil War 2.0 playing out on a global stage."
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/the-geopolitical-monopoly-board-venezuela-18f
32. "Failing to adapt to tectonic shifts. If ever this were true, it’s true today.
Being physically or emotionally removed. Teams who don’t use AI daily miss the pace of change. The technology moves too fast for quarterly strategy reviews. If leadership isn’t prompting Claude or GPT every day, they’re already behind.
Cognitive biases are always hard to see in ourselves. A short seller’s mirror is a useful one at this moment in AI."
https://tomtunguz.com/dead-companies-walking/
33. This was deeply insightful. The art and science of building a venture machine. Flood the zone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OHeOZiij_M
34. This was a fun and educational interview with media and VC impresario Henry Stebbings. Chips on shoulders leads to chips in pockets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk2VN8wiTr8
35. "In the end, this isn’t really about Poland.
It’s about how we think about sovereignty and optimization in an era where geography is increasingly optional for earning income.
Portugal pioneered the “tax break for mobile talent” model with NHR. It worked brilliantly-for a decade. Then political pressure killed it. Italy tried to go ultra-premium. Greece added investment requirements.
Poland is offering what Portugal did in 2013: exceptional value for those who know where to look.
The pattern suggests this won’t last forever in its current form. Not because Poland will necessarily eliminate it, but because success breeds attention, and attention breeds political backlash.
But the question always is: what are you optimizing for?
If it’s complete tax elimination, well then you’re outside Europe entirely.
If it’s Mediterranean lifestyle with reasonable tax treatment, you’re looking at different trade-offs.
If it’s pure tax efficiency on capital gains with EU quality of life, Poland might be the best answer available in 2025.
Sovereignty in the 21st century means having options.
Poland is an option worth understanding."
https://palombo.substack.com/p/polands-flat-tax-europes-best-kept
36. "In that sense, Greenland is not the core problem but a catalyst. The real issue exposed by today’s meeting is the tension between American unilateral impulse and structural dependence on allies in an environment where power projection is hardest and cooperation matters most."
https://substack.com/inbox/post/184603356
37. "This essay will present a cornucopia of chart porn annotated with my thoughts to contextualize the co-movement of these assets. I believe Bitcoin did exactly what it was supposed to do. It rode the wave of fiat liquidity lower, specifically dollar liquidity, as Pax Americana’s credit impulse was the most important force in 2025. Gold surged as price-insensitive sovereign nations hoovered it up because they were afraid to remain in US treasuries lest Pax Americana steal their wealth like it did to Russia in 2022. The act of war committed upon Venezuela by Pax Americana most recently only intensifies the desire for nations to save in gold rather than US treasuries. Finally, the AI bubble and all the ancillary industries that benefit, are not going anywhere.
In fact, US President Trump must double down on state support for all things AI because it is the largest contributor to GDP growth in the empire. This means that even if the pace of dollar creation slows, the Nasdaq can continue to rise because Trump effectively nationalized it. For those of you who study Chinese capital markets, you know stonks do very well in the early period of nationalization, but then underperform massively as political goals take precedence over return on equity for unpatriotic capitalists.
If the 2025 price action of Bitcoin, gold, and stonks validated my market schema, then I can continue focusing on the vicissitudes of dollar liquidity. To remind readers, my prognosis is that Trump will pump credit to run the economy fucking hot. A rip-roaring economy helps the re-election chances for Team Red Republicans this November. Dollar credit will expand as the central bank balance sheet grows, commercial banks lend more to “strategic industries”, and mortgage rates decline because of printed money."
https://cryptohayes.substack.com/p/frowny-cloud
38. Depressing conversation on how the West over-financialized, screwed up our supply chains and became over-reliant on China for key metals and minerals. We will have to take some major pain to fix this.