Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads March 1st, 2026
“There are always flowers for those who want to see them” – Henri Matisse
"Myriad reasons I’ve written about countless times, but important reasons as it relates to this reflection now were the yearning to prove I had what I call independent commercial value (ICV) versus relying on a single “intermediary” or “sole client” aka an employer in a W2 environment… and also to create my own universe in a way… to ram force sovereignty… to stop asking permission… to be completely free “from the matrix” as they say… live where I wanted with my wife and kids… travel anywhere… do anything… yet simultaneously build my own business… do the work I enjoyed and am good at… and build a brand around what I was doing."
https://www.junteau.com/p/proving-it-twice
2. "What justifies this action, from a Pentagon strategic perspective, is the convergence of three existential threats from America’s three primary adversaries. China has embedded operational control into critical mineral extraction that feeds weapons manufacturing. Iran has established drone production facilities within strike range of the continental United States. Russia has deployed military advisers and integrated air defense systems in the Caribbean.
Venezuela represents the only location where all three adversaries operate simultaneously. The oil is secondary. Breaking Chinese supply chain dominance, eliminating Iranian manufacturing capability, and expelling Russian military presence are primary."
https://renegaderesources.pro/p/the-venezuelan-oil-narative-is-pure
3. "If you want to know whether this is a real transition, look for measurable changes: generals rotated out, interior security restructured, ports and customs leadership replaced, and money flows brought above ground. If those don’t happen, then what’s being marketed as “liberation” is just succession with better optics.
That’s why, instead of watching the headlines and statements, we should watch who holds the interior ministry, the security forces, and the money. If those hands don’t change, then the country didn’t change—only the face on the poster did.
Capturing Maduro is a headline. The regime is an operating system. And operating systems don’t crash when one user logs out."
https://jaymartin.substack.com/p/the-part-they-never-show-after-regime
4. "Denmark is a small nation of almost 6 million souls in a space of land about 2/3 the size of West Virginia. In the last year she finally started spending her fair share on defense, but even before then, she had been a solid ally. She already let us have bases in Greenland. If we need more we can sell the concept—along with Canada—as part of mutual defense. When it comes to keeping Russia and China at a distance, in backrooms we can work deals and twist Danish elbows. We won’t get all we want, but we should be able to get 80%. That’s good enough with friends.
I don’t get antagonizing the Danes like this. I think it is unnecessary and counterproductive. $0.02.
Yes, I would love to have American ownership of Greenland, but that isn’t a realistic option right now…especially after the last year. What we can have—if the Danes will let us—is an expanded presence on the island as needed."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/the-unfortunate-greenland-kerfuffle
5. "I especially struggle taking seriously the “modernity sucks” people who lay the blame on technology and seem to idolize the pre-industrial past. Modern technology is wonderful, and our current problems are not because of the machines, but in how we use them."
https://walkingtheworld.substack.com/p/modern-life-is-good-actually
6. The journey to AGI. A must watch documentary on Demis and Deepmind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ
7. "To be lethal, you need to be a modern renaissance man.
You need high standards for yourself & who you choose to have in your circle.
Non-negotiables that govern how you move through business, relationships, and life itself.
The character traits that command respect when you walk into a room; not because you’re the strongest, but because you’ve systematically engineered yourself into someone who cannot be ignored."
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/the-standards-of-a-lethal-gentleman
8. The rule of law to rule of code. Fascinating discussion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-S2P7dmjD0
9. Innovation happening in DoW. Important conversation here on DIU priorities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Lfst-RXX9k
10. "Smart people in hard jobs with limited resources are doing their best to improve the odds in the place we have neglected almost as much as the Caribbean, the Pacific."
https://cdrsalamander.substack.com/p/the-pacifics-hubs-spokes-and-aces
11. "Across sleepy and remote islands in the Pacific, U.S. military engineers are working around the clock to revive strategically important airstrips that American troops first built under fire over 70 years ago during World War II.
The reconstruction effort is being led by a designated office within the U.S. Air Force, whose Agile Combat Employment, or ACE, doctrine has identified dozens of airfields that will be used to house and launch fighter jets, aerial refuelling tankers and weapons during a war with China. A trilateral force of the Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force is now converging with a single goal in mind: re-establish a presence on the airfields once used to deliver decisive combat power for the United States during the last great power war.
“I like to say we're going back to the future," Lt. Col Frank Blaz, a senior engineer and site lead for the Pacific Air Forces, said back in 2024. "As part of our Agile Combat Employment, we’ve taken a look at all of the historic airfields within the Pacific that helped us launch and execute successful campaigns. Building new is not the way to go. It’s expensive. Repairing and rehabilitating what exists is a much better economic solution.”
https://www.newsweek.com/inside-us-plans-to-reopen-wwii-air-bases-for-war-with-china-11286002
12. I always learn from his interviews. Lots of history and excellent thinking frameworks. A good state of Silicon Valley and AI right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRh2sVcNXQ8
13. "You’ll essentially confirm that you are now a man with free will. And that the job of a man is not an easy one. It doesn’t come easy. It has a ton of obstacles and preparations in place before you’re able to live life fully on your terms.
But that’s what makes it all that sweeter when you get even a taste of that freedom. And that is why you are blessed to be a man. Things don’t come easy to you. You are a hero in a movie. Starting out in the desert with little to your name, status, accomplishment, and abilities. But your dreams and the time to dream is unlimited."
https://www.rawmanifesto.com/p/how-to-live-a-fulfilled-life
14. Gzero and the top risks of 2026. If you don't pay attention to geopolitics you will get rekt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqVfnC_muaI&t=1224s
15. "The primary objective is geopolitical. It is the securitization of the U.S. backyard under Cold War 2.0 conditions.
The revived Monroe Doctrine does not represent a retreat from global confrontation or a downgrading of competition with China. On the contrary, it is a strategic consolidation phase designed to enable the United States to compete more effectively at the systemic level. America faces a two-front challenge. China functions as the trade, economic, and technological hegemonic rival. Russia operates as the military-revisionist spoiler willing to destabilize regions through force. Together, they form the DragonBear as a coordinated pressure system.
To succeed, Washington must prevent encirclement and strategic distraction in its own hemisphere. Monroe Doctrine 2.0 achieves precisely that by blocking China’s western flank and erecting an anti-China firewall.
History offers clarity. Russia did not refrain from invading Ukraine out of respect for international norms. China has not restrained itself on Taiwan due to diplomatic language. Deterrence is produced by strength and demonstrated willingness to act.
The CRINK axis has been constrained not by eloquent speeches, but by the use and demonstration of force. Middle powers such as India, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea must internalize this shift. So must European powers. The world is becoming increasingly binary. The space for hedging is narrowing."
https://open.substack.com/pub/velinatchakarova/p/the-revival-of-monroe-doctrine-20
16. Surprisingly frank and human discussion on success, investing, hedge funds and managing people. And serving god.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlTYj9KNNZk
17. "His message was clear and sobering: The world has an insatiable thirst for metals, from surging military budgets to AI data centers and the greening of the global economy, but it does not have a credible way to supply the metals it intends to consume over the next few decades.
The United States is totally dependent on China for almost every critical mineral."
https://robertsinn.substack.com/p/billionaire-investor-robert-friedland
18. Incredible episode. Lots of insight here: be the best or you are toast. Whether going public, building cos or investing. Invisible unemployment is a real thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGii3mpwsNU
19. "it ain’t enough to simply want to survive, to want more for your people. it ain’t enough. your mind must focus in on what matters before nature and nature’s god: victory. victory is the only thing that matters. winning is the only rule found in nature. how far have our people fallen to the standards laid out by nietzsche in twilight of the idols? hell, let’s start with his first rule: “nobody must ‘let themselves go,’ not even when he is alone.” damn near everyone has already failed and we haven’t even gotten to the meat and potatoes of his aphorism.
unfortunately, it doesn’t get any better from there. “everything good is an inheritance.”
https://resavager.com/p/everything-good-is-an-inheritance
20. "If the US cannot continue on its current path without taking over much of the world’s largest fossil fuel reserves, and if China still needs access to those the same sources, the predictable result is that America’s energy adventurism will turn into an energy blockade on China, immediately reminiscent of the embargo on oil exports to Japan announced by the US on August 1, 1941. As a result, Japan lost access to nearly 90 percent of imported oil. Pearl Harbour followed later in the year."
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/the-energy-wars-are-china-and-america
21. "One of the most consequential illusions of the post-Cold War era was the belief that economic interdependence would permanently discipline geopolitical competition. This assumption underpinned decades of policy choices, particularly in Europe, and shaped the integration of China into Western-led economic systems.
Between 2021 and 2026, this illusion collapsed. Globalization did not disappear, but it underwent a fundamental transformation. Interdependence was not dissolved; it was weaponized. The global system remains interconnected, yet those connections are no longer neutral or benign. They are assessed, managed, and exploited through a security lens.
Power in Cold War 2.0 is increasingly measured by the ability to control energy flows, maritime chokepoints, digital infrastructure, rare-earth and critical-mineral supply chains, food corridors, and financial clearing mechanisms. As a result, commerce, territory, and security have fused into a single strategic battlefield. Control over networks has become more consequential than control over land."
https://substack.com/inbox/post/183905750
22. "Everything we do, everything we rely on, the entire world we’ve built all depends on trust. It depends on relying on others, working with others, taking actions that benefit others. It depends on enforcement mechanisms to accompany the trust, but the enforcement mechanisms only matter if the trust exists to initiate the process.
That’s not what I’m seeing these days from our leaders on both sides of the aisle and across multiple sectors and in countless corners of society. If the world we live in ceases to function in the way we want, it’s not going to be because of artificial intelligence. It’s not because of illegal immigrants. It’s not because of the one percent. It’s because we stopped buying into the basic notion of trust.
Will I ever go back to that specific bar? I don’t know. I don’t go to bars that often. But either way, I like knowing it’s there if I happen to be in Miami. I like knowing I had a really good time and can go back there and do it again.
I like living in a world where we can build a whole that’s far, far greater than if we each just relied solely on our individual abilities to do everything. A world that advances, a world that evolves, a world that functions. A world that’s — sometimes — even happy. All because we choose to trust."
https://bradleytusk.substack.com/p/one-night-in-miami
23. "A continuing worry for a negative surprise for Japan in 2026 comes from China. Beijing’s failure to re-engage with America forces a rise in Chinese unemployment, more China deflation, more idle capacity and surging bad debt. China has been trying to stimulate growth by easing both monetary and fiscal policy since the summer of 2024.
If the economy does not respond and does not begin to accelerate by late spring 2026, currency devaluation may become its last option. China being forced to start a currency war by the compounding forces of domestic deflation and U.S. protectionism would force a dramatic disruption not just for Japan’s cyclical competitiveness, but for Japan’s future prosperity."
https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/japan-surprises-2026
24. "The automation story has always been about per-unit economics. Robots cost more upfront, but the marginal cost of each widget collapses. We’ve had a century to get comfortable with that trade. Now the unit is “conversation that changes someone’s mind.” Same economics, same logic. Except the thing being produced at scale is persuasion."
https://www.gettheleverage.com/p/dude-i-just-fired-half-my-sales-team
25. I always get inspired by this. Obsessive craftsman is what I always take away from his talks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVdwU711kP0
26. State of investing in Private Markets, lots of good perspective from someone who has been doing this for a very long time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW42EjOft40
27. "Now Venezuela is causing further conflict between Trump and the New Axis powers. The U.S. has been trying to interdict ships purportedly carrying weapons from Iran or Russia to Venezuela. Trump has been vocally insulting Russia since the raid, and demanding that Venezuela’s oil industry refuse to partner with China, Russia, and Iran.
Trump’s chaotic actions are thus throwing a wrench in the idea of a global right-wing concert of powers that divides the world into three authoritarian “spheres of influence”. And by injecting chaos and uncertainty, Trump might keep China’s plans for world domination off balance, buying crucial time for its moment of economic dominance to falter.
In the new, chaotic world, our hope has to be that the chaos happens to resolve itself to our benefit. That’s a thin reed to place our hopes on, but in the new geopolitical anarchy, and with America’s leadership and society being what they are right now, it’s probably the best we’ve got."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/welcome-to-chaos-world
28. "We can express all this in summary terms as follows. Organisations do not constitute themselves naturally from separate individuals. Organisations with any degree of complexity at all require purpose, effort and energy to put together in the first place. They then require further periodic inputs if they are to remain effective, because entropy ensures that, left to themselves, organisations will become less ordered and thus less capable over time. This is a natural process and not necessarily the fault of individuals, although they may make it worse or conversely help to slow it down.
Capable organisations have always known this. Emergency services don’t just write procedures, they should practice them frequently. Governments make and rehearse plans for dealing with unexpected crises. Military units are given special training before being sent on operations. If you go to a dangerous area of the world you may have to listen to a security briefing you’ve heard several times before, just to make sure that you remember it. And so on.
And if we are to seek a single dominant, immediate cause for the decline in politics and government in the western world over the last couple of generations, it is precisely that the natural tendency towards entropy has not been taken seriously. Indeed, as I shall try to show, everything has been done to increase entropy, sometimes through incompetence, sometimes through ideology, sometimes just by accident. And in turn, the ultimate causes of that are rather disturbing.
It’s this, more than anything else, that lies behind the shambles that is now the western military, and its inability to understand, let alone to imagine how to counter, what the Russians are doing in Ukraine The military is a very high-entropy organisation, and needs to practice not only skills but also the retention of its guiding mindset, quite regularly.
This is why regiments cultivate their history, and why naval vessels bear the same name through different generations. It reminds them who they are and why they exist. Western militaries have become largely dysfunctional not just for practical reasons (and here we may reflect that the consumption of ammunition and spares is a form of entropy that has to be allowed for, and it turns out it hasn’t been) but because no effort has been made to preserve this mindset: indeed, rather the reverse."
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-politics-of-destruction
29. Wide ranging convo as always, prediction markets to robotics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDVKaOENI_I
30. Great episode on very topical subjects in Silicon Valley: California wealth tax and software is not where it is at anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMEDrOnLAGM&list=RDDMEDrOnLAGM&start_radio=1
31. "Artificial intelligence has been a big help, yet the complex economic machine seems to be responding to the holistic strategy of tariffs, deregulation, lower interest rates, a return to QE, increased control of strategic assets on the geopolitical stage, and the deportation of illegal immigrants domestically.
But nothing says the economy can’t grow even faster.
Elon Musk is predicting GDP growth can reach 10% or higher. That seems unreasonable compared to historical norms, but I would not discount his view. The rise of AI has created an exponential growth scenario that could easily thrust the US into an ever-increasing growth trajectory."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/the-great-economic-boom-why-trumps
32. "If rare earths are the new oil, China is the new OPEC. Chinese mines supply nearly 70% of the ore from which rare earth elements are extracted, and more than 90% of the refined materials. Meanwhile, the U.S. imports 70% of its rare earths from China. This asymmetry is a strategic vulnerability. According to a 2025 report from the Center on Strategic and International Studies, China has demonstrated a willingness to “weaponize” rare earths.
In 2010, for example, China cut off rare earth exports to Japan over a maritime dispute, threatening to halt its automotive production. Japan responded by importing more rare earths from Australia in the short term and ramping up domestic production long term. Since then, Japanese rare earth imports from China have fallen from 90% to 60% — still too high, but low enough that Tokyo has options if Beijing restricts access. This week, China again banned the export of rare earths to Japan over its support for Taiwan, but, notably, the ban included a far broader category of goods, suggesting China’s rare earth leverage over Japan has weakened.
It’s a different story for the U.S. In April, China retaliated against Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs by restricting the export of seven types of rare earths. Trump folded, naturally, but even after reaching a deal in October to resume exports, the U.S. remains at China’s mercy. According to a recent Bloomberg report, continued restrictions on deliveries of raw materials “hamstring” U.S. efforts to build domestic rare earth processing capacity."
https://www.profgalloway.com/rare-earths/
33. "Elon didn’t go for batteries, EVs, and solar power because he was a climate-obsessed liberal; he correctly understood that there was a revolution underway in the technologies that humans use to produce, store, transport, and harness energy. He knew that whoever mastered that technological revolution would attain a dominant position in a bunch of different, seemingly unrelated industries.
In other words, Elon understood — and still understands — the importance of the Electric Tech Stack.
Currently, China generates much more electricity than the U.S. does — partly because it’s willing to build out solar power, where in the U.S. solar is often blocked by local NIMBYs, “environmental” permitting laws, and a hostile Trump administration. But China also builds most of the world’s batteries, meaning that American AI is going to be dependent on Chinese batteries as well.
On top of all that, America desperately needs the Electric Tech Stack for its national defense. I pointed this out in a post back in September, and Ryan talks about it a lot as well. Drones are taking over the modern battlefield, and drones require batteries and rare-earth electric motors — the same components that go into the EVs that America is now refusing to build.
Thus, America’s weakness in EVs, batteries, and rare earths threatens to become a weakness in everything — a weakness in AI, a weakness in drones, a weakness in robots, and so on. Because we collectively decided that EVs are hippie-dippy climate bullshit, we ignored the key physical technologies that increasingly underlie all of manufacturing, including defense manufacturing."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-must-embrace-the-electric
34. "There is tremendous reason for optimism. America leads in product and module design, and the upstream materials and device primitives we need are, for the most part, increasingly available. We also have the world’s deepest and most demanding consumer markets, and the brands best positioned to serve them. On paper, this should put the United States in a strong position. But in practice, closing the production gap will require a significant and durable shift to support an electronics ecosystem that now spans consumer products, industrial systems, and defense applications.
We may never match Shenzhen’s sheer density of low-cost suppliers. But software can help us stitch together a distributed manufacturing network of highly automated factories — not just to reshore high-volume production, but to continuously drive down the marginal cost of new product iteration. Without this, domestic manufacturing becomes increasingly static, bespoke, and expensive, while foreign competitors’ advantages compound through faster iteration.
At the same time, we must be careful about lax subsidies that merely entrench incumbents or suppress competition; industrial policy that rewards presence rather than world-class performance will create lethargic firms vulnerable to the hyper-competitive dynamics of Asian markets. Finally, we should be intentional about inviting firms to build their production ecosystems here to learn from. American firms repatriating capabilities offshored decades ago are not the same as foreign firms just extending theirs.
America started this race with the smartphone in all of our pockets. We built the blueprint for the consumer electronics revolution; others scaled it. The billionth unit is always better and cheaper than the first. The next decade will determine whether our ecosystem remains merely architects or becomes builders. That depends on whether we can manifest the industrial layer we left behind. We will do this not through nostalgia for the factories of the past, but through mastery of the production model of the future. America invented the smartphone. Now we need to learn its lesson: the future belongs to whoever can build it."
https://www.a16z.news/p/everything-is-computer
35. "Until recently, except for a handful of services firms, defense primes, and a few international spyware companies, few private commercial companies operated in the offensive cyber domain. Traditionally, U.S. government agencies charged with offensive cyber built most capabilities internally, turning to specialized firms and vulnerability brokers only on occasion.
However, this status quo is no longer sustainable: rapid private-sector breakthroughs in AI are fundamentally reshaping offensive cyber operations, and the expertise to harness these capabilities increasingly resides outside government, in AI-native companies. If the U.S. and its allies want to remain competitive in offensive cyber operations, they will need to explore how to use commercial technologies as force multipliers. Over the past few years several startups have emerged to bring commercial AI technology to U.S. and allied governments to accelerate their offensive cyber operations, and we are just at the beginning of this shift in the market."
https://maggiegray.us/p/the-age-of-ai-for-offensive-cyber
36. "First, a16z is founded and run by engineers. Not just founders, engineer-founders. This influences how they designed the Firm (to feast on scale and network effects), and also how they pick markets and the companies within them.
Second, there is perhaps no bigger investing sin at a16z than investing in second best. If you miss a winner early, you can always invest in a later round. If you invest in second best, you lock yourself out from investing in the winner. This is true even if the eventual winner isn’t yet born.
Third, once a16z believes it has identified the category winner, the classic a16z move is to give it more money than it thought it needed. Everyone makes fun of them for that move.
These three things have been true since the Firm’s earliest days.
a16z is a cult of technology. Everything it does is to bring about better technology to make the future better. It believes that “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.” Everything flows from that. It believes in the future and bets the firm that way.
a16z is a Firm. It is a business, a company. It is built with the goal to scale, and to improve with scale. There are many characteristics of a Firm that I believe do not apply to a traditional Fund, and we will cover them. I think this distinction solves one of the oddest things about venture capital’s self-image: that venture capital is an industry that sells the world’s most scalable product (money) to its most scalable companies (technology startups) but must not, itself, scale.
a16z is a temporal sovereign. It is the institution for the future. The Firm, in its more ambitious moments, views itself as a peer to the world’s leading financial institutions and governments. It has said that it aims to be the (original) JP Morgan for the Information Age, but I think that undershoots the true ambition. If governments work on behalf of chunks of space, a16z works on behalf of that big chunk of time that is the future. Venture capital is simply the way that it’s found it can have the biggest impact on the future, and the business model most aligned with profiting when it does.
a16z makes and sells power. It builds its own power through scale, culture, network, organizational infrastructure, and success, and then gives its power to the technology startups in its portfolio through sales, marketing, hiring, and government relations, primarily, although to hear its founders tell it, a16z will do whatever is in its power to do, which seems to be a lot.
a16z is betting that technology will eat more and more of the economy, and that when it does, the new companies will be 10x, 100x bigger than the old ones they replace. That is a foundational one, but one that is available to any venture fund with some cajones.
a16z is betting that it can help make that future bigger and better than it would otherwise be, sooner, through policy and platform and power, and help its portfolio companies win in the process. Based on my conversations with a16z’s founders, this bet seems to be paying off today, and it is an unbelievably asymmetric one. Each win can pay for a lot of capabilities. The machine compounds."