Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads March 22nd, 2026
“An optimist is the human personification of spring." – Susan J. Bissonette
Peter Zeihan's recent takes on world events.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg1hSqAohHw
2. AI and Physical AI: Discussion of the future with the head of Mckinsey & General Catalyst VC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8cXD5hTt3c
3. The basics of investing in deep-tech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntGJhKKtZns
4. "Operation Absolute Resolve serves as a very loose proof-of-concept for this, showing how it is possible to employ large numbers of drones in close coordination with a few helicopters embedded in a much larger air campaign, with all the deconfliction headaches that entails. Employing hard-kill systems so close to rotary-wing platforms introduces yet another degree of technical complexity amidst even more congested airspace. Yet all the elements are there, and it may show a way forward."
https://dispatch.bazaarofwar.com/p/looking-for-lessons-in-venezuela
5. "Future great-power conflict victory will more likely resemble World War I than World War II. It is entirely conceivable that within the first weeks of fighting, inventories on all sides are rapidly depleted, followed by a prolonged “phony war” while stocks are replenished. In such a scenario, victory does not hinge on battlefield brilliance alone, but on which side can replenish its inventory fastest and achieve sustainable cost dominance.
The war in Ukraine has already exposed a critical weakness: the U.S. defense industrial base cannot scale production quickly, even when operating in peacetime conditions. To future-proof American military dominance, the United States must focus not only on system performance, but on how those systems are manufactured. Systems need to be manufactured using mass manufacturing techniques vs methods economical for low/medium volume. Just as importantly, the Department of War must begin running manufacturing-scale military exercises to ensure industrial responsiveness in wartime.
We need to prepare for a war of inventory."
https://marlinspike.substack.com/p/war-of-inventory
6. Such a great discussion on what is happening in AI and Silicon Valley and the nuances of Venture capital. A must watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXLJk-SyGfA
7. Educational episode to what is up in Silicon Valley. It helps me keep up and learn the zeitgeist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q99bDO-a1E
8. Man, an American gem. I always learn new stuff and get inspired by listening to Palmer Luckey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dejWbn_-gUQ
9. Trying to understand the Donroe Doctrine and implications for Latin America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08w8SeNwkNA
10. "The world wants you to be “transparent” so it can sell to you more easily. Resist. True power is found in the shadows. Build a life so good that you don’t feel the need to prove it to a single soul on the internet. Silence is not just golden; it is a fortress."
https://substack.com/inbox/post/184748132
11. "Since February 24, 2022, Russia has been fighting on two fronts.
One is kinetic und disastrous: tanks, missiles, drones, trenches, and attrition.
The other is non-kinetic—and aimed squarely at the European security architecture.
Energy blackmail. Food and fertilizer pressure. Migration instrumentalization. Hybrid warfare, including sabotage operations across European territory. Persistent nuclear coercion, designed not to be used but to paralyze.
This is not escalation by accident.
It is escalation by design.
And yet, Europe has largely refused to act as a continent under attack.
Why?
Because denial is more comfortable than mobilization.
Because moral rhetoric has replaced realpolitik analysis.
Because institutions built for crisis management during peace time were never designed for systemic confrontation.
Europe mistook restraint for virtue, and inertia for stability."
https://substack.com/inbox/post/184785433
12. "That’s why many performance metrics are leading indicators. They don’t correlate to DPI perfectly, and sometimes conflate success with noise. For example:
Fast mark-ups, which show genuine fundraising momentum, which is often associated with underlying revenue traction. But more rounds also means more dilution, and thus return compression.
Winning access or allocation into rounds is a proxy for competitive position in the moment. But if funds are winning access to hot rounds, the upside is often at least partially baked in with higher prices, which lowers the potential for multiples (just look at your favorite 100x revenue AI deal!)
Reputation and brand, which shape future access and founder perception. But if the reputation is relevant to the wrong audience, then it won’t drive returns, and worse divert fund resources and attention.
Return proxies matter, but they are not the same thing as performance. Many venture debates are really arguments about such proxies, not outcomes."
https://99tech.alexlazarow.com/p/the-future-of-venture-capital-strategies
13. "Young men themselves are part of the solution. Women aren’t to blame for their relationship woes, just as immigrants aren’t responsible for America’s economic problems. Men need to seize the opportunity to become better, and we need to provide an off-ramp for red-pilled men who believe the mating market is rigged against them, helping to prevent their descent into bitterness and potential extremism.
Many young men struggle with mental health — understandable given the challenges they face. But here’s a truth the manosphere won’t tell you: In the end, meaningful relationships are the only things that matter. If you’re alone and resigned to being nutrition for Big Tech, you need to reset and commit to becoming voluntarily incelibate. If you sequester from other mammals, the anxiety and depression you’ll ultimately feel will dwarf any terror about disappointment that exists in the outside world — isolation is the only danger that compounds."
https://www.profgalloway.com/the-vcel-movement/
14. This event looks awesome. Anti-Fund Summit. Where was my invite??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIH2C-dLLUc
15. "Entrepreneurs would do well to think intentionally about the journey from 10/90 to 90/10 and to develop the discipline and prioritization needed to spend the majority of their time on the areas where they are most uniquely skilled and suited. The path from 10/90 to 90/10 is often bumpy, but the entrepreneurs who grow and develop faster than their startups ultimately achieve the greatest success."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/01/17/90-10-or-10-90-entrepreneur/
16. "The world is getting louder and faster. The only way to win is to get quieter and slower. Your “Buffer” is your moat. If you can stay calm while everyone else is losing their minds, you don’t just win the game you own the board.
Takeaway:
The next time you feel the “urge” to respond to a stressful input, wait 4 hours. Observe the impulse, then let it die."
https://substack.com/inbox/post/184802092
17. "Now more than ever, I believe we could all use a little beauty each day. Goethe understood something we often forget. What we regularly take in or view becomes part of us. We are shaped not only by what we do, but by what we contemplate. Sadly, beauty is no longer treated as a necessity in today’s world. In many places, it is dismissed as trivial, or worse, replaced with what is coarse or seems to be intentionally ugly. We do not have to accept that. We still have agency over what we allow to form us and what we take in each day."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/beauty-refreshes-the-soul-art-poetry
18. A Drone battle Super Bowl. This was a fun discussion with Olaf from Neros.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHelpDoyF40
19. How to scale a Venture capital firm. A16Z. A platform with many focussed funds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kdql4I-NJ0M
20. NIA: the nature of work in the age of AI + Central Bank Stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I24Yfhm8tm4
21. "Dan Robinson calls this the “nocturnal phase.” Ship features during the day, agents clean up overnight. But night is just the obvious gap. Everything CAN run in parallel while you’re somewhere else.
Managing agents feels exactly like managing a team. Set direction, spin up work streams, check outputs, adjust course. A decade of product management trained me for this without knowing it. Constantly thinking of new ideas. Building articulate plans. Rapid context switching. Good sense of outcomes. Talking to customers.
Great builders were always hamstrung by the pace of development. Not anymore.
The difference is I couldn’t run six projects simultaneously when I managed people. Now I can.
We work ~eight hours. Sleep eight. Sixteen hours every day where we don’t exist professionally. AI works those sixteen. Handles parallel tasks while you focus. Learns overnight while you rest."
https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/time-expansion-348
22. "The final distinction between big swings and fast swings, and king-making is permissionless vs. permissioned entrepreneurship. Big swings and fast swings are both permissionless paths to conviction. One through vision, one through learning. King making is permission-based; it only works on the basis of elite buy-in/consensus.
So “calling capital” and becoming a hypercapitalized club deal isn’t wrong per se. It’s just that it needs to come after you (the founder) already developed internal conviction and the vision to go put beaucoup bucks to use uniquely and productively. Once you’ve developed that on your own/without permission, getting into the club can transform you into a substantive, obvious winner. This is fundamentally the process of producing legibility and narrative momentum."
https://99d.substack.com/p/call-your-customer-call-your-shot
23. "It’s possible to spin all sorts of ad hoc hypotheses about why consumer sentiment has diverged from its traditional determinants. Perhaps Americans are upset about social issues and politics, and expressing this as dissatisfaction about the economy. Perhaps they’re mad that Trump seems to be trying to hurt the economy. Perhaps they’re scared that AI will take their jobs. And so on.
Here’s another hypothesis: Maybe Americans are down in the dumps because their perception of the “good life” is being warped by TikTok and Instagram.
I’ve been reading for many years about how social media would make Americans unhappier by prompting them to engage in more frequent social comparisons. In the 2010s, as happiness plummeted among young people, the standard story was that Facebook and Instagram were shoving our friends’ happiest moments in our faces — their smiling babies, their beautiful weddings, their exciting vacations — and instilling a sense of envy and inadequacy.
In fact, plenty of careful research found that using Facebook and Instagram made people at least temporarily unhappier, and there’s some evidence that social comparisons were the reason."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/trapped-in-the-hell-of-social-comparison
24. The case for why De-treasurization & De-Dollarization is happening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYnFjWCZcV8
25. This is a must watch: Geo-economics. Helps you understand what is going on in the world right now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re5Ys6NYQKo
26. "Most people confuse “Expensive” with “High Value.” They buy what is trendy, loud, and recognizable. This is a low-status signal. It screams: “I want you to know I have money.” True elites use Quiet Luxury and obscure references as a coded language. If your status is easily recognizable by the masses, you aren’t exclusive; you are a target.
Good taste is the only fence that doesn’t require a security guard."
https://substack.com/inbox/post/184989545
27. "In one week we witnessed the ever further erosion of morality and human decency to score some short term gains. Carney will never talk about freedom or human rights in relation to China, but he’s got some deals in his hand to prop up his position domestically. Trump steamrolls Greenland and is willing to lose relationships and allies that were the backbone of what once was a stable western democratic alliance. And finally the consensus appears to be that the ongoing slaughter of Iran’s finest is secondary to temporary regional stability.
That is your ‘new global order’. Transactional, vacuous and creating ever more uncertainty."
https://pieterdorsman.substack.com/p/a-new-world-order
28. "A returning to an old capital serves as a psychological, historical, and cultural anchor. Erecting a new order in old capitals lets a new government get the legacy and legitimacy from the old order.
Even in the event of a regime change or a new state, it’s very likely the successor (especially if they’re weak or unstable) will build its new capital on the rubble of the old one.
A new regime lacks the weight" of centuries. They use the physical landmarks of a previous state to give legitimacy to their new one.
Legitimacy rests on the habit of obedience. Moving a capital disrupts the collective gaze of the population. People are conditioned by cultural habit to look for power in the same geographical place as old ones.
Established capitals possess a centralization of elite labor and investment that exists independently of the government. Stealing or co-opting is politically more efficient."
https://pplsartofwar.substack.com/p/why-new-orders-likes-old-capitals
29. "There’s a silent crisis brewing in semiconductor physics, and almost nobody is talking about it. While the industry celebrates the march to 2nm logic—and the AI capabilities it promises—the memory that actually feeds these processors is stuck in the past. This matters most at the edge: the phones, wearables, sensors, and embedded devices where latency, privacy, and power efficiency aren’t nice-to-haves but existential requirements.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the stagnation of SRAM scaling is creating a “density wall” that threatens to stall the evolution of on-device AI entirely. And solving it will force a radical rethink of both hardware architecture and model optimization."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/how-to-invest-in-edge-ai-part-1-the
30. Ukrainian SOF is top tier & scary proficient.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgdR6BzP7PE
31. "There is a direct, causal relationship between the ever-increasing difficulty of achieving thermal comfort in Britain and the unpopularity of its current ruling class, currently embodied by the much-maligned and politically tone-deaf Sir Keir Starmer.
This analysis at the individual and dwelling levels also integrates up to society as a whole, where it quickly becomes clear why the pursuit of developable energy resources is a core strategic imperative for nation-states. Countries blessed with abundant energy assets and the technical capacity to both extract them and defend them from invasion tend to flourish, while those lacking either are easily conquered or gradually fade from prominence. Every war ever fought was, at its core, an energy war—whether the participants realized it or not."
https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/cold-truths
32. "For upside to re-accelerate, the market’s constraints need to shift. ETF eligibility, funding costs and regulatory clarity are the levers that matter. When they move, capital follows.
Investors who outperform in 2026 will be the ones who understand where capital can flow and what needs to change for it to flow elsewhere. Investors waiting for the next cycle opportunity will be waiting a long time.
Crypto is more institutional, more disciplined and better capitalized than it’s ever been. The next rally will be quieter and more selective. But for those paying attention to the right signals and structure, it will be just as rewarding."
https://pomp.substack.com/p/why-the-next-crypto-rally-will-look
33. "There is great power in belief. It lends a heavy hand to the survival instinct and allows man to go beyond mere survival. It gives man the opportunity to leave his mark on the world. It allowed our ancestors to carve out an empire out of the new world from nothing. You are not going into space without it. Now, this isn’t throwing my hat in with one religion or another, but as Pindar said, “custom is the lord of everything.” There is an American metaphysics and Americans are most adapted to it and it will remain ingrained into our very cores until something superior takes its place.
The bare minimum a man must have is this belief, and despite everything, optimism over cynicism. No doubt this is the most challenging obstacle in our path because belief is being stomped out of everything with a merciless fury by the enemies of mankind. Without it, there is no hope. The great beyond is a frontier like no other. The ultimate frontier. It is damn near impossible to comprehend what it will take for man to separate himself from the earth. There is a secret fear we must consider if we want to attempt this legendary feat."
https://resavager.com/p/the-ultimate-frontier-and-the-american
34. "Today’s AI wave is riding the same mesa. The correlation remains above historical levels. The rapid pace of deal-making & explosive rates of inference growth suggest this roller coaster ride will continue."
https://tomtunguz.com/nvidia-pe-predicts-growth/
35. "You may not have children of your own, but you are no less influential. Every time you speak in public, comment online, hold a door, lose your temper, or extend kindness to someone, you are being observed by young people you may never meet. The cynic will scoff at this and insist that no one owes anyone anything, that in a free society, people are free to live however they please.
That is true, in a narrow sense. However, if we wish to live in a society marked by decency and mutual respect, then we must be willing to model those qualities ourselves. Cultures do not improve by accident; they improve by example."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/our-duty-to-the-next-generation
36. "Perhaps in a rich country like America, where the pie grows only slowly and there are lots of opportunities for redistribution, it’s natural for people on both the right and the left to start thinking of the world as a lump of “resources” to be divvied up. But in reality, it’s production that maintains our high standard of living, and which creates the wealth necessary for redistribution to occur. A dangerously large number of Americans seem to have forgotten that."
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/zero-sum-economics-keeps-failing
37. Agree with this take. Not sure why we are trying to take Greenland this way.