Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads May 31st, 2026
“Everything good, everything magical happens between the months of June and August”--Jenny Han
"The Strait of Hormuz is not a chokepoint. It is a civilizational lever. Its closure — even partial, even temporary — does not merely raise prices. It fractures supply chains, paralyses monetary policy, triggers food crises months downstream, cascades through metals and industrial production, and hands the DragonBear axis a structural competitive advantage at the precise moment when the Cold War 2.0 contest over global economic architecture is entering its decisive phase.
Any instability in this important maritime route could rattle economic stability worldwide. The shock would reverberate far beyond energy markets — tightening financial conditions, fuelling inflation, and pushing fragile economies closer to recession in a matter of weeks.
The blood vessels of globalization are being compressed in real time. The world is watching whether the defenders of the existing order have the strategic coherence to reopen them — or whether the chokepoint of the 21st century becomes the pressure point through which Cold War 2.0 is ultimately decided."
https://velinatchakarova.substack.com/p/the-arteries-of-power-global-chokepoints
2."The truly vicious part of Beijing’s situation is that Iran’s entire playbook for retaliation was designed to punish Washington, but the geography and economics of each weapon mean the damage lands on China instead. Iranian missiles aimed at Gulf states threaten the very oil infrastructure and port facilities that Chinese companies have spent billions investing in across the region.
Xi bet a decade of foreign policy on Khamenei’s ability to withstand American pressure, and the bet did not pay off. Operation Epic Fury was designed to break the Islamic Republic, but it may also have exposed the uncomfortable truth that Chinese influence in the Middle East was only as durable as the assumption that no one would ever call it into question, and in Zhongnanhai, they know it."
https://www.zinebriboua.com/p/china-is-scrambling
3."Presence is not something that appears overnight. It is has to be cultivated through small, consistent habits that we practice every day. Regardless of how busy we might be or how tired we are, we must always be cognizant of our presence and how we present ourselves to the world.
How we stand, how we speak, how we dress, and how we treat the people around us all matter. While these things may seem subtle, the effects are significant. In a society that encourages men to be casual, a disciplined presence becomes a form of leadership. It reminds others, and the world, that order, dignity, and self-respect still have a place in modern life."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/the-way-a-man-carries-himself-still
4."The love of the picturesque, a feature present in many cultures, isn’t simply a collective psychological curiosity but a spiritual one. In traditional Western and especially Protestant cultures—take the Netherlands as an example—the love of beauty emerges only once a certain level of material stability is reached.
If you aren’t well off, you don’t think about beauty, you don’t care about it. In times of crisis, the Dutch peasant historically finds himself in the middle of an existential hardship. In contrast, in Southeastern Europe, such a context doesn’t carry the same consequences. Their devotion to beauty isn’t dependent on a high level of economic standard at all. "
https://vizi.substack.com/p/the-power-of-beauty-in-times-of-crisis
5."The latest Pentagon news reinforces that critical minerals are becoming a defense asset class.
Drivers:
-U.S.–China resource competition
-AI / semiconductor supply chains
-missile & weapons production
-geopolitical conflict
In practical terms:
-strategic metals valuations could rerate
-government funding will accelerate project timelines
-Western supply chains will be subsidized
-Copper and gold are great, but defense metals are now coming into focus"
https://open.substack.com/pub/robertsinn/p/pentagon-signals-that-us-is-entering
6. A good rundown on energy in America, what he saw in China and running a foundation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1nMi7t-uo
7.Dalio has an interesting framework. I am not sure I agree with his conclusions but it's good to get a differing global macro view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-vMNzHgSHI
8."I’ve been a generalist my entire career. Never picked a lane. At every company I just found the most important problem and went after it, regardless of whose job it was supposed to be. For most of my career that felt like swimming against the current.
Not anymore. No fast-growing startup I know hires just a PM or just a marketer anymore. They want tinkerers. That marketer? She’s in Claude figuring out what the last deploy changed, building the landing page herself, writing ad copy, and launching the campaign before she goes home. No tickets. No handoffs. The engineer ships the feature, creates the launch video, spins up agents to review the PR, and owns what happens after it goes live. Nobody told them to work this way. There was just a problem and they went after it.
Early startups always operated like this. No boundaries, just outcomes. The difference now is that AI lets you keep that scrappiness at 50, 100, 200 people. The gaps that forced specialization at scale are gone. These teams pay more in tokens than they’d spend on new hires."
https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/become-a-tinkerer
9."You mix the old school, with the new school.
You run a global operations, you have men of your ilk sprinkled across the globe, but you also know the importance of being a presence locally.
You don’t just build online, you have the offline ecosystem built to match…
You appreciate the importance of a handshake, business conducted over an eye fillet, back of the napkin deals, wheeling & dealing for the sport of it.
This is truly the rarest breed of man…
A man who is athletic, who appreciates his physical vessel & knows his body is a billion dollar asset.
And equally, a man who can take care of business, who is an elite operator & has balanced both disciplines with the same engineering brilliance you see at Le Mans."
https://www.lethalgentleman.com/p/how-to-be-an-athletic-businessman
10.Some of the best takes on b2b software in Silicon Valley. Always worth watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RHwE_M68BY
11.Lots of lessons from history. Analogy is the decades prior to 1914. A parallel in the dangerous alliances with declining power. (ie. Germany and Austro-Hungarian empire=Russia as example)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMmcRz8gxk0
12.I've followed these two for a while. Been helpful to understand the changes in the world economy via the lens of economic statecraft and geopolitics. It's a really good lens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKzsjvRVkik
13."When you’re in a high-velocity social media culture, relevance is everything. The pressure to be first creates bad incentives. Mix in monetization and dopamine, and even careful people start pushing things they haven’t fully verified. You end up following geopol astrologers.
In many ways, I think the military intelligence and intelligence agencies have found a solution to those pesky online randos noticing things. It's just to simply bury them alive.
There’s an older deception principle at work here: hiding a tree in a forest.You don’t need to hide a secret if you can surround it with ten thousand high-fidelity fakes. By the time an analyst spots the real signal, it’s been buried by the algorithm or drowned out by a million people arguing about the wrong thing."
https://pplsartofwar.substack.com/p/6-observations-about-infowar
14.Another great summary of this week's big news in Silicon Valley: latest AI battle between Anthropic and OpenAI, China vs USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIdKqkNCymQ
15. "Taken together, speech, posture, composure, grooming, dress, and attentiveness form the outward structure of presence. None of them are difficult or require extraordinary talent. However, when practiced consistently they create a man who moves through the world with authority and influence.
Others trust him more readily and they listen when he speaks. His steadiness influences the tone of the room and calms others during difficult times. For men with families, this influence carries even greater weight. Children observe how their fathers conduct themselves in public, how they greet others, how they respond to challenges, and how they carry responsibility as a husband and father."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/five-ways-a-man-can-strengthen-his
16."Macro pressure. Commoditization. Competition. AI. Each blade cuts differently. The bottom quartile will see accelerating losses. Some may tip into outright contraction. The sword of Damocles hangs by a single horsehair. For simpler products in competitive categories, that horsehair is fraying."
https://tomtunguz.com/software-ndr-decline-2026/
17."Being an entrepreneur really is one of life’s great challenges. Getting a business off the ground, signing the first customers, and building the product all require leaps of faith. But like anything important in life, every bit of effort helps.
As the founder of Southwest Airlines, Herb Kelleher, once said: “I have a strategic plan. It’s called getting things done.” Turn effort into results, and results into startup success."
https://davidcummings.org/2026/03/07/every-bit-of-effort-helps/
18. "One also cannot quibble with the results in Franklin’s case: he became one of the most accomplished men in American history, and maybe Western history too—absurdly distinguished in fields as diverse as writing, diplomacy, invention, practical science, and business.
But the question is how well his virtue-techniques can be replicated by lesser spirits, how well his model works for others. Mark Twain suggested that Franklin doomed countless boys born in the century that followed, boys who would be expected to dedicate themselves to getting ahead with the same dull fanaticism. Put another way: Ben Franklin as a dynamo, inventor, newspaperman, and virtual founder of a great city is far superior to Ben Franklin as self-help guru.
The authors of this volume on manliness didn’t seem to realize that more is required than guys rocking red flannel shirts, suspenders, and meticulously kempt beards while cultivating the shopkeeper virtues. It was a sign of my own cluelessness that I expected anything more substantial from this book on manliness, and a sign of the larger strangeness of the times that such a book would be turned to.
As an alternative to the shopkeeper virtues and the manosphere, I recommend the theological, cardinal, and chivalric virtues."
https://thechivalryguild.substack.com/p/you-too-could-have-been-a-lumberjack
19."As a result, what I’ve been saying for over a while now, which I’m reiterating here is that over the next 5 years, social networking is going to increasingly move offline. And it’s all going to happen through events, experiences, social clubs and offline/hybrid communities.
This means anything from a dinner through to a retreat and up to a conference. Or a run club, a women’s social club, a private men’s club, or the hundreds of creator, entrepreneur and lifestyle clubs and communities popping up all over the world.
I don’t care if it’s existing event organisers, or creators or brands - they are all going to become increasingly “community” oriented, and look to build deeper relationships with and turn their audiences & their customers into real, IRL communities.
Even physical venues like retail shops & cafes will undergo a massive transformation (they already are) into spaces that people want to come to and hang out in. I saw this a couple months back, and it reflects what I saw in real life while I was traveling, and what I mentioned above about brands like Othership, Soho House and Equinox (not to mention the tens of thousands of others around the world).
As AI continues to eat the internet, more value, more people and more social activity will migrate offline. Events, experiences, social clubs, IRL Communities, curated trips, date nights, you name it. This is where the opportunity is. This is where the puck is going. This is where I am playing. This where you should go."
https://remnantchronicles.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-experience-economy
20.Helpful framework on Trump 2.0's geopolitical plan. Hard power is back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA5POz9bVhE
21."At his core, Bond embodies something many modern men sense is missing today and that is presence. Presence is not just a matter of style, nor is it arrogance or bravado. What makes Bond compelling to us is the way he carries himself. He moves through the world with composure and confidence. Unfortunately, these qualities are becoming increasingly rare in a society that often derides masculinity as toxic while encouraging men to adopt traits that dilute the strength traditionally associated with manhood.
While few of us will find ourselves as international men of mystery navigating intrigue in distant lands, the principles that give Bond his presence are relevant to ordinary life. By examining some of the qualities that define this iconic fictional character, we may discover habits and disciplines that can be cultivated in our own lives."
https://thewaysofagentleman.substack.com/p/what-james-bond-gets-right-about
22."So far, for me at least, the arrival of Intelligence Age isn’t a story about having more time. It’s a story about having more capability and becoming obsessed with using it. In the end, this feels a continuation of an ongoing trend. The internet changed the way we work, but no one thinks it helped us to work less hard. Phones certainly didn’t.
Perhaps this is what it means to be a creature wired by evolution to strive, now equipped with weird new superpowers. The technologies change; the restlessness remains. New world, same humans."
https://www.newworldsamehumans.xyz/p/me-my-work-and-i
23."AI is not a tool we use. It is an environment we are moving into. The first wave was about efficiency — doing the same things faster, cheaper, at scale. This wave is structural. It is reorganizing the architecture of professional life: how we develop talent, how we manage organizations, how we price expertise, and ultimately how we define what makes a professional valuable.
To survive the massive structural change of the white-collar economy, professionals cannot continue to function as operators of tasks. They must become orchestrators of outcomes. The question is no longer “Can I do this faster with AI?” It is “Can I design a system that produces better results than my competitors’ systems?” The future of work is not about competing with the machine. It is about owning the intent behind the machine — the strategy, the values, the judgment that determine what the machine is even trying to accomplish. That is the only moat left. And it is more defensible than anything a title or a credential ever provided."
https://investinginai.substack.com/p/the-new-white-collar-moat-in-ai
24."If your life feels flat right now, consider that the solution probably isn’t another system. It’s a decision.
What is the thing you keep not doing because the timing isn’t right, the justification isn’t airtight, the risk feels slightly too large? That’s usually the thing. Not always. But usually.
The interesting men I know made the call when it wasn’t fully safe. They bought the car, took the trip, started the company, made the move. Not carelessly — but without waiting for a certainty that was never going to arrive.
And then they had something the optimizers don’t: a life with actual evidence in it. A story with weight. A self that has been tested against reality rather than just theorized about in a journal.
The goal was never a better routine. The goal was a life that made the routine irrelevant.
That’s the version worth building toward.
Not optimized. Lived."
https://hayescarrera.substack.com/p/nobody-is-coming-to-make-your-life
25."You have the right to choose your circle. You are free to do this. Surround yourself with people who lift you up. People who accept you, fully. People who don’t judge you, who don’t throw little barbs to make themselves feel bigger. People who see the best in you and want to help you set it free.
They are out there. Find them.
And let the little monster starve."
https://2lr.substack.com/p/the-little-monster
26. "What you have right now is an amazing opportunity, especially if you’re between the ages of 25 and 45, especially if your living situation is stable, especially if you are more than helpless with a computer. You have an amazing opportunity to do useful things as every other smart person is getting extremely distracted, intensely more distracted by the day, from doing anything useful.
Tomorrow is Monday; do something useful and remunerative this week."
https://indianbronson.substack.com/p/stop-monitoring-the-situation
27."In all of warfare, the leap from operational art to strategy is the hardest to make. Whereas operational art is in many ways an extension of tactics, dealing with the same sorts of considerations, strategy is different in both kind and scale.
The problems it seeks to address are of a fundamentally different nature, as are the tools to effect it—yet by the very nature of the problem, it is almost impossible to train anyone to practice good strategy."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-190343719
28.One of the top seed investors in Silicon Valley. This was really insightful. Chad Byers of Susa VC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2dEkmnOWwI
29.Lots of stuff here: AI, Defense and Space. The future is bright in America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zNKcH3uZec
30."We have been conditioned to believe that “Knowledge is Power.” This is a 20th-century lie. In 2026, Selection is Power. Information is now a commodity with a price of zero. If you spend your morning “catching up” on the news, you are allowing the world’s chaos to set your internal tempo. You are a Consumer of Garbage, filling your mental palace with junk that will be irrelevant by sunset. To “know everything” is to understand nothing."
https://luxlifestylelab.substack.com/p/the-information-glutton
31."When it comes to your career, you have two choices:
–become really good at a skill, and sell that skill to a company in exchange for wages
–Or, start the company and employ the people who are really good at the skills you need
Those who choose option 1 have capped upside.
They can be the BEST in the world at what they do, and even make millions of dollars (cameraman). But, those who employ them are the one’s who have the *chance* to make billions because they own the equity (studios)
If you want to make money, go after the main man.
Get in the business of making money, not trading your time/skills for wages."
https://colejaczko.substack.com/p/have-you-ever-seen-a-billionaire
32."It's far from a positive development that the country with the biggest military and a highly improvisational foreign policy is also the one that bears the smallest relative share of the economic consequences of its actions. The economic story of the last decade and a half has been that the world grows, and the US grows faster.
It would be tempting to think that the US is levered to growth, and would decline faster, too. That might be true in terms of initial equity price reactions, but over longer periods the US will probably hold up better."
https://www.thediff.co/archive/america-has-a-comparative-advantage-in-handling-global-disorder/
33."In general, you should limit exposure to airline, transportation and auto related companies (ex-Tesla since they are electric). If you’re in the camp that this is solved quickly you’d take a derivative out on oil prices. No we won’t do this since we have no idea how long this takes.
If you’re in the long-term pain camp, you’d continue to sit in cash/build up a cash position or leave it in ultra-boring need to have stocks like utilities. You already know we’re going to be sitting in the same stance of waiting for crypto to bottom and investing in some long-term tech companies.
We’ll say it a billion times. You’re better off learning how to read emotions/psychology than worthless P/E ratios and Discounted Cash Flow valuations. The numbers in excel are fictional. The ratios mean nothing if everyone is clicking the green buy button or the red sell button.
Would you rather know if more money clicks buy or sell for the next year or if the company makes more money next year? You know the answer."
https://bowtiedbull.io/p/worried-about-oil-just-survive-the
34. "Having spent time working at Palantir, Volz is deeply knowledgeable about the defense tech sector but she’s making investments in all sorts of startups that are trying to reinvent America’s industrial base.
“I bet on people more than anything — people who want to work on the hardest, most important problems and actually have a mission underlying what they’re working on,” Volz said. “There are a lot of ways to make money. I want to make money on people actually doing important things rather than AI slop.”
https://www.newcomer.co/p/exclusive-ex-a16z-partner-michelle
35.A crash course on geopolitics and what the new world order could look like. Michael Every provides some great frameworks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLchr__I-0Y&t=1513s
36.Good dissection of the Sphere's business model.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2BCXdeHD18
37.Food for thought on the direction of AI & implications on society writ large.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8YC8OCnDxM
38.One of my favorite tech biz blog posts. You really get the bleeding edge of Silicon Valley.