Johan Norberg: “Protectionism might seem like a shield, but it easily becomes a cage. It’s a way of cutting a nation off from the world’s brains and skills, forfeiting not just wealth but the energy and constant renewal that make civilizations shine. Then all that remains are the fading memories of golden ages—and the broken shards of discarded amphorae.”
Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps by a16z.
WSJ: “The workplace is changing radically as the relationship between bosses and employees undergoes a dramatic shift. Harried managers need new strategies to run ever-larger teams and keep up with an ever-expanding list of duties. Many employees say they need to talk up their accomplishments because the boss is too busy to notice, and they have just a few minutes to do it. And both sides agree, only high-performing self-starters thrive.”
Colossus: “My guest today is Joe Liemandt. Joe is the principal at Alpha School and the founder of Trilogy Software and ESW Capital. He became the youngest member of the Forbes 400 in the 1990s before vanishing from public view for two decades, only to emerge with a $1 billion bet that he can make kids learn 10 times faster using AI. Joe has built an AI tutoring system so effective that students at his Alpha School literally beg not to take summer breaks, achieving two times learning outcomes in just two hours with standardized test results that compete with the very best schools in the world. We dive deep into why this could be the most valuable product he’s ever built, his contrarian thesis that traditional SaaS is facing AI-driven obsolescence, and how his experience buying a hundred plus software companies prepared him for this moonshot in a trillion-dollar market that hasn’t been innovated on in 200 years.”
FT: “Despite its stranglehold over rare earths — with 70 per cent of the mining, 90 per cent of separation and processing and 93 per cent of magnet manufacturing — Beijing also has generally kept prices low enough to discourage new competitors. That holds lessons for a range of strategic supply chains, and underscores how difficult it will be for the west to compete. “They don’t turn around and curb production to raise prices — instead they use this market dominance to retain leverage and then weaponise these resources,” said Gracelin Baskaran, a critical minerals expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s not just rare earths — it’s a story that’s being replicated across commodities.” China’s dominance of the industry was envisaged decades ago, when then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping lauded China’s mineral wealth, saying that “the Middle East has oil, China has rare earths”.”
