Category: Thinks

FT: “The Chess Revolution provides an entertaining and instructive overview of a game in the throes of reinvention. A decade ago it would have been quite possible to view chess as a fading sport, as its mysteries were solved by computers and its audiences tempted away by video games and other less taxing entertainments. Instead, by embracing a heady mix of technology and globalisation, it has been re-energised — providing a lesson for other human intellectual pursuits far beyond the sixty four squares.”

Benjamin Rapoport: “The way a brain-computer interface works is that there is a set of tiny little electrodes. In our case, it’s tiny little platinum electrodes. We work in groups of about 1,000 at a time. Each of these little electrodes is about the size of an individual neuron. There are a thousand tiny little dots of platinum embedded in what is a very thin film that’s about a fifth the width of your eyelash. That film conforms to the surface of the brain without doing any damage to the underlying brain. And it basically listens. Each one of those platinum electrodes listens to the electrical activity of the brain underneath. Thought actually has a physical manifestation, and it is electrical in nature. The precision device basically takes an electrical video in real time of the thoughts that are taking place on the brain surface. It records them, amplifies them, digitizes them and then wirelessly transmits them out of the body.”

WSJ: “We all need to move more. The sedentary behavior of the average American presents a health risk. One of the simplest and least expensive ways to get more active is just putting one foot in front of the other. Walking at a brisk pace for at least 150 minutes a week can help you sleep better, improve your memory, reduce the risk of serious conditions like heart disease and diabetes, boost bone health and curb weight gain, according to research from the American Heart Association. What’s less clear: the right way to pack in those 150 minutes. It’s time to revisit how to walk. Yes, you mastered it back in your toddler days. But when you’re walking for exercise, proper form is essential. When you put thought into the mechanics of your gait, your footwear and your routine can make a difference in your fitness.”

McKinsey on the high-growth arenas of the future. “E-commerce, Artificial intelligence software and services, Cloud services, Electric vehicles, Digital advertising, Semiconductors, Shared autonomous vehicles, Space, Cybersecurity, Batteries, Modular construction, Streaming video, Video games, Robotics, Industrial and consumer biotechnology, Future air mobility, Drugs for obesity and related conditions, Nuclear fission power plants.”

Harish Damodaran writes why aspiration is dead in India: “Multiple indicators — reverse migration, two-wheeler sales, rural employment — show that Indians increasingly have less confidence in the future. The animal spirits of millions need to be revived.”

Ted Sarandos: “The more time you spend watching Netflix, the more you value the things you watch on Netflix, is in direct correlation to how much we can charge for Netflix. If you don’t think Netflix is valuable to you at that price point, you just click one button and you’re off. So, we are constantly in search of adding more value. Every once in a while, we come back to members and ask for an increase so that we can..Our business was always going right to the consumer with an instant-feedback model. So, we’ve always been focused on that: Are you happy with what we’re providing you? I have found that there’s no better measurement of joy than engagement, because I’ve never seen anybody turn off a show that they love unless they just have to go to bed and they’re going to watch more tomorrow. And I’ve never seen one stick around for a show that they hate. keep that cycle going. But I don’t think we can do it unless we continue to add to the value.”

FT: “The art of good public speaking is often to say less, giving each idea time to breathe, and time to be absorbed by the audience. But the anxiety of the speaker pushes in the other direction, more facts, more notes, more words, all in the service of ensuring they don’t dry up on stage. It’s true that speaking in public is difficult, even risky. But the best way to view it is as an opportunity to define yourself and your ideas. If you are being handed a microphone and placed at the centre of an audience’s attention for 20 minutes, you’re much more likely to flourish if you aim to seize that opportunity. Everyone is watching; you’re there for a reason. So . . . what is it that you really want to say?”

Manny Skevofilax: “[A] joke I was taught in banking: No one ever went out of business from having too much debt. It was the inability to service that debt that caused their demise. That’s like saying that it’s not the fall from a tall building that kills you, it’s the sudden stop! The key consideration about debt is that it has to be paid off, usually with interest and even penalties. A great many students thought the government was going to erase their student debt, but they were wrong. Even debt in a family that’s “forgiven” can create ill will and resentment. And that debt didn’t disappear, someone else paid it off. Borrow for the short-term, e.g., to hire a new salesperson who will be productive short term and enable you to quickly pay back the loan, or to improve your technology so that customers can order online faster and in greater quantities. Don’t borrow for ego or “show.””

WSJ: “I recently asked [Brian] Chesky to explain the benefits of product releases—and his eyes lit up with excitement…“I’m very, very passionate about this,” Chesky said. These releases are not just PR stunts. He makes a very, very impassioned case for product announcements as a management strategy—a way to focus a company’s attention and even accelerate the pace of innovation. After all, if you commit to showcasing products once or twice a year, you have to actually come up with products worth the showcase…Apple-like product launches can be an effective management strategy—whether you’re in the business of tech or tacos.”

Morgan Housel: “There’s a Russian saying about nostalgia: “The past is more unpredictable than the future.” It’s so common for people’s memories about a time to become disconnected from how they actually felt at the time. I have a theory for why this happens: When studying history, you know how the story ends, which makes it impossible to imagine what people were thinking or feeling in the past. When thinking about our own lives, we don’t remember how we actually felt in the past; We remember how we think we should have felt, given what we know today…The past wasn’t as good as you remember. The present isn’t as bad as you think. The future will be better than you anticipate.”

NYTimes: “Today Nvidia is the unrivaled A.I. chip king and one of the most valuable corporations in the world, while Intel, once the semiconductor superpower, is reeling and getting no lift from the A.I. gold rush. Nvidia’s stock market value, for years a fraction of Intel’s, is now more than $3 trillion, roughly 30 times that of the struggling Silicon Valley icon, which has fallen below $100 billion…The story of how Intel, which recently cut 15,000 jobs, got left behind in A.I. is representative of the broader challenges the company now faces. There were opportunities missed, wayward decisions and poor execution, according to interviews with more than two dozen former Intel managers, board directors and industry analysts. The trail of missteps was a byproduct of a corporate culture born of decades of success and high profits, going back to the 1980s, when Intel’s chips and Microsoft’s software became the twin engines of the fast-growing personal computer industry.”

WSJ: “Companies are connecting large language models to their data with a technique known as retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. It is an obscure term, but at heart the idea is fairly straightforward: Retrieve a company’s data and use it to augment the work of generative AI…If a company creates an AI-based call-center agent, on the other hand, it will use RAG technology to import the processes, procedures and data used by human agents or operators. The agent’s large language model extracts its answers from that data…Once in place, however, these systems can open up a range of uses that go beyond call-center agents and other now-familiar enterprise AI applications such as writing software code.”

Arnold Kling on his conversation with John Samples: “Facebook saw TikTok as a threat. Facebook’s assumption was that you would want your posts to be seen by friends and family. TikTok assumed that you wanted to be followed by strangers. Facebook felt that it had to compete with TikTok, which meant enabling people to use its service to send messages to strangers. As people used that service to send political messages, this created a lot of dissatisfaction. More recently, by changing the feed algorithm to cut back on political content, Facebook was able to calm things down a bit.”

FT: “In Factorio, from the Czech developer Wube Software, you have crash-landed on an alien planet and your task is to build a rocket so you can escape. This entails single-handedly restaging the Industrial Revolution, from breaking up rocks for crude stone furnaces to refining oil into rocket fuel…The game, which has sold about four million copies over the past eight years, and released its first expansion pack last week, has been nicknamed Cracktorio for its addictiveness. What makes this all the more remarkable is that Factorio makes so little effort to seduce you. It’s a dour and fiddly experience, with graphics that look 20 years old, where taking a shortcut is always punished down the line and in which, if you want to excel, you will spend at least part of your time calculating ratios.”

WSJ: “On “The Rest Is History,” the world’s most popular history podcast, hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook ask some surprising questions. Was the Roman historian Tacitus woke? Is Louis XVI’s bad reputation unfair? Was World War I partly caused by the German Kaiser’s anger at being ridiculed for wearing the wrong shoes at a yacht party? History professors struggle to get students excited about the past. Yet at a recent live show in London, Holland and Sandbrook drew a raucous Gen Z audience with a rock-concert vibe. “The Rest Is History” podcast gets 11 million downloads a month and 1.2 million monthly YouTube views, and seven out of 10 listeners are under 40. People familiar with the show say that it has over 45,000 paying subscribers, who, along with advertising, make it possible for each host to earn nearly $100,000 a month.”

Janan Ganesh: “No other major democracy in the world is anything like as consistently deadlocked. Nor was the US itself in the last century. Its mutation into a 50-50 country (or really a 30-30-40 one, as four in 10 voters often abstain) has been a civic disaster. Why? Because there is no incentive to moderate. If you are guaranteed to be competitive in every national election, even if you nominate a twice-impeached felon, why mend your ways? A major party in 21st-century America is never truly out of power. It will tend to have a chamber of Congress, 20-plus governorships and a good chance of the White House next time, almost regardless of its candidate. Throw in a vast and lucrative media ecosystem, which affords politicos a nice life outside office, and there exists little express reason to behave well. When the state underwrites a financial institution, we fret about “moral hazard”. Here the electorate is the backstop and the parties are the banks.”

Anurag Wadehra: “AI is transforming industries across the board, but merely adopting AI doesn’t automatically set you apart from competitors. In fact, AI will soon become a baseline capability for many businesses. The companies that thrive will be those that can position themselves effectively by showcasing how their AI solutions deliver unique, tangible value. For example, in industries like SaaS, AI-driven features such as predictive analytics or workflow automation are becoming common. To differentiate, your positioning needs to focus on what specific problems your AI solves and how it creates value in a way that competitors can’t replicate.”

Ismar Volic: “Ranked choice collects more information, so math can do more with it. If nobody has won more than 50 percent of the vote, you eliminate the person with the least number of first-place votes — and the votes for that person are transferred down the ballot to the next candidate. This is like saying to the voter, Look, your top choice didn’t make it, but who would you like to give your vote to now, knowing that your person is out? So your ballot still contributes. In this iterative process, math can do a much better job of understanding the collective preferences of the voters. Showing the improvement with a different method is powerful and disarming precisely because it is steeped in logic and reason.”

Steve Huffman: “Reddit is communities and conversation, and we have communities for literally anything that you’re into or going through. So if you have questions, there’s just a high likelihood that Reddit, where people have been talking about everything for almost two decades, has an answer or perspectives on whatever it is. Whether you’re 17 or 70, a nerd or a normie, a man or a woman or anything in between, Reddit has a home for you. I think that’s unique on the Internet…The source of artificial intelligence is actual intelligence, which is what you find on Reddit. And indeed, the Reddit corpus is a significant part of the training of the major foundation models. I think your observation is true, that it does seem like there’s a general lowering of quality on the internet because more content is written by AI. But I think that actually makes Reddit stand out more as the place where there’s all of this human content. What people want is to hear from other people.”

Vinod Khosla: ” I call any technology as important if it’ll eventually get to the Chi-India price, where it will be adapted in India or China, irrespective of climate or not. Solar has reached that and India is deploying solar very heavily, and that’s a great thing. But could India afford technologies today that cost more than their fossil competitors or afford to subsidize them? No. And I do think the West, and West won’t transfer billions of dollars or hundreds of billions of dollars a year to the developing world, but they can get technologies going in their own countries and win the manufacturing battles so they get benefit from these new climate technologies when they get to unsubsidized competitiveness and then deploy them all over the world.”

Ashu Garg speaks to former Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman: “Companies that fail are often those “that can’t handle the truth” about their deepest problems, Frank says. A sales slump may actually stem from a flawed product, not a lackluster sales team. “A lousy salesperson can sell a great product, but a great salesperson cannot sell a lousy one,” he notes. Frank built a reputation as a “confrontational” executive. But confrontational can be misinterpreted, he says.“Being a CEO is a highly confrontational role, but they think that confrontational means grabbing people by the lapels,” Frank told me. “That’s not what I mean by confrontation. Confrontation is about confronting issues and situations that are either not good enough or could be better.” Leadership is about relentlessly confronting reality and having the courage to address what others would rather ignore.”

Larry Summers: “I think that the more I study history, the more I am struck that the major inflection points in history have to do with technology. I did a calculation not long ago, and I calculated that while only 7% of the people who’ve ever lived are alive right now, two-thirds of the GDP that’s ever been produced by human beings was produced during my lifetime. And on reasonable projections, there could be three times as much produced in the next 50 years as there has been through all of human history to this point. So technology, what it means for human productivity—that’s the largest part of what drives history. So I’ve been learning about other technological revolutions. I had never been caused to think appreciably about the transition thousands of years ago from hunter-gatherer society to agricultural society. I’ve thought about the implications of the Renaissance, the implications of the great turn away from a Malthusian dynamic that was represented by the Industrial Revolution. So the first part of it is thinking about technology and what it means in broad ways.”

WSJ: “In the long term, Nvidia is creating what [Jensen] Huang calls its own “AI brain.” That’s the idea that knowledge of how a company works, its business processes and customer interactions need to be collected and turned over to AI. The end goal is to turn that information into an AI that CIOs and CEOs “can just talk to,” Huang said. Nvidia has already started turning all of its private data into an AI, Huang said, adding that “everybody should do that.” In service of that goal, the company is announcing a tool that makes PDF files easier for AI to understand and ingest, Huang said. For the most part, “unstructured data” like emails and PDFs have been difficult for more traditional types of AI to capture. Further down the line, it also means companies will have “large populations of digital workers,” or AI agents, in roles such as marketing, sales, engineering and supply chain, working alongside their human counterparts, Huang said. To get there, everyone—including business technology leaders—needs to learn how to instruct an AI.”

Howard Marks: “There are only really two asset classes: ownership and debt. If someone wants to participate financially in a business, the essential choice is between owning part of it and making a loan to it. I have always felt that most investors do not fully grasp the essential difference between ownership and lending. In fact, they have nothing in common. Owners put their money at risk with no guarantee of a return; they merely expect to share in the residual cash flows and enterprise value from a business. Lenders, on the other hand, finance owners’ activities in exchange for contractual promises of periodic interest and the repayment of principal at the end, meaning the resulting return is known in advance, assuming the borrower makes the payments as promised.”

FT: “Every reader knows the moment when the paths of destiny fork. You must either become a Chucker, steel your nerves and give away old books before they march into the linen cupboards and storm the sofas, the dining table, the guest room, or become a Keeper, accept defeat and move to a larger home, just to accommodate the relentless tide of a personal library gone rogue…A simple principle emerges: intention matters. Booklovers who organise their lives and their homes around their desire to have a research library at hand are seldom overwhelmed in the manner of us amateurs who buy books on impulse, letting a library grow over time.”

Arnold Kling: “At any moment, there are two possible states of the world concerning a nation’s government debt. In the high-confidence state, investors are sure that the government will put its finances in order, and the interest rate is low. In the low-confidence state, investors do not have confidence, the interest rate is high, and this produces an immediate crisis. Either state is self-reinforcing, and the move from the high-confidence state to the crisis state can be sudden.”

Andy Kessler: “Large language models are impressive, but they are still statistical models mimicking human thinking. You can’t just throw cheaper chips at the problem and expect growth. More than Moore’s Law (chips doubling in density every 18 months) is in play. I hate to be the one to throw it, but here’s some cold water on the AI hype cycle…I’m convinced AI will transform our lives for the better, but it isn’t a straight line up.”

Demis Hassabis: ” I hope we look back in 10 years and AlphaFold will have heralded a new golden era of scientific discovery in all these different domains. I hope that we will be adding to that body of work. I think we’re quite unique as one of the big labs in the world that actually doesn’t just talk about using it for science, but is doing it.”

Akash Prakash: “[India’s] IPO markets are wide open, with over 250 listings in the last three years. India is probably the best place to list for a startup today. Most startups are quickly flipping back to an Indian incorporation to enable them to list in our markets. With the flow of retail money into funds and also the continued success of active management, there is enough demand for new listings. However, we must ensure that the pricing of new VC-backed listings is reasonable enough for investors to make money; otherwise, they may choose to stay away. The VC stalwarts also need to keep the pressure on founders to list, ensuring that the liquidity needs of founders and employees cannot be fully met through secondaries. Boards must also ensure that founders understand that in most cases the end goal is a public listing. Remaining private forever is not an option!”

Foreign Affairs: “Today’s wars and the assiduous investments made by the United States and China show that mass is making a comeback, but not at the expense of precision. Indeed, the current age of warfare is collapsing the binary between mass and precision, scale and sophistication. Call it the age of “precise mass.” Militaries find themselves in a new era in which more and more actors can muster uncrewed systems and missiles and gain access to inexpensive satellites and cutting-edge commercially available technology. With these tools, they can more easily conduct surveillance and stage accurate and devastating attacks. Its imperatives already shape warfare in Ukraine and the Middle East, influence dynamics in the Taiwan Strait, and inform planning and procurement in the Pentagon. In the era of precise mass, war will be defined in large part by the deployment of huge numbers of uncrewed systems, whether fully autonomous and powered by artificial intelligence or remote-controlled, from outer space to under the sea. The U.S. military has positioned itself to lead in adapting to these changes in the character of warfare, but it must be ready to adopt innovations quickly and at scale. The pioneering breakthroughs evident in today’s conflicts merely foreshadow how wars will be waged in the years and decades to come as militaries grapple with the imperatives of both mass and precision.”

Economic Times: “Sri City in Andhra Pradesh, Hosur in Tamil Nadu, Dahej and Dholera in Gujarat. Manesar in Haryana, Greater Noida in Uttar Pradesh, and Shendra-Bidkin and Navi Mumbai in Maharashtra. These new Gurgaons are promising to be new industrial and population hubs, taking away the pressure from overcongested New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Ahmedabad. Urban planning and development experts believe these new satellite cities that tap into the overflow from abutting megacities could be the real answer to India’s urban woes.”

NYTimes: “Leadership is an action, not a title. And many of our leaders are paralyzed by broken, perverse incentives that impair their abilities to fulfill institutional missions and mandates. Paradoxically, many leaders feel that any reduction in their visibility brings with it a promise of reward. Increasingly, I worry that well-intentioned boards of directors are selecting rising leaders for safety, appointing executives who have assiduously avoided controversy rather than those most adept at managing it. Then, they counsel toward caution, not conscience…Effective leadership requires managing nuance and complexity, seeing all sides of an issue from the perspective of every stakeholder, and then setting a course, and communicating with clarity, consistent with common values.”

WSJ: “There’s an art to crafting the perfect email intro. Dewane, the Chicago architect who’s orchestrated thousands of introductions, is constantly scanning his mental Rolodex for pairs of contacts who can solve each other’s problems. He usually gets preapproval to reach out from both parties, then turns to his formula. There’s two paragraphs—one for each person. He describes what they do, why he thought of them, and how they’re perfect to connect on this particular thing. He includes hyperlinks to both LinkedIn profiles. And he always puts the person who stands to gain more from the interaction last, queuing them up to initiate contact. “I get kind of paranoid if intros just hang there,” he says. If there’s a big difference in power between the two people, he choreographs the thread even more intricately.”

Daren Acemoglu: “Technological transitions, such as the shift to agriculture or the Industrial Revolution, have always been pivotal moments requiring adaptation and choice. During these transitions, societies make critical choices about how to utilise new technologies, and these choices shape their future trajectory. The current age of AI presents a similar opportunity and requires careful consideration of its potential benefits and risks…While human innovation, creativity, and state capacity remain crucial, the specific skills needed in the 21st century are evolving. Generative AI is likely to automate certain tasks, reducing the value of skills related to information processing, retrieval, and certain types of manual labour. However, human creativity and flexibility will remain central.”

WSJ: “There is one idea that encapsulates the approach to innovation that makes all of it possible—and it’s maybe the closest thing to a grand unified theory of Apple. It’s a philosophy of just four words that describe Apple’s past, present and definitely its future. Four words that help explain why this was the year the company plowed into spatial computing and artificial intelligence. During one of those epochal years when it feels like everything is about to change again, I heard them over and over, in conversation with Apple executives and Cook himself: Not first, but best.”

Steve Correa & Ajay Kelkar: “Reflection and vulnerability are essential in leadership. During a leadership programme, one of us resisted words like “care” and “empathy,” which felt unfamiliar. Yet, these softer qualities strengthened his leadership, helping him connect more deeply with his team. If you want to enhance your coachability, ask yourself: Are you open to feedback, even when it challenges your beliefs? Have you successfully adapted based on past feedback? Improving coachability is a journey of self-reflection, adaptation and daily practice. Embrace this process, and you’ll find leadership growth to be a continuous and rewarding path. Being coachable is often about ‘stopping doing’ rather than ‘starting to do’ a few more things.”

Business Standard: “India’s recent struggles with reform are also, at their root, about land. India has a similarly inflexible land market. In fact, it has no land market as such; land use is determined by bureaucratic diktat, and there is no secure record of ownership. But, unlike China, local governments will also struggle to build land banks or borrow against it. Here, if anyone captures value from land, it is not rentiers but the middlemen linked to politicians and bureaucrats who can influence the change of land use notification. The outcome is that neither the private nor the public sector can easily transform or build on land. Agriculture is low-margin and investment in industry is low in large part as a consequence of these restrictions on land ownership and value extraction.”

Debashis Basu: “Permanent changes being highlighted by stock-market experts, such as a strong banking system, a strong current account, low inflation, a controlled Budget deficit, and a low debt-to-GDP ratio, don’t hold up on closer scrutiny. Now the data shows that the Indian economy remains a cyclical play after all; there has been no fundamental transition to higher income through higher productivity and improved competitiveness. After all, prosperity is not India’s birth right. We need to do the hard work of raising rural incomes through agricultural reforms, make mass manufacturing cheaper, and exports competitive. These are nowhere on the agenda. But the popular narrative is that this is “India’s century” or “India’s era”. If growth reverts to the pre-Covid level, a lot of people may have to temper their rosy optimism.”

FT: “Leading artificial intelligence companies that are racing to develop the cutting-edge technology are tackling a very human challenge: how to give AI models a personality. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have developed teams focused on improving “model behaviour”, an emerging field that shapes AI systems’ responses and characteristics, impacting how their chatbots come across to users.  Their differing approaches to model behaviour could prove crucial in which group dominates the burgeoning AI market, as they attempt to make their models more responsive and useful to millions of people and businesses around the world. The groups are shaping their models to have characteristics such as being “kind” and “fun”, while also enforcing rules to prevent harm and ensure nuanced interactions.”

Ritesh Banglani: “The venture business model relies on the portfolio effect: In a high-risk sector, you need to fund several companies to generate one large winner. A fund will only find it viable to invest in a new sector when it sees an opportunity to invest in at least 15-20 such startups over a 3-4 year period. Only then will a VC fund invest in the expertise required to evaluate them. A new space attains a critical mass of fundable opportunities when at least 100-200 credible new companies are created in it every year. When this starts to happen in deep technology areas, we will likely see VC money rush into them. Hopefully, we will finally be able to put the moonshot debate to rest then.” TN Hari: “It’s just a matter of time before VCs in India realize that deep-tech bets are no longer as risky, and that they are probably better off with deep tech than going after less risky ideas on a path of diminishing returns. A new generation of VCs, whose partners come from deep science or tech backgrounds, is likely to emerge and help set off the next wave of tech entrepreneurship in India.”

NYTimes: “On one level, “Shark Tank” is your basic reality TV show. The pitches, which last about 45 minutes, are edited to snappy 12- to 15-minute segments with music scored for suspense over tight shots of bug-eyed, sweaty supplicants. Some founders leave the tank defeated, humiliated or in tears. Others leave triumphant with handshake deals. Stories about overcoming struggle and self-doubt feel calibrated to make you cry…But if you watch the show as I did — most of its 15 seasons in one year — you might be struck by something else: the way it reflects the shifting contours of the American economy. The show started in August 2009, in the pit of the Great Recession. Over the next decade and a half, 1,275 people pitched their ideas on air. The comfort food and DVDs featured in those first years were replaced by the rise of online direct-to-consumer businesses, the allure of Silicon Valley and its build-at-all-costs mentality, and then the shock of the pandemic and the ingenuity that came out of it.

WSJ: “Anime is shaping up as the country’s next big export industry, beyond cars and electronics…Japan’s anime and manga, the Japanese word for comics, have created many well-known characters and franchises over the years, such as Pokémon. And it looks to be getting even more mainstream.” More in the Economist.

FT: “[Hilton CEO Chris] Nassetta says he is aware that turning round a company such as Hilton — which has around 8,000 hotels in 126 territories and about 500,000 employees — “takes a village”. “I’m not that special”. He has to manage his ambition with delegating appropriately and realising that “if you don’t stop, take a deep breath, celebrate successes, and give credit where credit is due, people just burn out”. “Earlier in my leadership journey, I probably didn’t take enough time to slow down,” he admits. He says other business leaders often ask him how a company can transform itself. Turnrounds, he notes, fail because of “bad strategy or bad culture”. Good leaders are able to get not just managers onside but also staff lower down the chain. “You need to get people to believe in where you’re going and in you.” He says he attempts the latter by being authentic, hardworking and a good listener, although admits he could always improve.”

Nabeel Qureshi on Palantir: “The big productivity gains of this AI cycle are going to come when AI starts providing leverage to the large companies and businesses of this era – in industries like manufacturing, defense, logistics, healthcare and more. Palantir has spent a decade working with these companies. AI agents will eventually drive many core business workflows, and these agents will rely on read/write access to critical business data. Spending a decade integrating enterprise data is the critical foundation for deploying AI to the enterprise. The opportunity is massive.”

Rohit Krishnan: “Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations conducted a thousand times a day.”

WSJ: “Research shows we lose roughly 3% to 8% of muscle mass per decade after age 30, with a faster decline after 60, while fat mass increases. This can lead to less mobility and a greater risk of falls and injury, plus other long-term effects. The changes mean we need to eat progressively fewer calories as we age to maintain our weight, says Dr. Sarah Nosal, a family-medicine doctor in New York and president-elect of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Muscle tissue stores more water than fat mass does, so we are more susceptible to dehydration as we age, says Nosal. That, plus changes in our enzymes that process alcohol differently and at a lower level, help explain why it often feels harder to recover from a night of drinking the older we get.”

Daron Acemoglu: “Inflation seems under control. The job market remains healthy. Wages, including at the bottom end of the scale, are rising. But this is just a lull. There is a storm approaching, and Americans are not prepared. Barreling toward us are three epochal changes poised to reshape the U.S. economy in coming years: an aging population, the rise of artificial intelligence and the rewiring of the global economy. There should be little surprise in this, since all these are evolving slowly in plain sight. What has not been fully understood is how these changes in combination are likely to transform the lives of working people in ways not seen since the late 1970s, when wage inequality surged and wages at the low end stagnated or even fell. Together, if handled correctly, these challenges could remake work and deliver much higher productivity, wages and opportunities — something the computer revolution promised and never fulfilled.”

Marissa Mayer on a technology that she is secretly excited about: “Carbon nanotubes. They’re made of carbon and they’re tiny, and they’re incredibly strong. If you do a space tether, you can make things that are incredibly light and incredibly strong. Because they’re carbon, you can actually print them. One day you could do 3D printing of a bridge or of a heart. I’m surprised more hasn’t happened with carbon nanotubes.”