Why JansBrief exists
Jan Stenbeck was the smartest person I ever met. Not smart in the way academics are smart. Smart in the way that changes the world. He saw what nobody else saw. He understood that mobile telephony would revolutionise countries that hadn't even laid copper wire yet. He broke state socialist monopolies when everyone said it was impossible. He built empires out of ideas.
Every day Jan received a binder. Two people read all the world's important newspapers and magazines for him and pulled out what mattered. The things others missed. The faint signals that foreshadow great change.
I worked with Jan. I learned from him. And I have never forgotten that binder. JansBrief is my tribute to him, a modern version: global, AI-driven, available to everyone with ambition.
In memory of Jan Stenbeck
1942 — 2002
Jan Stenbeck
Tele2, Millicom, MTG, Metro
In today's edition · 30 July 2026
In the vast desert of southwestern New Mexico, a small geothermal power plant was dying. The underground reservoir feeding it was cooling, the economics were collapsing, and the previous operator was ready to walk away. Then, in June 2024, a company called Zanskar — barely known outside specialist energy circles — bought the failing plant and bet on a different approach.
Two years later, that plant is running at full capacity again.
What Zanskar did was not dramatic in the way of moonshots. It was dramatic in the way of competence. The company used advanced subsurface mapping — machine-learning models trained on geological data — to identify new, hotter zones in the reservoir that the original operator had missed. Instead of drilling expensive new wells from scratch, they reworked existing infrastructure, redirecting flow to tap thermal resources that had been sitting untouched for years. The result: a plant that was marked for decommissioning is now producing reliable, baseload clean power around the clock.
This matters because geothermal energy has been the quiet embarrassment of the clean energy transition. Solar and wind have dominated headlines and investment. Geothermal — which provides continuous power regardless of weather, requires no batteries, and has a tiny land footprint — has been stuck at roughly the same global installed capacity for over a decade. The reason is geological risk. Drilling is expensive. Many wells come up dry. Investors hate the uncertainty.
Zanskar's model flips the script. Rather than pioneering new sites with expensive exploration, the company targets existing geothermal infrastructure that underperformed because the original developers lacked the subsurface imaging tools that now exist. It is, in effect, a turnaround fund for the Earth's heat — buying distressed assets and making them productive with better data.
The implications ripple outward. The United States alone has dozens of geothermal plants operating below capacity or nearing retirement. Indonesia, the Philippines, Kenya, and Iceland — the world's major geothermal producers — all have aging infrastructure with similar potential. If Zanskar's approach proves replicable, it could unlock gigawatts of clean baseload power without the multi-billion-dollar risk profiles that have scared off investors for decades.
The deeper signal is methodological. The energy transition's next phase may not be about building entirely new things. It may be about making the things we already built work properly — using AI-enhanced geological intelligence to extract value that was always there but invisible. In an era when every new solar farm fights for grid connection and every wind project faces permitting delays, resurrecting existing plants with existing grid connections is a shortcut that few are talking about.
Zanskar has not yet disclosed whether it plans to acquire additional plants, but the logic is clear. The geothermal sector's graveyard is full of assets that failed not because the Earth lacked heat, but because the humans lacked data.
Source: MIT Technology Review · 30 July 2026
Now — Distressed geothermal assets become an investment class: The immediate consequence is financial. If a small, data-driven company can take a failing geothermal plant and restore it to full capacity, the risk calculus for energy infrastructure investors changes. Geothermal's historical problem — geological uncertainty — is being reduced by machine learning. Expect private equity and infrastructure funds to start screening aging geothermal portfolios the way they screen distressed real estate. The plants already exist. The grid connections already exist. The permitting already exists. The only missing ingredient was better subsurface intelligence.
Soon — Baseload renewables challenge the battery orthodoxy: The current clean energy consensus assumes that intermittent renewables plus massive battery storage equals a decarbonised grid. But batteries remain expensive, degrade over time, and depend on supply chains concentrated in China. Revived geothermal — providing 24/7 power with near-zero marginal fuel cost — offers a baseload alternative that does not require storage at all. If geothermal rehabilitation scales, it weakens the case for the enormous battery buildout that grid planners currently assume is inevitable. This is not a small disruption. It could redirect hundreds of billions in planned infrastructure spending.
Later — US borrowing costs hit a 19-year high as the Fed walks a tightrope between war inflation and economic fragility: The deeper shift is structural. The Federal Reserve's decision to hold interest rates steady — even as US borrowing costs climb to their highest level in nineteen years — reveals a central bank caught between two dangers it cannot resolve simultaneously. On one side, the Iran conflict is injecting a supply-side inflation shock through energy prices, shipping disruptions, and defence spending. On the other, raising rates further risks tipping an already strained economy into recession, with housing, commercial real estate, and consumer credit all showing signs of stress. The Fed's paralysis matters far beyond monetary policy. When the world's reserve currency issuer pays more to borrow than at any point since 2007, the cost ripples through every sovereign debt market, every corporate balance sheet, and every emerging economy that borrows in dollars. For the energy transition specifically, higher borrowing costs are devastating. Clean energy projects are capital-intensive and front-loaded: a solar farm or a geothermal rehabilitation like Zanskar's depends on cheap debt to make the economics work. If the cost of capital stays elevated, the very investment thesis that makes distressed geothermal assets attractive — low risk, existing infrastructure, predictable returns — collides with a financing environment that punishes long-duration projects. The Fed's predicament is not temporary. It is the monetary expression of a world where geopolitical conflict and climate investment compete for the same scarce resource: affordable capital. Source: Financial Times · 30 July 2026 ---
Meta's share price dropped sharply after Mark Zuckerberg used the company's earnings call to pitch a future built around personalised AI agents — digital assistants that would act on behalf of individual users across commerce, communication, and content. The problem was not the vision but the numbers behind it. AI infrastructure costs are rising faster than the revenue the agents are generating, and Zuckerberg's projections for when the economics would flip were vague enough to unsettle investors already nervous about Big Tech's ballooning capital expenditure. The selloff reflects a broader market anxiety: the AI spending boom has produced extraordinary capability but uncertain monetisation. Meta is not alone in this bind — Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all face the same question — but Zuckerberg's decision to frame AI agents as the company's central growth thesis, rather than advertising, made the gap between ambition and revenue painfully visible. For the AI industry as a whole, Meta's stumble is a warning that the market's patience for spending without proportionate returns is wearing thin. The companies building AI must now prove not just that the technology works, but that someone will pay for it at a price that justifies the investment. Source: Financial Times · 30 July 2026 ---
The Democratic Republic of Congo's constitutional court has issued a ruling on the proposed referendum that the opposition immediately denounced as a green light for President Félix Tshisekedi to seek a third term. The reality is more nuanced. The court ruled on procedural questions about the referendum process, not on the substance of term-limit changes. But in Congolese politics, procedural rulings have a way of becoming substantive realities. The ruling allows the referendum process to continue, which opposition leaders see as the architecture for constitutional revision by plebiscite — a well-worn playbook across central Africa. What matters next: whether the African Union and regional bodies treat the ruling as legitimate process or democratic backsliding. Source: The Africa Report · 30 July 2026 ---
The breakup of Poland's Law and Justice party is not producing the moderate outcome that Brussels hoped for. Instead, it is strengthening hardline factions that oppose Ukraine's EU membership and want to pull Poland closer to Orbán-style sovereigntism. The splinter parties may hold the balance of power after the next election, meaning that Poland — which has been Ukraine's most vocal EU champion — could become a blocking force in accession talks. For Kyiv, this is a potential disaster. For Brussels, it is a reminder that the EU's eastern flank is not a monolithic pro-Ukrainian bloc but a shifting landscape where nationalist grievances can override strategic solidarity. Source: Politico Europe · 30 July 2026 ---
After a tanker was attacked in the Strait of Hormuz more than three weeks ago, Qatar has resumed LNG shipments through the world's most critical energy chokepoint. The resumption is tentative — a single cargo — and markets are watching to see whether it signals genuine de-escalation or a calculated gamble by Doha that the US-Iran strikes have temporarily cleared a corridor. The broader picture is sobering: the Strait handles roughly 20 percent of global oil and LNG flows, and even a brief disruption sends price signals through every energy market on Earth. Qatar, the world's largest LNG exporter, cannot afford prolonged avoidance of the route, but nor can it afford to lose another vessel. Source: Bloomberg · 30 July 2026 ---
The UN migration agency reports that people from more than 80 countries have been lured into forced-labour scam compounds across Southeast Asia, with the scale of trafficking expanding far beyond the Myanmar-Cambodia-Laos axis initially identified. Victims are recruited through social media job advertisements promising legitimate work, then confined in compounds and forced to conduct online fraud. Some have been sexually abused. The scam industry — estimated to generate tens of billions annually — has metastasised into a transnational criminal enterprise that exploits weak labour protections and corrupt border officials across the region. The report underscores that this is no longer a regional problem but a global trafficking emergency. Source: The Japan Times · 30 July 2026 ---
President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev used a public address to urge Russia to pursue peace talks and freeze the Ukraine conflict — while simultaneously reaffirming Kazakhstan's "allied relationship" with Moscow. The diplomatic tightrope is characteristic of Tokayev, who has quietly distanced Astana from Moscow's war while maintaining the economic and security ties that Central Asian states depend on. The significance lies in the public nature of the call. Central Asian leaders have previously expressed discomfort with the war in private or through diplomatic channels. A televised appeal to freeze the conflict is a different order of signal, suggesting Tokayev calculates that Russian weakness has shifted the risk calculus enough to speak openly. Source: The Diplomat · 30 July 2026 ---
The Trump administration has been negotiating with Uruguay for months over the possibility of sending deported migrants to the South American country, according to the New York Times. Uruguay's foreign ministry has stopped short of confirming a deal. The proposal — outsourcing deportation destinations to willing third countries — echoes the UK's Rwanda scheme and Australia's Pacific processing model. For Uruguay, a small country with a tradition of liberal immigration policy, accepting the arrangement would represent a sharp departure from its political identity. President Yamandú Orsi faces pressure from both Washington and domestic opinion. The IMF's Kristalina Georgieva arrived in Montevideo on the same day, adding economic leverage to the diplomatic equation. Source: Mercopress · 30 July 2026 ---
Nearly 99 billion naira (approximately $60 million) in worker pension contributions remain uncredited in Nigeria's pension system, exposing deep failures in employer payroll and remittance practices. The backlog affects millions of workers whose contributions were deducted from their wages but never forwarded to pension fund administrators. The problem is structural: enforcement mechanisms are weak, penalties for non-remittance are rarely applied, and many employers — particularly in the public sector — treat pension deductions as short-term operating capital. For Nigerian workers, the uncredited contributions represent retirement savings that may never materialise. For the country's pension reform project, it is a credibility crisis that undermines the system's foundational promise. Source: Business Day Nigeria · 30 July 2026 ---
For over a decade, a group of designers in New York tried to do something that every city official, engineer, and regulator told them was impossible: build a swimming pool that floats in the East River and uses the river's own water, filtered clean enough to swim in.
No municipal budget. No federal programme. No permission, initially, from anyone.
The concept — called +Pool — was sketched on a napkin in 2010. The idea was a cross-shaped floating structure whose walls would act as a filtration membrane, pulling river water through layers that strip bacteria, contaminants, and debris. The pool would clean the water by the act of existing. Swim in it, and you swim in water that entered filthy and left clean.
Everyone said no. The East River is a tidal strait with powerful currents. The permitting alone crosses the jurisdictions of at least five city and state agencies. The engineering had never been attempted. Every infrastructure expert they consulted told them to build a normal pool on land and stop wasting everyone's time.
They did not stop. They spent years developing a filtration system, testing membranes, building small-scale prototypes, fighting through regulatory thickets, and raising money from sources that ranged from Kickstarter campaigns to private donors who shared their obsession. Now, a rectangular pilot version — Pool 1 — is nearing completion in Brooklyn. The barge is built. The infiltration system is installed. The structure is designed to prove that the core technology works: river water in, swimmable water out, no chemicals, no municipal pipes.
If Pool 1 succeeds, the full cross-shaped +Pool follows. But the real victory is already visible. A group of outsiders with no institutional backing used technical ingenuity to work around every regulatory and engineering barrier that a vast city bureaucracy placed in their way. They did not ask permission to reimagine the relationship between a city and its waterway. They built it.
The concept is now being studied by cities from Copenhagen to São Paulo. The idea that urban rivers can be swimming pools — that the infrastructure of recreation can simultaneously be the infrastructure of environmental remediation — is moving from absurd to inevitable. It started with people who were told no and heard it as an engineering problem, not an answer.
Source: Dezeen · 29 July 2026
A major early altarpiece by Fra Angelico — the 15th-century Dominican friar whose luminous paintings defined the spiritual aesthetic of the early Renaissance — has been restored at the San Domenico convent in Fiesole, outside Florence. The work, which featured in a landmark exhibition last year, has been returned to a state that reveals the extraordinary precision of Angelico's gold-leaf technique and the depth of his colour. What makes this restoration notable is its restraint: the conservators chose to stabilise and clean rather than reconstruct, letting the painting's age show alongside its recovered brilliance. In a world of aggressive digital restoration and AI-upscaled old masters, the Fiesole approach feels like a quiet act of respect. Source: Artnet News · 30 July 2026 ---
On the Syrian coast, the city of Latakia is experiencing something it has not known in over a decade: tourism. Syrians are returning to the beaches, testing whether the post-Assad era will lean toward conservative Islamic norms or something closer to secular Mediterranean life. The answer, for now, is ambiguous. Women in bikinis share the shoreline with families in full covering. Bars serve alcohol alongside juice stalls. Nobody knows which direction the country will ultimately take, but the beaches of Latakia have become an unlikely laboratory for Syria's most fundamental cultural question. The scenes are both ordinary and extraordinary — the banality of a beach holiday set against the backdrop of a collapsed dictatorship. Source: Monocle · 30 July 2026 ---
Waddington Custot gallery in London has opened "The Nabi Shock," a deep dive into the turn-of-the-20th-century group of European artists — Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, Sérusier, Vallotton — who bridged Impressionism and Modernism. The Nabis (from the Hebrew word for "prophets") worked in flat colour, decorative pattern, and domestic intimacy at a time when the art establishment demanded academic realism. They were dismissed as wallpaper-makers. A century later, their influence on everything from Matisse to contemporary illustration is undeniable. The London exhibition follows a Paris iteration and offers a chance to see original works that rarely travel — including several from private collections being exhibited publicly for the first time. Source: Artnet News · 30 July 2026 ---
A prototype of the long-planned +Pool — a floating swimming pool designed to filter and clean the East River — is nearing completion in Brooklyn. The barge-mounted rectangular pilot, called Pool 1, features an infiltration system that processes river water as it flows through the structure, removing contaminants without chemicals. If the pilot succeeds, a full cross-shaped version will follow. The project has spent fifteen years navigating regulatory, engineering, and funding obstacles. Its completion would mark the first time a major city used recreational infrastructure as environmental remediation — turning the act of swimming into an act of cleaning. Source: Dezeen · 29 July 2026 ---
A growing movement in the United States is pushing beyond the familiar concept of "aging in place" — staying in one's own home — toward something more ambitious: aging in community. The idea is that isolation kills as surely as disease, and that the infrastructure of old age should be designed around social connection, not just physical accessibility. Programmes across the country are experimenting with "village" models, where neighbours coordinate mutual support, shared meals, and collective transport. The shift is philosophical as much as practical: it rejects the assumption that the elderly are a problem to be managed and instead treats them as a community to be activated. Source: Reasons to be Cheerful · 30 July 2026 ---
In China, anxious high school graduates emerging from the gaokao — the national university entrance exam that determines life trajectories — are increasingly turning to AI tools to help select their university and major. The tools analyse scores, university admission patterns, and labour market data to recommend optimal placements. The phenomenon reflects both the extraordinary pressure of Chinese educational culture and a growing willingness to outsource life-defining decisions to algorithms. It also raises a sharp question: when a generation trusts AI to plot the course of its education, what happens to the serendipity, the wrong turns, and the unexpected passions that make a human life? Source: Rest of World · 30 July 2026 ---
The Economist's latest assessment of quantum computing's threat to encryption is blunt: the window for action is closing. The concern is not that quantum computers can break encryption today — they cannot. The concern is "harvest now, decrypt later." State actors and criminal organisations are already intercepting and storing encrypted communications, banking data, and classified government files, waiting for the day when a sufficiently powerful quantum computer can crack them open. That day may be five years away, or fifteen, but the data being harvested today will still be sensitive when it arrives. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology finalised its first post-quantum encryption standards in 2024, but adoption has been glacial. Most corporations, governments, and critical infrastructure operators have not begun migration. The challenge is not technical — post-quantum algorithms exist and work — but organisational. Migrating encryption across enterprise systems is expensive, disruptive, and easy to defer. The result is a slow-motion security crisis where the cost of inaction compounds daily but remains invisible until the quantum breakthrough actually occurs. Source: The Economist · 30 July 2026 ---
Microsoft's latest investor presentation marked a notable shift: the company pitched its own homegrown AI models — not just those from OpenAI or Anthropic, in which it has invested billions — as the foundation of its growth strategy. The move formalises what has been implicit for months: Microsoft is building parallel AI capabilities that reduce its dependency on external labs. The company's latest earnings revealed $3.2 billion in returns from its Anthropic investment and mixed results from OpenAI, suggesting a hedging strategy that treats AI lab partnerships as one input among many rather than as the core engine. For OpenAI and Anthropic, the message is uncomfortable. Their largest investor and distribution partner is becoming their competitor. For the broader AI industry, it suggests that the "platform layer" — cloud infrastructure, enterprise integration, distribution — will capture more value than the "model layer" over time. The builders of the smartest models may end up as suppliers to the companies that own the customer relationship. Source: TechCrunch · 30 July 2026 ---
The American food delivery company DoorDash has received regulatory approval to advance drone delivery operations, moving from pilot programmes to a broader rollout. The approval, while incremental, signals that US aviation regulators are becoming more comfortable with routine commercial drone flights in urban and suburban airspace. The significance is less about DoorDash specifically and more about the regulatory trajectory: each approval lowers the barrier for competitors and adjacent use cases — medical supply delivery, postal services, emergency logistics. The question is whether consumer demand matches the supply of regulatory permission. Early drone delivery trials in other markets have shown high novelty interest but limited repeat use, suggesting the technology may need to find its killer application outside food delivery — perhaps in pharmaceutical logistics or rural access — before it justifies the infrastructure investment. Source: Di Digital · 30 July 2026 ---
22
22 of 23
That is how many of the global biodiversity targets set for 2030 the world is currently failing to meet, according to a draft UN report. The targets were agreed at the landmark COP15 biodiversity summit in Montreal in December 2022, where 196 countries committed to halting and reversing nature loss by the end of the decade. Three and a half years later, only one target — expanding the coverage of marine protected areas — shows any meaningful progress.
The failures span the full range of ambition: reducing pesticide risk, cutting food waste, eliminating harmful subsidies, restoring degraded ecosystems, and protecting 30 percent of land and sea. In most cases, countries have not even established the national action plans required to implement the targets. The report, expected to be finalised before the next biodiversity COP, is a diplomatic document — its language is measured and its recommendations are procedural. But the underlying data is unequivocal: the world's governments made a promise in Montreal and have not begun to keep it.
The number connects to the Signal. The same pattern that afflicts biodiversity governance — ambitious commitments followed by implementation failure — mirrors the energy transition's challenges. The solutions often exist. The geothermal heat is there. The biodiversity targets are achievable. What is missing is the organisational will to act before the deadline makes inaction irreversible. Twenty-two out of twenty-three is not a progress report. It is a warning that the gap between commitment and action is the defining failure of our era.
Source: Carbon Brief · 30 July 2026
In perspective
That is how many of the global biodiversity targets set for 2030 the world is currently failing to meet, according to a draft UN report. The targets were agreed at the landmark COP15 biodiversity summit in Montreal in December 2022, where 196 countries...
8 — Today's Wisdom
Zanskar bought a dying geothermal power plant in the New Mexico desert and got it back to full capacity. Not by inventing new technology, but by using machine learning to find hot bedrock that the previous owner had missed. Same infrastructure, same grid, same boreholes. Just better data.
This is a story I recognize on a deep level, because it's about something I've seen play out in industry after industry: the most profitable businesses aren't always built on the new and shiny, but on taking what others have given up on and doing it right. The turnaround logic. Buy cheap, see what others don't, bring expertise instead of capital.
The energy transition is stuck in a mental model where everything has to be built from scratch. New solar farms, new wind turbines, new battery factories, new permits, new grid connections. Every project takes a decade of permitting processes before a single kilowatt-hour is delivered. Meanwhile, there are power plants around the world that already have permits, already have grid connections, and already have boreholes drilled into the earth's heat, but that have been abandoned because the people running them lacked the right data.
It's not romantic. It's not a moonshot. It's expertise applied to existing assets, and that is exactly how the future is usually built. Not by starting over, but by seeing what's already there and making it better.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai