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 · 5 May 2026
Iceland has quietly built something extraordinary: a circular economy around cod. Not the glamorous kind of innovation that attracts Silicon Valley pitch decks, but the kind that transforms an entire national industry from the inside out.
Icelandic companies have learned to extract value from virtually every part of their catch. Fish skins become medical bandages for wound care. Fish bones are processed into calcium supplements. Collagen from swim bladders goes into cosmetics. Offcuts are turned into premium pet food. And now — in perhaps the most striking example — fish leather is being fashioned into notebooks, wallets and luxury goods that sell for serious money in European and Asian markets.
The numbers behind Iceland's "blue economy" are remarkable for a nation of 380,000 people. Where traditional fishing nations discard 40 to 60 percent of their catch as waste, Iceland now utilizes an estimated 95 percent. The transformation did not happen overnight. It required decades of collaboration between marine biologists, product designers and fisheries companies willing to invest in R&D rather than simply increasing catch volumes.
What makes this story a signal rather than a curiosity is its replicability. The global fishing industry generates roughly 60 million tonnes of waste annually. If even a fraction of fishing nations adopted Iceland's approach, the impact on coastal economies — from Senegal to the Philippines — would be transformative. Several Icelandic firms are already licensing their extraction technologies to partners in Norway and the Faroe Islands.
The model also represents something philosophically important: a complete inversion of the extractive mindset. Rather than asking "how do we catch more fish?", Iceland asked "how do we waste less of what we already catch?" The answer turned a declining industry into an innovation cluster. Fish processing companies that once competed solely on volume now compete on ingenuity.
There is a climate dimension too. By replacing petroleum-based materials — synthetic leather, plastic-derived collagen, chemical wound dressings — with marine-derived alternatives, Iceland's blue bioeconomy chips away at fossil fuel dependency in sectors nobody typically associates with oil.
The weak signal here is not about fish. It is about what happens when a small, resource-constrained economy decides that waste itself is the resource. In a world obsessed with finding new things to extract, Iceland found wealth in what everyone else throws away.
Source: Reasons to be Cheerful · 4 May 2026
Short term (now–12 months): Iceland's blue economy model is attracting licensing deals from Nordic neighbours. As jet fuel shortages and the Hormuz crisis push up the cost of imported materials across Europe, locally sourced bio-alternatives — fish-derived collagen, marine leather, bone-calcium supplements — gain a cost advantage they never had before. Expect Nordic trade delegations and at least one EU pilot programme before year's end.
Medium term (1–3 years): The FAO and development banks are watching. If Iceland's zero-waste fisheries model can be adapted for tropical species — tilapia in East Africa, catfish in the Mekong — it could reshape coastal livelihoods for millions. The key barrier is not technology but regulation: most developing nations classify fish byproducts as waste, not raw material, creating bureaucratic obstacles to commercialisation. Changing those classifications becomes a quiet policy battleground.
Long term (3–10 years): The deeper shift is conceptual. The twentieth-century economy was built on extraction — dig it up, pump it out, cut it down. The twenty-first century's most resilient economies will be built on utilisation — getting more from less. Iceland's fish story is a microcosm of a circular economy that climate targets will eventually demand everywhere. The nations that learn this lesson first, from fish guts and bark and soot, will hold the intellectual property that everyone else needs to license. Source: Reasons to be Cheerful · 4 May 2026 ---
A leaked confidential briefing has exposed structural collapse inside the Democratic Republic of Congo's armed forces. The FARDC document reveals weak command chains, critical intelligence gaps, soldiers going unpaid for months, and a dangerous reliance on poorly controlled militia groups to fill frontline positions. The dysfunction explains the military's inability to halt the M23 advance and raises hard questions about where billions in Western security assistance actually go. Congo's war is often covered as a rebel problem. This report makes clear it is equally a state problem. Source: The Africa Report · 4 May 2026
Malawi's rollout of a new digital tax platform has triggered a nationwide business shutdown. Traders argue the government ignored economic realities — chronic foreign exchange shortages, inflation, collapsing margins — when designing the system. The protests expose a deeper tension across Africa: governments desperate for revenue are digitising tax collection at speed, but doing so in economies where most businesses operate on razor-thin margins and unreliable internet. Malawi's revolt could become a template for resistance elsewhere. Source: Mail and Guardian · 4 May 2026
A leaked audio recording purportedly featuring a senior TPLF official suggests the Tigray region may be seeking to trade with Eritrea and align with domestic armed groups against Addis Ababa — despite the 2022 peace agreement. The TPLF denies the recording's authenticity. Whether real or fabricated, its emergence signals that the Ethiopian federation's deepest fracture remains unhealed, and that external actors — Eritrea chief among them — still see opportunity in Ethiopian division. Source: The Africa Report · 4 May 2026
Fiji recorded over 2,000 new HIV cases in 2025, a 26 percent increase from the previous year. For a Pacific island nation of under a million people, these numbers represent a public health emergency that has received almost no international attention. Health workers describe the spread as "wildfire" — driven by limited testing infrastructure, stigma that prevents diagnosis, and underfunded prevention campaigns. The South Pacific's health systems, already stretched by climate-related illness, face a convergence of crises. Source: Straits Times · 4 May 2026
Narendra Modi's BJP has scored what his party calls a "record" result in West Bengal, long a bastion of opposition politics. The victory strengthens Modi's hand ahead of the 2029 general election and further erodes the regional power bases that once served as checks on Delhi's dominance. India's opposition now faces a shrinking map — and an increasingly confident ruling party with fewer institutional counterweights. Source: The Japan Times · 4 May 2026
Three passengers — a Dutch couple and a German national — have died aboard the expedition vessel MV Hondius after contracting hantavirus, with a second confirmed case now under investigation. The outbreak is extraordinary: hantavirus is typically transmitted through contact with rodent droppings in rural settings, making a cruise ship an almost unheard-of transmission environment. Nature reports that scientists are closely watching whether the strain involved shows any unusual characteristics. For the cruise industry, still rebuilding after the pandemic, the episode is a nightmare scenario — a deadly pathogen in a confined, internationally mobile setting. For epidemiologists, the mystery is how rodent-borne virus reached passengers at sea at all. Source: Nature / BBC World · 4 May 2026
Meteorologists are warning of a "Super El Niño" forming in the Pacific, with potentially devastating consequences for Asian economies already reeling from the Middle East conflict. The climate pattern could spike energy demand through extreme heat, sap hydropower generation across Southeast Asia, and damage crops from India to Indonesia. The combination of war-driven fuel shortages and climate-driven agricultural stress creates a compounding risk that no single policy can address. Source: The Japan Times · 4 May 2026
Tamil Nadu's assembly elections have produced a stunning result: actor-politician Vijay's TVK party has crossed 100 seats, while Chief Minister M.K. Stalin lost his own constituency of Kolathur. Vote-splitting affected 214 seats, fragmenting the state's traditional two-party system beyond recognition. Tamil Nadu — India's most industrialised southern state — now enters a period of coalition uncertainty that will ripple through national politics. Source: Hindu BusinessLine · 4 May 2026 ---
The ancient Athenians did not elect their leaders. They drew lots. Citizens were selected randomly to serve in government — much as jury duty works today — on the principle that elections inevitably favour the wealthy, the connected and the professionally ambitious, while random selection produces assemblies that actually look like the population they serve.
It sounds quaint. But a growing body of political science research suggests sortition — democracy by lottery — may be one of the most promising responses to the crisis of representative government. Citizens' assemblies chosen by lot have already been used in Ireland (to resolve the abortion debate), France (for climate policy), and parts of Belgium and Germany. The results are consistent: randomly selected citizens deliberate more carefully, reach more nuanced conclusions, and enjoy higher public trust than elected politicians.
Jan Stenbeck spent his career fighting monopolies — in telecoms, in media, in the cosy arrangements between Swedish state and industry. He understood that the deepest monopoly of all is the one held by political professionals over public life. A system where ordinary people — taxi drivers, teachers, engineers, nurses — directly participate in governance would have appealed to his instinct for disruption.
The idea is not utopian. It is modular. Citizens' assemblies can complement rather than replace elected parliaments, handling specific policy questions where partisan gridlock has failed. In an era of collapsing trust in institutions, the lottery may be democracy's most radical — and most ancient — innovation.
Source: Aeon · 4 May 2026
At London's Incubator gallery, 25-year-old Charlie Gosling is showing "Good Luck with Me Here" — thickly layered, haunting portraits that critics are already comparing to Frank Auerbach. The comparison is dangerous for any young artist, but Gosling's paintings earn it through sheer material intensity: faces built up and scraped back over weeks, emerging from pigment like something excavated. London-born, painting in a Hackney studio, Gosling represents a generation returning to figurative painting without irony or apology. Source: Wallpaper · 4 May 2026
The 2026 Met Gala — themed "Fashion Is Art" — delivered on its premise more literally than any previous edition. Guests arrived channelling specific art-historical references: Klimt's golden mosaics, Tom of Finland's exaggerated masculinity, Cubist fragmentation rendered in fabric. Beyoncé, Rihanna in sculptural Margiela couture, and Bad Bunny aged fifty years by prosthetics all competed for the night's most memorable image. The event has long been fashion's most theatrical evening, but this year it functioned as something closer to a living museum — a mass performance arguing that clothing and painting share a common ambition: to make visible what cannot otherwise be seen. Source: Artnet News / Vanity Fair · 4 May 2026
Kai Hakone, a modern ryokan along the Old Tokaido Road, immerses guests in the rituals that once sustained travellers between Edo and Kyoto: communal tea houses, daily hot spring soaks, seasonal kaiseki meals. The design balances contemporary minimalism with deep historical reference, proving that Japan's hospitality tradition can evolve without losing its soul. No infinity pools. No lobby DJs. Just centuries of accumulated wisdom about how to rest. Source: Wallpaper · 4 May 2026
Tokyo studio I IN has completed Lulla, a house in Kamakura that frames simultaneous views of the Pacific and Mount Fuji through an exercise in radical Japanese minimalism. Natural materials, restrained geometry, and the deliberate absence of ornament create what the architects describe as an "otherworldly" domestic experience — proof that in residential design, less remains devastatingly more. Source: Wallpaper · 4 May 2026
The U.S. government has appointed design executive Peter Arnell as America's first "chief brand architect," tasked with creating a unified visual identity for federal agencies through a newly formed National Design Studio. The ambition — to brand the government like a corporation — will either elevate public design standards or produce the world's most expensive logo guidelines. Either way, it marks an unprecedented attempt to apply commercial brand thinking to the state itself. Source: Dezeen · 4 May 2026
A 5,000-year-old writing system, long overlooked by scholars, may mark the moment humans first represented spoken language with written symbols. The largely undeciphered script challenges the conventional narrative that writing began in Mesopotamia with cuneiform, suggesting the leap from pictograph to phonetic representation happened in ways — and places — we have yet to fully understand. Source: New Scientist · 4 May 2026 ---
Motorola's Indian subsidiary has filed a lawsuit naming X, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Google and Meta — demanding they remove existing and future "defamatory" content. The case is legally ambitious: it asks platforms not merely to react to complaints but to proactively police speech. If Indian courts accept this framework, it would create a precedent with global implications. India is the world's largest internet market by users. A ruling requiring pre-emptive content removal there would pressure platforms to build censorship infrastructure deployable anywhere. The case matters because it originates not from a government regulator but from a private corporation — expanding the universe of actors who can compel speech removal. For AI companies building content moderation tools, India just became the most important jurisdiction to watch. Source: Rest of World · 4 May 2026
Powerful new assay technologies are accelerating the identification of DNA sequences that regulate gene expression — the so-called "control knobs" of the genome. Nature reports that scientists can now map regulatory elements at unprecedented speed and resolution, revealing the hidden grammar that determines which genes activate, when, and in which cells. The implications for medicine are profound: most disease-associated genetic variants identified by genome-wide studies fall not in genes themselves but in these regulatory regions. Understanding the grammar means understanding the disease. And, critically, it means being able to rewrite it — opening a path toward precision therapies that correct regulatory errors rather than replacing whole genes. This is the kind of deep science that will quietly reshape medicine over the next decade while the headlines chase chatbot wars. Source: Nature · 4 May 2026
A 500-kilometre-wide object orbiting beyond Pluto has been found to possess an atmosphere — something no current model predicted for a body that small and cold. The discovery, reported by New Scientist, challenges fundamental assumptions about how atmospheres form and persist on small bodies in the outer solar system. If objects this tiny can hold gas envelopes, the habitability calculations for moons and dwarf planets across the solar system need revision. It is a reminder that the universe remains better at surprises than our models are at predictions. Source: New Scientist · 4 May 2026 ---
95
95%
That is the proportion of each fish that Iceland's fishing industry now utilises commercially — skins, bones, swim bladders, offcuts and all. The global average hovers between 40 and 60 percent, meaning most fishing nations throw away roughly half of everything they pull from the sea. Iceland's achievement is not the result of a single technology breakthrough but of systematic, decades-long investment in finding economic value in what was previously classified as waste. Applied globally to the 60 million tonnes of fish waste generated annually, even a modest improvement toward Iceland's standard could create tens of billions of dollars in new coastal economic activity — and displace petroleum-based materials in medical, cosmetic and textile supply chains. The number captures a principle that extends far beyond fish: the next economy will not be built by extracting more, but by wasting less.
Source: Reasons to be Cheerful · 4 May 2026
In perspective
That is the proportion of each fish that Iceland's fishing industry now utilises commercially — skins, bones, swim bladders, offcuts and all. The global average hovers between 40 and 60 percent, meaning most fishing nations throw away roughly half of...
8 — Today's Wisdom
Iceland throws away five percent of its fish. The rest of the world throws away half. That difference says more about economic maturity than most GDP figures do.
We've grown accustomed to the idea that innovation means something new, something that didn't exist before, preferably clad in black aluminum with an app attached to it. But Iceland's blue economy shows that the most profitable innovation is often about looking into the trash can and realizing you're throwing away money. Fish skin becomes medical bandages. Swim bladders become collagen. Bones become calcium supplements. None of it required a breakthrough in quantum physics. It required someone who refused to accept that waste is a final state.
I've been building companies my whole life and the pattern I've seen over and over again is that the most resilient businesses aren't the ones chasing the next big thing, but the ones that become obsessed with extracting more value from what they already have. It applies to fish, it applies to data, it applies to time. Extraction is the logic of the 20th century. Utilisation is the logic of the 21st.
The beauty of it is that the model is replicable. Sixty million tons of fish waste are generated globally every year. That's not an environmental problem. It's an untaxed industrial sector waiting for someone to build it. And those who do it first will own the licenses everyone else is going to need.
Johan Staël von Holstein
Serial entrepreneur · wakopa.ai