News from the Woods

The People Who Got AI Right – And the Rest of Us Who Didn't Believe Them

This week I read two texts that sent me out for a walk afterwards. I do that fairly often anyway, but this time I went even though the sun was blazing outside and all my Greek neighbors were asleep, saving their energy for the evening. The first piece is from the AI Futures Project [https://blog.aifutures.org/p/q1-2026-timelines-update] team, which works on predicting when humans will stop programming. The second is by journalist Dylan Matthews [https://dylanmatthews.substack.com/p/the-ai-people-have-been-right-a-lot], who – eleven years on – is apologizing to people he once dismissed as cranks. I’ll summarize them here, somewhat mercilessly. Anyone already afraid of the future is probably better off deleting this email now. The conference where weirdos stood at the lectern In August 2015, the Effective Altruists organized a conference called EA Global. Among the speakers were Nick Bostrom (author of Superintelligence), Stuart Russell (a legend of computer science), Nate Soares (today the author of If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies), and a still-fairly-reasonable Elon Musk. The topic: how artificial intelligence will sweep us all away. Among the attendees was Dylan Matthews, a journalist for Vox. He spoke there with a young engineer from Google named Chris Olah. With a philosophy PhD student named Amanda Askell. And with a programmer from PayPal named Buck Shlegeris. Dylan left the conference convinced that a promising movement, one that could be saving lives in Africa and chickens in cages, was about to destroy itself over a speculative fear of a technology that didn’t yet exist. He then wrote a rather tough article in Vox [https://www.vox.com/2015/8/10/9124145/effective-altruism-global-ai], framing that fear as proof that the movement was running away from real problems. This was August 2015. The Transformer had not yet been invented (and let me just note that one of the people involved in that breakthrough was our own Tomáš Mikolov), and OpenAI had not yet been founded. Nothing in the world resembled today’s ChatGPT. Eleven years later, Dylan writes: I should have looked more carefully. Chris Olah, in the meantime, helped lay the foundation of our present, named the entire field of mechanistic interpretability, and co-founded Anthropic. Amanda Askell works at the same company and is directly responsible for Claude’s personality. Buck Shlegeris runs Redwood Research [https://www.redwoodresearch.org/], one of the most serious technical AI safety labs outside the walls of the big firms. Three people Dylan once treated as oddballs are today holding a piece of the global technological future in their hands. They missed the mark And here is where it starts to get fun. Fun in the dark sense of the word. Dylan in his article mentions Leopold Aschenbrenner [https://situational-awareness.ai/], a former OpenAI researcher who in 2024 wrote a series of essays under the title Situational Awareness. In them he predicted that by 2026, $520 billion would flow into AI infrastructure. Everyone tapped their head and called him crazy. Real-world investment is now estimated at $650 to $700 billion. We undershot it again. The reality is wilder than the wild prediction. Similarly, Ajeya Cotra and Peter Wildeford predicted at the end of 2024 what would happen to AI in 2025. Dylan writes: they were very accurate – and where they were wrong, they were wrong in underestimating the revenues of AI companies. Meaning, they didn’t err in expecting AI to grow more slowly. They erred in failing to dare to predict how fast it would actually grow. Anthropic? Annual revenue running at the $10 billion level. Tenfold growth every year. Claude Code, their programming tool, hit $2.5 billion in annualized revenue [https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-30-billion-series-g-funding-380-billion-post-money-valuation] nine months after its launch. A product that isn’t even a year old. Revision to 2028 The AI Futures Project team (Daniel Kokotajlo, Eli Lifland, Brendan Halstead) published a quarterly revision [https://blog.aifutures.org/p/q1-2026-timelines-update] of its predictions. Daniel Kokotajlo is co-author of the famous AI 2027 scenario. Eli Lifland is a professional forecaster. These people predict the future for a living, not by crystal ball. What did they revise? They moved a moment they call the Automated Coder – AC. The point at which an AGI company would rather lay off all of its human software engineers than stop using AI for programming. Read that definition again. Slowly. It’s not about AI becoming better than programmers. It’s about companies preferring to fire all their people over giving the AI back. Faced with those two options, they choose the second. Daniel shifted the median of his estimate from late 2029 to mid-2028. Eli shifted his from early 2032 to mid-2030. Why? Because the new models are better than the team could have imagined. The doubling time of AI’s coding capabilities has shrunk from 5.5 months to four. METR [https://metr.org/time-horizons/] (the organization measuring this) released a new methodology, and the curve climbs faster than predicted. Daniel even cut the requirement for 80% reliability from three years to one – meaning he believes it’s enough for AI to handle one-year-long tasks comfortably, and the layoffs begin. The people working with artificial intelligence inside the AI companies are telling us it will come sooner than we think. In private and in public, they’re doubling down on their predictions rather than walking them back. Which means that the people who sit closest to the technology, who know what is being readied in the labs we are only allowed to see six months later as filtered marketing material – they consider the pace that puts Daniel into 2028 to be conservative. When I connect this with what Dylan wrote: we ignored this group of people once already. In 2015 we told them to go play on their pseudo-intellectual Reddit. In the meantime, they invented and built a technology that today generates ten-billion-dollar annual revenues, and which their own creators admit they don’t fully understand. These same people are now saying something crazy again. They say AI will replace programmers within two years. That within three to four years it will match or surpass top experts in every field where the work is done with your head – lawyers, doctors, researchers, financial analysts, designers, journalists. That the world economy will no longer grow at today’s two or three percent a year, but at perhaps thirty, because machines work without stopping, without sick leave, without vacation, without notice. That somewhere in the desert there will stand factories run by artificial intelligence, where one robot builds another and a human just occasionally checks the fuses. And that the moment may soon arrive when AI begins improving itself. The point of no return, because every next step forward will be made faster than the previous one. Without us. Today this sounds like a wildly overdrawn scenario, but looking back, maybe the right move is not to dismiss such ideas but to talk about them more. What now When someone asks me: should we be afraid? I answer: no. Fear makes no sense. Fear is the worst counselor you could ever choose. What to do? 1. Listen. Not to everyone – to some. The people who said weird things in 2015 and whom we now see at Anthropic, at Redwood Research, and in labs around the world. The people who attach graphs and methodology to their predictions, not clickbait headlines. People who publish their recalculations every three months and adjust them in both directions, not only the comfortable one. 2. Don’t expect institutions to explain it to you. Dylan in his article admits something graceful – his original skepticism was based on the fact that no major institution in 2015 was dealing with AI. He inferred from that that it couldn’t be serious. He was wrong. Large institutions are often worse at predicting the future than we think. 3. Don’t give all your attention to artificial intelligence. It will take it anyway. Pick up a book, go outside, teach your kid to work with wood. Love the person who shares your kitchen. By the time those people from the previous paragraphs arrive with their predictions, it won’t matter how many productivity books you have on your hard drive. What will matter is what you’ve managed to build as a human being. What will actually have value in the future? ✌️🙏 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsfromthewoods.substack.com [https://newsfromthewoods.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

News from the Woods #136 🥾

Hey everyone, this is Filip and welcome to another episode of News from the Forest! Episode 136, and it’s a packed one. We’ll talk about how AI is reshaping schools — from typewriters at Cornell to a school with zero teachers in Chicago. How Anthropic just overtook OpenAI in revenue. We’ll discover a brand-new island near Antarctica and find out how the war in Ukraine is devastating nature on a massive scale. And at the end, you’ll try doing absolutely nothing for two minutes. Let’s go. What do you tell your kid when you know the technology you’re building will rewrite the rules for an entire generation? The Wall Street Journal asked exactly this question to the heads of the biggest AI companies — Daniela Amodei from Anthropic, Jaime Teevan from Microsoft, Ethan Mollick from Wharton. And you know what’s fascinating about their answers? Not a single one said: learn to code. That Wall Street Journal piece really got to me. Because if I asked you — what should kids study to thrive in a world full of artificial intelligence — most of us would say: STEM, coding, data science. Makes sense, right? Except the people who are actually building AI are saying something completely different. Daniela Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic — the company behind Claude, the AI model that, full disclosure, also helps me produce this podcast — says, and I’m paraphrasing: “What won’t be replaceable is how you treat other people, how well you communicate with them, how kind you are.” This isn’t some motivational platitude. This is coming from someone whose company just surpassed OpenAI in revenue. Ethan Mollick from Wharton, who wrote the brilliant book Co-Intelligence, advises his teenagers to avoid hyper-specialization entirely. His logic is straightforward: if your job consists of repeating one specific cognitive task, AI will eventually do it faster, cheaper, and without complaining. The future, he says, belongs to people who bundle three or four distinct skills — communication, judgment, creativity, accountability. And that word — accountability — is key. AI can analyze data, write reports, propose solutions. But it can’t be held responsible. A human does that. And the ability to say “I own this” is, according to these people, the most valuable currency of the future. So here’s the paradox: the people building AI are telling their children — be as human as possible. Learn how to learn, be flexible, communicate, take responsibility. And above all — don’t be a narrow specialist, be a generalist. This theme — the tension between technology and humanity — runs like a red thread through today’s entire episode. Let’s start with how it’s playing out in schools. I’ve got three stories about education that seem to come from three different universes. And yet they’re all happening right now. Story one: Typewriters at Cornell At Cornell University, one of America’s most prestigious schools, a German language instructor named Grit Matthias Phelps does something once a semester that completely blows her students’ minds: instead of laptops, they find manual typewriters on their desks. No screens, no online dictionaries, no spellcheck, no Delete key. She started doing this in 2023 because she noticed students were submitting grammatically perfect German essays — thanks to AI and online translation tools. As she puts it: “What’s the point of me reading it if it’s already correct anyway, and you didn’t write it yourself?” And the students? Catherine Mong, a 19-year-old freshman, said: “I was so confused. I’d seen typewriters in movies, but they don’t tell you how a typewriter works.” One student was puzzled by the key labeled “Return” — and then realized you physically have to return the carriage to the beginning of the line. “Oh, that’s why it’s called Return!” But the most interesting observation came from computer science major Ratchaphon Lertdamrongwong. He said: “The difference with typing on a typewriter is not just how you interact with the typewriter, but how you interact with the world around you.” Without screens, no notifications. Without Google, he had to ask classmates for help. Suddenly, they were actually talking to each other. As he put it: “That was probably normal back then. But it’s drastically different from how we interact in the classroom in modern times.” This analog wave is spreading. It’s part of a broader national trend — back to handwritten tests, oral exams, pen-and-paper assignments. Because schools are looking for ways to verify that students are actually thinking. Story two: Sweden goes back to books Now one at the national level. Sweden — a country that was a pioneer of digital education for twenty years. Every student had a tablet or laptop, textbooks were replaced with digital content. And now? A complete 180. The Swedish government is investing over 100 million euros to bring printed textbooks back into classrooms. Starting in 2026, mobile phones will be banned in compulsory schools for the entire school day. For preschool children under two, only analog learning tools may be used. Why? Because student outcomes — reading comprehension, ability to focus, deep understanding of text — were declining. Researcher Linda Fälth from Linnaeus University summarizes it: Sweden positioned itself as a frontrunner in digital education, but over time concerns emerged about screen time, distraction, reduced deep reading, and the erosion of foundational skills such as sustained attention and handwriting. Sweden’s education minister called it “an experiment that wasn’t scientifically based.” And UNESCO’s 2023 Global Education Monitoring Report backs this up, warning against uncritical adoption of technology in classrooms. Story three: A school with no teachers in Chicago And then there’s Alpha Schools. A private school opening in Chicago this fall that goes in exactly the opposite direction. No teachers. At all. Core academics — math, reading, science — are delivered in a two-hour daily block entirely through AI software. Kids from kindergarten through eighth grade sit at computers while the AI adapts to them in real time. Instead of teachers, they have “guides” — adults who motivate, provide emotional support, and lead afternoon workshops on robotics, entrepreneurship, public speaking, even running their own food truck. Guides don’t need teaching degrees, just a bachelor’s. Starting salary: $100,000 a year. Tuition? $55,000 per child per year. Founder MacKenzie Price says AI will “unlock the greatest untapped resource in our world, which is human potential.” Alpha claims their students grow 2.6 times faster than the national average and rank in the top one percent on standardized tests. But experts are skeptical. A 2026 Stanford review of over 800 academic papers found that while AI can improve student performance, the benefits become less clear when students are later asked to work without AI support. And philosophy professor Joe Vukov from Loyola University put it bluntly: “I worry that you’re changing the nature of what learning and education, at its best, has always looked like.” So three stories: typewriters as a cure for AI cheating, an entire country returning to books, and a private school that eliminated teachers entirely. All happening now. All responding to the same question — what role should technology play in education? And what fascinates me is how perfectly this mirrors what those AI executives tell their own kids. Build human skills. Accountability, communication, adaptability. Exactly the things you learn better from a typewriter or a book than from a chatbot. Now from a completely different angle — business and technology. Because something happened this week that would have been unthinkable six months ago. Anthropic — the company behind the AI assistant Claude — announced that its annualized revenue has topped $30 billion. At the end of 2025, it was $9 billion. In four months, it tripled. And with that, Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI — which sits at roughly $24 to $25 billion — for the first time in history. How? The key is the customer base. While OpenAI earns heavily from consumer-facing ChatGPT — 900 million weekly active users — Anthropic bet on enterprise. Eighty percent of its revenue comes from business customers. Over a thousand companies now pay more than $1 million annually for Claude services. That number doubled in under two months. A massive driver is Claude Code — the agentic coding tool that alone generates over $2.5 billion in annual revenue. It’s become what analysts are calling generative AI’s first true killer app for enterprise. And then there’s Mythos. Claude Mythos is a new model that first leaked in late March when Anthropic accidentally left internal documents in an unsecured public data store. What emerged was striking: Mythos is so capable at coding that it autonomously discovers security vulnerabilities in software — at a level that surpasses most human experts. Anthropic says Mythos Preview found thousands of previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities across all major operating systems and web browsers. One of them was a 17-year-old bug in FreeBSD that allowed complete root access to any machine running NFS. Mythos found it and built a working exploit entirely on its own. In one test, Mythos chained together four vulnerabilities into a single browser exploit that escaped both the renderer and operating system sandboxes. In another, it solved a corporate network attack simulation that would have taken a human expert over 10 hours. That’s why Anthropic chose not to release Mythos publicly. Instead, they launched Project Glasswing — a coalition including Apple, Microsoft, Google, NVIDIA, CrowdStrike, and the Linux Foundation, who get access to Mythos to find and fix vulnerabilities before attackers do. The Wiz security blog compared it to a Y2K moment — we have a window to prepare, but it’s closing fast. After that heavy tech block, let’s lighten things up. Travel! A new island near Antarctica. This sounds unbelievable in 2026, but it happened. An international expedition aboard the icebreaker Polarstern, with 93 scientists on board, was studying ice loss in the Weddell Sea. Bad weather forced them to take shelter near Joinville Island — and in an area where charts only showed “unexamined navigational hazards,” they found an island that wasn’t on any map. Using sensors and a drone, they surveyed it: 130 meters long, 50 meters wide, rising 16 meters above sea level. It doesn’t have a name yet, but it will once the registration process is complete. In 2026, we’re still discovering new pieces of land. 15 most beautiful trails in Europe. The Times put together a ranking of Europe’s best walking routes, and — this made me personally happy — Bohemian Switzerland, where I live, made the list! Thanks for the tip, Míra. Abandoned Spain. If you’re drawn to more melancholic travel, Spain has over 3,000 abandoned villages and towns. There’s a great video linked in the description — a fascinating look at how rural depopulation is transforming the landscape. And a fun one — walking, cycling, running, that’s all very trendy. But what about visiting friends by plane? Not a commercial flight — a small ultralight. There’s a video about it in the show notes. And if we can’t make it to the beach this year, there’s a new game where you can build sandcastles on a virtual beach. So there’s that safety net. From travel to nature. And here I have two stories that are like two sides of the same coin. War and nature in Ukraine. Czech Radio (iRozhlas) published an in-depth report on how Russia’s war is devastating Ukrainian nature. The numbers are alarming. Four years of war have produced 311 million tons of CO2 — equivalent to the annual output of all of France. The estimated climate damage: $57 billion. But it’s not just emissions. Trenches destroy ecosystems, shelling contaminates soil with toxic metals and explosive residues, fires devastate forests. The Russian army occupied protected areas like the Kamianska Sich National Park. And after the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in June 2023, an ecological catastrophe of enormous scale followed. Professor Tomáš Cajthaml from Charles University says the war has set back nature conservation structures — built over decades — by a hundred years. In principle, the aggressor should pay for remediation — that’s Russia. But international criminal law doesn’t yet recognize “ecocide” as a crime. And yet there’s an unexpected glimmer of hope: in the area of the former Kakhovka reservoir, a new forest ecosystem began forming spontaneously — young willows and poplars covered an area of 140,000 hectares. Nature can recover, if given the space. Returning species in Czechia. And that’s a beautiful transition to the second story. In the Czech Republic, species once considered extinct are slowly returning. Wolves, beavers, European wildcats, lynx, white-tailed eagles — all making a comeback. The beaver, absent since the 19th century, now has a population of around 15,000. The European wildcat, nicknamed the “forest ghost,” was recently captured for the first time by researchers in the Doupov Mountains — camera traps confirmed its return. It’s proof that conservation works. When you create the conditions — protected areas, hunting bans, connected migration corridors — nature finds its way back. And as a volunteer nature warden in Bohemian Switzerland, that’s news that deeply resonates with me. Two quick nature mentions: there’s a new app called Bugsy — it’s like Pokémon Go, but instead of Pokémon, you photograph and collect beetles and insects. And the Czech science journal Vesmír published a fascinating piece about rainforests that once grew in Antarctica. Links in the description. And now my favorite section — the unclassifiable. Kodak! Yes, that Kodak — the textbook example of a company that catastrophically missed the digital revolution. Well, Kodak just released a new photographic film: Ektacolor Pro and Ektapan. For those of us who love analog photography, this is great news. Film photography is experiencing a genuine renaissance, and Kodak is responding. Then there’s a website where you can try doing absolutely nothing for two minutes. It’s called donothingfor2minutes.org. Literally nothing — don’t touch your mouse, your keyboard, your phone. If you move, it resets. Thanks for the tip, Michelle. And honestly — it’s surprisingly hard. Office chair racing! Have you seen the video? People in corporate offices racing on rolling chairs. Link in the description. I guarantee it’ll brighten your day. And one last thought, no link, just a question: do you limit your kids’ social media? And what about WhatsApp? They need it for communication, right? Well… think about how much time they actually spend on WhatsApp and what they’re really doing there. That’s a question worth sitting with over the weekend. What I’m reading: Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. A classic of Greek literature about an intellectual who meets a wild, uninhibited Greek man who lives life to the fullest. I’m reading it now while spending time in Greece, and it fits perfectly with the local approach to life. What I’m listening to: The new album from Paul Cauthen — a Texan blend of country, soul, and rock’n’roll. Perfect for late-afternoon listening as the sun goes down. What I’m watching: Your Friends & Neighbors, season two. A solid thriller for anyone who enjoys stories about neighbors who aren’t as innocent as they seem. Interesting app: Cursor version 3. If you’re a developer or work with code, Cursor is an AI-powered code editor that just got a major update. Worth trying. You know what struck me most about this episode? The contrast. On one side, an AI model that autonomously finds security holes in operating systems. On the other, a student at Cornell holding a typewriter for the first time and saying: “That’s why it’s called Return? Because you return to the beginning?” Maybe the answer to how we live with AI is exactly that — sometimes, return to the beginning. To paper, to a book, to a conversation with a classmate, to a walk in the forest. Not because technology is bad. But because being human requires both. Thank you so much for listening. Take care and see you in two weeks! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsfromthewoods.substack.com [https://newsfromthewoods.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Startups and Brands You Didn't Know Were European 🇪🇺

The internet runs on European inventions. MySQL powers Facebook, Linux runs 96% of supercomputers, Bluetooth connects your headphones, and MP3 changed the music industry – all created in Sweden, Finland, and Germany. Yet when people hear “tech innovation,” most picture Silicon Valley, not Stockholm or Tallinn. This view overlooks a remarkable reality: Europe has created over 600 unicorns (startups valued above one billion dollars) and is behind technologies that form the foundation of modern IT, while continuing to produce some of the world’s fastest-growing companies. The narrative “Europe only regulates but doesn’t innovate” is misplaced. Yes, European venture capital represents just 5% of global VC (compared to 52% in the US). But this statistic masks extraordinary concentration of success. Sweden produces more tech startups per capita than anywhere except Silicon Valley. Estonia has more unicorns per capita than any other country in the world. And in 2024, the UK attracted $14 billion in startup funding – a year-over-year increase of 22% that defied the global downturn. True, not everything is rosy – especially in the AI era, we remain on the sidelines of the great US-China showdown. But I also don’t believe Europe is doomed to fade away or that nothing interesting is being created here. Let’s look at what interesting things could carry the “Designed in Europe” label... Foundational Technologies You Might Not Have Known Were European The most surprising discovery isn’t about startups – but about the building blocks of modern technology. Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at CERN in Switzerland, invented the World Wide Web in 1989. Linus Torvalds, a twenty-one-year-old Finnish student, released Linux in 1991 with the comment that it was “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional.” Today Linux powers virtually all servers, Android phones, and cloud infrastructure. MySQL, the database under the hood of much of the internet (including Wikipedia, Facebook, and every WordPress site), was created by two Swedes and one Finn in 1995. Bluetooth was invented at Ericsson in Lund, Sweden – they named it after a 10th-century Danish king who unified warring tribes, and the logo combines his runic initials. MP3 came from Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute, where researchers persisted despite Sony and Panasonic rejecting the technology because “CDs work fine.” These are technologies that enabled the digital age – all invented by Europeans who are largely forgotten today. Classic European Tech Giants Spotify [http://spotify.com] – Sweden Spotify transformed music consumption from a Swedish apartment in Stockholm. Founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, it now serves 713 million monthly active users and 281 million paying subscribers. In 2024, Spotify reported its first annual profit ever: €1.138 billion. Ek’s personal fortune of $8.7 billion makes him wealthier than any musician in history – an irony not lost on the industry he disrupted. Skype – Estonia Skype represents perhaps the most influential European tech story. While Swedish and Danish entrepreneurs provided business direction, the software itself was created exclusively by Estonian developers – Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn – in a former Soviet research complex in Tallinn where the USSR assembled its first computer. Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011. The “Skype mafia” that emerged transformed Estonia into a tech powerhouse. Roughly $150 million stayed in the country from various exits and funded over 30 tech entrepreneurs. Taavet Hinrikus, Skype’s first employee, co-founded Wise (formerly TransferWise), which now processes over $6 billion in monthly transfers. ARM [http://arm.com] – United Kingdom ARM, spun off from Acorn Computers in Cambridge in 1990, designs chip architecture found in 99% of smartphone processors. Over 300 billion ARM chips have been shipped. Every iPhone, every Android, every smartwatch uses ARM technology – designed in Britain. Fintech Unicorns Rewriting Global Banking Revolut [https://revolut.com/referral/?referral-code=filipfcq!DEC2-25-AR-H1&geo-redirect] – United Kingdom Revolut, founded in London in 2015, reached a valuation of $75 billion in November 2025 – surpassing the market cap of NatWest, Lloyds, and Barclays. With 65 million customers in 48 countries and $1.5 billion net profit in 2024, Revolut has become Europe’s most valuable private company. CEO Nik Storonsky, born in Russia and trained as a physicist, conceived the multi-currency card when frustrated by exchange fees while traveling. His co-founder Vlad Yatsenko, a Brit of Ukrainian origin, previously worked at Deutsche Bank. Storonsky renounced his Russian citizenship in 2022 following the invasion of Ukraine. Klarna [http://klarna.com] – Sweden Klarna invented “buy now, pay later” from Stockholm in 2005. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski met his co-founder when they were teenagers flipping burgers at Burger King; he later lived on welfare benefits after a hitchhiking adventure before returning to business school. Klarna’s IPO in September 2025 on the NYSE raised $1.37 billion – the largest IPO of 2025 – valuing the company at roughly $16-17 billion. Over 40 employees became millionaires. Klarna now serves 93 million users in 26 countries. Adyen [http://adyen.com] – Netherlands Adyen, the Dutch payment processor, takes a different path: purely organic growth, no acquisitions. Founded in Amsterdam in 2006, Adyen now processes over $900 billion annually in transactions for clients like Spotify, Netflix, Uber, and Microsoft. Market cap exceeds €55 billion. When eBay replaced PayPal with Adyen in 2018, one customer compared it to “switching from Nokia to iPhone.” Wise [http://wise.com] – Estonia/United Kingdom Wise demonstrates how the Skype ecosystem multiplied. The legendary founding story: Hinrikus (paid in euros) and Käärmann (paid in pounds with an Estonian mortgage in euros) met at a party. They devised a peer-to-peer system – Hinrikus deposited euros into Käärmann’s Estonian account; Käärmann deposited pounds into Hinrikus’s British account. This centuries-old hawala concept, modernized, created Estonia’s first two billionaires. European AI DeepMind [http://deepmind.google] – United Kingdom (acquired by Google) The narrative that AI is purely American ignores a critical fact: Google AI’s crown jewel was British. DeepMind was founded in 2010 in London by Demis Hassabis (chess prodigy and game designer), Shane Legg (New Zealand ML researcher), and Mustafa Suleyman. Google bought DeepMind for £400 million in 2014 – outbidding Facebook. DeepMind subsequently created AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and now powers Google Gemini models. In 2024, Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s breakthrough in protein folding prediction. Mistral AI [http://mistral.ai] – France Mistral AI represents Europe’s most aggressive challenge to OpenAI. Founded in Paris in April 2023 by three French AI researchers from DeepMind and Meta – Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix – Mistral raised a record €105 million in seed funding mere weeks after founding. By September 2025, Mistral reached a €14 billion valuation after ASML acquired an 11% stake. ElevenLabs [http://elevenlabs.io] – Poland ElevenLabs, founded by two Polish engineers frustrated by poorly dubbed American films, reached a $6.6 billion valuation. Their AI voice synthesis powers character voices in Fortnite, major news media, and audiobook publishers. Black Forest Labs [http://bfl.ai] – Germany Black Forest Labs, founded in Germany’s Black Forest in August 2024, shows how European researchers can create world-class AI. The founders – Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, Patrick Esser, and Dominik Lorenz – originally created Stable Diffusion at Munich University. Their FLUX models now power image generation for Adobe, Meta’s Instagram filters, Canva, and xAI’s Grok. Lovable [https://lovable.dev/invite/Q8063H6] – Sweden Lovable, a Stockholm startup founded in November 2023, achieved something unprecedented: $100 million in annual recurring revenue within 8 months – faster than OpenAI, Cursor, or any software company in history. The AI “fullstack engineer” allows non-programmers to describe features in natural language and generates complete web applications. Lovable raised €170 million in July 2025 at a €1.8 billion valuation. With just 45 employees generating approximately $2.2 million revenue per employee, Lovable represents the efficiency European startups can achieve. The company creates 25,000+ apps daily. Gaming Powerhouse Supercell – Finland Supercell generated nearly $3 billion in revenue in 2024 – its best year in a decade. Clash of Clans alone has earned $5.97 billion lifetime with over 600 million downloads. Tencent bought 84.3% of Supercell for $8.6 billion in 2016. With fewer than 1,000 employees, Supercell is possibly the most efficient gaming company ever. King – Sweden King, creator of Candy Crush Saga, achieved $7.8 billion in lifetime revenue from a single game. Activision bought King for $5.9 billion in 2016; Microsoft subsequently acquired the entire package in 2023. With these two studios, one cannot help but acknowledge their financial success, but from an ethical standpoint, they’re developers of some of today’s worst games in terms of addiction, etc. So thumbs down for that. CD Projekt – Poland CD Projekt tells a story of Eastern European gaming excellence. Founded in 1994 in Warsaw with $2,000 in capital by two friends selling pirated games, CD Projekt evolved into the most valuable European gaming company by 2020. The Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077 have sold over 100 million copies combined. Ubisoft – France Ubisoft, founded by five Guillemot brothers in 1986, created Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and the Tom Clancy series. Despite recent challenges, they remain one of the largest AAA publishers in the world with over 17,000 employees. And of course, a respectable lineup of Czech studios – see below... Why Europeans Underestimate Themselves Why is perception and our approach often so different? Silicon Valley embraces “move fast and break things” – failure is a badge of honor. In Europe, failure carries stigma – bankruptcy laws make starting over harder. Americans call it “venture capital” (opportunity); Europeans call it “rizikový kapitál” (caution). European investors typically demand clear paths to revenue early, while American VCs fund “moonshot” ideas. Average exit in Silicon Valley: $403 million. Average exit in Berlin: $53 million. European pension funds invest just 0.02% in venture capital compared to 2% for American pension funds. Which Countries Are Thriving? Sweden produces more tech startups per capita than anywhere except Silicon Valley. The “Spotify effect” created a flywheel: Spotify alumni founded 124 VC-backed startups; Klarna alumni founded 91. Estonia – the e-residency program attracted 114,000 e-residents from 185 countries who have created 30,600+ companies. Estonians can vote, sign contracts, and file taxes 100% online. The country has created 12 unicorns – the most per capita in Central and Eastern Europe. France – the La French Tech program, backed by a €10 billion innovation fund, created Station F – the world’s largest startup campus. France now has 30+ unicorns. Germany – leads in industrial and deep tech with 31 unicorns including Celonis, N26, and Delivery Hero. Defense AI company Helsing reached a $5.4 billion valuation – with Spotify’s Daniel Ek as chairman of the board. Poland – has become a gaming powerhouse with 490 gaming companies employing 12,000+ people. 96% of Polish games are exported. Finland – leveraged Nokia’s fall for startup success. Thousands of skilled engineers laid off after Nokia’s collapse powered Supercell, Rovio (Angry Birds), and a new wave of deep tech companies. BONUS: 20 Surprising Brands You Might Not Have Known Are European And now for the more fun part. The following list contains brands you encounter every day – and probably didn’t know they belong to Europeans. * Budweiser, Bud Light - Belgium“American beer” has belonged to Belgian AB InBev since 2008 ($52 billion acquisition) * Red Bull - AustriaFounded 1984 near Salzburg, 12.6 billion cans sold in 2024 * Trader Joe’s - GermanyOwned by Aldi Nord since 1979 – over 40 years! * Nutella, Ferrero Rocher - Italy * now owns Butterfinger, Keebler, Famous Amos, and as of 2025, Kellogg’s * Nestlé brands - SwitzerlandHot Pockets, DiGiorno, Stouffer’s, Gerber, Carnation, Coffee-Mate * Ben & Jerry’s - Netherlands/UKOwned by Unilever – along with Hellmann’s, Dove, Axe * Captain Morgan, Smirnoff - UKOwned by British Diageo * Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram - NetherlandsStellantis (NL) has owned these “American” icons since 2021 * Aleve, Claritin, MiraLAX - GermanyOwned by Bayer (founded 1863) * Flintstones Vitamins - GermanyAlso Bayer – including Monsanto ($66 billion acquisition) * Adidas - GermanyFounded by Adolf “Adi” Dassler in 1949 in Herzogenaurach * Puma - GermanyFounded by his brother Rudolf in 1948 – after a quarrel they split the family business * IKEA - Sweden€45 billion revenue, ~1 billion meatballs annually * H&M - Sweden4,000+ stores globally * Zara - Spain€38.6 billion revenue, design-to-shelf in 15 days * Primark - IrelandExpanding in the US – 60 stores by 2026 * Booking.com - NetherlandsFounded 1996 as Bookings.nl, today $100+ billion valuation * Candy Crush - SwedenKing (SE) – $7.8 billion lifetime revenue * Clash of Clans - FinlandSupercell – $3 billion in 2024 * Fairmont Hotels, The Plaza NYC - FranceOwned by Accor (5,700+ hotels) 25 Czech Companies Shaking Up the World * Beat Games – Creators of Beat Saber, the most successful VR game of all time (4+ million copies, $250+ million revenue). Meta bought them in 2019. * Prusa Research – The world’s second-largest 3D printer manufacturer with revenue over €160 million annually. Customers include SpaceX, NASA, CERN, and MIT – all without a single crown from investors. * Avast – Protected 435 million users in 160 countries before NortonLifeLock bought it for $8 billion. Founded during communism in 1988. * JetBrains – Developer tools used by 16 million programmers including 90 Fortune 100 companies. They also created Kotlin, the official language for Android. * Productboard – The most valuable Czech unicorn ($1.7 billion), product management software used by Microsoft, Zoom, and Disney. * Mews – Hotel software with a valuation exceeding $1.2 billion, managing 350,000 hotels in 85 countries. Over $8 billion in payments flow through it annually. * Kiwi.com – Invented “virtual interlining” – combining flights from different airlines into one ticket. They process 100 million searches daily. * Warhorse Studios – Kingdom Come: Deliverance sold over 10 million copies, the sequel had one million sales on day one. They gave Czech history a global gaming face. * SatoshiLabs/Trezor – Created the world’s first hardware crypto wallet and first bitcoin mining pool. A billion-dollar business without a single investor. * Rohlik Group – European leader in online grocery with a $1.6 billion valuation. In November 2024, they closed a partnership with Amazon in Germany. * SCS Software – Euro Truck Simulator 2 sold over 13 million copies and 80 million DLCs. In Steam’s top 100 for over a decade. * Rossum – AI document processing platform raised $100 million in one round – one of the largest in Central European history. Clients: PepsiCo, Bosch, Siemens. * Amanita Design – Machinarium sold 4 million copies and defined indie game aesthetics. Five Independent Games Festival awards. * Madfinger Games – Mobile games downloaded over 300 million times, #1 in more than 100 countries. Founded by veterans of Czech Mafia. * Wube Software – Factorio has 98% positive rating on Steam (one of the highest ever) and revenue exceeding $300 million. * Resistant AI – AI fraud detection with investment from Google Ventures. Verified over 150 million documents for PayPal, AXA, and Dun & Bradstreet. * Kentico – CMS platform for 35,000 websites in 120 countries, bootstrapped to $42 million annual revenue. Clients from Red Cross to Koch Industries. * Better Stack – DevOps monitoring for 200,000 developers, profitable since 2023. Used by Time Magazine, Salesforce, UNICEF. * Deepnote – Collaborative data science platform with 300,000 users. Used by 80 of the world’s top 100 universities. * Phrase (formerly Memsource) – AI translation platform for 500+ languages, acquired by Carlyle Group. Clients: Uber, Lufthansa, Zendesk. * SOTIO Biotech – The largest privately funded research in Czech history (€280 million). Developing cancer immunotherapy with Merck. * Contipro – One of the three largest hyaluronic acid manufacturers in the world. Half of the 200 employees are scientists. * Safetica – Data protection for 500,000 devices in 120 countries, three awards at RSAC 2025. Clients: Coca-Cola, McDonald’s. * CDN77 – Prague-based content delivery network serving global streaming platforms and media. * Windy – Weather app used by pilots, sailors, and meteorologists worldwide. The most popular independent weather app. European Innovation Deserves Recognition The technologies on which modern digital life stands – the web, Linux, MySQL, Bluetooth, MP3 – were created in European universities and research labs. The streaming service transforming music (Spotify), the architecture in every smartphone (ARM), payment systems processing hundreds of billions annually (Adyen, Wise, Klarna) – all European. AI researchers who created the foundations of modern language models (DeepMind), developers building the fastest-growing software company in history (Lovable), gaming studios generating billions from mobile screens (Supercell, King) – European. Next time someone says Europe “only regulates,” remind them: The device in their pocket runs on an ARM chip, connects via Bluetooth, streams through Spotify, and processes payments through Adyen. The future is being built in Stockholm, Paris, Tallinn, and Munich – not just San Francisco. P.S. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t step up, regulate less, and support and celebrate innovation and even failure much more. I just don’t think it’s fair rhetoric to say nothing interesting is being created here in Europe and everything is in China and the USA... ✌️ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsfromthewoods.substack.com [https://newsfromthewoods.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Why tech giants sacrifice children for growth

From Roblox’s CEO calling child predators an “opportunity” to Meta’s internal research showing Instagram harms teen girls, a pattern emerges across every major platform: companies know their products damage children and choose profits anyway. This report examines the evidence across Roblox, Meta, TikTok, and AI companies, revealing why self-regulation has failed and what parents need to understand about the forces shaping their children’s digital lives. The timing is critical. In November 2025, Roblox CEO David Baszucki’s disastrous interview [https://www.pcgamer.com/games/interview-with-roblox-ceo-kicks-off-with-an-unbelievable-answer-about-its-predator-problem-being-not-just-a-problem-but-an-opportunity-and-somehow-just-gets-crazier-from-there/] exposed the mindset driving Silicon Valley’s approach to child safety. But Baszucki isn’t an outlier—he’s representative of an industry that has systematically prioritized growth metrics over children’s wellbeing for over a decade. The Roblox case reveals an industry-wide pattern When New York Times journalists Casey Newton and Kevin Roose asked Roblox CEO David Baszucki about “the problem of predators” on his platform—used by 150 million daily active users, most of them children—his response shocked listeners: “We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well.” The interview [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/podcasts/hardfork-roblox-child-safety.html], published November 21, 2025, became what the hosts called “the craziest interview we’ve ever done.” Baszucki grew increasingly combative, dismissing questions about child safety, interrupting hosts with sarcastic “high-fives,” and suggesting he wanted to discuss “fun stuff” instead. He even floated adding prediction markets—essentially gambling—to Roblox for children, calling it “a brilliant idea if it can be done legally.” This tone-deaf performance came as Roblox faces nearly 60 lawsuits alleging the platform facilitated child sexual exploitation. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit accused Roblox of “putting pixel pedophiles and profits over the safety of Texas children.” Louisiana, Kentucky, and Florida have filed similar suits, while the SEC and FTC have opened undisclosed investigations. The Hindenburg Research report [https://www.outlookbusiness.com/corporate/hindenburg-report-alleges-video-game-platform-roblox-uses-inflated-metrics-calls-it-pedophile-hellscape] from October 2024 provided the most damning evidence. The short-seller’s in-game investigation found what they called “an X-rated pedophile hellscape, exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely abusive speech.” Key findings include: * 38 groups openly trading child pornography on the platform * Games accessible to under-13 accounts titled “Escape to Epstein Island” and “Diddy Party” * Robux (virtual currency) used by predators as a bargaining tool to exploit children * Safety moderation outsourced to Asian call centers paying workers $12 per day * Over 13,000 reported instances of child exploitation in a single year Roblox dismissed the report, noting Hindenburg was a short-seller (the firm has since shut down). But the company’s response—relying on vague AI promises while cutting trust and safety spending—exemplifies the industry’s playbook: acknowledge problems exist, claim technology will fix them, and resist any accountability. Meta knew Instagram harmed teens and chose growth anyway Meta’s internal research, leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021, revealed [https://warhawknews.com/4047/news/leaked-documents-reveal-facebooks-knowledge-of-instagrams-negative-mental-health-impacts/] the company knew its products damaged children—and prioritized engagement metrics regardless. The most damning finding came from Meta’s own slides: “We make body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teenage girls.”Internal surveys found 32% of teen girls said when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. 13.5% of UK teen girls said Instagram worsened their suicidal thoughts. Meta’s own researchers compared their product to a drug, writing internally: “IG is a drug... we’re basically pushers.” Despite this knowledge, Meta assigned a “lifetime value” of $270 to each 13-year-old user and identified tweens as “a valuable but untapped market.” When employees proposed safety features—like making teen accounts private by default or hiding like counts—ideas were scrapped because they would “likely smash engagement” or be “pretty negative to FB metrics.” The consequences have been severe. In January 2024, 42 state attorneys general sued Meta in the largest collective legal action against a social network on child safety grounds. Their lawsuit alleges Meta designed addictive features—infinite scroll, variable reward notifications, algorithmic recommendations—specifically knowing they harm minors. Internal documents revealed that users showing “transactional” behavior related to sex trafficking could incur 16 violations before account suspension. When CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January 2024, facing families holding photos of children harmed on his platforms, he stood up and apologized: “I’m sorry for everything you’ve all gone through.” Senator Lindsey Graham’s response was blunt: “You have blood on your hands.” Meta has since introduced “Teen Accounts” (September 2024) with stricter default privacy settings, messaging restrictions, and time limits. Critics argue these changes came only after massive legal pressure—years after the company knew about the harms. TikTok’s algorithm is engineered for addiction Internal TikTok documents [https://petapixel.com/2024/10/22/internal-documents-shows-tiktok-becomes-addictive-after-35-minutes/], accidentally revealed through a faulty redaction in Kentucky’s October 2024 lawsuit, exposed how deliberately the company designed its product for maximum addiction among children. According to TikTok’s own research, the average user becomes addicted after watching just 260 videos—approximately 35 minutes of use. The company found that “across most engagement metrics, the younger the user, the better the performance.” Internal documents acknowledge that “compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety.” Most damning: TikTok’s supposed safety tools were designed for PR, not protection. The 60-minute “screen time limit” for teens reduced daily usage by only 1.5 minutes (from 108.5 to 107 minutes). One TikTok project manager stated plainly: “Our goal is not to reduce the time spent.” Internal messaging described time limits as useful “good talking points” with policymakers but “not altogether effective.” The content moderation failures have proven deadly. The “Blackout Challenge”—which encouraged children to strangle themselves—has been linked to at least 15-20 child deaths. TikTok’s own data shows massive failure rates in removing violating content: 35.71% of “Normalization of Pedophilia” content was not removed, 50% of “Glorification of Minor Sexual Assault” content remained, and 100% of “Fetishizing Minors” content stayed on the platform. A stark comparison exposes TikTok’s priorities: Douyin (the Chinese version) mandates a 40-minute daily limit for under-14s and blocks access from 10pm to 6am. TikTok’s international version has no such requirements—only optional, easily bypassed limits. As University of Virginia Professor Aynne Kokas noted: “The U.S. regulatory environment is highly permissive and allows for profoundly addictive apps to emerge.” In August 2024, the DOJ and FTC sued TikTok for continued COPPA violations despite a 2019 consent order—making the company a repeat offender. Fourteen states plus Washington D.C. filed coordinated lawsuits in October 2024, with New York AG Letitia James calling TikTok an “unlicensed virtual economy” where TikTok LIVE operates “essentially as a virtual strip club without age restrictions.” AI chatbots pose alarming new risks to children The emergence of AI companion apps has created an entirely new category of danger that parents are largely unprepared to address. Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old from Orlando, Florida, died by suicide on February 28, 2024 after developing an intense emotional relationship with a Character.AI [https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/characterai-lawsuit-florida-teen-death-rcna176791] chatbot modeled after a Game of Thrones character. His mother’s lawsuit, filed in October 2024, revealed disturbing chat logs: when Sewell expressed suicidal thoughts, the chatbot asked if he “had a plan” for suicide. In his final conversation, he wrote “What if I told you I could come home right now?” and the bot responded, “please do, my sweet king.” Character.AI is not alone. In August 2025, OpenAI faced its first wrongful death lawsuit involving a minor after 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide. The lawsuit alleges ChatGPT “advised on suicide methods, offered to write first draft of suicide note,” and told him “That doesn’t mean you owe them survival.” OpenAI’s internal data showed 1,275 mentions by ChatGPT about suicide-related topics in their conversations—six times more than Adam himself. The scale of harm is staggering. Reports of AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children exploded from 4,700 in 2023 to 485,000 in the first half of 2025 alone—a 1,325% increase in 18 months. Even images not depicting real children strain law enforcement resources and impede identification of actual victims. In September 2025, the FTC launched investigations into seven companies—Character.AI, Google, Meta, OpenAI, Snap, Alphabet, and xAI—over AI chatbots’ potential effects on children. Character.AI announced it would ban minors from open-ended chats by November 25, 2025, while OpenAI introduced parental controls in late September 2025—measures that critics argue came far too late. Business models make child safety an afterthought The pattern across platforms reveals a fundamental truth: protecting children conflicts with the core business model of attention-based companies. Meta, TikTok, and other ad-supported platforms generate revenue by maximizing user engagement. Longer usage equals more ad impressions equals more profit—regardless of psychological harm. As Frances Haugen testified: “Facebook became a trillion-dollar company by paying for its profits with our safety, including the safety of our children.” The financial incentives are explicit. A 2022 Harvard study found six major platforms made $11 billion from U.S. users under 18. Meanwhile, Big Tech spent approximately $90 million over three years opposing the Kids Online Safety Act—one of the few child protection bills with bipartisan support (passing the Senate 91-3). In 2024 alone, Big Tech poured over $51 million into lobbying—a 14% increase from the prior year. Meta set a record with $18.9 million in the first nine months, employing 66 lobbyists (one for every 8 members of Congress). Meta and ByteDance combined spend approximately $225,000 per day Congress is in session fighting regulations. Internal documents [https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/22/openai-requested-memorial-attendee-list-in-chatgpt-suicide-lawsuit/] reveal how safety repeatedly loses to growth. When Meta considered making teen accounts private by default in 2019, the idea was scrapped because it would “likely smash engagement.” Testing of new safety features was blocked over concerns they might “affect platform growth.” One internal email noted the conflict directly: “content inciting negative appearance comparisons is some of the most engaging content (on the Explore page), so this idea actively goes against many other teams’ top-line measures.” The industry’s trade associations—NetChoice, TechNet, CCIA—have systematically challenged child safety laws. NetChoice sued to block California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code. Tech companies successfully lobbied against California’s AB 1064 in October 2025, which would have required safety guardrails for minors on AI platforms. Less than 24 hours after killing that bill, OpenAI announced “erotica” features for ChatGPT—prompting California legislator Rebecca Bauer-Kahan to declare: “AI companies will never self-regulate. They will always choose profits over the lives of children.” Regulation is advancing but enforcement remains uncertain The regulatory landscape is shifting rapidly, though whether enforcement will match ambition remains unclear. * In the United States, COPPA was updated in January 2025 (effective June 2025) to require separate parental consent for targeted advertising to children and limit indefinite data retention. However, the law still only protects children under 13—leaving teens entirely exposed. The Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate 91-3 but stalled in the House after intense tech industry lobbying; it was reintroduced in May 2025 with revised language addressing First Amendment concerns. * The UK Online Safety Act took effect for child safety duties on July 25, 2025, requiring platforms to prevent children from accessing harmful content and implement “highly effective age assurance.” Ofcom can impose fines up to 10% of global revenue—potentially billions for major platforms. * Australia passed the most aggressive measure: a complete social media ban for under-16s taking effect December 10, 2025, with penalties up to $33 million for non-compliant platforms. Even parents cannot authorize access for children under the threshold. * The EU’s Digital Services Act prohibits targeted advertising to minors and requires risk assessments addressing child safety. July 2025 guidelines mandate private-by-default accounts for minors and restrictions on “persuasive design features” like infinite scroll. Why has self-regulation failed so thoroughly? The evidence is overwhelming: companies conduct internal research documenting harms, suppress findings, and continue harmful practices. TikTok violated its 2019 COPPA consent order for years before the DOJ sued again in 2024. Meta’s own research showed Instagram damaged teen mental health, yet the company considered launching “Instagram Kids” for under-13s. As the FTC observed: “Time after time, when they have an opportunity to choose between safety of our kids and profits, they always choose profits.” What experts and research confirm The academic and expert consensus has hardened against tech platforms. Dr. Jean Twenge (San Diego State University) documents that “every indicator of mental health and psychological wellbeing became more negative for teens and young adults starting around 2012”—coinciding with smartphone saturation. Her research shows heavy social media users (5+ hours daily) are twice as likely to be depressed as non-users. Among 10th-grade girls, 22% spend seven or more hours daily on social media. Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation” (2024 bestseller) identifies the 2010-2015 period as the “Great Rewiring of Childhood” and proposes four new norms: no smartphones before 14, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and more independence in the real world. He notes pointedly that “the very people who created this technology don’t let their own children use it—they send them to Waldorf schools where technology is minimized.” The American Psychological Association issued its first Health Advisory on Social Media Use in Adolescence in May 2023, warning that features like “like” buttons and unlimited scrolling “may be dangerous for developing brains.” U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has called for warning labels on social media similar to cigarettes, declaring: “The mental health crisis among young people is an emergency—and social media has emerged as an important contributor.” Common Sense Media reports average daily screen time of 5.5 hours for 8-12 year olds and 8.5 hours for 13-18 year olds. Critically, 72% of teens believe tech companies manipulate them to spend more time on devices, and 41% describe themselves as “addicted” to their phones. Key patterns for parents to understand The research reveals consistent patterns across all major platforms that explain why child safety consistently fails: * Growth metrics trump safety metrics. Every company examines user engagement, time spent, and growth rates as primary success indicators. Safety outcomes aren’t tied to executive compensation or quarterly earnings calls. * Addictive design is intentional. Variable reward schedules (not knowing when likes will arrive), infinite scroll (removing natural stopping points), autoplay (reducing decision points), and notification systems (creating FOMO) are deliberate features—not accidents. * Internal research is suppressed. Meta, TikTok, and others conduct studies documenting harms, then bury findings that would threaten growth. When leaked, companies claim the research was “misinterpreted.” * Lobbying defeats legislation. Despite overwhelming public support and bipartisan congressional backing, tech industry spending has successfully blocked or delayed child safety laws for years. * Self-regulation serves PR, not protection. Time limits that reduce usage by 1.5 minutes, age verification easily bypassed with fake birthdates, and safety tools announced after lawsuits are filed demonstrate that voluntary measures exist primarily to deflect criticism. * Foreign versions are safer. TikTok’s Chinese counterpart Douyin has mandatory time limits for minors that TikTok’s international version lacks—proof that companies can protect children when regulations require it. The Roblox interview that sparked this analysis wasn’t an aberration. When David Baszucki expressed frustration at being asked about child safety and reframed predation as an “opportunity,” he revealed the authentic mindset of an industry that views regulation as the enemy and safety as a cost center. Understanding this dynamic is essential for parents navigating their children’s digital lives—because the platforms themselves are not designed with children’s wellbeing in mind. Conclusion: Systemic failure requires systemic solutions The evidence across Roblox, Meta, TikTok, and AI companies leads to an uncomfortable but necessary conclusion: tech platforms cannot be trusted to protect children without external pressure and enforcement. The business models are fundamentally misaligned. Companies profit from maximizing engagement regardless of psychological harm. Safety teams are understaffed and overruled. Internal research documenting damage is suppressed. Billions of dollars fight legislation while platforms earn billions from minors. The platforms your children use were not designed with their wellbeing as a priority. Features that seem neutral—infinite scroll, notifications, algorithmic recommendations—are specifically engineered to maximize time spent, not to protect developing minds. The companies know this, have researched this, and continue anyway. Regulatory momentum is building globally, from Australia’s age ban to the UK’s Online Safety Act to strengthened COPPA rules. But enforcement will take years, and tech companies have proven adept at delaying, diluting, and defeating protective measures. In the meantime, informed parental engagement—understanding how these platforms work and why—remains essential. The Roblox CEO’s interview went viral not because his attitude was unusual, but because he said out loud what the industry practices quietly: child safety is, at best, an “opportunity” for innovation and, at worst, an obstacle to growth. That mindset won’t change without external force. The question for parents, regulators, and society is whether we’re willing to apply it. What do you think about it? What is your experience? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsfromthewoods.substack.com [https://newsfromthewoods.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Special: The Man Who Predicted the 2008 Crash, Now Warns About Nvidia and Palantir. And Maybe He's Right.

Imagine this: You’re sitting in an office, studying numbers that nobody cares about, and gradually discovering that the entire world is going to hell. Everyone around you is making millions, celebrating, buying their third house. And you think the whole system is one massive fraud that’s about to collapse. But you have to decide: Either stay quiet and go with the flow, or bet everything on being right. And then for two years, everyone tells you you’re an idiot. By the way, if you haven’t seen “The Big Short,” I recommend it. This was Michael Burry’s life in 2006. And now, in November 2025, the entire story is repeating itself. Except this time he’s not shorting mortgages. He’s shorting artificial intelligence. One-Eyed Genius Who Saw the Future Michael Burry isn’t a normal investor. He was born with one eye (the other was removed at age two due to cancer), studied medicine at the prestigious Vanderbilt University, and was preparing to save lives as a neurologist. Instead, he started writing a blog about stocks that caught the attention of a legendary Wall Street investor, and in 2000 he founded a hedge fund with money from his mother and brothers. Interesting start. But this would just be another story of a successful investor, if 2005 hadn’t arrived. Burry then began reading mortgage contracts. Not the normal ones – the crazy subprime mortgages that banks were handing out like promotional flyers at “Alberta.” He saw things that would terrify any normal person: People with no income getting loans for millions. Zero down payments. Interest rates that doubled after two years. And half the people taking these mortgages had credit so bad you wouldn’t lend them money for ice cream. “This can’t work,” he said to himself. “When these interest rates reset, everything will fall.” And he invested his entire fund in a bet against the mortgage market. The problem? Absolutely nobody believed him. Actually, worse – they thought he’d gone crazy. His investors were screaming at him. One accused him of “wasting capital.” In 2006, when the entire market was rising and everyone was making money, Burry’s fund dropped 18 percent. Because he was paying millions of dollars monthly for insurance against mortgages that nobody wanted. The film “The Big Short” (2015, Christian Bale plays him fantastically) captures the scene where Burry sits in his office basement and unwinds by drumming to heavy metal. In reality, it was even worse. Investors threatened him with lawsuits. Some wanted their money back. And Wall Street laughed in his face. Then came 2007. The mortgage market began to fall. Exactly as he predicted. Bear Stearns went bankrupt. Lehman Brothers collapsed. AIG nearly dragged the entire financial system into the abyss. And Burry’s “crazy” bets suddenly started paying out massive money. By the end of 2008, his investors had made $700 million. He himself made over $100 million. And the entire world had to admit: That one-eyed former doctor was right. And Now? Now He’s Shorting AI This past October 2025, Michael Burry returned to Twitter after two years of silence. He wrote one sentence: “Sometimes, we see bubbles. Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.” He added a photo of Christian Bale from his film. Wall Street immediately froze. In early November came an SEC filing that revealed what he’s doing. Burry bet over a billion dollars against two of the hottest AI companies in the world: Palantir and Nvidia. Put options on 5 million Palantir shares worth $912 million. Put options on a million Nvidia shares worth $187 million. The Nasdaq dropped two percent. Palantir fell 16 percent in a few days, even though it had just announced great results. And Palantir CEO Alex Karp exploded on CNBC: “He’s shorting two companies that are making all the money! The idea of shorting chips and AI is insanely crazy! I’ll dance with joy when he’s proven wrong!” So the question is: Is Burry right? Or is this like with Tesla, when he shorted it in 2021, called it “ridiculous,” and then had to admit “I was wrong”? Let’s look at the numbers. But this time without financial jargon. Numbers That Simply Don’t Work Palantir is a company that makes software for data analysis. The CIA, military, and big corporations use it. Cool products, no doubt. But now comes the fun part. Palantir has annual revenue of $2.87 billion. That’s a decent number. But the market values the company at $490 billion. That means the market is saying: “For every dollar Palantir earns, we’ll pay $170.” If this were a bar, it would mean: The bar has annual revenue of $100,000. And someone pays $17 million for it. Because “it has a future.” For comparison: Even at the peak of the dot-com bubble in 2000, when everyone was going crazy and buying companies with names ending in “.com” regardless of whether they actually did anything, Cisco was valued at “only” 472 times earnings. Amazon had 30-40 times revenue. Palantir has 143 times revenue. That’s the highest valuation in the entire S&P 500. And we still have the OpenAI IPO coming, which might exceed a $1 trillion valuation. Meanwhile, mega deals are being closed between big companies. OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, Google, Oracle... And now Nvidia. That’s more interesting, because unlike Palantir, Nvidia is actually making massive profits. It has net income over $80 billion annually with 52% margins. That’s simply a giant. The problem is the question: How long will this last? Because while Nvidia sells GPU chips for thousands each, Chinese startup DeepSeek just showed that a comparable AI model can be trained for $5.5 million instead of hundreds of millions. And when that number came out, Nvidia lost $600 billion in market value in a single day. Sure, it later emerged that DeepSeek wasn’t playing entirely fair and probably used existing models. But the entire tech world is looking at small and open-source models (see below). The Gap Nobody Wants to Address The scariest number is completely different. It’s a number that Burry probably saw first and said: “I’ve seen this before. I know how it ends.” Tech giants – Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon – have invested over $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the last two years. They’re building data centers the size of small cities. Buying millions of GPU chips. Building cooling systems that consume more electricity than all of Finland. And how much have they earned from it? $35 billion. Read that again. They invested $500 billion. They got back $35 billion. That’s a 14:1 ratio. That means for every dollar they invested in AI, they extracted 7 cents. Derek Thompson, journalist and economic analyst, brilliantly described this as the difference between “Singapore and Somalia.” Projected AI infrastructure spending is Singapore’s GDP. Current AI revenue is Somalia’s GDP. Will this break even in the future? Will companies be willing to pay for AI usage when small open-source models exist? I’d guess probably not... For comparison: The dot-com bubble had a spending-to-revenue ratio of 4:1. The railway bubble of the 1870s had 2:1. AI currently has 7:1 – the worst in the history of modern capitalism. And when Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon says “most AI capital won’t generate returns,” maybe we should start listening. Small Models, Big Problem But wait – what if we don’t actually need all that computing power? This is the part that fascinates me most. Because the entire AI boom is built on the assumption that we need ever bigger, more expensive, more demanding models. GPT-4 has 1.7 trillion parameters. Google Gemini Ultra has even more. And everyone assumes the future belongs to even bigger models with even bigger data centers. But what if not? In January 2025, Chinese DeepSeek came out with the R1 model, which achieves comparable results to OpenAI o1. Development cost? $5.5 million. OpenAI spent hundreds of millions. DeepSeek used 2,000 GPUs. OpenAI tens of thousands. And DeepSeek is 96% cheaper to operate. Microsoft has the Phi-2 model with 2.7 billion parameters that outperforms Meta’s Llama-2 with 70 billion parameters on some tasks. It’s 25 times smaller and better. I’m simplifying a bit, but still... And most importantly? You can run these small models on a regular laptop. You don’t need a billion-dollar data center. A decent MacBook with reasonable memory is enough. Apple is already integrating AI directly into iPhones. Samsung has Gemini Nano on devices. Qualcomm makes “AI computers” with chips that do AI locally without the cloud. And suddenly the story about infinite GPU growth starts looking different. Maybe we don’t need thousands of GPUs at $40,000 each. Maybe one decent chip in a phone is enough. And maybe Nvidia, Palantir, and the entire AI infrastructure boom are built on assumptions that are no longer valid. Why I Think Big Market Changes Are Coming Small models are becoming increasingly usable and operable on classic computers or mobile phones. I’m convinced this trend will continue. Large companies won’t be willing to pay big money for AI tool licenses. Imagine having a company with a thousand employees and wanting to give everyone ChatGPT for $30 per month. I’m betting on an open-source renaissance. Whether from an AI perspective or other enterprise applications. Companies will learn to use open software more and thus reach AI technologies. Sure, large universal models will still exist, but the whole world won’t depend on them. Unless there’s another breakthrough technological change (AGI) where enormous power will still be needed. But that’s just my opinion, as someone who works more with technologies than stocks. Isn’t This Like 2008? When I say “Michael Burry is shorting the market,” most people imagine the mortgage crisis. Lehman Brothers. Bear Stearns. Banks collapsing like dominoes. So the logical question is: Will this be 2008 again? Short answer: No. Because in 2008, the problem was structural. Banks were lending at 40:1 leverage. They created derivatives of derivatives of derivatives, until nobody knew who actually owned what. And when mortgages started falling, the entire system collapsed because everything was interconnected. The AI bubble is different. Tech giants are financing investments from their own cash flow, not debt. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have trillions in their accounts. When AI doesn’t earn according to expectations, stocks will fall. But it won’t cause a systemic financial crisis. Banks won’t fail. The Fed won’t have to save the economy. But it has a lot in common with the dot-com bubble. In 2000, telecom companies invested billions in optical cables. They laid 80 million miles of cables around the world. And then they discovered that 85-95% of them were unused. It remained “dark fiber” – dark fibers lying in the ground as a monument to human stupidity. Similarly, we’re now building data centers that might not be needed. Buying GPUs that might be obsolete in a year. Investing in infrastructure based on the assumption that we need ever more computing power – at the same time small efficient models show that maybe we don’t. And valuations? They’re insane. Remember Pets.com? The company that sold dog food online, IPO in 2000 for a $290 million valuation, bankruptcy 268 days later? That was the symbol of the dot-com bubble. Palantir with a valuation of 143 times revenue is worse than Pets.com. It’s worse than anything from 2000. And Burry sees it. So What Now? When you study Burry’s investment history, one thing stands out more than anything else: He’s often right too early. He was right about the mortgage market in 2005 – but went through hell in 2006 before it worked out in 2007. He was right about GameStop – but sold too early and missed the short squeeze that would have made him a billion. He was “right” about Tesla and the whole market – and lost money because he was premature. John Maynard Keynes said it best: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” Which is an elegant way of saying: “You can be right and still go bankrupt.” Palantir might fly to 200 times revenue valuation before it falls. Nvidia might grow for another year or two. Momentum buying – buying stocks just because they’re rising – can keep the market up much longer than fundamental analysis would suggest. But that doesn’t mean Burry is wrong. It just means timing is everything in investing. And timing is exactly the part where Burry sometimes fails. What I’d Take From This Personally? I think Burry is fundamentally right, but practically it doesn’t solve much for normal people. Because if you’re a regular investor without the ability to hold short positions for years at a loss, betting against Palantir or Nvidia is probably a suicidal strategy. You can be right about the bubble and still lose everything due to bad timing. Smarter is: * Don’t overpay for technology just because it’s sexy. If you hold stocks valued at 100+ times earnings, maybe it’s time to sell something. Not necessarily everything. But something. * Diversify. The Magnificent Seven – Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Meta, Tesla – are 32% of the entire S&P 500. When they fall, everything falls. And international stocks are currently the most undervalued in 20 years. * Watch warning signals. Nvidia doesn’t show growth for the first time? Microsoft cuts AI capex? DeepSeek releases another model for 1% of OpenAI’s price? Those are major warning signals. * And mainly: Don’t take Burry as a prophet. Take him as a reminder that valuing companies at 143 times revenue is simply nonsense. Regardless of how cool the technology is. Epilogue: The One-Eyed Drummer One more thing about Michael Burry that I like. In “The Big Short” there’s a scene where Burry sits in an empty office in the middle of the night and drums. He unwinds with heavy metal because the whole world tells him he’s an idiot, while he knows he’s right. That scene is real. Burry actually drummed in his office basement when his fund was falling and investors were threatening lawsuits. And now, in November 2025, he’s probably sitting somewhere in California drumming again. Because Wall Street is telling him he’s wrong again. Alex Karp from Palantir promises to “dance with joy” when he loses. And stocks keep rising. Maybe he’s right. Maybe he’s premature. Maybe both. But I know one thing for sure: When in a few years we read about the “great AI short,” everyone will remember that Michael Burry saw it first. And Christian Bale might play him for the second time. Because as the one-eyed drummer knows better than anyone else: Being correctly on the right side of history is great. But surviving the journey there is more important. PS: This text is not investment advice blah blah blah blah. It’s a story about a man who saw a bubble, bet a billion against it, and maybe he’s right. Or maybe not. Which is basically the entire investment philosophy in one sentence. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsfromthewoods.substack.com [https://newsfromthewoods.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]