Could Iceland become the next country to join the EU? The Nordic nation is holding a referendum in August to ask citizens whether they want to reopen membership talks. John Reed analyses why accession to the bloc has risen to the top of its political agenda. pic.twitter.com/X3dsv1JbUd
8,000 km of green defiance stretching from Senegal to Djibouti: it’s called the Great Green Wall – a plan to stop the Sahara desert, restore dead land, and lift 100 million people.
I’ve made a deliberate decision never to publicly describe the narcissism and sadism that shaped the first eighteen years of my life. Nor will I ever transform that history into a novel. I’ve chosen to carry it privately for the rest of my life, shared only with two people from my childhood who witnessed fragments of what occurred. This decision isn’t rooted in avoidance, but in realism. No paper, book, work of art, or lecture series could ever fully convey what that particular parent was like. Complete understanding would remain impossible, even if I were to speak uninterrupted for months.
Over the past years, however, I immersed myself more deeply in the work of Carl Jung. I wrote several articles inspired by this engagement, particularly on the experience of moving through the world as an empath. The responses I received were striking. Many readers described the pieces as resonant.
What stood out most were the personal messages. People recognized themselves in the descriptions and felt understood. When I reflected on why these texts had landed so strongly, the answer felt almost uncomfortably simple. They were clear because they were lived. They carried coherence because they were shaped by endurance. They resonated because they emerged from experience that had been metabolized into insight.
This realization prompted a shift in perspective. While I remain unwilling to expose my personal experiences in detail, I began to consider whether I could speak in a different register, by articulating, in general terms, what it means to grow up with narcissistic parents. What patterns emerge. What damage systematically forms. What remains invisible for decades. What continues to shape adult life long after physical distance from the family has been achieved.
The reflections gathered emerge from that intention. This is for entertainment or infotainment purposes only. Some elements described here don’t apply to me personally but are important in the larger context of the subject. Others reflect experiences I know intimately but won’t elaborate upon. Many things that shaped my life are absent from these words by design. As stated earlier, I will carry those until my final breath. What is offered here isn’t total disclosure, but careful distillation.
This care extends especially to language. The term narcissism is used far too casually in contemporary discourse. It has become a convenient label, applied loosely and often without consequence. Such usage isn’t merely imprecise. It’s disrespectful to those whose lives weren’t simply influenced, but structurally damaged by narcissistic parenting. When a life has been formed under conditions of chronic emotional control, gaslighting, enmeshment, and role assignment, the word narcissism doesn’t describe a personality quirk. It names a formative environment. For this reason, restraint and precision are ethical necessities.
The purpose of this work is to offer structure where there has been confusion, language where there has been silence, and conceptual clarity where there has long been self-doubt. Healing, as will become clear, is a slow and demanding process. I know what I’m describing. I also know the cost of walking it alone. If these words provide orientation, recognition, or steadiness for others, then they serve their purpose.
AI and the Self You Left BehindAI isn’t stealing your intelligence, you just stopped reaching for it.
By John Nosta
KEY POINTS:AI doesn’t steal your intelligence, it makes surrendering it feel rational.The risk isn’t atrophy or addiction but estrangement from the self that thinks.
The sharpest minds are most at risk because the substitution is most convincing when the gap is narrowest.Source: Image by Christian Bodhi from Pixabay.
The surrender of your cognitive voice to AI isn’t loss of ability. It’s estrangement from the self that thinks. Let’s unpack this carefully, because the self that thinks isn’t a fixed thing. William James was right that consciousness is a stream, not a monument. It’s fluid and shaped by the dimensions of our humanity from language to culture to tools and even to the people with whom we debate this very concept.
AI may simply be the latest participant in that ongoing construction. So, if the self was never stable, what exactly are we becoming estranged from? The answer isn’t: a fixed identity. It’s: a process. It’s how you move through a problem. It’s the specific texture of your uncertainty, the way your thinking hesitates and then commits, the half-formed idea that becomes, through friction, yours.That process is recognizable and you know it when you’re in it. You know it, too, as a kind of meeting or impact with the problem, and with yourself. And you notice when the meeting doesn’t happen.
Today we’ve grown particularly comfortable with medical metaphors for this absence. Atrophy. Dependency. Addiction. They position the person as patient and the technology as agent that’s doing something to us. And this insult is amenable to intervention and treatable with better habits or stronger regulation.This perspective misses the mechanism.
AI doesn’t degrade cognition directly as a disease that targets a biological structure or function. It’s my sense that AI reshapes the cost structure of thinking. And we, as rational humans, optimize accordingly. The hard paragraph to draft is no longer something you struggle with. It becomes something you route around.The moment you reached for AI wasn’t because you couldn’t think for yourself. It’s because your thinking felt inefficient compared to what the machine returns in the click of a button.
The key point here is that this isn’t dependency; it’s preference that’s taking shape. And preferences, repeated, become the shape of a life. Until, of course, the choice disappears into habit and the habit stops feeling like a choice.What gets traded away isn’t capacity. Your intrinsic cognitive ability likely remains. What changes is the tolerance for cognitive toil or friction. These aren’t trivial inefficiencies that are just optimized away. They’re the occasion for driving development and growth. Remove the friction and you remove development and growth.I believe that this is the particular vulnerability of people who think well, because, for them, the substitution is most convincing.
The AI output may most closely resemble what they would have produced, and that gap can be harder to see when it’s very narrow. The person who struggles to write was never tempted to believe the machine’s voice was their own. The person who thinks well is precisely the one most likely to mistake the echo for the original.Yes, estrangement is the right word because it’s relational and gradual. Something that was close becomes unfamiliar as your own voice starts to feel effortful. The AI voice feels curiously more like you, or perhaps the you that you aspire to be. It’s a rational trade-off that fits nicely into this cost structure. That’s precisely what makes it hard to resist and harder to reverse.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images
Axios CEO Jim VandeHei wrote a piece in his Axios C-Suite newsletter (ask to join) to help other CEOs think about how to future-proof themselves during this moment of profound technological change.He wanted to expand it for the Axios AM audience because EVERYONE is staring down this moment together. Whether you’re the CEO or an entry-level hire, we want you to see how a really good leader can approach the AI transition.
Your employer’s job is getting harder, faster, too.
Companies are being redesigned from the top down around AI. The leaders who get it right will look very different from the ones who don’t.
A startup with a handful of people and a team of AI agents might undercut your work at any moment, at a fraction of your cost.
Why it matters: The next 18 months will sort companies into two camps — those with leaders committed to running a genuinely AI-integrated organization, and those that bought a bunch of AI tools and called it transformation.
Here’s what a future-proofed CEO is actually acting on right now:
1. Becoming an AI decision-maker. AI strategy is no longer being handed off to CTOs. Corporate leaders are becoming systems architects. They personally decide where AI agents run workflows end-to-end, where humans stay in the loop and where both work together
Nearly three-quarters of CEOs say they’re now their companies’ chief AI decision-maker, per the consulting firm BCG. Half say their job stability depends on getting it right this year.
2. Reimagining their team. The most important role in any company by 2027 won’t have a clean title. It’s someone who understands AI systems well enough to architect workflows, people well enough to keep talent motivated through the transition, and the business well enough to know what matters.
That’s a hybrid of your current CTO, CHRO and COO.
The companies that find or develop this person first will move at twice the speed of those still routing AI decisions through a committee.
3. Anticipating the politics. The pressure on leaders not to replace workers with AI is already real. The temptation to do so anyway once the tech gets good enough will be real, too.
Klarna learned this the hard way. It cut 700 customer service jobs, watched satisfaction crater and quietly rehired humans after CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski admitted he went too far.
The gap between executive optimism and employee anxiety is a powder keg most organizations haven’t figured out how to defuse.
4. Managing trust issues. Employees fear replacement. Customers fear misuse. Regulators fear concentration. Investors fear wasted spending. That’s a big balancing act to manage.
The companies getting this right aren’t winging it. PwC found that firms with formal responsible AI frameworks are 1.7x more likely to capture real ROI from the tech.
5. Running at dual speed. The planning cycle that matters now requires leaders to think on two time scales simultaneously. Keeping both in sync will be a massive challenge in the years ahead.
There’s a fast clock (weekly and monthly cycles of AI deployment, agent testing, efficiency pushes and product shifts) where companies are trying to move like startups.
And there’s a slow clock (quarterly culture shifts, trust-building, infrastructure investment and talent development) where they’re trying to build something that lasts.
6. Retaining talent. Most companies already anticipate bringing on fewer junior workers in the near term as AI absorbs that work.
That’s rough when seniority amounts to thousands of solved problems, fixed mistakes and navigated crises that accumulated over time. Leaders who shrink the pipeline now are quietly borrowing against the institutional judgment they’ll need later.
The bottom line: The leaders you trust won’t be defined by vision alone. They’ll be the ones who treated AI like a discipline — not a distraction — and stayed honest with you all the way through.If you’re a CEO or on a CEO’s team: Ask to join Jim’s new weekly Axios C-Suite newsletter.
2. The tangible AI economy: Caterpillar as AI darling
Caterpillar excavators are unloaded at the Port of Long Beach in January. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty ImagesCaterpillar — founded decades before computers and nearly a century before ChatGPT — is becoming an AI play, Axios’ Nathan Bomey writes.
Why it matters: The equipment maker is enjoying a sales boom from the surge in development of AI data centers and power plants.
Between the lines: Much of Caterpillar’s growth in power and energy is driven by data center demand and the electricity needed to support cloud computing and generative AI, CEO Joe Creed said on an earnings call.
Caterpillar makes the engines and turbines that supply both primary and backup power to those facilities, as well as the electrical infrastructure to run them.
Driving the news: Caterpillar this week recorded a 22% increase in revenue, compared with a year earlier, to $17.4 billion.
That crushed S&P Capital IQ estimates of $16.4 billion.
It included a 38% increase in construction industry revenue and a 22% rise in its power and energy segment.
Caterpillar has accumulated a “record” backlog in orders, Creed said. The backlog totaled $63 billion, up 79% from a year earlier.
The bottom line: The AI economy continues to translate into demand for actual stuff like Nvidia chips and Caterpillar machines.
That’s making it increasingly difficult to argue the AI boom is a mirage.Share this story.
The USGS estimates there’s 2.3 million metric tons of lithium oxide untapped in parts of Appalachia.Cristobal Olivares/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Lithium is everywhere: It’s in the battery powering the device on which you’re reading this article. It powers electric vehicles (EVs). It’s in your headphones, your power tools, and your TV remote. In short, lithium powers modern life.
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The ubiquity of the element is why the United States Geological Survey (USGS) deemed it a critical mineral in November. While the U.S. remains highly reliant on imports of lithium, a new report from the USGS found an estimated 2.3 million metric tons of the lithium oxide in Appalachia, enough to replace 328 years’ worth of U.S. imports at last year’s level.
“This research shows that the Appalachians contain enough lithium to help meet the nation’s growing needs,” USGS director Ned Mamula said in a statement, “a major contribution to U.S. mineral security, at a time when global lithium demand is rising rapidly.”
The discovery comes as the demand for lithium continues to snowball as manufacturers ditch conventional lead-acid or alkaline for lithium-ion batteries. The USGS expects global lithium production capacity to double by 2029 on increasing demand. While the U.S. imports the majority of its lithium carbonate—the compound critical to lithium-ion battery production—primarily from Chile and Argentina, China dominates the supply of finished lithium-ion batteries, powering everything from EVs to phones and laptops.The U.S. imported nearly $85 million worth of lithium-ion batteries from China over the past year, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity. The import of lithium-ion batteries is particularly costly as both the Trump and Biden administrations have levied tariffs on Chinese imports of the product.
The scale of the lithium found in the U.S.
Out of the 2.3 million metric tons of lithium oxide that USGS estimates may be economically recoverable from Appalachian pegmatites—large-grained rocks similar to granite—about 1.43 million metric tons are estimated to be locked in the southern Appalachians, concentrated in the Carolinas. About another 900,000 metric tons are under the forests of rural western Maine and New Hampshire.
The scale of lithium in the U.S. is massive. USGS estimates it’s enough to power 130 million EVs, or enough for more than one-third of the U.S. population to own one. It’s enough for 3 billion tablets and laptops, 500 billion cell phones, or 1.6 million electric grid batteries.
Lithium is also critical to the AI infrastructure build-out. Lithium-ion batteries last two to three times longer than conventional batteries. They recharge faster than the average battery, making them a preferred choice for data centers. The batteries are a critical backup energy source for data centers during power outages. Hyperscalers are buying into that belief. Last year, Google announced the company had deployed 100 million lithium-ion cells in its data centers.
Where the U.S. stands in lithium production
But the problem is accessing the lithium. The U.S. was the dominant world producer of lithium three decades ago, according to Mamula. While domestic demand for the material is robust, lithium production today pales in comparison to its past production levels. The U.S. hosts just a handful of lithium projects—where the element is processed and refined—concentrated in areas outside of where the 2.3 million metric tons are estimated to be, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Nevada hosts the most projects, as well as the only operating lithium mine in the country, in Silver Peak, Nev.
The U.S. produced just 610 metric tons of lithium in 2024, according to an estimate from the Energy Institute’s 2024 Statistical Review of World Energy. That’s only 0.3% of all global production.
But the U.S. is investing in lithium extraction. The Department of Energy finalized a $225 million grant for Standard Lithium and Equinor’s South West Arkansas lithium project, which is targeting an initial 22,500 metric tons of annual battery-quality lithium carbonate production. That comes as firms flock to the state to extract the element. A chemical extraction process developed by Standard Lithium is focusing on a region of Arkansas the company estimates to hold about 1.2 million tons of lithium reserves, according to company officials as reported by NewsNation.
Still, the USGS said the recent discovery offers a lifeline to the U.S. to stake a claim amid the skyrocketing global lithium demand. “This research highlights the abundant potential to reclaim our mineral independence,” Mamula said.
The Fortune 500 Innovation Forum will convene Fortune 500 executives, U.S. policy officials, top founders, and thought leaders to help define what’s next for the American economy, Nov. 16-17 in Detroit. Apply here.
Source: Image by Christian Bodhi from Pixabay.
If you’re a CEO or on a CEO’s team: 
Caterpillar excavators are unloaded at the Port of Long Beach in January. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty ImagesCaterpillar — founded decades before computers and nearly a century before ChatGPT — is becoming an AI play, Axios’ Nathan Bomey writes.
