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Welcome to a new episode of the sharp 10 Global Trends Podcast.

My name is Andrea, and today we are talking about the cost of wars, not just in lives, which we already know is unbearable, but in money, in opportunity costs, in the futures we are quietly choosing not to build.

Here is the number that started this episode for me. Between the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, and the planned military budgets of the US, China, and Europe through 2030, humanity is on track to spend roughly $20 trillion on weapons and military.

That's more than $10...

Welcome to a new episode of the sharp10 Global Trends podcast. My name is Andrea, and today we're diving into something that might sound a bit abstract at first, the values of the European Union.

Now, you might be thinking, "Values? That sounds a little dry, maybe even boring."

But stay with me, because by the end of this episode, I think you'll see this very differently.

What struck me while preparing this episode is how few people actually know what the EU has defined as its core values and what the challenges are, and I have to include myself...

Today we're diving into geopolitical tensions.

It's a big topic and a hot one. It deserves more context than usual, especially for a podcast focused on business insights for executives and founders.

Something has changed.

The world feels different now.

Think back 10, maybe 15 years. Yes, we had major crises between 2000 and 2016. The September 11th attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the global financial crisis in 2008, the Arab Spring, which brought down regimes and contributed to the migration crisis in Europe.

And in 2014, Russia annexed Crimea, although at the time that didn't dominate headlines...

It's April 2026, and everyone is talking about AI, your colleagues, your LinkedIn feed, probably even your dentist.

But very few are asking the question that actually matters:

Where are the opportunities right now and in the next 10 years?

Because this shift is not just about better technology, it is changing who wins, who falls behind, and where real value is created.

For entrepreneurs and job seekers, it opens up entirely new career paths and business models. For investors, it creates a chance to move early before the market fully catches on.

And for policymakers, it raises a fundamental...

Imagine this:

You’re sitting with friends and someone says, “You know what someone should build?”

Ideas start flying.

Everyone has one.

Everyone feels like discovering the next big thing.

And the next day, nothing happens. The idea that felt so obvious at midnight looks a lot less revolutionary over breakfast.

Because having an idea is easy. It’s exciting. It’s safe. But building a company, that’s where most people stop.

And here’s the twist:

Somewhere else, someone has the same idea, and they actually start.

They build. They struggle. They figure it out.

And over time, they create something real.

That’s...

Will AI take your job?

Or even more radical, will humans even matter economically anymore?

It’s March twenty twenty-six, and the headlines are getting tough to ignore.

UPS just laid off forty-eight thousand people blaming their new AI-driven network of the future.

Amazon has already cut another sixteen thousand this year on top of fourteen thousand last year.

Accenture, Citigroup, Goldman, Klarna, Lufthansa, one after another, companies keep saying the same thing: AI made us do it.

So what if humans just are not or less needed in the economy anymore? Who actually owns this new AI economy?

And if...

From Silicon Valley to Washington and even within Europe itself, the European Union has become a favourite target for criticism. Too regulated. Too slow. Too weak. But what happens when you test that narrative against the actual data? And what is the case for the European Union?

In this episode, Andrea Anderheggen sits down with Claude, an AI developed by Anthropic, to examine the EU's achievements and quality-of-life indicators compared to the US and China, identify its weaknesses, and ask what it would take to fix them.

The result is a conversation that starts with the data, takes the critics...