YouTube — Week of 2026-05-16 to 2026-05-22#

Watch First#

If you only watch one thing this week, make it TED’s hour-long masterclass, How to Be Smarter About the News | TED Explains the World with Ian Bremmer, featuring the renowned political scientist. It is an essential guide to curating a healthy media diet, tuning out geopolitical noise, and using AI to actively challenge your own biases.

Week in Review#

This week’s content was dominated by the hidden physical and economic costs of the AI boom, revealing how the technology is reshaping everything from blue-collar job markets to global power grids. Simultaneously, geopolitical tensions remained a massive focus, with deep dives into US-China relations, upcoming summits, and the macroeconomic turbulence hitting both American tech giants and Chinese markets.

YouTube — 2026-05-20#

Watch First#

How Cheap AI Could Derail OpenAI And Anthropic’s IPOs is the single most important watch today if you follow the tech sector, detailing how inexpensive, highly capable open-source Chinese models are rapidly closing the gap with American frontier models. It fundamentally questions whether the multi-billion dollar valuations of US AI labs are justified if their premium pricing power evaporates.

Highlights by Theme#

News & Business#

In the business world, The Wall Street Journal reveals an unexpected private equity strategy: rolling up mom-and-pop ice hockey rinks to monopolize lucrative youth sports programming and tournaments. Over on CNBC, a brief segment points out that spiking gas prices are quietly keeping EVs in the public conversation, even as automakers pull back and used EV inventories swell. For those tracking Chinese-language financial commentary, the latest dispatch from 美投侃新闻 (Meitou News) offers a fantastic breakdown of the macro jitters surrounding Nvidia’s upcoming earnings and how the market is totally re-evaluating memory chip stocks thanks to new long-term supply agreements.