10 Friday AM Reads

• Hotdogs and motorways: The ripples created by Denmark’s Ozempic and Wegovy boom: American demand for weight-loss drugs is supercharging Denmark’s economy and transforming a small Danish community into an unlikely boomtown. (BBC)

• Microsoft’s New Majorana 1 Processor Could Transform Quantum Computing: The processor uses qubits that can be measured without error and are resistant to outside interference, which the company says marks a “transformative leap toward practical quantum computing.” (Wired) see also Microsoft just claimed a quantum breakthrough. A quantum physicist explains what it means: Researchers at Microsoft have announced the creation of the first “topological qubits” in a device that stores information in an exotic state of matter, in what may be a significant breakthrough for quantum computing. (The Conversation)

• A Conversation with Jim Chanos: It’s the golden age of fraud, and other observations: I knew Chanos through the “dinners” he refers to in the conversation. Every couple of months some civilized Wall Streeters, media people and economists get together for a dinner where we plot global domination carefully analyze global trends drink wine and tell bad jokes. Chanos has come to some of those dinners, and despite his fearsome reputation is charming, completely approachable and something of a historical scholar (he’s been teaching courses at Yale and Wisconsin.) (Paul Krugman)

• Wall Street Gamblers Get Crushed as Leveraged ETF Losses Hit 40%: Selling pressures rise after disappointing economic reports; Bets tied to cryptocurrencies have been particularly hard hit. (Bloomberg)

• Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong. Here’s why unemployment is higher, wages are lower and growth less robust than government statistics suggest. (Politico)

• Elon Musk’s business empire is built on $38 billion in government funding: Government infusions at key moments helped Tesla and SpaceX flourish, boosting Musk’s wealth. (Washington Post)

• Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World: Ed Yong, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, was one of the most trusted journalists covering Covid-19. His immersion in the pandemic left him depleted, and the natural world helped act as a salve to that despair. (New York Times)

• How the West lost the war it thought it had won: On the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has reason to celebrate. He has scripted a new ending to the Cold War by exploiting the gap between Western democratic ideals and their practice. (Coda) see also Trump’s psychopathology and the suicide of a superpower: A delusion is a false belief that is at once held with great conviction and impervious to revision, no matter the strength of the contrary evidence. Those suffering from delusions perceive their false beliefs to be self-evident and immutable truths. It has long been recognized that delusions can be contagious, sometimes virulently so. Typically, there is a dominant person—the “inducer”—who is the source of the delusions. (The Cosmopolitan Globalist)

• 6 Cognitive Distortions That Fuel Anxiety in ADHD Brains: From catastrophizing to mental filtering, cognitive distortions negatively influence how you view events, situations, others, and yourself. (Additude)

• Bill Burr Is About to Hit Broadway. Broadway Better Duck. The acerbic comic sounds like a Mamet character, and thanks to Nathan Lane, he’s making his Broadway debut as one in “Glengarry Glen Ross.” (New York Times)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Melissa Smith of J.P. Morgan, where she is co-head of commercial banking. Previously, she was co-Head of Innovation Economy and Head of Specialized Industries,. She has been with JPM Chase for more than 20 years, working with founders, entrepreneurs and startups.

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