In conversation with Michael Power and Steven Boykey Sidley.

“The token is a measure of input. It’s not a measure of output.”

That observation, from economist Michael Power, goes to the heart of this conversation — the possibility that we are fundamentally misreading the AI boom.

Michael Power spent two decades as Global Strategist at Ninety One, formerly Investec Asset Management. Steven Boykey Sidley spent years as Group Chief Technology Officer at a prominent Fortune 500 company before becoming Professor of Practice at the Johannesburg Business School, a partner at Bridge Capital, and a columnist-at-large at the Daily Maverick. Together they argue that the race for AI is no longer simply a technological contest, but a contest between competing economic systems, competing political philosophies, and competing visions of who should own intelligence itself.

Recorded on June 25, 2026, this conversation covers trillion-dollar valuations built on losses, pension funds corralled into holding equity they never consented to own, the Chinese open-weight ecosystem that could make the US AI business model structurally irrelevant, and why the democratic backlash against artificial intelligence — however legitimate — may be the most consequential strategic error of our time.

Not long before recording this episode, Power asked DeepSeek to rewrite Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43 — “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” — to describe what is happening in AI today. What came back, in seconds, reads like an uncanny gloss on the argument Power and Sidley make about open weights and closed fortresses:

How many ways will those fortress walls collapse?
Let me count the ways—on cost, on speed, on might,
On data’s flow, on talent’s flight, on gaps
In licensing, in ecosystem’s light.
The fortress thought its walls were built to last—
On hardware, training, benchmarks, and control.
But open weights have broken through them fast,
And now the Free City has claimed its role.
The walls are down—not by a single blow,
But by a thousand cuts, a thousand ways.
The fortress cannot stop the open flow—
The Free City is rising—count the days.
How many ways? A hundred, more than ten—
The fortress falls, and freedom rises then.

Beneath the excitement about AI lies a far bigger story. This is it.

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Credits:

Host: Meredith Ogilvie-Thompson

Sound Editing: Dax Krishna and the team at SpeechDocs

Music: Ilya Kuznetsov