Peace by piece? Zelensky and Trump meet again

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1:27Given that AI can do the work of lots of people, and people cost a company lots of money, the trend line for startups is pointing towards fewer and fewer employees. By now, the hunt is on for the world's first one-person unicorn firm worth a billion bucks. And why a 400-year-old cough syrup from China with the consistency of mud is enjoying newfound popularity, including in the West.

2:05But first...

2:12In wartime, late nights are a luxury few Ukrainians can afford. When curfew comes, the heads hit pillows and people chase sleep before the sirens roll. So it was Saturday morning when most began to absorb the news of the Anchorage summit. Oliver Carroll, our Ukraine correspondent, has been reflecting on a tumultuous weekend. The first headlines, they were restrained. The feared grand bargain had not materialised. An MP I know even sent me a note. Disaster averted, he wrote. But as the day went on and people started to read between the lines, analysing how things were said, what went unsaid, the mood darkened.

2:53Officials told me they were shocked that the Americans had, perhaps without realising it, seemingly aligned themselves with the Russian view of the war. Speaking privately, some were pretty rude about Trump and the chaos and unpredictability of his White House. But what's interesting is many of the same said there's been progress. They compared it to the film's speed. Rapid, dramatic, dynamic. But maybe the bus is out of control? You have an American president pushing for a quick peace at any cost. And you have a Ukrainian president who is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Protests if there is a bad peace.

3:34Problems if he fails to seize peace, if that's what's really on offer. The press on Zelensky before Monday's meeting is immense. And there are fears that there will be a repeat of the Oval Office fiasco. We still don't know exactly what Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin discussed in Alaska on Friday. Though Trump has talked about American-backed security guarantees for Ukraine, he's also said that Russia will not return the Crimea as part of any peace deal, and that Ukraine won't be allowed to join NATO. Later today, Zelensky will go to the White House for the first time since his epic bust-up there with Trump in February.

4:15This is an incredibly high-stakes meeting. Chris Lockwood is The Economist's Europe editor. Now, the last time that Vladimir Zelensky was in Washington, in the Oval Office, was back in February, and it went incredibly badly. He was berated by the vice president, J.D. Vance. He was accused of not wearing a suit and not saying thank you. And at one point, Donald Trump said to him, you've got no cards. Because let me tell you, you don't have the cards. With us, you have the cards. But without us, you don't have any cards. And then they threw him out of the building because he was not prepared to sign a very one-sided deal on mineral exploitation.

4:53So it went incredibly badly. But then it was put back on track. And everything was looking quite good until a few days ago. Then, of course, Trump and Vladimir Putin met in Anchorage and everything has gone sour again. He seems to be on the point of trying to push Zelensky Zelensky into accepting a really pretty bad deal for Ukraine. It's hard to imagine a day where the diplomatic stakes have been higher. So Chris, what do you think both Trump and Zelensky actually want to get out of today's meeting? Well, it's pretty clear, I think, what Donald Trump wants to get. What he wants is for Zelensky to sign up to a deal he appears to have hatched with Putin at the Anchorage summit.

5:37And this is a quite different thing to what they were going for in the past. Previously, the idea had been to get a ceasefire and then the beginning of a process that would lead to a more permanent settlement, perhaps working out how territory might be swapped, how sanctions might be relaxed on Russia. But now, after Anchorage, Trump seems to want to jump straight to a final settlement without a ceasefire, with the war still going on. And from what we know, he appears to be demanding that Zelensky give up not just territory that has already been occupied by Russia, but additional territory as well.

6:14A big chunk of territory in the Donbass, where the main Ukrainian fortifications are that stop Russia from pushing further and deeper into Ukraine. So that will be very, very hard, I think, for Zelensky to concede. But it looks like that's the track that Trump is on. Now, from Zelensky's point of view, he needs to find a way to resist some of that without enraging Trump. The great fear will be another blow up. And what is it that you think Zelensky would accept? And how will he avoid ending up in a situation as he did last time where he's shouted at by Trump? Well, I think it's very difficult if Trump is going to insist on further territorial surrender.

6:54Perhaps he can just say, well, that's something that we can discuss. The main thing he will try to get if he makes any concessions at all is to make sure that they are traded for a robust security guarantee, either backed by America or actually enforced by America. This would be the idea that were Russia to further attack Ukraine, America and the Europeans would be obligated to come to Ukraine's assistance. Now, I'm personally very sceptical about such a security guarantee because it relies on Donald Trump keeping his word. The Europeans can't do this without America. So without American backstop, a very forceful one, and preferably actual American involvement, such a security guarantee is not really worth the paper that it's written on.

7:41And the problem with this force is that it almost creates an incentive for Russia to attack it. If you're Putin, what you really want more than anything is to show the weakness of NATO, to drive a wedge between Europe and the Americans. And he's been incredibly successful at that. By attacking a European force and having it in effect abandoned by the Americans, hard to imagine a more brutal wedge being driven into the heart of the Atlantic Alliance. And that, I fear, is what Putin may have in mind. Chris, we know that a number of European leaders have flown in to support Zelensky. How will their presence affect this meeting?

8:23Well, the problem is they're probably not going to be in the meeting. It looks as though there are going to be two meetings. The first one between Trump and Zelensky only. And then secondly, a meeting between the European leaders and Trump. Not at all clear that Zelensky will be at that meeting. So the problem is that could be a meeting more like trying to pick up the pieces after whatever happens between Trump and Zelensky. Now, the good news is there will be some people in there that Trump seems to listen to, seems to quite respect. Keir Starmer has a good relationship with him. He seems to have got on well with Friedrich Mertz of Germany.

8:55Critically, Giorgio Maloney, the Italian prime minister, has a very strong relationship with Trump. And Mark Rutter, the Secretary General of NATO, also a good relationship. So it's possible that that second meeting will make some genuine progress, but it all depends on how the earlier meeting has gone. It sounds almost a naive question at this point, but how likely is it at the end of this that we're going to get some kind of trilateral meeting between the US, Russia and Ukraine? Well, a summit between Zelensky, Trump and Putin has been talked about, might even happen at the end of this week, some suggest.

9:27Now, I think that's pretty unlikely. In order for us to get to that point, you'd need to have pretty good agreement today between Zelensky and Trump on the way forward. The idea of territorial swaps in return for a solid security guarantee. We don't have any clear idea on how the security guarantee would look. So it's a very hard thing for Zelensky to accept. Would he want to go into a meeting where that wasn't all clear and bolted down? I think not. The problem is, I think, that Trump has got a vision in his mind of great power politics, a division of Europe, just like was done at Yalta at the end of the Second World War, him and Putin dividing up the territory and poor Europeans being disregarded and Ukraine and embarrassment left to its own fate.

10:10As Thucydides, the Greek historian, said, the weak suffer what they must. Chris, thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you, Rosie.

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12:15Technological revolutions don't only create new kinds of businesses. They change the way businesses do business. In the late 19th century, both machinery and transport networks got sophisticated. That led to the rise of giant corporations, vertical integrators that brought lots of work in-house. The revolution that brought us digital communication undid some of that. Firms could outsource manufacturing and back-office jobs to low-cost countries and let the tech giants host their data and do their computing. Now the AI revolution is upon us, and the change that looks to bring is more businesses with fewer employees.

12:55In Silicon Valley, the bets the business tycoons are taking at the moment is who will be the first one-person unicorn. Henry Trix is our U.S. technology editor. A billion dollar company with one boss, no employees and every job done by AI. The hope is that AI will enable anyone to set up and run a company. Of course, setting up any new business is difficult and one person AI run companies will be no different. But there's a lot of buzz about this at the moment. and presumably given all the buzz around ai there are already one person almost entirely ai run companies right they're getting off the ground i mean i know several people who are trying to do this and i met one person called sarah guilliam she calls herself a solopreneur and she has a very early stage startup called Solace, which she conceived of amidst the grief of losing her father.

14:05She realized that actually people needed advice on how to set up a funeral, how to deal with inheritance, etc. She approached an online incubator called Ordos and this enabled her to basically set up the business without knowing how to code, how to build a website, how to do Photoshop. She used Ordos' AI bots to help her set up online and on Instagram. And it was amazing to hear her talk because she was so excited. In true California stuff, she lives in LA. She said it was awesome that within a day or two, she could actually see her idea emerge as reality on a website. And if it works out, and it's early days and who knows whether it will, the AI agents will help her with capital, with product development skills, sales, marketing, and that sort of thing.

15:02I spoke to the co-founder of Ordos, Henrik Werdelin, and his hope is that this sort of platform will give rise to a flood of startups built by people who don't necessarily have any technical background, but have real problems to solve, even if they're niche problems like Sarah Williams. Let a thousand flowers bloom. I guess the appeal here is basically if you are the only real employee, you get to keep all the profits. Is that the major drive here? Yeah, that is one of the great incentives. You don't have to share your equity with anyone. But there are other reasons why you would do this. The era of free money is now over, so companies are very keen to keep costs down.

15:49There's data out there that suggests that the median period for founders to hire their first employee after the startup incorporates has risen from less than six months in 2022 to more than nine months in 2024. and you're already seeing companies being sold for quite considerable amounts of money with very few employees. So an example of that is Base44, which is a kind of a coding startup that was sold recently to a web development platform called Wix for$80 million and it had just eight employees at the time. Far be it for me to stop entrepreneurs from trying this kind of thing, but is the AI ready for this to suggest that the bots can do everything and all the back office and secure the capital and so on?

16:38The AI is glitchy. Yes, Jason, you and I know that from using it for our work, I'm sure. The tech still needs to be improved. There was a fascinating experiment in June from Anthropic, which is a maker of one of these AI models called Claude. And it conducted an experiment to see whether Claude could actually operate a vending machine at the company's headquarters. And the aim of the AI was to avoid bankruptcy. And it was an interesting experiment in the sense that it identified suppliers. It adapted to user requests. One of the mischievous Anthropoc employees asked if it could provide a cube of tungsten.

17:25and it tried to go off in search of that. However, the end result was, according to Anthropic, not wholly successful. It ignored lucrative opportunities out there. It hallucinated. It offered a load of discounts and essentially it failed to make any money. So there is still a lot to be done with the technology to make it fully capable of acting pretty much autonomously within a company. So the way of running a largely AI-run business will evolve with the AI itself, I suppose. But you mentioned at the start that AI-led businesses are going to have all the usual problems that other businesses are going to have as well.

18:11Yeah, it's always hard to start a business. and business formation in America has actually been fairly anemic for many years. I think it could be more difficult with AI because if you come up with a business idea, it's also going to be extremely easy for people to copy your idea. There's no cost to being able to flood the market with lots of different ideas and borrow everyone's ideas, if you like. It's very easy to iterate with new ideas using AI. So the barriers to entry are very low. Unless you have a founder who has really unique experience, it's going to be hard to sustain a competitive advantage.

19:03And then there's an additional problem, which is that these one-person AI-backed companies are going to be very dependent upon the platforms that provide the AI, like Anthropic or like OpenAI. So presumably the strategy then is come up with a damned good idea, make a business real fast, and then try to sell out to the tech giants. It is a worry that the tech giants will be able to poach the best ideas out there. But at the same time, they could also buy up the companies that have the ideas and, you know, in a sense, entrepreneurs are in it for the money. And if a big tech company comes along, knocks on the door and says, we're taking your idea, as long as they get paid for it, they're more than happy to do that and move on to the next challenge.

19:57So a solopreneur is not likely to be any different from a typical entrepreneur in that respect. Henry, thanks as ever for joining us. Great to talk to you, Jason.

20:25Ninja on paper Coa doesn't look that appetizing. Emma Irving is a news editor for The Economist and is based in Hong Kong. It's the colour and consistency of mud and its recipe hasn't changed since the 1600s when the story goes that it was created by a provincial commander in China who wanted to try and soothe his mum's persistent cough. So it's a bit of a surprise that the cough syrup is becoming more popular. PayPal Coat now spans 20 countries and even Walmart has started selling it. Sales of the cough syrup rose by more than a third between 2019 and 2024 reaching$88.4 million. In Hong Kong, where the cough syrup is manufactured, bottles usually go for about$5 in pharmacies, but they can fetch up to 10 times that price on Amazon in America.

21:18This is Chinese cough syrup and it originated over 400 years ago. The paper is becoming more popular, partly because more people in the West are becoming enthusiastic about traditional Chinese medicine. Just to name a few, it has the consistency of honey. Christine Lan is one of the many people on social media who's touted its benefits. And young people seem particularly keen. Google searches for Paypacker rose by a whopping 93 % in 2024. And videos about Paypacker now have more than 500 million views on TikTok. Celebrities have espoused its benefits too. People like Zayn Malik of One Direction fame and actors in the hit musical Wicked have said that it helps them soothe their scrunchy vocal cords.

22:02Pei Pakura is part of the biohacking trend, which is a social media craze. Lots of people on social media have also turned to traditional Chinese medicine like Gua Sha, for example, which is rubbing rocks across your face to try and stimulate lymphatic drainage. But it's not just the young who are turning to Pei Pakura. Some people I've spoke to have turned to traditional Chinese medicine in the wake of COVID as they try to find alternative ways to battle some of their long COVID symptoms.

22:31But Pei Pa Coe may have a new battle to fight In 2020, America revoked Hong Kong's special customs status Which means that products imported from the territory are now treated the same as those from mainland China And there are no exemptions for medicines So, because of the tariff war between China and America American customers will probably have to cough up more for bottles of Pei Pa Coe And in fact, the herbal remedy sector is particularly vulnerable to tariffs because a lot of the ingredients that are traditionally used come from China and cannot be easily sourced elsewhere. Little cough relief is expected as long as Trump's trade policies last.

23:22That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

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