McDonald’s CEO and chairman Chris Kempczinski recently posted a video of himself on Instagram trying the brand’s newly launched Big Arch burger. It was basically the Golden Arches’ version of a dorky corporate unboxing. 

When he got the Big Arch into his grips, he took a reasonable, if small, bite and said, “I love this product. It is so good.”

Cue the online mockfest. 

Kempczinski didn’t deliver the news like an amphetamine-laced nano-influencer. No, here he was eating like some quarter-zip normie on a first date. On a scale of 1 to 10 in executive public performance, if 1 is Bank of America’s 2006 adaptation of U2’s “One” and 10 is Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the iPhone, this was somewhere in the gaping maw of middle ground. 

It’s amazing how a seemingly small moment—a lo-fi social post—can blow up bigger than most ambitions for a major ad campaign. The earned media value here for McDonald’s is easily in the millions, which is exactly why so many CEOs from its fast-food rival brands fervently jumped on the moment as an opportunity to soak in some of that sweet, sweet attention with their own take on the big bite. 

As the video spawned cringe-inducing knockoffs from the CEOs of Burger King, Wendy’s, and others, it entered the natural cycle of online brand virality: A video goes viral; it gets mocked; rival brands capitalize on the moment, squashing any last trace of organic attention; people turn on the pile-on brands; suddenly, the original video starts to look brilliant.

It’s a brutal but beautiful cycle that ended with Kempczinski and the marketing machine behind him being heralded by some as calculating geniuses. There are theories floating around now that this is all a big orchestrated stunt meant to hype the Big Arch’s U.S. launch, and that Kempczinski & Co. are playing 4D social media chess, knowing this would happen all along.

Sources familiar with the company have assured me this isn’t the case. Kempczinski has been doing tasting videos for years, and until people began making fun of it weeks after it was originally posted, it was in no way a standout among all his other takes. 

Serving consistency

Kempczinski has an impressively consistent record of just this sort of dorky unboxing taste-test video. In May 2024, he took a solid chomp out of a Ghost Pepper McChicken from Canada. In September 2024, it was a big normal bite out of a Samurai McSpicy from Thailand. Back in May of last year, it was the McCrispy Strips. Totally normal. In July, it was the Snack Wrap. Guess what? Normal. 

Why did this video take off? For many, the sheer Squidward of it all made it a slow, arching meatball of a pitch right over home plate to hit with jokes about out-of-touch executives. But let’s just roll with the idea that the Big Arch video does, in fact, make Kempczinski look like an out-of-step corporate CEO. I hate to break it to everybody, but every burger-eating CEO jumping on this bandwagon is in the same club. Burger King president Tom Curtis made more than $6.9 million in 2024, and $5.4 million in 2023. 

Meanwhile, Wendy’s has taken things a step further and is now advertising for a “chief tasting officer.” The smell of desperation is clear. The brand is on its third CEO in three years, and has been forced to close hundreds of restaurants due to a sales slide. It’s got bigger burger issues to fry.

If I may address the executives flexing their big-boy bites directly for a quick second: Gentlemen, this is beneath you. You may think this makes your brand look strong. It makes it look small. Throwing rocks from the sidelines shows everyone just how much bigger McDonald’s actually is. 

As dorky as Kempczinski’s tasting videos may be, his consistency is the reason why any real attempt to frame this single video as disingenuous falls flat.

Cultural goodwill

McDonald’s has worked for years to build up enough cultural goodwill to make this Big Arch episode seem quaint in the grand scheme of its marketing—from all the various Famous Orders collabs, to the 2024 anime-inspired WcDonald’s work, to last year’s headfirst dive into the Minecraft Movie, and to making Grimace an unofficial New York Mets mascot. 

But just as important is how the brand navigates fan-driven social media moments. Sources familiar with the company, who were not authorized to speak on the record, tell me that it wasn’t a question of if McDonald’s would respond or comment in some way, but how. 

It could’ve been a press release. Or at the other end of the spectrum, a limited edition Kempczinski Happy Meal on the McD’s app that’s just a hamburger, small fries, and a small Diet Coke. Instead, it went with a just-fun-enough wink, acknowledging the joke but not ruining it. 

The approach, when something is decidedly fan-driven online, is to keep it that way. This is in the same vein as how the brand only very subtly nodded to the hilarious 2023 Grimace shake TikTok trend, which saw users act out their mysterious-yet-gruesome murder at the hands of the purple shake.

As a general rule, McDonald’s doesn’t participate in the brand-on-brand violence that so often flushes through our feeds. 

It’s weird enough when brands on social media talk to people as if they’re people, but when it’s brands talking to other brands, the sheer thirst for our attention and approval is suffocating. Like a Dutch oven of corporate pseudo-comedy. Nothing could illustrate this more than this week’s scramble of social media managers trying to cook up the best quip. 

I wrote the same paragraph almost word for word in 2019. Great job, everyone. 

A little fun between brands is obviously fine, but these big-biting CEOs all need to remember that the public is the real boss in these social media feeding frenzies. And unless they’re using more energy building up their own cultural goodwill, the next time, say, there’s a horsemeat situation, or maybe a kerfuffle over AI-driven price surging, it’ll be them and their brand on the menu.

I’m not singularly focused on vehicle size, but it’s a growing issue among people who already drive badly. The percentage of new vehicle sales/leases for pickup trucks, SUVs, and minivans continues to rise, and so will the debate over vehicle dimensions.

It’s not hard to find recent reports and commentary about the trade-offs associated with larger (and heavier) vehicles that are flooding the consumer market.

• Governors Highway Safety Association study: Larger vehicles like pickup trucks and SUVs are inherently more dangerous to pedestrians.
  
• University of Illinois at Springfield study: Kids are eight times more likely to be killed when hit by an SUV or light truck than kids who are struck by passenger cars.
  
• Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study: The reduced visibility in the front corners of large vehicles leads to a higher likelihood that those drivers will strike pedestrians and cyclists. Tall trucks and SUVs are 45% deadlier to pedestrians. 
  
• Social media response: Sounds like Communist propaganda. I’m better dead than red.

Asking for trouble

I’m the type of person who hates extra layers of rules. I don’t want to control what people drive, but I remember the first time I drove a moving van with zero experience or training. I’d never driven something even remotely that large in an empty parking lot, let alone in mixed traffic or through a gas station.

Putting already careless and reckless drivers in large vehicles without any sort of demonstrated skill is asking for trouble.

I remember my late teens and early 20s, and I was definitely not thinking about people walking on sidewalks or crossing streets when I was zipping around corners. I was not thinking about families walking through parking lots when I was rushing to pick up a video rental and pizza.

Both of my kids are in their 20s, and several of their friends drive SUVs and tall trucks. It’s nerve racking.

Whatever their nose shape, pickups, SUVs and vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches are about 45% more likely to cause fatalities in pedestrian crashes than cars and other vehicles with a hood height of 30 inches or less and a sloping profile. —Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

The core problem

The largest trucks and buses in the world can be driven without incident. Driver behavior is the core problem. I have zero interest in banning trucks, SUVs, etc. My interest is human flourishing, which is why it’s important to talk about vehicle designs that are contributing to preventable injuries and deaths. We’ve got to be able to talk about how vehicle designs now make it much harder to see what’s happening outside the vehicle.

Here’s what Ford literature says about their big vehicles:

The 2024 F150 is equipped with a pedestrian detection system that uses sensors and cameras to identify pedestrians in the vehicle’s path. If a pedestrian is detected, the system can alert the driver and may even apply automatic emergency braking to help avoid or mitigate a collision.

Manufacturers want to sell you a truck so large that it needs a computer to see the people your own eyes can’t.

The real question isn’t whether you have the right to drive a big truck. You do. The question is whether we’re honest enough — as drivers, as parents, as neighbors — to acknowledge what the data shows and have difficult conversations about the dangers of large vehicles. Loving freedom and caring about the people around you aren’t in conflict. 

But to understand what’s at play, we need to zoom out for a moment to take a quick scan of the global coffee market.

Inside the coffee wars

With around 40,000 stores and $37 billion in revenue, Starbucks is the biggest coffee company in the world. While it’s had a few stagnant years, its all-star CEO Brian Niccol has been staging a design-led turnaround, in which cozier cafes and a protein-laden menu have siren-called customers back with some early success.

Luckin, a company controlled by the Chinese private equity firm ​​Centurium Capital, is its only sizable challenger—which grew its global footprint by a hyper aggressive 39% in 2025 to reach around 31,000 stores. Luckin is in some ways the antithesis of Niccol’s Starbucks. The stores are smaller footprint, emphasizing digital ordering. They will also gladly operate at a loss to unlock new markets—all while Starbucks has been closing its underperforming stores. (Luckin has reportedly seized this moment to actually buy some old Starbucks locations—undoubtedly hoping to swap someone’s daily Starbucks run for their own brand.)

Neither of these companies is operating in a vacuum, though. A slew of smaller challengers are eating the coffee market. You’ll find 12,000 Dunkin’s globally, and other chains including Tim Hortons, Dutch Bros, Scooter’s, and Blank Street, none of which break the four figures. Each of these brands is finding a most certain appeal with consumers, ranging from pumping out relatively inexpensive giant iced coffees to offering simple drinks with a minimal decor to serving up desserts disguised as coffee straight of a drive-thru window.

But none of them is really good coffee, if we’re being honest. They all lack the third wave coffee vibe where single origin pour overs still rule, where spending over $10 for a cup is far from rare. 

On one hand, perhaps the third wave coffee market matters less than we think these days. Blue Bottle’s 140 stores globally aren’t profitable. Starbucks closed two of its high-end “reserve” stores in Seattle in 2025 amidst higher spectacle investments, while it’s spent nearly two decades now tuning its own response to third wave coffee (don’t forget, this is the company that bought the theatrical/techie coffee company Clover in 2008). We live in the age of iced coffee and matcha anyway (60% of drinks from Starbucks are sold on ice these days). 

On the other hand? One report suggests that ​​Centurium Capital is already talking to malls in China, scoping closed Starbucks Reserve stores that might fit a Blue Bottle.

In other words, Luckin sees an opportunity to own the next tier of coffee snobbery by leveraging Blue Bottle has a bonafide and distinct premium sub brand. Luckin can stay Luckin—it can be the best in convenient coffee—while Blue Bottle becomes its reserve identity.

Is that it for the story?

So does this mean Luckin played the game better than Starbucks? Not so fast. There’s a strange, third party twist in the story where the real winner here may be Nestlé—which by some measures is the real close-second coffee company in the world. Coffee is one of the top categories for its $115 billion business—representing $32 billion in sales last year—just $5 billion shy of Starbucks.

Nestlé bought its majority stake in Blue Bottle for $425 million back in 2017 (eventually buying out the full company for an estimated $700 million) back when third wave coffee shops were consolidating, and big budget cold brew was hitting grocery store shelves. It left Blue Bottle stores running with relative independence, while it made Blue Bottle a shining star of its rich, at-home portfolio. 

Nestlé owns—wait for it—the biggest instant coffee brand in the world with Nescafé (instant coffee was a $42 billion industry in 2023, by the way, and is growing). It also owns Seattle’s Best, Coffee Mate (those creamers), and rights for Starbucks dry prepackaged coffee, pods, and instant offerings. (PepsiCo handles the premade Starbucks drinks you buy from the store in a 50/50 split with Starbucks.)

As part of Blue Bottle’s sale to Centurium Capital, it appears Nestlé retained the entire grocery store side of Blue Bottle. So it seemingly took a $300 million loss, dumped off the management of unprofitable high end coffee shops while retaining their cachet on the shelf. Nestlé doesn’t report revenue on Blue Bottle store products, so we have no idea how long that $300 million will take to recoup, but we do know their Starbucks line was pulling in about $2 billion in revenue a year way back in 2018. While Blue Bottle would be vastly smaller, Nestlé stands to recoup its loss and even see gains in the long term if Centurium Capital makes Blue Bottle cafes a bigger deal. 

But in the short term, did anyone win from the Blue Bottle acquisition? We might not know for a while. It all depends on where Luckin takes the brand, how Starbucks responds, and whether all those millennials who made third wave coffee a thing will even notice. 

We have reached out to Blue Bottle and Luckin to verify reports of sale and will update the story with any details as they come.

But instead, 30 years ago this spring, Alameda County Parcel Number 8-641-8-5 became home to the Oakland Ice Center—where recently-crowned Olympic gold-medalist figure skater Alysa Liu still trains.

Located just north of downtown Oakland, in what the city considers the Uptown Retail and Entertainment Area, parcel 8-641-8-5 was just a vacant, privately-owned lot back in 1991. But in that year, Oakland’s now-defunct Redevelopment Agency acquired it as part of a three-parcel transaction for $1.8 million.

The Bay Area was a hot spot for ice sports in the early 1990s. Mountain View’s Brian Boitano had won a figure skating gold medal at the 1988 Winter Olympics. Fremont’s Kristi Yamaguchi was on her way to figure skating gold in the 1992 Winter Olympics. After a brief flirtation with the NHL’s Minnesota North Stars moving to Oakland (the team infamously moved to Dallas in 1993), the Bay Area finally got its first NHL team in the San Jose Sharks, who dropped the puck for their inaugural season in the fall of—you guessed it—1991.

Oakland City Council Members came to believe an ice sports center was just what they needed to revitalize a struggling downtown. The eight other ice sports facilities in the Bay Area were over-booked with youth and adult hockey leagues as well as figure skaters of all ages training, twirling and competing.

Projections came in that a new ice center would bring in 500,000 visitors annually to downtown Oakland, generating nearly $5 million a year in retail, food and lodging revenue. So in April 1995, Oakland’s Redevelopment Agency signed a ground lease with a private developer team to build and operate the facility, which the agency financed with $11 million in tax-exempt bonds.

Those projections were way off, of course. The private developer team went belly-up just three months after the Oakland Ice Center opened in March 1996. It would take more than a decade and three changes in private operators to stabilize the Oakland Ice Center. The parent company of the San Jose Sharks, which still manages the facility today, took over in October 2007—when Alysa Liu was just 26 months old.

The City of Oakland now owns the Oakland Ice Center. But the community investment program that enabled this center’s development has been dissolved: The state of California contentiously eliminated its 400-plus local redevelopment agencies in 2012 as part of closing a $26 billion state budget deficit.

While budget hawks and accountability groups praised the move, it meant eliminating specialized public entities that created redevelopment plans, funded local infrastructure improvements, assembled parcels, assisted developers, brokered deals and sold tax-exempt bonds to pay for all the above.

California’s redevelopment agencies had their flaws and missteps, but planners and community development leaders across the state say no entity has truly filled the gap they left, both as long-term stewards of publicly-owned land and sources of local public dollars dedicated to local economic and real estate development.

And so the ecosystem that created Alysa Liu’s home rink—and shielded it from the pressures of the market until it could find its footing—no longer exists.

Complicated roots

At the time California’s redevelopment agencies were dissolved in 2012, they were recipients of $5.6 billion a year in property tax revenues. Enough for Next City to label them “America’s Biggest Redevelopment Program.”

The story of California’s redevelopment agencies begins in 1945, when state lawmakers passed the Community Redevelopment Act. The legislation gave cities and counties the authority to establish redevelopment agencies (or RDAs) as independent, publicly-affiliated entities with a mission to eliminate blight through development, reconstruction, and rehabilitation of residential, commercial, industrial, and retail districts.

Those agencies were supercharged after Congress passed the Housing Act of 1949. Title I of that legislation infamously created “Slum Clearance” powers that allowed cities across the country to declare entire neighborhoods as “slums” and offered federal loans and grants to bulldoze them and make way for private developers to rebuild. To access those federal loans and grants, local governments needed to come up with their own matching funds. In 1951, California passed new legislation that provided RDAs with matching dollars via the nation’s first “tax-increment financing” scheme.

With tax-increment financing, also known as TIF, cities or counties designate an area or sometimes a single property as “blighted” and in need of new investment. Upon designation, the existing amount of property taxes paid to the local government (as well as to the school district, parks district, transportation district or other local government bodies) is frozen within that area. Over time, if property values within the designated area rise, any property taxes assessed above the frozen amount are set aside to subsidize redevelopment projects or fund other eligible activities within the designated area.

Fueled by Title I Slum Clearance and their new TIF dollars, California RDAs went right to work, using eminent domain to demolish cherished homes and neighborhoods wholesale in the name of “urban renewal.” The project that incited James Baldwin to re-dub urban renewal as “negro removal” was in fact a project involving the San Francisco RDA bulldozing a huge chunk of the Fillmore District, a predominantly-Black enclave in San Francisco.

Oakland created its RDA in 1956. Its first large-scale project involved bulldozing the 34-acre Acorn neighborhood, home to around 500 primarily low-income families (78% African American, 20% Mexican American, and 2% white) living in some 600 dwellings.

But it wasn’t as simple as RDAs being wielded only to destroy Black neighborhoods and hand them over to white developers and contractors.

In the aftermath of Acorn’s 1962 destruction, John B. Williams became the head of Oakland’s RDA in 1964—making him among the first Black people to head a city agency in the United States.

A baptist preacher born in Covington, Georgia, Williams also had a fine arts degree and helped found First Enterprise Bank, the first minority-owned bank in Northern California. According to Places Journal, with his fine arts background he supported art as a means to engage community members in the agency’s work. He was the first Oakland official to enforce minority training and hiring policies, and required that the agency employ laborers and award contracts proportionate to city demographics. Williams led Oakland’s RDA until he died of cancer in 1976.

Complicated demise

Since proliferating across the country, TIF schemes differ from state-to-state, and they go by many names. In Texas, it’s known as a Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone, or TIRZ. Florida calls it Community Redevelopment Area, or CRA. Back in 2018, Chicago infamously had around 150 TIF districts, as many as the next nine largest U.S. cities combined, according to a study of TIFs by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

For local public officials, TIF can seem like a magical way for redevelopment to pay for itself. Cities can borrow dollars up front, based on projected future TIF area property tax payments, then use those dollars to do almost anything they want—like build the Oakland Ice Center. If all goes as planned, property tax revenues will then be collected within the TIF area repay the debt automatically as time goes by.

TIF schemes also vary greatly in how decisions get made about what projects to finance or which properties to acquire for redevelopment. Not all TIF schemes create an RDA-like entity that can acquire properties. In Chicago, TIF districts don’t have a separate governing entity, only separate bank accounts whose dollars are ultimately doled out by the city’s Department of Planning and Development, which is really controlled by the mayor. In Texas and Florida, each TIRZ or CRA has its own board of commissioners that oversees an entity that controls its dollars, acquires properties and sets up partnerships with private developers.

Back in California, each city or county established an RDA with the power to designate multiple TIF areas, acquire properties and spend TIF dollars on projects located in the designated areas where the dollars came from. City and county legislators had the flexibility to control RDAs directly themselves or create an appointed commission to wield RDA powers.

Since it derives revenue from local property taxes, TIF is often seen as pulling money away from schools, fire departments, parks, libraries and other local public services usually supported by local property taxes. TIF projects also don’t often require direct approval from mayors, city councils or voters, so TIF dollars also often end up being used as a slush fund to support local politicians’ pet projects that happen to be developed by their biggest campaign donors. For these and other reasons, TIF continues to be a hot button issue in places like Chicago or St. Louis.

Ultimately, it was the TIF funding mechanism that led to the demise of California’s RDAs.

When former Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown came into office as California governor in 2011, he inherited a $26 billion state budget deficit from the Governator. Although Brown had been a huge beneficiary of Oakland’s RDA during his time as mayor, the RDAs suddenly became sacrificial lambs to help close that giant hole.

Under the state laws governing RDAs, the state was obligated to pay local school districts for any revenues lost to tax-increment financing. The state, he argued, could no longer afford those payments. At the time, RDAs accounted for 12% of all property taxes paid across California; in some places, they earned more property tax revenue than the local city or county government that created them.

Cities, counties and RDAs fought back vehemently. Gov. Brown first tried eliminating them by executive order. When that didn’t work, the state passed legislation that the RDAs and local governments later fought in court. The state emerged victorious, leading to the dissolution of RDAs in 2012.

More than money

Losing RDAs has meant losing more than just funding for local economic and real estate development across California.

While many of the decisions they made were questionable or arguably malicious, each RDA over time came to build its own internal capacity for wielding land and money in ways that always had the potential to reflect the best of public interest. And that capacity that has never really been replaced.

Helen Leung is the executive director of LA Más, a nonprofit fighting against real estate speculation in Northeast Los Angeles, where she was born and raised. She previously worked as a planning and land use staffer for former L.A. city council member Eric Garcetti, who held that office from 2001-2013 before becoming mayor.

“It was fascinating to see how much money and land the redevelopment agency had access to, how much power it had to put together giant economic development projects,” Leung tells Next City. “Projects took a long time but they were also catalytic and had community benefits or contributions that weren’t possible outside the redevelopment agency area or without redevelopment agency investment.”

Things have changed for planners and local officials attempting to revitalize their cities.

“All the things we do now to require things like prevailing wages on projects or inclusionary housing was just done deal-by-deal by the redevelopment agency,” she says. “I can appreciate that power as someone with a planning background and who used to work for local government — but I can also understand the fear or skepticism of big agencies with a lot of power and the ability to move fast.”

While they had the power to move fast, as public entities RDAs also had the ability to be patient when warranted.

After the Oakland Ice Center’s original developers went belly-up, Oakland’s Redevelopment Agency was able to step in quickly and take ownership of the facility, keeping it open as it searched for a new private partner to operate it. The second manager it picked ended up having political ties as a campaign contributor. They were gone after three years. The third manager it picked only signed a two-year lease, but stayed on month-to-month for five more years as the facility continued to lose money.

It wasn’t till 2007 that Oakland’s Redevelopment Agency finally found a partner—the corporate parent of the San Jose Sharks—who was able to work out a sustainable business model for the facility.

Models for this sort of dedicated, long-term stewardship of real estate by public or quasi-public independent entities have shown long-term success in other places, most notably Seattle.

In 1973, the Seattle City Council created the Pike Place Preservation and Development Authority to steward the landmark eponymous public market, which the city previously tried to convert into a parking garage. Created in 1974, Historic Seattle stewards a citywide portfolio of historic cultural venues. Created in 1975, the Seattle Chinatown-International District Preservation and Development Authority stewards a growing portfolio of properties in its eponymous neighborhood.

Around 20 such entities operate in and around Seattle, including the Social Housing Public Development Authority, created in 2023 to acquire and build a citywide portfolio of mixed-income housing. The new social housing development authority shows that it’s not necessary to fund redevelopment entities using TIF schemes, either: It’s funded by a 5% tax on local employee salaries of $1 million or more. The tax netted $115 million in its first year, far exceeding projections.

The success of California’s redevelopment agencies varied greatly from city to city, sometimes TIF area by TIF area, within a single redevelopment agency. There’s also more than one way to define or measure success: A neighborhood where RDA-supported projects succeed in catalyzing new private investment without RDA support may also be targeted for speculative investment that displaces the very people who were supposed to benefit from their own property tax dollars being invested locally.

“Redevelopment agency projects also gentrified some communities,” Leung says. “Hollywood looks a lot different now than it did back then. Everyone you talk to about redevelopment agencies will have lots of pros and cons, whether they’re in the weeds or not in the weeds.”

This story was originally published by Next City, a nonprofit news outlet covering solutions for equitable cities. Sign up for Next City’s newsletter for their latest articles and events.

Given widespread concerns about the potential downsides of AI, ranging from mass layoffs to robot overlords, “opportunistic and sloppy” are just about the last attributes OpenAI wants to be associated with, perhaps especially in the context of a Department of War partnership. But this isn’t just an image headache; the brand backlash has included a surge of signups for the rival OpenAI seemed to have bested, Anthropic, whose Claude AI leapt past OpenAI’s ChatGPT to the top of the app charts.

Some of that surge can be attributed to Anthropic’s behavior and rhetoric matching up to its brand image as a thoughtful steward of AI that’s mindful of its possible consequences. It’s a brand image that was tested recently when Anthropic wanted to add some caveats to the Pentagon’s desire to use its tech for “all legal purposes.” 

Anthropic’s Claude, then the only AI agent cleared for use in classified operations, had already been used to plan the recent military action against Venezuela (and was used in preparing for the attack on Iran.) But this evidently harmonious relationship snagged on Anthropic seeking guardrails that would prevent its technology from being used to enable mass surveillance or autonomous lethality. The Pentagon pushed back, and over a few weeks, this spiraled into an acrimonious and very public split that included petulant criticism from the president. The Department of War not only signalled it wanted more compliance as it added AI partners, but threatened to kneecap Anthropic by labeling it a “supply chain risk.”

In sticking to its guns, so to speak, Anthropic stayed true to its brand as the serious, non-reckless AI company. In general, Silicon Valley seemed to rally around Anthropic, with employees at Google, Microsoft, and Amazon circulating petitions and open letters urging corporate leadership to follow Anthropic’s example and “hold the line” against objectionable government uses of AI.   

That was the backdrop when OpenAI’s deal with the Pentagon was announced. While the Department of War had already been in talks with various AI firms to add them to classified use cases, the timing of the announcement came across as if OpenAI was effectively replacing Anthropic. While Altman promised the company had the same “red lines” as Anthropic, it agreed to Pentagon language that permits the technology’s use for “all lawful purposes.” OpenAI insists the contract details establish guardrails, and Altman has said Anthropic should be offered the same deal, and should not be tagged as a security risk.

But the timing and what some observers saw as capitulation led to a backlash. Aside from online sniping at OpenAI, the results were plain enough in the app charts, as Anthropic downloads and paid subscriptions spiked. The big-tech Information Technology Industry Council, whose members include Nvidia and Apple, weighed in with a letter of concern about “the Department of War’s consideration of imposing a supply-chain risk designation in response to a procurement dispute.” Research firm Sensor Tower found ChatGPT mobile uninstalls jumped 295%. It was almost the Anthropic vs. Pentagon story run in reverse: Instead of a client battle oddly burnishing a brand, a prestigious new-client deal seemed to blow up in a brand’s face.

Altman has called the backlash “really painful,” and the result of poor optics rather than any substantial capitulation or opportunism. He reportedly told an all-hands meeting that the deal was a “complex” decision with “extremely difficult brand consequences” in the short term, but ultimately the correct decision. And this may prove right in the long run. 

Anthropic is back in talks with the Pentagon about salvaging their relationship. And its investors reportedly want to see more diplomacy and less ego from the company; the brand won’t mean much without clients. Meanwhile there’s still plenty of room for OpenAI to be opportunistic, but maybe do a better job at not looking opportunistic—because the best way to avoid “difficult brand consequences” is to anticipate them. 

Nearly three decades later, Rose is not just wearing the brand—she’s designing for it. Rose’s eponymous clothing label, which she launched in 1998, and Lucchese, the 143-year-old bootmaker, will launch a collaboration on March 10. It’s a partnership that makes sense: two brands with deep Texas roots finally finding each other.

The collection comprises three boots, each bearing Rose’s signature blend of femininity and Western romanticism. The standout is a white boot adorned with a sculptural 3D flower and intricate quilted stitching, which is already creating a stir among brides. The partnership goes beyond footwear: Rose’s team has developed an accompanying clothing line that connects directly to the boots, and both brands will cross-sell in their respective stores. (Boots start at $1,295, and clothes start at $490.)

The Cowboy Look Is Here to Stay

Rose has always wanted to design boots, but she acknowledges that her team didn’t have the skills to make them at the level of craftsmanship she wanted. So she was thrilled when Lucchese was interested in working together. “We are not experts in footwear,” she says. “This was such a great opportunity to partner with someone who completely knows quality and fit, and then we could bring our design aesthetic to that, and vice versa with clothing.”

The collaboration feels timely. Historically, Western style has entered the fashion cycle every decade or so, with brands incorporating cowboy boots and shirts into their collections. But over the last several years, something has changed. The Western look has become embedded within the American aesthetic, alongside the preppy look and sportswear.

Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour sent Stetsons and fringe flying off shelves. Louis Vuitton staged a Western-inspired runway show featuring real cowboys. Boot brands like Tecovas and Miron Crosby are growing with remarkable speed. And the customer base has shifted—it’s no longer just Texans and ranchers, but New Yorkers, Angelenos, and Bostonians who are wearing boots year-round. The cowboy boot is beginning to be thought of more like a loafer—a wardrobe staple that transcends region and occasion.

Lela Rose Has Always Loved Western Style

Rose launched her brand in 1998, creating clothes that appealed to her: dresses for a busy social calendar of parties and events that stand out for their sculptural silhouettes, colorful prints, and unapologetic femininity. (Her pieces are at a luxury price point, with dresses that easily hit $3,000 or $4,000, and tops that start at $400.)

For Rose, this focus on ranch style isn’t a pivot. Eighteen years ago, she developed a collection of Western-influenced pieces—bead shirts, intricate Western-chic separates—and tried to sell them to Neiman Marcus, Saks, and Bergdorf Goodman. “They all just looked at us like, ‘what?’” she recalls.

The timing was wrong, and the collection was quietly shelved, though she loved the shirt so much that she kept it in her permanent collection. When Rose moved to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, five years ago, she decided it was time to pursue her longtime dream of launching a Western line, called Lela Rose Ranch. She’s opened a shop in Jackson Hole that’s built around her personal vision of Western chic and stocked with vintage Navajo silver, one-of-a-kind pieces sourced from her own travels, and clothing designed entirely according to her instincts. The Ranch collection is now being integrated into the main Lela Rose line.

Rose started her namesake label at a time when the only way to be relevant in fashion was to have a rack at Neiman Marcus and a runway show at New York Fashion Week. She did both. One year, the theme was “The Roseminster Dog Show,” a tongue-in-cheek riff on the Westminster Dog Show. “I look back on some of our shows as some of my favorite things that we’ve ever done,” she says. “We’re always trying to entertain you as much as show you the clothing.”

But the industry Rose launched into no longer exists. The wholesale model and department stores have been disrupted by e-commerce, then disrupted again by social media, then disrupted yet again by a pandemic. These changes scrambled every assumption about how and where people shop. Rose has navigated all of this without outside investors, bootstrapping from a studio with one seamstress to a brand with three retail stores and two more locations opening this year.

Over the last 25 years, she’s cultivated a well-heeled, well-traveled customer—a woman with a full social calendar who jets frequently from fundraisers in big cities to more rural locations like Jackson Hole and Aspen, Colorado. Her collections are designed to help these women look appropriate as they navigate across these different situations.

That customer, Rose believes, is exactly the person who has been waiting for this Western moment. The pieces she has designed aren’t supposed to look like a costume from a spaghetti Western, but a nod to the outdoors and the heritage of cowboy style. “It’s not like I’m putting on a holster and wearing chaps every day,” she says. “I love this aesthetic, but I want to weave it seamlessly into the rest of my wardrobe.”

A denim skirt, she argues, can be worn with a concho belt in Aspen or with heels in New York or with tennis shoes in Paris. The West, in other words, is not a destination anymore. It’s an aesthetic vocabulary, one that Lela Rose has been speaking her whole life.

Gasoline-powered cars have held onto two supreme advantages for a century: the five-minute pit stop and the typical 400-mile range that enabled people to take long road trips without worry. Meanwhile, EVs have suffered from long charging times and short ranges that induced range anxiety in potential buyers, who mostly preferred to stay with internal-combustion-engine (ICE) cars or hybrids. With the release of its new Blade Battery 2.0 and Megawatt Flash Charge 2.0 architectures, the fear is over. 

According to the official figures announced at the event, high-volume production BYD cars like its new Denza Z9GT now can drive over 621 miles on a single charge, add roughly 250 miles of range in the time it takes to order a coffee, and rely on a battery pack that refuses to die before the car does, with a guaranteed 620,000-mile lifetime unheard of in any EV.

BYD’s latest battery and charging tech make other electric vehicles look like Model T’s—at least for now. As the second-largest manufacturer of batteries in the world, BYD is currently supplying batteries to other manufacturers like Toyota, Kia, Hyundai, and even Tesla.

BYD’s new charging architecture kills the ICE pit stop advantage entirely by pushing 1,500 kilowatts of peak power through a single cable, or up to 2,100 kilowatts if using a dual-gun setup. To understand the sheer power of that electrical flow, you have to look at the current industry standard.

Think of kilowatts as the width of a water pipe filling a swimming pool. A standard home charger trickles power overnight at roughly 7 kilowatts, like a garden hose. A Tesla Supercharger—long considered the gold standard of public fast-charging—maxes out around 250 kilowatts. BYD is unleashing six times that amount of energy, effectively hooking the car up to a high-pressure municipal water main.

During a live demonstration onstage, BYD plugged in its new Han L sedan, making the battery jump from 10% to 80% capacity in exactly six minutes and 30 seconds. On the keynote screen, BYD officially declared a charging speed of “1 second = 2 kilometers.” Translated to real-world driving terms, five minutes plugged into this hardware yields between 250 and 310 miles of driving range.

Of course, a 1,500-kilowatt charger is useless without a network to plug into. To solve this, BYD confirmed it is rolling out 15,000 of these megawatt charging stations across China by the end of 2026. The company is building over 4,000 of these stations independently, while deploying the rest through joint ventures. They also plan to deploy a European 3,000-charger network by the end of 2026.

Anxiety no more

The Blade Battery 2.0 pushes the driving range of upcoming vehicles like the Yangwang U7 past the 621-mile mark, easily beating a standard full tank of gas, which usually taps out around 350 to 400 miles for sedans (although a handful of diesel, hybrid, and gasoline models with oversize tanks can go beyond 600 miles).

BYD achieved this through a massive leap in energy density, a measure of how much raw electrical energy you can pack into a given physical weight. For years, the auto industry faced a rigid dilemma. You could build a battery using lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) chemistry—which is cheap, highly durable, and extremely safe—but the industry standard density hovers at a mediocre 150 to 180 watt-hours per kilogram. The alternate nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM) chemistry, which typically packs 200 to 280 watt-hours per kilogram, is more expensive and prone to catching fire.

Because of their architecture and chemistry, NCM batteries have low abuse tolerance and release a lot of oxygen when punctured during an accident, which feeds the battery fire and makes it virtually impossible to put out. LFP batteries are much harder to puncture and, if it happens, they release minimal oxygen.

The density boost comes from Blade Battery 2.0’s new internal structure. First, BYD engineers ground the LFP battery’s chemical materials into an ultrafine microscopic powder in order to cram vastly more raw energy into the exact same physical space. Second, they built shorter, direct internal superhighways for the electrical charge, allowing the battery to absorb massive amounts of power in seconds without overheating. This increased the energy density of the new version by 36% to 40% over its previous generation. The new packs hit between 190 and 210 watt-hours per kilogram and, they say, came in at a lower cost. (They didn’t disclose the cost, but BYD claims it will boost their profit margins.)

Effectively, the Chinese manufacturer has delivered the promises Elon Musk made back in 2020, when he introduced the idea of his so-called “revolutionary 4680 battery cell” that would dramatically increase range and slash costs. Half a decade later, Tesla’s 4680 rollout has been plagued by manufacturing bottlenecks and underwhelming density figures. Tesla was forced to buy BYD’s first-generation Blade batteries to power the Model Y built in its Berlin gigafactory while using its failed 4680 in some Model Y’s at its Texas factory. The Cybertruck uses an improved version of the 4680 that’s called Cybercell, which reportedly has a 272 watt-hours-per-kilogram density.

It gets better

Another big selling point of new battery technology is its lifetime. Batteries represent roughly 30% to 40% of the cost of EVs, so consumers naturally fear the day their battery degrades to the point of a ruinously expensive replacement. Right now, the industry average EV battery lasts roughly 150,000 to 300,000 miles. The standard NCM batteries used by most competitors tap out after 1,000 to 2,000 charge cycles before losing a severe percentage of their capacity and needing a swap. The Blade 2.0 is rated for over 5,000 charge cycles. While multiplying those cycles by the maximum range yields a theoretical limit in the millions, BYD officially rates the degradation curve to guarantee an operational lifespan of 1.2 million kilometers, or roughly 745,000 miles.

The average American drives about 13,500 miles a year. At that pace, you would have to drive this car every day for 55 years before hitting the end of the battery’s life. The battery will outlast the metal chassis, the seats, and probably the driver. 

You would assume these specifications come with a brutal premium, but the financial mechanics here are moving in reverse. BYD managed to lower the production cost of the Blade 2.0 by 15% to 30% compared with its previous generation. While the previous Blade was mostly hoarded by six-figure luxury vehicles, now the Chinese company claims the new batteries and charging architectures are going into high-volume, mainstream 2026 models like the Tang and the Song, which sit in the $19,000 to $30,000 price bracket. 

It’s not perfect, however. There’s still one undeniable advantage for the internal combustion engine: bad winters. LFP batteries historically hate freezing temperatures. A gas tank holds the exact same amount of combustible energy at negative 4 degrees Fahrenheit as it does at room temperature. An EV battery, however, usually loses 10% to 20% of its range to heat the cabin, and its chemical reactions slow down so much that fast charging becomes impossible until the pack warms up.

BYD integrated an internal pulse-heating system and a full liquid thermal management array directly into the Blade 2.0 to avoid losing so much energy and allow for fast charging in extremely cold environments. At -4°F, the Blade 2.0 retains over 85% of its capacity. At -22°F, it keeps 80% of its capacity (previous-generation LFP electric vehicles could drop as much as 50% at this temperature). Standard nickel-cobalt-manganese EV batteries typically retain 70% to 80% of their total capacity at -4°F, falling to roughly 40% to 60% at -22°F.

EVs with the standard NCM batteries also actively restrict or entirely lock out fast charging at low temperatures in order to prevent permanent physical damage to the battery cells. But according to BYD’s CEO Wang Chuanfu during the event, “the new Blade Battery can be charged from 20% to 97% in less than 12 minutes in temperatures as low as -4°F, enabling a driving range of 483 miles.” That, while not matching the 0% loss of gasoline, is an impressive claim, too.

We will have to wait for test-drives to see how all these claims pan out. But, judging by how well the previous generation worked, I have no reason to doubt it. Add the fact that all this tech will be available across BYD’s entire car range—from the luxurious new Yangwang U7 sedan to the budget Dolphin—and apparently, we may have entered a new era for electric vehicles. Too bad it will not be arriving in the U.S. anytime soon.

It’s a message his campaign isn’t just saying with words, but with the letterforms that shape them, too. Talarcio won the primary with typography that’s intentionally imperfect.

Contemporary political typography tends toward fonts that are loud and bold, especially when it comes to campaign logos. Those used for candidates like President Donald Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris set their last names in all-caps, sans-serif typefaces that could be read clearly and at a distance, like an athlete’s surname on the back of a jersey. In contrast, the Talarico campaign’s visual identity looks a little rough around the edges.

The politician’s primary campaign slogan, “Talarico for Texas,” is far from precision set. It’s subtle at first, but upon closer inspection, you’ll notice that the letters’ strokes aren’t straight (most evident in the letter C, which has an especially uneven weight). And where another designer might have used clean and crisp Texas Lone Stars, this wordmark features rounded, ornamental asterisks to set apart “For Texas.”

Talarico’s black-and-white palette recalls the one used for former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 campaign for a U.S. Senate seat, but their approaches to typography are different. O’Rourke’s type was tall and condensed. Talarico’s looks handmade.

A secondary “Talarico for Texas” logo arranges the words within the shape of a letter T. It uses slightly different but still notably imperfect typography that draws a contrast to previous political branding standard bearers. Whereas then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s iconic, corporate-style “O” logo was geometric, balanced, and precisely designed, the “O” in “Talarico” is not at all perfectly round.

Talarico deploys that look at scale with Birdie, a handmade, vintage-print-inspired typeface by designer Taylor Penton, who says on his website that he designed the font to be “a little off.” Those slight imperfections have proven popular. Penton calls Birdie the “most-used, most-downloaded, and least-regretted font” he’s ever released. Neither Penton nor the Talarico campaign responded to a request for comment.

Overall, the effect of the typography gives Talarico’s campaign brand voice a sense of humanity. This type wasn’t whipped up by a computer, it suggests, but made with a human touch. It’s not unlike the hand-drawn logo New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign used last year, which was inspired by city street signs and Bollywood movie posters. In Talarico slogans like “It’s Time to Start Flipping Tables”—a Biblical reference about righteous moral outrage toward the sins of the Trump administration—the type style gives the letters life.

Talarico is running to change politics as we know it, and much like Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez before him, he’s doing it with typography that doesn’t look like typical political branding. As campaigns have grown more digital, fonts that feel analog can help candidates communicate authenticity through type.

The site was a quarry that from 1990 to 2015 provided the raw material to help Beijing grow at hyperspeed, supplying everything from skyscrapers to roads to the main stadium built for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Last operated by Beijing Xingfa Cement Co., its closure left behind a negative space that is the inverse of the vertical urbanity of Beijing. Now, after nearly a decade of planning and design, the quarry’s rehabilitation into a striking and surreal 265-acre park is complete.

The park was designed by the global landscape architecture and design firm SWA, which also led the landscape architecture and planning that’s turned the quarry’s factory and administrative buildings into a national science research campus. The highly complex remediation of the quarry is restoring life to the land and soil while using its unique physicality to create an unexpected destination. As a whole, it’s a remarkable second turn for a swath of land that has been all but drained of its resources.

“We needed to create an ecological base. But on top of that, we also wanted to bring people back into this park,” says Jack Wu, managing principal of SWA’s Shanghai studio and design lead for the quarry park and broader campus. “Although it was originally a mining place, we feel like these two things can kind of coexist.”

The park that’s resulted from nearly a decade of planning is part landscape repair, part land art. The unavoidable scars of the quarry’s two crater-like pits have been reframed as performative elements. One pit serves as a seasonal lake that captures water from across the site in a carefully coordinated drainage system engineered to handle the summer deluges that can cause flooding in the region. The other pit serves a more scenic role, with shaded overlooks at its rim, an amphitheater, and walking paths carved through its terraced cliffside.

In a unique design move, the extractive processes that cut this landscape into a pixelated cavity are not hidden away but rather emphasized, centering the raw, destructive nature of the quarry’s past life into a landscape experience. SWA collected large stones and boulders from across the site to create sculpture-esque mounds and landforms reminiscent of its days as an active quarry.

Abandoned machinery and mining vehicles have also been integrated into the landscape. “We feel like it’s very important and very interesting to just keep them, to remind people about the history of the original site,” Wu says.

The project also aims to counteract some of the quarry’s terrestrial reengineering by using its vast holes and cuts to move water through the site. The planting was designed to manage how water absorbs into the ground while also filtering the modest contamination and heavy metals that remain in the upper levels of the soil. It also controls how water moves past the park’s edges without flooding nearby villages or spreading the contaminants the park itself is working to clean.

“We really want to keep all the water on-site so that we can prevent it from further eroding the edges of the pits, but also so that we can keep that water to use for irrigation,” says Peichen Hao, an associate principal at SWA.

The designers used raw materials from the site to re-create some of the terracing and land formations common to quarries, turning the stones into building materials for walkways, staircases, and the sculpted forms that mimic the look and feel of common open-pit mines.

The biggest design move, though, may be simply letting the disturbed landscape reveal itself. The designers developed methods to preserve the cratered hillsides and carved-up cliffs of the quarry pits, keeping them on display as relics of the industrial past while also celebrating their massive scale.

Wu says the site has such a strong connection to Beijing and its development that he hopes it lures visitors from the city to better understand that link. Even without that deeper context, he expects the site to be a draw for its grandness alone.

“As a city boy, you don’t really experience these big mountains, a giant pit, the scale difference,” Wu says. “We didn’t want to add brand-new things, to make it feel like it’s an urban park. We still want to keep the authentic industrial feeling of it.”

Now that AI has entered the picture, you’d be forgiven for thinking the architectural sketch as we know it is dead. Quite the opposite. “We are in a world that is now completely dominated by digital tools, but something strange is happening: The hand sketch is back,” says Andrew Holder.

Holder, a practicing architect and chair of graduate architecture, landscape, and urban design at the Pratt School of Architecture in Brooklyn, recently curated an exhibition that examines the role of the sketch in contemporary architecture. The exhibition, titled Levers Long Enough, includes more than 200 sketches from over 60 architecture practices that sent in watercolors, pencil sketches, and even embroidered scribbles. It is both a rebuke to AI, and an ode to the physical experience in an increasingly digital world.

How the architectural sketch (temporarily) died…

Definitionally, at least according to Holder, a sketch is quick, economical, and physical. Sometimes, he says, the sketch can be performed on a touch screen like an iPad, but only if “we can feel the contact between the hand and the image.”

As it happens, this physical contact has been disappearing for decades. “Beginning the ’90s and through the early aughts, the sketch was obliterated from the classroom,” says Holder.

With the dawn of computer-aided design, the sketch took a step back in the architecture practice, and though it never disappeared, it has yet to reclaim its place in architectural pedagogy. While life drawing was once a cornerstone in architecture schools—architecture students at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts studied and sketched the fragments and plaster casts—few universities today have a class dedicated to sketching. London’s Bartlett School, as well as the AA School, are both famous for their emphasis on freehand drawing, but most architecture schools around the world, Pratt included, focus on more technical practices like drafting and perspective drawing.

…And why it’s making a comeback

Slowly, however, the sketch is returning to the spotlight. Holder first noticed its re-emergence in 2025, in the work of Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith of MOS Architects. “A whole section of their website popped up where they showed hand sketches for every project,” he recalls.

MOS, who, in the early 2000s, became known for their experimental use of custom-coded software to animate renders, had never stopped hand-sketching. “They just haven’t been showing it,” says Holder, who went on looking for similar patterns across the industry.

The breadth of work on display at the exhibition is the culmination of his search. From industry giants like Steven Holl and Weiss Manfredi, to emerging practices like Current Interests and Almost Studio, everyone, it seemed, had a hand-sketching practice. “Everywhere you look, these people are showing [sketches] right alongside images of finished buildings, as though they had equal weight,” he says.

The willingness to show a hand-sketch right next to a photograph suggests a certain pride in this once-endangered art form. It also proves how much the narrative has shifted. “Pride is the word, but if we think back to what people were proud of 10 years ago, it would’ve been a polished photorealistic rendering,” says Holder.

The unintended AI effect

That the traditional sketch is coming back in the age of AI might seem surprising to some, but it becomes predictable once you understand what technology tends to do to the things it displaces. When digital cameras flooded the market, film photography was reborn as a deliberate practice. Similarly, in 2024, vinyl sales in the U.S. surpassed CD sales. Each time a new technology promises to render an older one obsolete, the older one re-emerges, stripped of its utility but charged with new meaning.

As Holder points out, the most common arguments in favor of AI have been about efficiency or speed, but for many architects, that is precisely what the sketch is for. As “AI slop” continues to creep into every nook and cranny of our digital lives, clients are also beginning to see the hand-drawn sketch as a sign of care, deliberation, and “actual thought,” says Holder.

As it turns out, the sketch may well be the most primordial expression of the human experience. No algorithm can ever replace that.

Things are moving so fast that it’s hard to tell.

Ryo Lu, head of design at the white-hot coding tool Cursor has invited me to their charcoal-hued San Francisco studio. Before anyone says hello, I’m greeted by a pile of footwear in the entry of the no-shoes open office. I suddenly regret my choice to wear my New Balance loafers without socks.

The softspoken Lu, donning the creative-approved uniform of flowy wide-legged pants and a button down, weaves me through desks—past half a sports bar’s worth of uptime monitors and a shelf of knicknacks including a New Jeans record and Bondi Blue iMac.

Maybe you’re a normie and you haven’t even heard of Cursor. That’s okay. It’s an AI coding startup at the vanguard of this movement that many now believe will reshape software as we know it. Cursor is aimed at serious development teams, but as we sit at his desk, Lu acknowledges that strength is also a weakness. If you’ve signed up for Cursor to do some casual vibecoding, you’ll probably find yourself disoriented by the command lines and acronyms that live throughout the software.

Lu proposes he can solve this tension with his new project, something he’s calling “Baby Cursor.” Lu imagines Baby Cursor as the next generation of the company’s software, which first launched in 2023. When he loads it, I see no scary boxes of code. I’m mostly just looking at a prompt. But with a tap, a designer can pull up an app and rearrange its components, which will spit out the updates as code. Or a product manager can load a project summary and translate goals into concrete workflows. Or anyone, really, can pull up a team of agents to coordinate and work while they grab a matcha.

As Lu whirs around his creation, he demonstrates how Baby Cursor can ultimately unfurl to a massive workstation—not unlike how Cursor looks now—or shrink down into an assistant that lives in the corner of your screen. Lu is imagining the future of Cursor as something of an infinite Swiss Army Knife, where every window offers a different facet of the service: an AI with a dozen different faces that all plug into the same engine, offering the perfect interface for any audience. 

“All I’m thinking is make Cursor the most simple thing and the most crazy thing all at once,” he says. 

But the craziest part about Baby Cursor isn’t even the design. It’s that Lu created the prototype in a single week, with just one other person (Lee Robinson). Read that again: A team of two rebuilt Cursor, currently valued at $29.3 billion, in a week.

While for most of us, the AI revolution has meant little more than conversational search engines, auto-written emails, and endless streams of multimedia slop, in the Valley, it’s completely upending product development. The way software is built has not only changed; it’s hit an exponential acceleration. Now, the designer can be the coder who can be the product manager, in a development process that can go straight from concept to production in a single step.

I’ve visited San Francisco countless times over my two decades of reporting, but during a trip three years ago, I felt the world shift a little. After ChatGPT exploded to the mainstream in 2023, I visited ground zero of the AI revolution, taking a 72-hour tour of startups in an attempt to untangle how AI was going to impact the future of design—and by proxy, the way people would experience this new technology in their lives. 

Just three years ago, designers waxed poetic in deeply philosophical discussions that unpacked ideas like: What, really, is an LLM? What might you do with an omniscient machine other than chat? With AI as the engine behind software, how could its touchpoints change into something we’ve never imagined before?

Then in February, I returned as both a design journalist and AI tourist, and found people were now speaking in far more concrete terms. I took back-to-back meetings at AI giants including OpenAI and Anthropic, and I also checked in with the investors and startups chasing the next big thing. In several cases, I caught up with the same people three years later to see how their views had changed. 

The piece that follows is a synthesis of their perspectives and my own observations. Think of it as a snapshot of the AI zeitgeist, and a forecast into what happens when the designer is also the software developer.

As Jason Yuan, a former Apple designer who founded the social AI startup Future Lovers tells me, “There’s never been a better time to be an auteur.”

Behind the vibe(code) shift

Whereas San Francisco in 2023 felt almost post-apocalyptic, the city has recently undergone a complete vibe shift. I was greeted by streets I hardly recognized, as countless venture capital dollars have wooed a new generation of young entrepreneurs to build anew. Parks are now teeming with people. Twenty-somethings line up outside once-abandoned storefronts for $7 croissants and $45 prix fix meals—wallet-friendly luxuries for pre-IPO life. Self-driving Waymos are so trusted that they command higher rates than human-driven Ubers.

This is a city that’s mastering automation, using new AIs to build new AIs, while every entrepreneur is worried about taking a vacation, lest they be left behind. From what I saw in just a few days, those concerns seem valid.

The new creative energy you can feel in San Francisco is fueled by the VC industry, which invested $122 billion in AI into Bay Area companies in 2025 alone. The greater VC industry itself is growing fast. In 1994, VC firms had just 150 general partners; now there are more than 33,000, according to James Currier, founding partner at the SF-based investment firm NFX. He says it’s a FOMO market, and so a company valued at $18 million for their series A in 2022 now commands a valuation of $140 million. 

When Currier and I first met three years ago, he had his eyes peeled for the startup that would leverage AI to change life as we know it, much like Uber used the smartphone to transform transportation. But instead, we’ve seen entrepreneurs largely gravitate toward one use case to rule them all: vibecoding. 

“[Investment success] is largely random at this point, because there’s so many startups, and there’s so many venture firms, and because everyone looks alike,” he says. 

After my 2023 visit, it seemed like nothing much happened in AI for a while. Yes, new models came out every week. Yes, they were each better than the last. But no one had really demonstrated how AI would make us live or work all that differently.

That changed in November 2025, when Anthropic released Claude 4.5. While developers had been using AI tools to help them code for years, this update was an inflection point. It was far more reliable and promptable. For the first time, you could truly code complex projects simply by chatting with AI.

“If AI didn’t evolve from now, we would see another 95% impact in the world,” insists Currier, speaking to not only the impact of vibecoding, but the untapped potential still lurking in modern LLMs. 

You could argue that vibecoding is that revolution, or that vibecoding is one of many tools that will get us there. But one thing that is certain? Here at ground zero of AI, vibecoding has already changed work in ways Middle America doesn’t see. Unlike earlier investment booms, many VC dollars need not go to funding large development staffs; they can simply be leveraged to buy more and more AI code.

I had expected that to tap the power of AI, we’d need a suite of new modalities, like how the mouse introduced the GUI or multitouch made smartphones intuitive. As it turned out, the AI revolution of today has nothing to do with buttons or knobs or voice. AI changed work without changing much about the front-end UI. It provided the power of having a coding agent, cooking up hundreds of lines of reliable code at a time, coordinating with other agents to bring new software to life.

Coding has been the most successful use case of AI, end stop. In retrospect, it makes sense. Machines naturally speak the language of machines. 

“I think what’s so amazing about code is it makes something useful for you. Like, it doesn’t come back with an answer or a sentence,” says Joel Lewenstein, head of design at Anthropic. “It actually creates.”

Intelligence is the new materiality

Sitting in a dimly lit cabaret, Abs Chowdhury places his iPhone Pro onto the table next to mine. I can tell he’s sizing up the color I chose (orange), which is fair because he designed the thing. The former Apple designer was on stage at Apple just last year, debuting his Pro and Air models. He was wooed away last November by an offer he couldn’t refuse, and the industrial designer started vibe-designing the UI of his new, secretive AI startup Hark (backed by $100 million in funding). While recruiting his team and building his design studio, he confesses that he transferred rough designs from Photoshop or Illustrator straight into AI code tools, and edited them via code prompts. No conceptual fantasies to be realized by some engineer required.

Likewise, another former Apple designer, Yuan, muses that he raised too much money for his new startup after learning how capable vibecoding had become. Over Albarino and potato soup at a packed restaurant where we can barely hear one another talk, he details how his company Future Lovers is creating a sort of social AI where Pluribus meets Gossip Girl. He’s spent the five months since Claude 4.5 came out building his first product mostly on his own alongside AI, with a coding advisor and a few contractors—though he has since hired a full-time AI specialist. (Disclosure: I was briefly a consultant for Yuan’s last startup, New Computer.)

“There’s a new reason to raise lots of money, which is compute,” Yuan says. “If you have lots of conviction, and you know exactly what you want, like, why would you hire another 20 other people right now to tell you what you’re doing? It’s a coordination cost.” 

Chowdhury and Yuan are two talented designers with prestigious professional pedigrees. They are true craftsmen who’ve mastered design tools to tweak details most of us can’t even perceive. But the fact that they’ve each embraced vibecoding or vibedesign, or vibeimplementation—whatever strange thing you want to call it—demonstrates a most certain evolution of practice. Yes, Chowdhury has since hired dedicated interface designers. But their enthusiasm for these workflows shows that once designers begin manifesting their ideas with AI as auteurs, it’s hard to go back. As Yuan has written, intelligence is the new material from which designers create. It’s a medium that’s becoming as natural for people to reshape as pixels or aluminum were in the last era.

This evolution seems sure to pull power from engineering teams back toward designers and other product visionaries. As designers are in essence learning to code, in many cases, the professional coder is becoming more abstracted from the process. 

Such abstraction is creating tension for engineering teams to straddle new efficiencies alongside traditional expertise—which is easier said than done. Later in the week, I visited the video game vibecoding startup Moonlake (with $30 million in funding from NVIDIA and others). The two young Stanford graduate student founders tell me that all of their engineer hires have to code in front of them now as part of the hiring process, and observing specifically how they use AI is a significant criteria for the job.

“It’s a very fine line. We find coders today who don’t really understand your code too well, and they end up breaking code bases,” says cofounder Sharon Lee. “We make sure half of our engineers now use [traditional] code, and the other half use a ton of tools.”

No doubt, speed to market is driving many of these decisions to build with machines rather than people. Even craftsmen have embraced the “move fast and break things” era of design, which is at odds with the last 30 years of chasing perfection.

“You can’t do the old school Apple thing of like, create lickable craft and interface,” says Yuan. “You can’t because, by the time you’ve done the best interface for ChatGPT 3, you’re on GPT 6.”

The next great interface (doesn’t exist?)

I’m perched in one of the many sun-filled conference rooms at Anthropic, clutching a fruity, light roast coffee that’s been handed to me in a half-glazed ceramic mug. The earthy sensation feels downright anachronistic as head of product design Joel Lewenstein speaks in a rapid fire, hyper optimistic cadence about his vision for the future of Claude.

Three years ago, much of the design world pondered if there would be one great AI interface to rule them all—something that came after chatting in a prompt with an LLM. Experiments in hardware were abound (RIP Humane and Rabbit), while debates raged around whether the future of all interfaces would be generative, in which AI spun up the perfect new buttons for you at any given moment.

“There’s a great irony. Obviously I hire and interview dozens of designers in AI, and everyone comes in [saying] ‘I want to do the next paradigm after chat! I have this idea!’ I’ve seen dozens of different directions, and none of them is the one after chat,” says Lewenstein—who notes that even Claude Code, as successful as it’s proven, is ostensibly an extension of chat. “So I don’t know the answer here. We’re not sitting on a prototype which I’m 100% sure is the paradigm after chat.”

Much like its rival OpenAI, Anthropic is in an expansion period, as the major model providers are diversifying their product portfolio similar to how Microsoft and Google stretched their services in earlier decades. Instead of making Claude itself do more through a single hero portal or interface, it’s spinning off Claude into all sorts of different sub products that feel somewhat the same.

“We have this Excel plug-in that finance people love. It kind of vaguely looks like our Chrome extension, which kind of vaguely looks like Claude AI, which kind of vaguely looks like Claude Code, but they’re all really bespoke for their different users,” says Lewenstein, noting that they’ve programmed a shared design language into their AI-fueled development process. “We would rather, at this point, have four really awesome products for four different types of people, and then figure out later what to do, because it just lets us learn faster, right?”

Ship first, learn later: It’s this sort of mentality that let Anthropic build its new Claude Cowork platform in just five days. But it also means that Cowork is divorced from Claude itself rather than tightly integrated. It’s another thing that Anthropic’s got to sell to its own audience.

“Things are moving so fast that we just have to experiment faster,” Lewenstein says. “Convergence is hard. Because you have to figure out what’s shared. You have to build that shared path. You have all of the fringe things that people loved on these other systems. And there’s too much changing too quickly.”

After Waymoing across town, I arrive at OpenAI whose offices are housed in a tower formerly owned by Uber. While most security is stationed at the front desk or door, OpenAI’s spills right outside onto the sidewalk. I make my way to an enclosed porch jutting out from an upper floor, where I meet with perhaps the greatest living legend behind web browsing. 

Sitting casually at a picnic table, Darin Fisher explains why his own approach to design at OpenAI isn’t more radical. The mind behind the Netscape, Chrome, and Arc browsers now spends his days as tech lead of OpenAI’s Atlas browser. One of his most pressing design debates? Which side of the interface gets the AI chat box, left or right? (Which, to be fair, is a more perplexing problem than it might first appear—but still not paradigm-busting work.)

“I’m not that person who’s like, ‘how can we transform everything?‘” he says. “I’m much more thinking about, how do you take where people are [and] what’s the iteration? How does it get better? It doesn’t really surprise me that a lot of stuff ends up being where people already are centered, about things that optimize workflows they’re familiar with.”

But then Fisher audits his own thoughts for a moment, offering a fair counterpoint.

“The whole aspect of [AI] doing it for you, and you not having to be there in all the weeds, is a paradigm shift in UI, right?”

Fisher isn’t wrong. But Anthropic and OpenAI—along with all the frontier model providers—still face a most certain risk. They are recreating a disparate suite of loosely connected services that made software giants dominant in the last era (think Microsoft Windows, Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, Excel, Word, etc). This tactic elbows out competition for highly specific applications like legal and healthcare, sure. But this isn’t the ’90s or aughts.

Software development is easy now. And so being a 30-headed hydra of platforms actually makes frontier model builders vulnerable to startups that have the clarity and license to build more encompassing, clearer, thoughtful services that could become the primary touchpoint of AI. 

The strategy the AI industry never saw coming

When I first met Barcelona cool kid Victor Perez a few years ago, he was building La Croix towers at his live-work condo. He was also building Krea, a sort of Photoshop for the AI age that incorporates the latest models into his software on an unrelenting cadence, promising new features every week.

Now, a $500 million valuation later, he sits in Krea’s new digs in Fisherman’s Wharf, a second floor, brick-walled space with a glass-encased conference room and views of Alcatraz through its century-old arched windows. Despite the natural light, Perez refers to spending his last three years in a cave. Krea is profitable and valuable, but Perez (alongside his team of 37) is still grinding. He looks like he could use a sandwich.

In 2023 when most AI companies were raising money in attempts to train massive AI models, Krea took a different approach. It built its own software, and then it plugged in the AI models of others. It offered the front end experience packaging many of the world’s leading AI models like Runway and Luma—models that appeared closed and closely protected at the time.

“This idea of being an API wrapper was really not obvious to me. We were the first to do it, but I thought that we would get sued,” admits Perez. “How was it possible that all of these companies are spending so many millions of dollars on training these systems, and they don’t try to log these systems into their own products? That’s what I expected!”

Instead of getting sued, Perez fielded requests to move models higher on the list to get more visibility. Krea was amongst the first companies to prove out an architecture that’s now commonplace, where a piece of software can serve as an interface for the AI models of others. Cursor takes a similar approach of owning AI through the application layer—like Krea, it runs some of its own AI models, but it also plugs in Claude and other third parties. Because AI models can be swapped in and out with a literal line of code, your Kreas and Cursors have some survivability even as better, newer models come and go. Their moat is their interface.

Perez acknowledges that no strategy is a safe bet in AI right now. “People, including us, have been very successful putting together APIs and building products on top,” he says. “But it feels to me that in three years, we’re gonna have a conversation around how those API wrappers were very hyped in 2026 and how they were not hyped anymore in 2029.”

Ironically, while Perez believes model generation is a dead-end for smaller startups in an era when no one can hope to compete with Google or OpenAI, he also sees Krea’s future as embracing it. He argues that you can’t build creative tools to manipulate AI without controlling the core levers of the model. That’s because frontier models are tuned in post-training for broad functionality across tasks rather than a specific POV—they’re built to be Wonder Bread to please the broadest generic audience. 

So in 2025, Krea worked with Black Forest Labs (creators of the popular model Flux) to help tune a custom Krea model, essentially giving the system taste across a diversity of styles. The text-to-image workflow creates images that shake off the obvious AI feel, creating photos that feel more photorealistic and illustrations that feel more painterly. 

This arrangement might sound technically confusing, but the partnership is familiar to the business world: It’s just a collab! Companies partner with external design teams all the time to take products, ranging from shoes to ice cream flavors, somewhere neither party could reach on their own.

Perez compares the process of post-training the model to using Pinterest. You customize your experience of Pinterest by teaching the algorithm your preferences. However, the opportunity to customize train frontier models doesn’t really exist in the industry today. This leaves everyone creating media at the mercy of engineers rather than designers, and we generate a lot more slop as a result.

“You cannot create a smarter model than Google, but you can create more taste—a model that is more tasteful,” says Perez. 

It’s a point echoed by Karina Nguyen, formerly a researcher at OpenAI and Anthropic, who is building her own company called Thoughtful. (We connect on the phone, as she’s just signing a lease on her company’s first space.) She estimates there are only 200 or so experts in post-training methods in the world, and because they are engineers, they optimize models around a mathematical and engineering mindset. 

But Nguyen imagines that Thoughtful, backed by an equal dose of engineering and design expertise, could post-train models for other companies, bringing specific AI sensibilities to areas like healthcare or legal otherwise lost in broadly optimized models.

A lot of AI experiences feel the same because the AI they plug into is the same. Krea and Thoughtful are considering how to tune frontier models without building them from scratch—allowing them to create richer experiences than the quick-shipped features we’re getting from frontier model companies.

“Every week there’s something new happening, they have to react. And so there’s no space [to really think],” says Nguyen. “You should allow people to just imagine, give them creative space to go off and imagine. I think that’s how the most transformational research came to be, and design is the same.” 

When I ask Perez why we haven’t seen more experimentation in the UI of AI from startups, his answer is two-fold. First, he notes that workflows have changed for a lot of creatives—echoing what I heard from OpenAI’s Fisher. For example, he says, designers can now take a product photo and generate more angles of that photo, or even a poster or a film. The UI here isn’t new, but the workflow is.

Second, he says the new modalities that might unlock the next level of AI capabilities aren’t possible yet because AI simply isn’t fast enough to support them. 

“We’re still in the stage of gaining capabilities,” says Perez, “and after we finish the capability stage, there’s going to be performance optimization.” 

Krea has chased performance optimization. It was the first company to generate stylized videos in real time, but he says it’s pretty much turned out to be a proof of concept, because people prefer the vastly better output they can get by waiting. Give the machine time to render, and it will create a higher-fidelity AI video. But AI render times are irreconcilable with fluid tools.

“You cannot build an interface with something that takes two to three minutes to generate,” Perez says flatly. But training models with Black Forest Labs gets them closer. Inevitably, Perez imagines a day when these AIs are running 100 to 1000 times faster, and at last, we will see more aggressive experimentation with how a new suite of mixed-modal GUI tools work.

Until then, we have vibecoding. 

AI is everything everywhere all at once

Blocks away from Cursor’s headquarters, I ascend a long staircase in North Beach as Lu discusses his greater vision for the company. He recalls that when he lived in China, he coded everything himself. But when he arrived in the Valley, he became a designer with a capital D. Suddenly touching code was divorced from his work. An early project in the U.S. was particularly spirit crushing, as he watched a vision project wither in development.

Cursor has allowed him to come full circle, to be a designer who is, in essence, able to code again. In this new era, designing and development are no longer separate steps. Each concept can be almost instantaneously made real. And that’s brewing new expectations for software.

“I think Figma still is useful for when I want to just play in 2D space. I want to do my artboards. I want to specify how my pixels look exactly how I want,” he says. “But then there’s a point where it doesn’t make sense to keep making these marks anymore. Like, you want it to happen in real life, right? If you…prototype in Cursor…it’s like, just really, really hard for me to go back to Figma.” 

It’s this ethos that’s driving his entire Swiss Army Knife of windows. Instead of buttons and tooltips, Cursor is evolving into an infinite browser of possibilities. It’s a myriad of tabula rasa, or digital putty, to be filled with your next creations. The challenge is really making sure that each window meets the user where they are, and takes them where they want to go next. But the engine under them? In the AI age, no matter the company, that engine is probably just a handful of shared models. 

The grand vision that Lu is teasing through Baby Cursor is actually largely the same as what Anthropic is chasing with its ever-expanding platforms and extensions—albeit they are coming at it from completely opposite directions. Developers are realizing that AI is an infinitely ergonomic machine. It’s not literally shapeshifting with generative-born UIs as some suggested, but it’s increasingly squeezing into every possible context. It can become any touchpoint that any particular user needs.

That means AI will not be defined by one new or old modality—not buttons, not agents, not voice, not tooltips. It will be all modalities, all the time, all at once. Ever growing with new capabilities. Ever bending toward new demands. Ever in more control of the designer-auteur. 

But if all these touchpoints ultimately plug into the same AI backend, I do wonder how long it will make sense to have all that many different pieces of software to begin with.

“My theory is, just like all software is pretty much the same thing. Some like wrappings of concepts and then data floating somewhere and then passing things around,” says Lu. “So the convergence is almost inevitable. And then it becomes like, whoever is creating the best interface and the best abstractions, the simplest ones that scale.”

You could almost imagine a future, for the first time ever, where everybody is using one app, I tell Lu. We already have a version of that with iOS and Android.

“But you know, the old OSs were built with this app model that doesn’t make sense anymore. Maybe we need to make an OS,” he says.

“Cursor?” I ask.

“Yeah,” says Lu. “I don’t know. It’s easy. Now, you just use the agent swarm, and then they just work on it for like a week.”

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro announced the “Let Freedom Ring” specialty license plate last summer to promote the commonwealth’s role in America’s founding 250 years ago. The cream-colored plate depicts a dark blue Liberty Bell in the background, along with the previously mentioned slogan and commonwealth’s name in red. None of that is at issue, though: The problem is the style of the zero.

The number has a slash through its counter to prevent confusion with the letter O. Now, however, Pennsylvania toll cameras—not to mention locals—are confusing the zero for an eight.

The mix-ups are occurring even though the lettering follows industry best practices to differentiate characters that can sometimes look alike.

“The addition of the slash through the zero was intended to help differentiate between the zero and the letter O, which both the license plate readers and human eye have had difficulty differentiating on past registration plates,” the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation said in a statement to ABC affiliate WPVI, the Philadelphia network that first reported the new plate’s design problem.

The diagonal slash was added in accordance with license plate recommendations from the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA), a Virginia-based trade group for state and province motor vehicle divisions in the U.S. and Canada.

The design passed other tests, too. PennDOT says the plate met its production and legibility requirements, and that it was developed in consultation with Pennsylvania State Police and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, its toll roads commission.

But those precautions didn’t prevent one motorist who contacted WPXI in Pittsburgh from receiving a toll-by-plate invoice for a car that wasn’t theirs. A camera mistook an “08” in their license plate for “88.”

Easily confused characters

Similar characters—like A and R; 8 and B; 0, O, and Q; 1 and 7; D and O; and Z and 2—can be misread by image processing tools, so AAMVA recommends characters be made distinct and identifiable. That’s easier said than done, apparently. One tolling authority found the misread rate of its automated license plate readers was 20%, per AAMVA’s 2012 recommendations.

To reduce confusion, some states limit the use of the most easily confused characters. Arizona doesn’t print I, O, Q, or U on standard license plates, while Arkansas doesn’t even offer Q for personalized license plates.

Pennsylvania solved one problem only to introduce another—but at least officials say misreadings are not widespread. They hope their systems will get better at distinguishing the new character over time. Turnpike Commission spokesman Crispin Havener told NBC affiliate WPXI that the agency is working with its software vendor to improve accuracy, but that machine learning is not perfect yet and improvements won’t be immediate.

Its $599 starting price isn’t much more than what a couple of sticks of DDR5 will cost these days. The secret to the low price? The Neo isn’t driven by your typical laptop chipset, but the same architecture inside your iPhone. It’s an iPhone with a 12.9-inch screen and keyboard.

But the Neo design is largely based on nostalgia. Its colorful anodized aluminum computer body—a callback to the classic iPod minis and nanos so coveted by gen Z and Alpha—is more a retro-release than something new. Much like the Nike Dunk is a cheaper, colorful take on a Jordan, the MacBook Neo is less a design innovation than a play for cash-strapped young consumers who can’t swing the cost of a traditional MacBook let alone a Pro.

To understand the Neo, let’s look at the brutal reality of the 2026 computer market: Global PC shipments are projected to drop by 10.4% this year, the “sharpest decline in over a decade,” says Tom’s Hardware, with consumer sales tanking as pandemic-era tech hoarding fades. Furthermore, Apple’s laptop grip on the youth may be slipping. UC Davis demographic data reveals Mac ownership among college students plummeted from a peak of nearly 50% in 2022 down to just 37.3% in 2025 (the cheap PCs and Chromebooks may have something to do with this). 

Yet, laptop ownership itself remains near universal among that exact same demographic at 96.3%. The kids are absolutely still buying clamshells for schoolwork. And Gen Z in particular is driven by aesthetics, prioritizing design sleekness and color options when upgrading their hardware. The Neo is Apple’s $599 calculated strike to win back those exact buyers. 

Logistic innovation, computer stagnation

Delivering a highly capable machine for $599 (and within Apple’s generous profit margins) is an absolute miracle of corporate logistics. We live in an age where artificial intelligence is drastically inflating the cost of building electronics. Chipmakers have redirected their factories to build high-bandwidth memory for AI servers, leaving mobile random access memory—the temporary digital workspace a computer needs to hold the information it is actively thinking about—in incredibly short supply. 

The crisis is so severe that Apple was recently forced into emergency negotiations with Samsung, reportedly accepting a massive 100% price hike on memory modules on the spot just to secure inventory. Getting a 2.7-pound fanless computer with an A18 Pro processor—the exact same microscopic silicon brain that powers their latest mobile devices—and up to 16 hours of battery life for six hundred bucks is unprecedented value in this hostile economic climate.

To bait the trap for the new gens, the Apple design team seems to have dug deep into its own history. The Neo comes encased in brightly colored anodized aluminum, offering shades like blush, indigo, silver, and citrus, a direct aesthetic descendant of the classic iPod minis and nanos. People are so tired of endless streaming that those vintage music players have recently become fashion accessories for the youth, serving as physical symbols of a simpler, more tactile technological past. By wrapping a barebones laptop in those exact same semiotics, Apple is deliberately positioning this cheap machine as classic, authentic tech to lure in a budget-constrained generation.

At its presentation in NY today, the Cupertino brass made a big point about how the Neo integrates seamlessly with the iPhone, highlighting features like Handoff—which lets you start a task on your phone and finish it on the laptop—and universal copy-pasting. They even touted a feature that mirrors the phone’s screen directly onto the Neo’s 2408-by-1506 pixel liquid crystal display, a screen technology that uses precise electric currents to manipulate light through millions of tiny color filters. But this supposed synergy is a marketing mirage. It works just like any other Mac does. There is nothing uniquely synergistic about the Neo.

Like everything else in it, the Neo is a marketing gambit. A name that implies a matrix-shattering rebirth actually delivers the exact same desktop environment we have used for a quarter of a century, macOS. It does not run a new UX that truly ties to the mobile operating system that billions of people intuitively understand. Which is fine. However, if you are targeting a generation that grew up tapping glass and swiping through apps, handing them a traditional desktop interface with floating windows, a hierarchical file system, and a trackpad pointer feels completely backwards. But hey, maybe that’s what they want.

I just keep thinking that Apple could have delivered something new, a unified, touch-first user experience that matches how the iPhone generation actually interacts with digital information (but not iPad OS, please). Instead, they played it safe, and they’ll retain a split software ecosystem that will keep people juggling iOS and MacOS. 

Yes, Nike sold a lot of Dunks before it came back and bit ‘em, and this product could help Apple reach consumers who have been priced out of its laptops. But I’m still not sure this should be called a Neo. It doesn’t feel like the future of computing, but it’s the future we got. 

The trust, founded in 1953, today runs the Getty Center and Getty Villa art museums in Los Angeles, as well as a foundation, conservation institute, and research institute. The new logo brings all the entities together as a unified brand.

“We needed a visual identity that was uniquely Getty and distinct enough to unify how we show up globally,” Yasmine Vatere, assistant director of brand management and marketing, said in a statement.

Famed designer Saul Bass created the outgoing logo for the opening of the Getty Center in 1997. The square mark houses the word Getty spelled out in oversize letters arranged in a manner that appears scattered but intentional. No letter is shown in its entirety. The Getty calls that logo “iconic,” but felt it had grown out of it, and sought out the agency Fred & Farid New York to come up with a refresh.

The new logo constructs the letter G from four shapes arranged into a square to symbolize the Getty’s four programs. Fred & Farid creative chair Farid Mokart told Fast Company the mark was inspired by the materiality of the travertine blocks at the Getty Center. He says his team wanted a mark that felt like it was built with weight and intention—and it helpfully calls back to Bass’s square logo.

“This system gives Getty one clear, ownable expression in support of the work we do around the world,” Vatere said.

The G also acts as a frame for the Getty’s collection. In early applications of the mark, artwork and sculptures peek in and over its shapes, adding a contemporary element to visuals that might otherwise read as old and dry to some audiences. The new color palette is led by Getty’s signature blue with bright accent hues drawn from the Getty’s architecture, artworks, and gardens.

The challenge in designing a single mark for such a broad application was finding the right level of abstraction so it could feel genuinely Getty but still flexible to appear across all four programs, the agency said. That’s because they reach different audiences. The museums, for example, offer free admission to the public, and thus have different communications and design needs than the conservation institute, which serves professionals, or the research institute, which is geared to students and educators.

The Getty’s new tagline to go with the rebrand is “All for Art,” and the new logo was designed for a wide breadth of expression. It’s a mark that’s made to be rearranged, filled with other images, and open by design.

Now there’s yet another version out there. This one celebrates the life and legacy of artist Keith Haring in a design by WS Game Company, a licensee of Hasbro (Monopoly’s parent company) that specializes in deluxe versions of classic tabletop games.

For the 40th anniversary of Haring’s iconic New York City store, Pop Shop, WS Game Company took inspiration from his portfolio of art, as well as the events of his life, to create the fully customized Keith Haring Monopoly game, now available on its website for $80. 

For game designers, Monopoly is something of a chameleon: The game’s simple setup, location-based play, and variety of physical pieces make it a perfect canvas for adaptation. The total figure is difficult to nail down, but some Monopoly-heads estimate that more than 1,500 official spin-offs have been produced. The game can bend to fit any universe or story, from a sci-fi epic to an ode to a small town. In this case, it doubles as a display-worthy piece of art.

Art that’s become ubiquitous

It was only a matter of time before someone decided to create Keith Haring Monopoly, considering how ubiquitous the late artist’s work has become in pop culture and brand collaborations. Since his death in 1990, Haring’s art has appeared on everything from Legos to Dr. Martens and inflatable home decor. 

For Haring, ubiquity was often the goal. He made his name through graffiti and public art, which he used to spread a message of equality and acceptance to the masses.

In 1986, Haring opened the Pop Shop in SoHo, where he sold buttons, stickers, posters, and other prints of his work for ultra-low prices. At the time, the move was intensely criticized by the art world—though now it’s recognized as a distinctly ahead-of-its-time approach.

A very Haring board game

To capture the legacy of both Haring and his iconic shop in Monopoly form, WS Game Company worked closely with Artestar, the agency representing the Keith Haring Foundation for licensing projects. Kerry Silva Addis, owner of WS Game Company, says each property on the board represents an important location from Haring’s life, highlighting everything from his birthplace to the schools he attended and the studio spaces he used. 

“Players travel from his hometown of Kutztown, Pennsylvania, to iconic New York City landmarks and nightclubs, as well as the subway stations where he first gained recognition for his signature white chalk drawings on vacant advertising panels,” Addis says.

Naturally, Haring’s art is also incorporated throughout the game. The die-cast metal tokens include 3D versions of his works Radiant Baby and Barking Dog. The houses are actually multicolored dancing figures, and the hotels are boom boxes. The Chance and Community Chest cards have been replaced with “Heart” and “Pop Shop” cards, which feature Haring’s signature heart illustration and the shop’s logo, respectively. Even the game board’s railroad spaces have been replaced with iterations of the drawings Haring posted in NYC subway stations in the 1980s. 

In an ode to Haring’s distinctive style, the front of the game box includes a heart-shaped gathering of dancing figures that could easily be repurposed as its own piece of mountable artwork.

“Throughout the process, it often felt like we weren’t just interpreting his work, but truly collaborating with Keith himself,” Addis says. “Immersing ourselves in his visual language, philosophy, and social impact gave the project a profound sense of purpose. Honoring his legacy in a way that feels genuine was truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

At Target’s investor day on Tuesday, CEO Michael Fiddelke tried to convince Wall Street that the retailer is about to undergo a massive turnaround, after years of declining comparable sales, most recently in this last quarter. His reinvention plan is anchored in stylish design, differentiation from other retailers, and delighting the customer in-store. But none of these strategies seemed built for the economic moment we’re currently in.

The plan, as laid out by Fiddelke, chief merchandising officer Cara Sylvester, and CFO Jim Lee, involves $1 billion in new investment, 130-plus store remodels, 3,000 new items in the beauty aisle, and a deliberate push to reclaim Target’s identity as the cool, affordable alternative to boring big-box retail. It is, in many respects, a story Target has told before—and that’s the problem.

“I’ve seen Target at our best, I’ve seen us when we’re not at our best,” Fiddelke said in response to an analyst who noted that many elements of the current plan looked remarkably similar to what Target attempted a decade ago. “The ingredients that have always fueled us at our best are when we’re design-led, when we’re winning with differentiation, and when our experience is top-notch.”

Fiddelke’s pitch did manage to convince some analysts that the company has the potential to bounce back, resulting in several increasing their price target for Target’s stock after the meeting. But it’s unclear whether strategies that have worked for Target in the past will work now. It’s not just that the retail landscape has evolved, with competitors like Walmart encroaching on Target’s territory with more stylish products. The U.S. is now in the midst of a full-blown affordability crisis, and consumers of all social classes are all looking for cheaper options that will stretch their dollar.

In a trade-down economy, Target’s focus on premium products and exciting in-store experiences doesn’t seem like what shoppers need right now.

A Playbook Built for Another Era

Target’s pitch to investors is rooted in a very specific vision of its customer: Someone who grabs a Starbucks cappuccino on the way in, wanders the aisles in search of something new, and feels good when the product is cheaper than what they saw at Nordstrom. “We want that smile to get bigger when you flip over the price tag and see the value that’s there,” Fiddelke said, describing the aspirational shopping experience that has long defined Target’s brand identity.

The problem is that this customer—the one who shops for pleasure, who browses, who reaches for the new—is under enormous financial pressure right now. As U.S. involvement in the Iran conflict sends energy prices climbing and reignites fears of a fresh inflation wave, American consumers are cutting back broadly.

According to the 2026 Cost-of-Living Crunch Report, only 12% of workers say their wages have kept pace with inflation, and just 17% feel financially secure enough to save money after spending on essentials. Many Americans are struggling to afford their essentials, with 65% saying these expenses cause stress, and 49% dipping into savings to buy what they need. The notion that these same consumers will resume discretionary spending through refreshed home and apparel aisles—however stylishly merchandised—may be wishful thinking.

Yet Target’s turnaround plan leans heavily into exactly those categories. Fiddelke spoke enthusiastically about the profit potential of clothing and home goods, describing them as “high-margin categories” that, when they are “humming on the top line,” generate substantial profit. Sylvester offered the brand’s own-label story as evidence of the value equation at work: “Cat & Jack—phenomenal kids’ clothing brand. We design the leggings with reinforced knees, they’re $5, oh and by the way, you can return it. That is the value equation that we expect of all of our own brands.” (The line generates upwards of $3 billion a year for Target.)

On the one hand, it makes sense for Target to spruce up its apparel lines. According to Coresight Research data, Target’s apparel sales fell almost 5% in 2025, when the rest of the market grew 4.8%. Target’s beauty sales were flat, when the total market grew 5%. “Target needs to act to stem its loss of market share,” says John Mercer, head of global research at Coresight Research.

But on the other, fashion-forward clothing is a discretionary purchase. And families feeling the financial pinch may be less inclined to buy their kids a wardrobe full of trendy new outfits. They might opt, instead, to buy basics from budget retailers like TJ Maxx or buying secondhand from ThredUp.

The Trade-Down Economy Is Real, and Target Is Late to It

While Target has spent years navigating several simultaneous crises—including a boycott because it reneged on its DEI policies, and complaints about messy stores and long check-out line—a different cohort of retailers has been quietly gaining ground.

Walmart has posted consistent comparable sales growth by doubling down on everyday value, grocery, and online sales. Ulta Beauty, once written off as a niche player, has grown explosively by understanding that customers are trading down from luxury but still want occasional indulgences.

The trade-down economy does not mean Americans stop spending. It means they spend more carefully and more deliberately. Value-focused retailers are winning because they are consistently focused on low prices and helping the customer stretch their dollar through promotions and discounts.

Target’s proposition, by contrast, has grown murky. The company is trying to be many things simultaneously: a design destination, a grocery stop, a beauty authority, a tech-enabled convenience play. Fiddelke argues that this allows it to differentiate itself from other retailers, which presumably includes its biggest competitor, Walmart. But this seems misguided. Budget-focused retailers have been growing in recent quarters. It might make better sense for Target to take a page from their playbook.

A Team of Veterans

Fiddelke, who began his career at Target in 2023 as an intern, was named CEO last year. Throughout the call, he argued that his institutional knowledge is a strength. “I feel more aligned as a leadership team and as a company on what our unique path is to win than I’ve probably ever felt in my 23 years,” he said.

Nostalgia is a powerful force inside a corporate culture. But a leadership team that has spent decades inside Target—and has absorbed its mythology—might be poorly positioned to reckon honestly with what it needs to become. Among Fiddleke’s direct reports, Sylvester, COO Lisa Roath, and the head of stores, Adrienne Costanzo, have been at Target for two decades or longer. (Other members of his team, like Lee, head of digital Sarah Travis, CIO Prat Vemana, and head of corporate affairs Alexis Williams, have joined over the last five years.)

When investors pressed on whether Fiddelke’s plan was truly different from past attempts, the answers kept circling back to the same touchstones: design, differentiation, delightful experience. These are real strengths. They built a genuinely beloved brand. But they are also a rearview mirror—a map of a landscape that has already changed.

The centerpiece of Target’s investment plan is the physical store. Hundreds of millions in added payroll, 130-plus full remodels, expansion into new markets. “The delight when we bring a new Target to a new market,” Fiddelke said, invoking the emotional resonance that a store opening can generate in a community. Lee added that the “bulk” of the $1 billion investment would go toward guest-facing store improvements. The company plans to touch all 2,000 locations with new assortment—more newness, Fiddelke said, “than we’ve seen in any year in the last decade.”

Analysts aren’t sure this is the right move. “As a general principle, we are wary of consumer staples retailers pouring money into store remodels when they are losing share to highly price-competitive retailers,” says Mercer of Coresight Research. “It’s an approach that generally hasn’t tended to work well in the past.”

Across Target’s existing footprint, the biggest challenge is not aesthetics. It is whether the value proposition—the reason to drive to a Target rather than click to Amazon or swing through Walmart—is compelling enough at a moment when the consumer isn’t looking for indulgence. In the trade-down economy, delight is a luxury. And Target has not yet made the case that it understands this new reality.

The creative agency Amsterdam Berlin designed the pitch kit, called the “All Conditions Cup System.” It includes everything one might need to host a game—from goals and field lines to chairs, lights, and whistles—all made out of lightweight, portable materials. 

The All Conditions Cup System was designed for the announcement of a new apparel collection between ACG and the Italian soccer club Inter Milan. (ACG, which stands for “All Conditions Gear,” recently provided inflatable team jackets for Team USA Winter Olympians and Paralympians.) As part of the launch, ACG commissioned a soccer pitch (playing field) that could be erected on the snowy mountainside of Piedmont, Italy, for an immersive five-on-five game. 

When it comes to professional sports infrastructure, we’re used to seeing games played inside massive billion-dollar stadiums that permanently alter the rhythms of their home cities. For this activation, ACG and Amsterdam Berlin built a system that purposefully strips out all of those bells and whistles to focus on the natural environment around the game.

A soccer field that leaves no trace

The assembly process of the All Conditions Cup System is similar to pitching a giant tent. 

Each of the kit’s 1,677 components was designed to be easily transported on foot or with sleds, according to Moritz Grub, Amsterdam Berlin’s founder and creative director. The “field” itself is made out of a series of minimal neon orange straps, which are staked into the ground to create the rectangular zones of play.

The bulkier elements of the setup—including both goals, the kit’s four 7-meter-tall floodlights, and 80 chairs—are primarily constructed out of 50-millimeter-wide recycled aluminum tubes that are ultra-light yet durable. Custom click-fit connectors allow these pieces to easily join together, meaning spectators are even able to assemble their own chairs on the field. 

The system can also be adapted to different climates by using a series of interchangeable foot attachments, which resemble claws or stakes. “This means it can be installed on sand, snow, rocky ground, or other difficult surfaces,” Grub says. “In addition, it is height-adjustable and can be easily leveled to uneven terrain.” The fact that orange is one of ACG’s core brand colors, he notes, was a bonus: The system is easily visible in contrast to the snow, dirt, or grass.

When it’s time to pack up the pitch, every piece of the kit can be stored in weather-resistant ripstop bags, which are light enough to carry or lug on a sled. The entire system weighs 2 tons, and it is compact enough to fit inside a small van. It was also designed around a principle of “low-to-no impact” for temporary land use—which means that the whole setup is completely reversible and leaves no physical traces on the actual site. 

For now, Amsterdam Berlin says it doesn’t have plans to make the system a commercially available product. Still, the design offers an interesting case study in making soccer (aka “football” in the vast majority of the world) a more accessible, environmentally friendly sport that’s playable in almost any climate and on almost any terrain.

Dave and Bill are co-founders of the Stanford Life Design Lab and co-authors of the New York Times bestseller, Designing Your Life.

What’s the big idea?

A meaningful life isn’t something you discover once or achieve at the top of a hierarchy. It’s something you design through daily practices, mindsets, and experiences.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Dave and Bill—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.

1. What’s better than fulfillment? Learning to become fully alive

People want their lives to make an impact and to achieve fulfillment. What is it people are looking for when they speak of fulfillment? They’re looking for what Abraham Maslow told them they ought to be looking for: self-actualization.

Going back to 1943, Maslow said, “Self-actualization is the apex of the human experience.” According to him, if you accomplish self-actualization by becoming “all that one can be,” then you will experience fulfillment.

But what we’ve learned in the Life Design Lab over 20 years is that everyone contains far more aliveness, far more human potential, than one lifetime will allow you to express. There’s no way all of you is going to get all the way out in the world.

You can’t be all that you can possibly be, and that’s the good news. It means we can move from FOMO (fear of missing out) to JOMO (joy of missing out). JOMO sounds like, “I’m way too big to be fully expressed, but I do get to pick which parts of me I’m will have a wonderful time exploring.”

Shift from the broken idea of fulfillment to the invitation to becoming fully alive. When you learn how to do that, you’re on your way to a much more meaningful life.

2. How to be in both the transactional world and the flow world

We’ve got to-do lists. We’re accomplishing things. We’re working with other people. And most people are spending 98 percent of their time in that transactional world. It’s a great world. It’s a necessary world. And that’s where important things get done. It is the part of our world where an awful lot of positive feedback occurs—feedback like making money, getting accolades, earning promotions, or feeling accomplished. But it’s not the only part of being a human being.

The other part is the flow world—the world happening in this present moment. It’s the cosmos that’s coursing underneath your feet, in front of your eyes, right now. When you are in it, are you thinking about that to-do list? Are you thinking about that goal? The next thing? No, not in the eternal, ongoing, present moment.

“You can be in two places at once.”

One way to enter the flow world is by learning how to flip or tip into two worlds at the same time. Let’s say you’re sitting in a staff meeting and it’s a little boring. You look out the window and notice the fall scenery. There’s an incredibly gorgeous red tree. As soon as you allow yourself to fully notice that thing happening right in front of you, you have entered the flow world.

You can be in two places at once. You can still get done what needs to get done and pay attention to the flow world along the way.

3. Your mindset seriously matters

Five core mindsets make up what we call The Designer’s Way—basically, a powerful way to think about your life and your place in the world. The five mindsets go like this:

• Wonder (the main character of mindsets) = curiosity + mystery.

Wonder is that vibe when you’re open, curious, and paying attention to the tiny moments that make life feel magical. When you expect good things to show up and be amazing, they weirdly… just are.

• Availability = showing up with a “yeah, let’s see what happens” attitude.

Life drops opportunities everywhere, but you only catch them if you’re available. Life designers keep their options open because more options mean better designs. It’s like upgrading from a sad two-item menu to the full brunch buffet.

• Radical Acceptance = fully acknowledging what is, not what you wish it was.

When you stop fighting reality, you free up a ton of energy to enjoy, create, and experience life. Life’s messy joys, flops, plot twists—all of it. Designers start in reality and meaning shows up right there in the mix.

• Fully Engaged & Calmly Detached = “I’m giving this my all, but I won’t freak out about the outcome.”

When you’re dialed in and doing the work but not stressing about results, you hit peak creativity mode. This combo lets you do your best work and enjoy it more.

• Create Your World = You’re not stuck with the default settings.

In this mindset, you’re not just letting life happen to you—you’re actively co-creating it with the people around you. You start noticing patterns in what used to look random, tuning into the moment, and spotting fresh possibilities everywhere. The world you create from that place can be amazing.

Some mindset combos of the above are basically the Avengers of personal growth—powerful on their own, but unstoppable together. The Designer’s Way power couple is Radical Acceptance + Availability. Radical acceptance by itself is great, but when you add availability, suddenly you’re not just open…you’re open and ready to roll. It’s a whole leaning-in, “let’s make something happen” energy. When someone can embody both acceptance and availability, they’re in this incredibly sweet spot where they are calm, present, and poised to make the most out anything life throws their way.

4. Put on your Wonder Glasses

Across many cultures and traditions, one story keeps popping up: totally normal people having these wild, transcendent, out-of-body moments of pure wonder. And even though the people are different, the experiences are weirdly similar. In these rare but seriously powerful moments, everything feels sharper, clearer—like your awareness leveled up. It’s that big oneness energy, a deep sense of connection to nature, humanity, everything.

A whole-body, soul-level feeling of wonder: you don’t need a mystical lightning bolt to get there. You can tap into wonder almost anytime by putting on your Wonder Glasses—not real glasses, but a metaphorical pair of lenses that make the world look more colorful and joyful.

“You don’t need a mystical lightning bolt to get there.”

With your Wonder Glasses on, you’re actively looking for something amazing: a flower that’s extra beautiful, a sunset that hits harder than it needs to, or a kid on a swing having the time of their life. The wonder is always there, and sometimes you just need those glasses to see it.

5. Welcome to flow, coherence, and formative community

First, flow is that magical state where time seems to stop, and you’re fully absorbed in what you’re doing. Neuroscience tells us there are tons of ways to get into flow, and it doesn’t have to be epic or dramatic. I hit flow chopping onions and cooking a great meal. Athletes get in the zone. Runners drift into it mid-run.

One of the easiest ways to add more meaning to your everyday life is by incorporating more mini flow moments. Once you get good at managing your mindset, any activity can take you there. The options are endless.

Second, living a coherent life means the pieces of your internal world match up. There are three parts to check in on:

• Your identity—the story you tell yourself about who you are.
• Your work view—what work means to you and how it fits into your life.
• Your life view—your big-picture take on what life is all about.

Research shows that when these three line up, everything feels more you. That feeling of alignment is a major generator of meaning and purpose.

And third, we arrive at formative community. As humans, we’re all in a constant loop of being → doing → becoming. In this way, we are always evolving into the next version of ourselves. Because of that, it’s crucial to find formative communities. These aren’t just hangout groups or project teams; they’re spaces where people come together to support each other’s growth—to help each person become their best self, together. These kinds of communities are essential.

Enjoy our full library of Book Bites—read by the authors!—in the Next Big Idea app.

This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.

None of his moves since embody this idea more than Live Mas LIVE, Taco Bell’s live stage show in the spirit of Apple’s WWDC. The show began in 2024, when Taco Bell fanatics (myself included) traveled to Las Vegas to watch company execs unveil the brand’s new and limited edition menu items for the year.

It was an absurdly perfect premise (a fast food company doing a product launch?!), but now it seems that Taco Bell is beating Apple at its own game. The company’s upcoming Live Mas event—happening on March 3 at Hollywood Palladium—is evolving beyond the WWDC model by going full-fledged variety show. The upshot? This is a company that is so in on its own joke that it’s turning that joke into real culture.

This year’s show is hosted by artist Vince Staples and will feature musical acts Doja Cat and Benson Boone, sports stars like NFLer Davante Adams, projected no. 1 NFL draft pick Fernando Mendoza. An edited version of the live show will stream exclusively on NBCUniversal’s Peacock on March 10.

Global chief brand officer Taylor Montgomery describes this year’s version as be a cross between the White House Correspondents’ dinner and the Emmys… which sounds a little weird! But so far, the brand’s thesis—that building content around its hardcore fans is a path to broader success and results—appears to be proving out. Parent company Yum Brands’ most recent earnings saw Taco Bell as the brightest spot in its portfolio, with 8% growth last year. 

Incremental evolution

Tresvant and Montgomery originally got the idea for Live Mas LIVE after watching Apple’s WWDC developer event in June 2023. Montgomery remembers wondering, “If Apple can do [an event like] that, with, like, a $1,000 iPhone made out of titanium that most of America can’t afford, why can’t we?”

The first two years of LIVE were designed to tap into Taco Bell’s rabid fanbase, which is deeply invested in its menu items. This year, though, the company is doubling down on the entertainment aspect of branded entertainment. “The most successful brands, I believe, are starting to behave more like entertainment companies,” says Montgomery. “The bar for what consumers want to engage with, whether you’re a brand that operates in QSR, or you’re an entertainment company or a music company, they’re all the same.”

Walking the line between high-profile experiential brand event and streaming entertainment is a tight needle to thread, and Taco Bell is approaching it with some caution. Even though the Palladium holds about 3,500 people, the brand is only hosting an audience of about 400, with tickets given to L.A. area Taco Bell Rewards Members on a first-come, first-served basis.

Onstage there is a seemingly random collection of famous names. Ariana Madix (Love Island USA, Vanderpump Rules), Ashley Park (Emily in Paris), Ego Nwodim (Saturday Night Live), comedian Devon Walker, athletes like Davante Adams, and Fernando Mendoza, and artists like DJ Pee.Wee (aka Anderson .Paak), Doja Cat, Benson Boone, Myke Towers, Yeat and more. All they seemingly have in common is a genuine taste for Taco Bell. 

“There’s so many people around the world that love Taco Bell, so for this one we threw up the bat signal and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to do something crazy in Hollywood, but that’s never been done before. Who’s in?’” says Montgomery. 

Experimentation as execution

When I attended the inaugural Live Mas LIVE in Las Vegas, there was a atmosphere of creative experimentation. The audience of about 200 was primarily hardcore fans of the brand and fast-food influencers, with a smattering of celebrity. It was mostly just Montgomery, Tresvant, and chief food and innovation officer Liz Matthews taking turns to unveil the year’s line-up of limited edition products. It had the vibe of food truck party that also happened to be a corporate retreat.

This year is a significant leveling up in terms of the show’s scale and the talent in attendance. But the brand is not taking too many chances, with a relatively small live audience, it will be able to curate the show edit before it hits Peacock a week later. That built-in layer of safety illustrates how Live Mas LIVE is very much still an ongoing experiment.

Montgomery says they plan to iterate on the LIVE format for years—perhaps growing its audience or loosening the guardrails—as long as its hardcore fans are happy to come along for the ride. He’s found that the thing that matters the most is simply giving people something to be excited about. (Like, say, a key lime pie–meets–Mtn Dew Baja Blast Pie.) 

“When you do things that are wild and innovative, it helps people really connect with us, sets expectations that we will give them that entertainment and levity and things to talk about with all of their friends,” he says.

Cultural researcher Matt Klein, author of award-winning cultural intel and research newsletter ZINE, says that even if the event is uneven or doesn’t draw millions of viewers to Peacock, more brands should take this approach. Not as a blueprint, but a sign to experiment more intently in their own way. 

“In a culture in which we are so afraid to make any creative decision without a bajillion data points and 500 slides to back up why we should do this, this is an organization that is playing with culture,” says Klein. “They’re rolling up their sleeves and just experimenting. They’re zagging, and that is worth applause.”

It’s critical that the experimentation isn’t just for fun. Montgomery says that because they combine entertainment with real upcoming new and limited edition menu items, the fan reactions in-person and online play a valuable role far beyond the single event. 

“We actually use it like a live focus group,” says Montgomery, about the entertainment format and the new menu items. “Let’s see what consumers say, and if they go for it, okay, awesome, we’ll put it on the calendar. If not, okay, then let’s think about something else. So I think we have used it a lot as a cultural thermostat on my brand view.”

Whatever happens this year, it will just be the newest dish from the brand’s entertainment test kitchen. 

Two months after the ruling, on February 13, Tesla’s attorneys filed a complaint alleging the state “wrongfully and baselessly” labeled it a false advertiser, brazenly arguing that “it was impossible” to buy or use the “auto-pilot” software “without seeing clear and repeated statements that they do not make the vehicle autonomous.” Yet, their fine-print defense clashes with Musk’s failed promises and stunts, such as when he took his hands off the wheel on CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2018 and proudly declared he was “not doing anything.” Or when he showed fake, staged videos of Autopilot in action.

Four days after Tesla’s complaint, California’s DMV backed off its shutdown threats when the company agreed to clean up its marketing, rebranding the $99-a-month subscription to “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)”.

Now CNBC reports that Tesla is suing anyway to completely reverse the ruling. Musk is demanding the right to use his futuristic language to sell cars— determined false by the courts—while simultaneously relying on its owners’ manuals to shift the blame to drivers the second the system fails. The move prompted the DMV to declare it will “defend the Administrative Law Judge’s findings and decision in court” to protect the public.

Long trail of bodies

Tesla’s new legal gambit to defend its autonomous driving fantasy clashes with the brutal reality of a deficient technology. Tesla cars still only have a Level 2 autonomy—a mechanism designed to handle basic steering and speed—out of four levels (the fourth is true full autonomy, which so far only Chinese manufacturer BYD has been able to achieve while parking).

According to the Tesla accident tracking site Tesla Deaths, in the decade after the release of Autopilot in October 2015 there have been at least 65 fatalities connected to Tesla’s Autopilot system. Of those, an April 2024 NHTSA report investigated and verified 29 fatal crashes.

The common thread in these tragedies is a catastrophic failure of the Level 2 advanced driver assistance system to recognize stationary objects or crossing vehicles. In May 2016, Joshua Brown died in Florida when the system failed to notice the white side of an 18-wheeler against a bright sky, leading the National Transportation Safety Board to conclude the software permitted “prolonged disengagement from the driving task.” Incidents continued over the years, culminating in a landmark August 2025 federal jury verdict where Tesla was found 33% liable and ordered to pay $243 million after a 2019 crash in Key Largo, where the driver admitted, “I trusted the technology too much.”

While Tesla continues to beta-test its software on public roads with deadly consequences, international competitors are quietly delivering the autonomous future Musk has been promising for a decade. Chinese automaker BYD recently deployed its ‘God’s Eye’ intelligent driving system over-the-air to more than one million cars, introducing a Level 4 autonomous parking feature that allows a vehicle to navigate a lot, find a spot, and park completely unattended.

Unlike Tesla’s stubborn reliance on cameras alone, BYD utilizes a robust sensor architecture that includes up to 12 cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors with 0.4-inch accuracy, millimeter-wave radars, and even lidar on higher trims. BYD is so confident in this technology that it issued a blanket guarantee to cover any damages if the system makes a mistake. They are not the only ones. Volvo, who uses Waymo’s self-driving system, also covers any damages. Tesla, on the other hand, deflects blame to the driver. 

Failure after failure

Musk has been predicting the imminent arrival of FSD every year for over a decade now. The gap between his grand vision and Tesla’s actual engineering output has become a chasm of broken promises and delayed timelines. So much so that I’m beginning to think that, in his head, FSD must mean Full Self-Delusion.

Musk promised a steering-wheel-free Cybercab by 2026, but January came and he changed the tune to “before 2027,” saying it was going to be extremely hard to produce them in big numbers. He also claimed that autonomy will begin moving the financial needle by mid-2026 and that the company’s humanoid Optimus robots will soon hit a production rate of one million units per year.

Reality tells a drastically different story, with executives warning Musk that the profitability for the robotaxi venture would be “very, very hard outside the U.S.” It’s a reality check that is reflected in the data. According to the latest stats, Waymo’s autonomous cabs currently manage a staggering 17,311 miles between disengagements, while Tesla’s Full Self-Driving struggles to hit just 489 miles before a human has to intervene.

Despite these internal warnings and external failures, Musk refuses to change course or adopt better hardware. He famously dismissed lidar—a crucial technology that uses pulsed laser light to map the environment in three dimensions, much like a bat uses echolocation to navigate in the dark—as a “crutch” and a “loser’s technology.” Instead, he opted to strip ultrasonic sensors from Tesla vehicles entirely, a cost-cutting move that has resulted in owners reporting persistent errors with basic parking assist features, particularly when rain, snow, or low light blinds the camera lenses. 

Tesla seems to be trying to change the narrative and manipulate public perception with words, but the public is increasingly not buying the propaganda. Tesla sales continue to tank quarter after quarter due to stale design, lack of innovation, and Musk’s personal brand failure. While the courts will ultimately decide if the automaker can continue advertising its flawed experimental program by dressing it up in the costume of a fully self-driving machine, the public has spoken.