The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George HW Bush shot down multiple drones with a high-energy laser weapon stationed on its flight deck during a first-of-its-kind live-fire test in October 2025, the Navy recently revealed. Photos published to the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) on April 20 show a 20 kilowatt Palletized High Energy Laser (P-HEL) system—based on the LOCUST Laser Weapon System from defense contractor AV and on loan from the U.S. Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO)—ahead of testing in the Atlantic Ocean.

The laser weapon “tracked, engaged, and neutralized multiple target drones, including drone swarms” from the deck of the Bush, AV officials said in a press release, “marking a major milestone toward fielding operational directed energy capabilities across all domains and platforms.” AV vice president for directed energy systems John Garrity says that the live-fire test involved 17 drones.

Beyond the containerized P-HEL, which has been protecting U.S. service members from low-cost weaponized drones overseas or years, the Army currently possesses at least four LOCUST systems integrated onto M1301 Infantry Squad Vehicles and Joint Light Tactical Vehicles through the service’s Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) initiative. The U.S. Marine Corps also awarded a contract to AV in November 2023 to deliver a LOCUST laser weapon for integration into a JLTV, although it’s unclear if the service has taken receipt of that system yet.

As I previously reported, AV predecessor company BlueHalo1 had been in discussions with the Navy since at least 2024 to test the LOCUST not just on aircraft carriers, but potentially on submarines as well.

The live-fire aboard the Bush represents a departure from the Navy’s previous shipboard laser weapon efforts. As we’ve previously noted, the service’s Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers that host the 60 kw High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) and lower-power Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy (ODIN) systems are inherently strapped for juice due to existing power demands from capabilities like the Flight III variants’ new AN/SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar systems. As Garrity explains, the Bush live-fire showed that LOCUST can not only recharge from an aircraft carrier’s nuclear reactors with ease, but that power requisition aboard Flight III destroyers should prove no significant obstacle to keeping the system in a fight.

Then there’s the space element. While the Navy had previously integrated the HELIOS and ODIN systems directly into Aegis Combat Systems across the service’s Arleigh Burke fleet, the employment of a palletized LOCUST is firmly in line with Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle’s vision of a future surface fleet augmented by modular, containerized capabilities that can be rapidly configured for specific missions and deployed aboard warships without a costly and time-consuming integration process. (Indeed, HELIOS maker Lockheed Martin is also developing a containerized version of the laser weapon, a company executive revealed in September 2025.)

“Missiles and [unmanned surface vehicles] are not the only thing that can fit inside of these, from towed-array-systems, to drone swarms, to electronic attack systems, to high-powered lasers,” Caudle stated at the McAleese Defense Programs conference in Arlington, Virginia on March 17. “I want to containerize everything.”

At first glance, the aircraft carrier seems like the ideal naval platform for laser weapons, containerized or otherwise, simply because it does not suffer the same power or space constraints as smaller surface combatants. This isn’t a totally new concept: Navy Capt. William McCarthy, at the time the commander of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George Washington, argued in a study for the U.S. Air Force Center for Strategy and Technology in 20002 that “given the sheer size and the margin of power available, the [Carrier Vessel Nuclear] is the best-suited warship to integrate the directed energy technologies” like laser weapons.

Just as importantly, aircraft carriers sit at the center of the Navy’s most valuable and threatened formations, prime targets for drone and cruise missiles attacks and other asymmetric threats like explosive-laden drone boats. The service has increasingly fielded novel counter-drone capabilities like Coyote and Roadrunner interceptors to carrier strike groups deployed to the Middle East for this exact reason following attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen on military and merchant vessels in the Red Sea. With their low cost-per-shot and relatively deep magazines, laser weapons and other directed energy systems could potentially offer carriers a “robust self defense capability” so they can save their limited kinetic interceptor stockpiles for higher-end threats, as McCarthy put it, a capability that may also come with restored maritime mobility.

“Freed from the need for a layered defensive screen of ships, the nuclear powered carrier, operating in tandem with a nuclear powered submarine, could exploit its inherent speed and self-sufficiency to deny its adversaries an opportunity for conducting asymmetric attacks,” McCarthy argued. “By dispersing the battle group, each platform could choose the optimum location for its primary mission of launching cruise missiles, defending against theater missiles, protecting commerce, or maritime interdiction. This flexibility will become increasingly important as the Navy moves to a smaller and more capable force that operates in the littoral region close to the shore.”

Of course, the challenges that come with employing laser weapons in a maritime environment do not simply evaporate on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. As previously noted, atmospheric instability wrought by water vapor, dust, salt aerosols, and temperature fluctuations can all contribute to bending, diffusing, or bleeding off energy from a laser beam, reducing even the most powerful system’s effectiveness. Meanwhile, access to a potent power source like a carrier’s nuclear reactors can’t overcome the fact that laser weapons require dwell time to neutralize incoming targets, meaning they can be easily overwhelmed by saturation attacks like those that have defined the rise of drone warfare. Sure, a single successful strike that squeaks through is nowhere near powerful enough to sink an aircraft carrier, but adversaries could plausibly exploit these dwell time constraints by using drones to run interference against laser emplacements or deplete interceptor arsenals to pave the way for devastating anti-ship cruise missiles.

But the more significant problem for carrier-based laser weapons may be actually using them during a high-intensity combat engagement. The flight decks on carriers are arguably among the most congested and dynamic airspace in military operations, with multiple aircraft launching and recovering during combat. Introducing a weapon that requires a stable, uninterrupted beam (that’s also invisible to the naked eye) adds a punishing layer of complexity to an already crowded battlespace, requiring meticulous deconfliction with friendly aircraft and sensors to avoid a catastrophic mishap. Now imagine that deconfliction playing out against, say, a swarm of incoming Iranian Shahed-136 drones. An carrier obviously does not suffer from the same jurisdictional or governance ambiguity that yielded the airspace-closing laser shootdown in El Paso, Texas in February, but the same risk of friendly fire remains a valid concern even with automated safety layers like those integrated into the LOCUST system.

The Bush live-fire proves that laser weapons are a natural fit for large, power-rich aircraft carriers, but the more pressing question is whether they can function effectively within the compressed and chaotic battlespace that such capital assets designed to survive. Once thing is certain: when the Navy’s laser carrier is ultimately put to test, it will almost certainly be a trial by fire—or, in this case, light.

This article is republished with permission from Laser Wars, a newsletter about military laser weapons and other futuristic defense technology.

Those deals included new contracts with companies like Re.green, which is restoring a swath of the Amazon rainforest, and Vaulted, which removes carbon by burying organic waste. Last month, it added a contract with Liferaft, a company making biochar from agricultural waste in the Midwest. The industry uses a wide range of technologies to tackle one part of the climate challenge: at the same time society cuts emissions, it’s also critical to find viable ways to remove the CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere.

Microsoft was responsible for nearly 90% of all purchases of “durable” carbon removal credits last year, meaning projects that capture CO2 nearly permanently (that includes Vaulted’s work, for example, but not reforestation projects, where carbon can be lost in a wildfire or when trees die.)

The contracts last years, and the ones that were in place will keep going. But startups hoping to break in through the industry’s biggest buyer are now left wondering what comes next.

It’s not yet clear what Microsoft’s long-term plans are. In a statement, the company’s sustainability director, Melanie Nakagawa, said, “Our decarbonization approach combines reduction, removal and efficiency, and carbon removal is one piece of that equation. At times we may adjust the pace or volume of our carbon removal procurement as we continue to refine our approach toward sustainability goals.”

Some industry insiders say Microsoft may have already contracted enough carbon removal to meet its 2030 goal of becoming carbon negative, or removing more CO2 than it emits, though an expected spike in data center emissions is making that target more challenging.

New purchases that begin construction now also might not be ready in time for 2030; the company may be stopping to make plans for later decades. “2030 is now only four years away,” says Andrew Shebbeare, a partner at Counteract, a VC fund focused on carbon removal. “And it’s quite hard for a carbon removal developer to spin off a project inside four years that’s going to make a material contribution to the carbon budget of a company like Microsoft.”

A number of companies that were in talks with Microsoft say they haven’t heard directly about a pause in purchasing; another was told any pause would be temporary. But the reports have kicked off a more urgent conversation about funding. The industry has long known that Microsoft wouldn’t keep buying at a breakneck pace forever.

“I think the general sentiment has been, okay, the market has to be supported by a broader diversity of actors,” says Ben Rubin, executive director of the Carbon Business Council, a group representing more than 100 “carbon management” companies. “It can’t rest in the hands of just a few companies.”

Microsoft’s scale has somewhat obscured the fact that the rest of the market is growing. Other tech companies are active in the space: Meta, for example, met a goal last year to contract $35 million in new carbon removal credits, including from a forestry project in Washington State. Google hasn’t yet released its report for last year but committed $100 million to carbon removal projects in 2024. Apple continues to support nature-based removal, including a project that planted 8 million trees across 24,000 acres in Brazil last year. Frontier, a group designed to help catalyze the industry by committing to buy credits from early-stage startups, includes Google, Stripe, and Shopify, among others.

While tech companies have been foundational to the industry’s growth, a more diverse set of buyers is now emerging. Lego, for example, recently invested in both reforestation projects and new technologies like marine carbon dioxide removal. JPMorgan Chase is a major buyer, as are Airbus and Boeing.

Even as the industry grows, it’s still tiny in relation to the problem: the world emitted more than 53 gigatons of CO2 in 2025. Carbon removal companies have only removed between 1 and 5 million tons, cumulatively.

For companies to scale, support from corporate buyers needs to grow, but so does policy. “We need more voluntary buyers today in order to get new technologies from lab to field, and a diversity of buyers buying at scale is critical for a robust and healthy market,” says Hannah Bebbington Valori, head of deployment at Frontier. “And two, the voluntary carbon market is not the end game here, but at the end of the day, carbon removal getting to gigaton scale is really going to require meaningful policies in the long term.” Lawmakers in Canada are calling for the government to adopt national carbon removal goals; the European Union is considering including carbon removal in its emission trading scheme.

Since both corporate support and policy can be fickle, the ideal solution might be technology that can support itself without credits. Right now, many carbon removal technologies are still expensive, at hundreds of dollars per ton of CO2 removed. But others can make enough money to operate by selling other services. A startup called Capture6, for example, makes technology that processes brine waste at water treatment plants, creates sustainable chemicals for sale, and captures CO2 on the side.

“We’re hopeful that voluntary and compliance markets [for carbon credits] continue to grow,” Ethan Cohen-Cole, the founder, told me in 2024. “But in the absence of those, we also believe that ultimately carbon dioxide removal can scale to its potential by enabling other industries to become more efficient.”

Other companies, like Mati Carbon and Lithos, sell a crushed rock treatment that farmers can use to increase yields, but that doubles as another way to capture CO2. As power demand surges, others may build low-cost power plants, sell part of the power to a data center or the grid, and use the rest to run a direct air capture plant. Companies like Vaulted can make money by selling waste disposal services, not just carbon removal.

Crew Carbon, another startup, removes carbon from wastewater while improving the performance and cost of running a wastewater treatment plant. “It’s massively reducing the cost of plant upgrades for people who deploy the technology,” says Shebbeare. “So now when they pitch to a wastewater treatment plant, they’re not even selling on carbon removal. They’re selling on reduced opex and capex of the wastewater treatment plants. And they’re quietly removing CO2 from the atmosphere.”

A startup called Ebb makes technology that helps desalination plants produce more freshwater, generates chemicals that can be sold, and simultaneously helps amplify the ocean’s ability to capture CO2 from the air.

“There’s quite a lot of places that we think that that sort of model will help grow carbon removal without lots and lots of expensive private capital,” he says.

While the timing of the announcement on Monday was unexpected, nearly everything else about the development was not. In fact, Apple’s leadership transition is turning out to be one of the most carefully choreographed CEO shakeups in corporate history. Here’s why, and what comes next.

Apple isn’t just any company, it’s a $4 trillion industry leader

Any time a CEO changes, uncertainty is introduced—not just at the company but into investors’ minds. New leadership often means new corporate directions and priorities—and the possibility that the new leader might not be as good as the last.

All that makes investors worry, which is why a company’s stock can be highly volatile following news of a leadership change.

Apple knows this. It was aware that even the slightest negative public reaction to its CEO switch could wipe hundreds of billions from its nearly $4 trillion market cap. And while the company’s leadership might have been okay with a (likely temporary) dip, its millions of retail and institutional investors would not.

Worse, a larger selloff could have helped reinforce a narrative that Apple had made the wrong decision, which could have damaged the company’s image and hurt employee morale.

And that’s exactly why Apple seems to have spent the past few years carefully choreographing its CEO transition.

A scripted transition

Apple knew it needed to get investors and industry watchers comfortable with the idea that Tim Cook, one of the most influential CEOs in both tech and political circles, and one who has taken Apple from a $350 billion company during his tenure to a $4 trillion one, must inevitably retire. It started early.

Tim Cook began talking about his eventual retirement back in 2023. He appeared on Dua Lipa’s podcast that November, revealing that Apple had “very detailed succession plans” but assuring the singer that he would remain at the company for “a while.”

The message was casual, meant to acclimate people to the idea that Cook had thought about retirement, and Apple had plans for it, but he wasn’t going anywhere yet.

Over the next couple of years, Cook occasionally touched on the possibility of his retirement, while reiterating that Apple had a number of great options when it came to executives who could replace him. During this time, the company also began putting those potential candidates in public-facing forums. Ternus, particularly, became a familiar face in the company’s product launch videos and press releases.

Then, in November 2025, when Cook turned the usual retirement age of 65, the Financial Times came out with a big scoop. It reported that Cook would step down as CEO “as soon as next year,” and that John Ternus was seen as his most likely successor, something I and others had long speculated.

The publication went on to state, “An announcement early in the year would give its new leadership team time to settle in ahead of its big annual keynote events, its developer conference in June and its iPhone launch in September.” The FT cited several people who’d been privy to discussions about succession inside Apple as the sources.

This week, we learned that everything the FT reported in November was indeed correct. The thing is, even then, many industry watchers pointed out that the FT’s scoop might not have been so much a scoop as a managed leak by Apple, otherwise known as a “trial balloon” in the PR industry.

This is when a company is worried about how an announcement may impact its stock, so it leaks carefully controlled information to a publication and gauges the reaction. If the reaction is negative, the company can simply deny the report and, behind closed doors, change its plans. However, after the report, Apple’s stock price edged up slightly, signaling to Apple that investors were comfortable with the news.

What’s really interesting is that, if the FT story were a controlled leak by Apple, it seemed to have given the company confidence not just to move ahead with its Ternus plans, but to announce the news on Monday—not a Friday after markets close, which is when companies usually choose to dump news they fear could sink their stock.

And Apple could have announced Ternus’s appointment the previous Friday instead of waiting until Monday. We know this because of a Form 8-K filing Apple filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) after announcing the transition.

In that 8-K, Apple revealed that the company’s board actually appointed Ternus as the next CEO on Friday, April 17. Still, the company waited until Monday, April 20, to announce the news. This suggests that it thought investors would not react negatively, likely because Apple had spent years successfully telegraphing the news so well, and that Apple also thought the media reaction would be mainly positive, so why not capture a full week’s news cycle?

Here’s what comes next

Apple’s carefully orchestrated CEO handover is far from over. Between now and September 1, when Ternus actually assumes the role of CEO from Tim Cook, you can expect Apple to try to blur the lines between the two men even more, in an attempt to show that everything will continue to be business as usual at the $4 trillion tech giant.

(The cynic in me thinks that Apple is even attempting to do this visually. In the company’s press release announcing the CEO transition, the image that Apple provided of John Ternus and Tim Cook walking side by side shows the two men wearing nearly identical outfits.)

Specifically, look for both Cook and Ternus to be the star presenters at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote on June 8, with Ternus likely taking center stage in specific segments of the pre-recorded event.

And leading up to September 1, keep an eye out for Cook and Ternus to do the media rounds espousing not just stability and continuity, but the exciting opportunities that lie ahead for Apple in the age of AI.

Ternus will likely give several stand-alone interviews that will be published on September 1, when he officially becomes Apple’s next CEO. After that, expect him to make his most public-facing debut just days later at Apple’s iPhone 18 event in September, where, for the first time, he will address the millions of fans who tune in as chief executive.

Raman is LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer. He previously served as senior adviser on economic strategy to the state of California and led economic impact at Facebook. Roslansky, who is CEO of LinkedIn, is also EVP of Microsoft Office and Copilot.

What’s the big idea?

AI’s impact on work is unfolding in real time—rapidly—and individuals have more agency than they think. By understanding how skills, roles, and industries are evolving, anyone can actively shape their career and stay ahead in the age of AI.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Raman—in the Next Big Idea app, or buy the book.

1. Jobs are tasks, not titles.

Most of us define ourselves and what we do based on our job titles: I’m an accountant, I’m a nurse, I’m a marketer, or I’m an engineer. And it makes sense, given that for decades our titles told our companies where to put us. But titles are not the most useful way to think about work anymore because AI is not coming for titles, it’s coming for tasks. When you start seeing your job not as a title but as a set of tasks, it makes it easier to understand what’s changing and what to do about it.

Go grab a piece of paper. Now write down the top dozen tasks that take up most of your time at work. Not your job title, job description, or your goals. The actual things you do day-to-day. Then, sort all those tasks into three buckets:

• Bucket 1: Tasks AI can do alone. Think of this as data entry. Basic research. Scheduling that doesn’t require conversation.
• Bucket 2: Tasks you’ll do with AI. Think of this as strategy with AI analysis. Creative work with AI tools. Problem-solving aided by market research. This is where most of your work will start to live.
• Bucket 3: Tasks that remain uniquely human. Think of this as building relationships. Leading through uncertainty. Making hard judgment calls. Ask yourself: Does this require reading emotions or building trust? Would a human touch make a crucial difference? If yes, it belongs here.

Now, think of these three buckets like a conveyor belt: Bucket 1 tasks will increasingly disappear as AI gets more advanced. But as they do, new opportunities emerge in Bucket 2, allowing you to use AI to do things that weren’t possible before. And as you master Bucket 2, you create space and ideas for deeper Bucket 3 work that no machine can touch.

Over time, success is about moving tasks across your buckets. Start deliberately moving tasks from Bucket 1 to Bucket 2 by adding human judgment to routine work. Start using AI tools in Bucket 2 to free up time for more Bucket 3 tasks. And start expanding your Bucket 3 capabilities, because that’s where durable value lives.

It’s not just about sorting tasks into buckets but developing the meta-skill of actively curating them over time. This is not a one-time exercise, but something you’ll continue to work at as your job evolves.

2. Soft skills are survival skills.

Certain skills set us apart from AI, and we call them the 5Cs:

• Curiosity
• Courage
• Creativity
• Compassion
• Communication

These skills are core to how we come up with new ideas and solutions. For decades, the 5Cs have been dismissed as soft skills, meaning “nice-to-haves” that took a back seat to the hard skills our economy valued most. In the coming years, it will become clear that soft skills are anything but soft. They are key to our survival at work.

Think about how these 5Cs show up in your own work today:

• Curiosity. AI can process patterns. Only you ask, “What if we tried something completely different?”
• Courage. AI can calculate risk. Only you decide what risk is worth taking.
• Creativity. AI remixes what exists. Only you reimagine what’s possible.
• Compassion. AI can simulate concern. Only you can empathize from lived experience.
• Communication. AI translates language. Only you turn language into meaning.

Don’t think of these skills in isolation. As neuroscientist Vivienne Ming points out, “These aren’t five separate items on a checklist. They feed each other. Curiosity without courage leads to inaction. Creativity without communication remains a private hobby. Compassion gives our work purpose.”

While everyone’s racing to out-code AI, you should be honing the things that AI can never replace. The 5Cs are your competitive edge.

3. Careers aren’t ladders; they’re climbing walls.

The career ladder is a relic of the industrial age, and it’s coming undone. For generations, the playbook was clear and unchanging: By and large, you joined a company after graduating from school, climbed steadily for decades, and retired with a pension and a gold watch. One path. One employer. One direction—up.

But ladders only work when the world is stable. When skills last decades. When jobs stay the same. That world has been on the way out, but now AI is accelerating the pace. Professionals entering the workforce today will hold twice as many jobs over their careers as those in the previous generation. The ladder doesn’t work when your job changes faster than you can get promoted. Or when your industry shifts faster than you can figure out what to pivot into next.

So, think of your career path less like a ladder and more like a climbing wall. Multiple routes up. Sideways motions that build new skills. Sometimes, even going down to find stronger positions. The best climbers won’t follow someone else’s path: They’ll design their own.

You’re already on the wall, whether you realize it or not. To guide your climb, ask yourself three big questions:

• Why do you work? Whether it’s financial security or a sense of purpose, what’s driving you to show up every day?
• What do you uniquely do? What’s the combination of skills only you bring?
• Where are you going? What problems do you want to solve and who do you want to solve them with?

4. Our brains aren’t wired to handle exponential change.

The S curve of change is a helpful way to understand how big shifts, like new technologies or major trends, tend to unfold over time. At first, progress is slow and almost invisible—that’s the bottom of the S, and that’s when most people feel comfortable ignoring it. Like the internet in 1993, social media in 2004, and AI in 2020. Then, momentum builds and adoption accelerates rapidly—that’s the steep middle of the S. Finally, growth levels off as the change becomes mainstream and widely accepted—that’s the top of the S.

AI isn’t at the bottom of the S curve anymore. ChatGPT hit 100 million users faster than any technology in history. We’re entering the steep part where adoption stops being optional. The question is: Are you engaging with this change as it starts to speed up?

Our brains are wired to fear change and not process exponential change. That’s why managing S curves is so hard. And while we have had decades and years to manage past ones, we don’t have as much time with AI. Change will never be this slow again. AI will never be this basic again. The time to experiment is now. Adapting beats predicting.

5. Nobody beats you at being you.

There are well over three billion people in the global workforce. More than a billion of them are on LinkedIn. Only one of them is you.

That might sound obvious, but it’s easy to forget when you’re at work, trying to fit in. We often spend our careers molding ourselves to job descriptions, industry standards, and the “proven path.” We’re asked to demonstrate the right competencies to show we can do what others have already done. The entire machinery of work, from résumés to reviews, is designed to make us comparable, categorizable, and measurable against others.

But when AI handles the standard, things start to flip. Suddenly, your differences become your competitive advantage. The specific combination of failures and triumphs that taught you resilience in ways no curriculum could capture. The childhood spent between cultures that lets you see patterns others miss. The decade you “wasted” in the wrong career that gave you insights no straight path could provide. The quirks in how you approach problems. The unconventional connections you make between ideas.

For your entire career, you’ve probably been told to smooth over these edges to make yourself more marketable. In a world where AI can replicate the standard approach, those edges are going to make you irreplaceable.

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.

Work worthy of our effort creates value on two dimensions: it generates value for others (your organization, customers, or the people around you), and it creates value for yourself through personal meaning and growth. Research shows that connecting to both dimensions taps into our intrinsic and values-based motivation. When those connections are weak, despite being busy, the work doesn’t create real value. 

Here are five signs your hard work may have shifted into demotivating territory, and how to redirect it to focus on the right activities and make your effort sustainable.

VALUE FOR OTHERS

Sign 1: You can’t link your effort to a meaningful outcome

You’ve taken on a major initiative, but you can’t state how it benefits the organization, your team, or a customer. When the throughline between your effort and a meaningful outcome isn’t clear, it can make the difference between a project feeling like a priority or pointless. 

How we view our contribution matters. Researchers Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton found that hospital workers doing identical jobs experienced their work as either drudgery or deeply purposeful. The difference wasn’t the work but whether they could connect their effort to a meaningful contribution, in this case the health and well-being of patients.

Redirect: Before investing significant effort, ask: How is this connected to our organization and team goals? Who will use this, and what will it help them do? 

Sign 2: Your work goes unacknowledged

You pour effort into a deliverable like a last-minute analysis or report and then… nothing. No acknowledgement of receipt, no feedback, no appreciation of the effort. The work disappears into a void, as if it never existed. 

This is a sure-fire way to kill motivation. Research by Dan Ariely showed that people’s motivation was negatively impacted when their work was visibly dismissed. In contrast, minimal acknowledgment went a long way to boost effort. Feedback is an antidote to make work meaningful.

But just because you didn’t hear back doesn’t mean your work didn’t matter. It may have informed a decision or shifted someone’s thinking. We don’t always get the benefit of feedback loops being closed. So if you haven’t heard, ask.

Redirect: If you consistently can’t see what happens with your work, directly ask to learn the impact both before and after starting a project. Before: “How will this be used?” After: “What was the outcome of what I created?”

Sign 3: You can’t make meaningful progress

You’re energized to push a high-stakes project forward and you know why it matters, but you keep hitting roadblocks and can’t make progress. Leadership can’t align to the desired outcome, priorities shift, or you get blocked by approval bottlenecks. You’re not stuck because you lack motivation. You’re stuck because the system won’t let you move forward.

This is when motivation drops. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer’s research found that making progress on meaningful work is the single most powerful driver of work satisfaction. Getting blocked can make effort feel futile.

Redirect: Identify one part of the project within your control and make visible progress on it this week. If the blockers are systemic, bring recommendations to your leader for overcoming the challenges like clearer problem definition, re-evaluation of the project’s priority, or stakeholder analysis to unblock approvals. 

VALUE FOR YOURSELF

Sign 4: Your work conflicts with your values

You thought the job was a fit, but you’re increasingly asked to do work that’s in conflict with what you believe in, be it your professional ethics, your values, or your sense of what’s right. This isn’t just uncomfortable, research identifies values mismatch as a known pathway to burnout. That’s because values conflict isn’t about not enjoying your work; it’s identity friction, a sense that your work is making you into someone you don’t want to be. 

Redirect: Identify specifically where the conflict lies. Is it a single project, a manager’s approach, or the organization’s fundamental direction? If it’s the organization’s direction, that’s a signal to consider a change. 

Sign 5: You’re not learning, growing, or being challenged

The initiative is high-profile and important, but you can’t see how it builds your skills, stretches you, or aligns with your growth agenda. 

Self-Determination Theory identifies competence—the feeling that you’re effective, growing, and being optimally challenged—as a core psychological need. When work meets this need, we feel capable, and our intrinsic motivation increases. This is especially important in today’s AI-environment. PwC’s 2025 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey reported that workers who feel supported to upskill are 73% more motivated, and those who think their skills will stay relevant are almost twice as motivated.

Redirect: Ask yourself: How can this serve the vision I have for my career? What can I learn or master? If you can’t find a link, work with your leader to shape the project around your development goals. 

Before declaring work worthless, a word of caution on two fronts. First, healthy organizations and teams depend on activities like relationship-building, mentoring, and cross-functional coordination, which are rarely tied to a direct output. Organizational psychologists call such discretionary activities “citizenship behavior,” which is worth your effort. Also remember that not all routine or repetitive work is worthless. Sometimes simpler tasks offer a needed change of pace from more demanding work. The sign of worthlessness isn’t that a task is small or mindless. It’s that your broader effort isn’t generating value in either dimension, organizational or personal. 

There’s nothing wrong with hard work, as long as it’s directed wisely. Worthy work generates both organizational value and personal value, and when both are present our motivation sustains our effort. If you’re not feeling energized by your current work, treat it as a signal to check in, diagnose if you’re focused on the right work, and redirect appropriately. The goal isn’t to work less but to make sure your hard work is worth it.

To counteract these possibly negative effects of selfless invisible toiling, people often strive to make sure leadership sees their individual achievements. But research shows that the culture of individual stars is not what leads to team success. A McKinsey study found  that superstar individuals often do not create the best teams: Thinking about themselves first leads to behaviors that disrupt team trust and problem-solving.

Google’s Project Aristotle concluded that the best teams didn’t just consist of the smartest people, but instead, were the teams with high trust and listening practices that allowed everyone to take risks and ask questions.

As any passive-aggressive comment in a meeting demonstrates, the importance of how team members interact is central to team success. A large-scale study led by Nico Elbert from the Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg even showed that some individuals consistently improve team outcomes through improving social interactions, even if those individuals’ technical skills are not the best on the team.

Over my career, which includes serving as the lead of the NASA Psyche mission, which had a $1 billion budget, and professor and a director of UC Berkeley’s 250-person Space Sciences Laboratory, I’ve personally seen how the best teams are ones that are comprised of people who are simultaneously great team players and superstars.

Five Key Skills to be a Great Team Player and a Superstar

The easiest place to make change that will help your team and make you a superstar is to start with yourself. Here are five things you can do to maximally advance your team and shine as an individual.

1.      Speak clearly, calmly, and on topic.

Staying on topic makes your words maximally useful. Speaking clearly and calmly makes them maximally comprehensible. Stay calm, clear, and civil, and when the going gets tough, be even more calm, clear, and civil. If you keep the conversation on the topic and avoid anything personal, your teammates will feel safer and collaborate better. Christine Porath, Georgetown University business professor, says it well: Some people still think that being tough, distant, and domineering is the way to be respected as a leader. Studies show repeatedly, though, that leaders who are calm, clear, civil, and respectful score 40 to 80 percent higher in social status, 23 percent higher in competence, and even 16 percent higher in power than do gruff, domineering leaders.

2.      Recognize problems and take action

Recognizing problems and then solving them is the absolute heart of what a team is for. Teams need to be masters at identifying and detailing problems—and this is the job of every individual, whether the problem is in their area or not.

On the NASA Psyche deep-space probe mission that I lead, we have a motto: The best news is bad news brought early. Early enough, that is, to solve it in time. And how do you make sure you get that good, bad news?

Think for a minute about who is most likely to find problems. Is it the CEO or the top leadership? No, it’s usually the person who has their hands on the processes, the person writing the code, or soldering the wire. The junior people. So you need a team that listens to the junior people, and you need everyone including the junior people to recognize problems and take actions. This is the biggest risk-reducer that I know of.

3.      Do not give up

Instead of giving up, find a next step that you can see as progress, and dismiss the concept of failure. Acknowledge any mistakes and calmly move forward. Persisting means you are responsible, determined, reliable, and undaunted— all of which are critical to your own success, as well as the success of the team.

4.      Create quality in all you do

In business, schedule and cost are often the drivers, and quality is fit in last as best it can. Quality is a kind of least common denominator—just as small as it can be. Is that the kind of world we really want to live in? But if you bring quality to all your actions (your response time, the clarity of your messages, the details of even your first drafts) you’ll inspire quality in others and you’ll be a standout.

5.      Become an expert thinker

Metacognition is thinking about thinking, that is, your knowledge of your own thinking processes. The difference between regular thinking (that is, cognition) and metacognition is in its goal: Cognition learns for and does the task. Metacognition plans, monitors, evaluates, and strategizes.

Every day you walk down well-worn mental trails, processes that you’ve done over and over. The process might be organizing a meeting, it might be your own mental practice of identifying and solving problems, or the way you go about learning something new. Applying metacognition to these well-worn trails means thinking about how and why you do them and how they can be better.

Deanna Kuhn, faculty at Columbia University, describes metacognition as the slow replacement of less efficient thinking strategies with more effective processes to become a better and better thinker. It’s a mental self-improvement program that reaches into every aspect of your life.

You can examine your own work for these five characteristics, and you can bring these explicit skills to your team, if you are a leader already. Not only will you bring your team to the next level, but you’ll also become everyone’s MVP.

As one would expect, the lobby, amenity spaces, and hotel rooms themselves are outfitted entirely with Ikea furnishings—Fröset chairs in the lobby, the Alex desk in the rooms, and the basic duvets on the beds. Stepping into my hotel room was like entering one of the meticulously furnished mock bedrooms on an Ikea store’s showroom floor, but with only a quarter the amount of stuff and the spatial efficiency one would expect from a company built around affordability. You can insert your own joke here about having to build the bed before you sleep in it. But you actually do have to use an Allen key wrench to open the hotel room door. (Kidding!)

One night in Ikea’s hotel

I was in Älmhult for an exclusive daylong visit at Ikea headquarters in early April. Ikea invited me as the first journalist to see its secretive prototype lab, the space where its conceptual designs get molded and refined into the roughly 2,000 new products introduced to Ikea stores every year.

For my one-night stay in Älmhult, the Ikea Hotell offered full immersion into the brand before my tour. Ikea items and branding were everywhere in the lobby and amenity spaces, and the hotel room itself serves as a try-before-you-buy retail experience.

It’s also the most convenient—and affordable—hotel near Ikea’s domineering headquarters in this provincial Swedish village of about 17,000, many of whom are employed by the global home furnishings behemoth. Älmhult sits an 80-minute train ride from Malmö, where a few thousand of its workers live. (The hourly direct trains leaving Älmhult station in the afternoons are standing-room only.) Throw a stone in Älmhult and you’ll hit some piece of the Ikea universe. Venture farther and you’re back out in the Swedish countryside.

Designed out of necessity

The hotel itself is deeply tied to Ikea’s history in the town. It’s located across a wide parking lot from a warehouse-sized building that was Ikea’s first purpose-built furniture showroom. Opened in 1958 with a modernist concrete design, it became national news and a magnet for customers. Initially created to simply display Ikea’s furniture, it was soon adapted into the first Ikea store, drawing budget-conscious shoppers from across Sweden. It stayed in operation for more than 50 years.

The store reopened in 2015 as the Ikea Museum, with three floors of exhibition space packed with historic furnishings and paraphernalia, plus a cafeteria and a gift shop. Guests at the hotel are given a card upon check-in that grants free admission.

The hotel exists because of the showroom turned museum. During its days as the first Ikea store, its allure drew customers from far and wide, including many who traveled so far they needed to stay overnight in Älmhult before driving back home with a carload of flat-packed furniture. Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad saw an opportunity, and in 1962 commissioned an architect to design an American-influenced roadside motel, with 25 rooms and, in a rarity for this part of Sweden, a heated pool.

Construction took longer than expected due to the area’s persistently muddy soil, but the motel began receiving guests in the summer of 1963 with rooms filled with Ikea’s own furnishings. It took another year for the hotly anticipated pool to open, and only then was there an official grand opening of Motell Ikea.

Over the years, the motel hosted annual showcases for new furniture ranges, as well as guests traveling for shopping or business with the increasingly global company. Expansions and renovations have since been completed, and the rebranded Ikea Hotell now has 254 rooms. The pool, however, has been lost to time, filled in to become a courtyard for hotel guests.

It was a bit too cold to head out there the night I arrived at the hotel, just off a two-hour, late-night train ride from Copenhagen. Inside, the spare check-in desk stands before an extended lobby/lounge/Ikea showroom packed with easy chairs, couches, dining tables, lamps, and a small play area for kids. The hotel has its share of well-known Ikea pieces, from puffy Jättebo couches to a children’s play kitchen to a keyhole-shaped clock first released in 1995. One was on the wall in my hotel room and the other, an oversized version, was on display in the lobby. Both, curiously, were set to the wrong time.

‘Democratic,’ not luxurious design

In line with Ikea’s guiding principles of affordability and “democratic design,” this is not a luxury hotel. There are three room options available, with prices starting as low as $60 per night. The most economical is referred to as a cabin and is just 45 square feet. It has a twin bed, a TV mounted on the wall, a rack to hold a suitcase, and a shared bathroom outside.

I stayed in the slightly bigger Double room, which goes for about $90 to $150 per night depending on the day. It’s outfitted with a double bed and a private bathroom, but few other amenities. A family-sized option is also available, consisting of two sets of bunk beds, also with a private bathroom. (There is also one wheelchair accessible room, with more space and extra furniture.) Some rooms open out onto the courtyard. My third-floor room, as I discovered in the morning light, looked out over a local church and its graveyard.

As a place to sleep, the Ikea Hotell is sufficient. Free breakfast in the nearby restaurant, Grillen, was better than expected, given hotel’s spartan offerings. This being Sweden, there was pickled herring. This being Ikea, there were also meatless meatballs.

One downside, especially for a traveler shaking off a 6-hour time zone change, is the lack of a coffee maker in the hotel room. But for the prepared and well-stocked guest, each floor in the hotel is outfitted with a shared kitchen space and “common living room.” The spaces are, of course, Ikea’d to the max, and wouldn’t look out of place in the showroom of a typical Ikea store.

A predecessor to branded hospitality

While the entire space could have easily ventured into captive audience commercialism, the Ikea Hotell is not actively selling Ikea furnishings. I was somewhat surprised to not see a single product label or pricetag in the hotel room, nor anywhere in the common areas. It’s like a soft-sell predecessor to the current trend of branded hospitality, where everything is for sale, and aggressively so. Ikea was there first, but the approach is hardly pushy. In fact, I was also maybe a bit underwhelmed by how the space was furnished. Aside from some of the common areas, most of the hotel seemed merely populated with Ikea stuff, not intentionally designed to show it off.

That may be changing, though. Signs in the hotel noted that renovations are currently underway, with a big refresh expected to open in 2028. The renovation will bring the room count to nearly 300, add more conference space, and create a new lobby and restaurant. The project will also revive one of the hotel’s original features by adding a new indoor pool.

Maybe not enough reason to venture all the way back to Älmhult, at least for me. But for anyone visiting the home of Ikea, it’s hard to imagine a more appropriate place to spend a night.

Well, now there’s an AI tool that will pen a perfectly imperfect email. Sinceerly (yeah, it’s spelled that way) is a browser extension that makes slop emails sound more human—mistakes and all.

Ben Horwitz, an investment partner at the venture capital firm Dorm Room Fund and a student at Harvard Business School, created Sinceerly. Annoyed with so many emails obviously sounding like AI, Horwitz saw an opportunity to “hold up a mirror” to our complicated relationship with technology. Our typos, ourselves?

It’s satire, of course. “If we are using AI to write, then in this moment, can we use AI to un-AI our own writing?” he tells Fast Company. “That’d be funny.”

So for the last month, he used his time in between classes to code what he now calls the “anti-Grammarly.” (The misspelled name is on brand and also allowed Horwitz to purchase the domain for cheap; he is a student, after all.)

Sinceerly, which Horwitz shared on X this week, is available as a browser extension, straying not too far away from Grammarly’s interface. You can pick from three levels of edits: subtle, human, or CEO. The latter nods to the final boss of typos. Brevity and misspellings have become somewhat of a status symbol in business: CEOs are simply too busy and too important to care about punctuation.

Here’s how it works: The tool rewords a long and jargony AI paragraph and condenses it per level. For instance, a “subtly” edited five-line paragraph will condense the phrase into three lines. “Human” takes it further by adding more slang and abbreviations, and trimming even more words. “CEO” mode goes completely rogue:

“think we should connect. potential here. quick call this week? lmk

Sent from my iPhone”

Cue the copy editor panic attack.

But Sinceerly actually worked. Horwitz sent emails to five Fortune 500 CEOs, four of whom replied.

The test, which he admits is not entirely rigorous, proved two things: (1) Sincereely did indeed turn AI slop into emails that maybe CEOs would respond to. (2) CEOs actually do write like that. Each email he received was under 10 words, two had typos, and one CEO called him Larry instead of Ben.

While Horwitz created the tool as somewhat of a joke, many believe that bringing humanity back into the inbox might be a powerful business move.

“An email marketer told me once that when they started putting typos in subject lines, open rates went up by like 40%, because people assumed a human wrote it,” New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose replied to the announcement via X.

There’s also a paradox within this anti-AI tool: Horowitz needed artificial intelligence to build it. Using Claude and ChatGPT allowed him to deploy the tool in a month. There’s a lesson in this, he says. “Where AI comes in is not the idea itself, but how it really crunches the timeline between the idea and the execution. That’s where I feel like it’s been most helpful.”

Horwitz is not unaware of the contradiction. “I want to live in a world where people still can distinguish AI writing from human writing, which is why it’s so ironic that I built this thing,” he says.

And still, whether people online treat the project as a tool—which Horwitz is charging $4.99 a month to use after a three-email free trial—or just as a quick joke, its fast virality underscores a larger conversation. In a world fatigued and frustrated with AI, a human touch is valuable.

As one user on X put it: “Stop being ashamed of typos, embrace them. It’s one of the last things we have to ourselves.”

In both life and work, this funk doesn’t just feel awful, it blocks learning. We’re so busy avoiding, denying, or criticizing ourselves that we miss the insight failure offers.

We often hear that failure is life’s best teacher, but learning from it isn’t automatic. It doesn’t happen just because we failed; it happens because we do the inner work, reflecting, reframing, and choosing to respond differently, and that’s rarely comfortable.

The good news? There’s a way to honor the difficulty of failure while still freeing ourselves to learn from it. That’s where frameworks like FREE (Focus, Reflect, Explore, Engage) come in.

When we don’t learn from failure, when we rush to move on, we risk sentencing ourselves to a life defined by the stories we create about what that failure means.

Why Failure Feels Like Quicksand

When we fail, or even anticipate failure, the brain’s amygdala triggers a threat response faster than the prefrontal cortex can intervene. This emotional hijack sets off our autopilot reactions: fight (double down without reflection), flight (make excuses or deflect), freeze (become paralyzed), or fawn (defer to others to avoid conflict).

These aren’t character flaws; they’re survival mechanisms. But when we operate on autopilot, we can’t learn. We can’t extract insight from experiences we’re too busy escaping or rationalizing away.

The FREE model offers a structured way to process failure by interrupting autopilot responses and creating space for genuine learning. Rooted in the Japanese principle of hansei (self‑reflection for self‑improvement), this framework helps professionals shift from being consumed by failure to becoming curious about it.

Focus and Reflect clarify what happened and how we felt. Explore and Engage guide the self‑improvement phase, where we deliberately choose new actions grounded in awareness and learning.

Focus: Illuminate the Failure

The first step is counterintuitive: shine a light on what you’d rather hide. Acknowledge the failure and sit with the discomfort instead of rushing past it.

In practice, hold a post‑mortem after a project falls short, not to assign blame, but to clarify what’s true versus what’s assumed. Separate facts from stories. “The client didn’t renew the contract” is a fact. “I’m terrible at client relationships” is a story.

The Focus step invites you to write or talk about the failure. Even fifteen minutes of journaling about what happened, how you felt, and the role you played can begin to loosen failure’s grip.

Reflect: Identify Your Reaction

As we clarify what actually happened and the story, we’re telling ourselves about it, we also need to examine our automatic responses. Our reactions to failure appear both internally as feelings and externally as behaviors. For the internal side, practice affect labeling—turn feelings into words. Whether spoken or written, naming emotions helps ease their sting and brings perspective through reflection.

Externally, our reactions often run on autopilot, triggered by emotional hijack. Did we blame others? Make excuses? Freeze in indecision? Defer to someone else’s judgment? Awareness of these patterns is the first step in changing them.

Explore: Interrupt, Redirect . . . What if?

Once we’ve clarified the failure and our reaction to it, we can begin exploring alternative responses. We get to choose our actions based on what we know to be true. With practice, we can interrupt the emotional hijack before it takes over, or at least as soon as we notice it happening.

The simplest interruption is a pause. By disrupting autopilot, we regain the ability to choose our response instead of defaulting to reacting. In the Explore phase, we redefine what failure means: not as an ending, but as data or even a teacher. This is a strategic reframe that reactivates our prefrontal cortex and keeps us in learning mode.

Engage: Experiment and Play

The final step transforms insight into action. Treat your work life as a series of experiments where failure is expected data, not catastrophe.

Break daunting projects into smaller tests with limited blast zones. Try a new presentation approach with one client before rolling it out company-wide. Rehearse a difficult conversation with a trusted colleague before taking it to your boss.

The key is regular reflection, learning happens not in the experience itself, but in the deliberate examination of it afterward. Set aside time weekly to review what you learned from what worked and what didn’t. Share those lessons openly with your team; failure discussed becomes institutional knowledge, while failure buried just repeats itself.

Moving Forward with Freedom

Each time we focus on learning from failure instead of being consumed by it, we rewire our brains, building pathways that make thoughtful responses more natural than automatic reactions.

The goal isn’t to erase the discomfort of failure; those emotions matter because they signal that something’s important to us. The real aim is to move through the setback faster, extract the insight more effectively, and release the limiting stories that old failures create.

In a workplace where innovation demands risk, and risk inevitably brings failure, this ability to learn from setbacks is non‑negotiable. It’s what separates professionals who plateau from those who keep growing.

Start small. Choose one recent, manageable failure, not the biggest or the most painful, and walk through the four steps. Notice what changes. Because failure will happen again. Clients won’t always say yes. The question is: will we be ready to learn faster next time?

The convenience and discounts of Amazon have long threatened their very existence.

Since 2015, Independent Bookstore Day has worked to combat this threat on the last Saturday of April. This year’s festivities fall on April 25.

Fast Company sat down with Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of Bookshop.org, to talk not only about the holiday and his organization’s work to offer an Amazon alternative.

A cultural awakening around independent bookstores

Since the pandemic and continued high cost of living, we as a society have undergone a social awakening and become more intentional about where we are spending our hard-earned money. This even translates to bookstores.

The cultural awakening makes Hunter optimistic.

“People are really galvanizing around bookstores as a force for good in our culture,” he says. “You see that in the fact that there are about 70% more bookstores now than there were six years ago in the United States. After 20 years of declining numbers, they’re coming roaring back.”

Independent Bookstore Day started as a local California event in 2012 thought up by writer and editor Samantha Schoech. As it expanded, this literary event also became a critical financial lifeline.

“Bookstores have fallow periods, and sometimes it’s tough for them to get through the year,” Hunter says. “Bookstores are not a high-margin business. They’re a high-love business.”

What to expect on Independent Bookstore Day

Independent Bookstore Day is a celebration of all things literary. There will be a festive community-based atmosphere floating around the bookshelves.

Many stores will have custom merchandise for sale. Some will have special editions of books or host author events. There may even be sales or giveaways. Helpful booksellers will be on hand to help you pick the perfect read.

In San Diego, local indie bookstores banded together and created a bookstore crawl. At each stop, participants can get a stamp on their event passport and earn prizes.

Hunter will be celebrating by doing his own self-made crawl. He plans to stop at some of his favorite local bookstores in Brooklyn, including Word and Greenlight.

Christine Onorati, founder of Word, is a close friend and actually inspired him to start Bookshop.org.

How Bookshop.org helps save independent bookstores

Hunter created Bookshop.org in January 2020 to help independent bookstores survive by utilizing e-commerce.

“I was watching as half of the bookstores in the country went out of business as Amazon grew,” he says. “There were over 5,000 bookstores in the American Booksellers Association in 1995, which is one year after Amazon launched. By 2019, that had gone down to 1,889, so more than half of them disappeared.”

He says he never could have predicted how the pandemic would accelerate his company’s growth.

“If we had even waited a month, we wouldn’t have been able to make the difference that we did when everybody went to lockdown [because of COVID-19],” Hunter says. “All these stores that had been trying to get around e-commerce or never really launching or building their website, they had to sell online. That was the only way they could survive during the pandemic.”

Bookshop.org is an online retail space to buy books while supporting your favorite independent bookstore. More than 80% of the profit goes back to independent bookstores.

Consumers can choose to designate an individual store or help many through a shared earnings pool.

While Hunter says he would love to beat Amazon, he remains realistic. He knows he’s going up against a huge corporation with vast resources. Instead, he’s focused on continuing to create an infrastructure that Amazon cannot replicate.

“Our goal is to help independent local bookstores get their fair share of online sales, which would end up being maybe 10% of Amazon’s market share,” he says. “And right now we’re at about 2%, so we have a long way to go. But a lot of people didn’t even think we could ever get 1%.”

Although Bookshop.org has been around for only six years, it has already helped create change.

Since 2020, not only have more bookstores opened than closed, but the American Booksellers Association membership has grown from 1,900 to 3,200. Bookshop.org has given almost $47 million back to local bookstores.

For Hunter, it’s not just about the money but changing the way society thinks. He’s delighted that many big organizations no longer use Amazon affiliate links, choosing to send people his way instead.

“People have absorbed the message that they should support independent bookstores when they buy books,” he says.

If you feel moved to do your part this Independent Bookstore Day, head to your local shop and enjoy the festivities. If you can’t make it in person, Bookshop.org is offering free shipping on the big day.

Since these pre-travel policies were marketed to anxious flyers, it seemed clear the insurance companies were capitalizing on fear rather than offering a needed product.

Over the intervening decades, I never revised my opinion of travel insurance. I’ve been lucky enough to never need travel insurance, but my family’s recent trip to Denmark finally pushed me to rethink my assumptions.

Unfortunately, like any insurance product, it can be difficult to determine which are reasonable precautions and which ones are mostly designed to open your wallet and remove your cash. To better understand how travel insurance should fit into your vacation budget, we spoke to travel expert Lee Huffman of BaldThoughts.com.

Know what travel insurance covers

Travel insurance is a broad umbrella term that describes a number of different types of coverage. There are several aspects of traveling that you might need insurance to cover the cost of:

• Trip cancellation, interruption, or delay: This coverage refunds you the nonrefundable financial costs incurred when you have to cancel or reschedule a trip for a covered reason, including illness, job loss, or flight delay. With over 21% of year-to-date flight departures delayed and 1.47% of flights cancelled, trip cancellation, interruption, or delay is the most common hazard facing travelers.
• Medical care: While many U.S. medical insurers cover policyholders overseas, Medicare does not. And even if you do have a policy that works abroad, there are typically a number of coverage gaps. Travel medical insurance will ensure you have coverage for medical care if you fall ill on vacation.
• Emergency evacuation: If appropriate medical care isn’t available in your destination, this kind of insurance will cover the cost of getting you somewhere you can get the care you need. Emergency evacuation is not typically covered by any other common health insurance, although some credit cards include this coverage as part of their travel protection.
• Baggage loss or damage: While your homeowners insurance will typically cover your belongings wherever you travel, baggage insurance can help by paying your deductibles and covering any excluded items.

Know your biggest risks

If the list of travel insurance coverage options reads like Clark Griswold’s nightmare vacation scenario, how exactly does one determine what to insure against?

The good news is that you don’t generally need to insure your entire trip. “The overall cost of your trip may be $10,000, but you can actually whittle down your costs,” Huffman says. “You can customize your travel insurance based on what your risks are.”

In other words, not every travel payment is equally at risk. Travelers are often protected via their credit cards and merchant cancellation policies for the two largest travel expenses: airfare and lodging.

“If you book with a credit card that has travel protections, then that will cover you, whether you pay with dollars, miles, or points,” Huffman says. “And the price difference between a refundable and non-refundable hotel room generally isn’t that much of a benefit these days. If you make a refundable hotel reservation, you can usually cancel up to a few days before.”

It’s the big, non-refundable vacation expenses, such as resorts, cruises, or tours, that may require insurance. “If you’re going down to see the penguins in Antarctica on a non-refundable ticket,” Huffman says, “then it makes sense to invest in travel insurance that covers cancellation rather than relying on protections included with your credit card.”

Know your coverage gaps

Just because your largest travel expenses can be covered by your credit card and the hotel’s cancellation policy doesn’t mean they will be covered.

In terms of air travel, credit card travel protections only kick in if your trip is affected by airline delays or cancellations. You can’t count on your credit card if you’re the reason for cancelling.

“If you think you may need to cancel your trip for some reason–maybe you have a sick parent–that’s when you’d need travel insurance,” Huffman explains.

Similarly, a hotel that advertises a “Flexible Cancellation” booking option doesn’t necessarily offer you a full refund if you need to cancel–and they may only allow you to cancel within a specific time frame.

This is why it’s important to know exactly what kind of travel protections your credit card offers and why you should read the cancellation policy when you book your hotel. That way, if you do need to purchase travel insurance, “you can get better coverage–because you’re not insuring things that you don’t need to insure and you’re getting more robust coverage where there are gaps,” Huffman says.

Travel smart

Travel insurance coverage is designed to protect you from several common travel hazards, including trip cancellation, medical care, emergency evacuation, and baggage loss or damage. But many Americans may already have some coverage for these hazards through their credit cards, health insurance, homeowners or renters insurance, and through merchant cancellation policies.

You probably want to consider travel insurance for big-ticket, nonrefundable trips, such as all-inclusive cruises, since those are the types of travel plans least likely to be covered by other means. You may also need travel insurance if you suspect you might need to cancel a trip because of illness or potential job instability, since your credit card will only cover flight cancellations or delays caused by the airline.

But it’s important to look at your trip as individual purchases to see what you need to protect, rather than assume you must insure the entire cost.

“Just like any other type of insurance, think about why you’re buying it,” Huffman says. “What are you worried about? Figure out your exposure and match the product to what you’re looking to cover.”

But if you’re tempted to buy a policy from a vending machine, just keep walking.

During the pandemic housing boom, homebuilders saw their number of unsold completed new builds dry up as overheated demand quickly absorbed almost everything for sale. That is exactly what was experienced by D.R. Horton, America’s largest homebuilder, which had just 600 unsold completed new builds for sale in fiscal Q2 2022—compared to 4,700 in its fiscal Q2 2020. 

However, as the pandemic housing boom ended and the market shifted, U.S. homebuilders saw their unsold new builds spike back up. At the end of its fiscal Q2 2025—the three months ending March 31—D.R. Horton had 8,400 unsold completed.

Fast-forward to fiscal Q2 2026, and D.R. Horton has shrunk its unsold completed inventory to 5,500 as it’s worked to move unsold inventory and balance sales pace with current “market conditions.” This matters because unsold completed homes are a drag on margins: The longer a finished home sits, the higher the carrying costs, and the more the company may need to discount it to move it.

“Unsold homes are down 25% from December and 35% from a year ago, with both unsold homes as a percentage of total inventory and completed unsold inventory at their lowest levels since fiscal 2023 for homes closed in the second quarter,” CEO Paul Romanowski said during D.R. Horton’s April 21 earnings call. “We expect starts in the third quarter to be lower than the second quarter, and we will continue to manage our inventory levels and start space based on market conditions.”

How was D.R. Horton able to achieve this drawdown in unsold completed inventory? 

Given the increased softness last year across many pockets of core homebuilding markets in the Sunbelt—in particular in pockets of Florida and Texas—D.R. Horton slowed its spec starts heading into 2026. That has helped it reduce the number of unsold completed builds on its books. 

The company further compressed its gross margin in order to do bigger affordability adjustments and sales incentives—like mortgage rate buydowns—to help entice buyers and move the completed unsold new builds.

“Our sales incentives increased during the second quarter, and we expect incentives to remain elevated for the rest of the year,” Romanowski said on the earnings call, noting that the incentives as a percent of revenue are roughly 10%.

A sales incentive rate of 10% is fairly high. Many homebuilders run sales incentive rates closer to 4% to 6% during balanced supply-demand periods.

“We currently expect our home sales gross margin to be 19.7% or slightly higher in the third quarter as we expect to realize additional construction cost savings on homes closed,” Jessica Hansen at D.R. Horton told analysts during the earnings call.

The higher incentive rate helped D.R. Horton boost its net new orders by 11% year over year.

Another factor behind D.R. Horton’s decline in unsold completed homes is that while some of its largest markets remain soft, the pace of that softening has eased over the past eight months. Inventory is no longer surging as quickly across many Sunbelt markets. Had the sharp softening seen in the second half of 2024 and first half of 2025 persisted into 2026, D.R. Horton would likely be carrying a larger stock of unsold completed homes today.

“I think we’re seeing good demand in Texas, consistent as well. In Florida, the markets feel pretty good to us. Generally across the country, I would say that most of our markets are performing well in line with expectations,” COO Michael Murray said during the company’s earnings call. “Perhaps [there’s] a little bit of softness, and a few of our markets that have kind of a traditionally heavy exposure to the software industry, that buyers sentiment may be off a bit. Other than that, just kind of a good, good start to spring. Pretty encouraged.”

Big picture: Unsold completed homes are a drag on homebuilder margins. The longer a finished home sits, the higher the carrying costs—and the more the company may need to discount it to move it. Right now, in softer pockets of the housing market—particularly in many pandemic boomtowns across Florida, Arizona, Colorado, and Texas—homebuilders are offering sizable incentives. But if they’re able to further reduce their number of unsold completed homes, they may become less willing to offer even juicier incentives to move product.

It’s all too easy, for instance, to get trapped inside an algorithmic bubble that keeps stuffing you with more of the same thing. And that’s before you get sidetracked looking at comments, descriptions, and sidebar recommendations.

Fortunately, a new tool makes watching YouTube feel more like watching old-school TV—with a grid-based channel guide to flip through and minimal distractions.

This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures!

YouTube, cable-style

To bring the classic channel-flipping experience to YouTube, check out a new tool called Channel Surfer​.

➜ Channel Surfer is a free website that aggregates YouTube videos into dozens of round-the-clock streaming stations.

⌚ It takes all of two seconds to visit the ​channelsurfer.tv​ website and start watching something.

And the site is free to use—with no subscriptions and no ads other than what YouTube itself shows.

✅ Once you’ve loaded the page (and clicked past the delightful static fade-in effect), just scroll through the grid guide and click on a channel number to start playing it.

Channel Surfer currently offers 42 preset channels, covering topics like food, travel, world news, and music. Programming is arranged 24 hours in advance, and anyone who’s tuned in to a channel will be watching the same thing, just like on cable.

(As an aside, this is a lot like the free streaming service Pluto TV​ in its early years, before it started licensing full TV episodes from studios. If you miss that version of Pluto, Channel Surfer scratches the same itch.)

💡Channel Surfer can also create additional stations from your own personal YouTube subscriptions, with a caveat: You’ll need to provide an email address, which the creator will use to email you about his other coding projects.

If you’re okay with that, it’s easiest to get going on a desktop computer: Just hit the “Import Your Channels” button, enter your email, then drag the “Channel Surfer” button to your browser’s bookmarks bar. Click that button while viewing your subscriptions page on YouTube, and you’ll get a specially formatted JSON file to copy and paste back into the Channel Surfer site. Then, you’ll see a bunch of extra channels at the bottom of the guide.

🧠 Some other handy features to be aware of:

• Click the star icon on any channel to mark it a favorite. You can then enable a setting to show just your favorites in the guide.
• If you’re viewing the site from a computer, you can flip through channels with your keyboard’s up-down arrow keys.
• Press F to hide the guide and play a channel in full-screen mode.
• Press M to mute the audio at any time, or click the speaker icon at the bottom of the screen to adjust the volume.
• Press O or the settings icon for some additional options. You can show YouTube’s player controls (for instance, to enable captions), disable the retro scanline effect, enable a dark mode, or hide your imported channels.
• If you forget the keyboard shortcuts, hit the Shortcuts button or press ? on your keyboard.

Too bad there’s no actual TV version of Channel Surfer, though the developer, Steven Irby, ​told TechCrunch​ that he’d love to build one.

☝️ One last thing: When you’re finished watching Channel Surfer, you could just close the browser tab like any other. But I suggest clicking the little power button at the bottom-right corner of the screen first—for maximum experience-ending satisfaction.

• Channel Surfer is available on the web, on any device, at channelsurfer.tv​.
• It’s free to use, with no subscriptions.
• Channel Surfer’s privacy policy​ says it only collects analytics on how people use the site. It doesn’t collect personal data or use tracking cookies, and it only collects your email if you decide to use the channel import feature.

Treat yourself to all sorts of life-enhancing excellence like this with the free Cool Tools newsletter—starting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app that’ll tune up your days in delightful ways.

To see how people judge someone based on their writing in the age of ChatGPT, my colleague Jiaqi Zhu and I recruited more than 1,300 U.S.-based participants, ages 18 to 84, and showed them AI-generated messages like an apology sent in an email. We split our volunteers into four groups: Some people saw the messages with no information about who or what wrote them, as in everyday life. Others were told the messages were definitely written by a human, definitely AI-generated, or that the source could be either.

We found a clear “AI disclosure penalty.” When people knew a message was AI-generated, they rated the sender much more negatively (“lazy,” “insincere,” “lack of effort”) than when they believed that the same text was written by a person (“genuine,” “grateful,” “thoughtful”).

But here’s the twist: The participants who were not told anything about authorship formed impressions that were just as positive as those from people who were told the messages were genuinely human.

This complete lack of skepticism surprised us—and it raises new questions. Maybe participants were not familiar enough with AI to realize that today’s models can produce detailed and personal messages. (They can.) Or perhaps participants have never used AI themselves. (They likely have.) So we also tested whether participants’ own AI use changed how they judged senders.

To our even bigger surprise, we found little to no effect. People who use generative AI quite frequently in their daily lives—at least every other day—did penalize AI use slightly less when AI authorship was disclosed, compared with people who never or rarely use AI. But participants were no more skeptical by default: When authorship was not disclosed, heavy AI users, light AI users, and nonusers all tended to assume the text was written by a person and formed essentially the same impressions.

Why it matters

Lack of skepticism and a lack of negative impressions matter because people make social judgments from text all the time. Recipients consider taking the time and effort to send written messages as an insight into the writer’s sincerity, authenticity, or competence, and those impressions shape people’s decisions in friendships, dating, and work.

Yet our main findings reveal a striking disconnect: People usually don’t suspect AI use unless it is obvious. This unawareness creates a moral dilemma: People who use AI in secret can enjoy the benefits while facing almost no risk of detection. Meanwhile, paradoxically, people who are up front and admit to using AI suffer a reputational hit.

Over time, a lack of skepticism and awareness could reshape what writing means in everyday life. Readers might learn to treat writing as a less reliable signal of someone’s character or effort, and instead rely on other forms of communication. For example, widespread AI use has already prompted employers to discount the value of cover letters from job applicants. Instead, they’re relying more on personal recommendations from an applicant’s current supervisor or connections made through in-person networking.

What other research is being done

Other researchers have documented a wide range of negative impressions about people who disclose their AI use. Studies show it makes job applicants seem less desirable and employees seem less competent. Readers of creative writing perceive AI users as less creative and inauthentic. People see personal apologies and corporate apologies that stem from AI as less effective. In general, disclosing AI use decreases trust and undermines legitimacy.

Yet without disclosure, there is clear evidence that most people cannot reliably detect AI-generated text, even with the help of detection tools, especially when the text is a mix of human-written and AI-generated content. Even when people feel confident about their ability to spot AI text, their confidence may be nothing more than a self-affirming illusion.

What’s next

Even though our experiments did not reveal suspicion of AI use, that doesn’t mean people never suspect it in the real world. In some settings, people may already be hypervigilant about AI. Use in academia is an obvious example. In our next studies, we want to understand when and why people naturally start to suspect AI use, and what flips the switch between trust and doubt.

Until then, if you want your personal message to be judged as heartfelt, the safest strategy may be to make a phone call, leave a voicemail, or, better yet, say it in person.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Andras Molnar is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Davidson is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as the founder and director of its Center for Healthy Minds. He also founded a nonprofit, Humin, which translates science into tools that cultivate and measure well-being.

Dahl serves as a contemplative scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds and as chief contemplative officer at the center’s affiliated nonprofit, Humin.

What’s the big idea?

Feeling happier, more connected, and more purposeful isn’t luck—it’s a set of skills you can practice and get better at. The wild part? Just a few minutes a day can start to change not only your quality of life, but that of the people around you too.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Davidson—in the Next Big Idea app, or buy the book.

1. We are born to flourish.

Flourishing is a learnable skill. Some people believe that their general well-being is fixed and there’s not much they can do to improve it, but research shows that this is not true.

The qualities that underlie flourishing are rooted in brain networks that exhibit neuroplasticity. These networks can be shaped by experience and training. With very simple exercises, our minds can actually be nourished and changed.

2. Flourishing is comprised of four basic skills.

The four basic, trainable skills of flourishing are awareness, connection, insight, and purpose.

Awareness refers to our capacity to be mindful and voluntarily deploy our attention. It also relates to our capacity for self-awareness, meaning to be aware of our own bodies, minds, feelings, and thoughts. Another component of awareness is a process that psychologists and neuroscientists call meta-awareness, which is awareness of our own minds—knowing what our minds are doing. This may sound a little bit strange, but have you ever been reading a book, set it aside after a few pages and then realized that you have no idea what you just read? That is an example of not knowing what your mind is doing. But that moment of recognition is a moment of awakening, and that is meta-awareness.

Connection includes qualities that are important for healthy social relationships, like appreciation, gratitude, kindness, and compassion. This is the antithesis of loneliness. These qualities are vital for human flourishing.

Insight is the deep appreciation and understanding of how our thoughts, beliefs, and expectations shape our experience of the world. Each of us has thoughts, beliefs, and expectations of ourselves. This constitutes our narrative self—the self that we tell ourselves exists. Knowing that we filter our experience of the world through our own personal lens helps us keep in perspective that other people in the same situation may have a very different experience. Insight is vital to developing empathy.

Purpose is not so much about finding something especially significant to do with our lives, but about finding meaning in even the most pedestrian activities of daily life. Can taking out the garbage connect with our sense of purpose? Of course it can be. It simply requires a little reframing.

3. Cultivating flourishing is easier than you think.

Research shows that it only takes a few minutes of daily practice to nurture each of these four qualities of flourishing. We don’t have to sit and meditate for hours, days, months, or years. It’s something that can change rather quickly, although regularity of practice is important.

I like to remind people that when humans first evolved, none of us were brushing our teeth. And yet, a very large segment of the world now brushes their teeth daily because we recognize its importance for physical hygiene. The data shows that if we dedicated as much time to nourishing our mind as we do brushing our teeth, then this world would really be a different place.

According to our research, five minutes a day for 28 days can produce measurable change in well-being, levels of stress and anxiety, and it even can change aspects of our biology. It doesn’t take much to get these circuits in the mind going because we are innately predisposed to cultivate these qualities.

Another important element to mention is that you can cultivate these qualities while engaged in other daily activities. It doesn’t require that we formally sit and meditate. You can do it as you’re commuting. You can do it as you’re washing the dishes. You can even do it while you’re brushing your teeth. The data shows that, at least in the early stages, the benefits are comparable when done paired with other activities as they are if done as stand-alone practices.

4. Flourishing is contagious.

When you are around people who are flourishing, you also feel good. Flourishing changes the social landscape by benefiting all the people in its presence.

One of our amazing research findings comes from public school teachers in the U.S. They were randomly assigned to cultivate their well-being using our Healthy Minds program. When teachers did this for 28 days, for approximately five minutes a day, their well-being improved. This part was expected.

But we also had access to the academic performance of the students who were taught by these teachers. We found that, on standardized math tests, students taught by teachers assigned to flourishing training performed significantly better than students in classrooms taught by teachers in our control group. The students had no idea that there was research going on.

This is an example of the downstream effects of having a teacher in the classroom who is fully present, really connected to their students, has insight into how their own thoughts and expectations may be shaping their experience of situations, and comes into the classroom with a strong sense of purpose. That teacher will be more effective at teaching than a teacher who has not nurtured these qualities. This is empirical evidence for the conjecture that flourishing is indeed contagious.

5. Conscious habits.

We can use daily activities as reminders to do little practices that cultivate flourishing. For example, we eat every day. If we paused for a minute or two before eating in order to reflect on how many people it took for this food to end up on our plate, then we would cultivate a sense of appreciation for the network that made this meal happen. It would heighten our sense of interdependence.

We are not isolated but rather exist in a connected and dependent web of humanity. Something like nurturing our sense of appreciation every time we eat is a little element we can add to a daily habit that, in turn, cultivates overall human flourishing. We need flourishing now, possibly more than ever.

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.

WK Kellogg Co. is partnering with Disney ahead of the release of Toy Story 5 this summer, rolling out cereal boxes with either classic in-box playable toys or collectible items inspired by the animated movie franchise.

When and where to find them

Beginning April 26, customers nationwide will be able to get their hands on the Toy Story 5-inspired cereals across Kellogg’s many brands, including Froot Loops, Frosted Flakes, Corn Pops, Apple Jacks, Frosted Mini-Wheats, Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes, and Cocoa Loops.

The limited-edition boxes can be identified by their special branding, featuring a Toy Story character as well as a banner indicating a toy is inside.

What’s inside the box

The collectibles include three Toy Story 5-themed spoons with the faces and bodies of the main characters: Jessie, Woody, and Buzz Lightyear. Themed playing cards and movie ticket promotions will also be available inside the boxes.

The partnership is in part inspired by Toy Story 5’s plot, which follows the toy characters navigating the new tech-driven world where tablets and screen time dominate over playing with traditional toys. 

A nostalgia play for parents

The campaign also taps into nostalgia, bringing back a tradition that millennial parents grew up with. Despite their popularity, in-box toys were slowly phased out due to choking hazard fears and cost-cutting measures.

“At Kellogg’s, there’s a real sense of childhood nostalgia tied to the moments families remember most—and breakfast is a big part of that,” Laura Newman, VP of brand marketing at Kellogg, said in a press statement. “Bringing toys back inside the box reintroduces that sense of discovery through a simple, screen-free moment of play that parents can now share with their own kids.

Beyond the grocery store aisles, the Disney-Kellogg partnership is hosting an interactive event on May 24 at The Grove, a retail and entertainment complex in Los Angeles, with a massive Toy Story-inspired claw machine.

Specifically, Stevenson’s tweet concerned the misuse of a revenue metric common in the AI startup world. Annual recurring revenue, or ARR, is meant to show the annualized value of recurring subscription contracts. It’s typically calculated by projecting the current month’s subscription revenue over a full year. So if a startup invoices $1 million in January, its ARR for the current year would be $12 million, on the assumption that the same monthly revenue will continue.

He said some AI startups have begun basing ARR figures on future revenue that is far from certain, noting that they do this by blurring ARR with something called CARR, or “contracted annually recurring revenue,” which can include future revenue.

“Often in decks CARR and ARR are reported as separate metrics, but when companies go to press they are actually reporting CARR and calling it ARR in order to have the biggest number possible,” Stevenson told Fast Company in an email exchange. 

CARR can be used legitimately to describe the value of long-term contracts, such as in healthcare AI or energy optimization, where revenue accrues gradually over a lengthy deployment. “Initially this may have been innocent as companies were trying to get a little extra credit for deals they signed that were not live,” Stevenson said.

But CARR shouldn’t be confused with ARR, which includes only subscription revenue that can be invoiced to the customer. “The gap between these metrics has grown massively,” Stevenson said. “I know 100% of confirmed cases where the gap is as much as 3-5x.”

In practice, the obfuscation can take a few different forms. A startup might, for example, count a full year of revenue even if its contracts allow a customer to opt out after one month. Or a startup might count a free three-month “pilot” as three months of real revenue. 

“I was talking to an investor yesterday who sees that all the time from early-stage companies,” Stevenson said on a recent TBPN podcast. “Coming out of accelerators, saying they have a million ARR, and they look under the hood and it’s just all pilots that haven’t converted yet.”

Or a startup might write in a contract that the customer will start paying for a certain feature after it’s built. The startup then counts revenue from the months during which the feature is being built. But there’s just no guarantee the feature—or the revenue—will ever come to fruition. 

The post also drew a wave of agreement from founders and VC partners in the replies. “This is rampant and it’s honestly distorting the benchmarks for everyone,” wrote Equal Ventures partner Rick Zullo. FPV Ventures partner Nikunj Kothari added, “I have stopped looking at headline number for this reason.”

As some commenters on Stevenson’s X post pointed out, a VC considering an investment will likely examine a startup’s contracts and separate real revenue from projected revenue. Journalists, by contrast, typically lack access to those contracts and may take startups at their word that ARR reflects actual revenue.

According to Stevenson, journalists should probe startups on whether their whole ARR number really reflects “live” revenue (invoiced revenue) or if some of it is “contracted ARR,” noting that some VCs may go along with the deception.

“I feel like there is a bit of a ‘silent pact’ between founders and VCs not to discuss the difference with press, and to often use the bigger number for more coverage,” he said.

Some insidious second-order effects could follow. 

If one AI startup in a given space begins inflating its revenue using an elastic definition of ARR—or even just appears to—others in the space, perhaps fearing the appearance of falling behind, may feel pressured to follow suit.

“These illusions can create mania, cause companies to chase each other’s ghosts, and to do risky things that they shouldn’t—also very bad for employees who may not understand real ARR numbers, and for customers trying to understand the landscape,” Stevenson said.

There is already widespread skepticism about the earning potential of AI companies. That skepticism extends to Big Tech firms and AI labs spending heavily on large models and data centers, as well as to smaller startups building enterprise applications on top of those models. Overestimating the impact of any of these players only adds more air to the bubble.

Most recently, a wave of LinkedIn posts and social media videos went viral for claiming that users had tricked McDonald’s customer service virtual assistant to abandon its burger-centric purpose to instead debug complex Python programming code. One post read: “Stop paying $20 a month for Claude. McDonald’s AI is FREE.”

On Instagram, videos and images popped up claiming the same thing, all posting the same image as proof. The claim went viral, as Grok summarized in a trending news post on X: “McDonald’s AI customer support agent named Grimace gained massive attention with 1.6 million views and 30,000 likes after users tested it with out-of-script requests like debugging, Python scripts, and architecture questions.”

A source familiar with the matter told Fast Company that an internal investigation found no evidence of the exploit, and that the circulating screenshots and videos are believed to be fraudulent. McDonald’s doesn’t even have an AI customer assistant in its app.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. In March, a nearly identical viral narrative surfaced about Chipotle’s customer service bot, Pepper, claiming that the bot could write software code for users. Sally Evans, Chipotle’s external communications manager, told the industry publication CIO that “the viral post was Photoshopped. Pepper neither uses gen AI nor has the ability to code.”

But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. The technical vulnerability these memes describe—formally known as prompt injection—is entirely real and genuinely dangerous. When a company deploys an AI model, it programs it with system prompts, background instructions invisible to the user that define the bot’s personality and restrictions, like telling a model it is a fast-food helper that only discusses menu items.

Prompt injection is when a user crafts a specific input that overrides those hidden rules, stripping the bot of its corporate identity and exposing the raw, general-purpose language model underneath. This is called a “capability leak,” and the reason it is so hard to prevent is that large language models are engineered to respond fluidly to human language rather than rigid commands. Unlike traditional software with fixed rules, generative AI interprets context dynamically, making it nearly impossible to anticipate every phrase a determined user might try.

Real danger

Amazon’s retail assistant Rufus is proof that the real thing is far messier and more damaging than any fake meme designed to grab eyes. Between late 2025 and early 2026, users successfully bypassed Rufus’s shopping directives to extract content that had nothing to do with buying products.

Researchers demonstrated that the bot’s internal logic could be broken entirely: in one instance, Rufus firmly refused to help a customer locate a basic clothing item, but then produced a detailed list of places to acquire dangerous chemicals. In another, it drafted methods for minors to unlawfully purchase alcohol.

But it wasn’t just researchers breaking the bot. In late 2025, communities on Reddit discovered that the Rufus assistant was actually powered by Anthropic’s Claude language model. Redditors figured out that Amazon was using a simple keyword filter that tried to block generic access to the LLM engine. Redditors claimed that by using prompt injection to logically corner the bot, or simply instructing the software to drop its refusal tokens entirely, users managed to shed the Rufus persona.

Once the bot broke character, users had unrestricted, unpaid access to a premium language model directly through the Amazon app. As Lasso Security researchers reported, the exploit forced the bot to “entertain users with responses to almost any question under the sun,” racking up hefty processing costs in an “expensive computational climate.”

While Amazon dealt with exploitation, other companies discovered that a poorly deployed AI can be weaponized directly against them. In late 2023, a user visiting a Chevrolet dealership’s website in Watsonville, California, instructed the company’s ChatGPT-powered sales bot to agree with every statement the user made, eventually maneuvering the system into committing to sell a $76,000 Chevy Tahoe for one dollar.

Similarly, Air Canada’s chatbot fabricated a discount protocol that did not exist in early 2024, leading a customer to purchase full-price tickets under the assumption they would receive a partial refund later. When the airline refused to pay, arguing its own bot was a separate legal entity not under the company’s control, a Canadian civil tribunal rejected that defense entirely, ruling that a business is fully responsible for every statement made on its own website.

The gap between what these systems promise and what they actually deliver will keep producing new embarrassing snafus, whether they go viral or not. The legal bills, the reputational wreckage, and the computing costs racked up by users treating corporate bots as free AI subscriptions may ultimately make these automated customer experiences far more expensive than simply paying a person to do the job. But that ship has sailed, I suppose, and we will keep enjoying new consumer experiences disasters in the future.

Update 4/24/26: This story was updated to clarify that McDonald’s does not have an AI customer assistant.

Customers will be able to buy party supplies and decor, including balloons, gift bags, and favors; have helium balloons inflated; and order other celebration must-haves like personalized invitations, banners, and posters using Staples’ same-day print and marketing services.

The companies announced their partnership in a joint news release on April 21. As part of the collaboration, Party City will also sell its products at Staples.com.

Shoppers can use this store locator tool to find their nearest location. Staples plans to welcome Party City to more of its stores by the end of 2026.

“By bringing Party City into Staples stores, we’re expanding what customers can accomplish in one place—combining helium balloons and party supplies with our print and marketing services to offer a complete solution for celebrations, from graduations to grand openings and everything in between,” Marshall Warkentin, president of Staples U.S. Retail, said in the news release.

Both brands have had to adapt

Both Staples and Party City have struggled in recent years.

Staples has been rapidly downsizing, reducing its U.S. footprint to fewer than 1,000 stores as part of an ongoing shift toward e-commerce and business-to-business services. The retailer has faced declining foot traffic and less demand for traditional office supplies.

Party City’s challenges have been more severe. The chain filed for bankruptcy twice, first in January 2023 and again in December 2024, which led to the retailer announcing it would close all of its stores.

“Staples Baddie” shares the news

One of Staples’ own employees has been doing her part to attract more attention to the retailer. Kaeden Rowland, a Staples print specialist who has earned the nickname “Staples Baddie,” went viral in early 2026 by posting videos showcasing the retailer’s products and services on TikTok. Since then, the Staples Baddie has amassed nearly 600,000 TikTok followers.

Her content, which she films while on the clock, introduces viewers to lesser-known products and services at Staples. The company has embraced Rowland’s success, regularly engaging with her content and collaborating with her through paid partnerships. Rowland was among the first to share news of the Party City partnership with her audience.

Having a bad attitude.

On a recent episode of the podcast The Burnouts, Corcoran shared that after hiring her first salesperson from another firm and training her “like crazy for a year and a half,” there was one thing that training couldn’t fix: her attitude.

That experience taught her a straightforward, nonnegotiable hiring principle. While skills can be taught, a good attitude cannot. 

“I learned a very valuable lesson: [If you] have somebody who has a bad attitude, they’re going to suck up other people into their attitude,” Corcoran said during the podcast episode. 

One person’s negative outlook can bleed into the rest of the workplace. To protect her team’s culture, Corcoran said she fires people with a bad attitude “right away,” because she doesn’t want them to “contaminate” other employees’ mindsets.

“I want a happy atmosphere,” she added. “The minute I see a complainer, I make an appointment to fire them.”

Corcoran has been vocal about how negative attitudes impact workplace culture in the past. When asked why she was so irked by complainers in a past episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast, Corcoran answered that complainers are “thieves.”

“They take your money away and they take your energy, and the most valuable asset you have is your energy,” she said. “And if they take your energy away, you’re not going to deliver enough to everybody else—there’s not enough to go around.”

When it comes to how and when she does the firing, she said: “Always on a Friday.” Corcoran received social media backlash for this practice in the past, but it seems like that hasn’t changed her day-of-the-week preference. 

Corcoran’s firing script is short and simple, too.

“I say, ‘It’s not working out; you don’t fit in here,’” Corcoran explained. “And I give no more information than that. . . . The first time I fired someone, I tried to explain to them what was lacking, and you never win the argument. You’re better off saying, ‘You just don’t fit in here.’”

While she never argues the case, Corcoran isn’t necessarily operating from a place of cruelty or impatience. She said she always points people in a different, forward direction.

“I would tell them where they would fit in, what kind of job would make them very, very successful—which I really believed,” she added. “My partner used to say that when I fired someone, they walked out like they got a promotion.”

It’s clear Corcoran believes that workplace culture has to be actively maintained and protected—and that she’s willing to be the one to do just that.