At first glance, the U.S. appears more active, but when you measure the weight of its AI laws, the picture reverses. For instance, a California deepfake bill and an EU article on high-risk AI systems are not equivalent instruments. A single EU article can carry more legal force than a dozen state statutes combined, because U.S. state laws might be narrowly focused, and later repealed by a federal law. EU law, on the other hand, has supremacy over national laws of the member states. A single article might have consequences for entire industries.

BANNING CATEGORIES VERSUS PROHIBITING USE CASES

Comparing what each system prohibits outright is also instructive. Article 5 of the EU AI Act bans eight categories of AI practices, including social scoring, real-time facial recognition in public spaces for law enforcement, emotion recognition in workplaces and schools, and pure profiling-based criminal prediction.

These technology uses are clearly unacceptable, so category-wide bans make sense. However, four of these eight categories have use exceptions. For example, in emergency cases, law enforcement agencies are allowed to use facial recognition to find kidnapping victims.

In comparison, the U.S. federal government has not banned any AI technology categories. Instead, during the previous presidency, federal agencies and then courts focused on a specific AI use, such as tenant screening and advertising housing opportunities, rather than banning the underlying tools.

The same logic applies to copyright laws.

There is no AI without content access. So, in a broad sense, copyright laws are also part of AI regulation.

The U.S. relies on the four-factor Fair Use doctrine, which allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission. The EU, on the other hand, relies on a closed list of exceptions under the 2019 DSM Directive.

The EU AI Act’s Article 4 permits commercial AI training on data only where rights holders haven’t actively blocked it. In practice, that means developers must audit their training data against a moving list of opt-outs. This problem does not exist on the other side of the Atlantic.

COMPLIANCE COSTS MORE IN EUROPE

Economists increasingly measure relevant regulation by what it adds to the price of building a product. For high-risk AI models, like the systems used in hiring, credit scoring, or healthcare, EU AI Act compliance is estimated to increase in sectors with stringent validation requirements.

In the U.S., the annual compliance burden is estimated to be between $50,000 and $150,000.  These costs are mostly related to data architecture for AI training and deployment and driven by state privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act. In other states without such comprehensive laws, the burden will still likely be driven by data handling regulation rather than AI laws directly.

By that measure, in the EU, AI is roughly two to three times more expensive to launch in the high-risk tier, as defined by the EU AI Act—AI systems that pose a significant risk of harm to health, safety, or fundamental individual rights.

Small to medium-size enterprises face compliance costs ranging from €50,000 to €500,000 depending on use-case complexity, and that’s before the product has even shipped. This partially explains why between 2008 and 2021, close to 30% of the unicorns—privately held companies valued at $1 billion or more—that were founded in Europe relocated their headquarters outside the European Union, and why today U.S.-based AI companies attract roughly 75% of global AI venture capital, compared with just 6% for EU companies.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Recently, Oxylabs became a unicorn, receiving a $130 million investment. We have no plans to relocate from Europe. But I understand why some firms do.

The change in how the EU regulates AI is already underway. While no model is perfect, the EU is feeling greater pressure to reconsider its approach. The EU produces 22% of global AI research journal articles, compared to 17% by U.S.-based researchers. The problem is that research doesn’t translate into commercial leadership.

EU policymakers are now saying so explicitly. In a May 2026 address to the Lisbon Council’s Scaling Europe Summit, Commissioner Dombrovskis acknowledged that excessive and overlapping regulatory obligations raise costs, deter investment, and divert resources from innovation.

The Commission has since tabled 10 simplification proposals targeting around €15 billion in annual savings for EU companies. It aims to keep the basic framework as is but make operating within the current framework less of a drag on commercial growth.

It’s a start.

Denas Grybauskas is chief governance and strategy officer at Oxylabs.

We recently conducted our inaugural Scribd Understanding Index, surveying 1,500 Americans about how they build knowledge today. The clearest signal in the data wasn’t about tools at all. In fact, 37% of those surveyed said the hardest part of any research session is knowing which sources to trust—twice the rate of the next biggest challenge. Confidence in information is the bottleneck.

THE NEW WORKFLOW

Verification is already a workflow that shows how people are handling the trust problem: They’re fact-checking. We found that 66% verify AI results nearly every time they use them, and 47% say validation is so critical they always make time for it, even when they’re busy.

I read that as maturity. When a technology is novel, we marvel at it. When it becomes routine, we hold it to a working standard. The stakes on trust rise precisely because AI is now embedded in real decisions. And this habit already exists inside your organization, whether you’ve designed for it or not.

Business professionals are the heaviest AI users we surveyed, with 55% using AI tools daily. They’re also the most disciplined about verification: 60% say they always make time to validate. Your best people are spending real hours grounding AI’s answers. The choice for leaders is whether verification happens ad hoc, invisibly, and inconsistently, or as a designed part of how work gets done.

Where do people go when they verify? To humans. In our research, human-authored expert documents earn a net trust score nearly four times higher than of AI-generated summaries alone. And people can tell you exactly why: 76% say author expertise is highly important to whether they trust a source, and 72% say the same of citations.

This data perfectly validates a core belief of mine: AI significantly raises the bar for human judgment. The lesson for leaders is that expertise isn’t a nice-to-have that AI replaces. AI generates answers; accountable human knowledge is what lets your teams act on them.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR HOW YOU LEAD

I constantly ask my own leaders to optimize for clarity. Three moves follow from the data to help you do just that:

1. Build verification into the workflow itself: Establish checkpoints, source requirements, and review norms rather than leaving it to individual diligence.

2. Reward accuracy and sourcing, not just speed: If your incentives only celebrate velocity, you’re training people to skip the step your best performers already consider non-negotiable.

3. Don’t outsource judgment to a black box: Keep investing in the subject-matter experts, primary documents, and institutional knowledge your people lean on to ground AI’s output.

Adoption is no longer the differentiator. It’s not about deploying technology. The next competitive advantage is how much trust you’ve built around it. The companies that pull ahead will have leaders treating trust as a system and building it into workflows.

Ultimately, the future belongs to people who understand. And that understanding is built by other people.

Tony Grimminck is chief executive officer of Scribd, Inc.

In traditional drug discovery, laboratory capacity is tightly budgeted, and evaluating unconventional biological ideas is often viewed as an unjustifiable luxury. But when a bundle of in vivo studies we purchased through a contract research organization had more assay capacity than our programs needed, our neuroscience team decided to run a test.

We turned to our AI target discovery platform, PandaOmics, to prioritize candidate targets from massive multimodal datasets. To our surprise, the AI surfaced Target Z—an innovative biological protein target our company was already actively developing for an entirely different disease area. The platform linked this familiar protein to pain signaling mechanisms for the first time.

Our scientists used this unused assay slot to evaluate a newly designed molecule engineered to interact with the Target Z protein—a chance to ask a new question. When the experimental data came back, one molecule accomplished what was previously thought to be highly improbable: It outperformed morphine in preclinical pain models.

That breakthrough led to ISM9528, an oral, brain-penetrant, non-opioid candidate. Beyond its immediate clinical potential, this moment revealed a fundamental truth for business leaders and technologists alike: The true power of AI in medicine isn’t just speeding up chemical synthesis—it’s engineering scientific serendipity at scale.

REIMAGINE A $100 BILLION GLOBAL CRISIS

Pain management represents one of modern medicine’s most intractable challenges and a global market approaching $100 billion. Worldwide, nearly 27% of the population suffers from chronic pain with significantly higher prevalence in people over the age of 45 (46.7%). In the United States, chronic pain impacts 24.3% of adults.

For decades, drug hunters have been forced into stark therapeutic compromises. Opioids like morphine and oxycodone are highly effective for acute pain, but carry severe liabilities including high risks of addiction, physical dependence, tolerance, and fatal overdose. NSAIDssuch asibuprofen and naproxen are useful for mild inflammation, but are often ineffective against severe pain involving the nervous system, while causing some toxicity during long-term use. And there are other drug classes with additional issues.

The industry’s core bottleneck is a shortage of novel, validated biological targets. Rather than attempting to design another incremental variation on well-worn pain receptors, our team used AI to ask a fundamental biological question: Can we target an entirely different pathway to achieve pain relief without the side effects and risks of existing treatments?

THE HUMAN-MACHINE LOOP IN ACTION

Uncovering a new mechanism requires a closed loop between biological target discovery, human laboratory validation, and generative chemistry. Crucially, this requires distinguishing between two distinct domains: biology (identifying where to intervene) and chemistry (designing what molecule to use). This is how we approached it.

1. Target discovery (the biological protein): Our AI platform synthesized human genetic, omics, and text data, identifying the specific protein pathway we designated as Target Z.

2. Experimental validation (human critical thinking): Our neuroscience team validated the biology. Using gene-knockout mouse models and specialized pharmacology, the team confirmed that inhibiting the Target Z protein reduced pain in the mice.

3. Generative chemistry (the chemical molecule): With the target validated, our generative AI platform, Chemistry42, designed and refined new molecules to meet several requirements at once. It designed novel small molecules capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier and selectively binding to the Target Z protein. This yielded ISM9528, our chosen development candidate molecule.

SCALE SCIENTIFIC SERENDIPITY

When an AI platform uncovers an unexpected drug candidate, business leaders naturally ask if it is an accidental fluke or a repeatable model for industrial R&D.

Historically, breakthrough therapeutics—from penicillin to GLP-1 receptor agonists—were discovered through unplanned scientific serendipity. But relying on pure chance in conventional drug discovery is slow, rigid, and prohibitively expensive. Modern AI changes the equation by turning serendipity into a systematic, scalable capability.

We addressed platform efficiency by creating foundational AI infrastructure. In early 2026, we introduced MMAI Gym, an open training and benchmarking platform that aggregates thousands of standardized biology and chemistry tasks to fine-tune general large language models into specialized scientific expert models. We found that it improves model performance on drug discovery tasks by up to 10-fold.

COMMERCIAL VALIDATION

The biopharmaceutical market is signaling strong interest in this platform model.

Our lead, fully AI-discovered asset, rentosertib (ISM001-055) for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, entered Phase III clinical trials in mid-2026, becoming the world’s first AI-discovered target and molecule to reach late-stage clinical evaluation.

Strong commercial interest provides another measure of the platform’s potential. Insilico has partnered with 13 of the world’s 20 largest pharmaceutical companies, with many returning for additional collaborations.

When machine intelligence illuminates non-obvious biological hypotheses and human scientists systematically validate them, AI evolves from an exploratory research tool into an enterprise-grade engine for medicine.

BIOLOGY GETS THE FINAL VOTE

Advancing ISM9528 toward planned clinical trials in 2027 is a significant milestone, but preclinical success is only the beginning.

Animal models do not mirror human pain perfectly. How much drug reaches different parts of the body can vary between animals and humans, and new targets in the nervous system can reveal unexpected safety risks in human trials. Human clinical studies will ultimately decide whether ISM9528 fulfills its promise as a transformative non-opioid medicine.

Until then, this program illustrates what can happen when AI expands the biological questions scientists can explore and what human researchers can put to the test. Neither replaces the other: AI can uncover connections that might otherwise be missed, while scientists determine which ideas hold up in the real world.

Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, is founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine.

After fashion retailers embraced brand-owned resale, it’s starting to show up in more categories, from toys to bikes. Sur La Table is the first in cookware with its new platform, called Second Servings, which lets people buy and sell secondhand versions of everything that it carries, from sauté pans to espresso machines.

Affordability is one of the motivations, says CEO Dan Goldman. “Resale is all about helping bridge the existing gap between consumers who love to cook and haven’t necessarily had access to the premium cooking products,” he says.

Goldman says he doesn’t expect the resale site to cannibalize the retailer’s new sales; instead, he believes it will bring in younger, budget-conscious customers the company wants to introduce to its products for the first time.

“We want to build lifelong relationships with those consumers,” he says. Goldman, who joined Sur La Table last year, previously helped launch resale programs at the North Face and Gap, where he says he saw the model successfully recruit new customers.

Of course, secondhand cookware is already ubiquitous on sites like eBay and Facebook Marketplace. But brands are realizing they can be part of the growing market.

“If there is already a larger resale market happening on other platforms, then the brands and retailers are going to want to own that. And it makes the customer experience so much better to have all of the assets and information that a brand has,” says Emily Gittins, CEO of Archive, the technology platform that customized Sur La Table’s new resale site. (Archive previously worked with Goldman on Renewed for the North Face.)

Sur La Table’s platform is launching today to let sellers list products before it opens up for buying. Someone listing an item can look up the SKU, answer a few questions, add a photo, and then automatically pull up original photos and descriptions, including materials, care instructions, and the original price.

Second Servings includes both Sur La Table’s own branded products and any of the brands it carries, from All-Clad to Le Creuset. (The platform suggests the prices, ranging from 20% to 70% off the original price based on condition, with most selling at a 50% to 70% discount.)

After an item sells, the seller will use a prepaid shipping label to ship it to the buyer directly, and then get either cash or store credit. Sellers get a 70% payout in cash, or 100% of the value if they take a store credit; buyers pay for shipping.

Of course, there’s a sustainability advantage to buying secondhand. Buying used clothing, for example, can cut the carbon emissions of an item by 80%. Gittins says brand-owned resale sites can also bring in customers who weren’t previously considering buying secondhand.

“We actually see a high proportion of buyers would have otherwise bought a new product but at a lower price point,” she says.

Cookware is unique in that some of it is designed to last decades, and in some cases to improve over time. “A seasoned cast iron is actually in many ways a desired asset,” Goldman says.

As Sur La Table gets data over time about which secondhand products are most popular and most retain their value, those insights could be valuable.

“What Second Serving gives us is really great insight in terms of what consumers care about—what actually holds up, what has desirability,” Goldman says. “When a Dutch oven changes hands three times over 10 years, it still holds value. That’s a win, right? It’s telling us that the product is durable.”

By the same token, he says, if a product doesn’t last as long, the company could discuss the lifecycle with the supplier to determine “How do you design something that does stand the test of time?”

That was the problem. Nobody had pushed back in weeks.

When we dug into it, the picture changed fast. People were still showing up to meetings, nodding along, hitting their individual deadlines, but two of the five team leads had stopped flagging risks, and one had started reverting to the old process the moment leadership wasn’t watching. On paper, the metrics looked fine. But underneath, the team had stopped moving with the leader and started moving around him.

That gap has a name I use with clients now: the “speed tax.” It’s the cost you pay when speed becomes the goal instead of the tool, and very often it doesn’t show up on a dashboard until it’s already expensive. The leaders who scale the fastest in the long term know exactly when to slow down long enough to bring people with them. So, how do you actually catch that gap before it costs you something? Here’s where to start:

1. WATCH FOR COMPLIANCE DISGUISED AS AGREEMENT

The fastest-moving leaders I work with all eventually ask me some version of the same question: How do you tell the difference between a team that’s aligned and a team that’s just along for the ride?

Jana Boone, senior VP of growth enablement at the digital marketing agency Intero Digital, put it to me this way: “The earliest sign is people just going along. They’ll nod in meetings, but they’re not aligned or invested. They are just appearing to agree.”

From there, she says, you start to see fragmentation where some teams execute the new way, while others revert to the old one because they never actually bought in. “It looks like an execution problem, but it’s a trust problem,” she said.

Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” pyramid maps this pattern out: An absence of trust breeds fear of conflict, fear of conflict breeds a lack of commitment, and a lack of commitment eventually shows up as missed results. The nodding and the silence aren’t two separate problems. They’re the same crack, showing up at different depths.

The fix starts with what you’re measuring. If you’re tracking only whether tasks got done, you’ll miss it every time because compliance and conviction look identical in a status update. Start watching for the subtler signals instead: who’s still asking questions, who’s gone silent, and whose execution has started drifting back toward the old way of doing things. That drift is your real dashboard.

2. BRING PEOPLE INTO THE CHANGE BEFORE YOU ANNOUNCE IT TO THEM

There’s an instinct, especially under pressure, to treat communication as a one-way broadcast. You decide, announce, and move on. It may feel efficient, but it rarely is.

As Boone at Intero Digital told me, “If people are just going along, you haven’t actually moved them. You’ve just created the illusion of movement.”

The leaders who get this right don’t necessarily move slower; they move differently. They pull a few key people into the thinking before the decision is final, even if it’s just one conversation: “Here’s the problem I’m trying to solve. What am I missing?” That single step changes the entire psychology of what follows. People who helped shape a change defend it under pressure, while people who only received it as a directive wait to see if it sticks.

Part of that means leading with the reason behind the change, not just the decision itself. Announce only the what, and people comply with it. Explain why it matters and how it’s going to work, and you’ve handed them something worth engaging with—a problem to help solve, instead of an order to carry out.

“When you bring people into the journey instead of imposing it, they own it,” Boone explained. “They move with conviction, not compliance.” That’s the difference between a change that holds and one that unravels three weeks after the announcement.

3. BUILD A CHECKPOINT BEFORE YOU SCALE A NEW PACE

Speeding up should be a decision your team makes with you, not a drift that suddenly happens to them. One simple habit can fix this. Before increasing the pace on any initiative, set a specific point (a date, a milestone, a number of weeks) where you’ll stop and ask the team directly, “Are we still moving together, or am I out ahead of you?” Ask it like you mean it, and be ready to act on whatever answer you get. If you slow down here, you will buy speed later. The checkpoint costs you one conversation, but skipping it can cost you the whole initiative.

I started building a check-in pause into my own coaching conversations after watching too many leaders discover the gap only after it had cost them something: a key player who quit, a project that stalled, a team lead who’d been disengaged for months without saying so. A checkpoint built in advance catches that gap while it’s still cheap to close. You won’t see this consistency on a quarterly speed report. You’ll see it in whether the same people are still on your team, still trusting you, by the time the next initiative kicks off.

None of this means slowing down for its own sake—after all, no one wants to lose good momentum. Rather, it means deciding your pace on purpose instead of letting it happen while you’re focused on the next milestone. The speed tax is always optional. You just have to notice you’re being charged before the bill comes due.

In an era where AI can write emails, summarize meetings, draft business plans, and generate presentations in seconds, the ability to communicate as a human has become a genuine competitive advantage.

Speaking to a Stanford graduate many years ago, Buffett offered this advice:

At your age, the best way you can improve yourself is to learn to communicate better. Your results in life will be magnified if you can communicate them better. The only diploma I hang in my office is the communications diploma I got from Dale Carnegie in 1952.

Buffett added that “without good communication skills, you won’t be able to convince people to follow you, even though you see over the mountain and they don’t.”

The value of human communication

While Buffett’s advice sounds obvious, its value has skyrocketed in the AI era.

AI can generate business plans, write marketing copy, analyze spreadsheets, summarize research, and even produce software code in seconds. What it can’t do is earn trust, inspire commitment, navigate conflict, or make another human feel understood.

That’s why communication has become a force multiplier. The leaders who will thrive over the next decade won’t necessarily be the ones with the best prompts. They’ll be the ones who can translate complexity into clarity, rally people around a vision, ask thoughtful questions, and build relationships that AI simply can’t replicate.

In fact, communication has evolved from being a “soft skill” into a strategic business skill. Every entrepreneur eventually discovers that customers don’t buy products—they buy confidence. Investors don’t fund ideas—they fund founders they believe can execute. Employees don’t stay because of perks alone—they stay because they trust the people leading them.

Buffett understood this long before generative AI arrived.

When he says your results in life will be “magnified” by learning to communicate, he’s describing, in classic Buffett fashion, a principle that compounds over time. Every conversation, presentation, sales pitch, interview, difficult feedback session, podcast appearance, or keynote becomes an opportunity to create influence—or lose it.

So what does exceptional communication look like today? Here are three habits that separate leaders people choose to follow.

1. Replace assumptions with curiosity

The fastest way to derail communication is to assume you already know what someone thinks or why they acted a certain way.

Curiosity changes the conversation. Instead of preparing your rebuttal, ask another question. Instead of defending your position, seek to understand theirs. Research consistently shows that people who demonstrate genuine curiosity build stronger relationships, collaborate more effectively, and are viewed as more trustworthy.

Before jumping to conclusions, ask yourself:

• What information am I missing?
• Am I trying to be right, or am I trying to understand?

Those two questions alone can prevent countless misunderstandings.

2. Make feedback an everyday conversation

The strongest leaders don’t save feedback for performance reviews. They offer it consistently, specifically, and with the person’s success in mind.

What’s the end goal here? It’s clarity. People want to know what’s working, where they can improve, and how to move forward. Clarity builds confidence because it removes uncertainty.

The best feedback answers three questions:

• What should I keep doing?
• What should I change?
• Why does it matter?

3. Listen to understand, not to respond

With all the notifications and daily distractions we face, attention and active listening are among the rarest gifts you can give another person. Active listening means resisting the urge to formulate your response while someone else is still speaking. It means putting away your phone, asking follow-up questions, and reflecting back what you’ve heard before offering advice.

People rarely remember every word you said. They almost always remember how you made them feel. Feeling heard is one of the fastest ways to build trust

Buffett earned his Dale Carnegie certificate more than 70 years ago, but the principle behind it has never been more timely. Technology will continue to transform how we work. It won’t change what people need from the leaders they trust.

If anything, the more AI fills our screens, the more valuable authentic human communication becomes.

—Marcel Schwantes

This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. 

Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.

Some 40 years on, NASA is considerably more hip to women, but little has progressed in menstrual studies in space.

The physicist and astronautical engineer Manju Bangalore, 28, is hoping to change that next year, when she and Priya Abiram, 22, an aerospace engineer, board a Virgin Galactic flight to conduct the first formal research study of menstrual fluid dynamics in microgravity. Along the way, they’ll become the youngest South Asian women in space.

With most information so far coming from anecdotal astronaut observations, the two engineers are seeking actual measurements. “Right now, the data says that menstruation is generally safe to do in space, but it’s limited data, and it’s all qualitative,” says Bangalore. “So, we are pursuing the first quantitative study of menstruation in space.”

Using a fluid that mimics the properties of menstrual blood, they plan to track both flow behavior and the absorption performance of feminine products. They hope their findings will pave the way for more research on longer orbital flights. Such datasets are needed for astronaut health and product allocation on longer-duration missions to the planned Moon Base and possibly Mars, while helping to improve commercially available products on Earth.

The study extends the mandate of Bangalore’s 11-year-old nonprofit, Operation Period, which delivers feminine products to marginalized communities, educates about menstrual health, and conducts menstrual research. Bangalore, a NASA engineer-turned-science-communicator, oversees the nonprofit as founder and executive producer alongside a group of Gen Z volunteers, with support from grassroots donors and institutional funders. They’re trying to raise $1.2 million for the spaceflight, which they hope to chronicle with a minidocumentary of the mission.

“The culture’s very much shifting right now in that people are willing to invest in menstrual health nonprofits,” says Bangalore.

Historically, astronauts have used oral contraceptives and hormonal IUDs, which can cause side effects that might worsen in space. For example, Bangalore notes, oral contraceptives can produce a higher risk of cardiovascular complications; existing limited data suggests a potential higher risk in space.

Research for earthbound users wasn’t much better. For decades, a dearth of standard definitions in menstrual health eluded clinical settings and research publications, while feminine care manufacturers used saline to test product absorbency. In 2023, an Oregon Health and Science University study showed much greater accuracy when using blood to diagnose heavy menstrual bleeding.

“You don’t need to be a physicist to know that saline and menstrual blood do not have the same viscosity or other kind of properties,” says Bangalore. “The implications were that doctors were underdiagnosing heavy menstrual bleeding, which affects 20% of people in America who bleed, and can be an indicator of other diseases or chronic conditions.”

A show of empathy

Operation Period’s Virgin Galactic mission has roots in Bangalore’s childhood dreams of spaceflight and awareness of social inequity. She grew up in rural Oregon to parents who immigrated from India and worked in agricultural crop science. By comparison, her maternal grandmother grew up in a 25%-literate village in India and was married at 12 and a mother at 14. That insight led to an epiphany Bangalore had at 17, during a period so painful she remembers the date.

“It was February 2015,” she says. “It hit me in one moment that my pain was not good, but I had a roof over my head, menstrual products, a heating pad, my doll—things that were luxuries to people just five miles away who were unhoused. Later that week, I was buying more [sanitary] pads, and the woman in front of me was buying hers when her card declined. So, I ended up buying both of ours together. It reminded me that this is not a distant issue—it’s literally happening in a grocery store near you. So, I ended up starting Operation Period.”

The nonprofit began by distributing feminine products to marginalized communities and slowly expanded to international outreach in countries like Bangladesh and India. To date, it’s distributed more than 300,000 menstrual products and is producing a documentary short on the challenges of menstruating in prison.

Now it’s expanding efforts to address the root causes of these issues, a concept Bangalore calls “menstrual freedom.” According to the World Bank, 500 million people worldwide lack access to menstrual products, education, sanitation, and cultural support, which present life-and-death consequences.

Over the last three years, Operation Period has launched the Youth Institute for Menstrual Freedom fellowship to train, mentor, and fund young people who want to lead similar projects in their communities. It established chapters in New York, Los Angeles, and Jackson, Mississippi, run by Gareema Dhiman, a Yale PhD candidate in planetary science, and launched Redshift Lab, a research arm directed by Abiram, a life support engineer with Vast Space, to help close gaps in menstrual and reproductive health.

Redshift Lab devised precursor microgravity experiments for a ZeroG flight, whose parabolic loops enable roughly 20 seconds of weightlessness apiece. Bangalore and Abiram are revising the experiment design for Virgin Galactic’s three-and-a-half minutes of microgravity in one suborbital loop that crests just above the NASA demarcation of space, at 52 miles.

“I posted about [the ZeroG flight] online as part of my platform to destigmatize periods. What better way to do that than in zero gravity?” says Bangalore. She and Abiram knew they’d touched a nerve when it got 25 million views and connected them with Virgin Galactic. They ultimately plan to publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals.

Furthering the message

Operation Period is now collaborating with organizations addressing issues that impact menstrual health—such as climate change, mental health, economics, and social justice. Which is how Bangalore found herself sharing the stage at the Hollywood Climate Summit earlier this summer on a panel that included Star Trek creatives and the NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman.

“It was a `pinch me’ moment being at the summit, getting to talk about the overview effect as a research astronaut training for my nonprofit,” she says. “A lot of the astronauts that come back talk about how we’re all interconnected, there aren’t borders, there’s just Earth from space.”

Bangalore’s public speaking springs from a concurrent performance sideline. A 2023 Miss Oregon USA and 2019 Miss World California, Bangalore has modeled for Sports Illustrated and appeared in General Hospital, Animal Kingdom, and Beyoncé’s Brown Skin Girl music video. That concurrent sideline honed her public speaking skills.

Bangalore is continuing her mission awareness campaign through the fall, with a TEDx talk in Tulsa, the Jasper Dark Sky Festival in Canada, and a keynote at the University of Oregon, her alma mater. Eventually, she’d like to develop an Operation Period conference in May, which is International Period Month.

“The whole concept of menstrual justice and menstrual freedom is providing opportunity where it hasn’t been provided in the past,” says Bangalore. She evokes her grandmother’s experience to drive her point home. “In two generations, I’m going to space, and I have a master’s degree. I use that example to say, `Look what’s possible when we have the right resources, support, and care.’ I don’t think I’m smarter than my grandma. So what would it have looked like to get her those opportunities, resources, support, and care? That’s our whole mission.”

I learned that lesson firsthand after leaving the company where I had worked for more than 20 years. During my time there, introducing myself was easy. My title did the heavy lifting. Once you say the words Global Managing Director, doors open easily. My title instantly communicated where I worked and what I was responsible for, and gave people a framework for understanding my career. Then I started my own company and started building an ecosystem around my skill of auctioneering. Suddenly, one simple question became surprisingly difficult to answer.

In New York City, where I have spent more than two decades, almost every conversation begins the same way, “So, what do you do?” That question isn’t considered intrusive in New York. It’s as common as asking someone’s name or recommending the newest restaurant everyone is talking about. Each time someone asked, I found myself hesitating. Which version of myself should I introduce? Charity auctioneer? CEO? Author? Keynote speaker? Podcast host? Mom of three? The more titles I accumulated, the harder it became to explain what I actually did.

That experience led me to rethink the traditional elevator pitch. The goal isn’t to squeeze every accomplishment into 30 seconds. It’s to create a clear storyline that helps people understand your value and remember it long after the conversation ends.

In my personal branding master class, I work with Fortune 500 executives, entrepreneurs, founders, and everything in between who face the exact same challenge. They have accomplished remarkable things, yet when someone asks what they do, they begin listing job titles, companies, side projects, and board positions. By the end of the conversation, they’ve shared plenty of information, but I often find that I’m wishing I never asked the question in the first place.

A great elevator pitch doesn’t explain everything; it creates a story that helps explain the concept of what you do rather than every single individual accomplishment. Here are three ways to build a personal brand that people will actually remember.

1. Lead with the problem you solve, not your job title

One of the biggest mistakes professionals make is introducing themselves by what they do instead of what they make possible. A title tells people where you work, but it rarely communicates why someone should care.

Rather than saying you’re a consultant, explain that you help companies revitalize stalled growth. Instead of introducing yourself as a financial advisor, describe how you help people make confident financial decisions. If you’re in marketing, don’t simply say you build campaigns, but explain that you help brands become impossible to ignore. This approach also gives your career room to evolve. Job titles and companies change. The value you consistently create becomes the foundation of your personal brand. When someone can immediately understand the impact you have, they are far more likely to remember you.

2. Find the thread that connects everything you do

Many professionals assume multiple roles make their careers harder to explain. I understand that instinct. Today I’m a charity auctioneer, founder and CEO of an agency, keynote speaker, author, and podcast host. If I introduce myself by listing each title, people spend more time trying to organize the information than understanding who I am. Instead, I focus on the idea that connects all of my work. I have spent more than two decades learning how to inspire people to take action. That single idea ties together every stage I stand on, every book I write, every podcast conversation I host, and every company I advise.

Ask yourself, what is the one idea that connects everything I do? Once you identify that answer, your introduction becomes far more compelling because every example reinforces the same message instead of competing for attention.

3. Give people something they can repeat

The best elevator pitches don’t end when the conversation is over. They continue when someone introduces you to your next opportunity. One question I ask participants in my master class is simple: If someone met you today, could they describe what makes you different when you aren’t around? Your personal brand isn’t defined by what you say about yourself. It’s defined by what other people say when you’re not around. That means your goal isn’t to share every accomplishment. It’s to leave someone with one clear idea they can easily pass along.

The professionals who create the most opportunities for themselves aren’t always the ones with the longest résumés. They’re the ones whose value proposition is so clear that other people naturally become advocates for their work. The real purpose of an elevator pitch is to establish credibility and make it easy for someone to remember you when the right opportunity appears. When your message is built around the outcomes you create, and anchored by a clear through line, your personal brand continues working long after the conversation ends.

So . . . what do you do?

The meeting software company just revealed a new logo, wordmark, color system, and brand positioning, created by the design studio Smith & Diction. At the same time, Calendly announced in a press release that it will be expanding its productivity offerings to include an AI email assistant and an AI-powered meeting notetaker, “forming a suite of AI tools designed to remove the friction—and frustration—surrounding meeting scheduling and busywork.”

Calendly is facing a conundrum that’s become almost ubiquitous for the broad category of productivity software as a service (SaaS) brands: Its ambitions and capabilities in the AI era are outpacing how consumers perceive it. Most people know Calendly for its original use-case of sending one simple blue link to set up a meeting without the hassle of discussing time zones and availability; now, though, the brand wants to be much more than that. 

As AI fundamentally transforms the productivity SaaS space, its key players are using design to help smooth the transition. In Calendly’s case, that means shifting from a loud, bright brand identity to a softer look that communicates clarity. 

Calendly’s brand problem

Calendly’s brand problem has two key facets. 

First, over the past several years, the brand has moved from powering straightforward meeting scheduling to offering a larger toolbox of AI-powered meeting features. Largely, though, it’s still known as a calendar. 

Second, recent advances in AI coding tools means that, today, almost anyone has the ability to build and deploy their own productivity tools. In this environment, Calendly is fighting an uphill battle to convince users that it’s worth using their software instead. 

“AI is changing the expectation for software,” says Jamal Miller, Calendly’s VP of brand and product marketing. “People no longer want a collection of isolated features; they want tools that understand context, work across the systems they already use, and can take action when they ask. At the same time, people can increasingly assemble their own workflows with general-purpose AI. That means Calendly has to be precise about the value only we can deliver.”

Calendly is far from the only SaaS brand tackling this challenge. Notion, for example, has spent the last several years transforming from a website builder to a broad AI-powered workspace, and the grammar-fixing tool Grammarly has ballooned into a productivity tool that can send AI agents into your Google Docs, email, Notes app, and more. Both of these platforms have used design to help users acclimate to the shift. Notion introduced an amorphous, Clippy-esque mascot to help introduce users to its new AI agents in 2024; and Grammarly underwent an entire rebrand—including changing its name to Superhuman—in 2025. 

According to Mike Smith, the cofounder of Smith & Diction who also spearheaded Grammarly’s rebrand, the key to these projects is identifying a clear pitch to help users understand, at the most fundamental level, why they should use the product—then building an entire design infrastructure around that tentpole. 

With Calendly, that pitch was the idea of “making space for what matters”: designing tools that are so simple to use (whether that be a meeting link or clean AI-powered meeting notes) that they help clear room for everything else in the day.

“When we talked to Calendly, they were like, ‘Our dedication to the simplicity of the thing just working is huge.’” With their original meeting scheduling link, for example, the Calendly team told Smith that most users never even open the app—they simply save the link in a Word document, send it every time they need to schedule something, and never think about it again. That’s the throughline that Calendly wants to hold onto as their actual product offerings expand. 

“They were like, ‘Okay, what if we could do that kind of seamlessness for everything?’” Smith recalls. “That’s what really sparked our interest.”

A gloopy, organic rebrand

Everything in Calendly’s new identity is engineered to look effortless, organic, and simple—a clear departure from the brand’s previous identity, which was designed by Pentagram in 2021. Whereas the brand’s former identity emphasized neon colors, bold shapes, and layers of illustration, the new look is soft and purposefully understated. 

Miller says the old identity worked to make Calendly feel friendly and approachable, but it “could too easily signal ‘booking link’ when we needed to communicate a more connected platform and a bigger role in our customers’ work.” There were also several practical challenges with the former branding that Smith’s team needed to address.

“I love neons and prints, but Calendly had these neon colors from the previous rebrand and they were like, ‘It’s so hard to work with them,’” Smith says. “‘Our pink isn’t printable. Our blue is barely printable. We can’t do any big graphics because the flood is just too intense and it feels like the pink felt like an error or something like that.’ They really wanted this brand to feel like a breath of fresh air.”

Smith & Diction’s new color palette emphasizes Calendly’s core blue but adds in a range of prismatic pastels that can be blended into an unlimited number of background gradients for the brand. The palette, Smith explains, is meant to feel like the little moments of stillness throughout the day: morning sunlight pouring over your desk, the edges of clouds at sunset, or light dancing off water.

Across the brand identity, Smith’s team worked to incorporate elements that would nod to Calendly’s role of “making space” in the workday by serving as the invisible connective tissue powering everyday tasks. One key asset is something that Smith has dubbed “gloop”—a recurring motif of organic, liquid shapes that help visually bridge the custom icons for features like the calendar, email assistant, and notetaker.

Meanwhile, the brand’s new wordmark, made in partnership with designer Gavin Potenza, has been edited so that the tail of the “C” flows seamlessly into the “a,” and the “e” likewise flows into the “n.” 

“Almost like how Calendly is the invisible connector for people, the wordmark can pay off that invisibility as well,” Smith wrote in a case study on Medium.

How Calendly got its new logo

By a long shot, Smith says, the hardest part of the rebrand was giving Calendly a logo that wasn’t a calendar.

Calendly felt strongly that its name needed to remain the same, given the 13 years of brand affinity backing it, but its accompanying icon (formerly a very techy blue “C”) needed to help signal the brand’s new positioning. Smith tasked Tully Ryan, his team’s “symbol guy,” with figuring what to do. 

“He was like, ‘This is so hard, because you just want to draw calendars. That’s all you want to do,’” Smith says. “We even had something that looked kind of like a Slack logo, but then it almost felt like a calendar without the edge. We’re like, ‘Oh, no.’”

From there, the team tried everything: sunrises to represent the start of the day; hourglasses for time; and even a modular system of different symbols that could expand over time. Ultimately, though, they ended up right back where they started. Ryan experimentally mocked up a “C,” this time with a less techy feel, surrounded by a series of ripples. That design was ultimately simplified down to a single ripple, represented by a shape that Smith calls a “squircle.”

“We presented this idea of a ‘C’ with a ripple effect,” Smith wrote in the case study. “To be over conceptually designer-y about it, this symbol represents the idea of how just sending one meeting link can change the trajectory of your business. Calendly is that first ripple.”

Smith might poke a bit of fun at the intense deliberation that went into Calendly’s new look, but that sentiment is a window into how SaaS companies are thinking about design right now. In a landscape where AI is making productivity platforms increasingly broad—and, frankly, confusing—design becomes the wayfinder to help users understand what they’re really signing up for.

The Fold8, which launched in early August for $1,900, is Samsung’s attempt to wipe away the last remaining compromises of earlier foldables in pursuit of broader appeal. The new passport-like shape is more pocketable than previous versions while unfolding into a small tablet, and the crease on the inner screen is barely noticeable. Samsung says it’s targeting folks who consume video on their phones, which is to say pretty much everyone. It’s probably no coincidence that the rumors of a forthcoming Apple foldable indicate a similar size and shape.

But in using the Fold8 over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that the new shape doesn’t really eliminate the compromises of a foldable phone. It merely introduces some different ones. I’m still a foldable phone fan and have enjoyed my time with the Fold8, but while I was once so sure that the perfect foldable was within reach, the new shape illustrates how foldable phones, like most tech products, will always have trade-offs.

Why Samsung widened the Fold’s front screen

In a way, the Fold8’s outer screen is a throwback, using the same 16:10 aspect ratio as Samsung’s breakthrough Galaxy Note from 2011. It’s shorter and wider than any other modern flagship phone, and it takes some getting used to.

The main challenge is one-handed use, as it’s a struggle to reach across the screen with your thumb while gripping the phone in your palm. Balancing the phone under your fingers makes things easier, but feels precarious.

Another issue, which hopefully improves with time: Some apps and websites aren’t ready for squatter displays. I nearly lost my Connections streak, for instance, when the Fold8 cut off the site’s “One Away” messages. I thought it was a bug, and only later realized the messages were appearing just out-of-frame.

The funny thing is that Samsung spent years trying to make the Fold feel more like a normal phone. Until 2025’s Fold7, the outer screens ran narrower than a typical smartphone, and while that made them easy to use one-handed, they looked awkward, and reviewers complained. Drew Blackard, Samsung Electronics America’s senior VP of mobile product management, says I’m pretty much the only one who didn’t mind the narrower design.

“Every year until probably last year, we were told, ‘Too slim, too slim, too slim,'” he tells Fast Company.

But in widening the Fold7’s cover screen, Samsung introduced a new compromise: The inner screen, which resembled a small tablet on earlier foldables, became wider too, to the point that it’s almost square. It’s more awkward to hold than previous generations, and it leads to thicker black bars around videos.

The Fold8’s unorthodox shape is a response to the previous response. Unfolded, the 4:3 aspect ratio results in smaller black bars for widescreen videos, and the camera cutout in the screen’s top-right section hides behind the videos’ letterboxing instead of getting in the way. Rotate the screen into portrait mode, and it feels more like a Kindle for reading (though the camera cutout becomes more intrusive, sitting along the screen’s side instead of at the top).

Samsung still offers the old shape on its pricier Fold8 Ultra, but now the company is pitching that device as a productivity solution, able to run two full-sized phone apps side-by-side. The Fold8 caters to the more mainstream use of watching videos and playing games, which Blackard says is what people spend 60% of their time doing.

“While the Fold [Ultra] is still multitasking powerhouse … there was certainly a more ideal form factor for someone who was focused primarily on content consumption.”

To that end, Samsung opted for one more strategic compromise: On the Fold8, you can’t unfold the screen partway to prop up as a selfie camera or use as a kickstand for video consumption. Blackard says the hinge that supports those features creates a more noticeable crease, so it relegated partial folding to the Fold8 Ultra and smaller Flip8.

Avi Greengart, the founder and lead analyst at Techsponential, says it’s a worthy trade-off given what Samsung is trying to accomplish.

“If you’re trying to prioritize video, then you’re going to want a widescreen shape, and you’re going to want that widescreen shape to have as minimal a crease as possible.” he says.

Looming large in this debate is Apple, which may launch a foldable phone as soon as this fall. Various leaks and rumors, as aggregated by MacRumors, point to a phone with a similar shape to Samsung’s Fold8 and a nearly invisible crease on the inner screen.

The rumors track with how Apple approaches consumer electronics. While Samsung likes to throw out lots of ideas to see what works, Apple is more cautious and is unlikely to experiment in public with a wide range of foldable shapes.

Room to disagree

Not everyone agrees that a squatter screen is the way forward. Google, for instance, adopted a passport-like shape for its original Pixel Fold in 2023, aiming to emphasize media consumption on the inner screen much like Samsung is doing with the Fold8. The company switched to a taller and narrower design for subsequent Pixel Folds in response to user feedback.

“Over time we found more users prefer having many interactions on the outside screen, so we prioritized making that an uncompromised experience,” Justin Savich, a group product manager for Google, says via email.

Meanwhile, Samsung’s Drew Blackard acknowledges that he prefers the Fold8 Ultra for his own personal use. If I were buying a new foldable phone today, that’d be my preference as well. Blackard doesn’t believe the market will ever consolidate toward one particular format.

“That’s the exciting thing to me about foldable technology,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be one standard form factor. It can take on different shapes and sizes.”

“You can just call us HUT for the next 25 weeks,” the pizza chain wrote in a social media post with an image of a temporarily rebranded Pizza Hut storefront.

On the restaurant’s facade, the “Pizza” part of the chain’s wordmark is covered up by a red banner showing a football; another image shows the word “Pizza” similarly covered by a football banner on a store marquee.

Don’t expect your local Pizza Hut to cover up its logo, however. The “rebrand” is actually just a stunt, the chain says, playing off the dual meaning of the word hut in its brand name, which quarterbacks shout in a football snap count. There won’t be a widespread change made to the signage at the shrinking number of Pizza Hut restaurants.

“This is a playful, limited activation deployed at select Pizza Hut locations, designed as a fun nod to our longtime role in football traditions,” Pizza Hut CMO Melissa Friebe tells Fast Company. “This creative take on our signage is simply a reminder to football fans that game day starts with ‘Hut.’”

Pizza Hut’s gimmick rebrand is part of a marketing trend among restaurant chains in the name of creating content. Rather than a work of graphic design, it’s meant to be a fun take on a logo, like IHOP briefly calling itself IHOb by flipping up the last letter in its logo in 2018 to sell more burgers, or Long John Silver’s stunt rebrand swapping out the fish in its logo for a chicken to sell more of the latter last year.

Pizza Hut’s not trying to sell a new product here. What it is trying to do is be top of mind for football fans who want to order pizza. Visually, the chain did it by removing some details of its logo to draw attention to a core brand element.

This is a familiar marketing playbook, and it works. Just look to Levi’s and Heinz covering up their logos for the World Cup, or McDonald’s advertising through just color and scent. Competitor Domino’s released a domino-shaped personal pizza that comes in a box designed like a domino to own the rectangle as its distinctive shape in a category known for circles.

The “rebrand” comes at a challenging time for Pizza Hut. The chain was sold by Yum Brands in June to buyers that include private equity and Yum China Holdings, its China division, which spun off as a separate company in 2016. It said earlier this year it would close nearly 250 U.S. stores.

Despite providing power around the clock, regardless of the weather, it was geographically limited and expensive to build. Over the past two decades, as wind and solar boomed across the grid, geothermal continued to make up only a minuscule fraction of the American electricity supply—more a piece of energy trivia than a viable source of power.

But in May 2026, geothermal startup Fervo Energy went public—and eventually raised $2.2 billion, making it the largest clean energy IPO ever. Later this year, the company will open the first utility-scale next-generation geothermal power plant. And this is all happening at an incredibly fraught moment for the clean energy industry.

Wind projects are being canceled—in some cases, developers are being paid by the Trump administration to pivot to fossil fuels. Solar developments are also facing cancellations, delays, and a much less certain policy environment.

As the federal government has attacked other renewables, billions of dollars in clean energy projects have been put at risk. And yet geothermal seems to be getting a pass, somehow untouched by President Donald Trump’s antipathy for other renewable power sources.

Fervo’s approach rests on a strange irony: The company realized that the oil and gas technology that helped unlock the shale boom could finally make geothermal scalable. Founder Tim Latimer, a former oil and gas engineer, saw an opportunity to repurpose the technology that others had missed—using new drilling techniques to make geothermal feasible in many more places than it ever had been before.

Can the advances in drilling that powered the fracking boom also create a new thriving sector of the clean energy economy—one that escapes the fraught politics of the rest of the sector?

For the past three years, Fervo has shown that its technology works in a 3.5-megawatt pilot project in Nevada that helps power a Google data center. Now, in a remote part of the Utah desert, the company is putting the final touches on Cape Station, a new power plant that will begin delivering power to the grid later this year. As it continues to scale up over the next two years, it will eventually deliver 500 megawatts, the equivalent of powering more than 375,000 homes.

The timing matters: Fervo has arrived just as the country desperately needs more power. As demand for electricity is surging because of AI data centers—and many projects are turning back to fossil fuels—Fervo has a renewable solution and rare political support. The question now is whether Fervo and other startups in the space can turn geothermal into a major new industry with growth curves that look like solar and wind before them.

Why an oil and gas engineer bet on geothermal

Latimer didn’t set out to launch a clean energy company. He grew up in rural Texas and studied engineering at the University of Tulsa, then started his career in the oil and gas industry as the shale boom was underway. But he was increasingly interested in ways to combat climate change. And as he was researching drilling techniques at work, he started to learn about geothermal power.

The basic approach is more than a century old. In certain places where the geological conditions are right—with natural underground reservoirs of water next to hot rock—it’s possible to tap into the Earth’s heat. A power plant can use the hot water or steam from those reservoirs to run a turbine and generate clean electricity 24/7.

Still, only a limited number of locations are the right fit. Across Iceland, for example, the volcanic landscape means that nearly a third of its electricity comes from geothermal power; 90% of its homes also use geothermal heat.

In the U.S, while some places have the right conditions (including hot spots in California and Nevada), they’re often less obvious, and exploration to test potential sites is often prohibitively expensive. Historically, geothermal has struggled to compete with other forms of energy because of the geographic limitations. Today it makes up less than 1% of American electricity.

In the 1970s, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory started researching an alternative: “hot dry rock” geothermal, an approach that involved drilling artificial reservoirs to make geothermal energy more widely accessible. But there were technical challenges in drilling, and as funding dwindled, progress slowed down.

Some projects continued around the world, and the technology made incremental progress in the decades that followed. But it wasn’t yet commercially viable. The breakthrough came when Latimer realized that some of the newer horizontal drilling and fracking techniques used in oil and gas had the potential to help geothermal finally scale up.

He tried, at first, to convince his own company to pivot to geothermal. Then he started cold-calling existing geothermal companies to explain the approach; they didn’t believe that it would work for them. Whenever he wasn’t at work, Latimer kept researching the idea—and eventually decided to go to Stanford for business school as he considered launching a startup.

At Stanford he faced more skepticism. But he also met Jack Norbeck, an expert in geothermal who had recently finished his PhD; he became Fervo’s cofounder and CTO. Latimer then met Dave Danielson, a partner at the climate tech VC firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures, who had deeply researched options for clean, always-available power and was very familiar with geothermal.

“When I started talking to [Danielson] about what we wanted to do about bringing horizontal drilling to geothermal, I think the light bulb went off for him,” Latimer says. “He realized that this was new and different, and actually had a strong thesis for why it was worth taking another look at geothermal.”

Latimer tried to pitch oil and gas companies—a natural fit since they were using the same equipment. But he found that a lot of the industry “really had a surface-level understanding of geothermal,” he says.

At one point, the ventures team at an oil and gas company was interested but then pulled out. When Latimer asked why, they cited an internal report that claimed geothermal was infeasible—but the report turned out to be nearly 20 years old and outdated.

“The irony is sometimes we felt like we were doing geothermal right under their noses,” he says.

Because the industry felt like it understood geothermal, it didn’t dive deeper, giving Fervo the opportunity to later establish itself as a leader.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures became one of the company’s first investors as Fervo raised $11 million in its Series A in 2019.

“We always look and try and figure out, is there something unusual about the entrepreneur operator that gives them an unfair, unusual advantage on what they’re doing?” says Carmichael Roberts, a partner at Breakthrough. Latimer’s insight about using oil and gas technology to industrialize geothermal “just made sense,” Roberts says. “He was the right person, it was the right story.”

Fervo joined Activate, a fellowship program that helps scientists commercialize research. As the team developed the technology and began planning the first site, Latimer hustled to meet potential customers—eventually convincing Google to be part of the pilot plant, as the tech giant looked for new ways to source 24/7 clean energy for its data centers.

In 2023, the pilot project started running in Nevada, bringing 3 megawatts of power production to the state’s grid. Fervo had shown that its innovative approach could work, and the race to scale it up began.

Turning geothermal into a repeatable product

From the beginning, the team focused on creating a modular system—something that hadn’t been possible in the industry before.

“If you’re doing traditional geothermal, you’re really just subject to what the natural geothermal reservoir will give you,” Latimer says. One well might be 300 degrees and support a 20-megawatt power plant; the next might happen to be 380 degrees, meaning the power plant will be bigger and need its own engineering design. “They couldn’t really standardize power plant design,” he says.

Fervo’s approach is designed to eliminate that variability. Since Fervo creates its own artificial reservoirs, it’s possible to drill to different depths to hit around the same temperature each time—430 degrees Fahrenheit. That makes it possible to have a repeatable design for the power plant, made in units the company calls GeoBlocks.

Each GeoBlock is similar to a standard industrial power unit, with a compact footprint and off-the-shelf equipment. The design includes adapted oil and gas components from existing suppliers.

Having the same basic design means that the company can enter into long-term supply agreements with manufacturers of turbines and other parts.

“We know that our design will be pretty standard across the next 100 plants that we build, and that is something we have brought to the industry that never really has been possible before,” Latimer says.

Already, performance has significantly improved. In 2022, in the first commercial well in the pilot, it took 70 days to drill more than 11,000 feet deep and more than 3,000 feet horizontally. By 2024, the company had drilled a deeper well at Cape Station in 21 days. This July, it announced the next milestone: a well that was even longer—nearly 20,000 feet deep, plus a 7,500-foot horizontal section—that also only took 21 days to drill.

As the drilling process has gotten faster, it’s also gotten substantially cheaper. To be clear, the capital cost of geothermal is still high, and wind and solar remain the cheapest forms of energy to build. In the second phase of Cape Station, Fervo expects its cost to be $5,500 per kilowatt of installed capacity, or roughly three to five times more expensive than a solar farm, with an aim to eventually hit $3,000 per kilowatt.

But geothermal can fill an important gap in the grid when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing. Because it can run continuously, it produces more electricity than a solar farm.

And as the cost of enhanced geothermal keeps coming down, the International Energy Agency has predicted that it could reach $50 per megawatt-hour by 2035, making it competitive with wind and solar. But the threshold Fervo is looking for is simply to beat natural gas, the usual fossil power that data centers run on when there isn’t enough clean energy available.

“We’ve always thought that chasing the cost of natural gas power generation was the goal and we had our road map to get there,” Latimer says. “I think what’s happened is it’s happening sooner than we thought because natural gas is not a fixed target. It’s getting more expensive. And every time you turn around, the turbine lead times are longer and construction costs are bigger.”

The strange politics that give geothermal an edge right now

Geothermal power has another advantage at the moment: Unlike wind and solar, it hasn’t been attacked by the Trump administration. The government has done everything from pausing permits and attempting to shut down offshore wind—both of which failed in court—to paying developers to abandon projects. When Trump successfully pushed to roll back tax credits for wind and solar, geothermal’s tax credits stayed in place. One of Trump’s executive orders described geothermal as an “essential” energy source.

“Geothermal is unique—it has probably more bipartisan support than any other energy source I can think of, all the way from the far left to the far right,” says Jason Lipton, senior manager of strategic finance for a geothermal program at the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force. “It checks the boxes for all sides of the political spectrum.”

It’s clean, renewable, and a domestic source of power. It provides power around the clock. It’s a source of jobs for former oil and gas workers. In Fervo’s case, in particular, it uses oil and gas industry equipment. The land footprint is small compared to solar. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who has been pushing for geothermal, previously founded Liberty Energy—a fracking company that invested in Fervo in 2022.

Right now, American companies are also leading in geothermal technology globally, another reason for bipartisan support. “We’re No. 1 in the rankings of amount of geothermal deployed,” says Ryan Panchadsaram, an adviser at the VC firm Kleiner Perkins and a partner at Doerr Capital, an LP (limited partner) at Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Since it’s an area where the country excels, he says, there’s an opportunity for America to dominate.

While the Trump administration has invested more in nuclear energy than geothermal, there’s a base level of support that solar and wind don’t have right now. That support helps give companies like Fervo more of a sense of predictability in planning.

“I think what you’re seeing is the market’s reaction to the thing that all businesses crave, which is regulatory and political certainty,” says Mike O’Connor, director of the Mountain West Geothermal Consortium, an industry group working with state governments to help geothermal scale up.

Can geothermal scale up?

Fervo’s fundamental approach is also helping make geothermal less risky for investors and lenders. In the past, companies might spend millions drilling a well and then find that the conditions aren’t right for a power plant.

“They don’t have something called ‘dry hole’ risk—there’s not a risk that they drill a hole and there’s no output,” O’Connor says. “The question is, is it going to be more, about the same, or less than what they expected it to be? And that’s a much better question for an investor to write a diligence sheet around, or an insurance company to frame.”

The company still faces some risks. The other rural locations where it plans to build have transmission constraints. Water is another challenge in the Western states where Fervo will operate, though the company notes that it can use non-potable water, so it’s not competing with drinking water supplies.

Over the long term, there’s also a risk of something called thermal decline, where a geothermal plant produces less power over time. But that is an engineering challenge Fervo believes it can address if needed. Like oil and gas fracking, the approach has some seismic risk; the industry contends that it’s manageable, but if a new geothermal plant triggers an earthquake, that could slow development.

There might still be some unknowns in terms of early performance. “My biggest concern is that they’re trying to be—let’s call it aspirational, almost, in how quickly they can produce power online for extended periods,” says Jefferson Tester, a Cornell University professor of sustainable energy who focuses on geothermal. Tester says he does believe any challenges will be solvable, but it’s possible there may be issues that need to be addressed.

Meanwhile, customers are already making large bets that Fervo will deliver.

Drilling for the data centers

In March, Google signed an agreement with Fervo to support the development of 3 gigawatts of geothermal power, a deal that gives the tech giant priority in new development. Fervo’s sites are large enough, though, that it can support multiple customers; it has more than $7.2 billion in contracted revenue from Google, Southern California Edison, Shell, and others. (Since its initial public offering, however, the company’s stock price has declined by more than 50%.)

According to Panchadsaram, the number of offtakers is a sign of how compelling the company’s approach is. “The investments those companies are making are not charity,” he says. “They deeply see how if those technologies succeed, it can help them with their goals, which is to get clean, sustainable, abundant energy.”

Though demand from AI data centers is helping pull Fervo forward, the market for geothermal would likely remain even if the AI bubble pops.

“If you talk to any utility and tell them that you could potentially bring 100 megawatts or 500 megawatts online that would be up 90% of the time, and that would deliver ‘firm’ around-the-clock power . . . geothermal is going to be a very attractive thing,” the Clean Air Task Force’s Lipton says. “Utilities are going to be very interested in that. So I think the benefits are much broader than data centers.”

As Cape Station begins sending power to the grid later this year, it will be a milestone for the industry: the first utility-scale proof point for enhanced geothermal. The wells and equipment are all in place for the first phase of 100 megawatts, and Fervo is finishing the process of commissioning the plant. Assuming that it runs as expected, it will likely mean more investment not just for Fervo but for other companies working on enhanced geothermal.

“The biggest challenge right now with the geothermal industry is that we have limited proof points,” says the Mountain West Geothermal Consortium’s O’Connor. “Every single proof point we design, the industry gobbles up very hungrily.” That’s happened with earlier milestones at Cape Station, he says, as well as at Forge, a government testing ground for enhanced geothermal adjacent to Cape Station in Utah.

Multiple other startups are now using Fervo’s approach of applying oil and gas drilling techniques to geothermal. Sage Geosystems, one competitor using a similar approach, recently announced that it connected a small power plant to the grid near San Antonio and is working on a project for Meta.

XGS Energy, which uses similar drilling techniques with a different closed-loop design, is also building power for Meta data centers. Others are working on different “superhot” technology that reaches much farther underground, including the MIT spin-out Quaise.

“My personal perspective is that we’re going to need an all-of-the-above approach,” Lipton says.

Fervo has spent years acquiring leasing options on sites for future development—more than 650,000 acres across seven states in the American West. More projects are ready to build in Utah and Nevada, and others are in the pipeline. The focus is on Western states because they have the best access to hot rock underground.

If Cape Station works as planned, Fervo will have a repeatable model that it can take to its next sites. As David Ulrey, Fervo’s CFO, says, “I think much of what we set out to do at Cape Station was demonstrate a blueprint for what we think could be a process and a technology that could really change the world.”

Data from the U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that in June 2026, the unemployment rate was 5.7% for recent college graduates between the ages of 22 to 27. Young workers overall, in the same age group, accounted for 7.2% of the unemployment rate. Those are both higher than the unemployment rate of all workers (4.7%).

Worse, when many Gen Z job seekers do secure an interview, they say they’re met with multiple interview rounds, lengthy job trials, or a recruiter ghosting them. We seem to hear more often about what Gen Z job seekers are doing wrong—rather than how behavior from recruiters is causing job seekers to lose hope. 

Both during and after job interviews, Gen Z applicants are facing a particular batch of road blocks, with some tensely awaiting whatever could be the final straw.

The ghosting epidemic

“What’s most frustrating is getting a callback for an interview or screening, having employment interest expressed towards me—and then being ghosted for a week or two,” says Patrick Daniel, a 23-year-old job seeker based in Atlanta.

“After sending references, keeping in touch with the recruiter, and even showing knowledge about the company,” Daniel just gets left hanging, he says. 

This consistently discouraging experience has affected the way Daniel approaches his job search. For the past year, he’s decided to focus on networking and face-to-face interactions, whether it be with a recruiter or with alumni from schools he’s attended. 

Daniel’s not alone. A recent report from the online career platform and résumé builder LiveCareer found that out of 1,000 U.S. workers, 45% say a potential employer stopped communicating with them after they’ve entered the hiring process. 

And indeed, job seekers are experiencing ghosting at every stage of the process. LiveCareer’s report found that 19% of job seekers were ghosted after an initial communication, 22% after one or more interviews, 12% after completing a skills test, and 13% after being told an offer was coming. 

Danielle, a 29-year-old working in public relations in New York City, relates to Daniel and says a lack of closure after a job interview is frustrating. (Danielle asked for her last name to be kept private to avoid being identifiable to future employers.) She would like to know the reason why she gets rejected as a candidate, despite meeting all qualifications and prerequisites on paper. 

“I wish there was more transparency into that process as a whole,” she says. “While ghosting is just one manifestation of that, a formal declination from a recruiter does not give me a sense of closure in entirety. ‘Why’ is the question that still lingers.”

Quick communication is key for today’s job seekers. According to a recent ZipRecruiter report of 1,500 job seekers across the U.S, 49% of job seekers expect to hear from an employer within three days of applying. 

In addition, 67.9% of job seekers wish employers would give a fast response, whether it’s a yes or no. Receiving a good or bad response in a reasonable time allows job seekers to move accordingly and focus on communicating with other employers. 

But for Gen Z, many of whom are looking to properly launch their careers, that time may feel of the essence as job search discouragement continues to mount.

One upsetting interview after another

Ghosting is not the only offense recruiters and potential employers are committing when it comes to hiring members of the workforce’s youngest generation. One Gen Z job seeker posted to TikTok about an unprofessional interview question she was recently asked during an interview for a clinical research role at an insomnia research startup.

“[The interviewer] goes, ‘Yeah, I watched your video interview,’” the TikTok user recounts. “‘So let’s get into some questions. What’s broken about you?’” This question stunned the user and she called it mind-boggling. The interviewer went on to say that the role needs to be filled by someone who’s has a good personality as the last few people hired were incompetent. To the TikTok user, the interview was an example of why nobody likes startups: “What is wrong with you people?” 

Some companies have not been receiving great representation lately when it comes to job interviews or applications. One Y-Combinator startup promised interviews to applicants who got permanent tattoos in a hiring stunt that prompted real conversations around exploitation in the job market. And recent encounters with inappropriate interview questions or other awkward instances are evident across other fields for Gen Z candidates, as well. 

Maame Asante, a 25-year-old job seeker based in New York City, had a recent job interview with a well-known charter school where she received live feedback. During her interview with the principal, Asante recounts, “She said I had a monotone voice and said she was being more expressive than me.” This comment displeased Asante since it didn’t connect to her ability to do the role she was interviewing for. After this comment, Asante says the interview ended pretty early.  

In another interview, Asante said the hiring manager was openly distracted, and seemed to be doing something else off screen. “Not sure if she was on her phone or doing work, but I was talking and realized she was looking elsewhere,” Asante says. 

In an already historically tough job market for entry-level job seekers, many in Gen Z keep bumping up against recruiters or hiring managers who act like they simply don’t take the candidates seriously.

An Aptitude Research report based on data collected in 2024 found that 82% of recruiters lost talent due to a poor interview process, and highlighted issues with standardization, bias, and consistency. A bad interview experience can deter a candidate from continuing to pursue a position. 

Gen Z job seekers are experiencing ghosting, inconsistent communication, and odd interviews that disrupt their job search process. This occurs at a time when the average number of weeks a U.S. job seeker remains unemployed, as of July 2026, is 24.9. That’s 1.2 weeks longer than an average of 23.7 weeks six months prior.

And when you’re looking for work, every extra day can feel like an eternity—regardless of how old you are, or where you are in your career.

The buzzy prebiotic soda brand is looking to fill five social media roles, ranging from entry-level to leadership positions. But rather than just posting listings on LinkedIn, Poppi is playing to its strengths and fashioning its latest recruitment push like a brand campaign. It’s a playbook that has helped turn Poppi into a $500 million-a-year business in roughly five years, while generating more than 3 billion views on TikTok alone.

“As a community- and creator-first brand, we’ve had such an influx over the years of people wanting to join the team,” says Sesto.

And increasingly, those people aren’t looking for jobs on traditional career sites. YouTube and Instagram are now the top platforms where Gen Z workers seek career advice, according to a new survey from Zety, a résumé builder. As Instagram becomes the new LinkedIn, brands are paying attention and meeting prospective applicants where they are.

These days, more of the inner workings of companies have become part of the content machine, from executives to employees on the shop floor. Fast Company first reported on employee-generated content back in 2024. Now, 40% of consumers and 62% of Gen Z discover new products through employee-generated content at least once a month, as companies from Starbucks to Staples leverage employees as creators as part of their brand strategies. The result is increasingly blurry lines between consumer marketing, employer branding, and creator content. For Poppi’s latest campaign, that blurring is the point.

Poppi hired creator Kitty Murphy to promote its recruitment drive on TikTok, casting her as a Poppi employee for the campaign. “I heard that employee of the month gets to go to HQ,” she said in a recent post, as she works the Poppi stand at San Diego State University’s (SDSU) sorority recruitment. “I’ve been on my best behavior, I’ve really been working as hard as I possibly can and I just hope it doesn’t go unnoticed.” The top comment reads, “promote her to CEO immediately.”

Murphy has been working with Poppi since earlier this year. “Her personality is like Poppi in human form,” Sesto says. Her combined audience of more than 311,000 is mostly Gen Z women, the same demographic Poppi is targeting with the new roles.

“We know that they’re all searching for their dream jobs,” Sesto adds, “because they’re telling us in our DMs and in our comments.”

The latest campaign builds on real Poppi employees and team responsibilities. This week, Murphy is at SDSU for RushTok, the TikTok-fueled spectacle around sorority recruitment. Next week, she will lift the curtain on Poppi headquarters. Next month, she will attend Poppi’s annual national sales meeting, documenting it for her followers.

Young consumers have shown increased interest in the behind-the-scenes workings of the brands they consume, particularly content that breaks down barriers between brand and consumer. Employee-generated content can make companies feel more approachable and build brand loyalty, while influencer partnerships still play an important role in expanding reach. Poppi’s strategy combines both, driving awareness and affinity while simultaneously attracting talent.

Poppi has already cultivated a loyal fan base that’s ready and willing to promote the brand in exchange for participation and cocreation. Its collegiate ambassador program has seen its largest-ever number of applicants this year, according to Sesto, topping 11,000. “We’ve been joking that it’s harder to get into the Poppi Ambassador program than an Ivy League with the acceptance rate,” she says. Poppi has even hired former ambassadors for full-time positions.

Sesto would “rather hire someone who knows the consumer because they are the consumer than someone with years of experience on their résumé but without brand fit.”

For the next generation of workers, the roles of consumer, creator, and now employee are no longer distinct. The dream job? A combination of all three.

You’ve almost certainly heard this line. You may have even said it yourself. It sounds both tough-minded and empowering. But of all the things managers say with good intentions, this is my least favorite. It inadvertently sends two unhelpful messages: First, that problems aren’t welcome, and second, that solving them is something you should do on your own. Both are exactly wrong in today’s complex, uncertain world.

As a management aphorism, it’s in direct tension with what the best leaders tend to say and do. Colin Powell once said: “Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.” 

Having spent much of my research career studying why people fail to speak up with their concerns, questions, and even ideas at work, Powell’s words seem refreshingly wise to me. And they remind me of something Fujio Cho, then the Toyota plant manager in Georgetown, Kentucky (and later chairman of Toyota worldwide) said in a senior leadership meeting to a subordinate named Jim Wiseman, as reported in Fast Company years ago: “Please talk to us about your problems so we can work on them together.”

Unpacking impact

Let’s start with what “don’t come to me with problems—come to me with solutions” actually conveys to subordinates. Although its intent may be to ask people to take initiative, to think critically about options rather than just dropping problems in the boss’s lap, or to discourage passive complaining, its impact is something else entirely. It is not brilliant solutions. It’s silence. It’s rework. Ultimately, it gives rise to, “How did this get so bad without anyone telling me?”

When people are told, “Don’t come to me with problems,” they hear, “Problems make you look weak, negative, or difficult.” They hear, “I don’t want to hear bad news.” Employees—especially those early in their careers or far from the center of power—are exquisitely attuned to what might get them labeled as a poor performer, or worse, a troublemaker. As a result, they naturally hold back half-formed concerns. They delay sharing early warning signs until the problem has grown so large that it can no longer be hidden.   

To be fair, there might have been a time and a context where this admonition made sense. In contexts characterized by relatively high levels of consistency and predictability, and especially when interdependence and complexity were relatively low, problem-detecting and -solving often paired together neatly. Expert work that’s neatly siloed—think of a brilliant diagnostician in a narrow field of medical expertise—also allows this to occur.

We see versions of this pattern in postmortems of crises and major corporate failures. In inquiry after inquiry—from NASA shuttle failures to VW “Dieselgate” and Theranos—investigators discovered that warning signs were present long before failures hit the headlines. Employees may have raised safety concerns, questioned aggressive targets, or flagged vulnerabilities—only to be ignored or discouraged. Months before Equifax’s massive data breach, for example, a security researcher warned the company that it was vulnerable to a large-scale attack.

Research across industries finds that people routinely stay silent about problems because they fear retaliation, doubt anything will change, or simply don’t believe their concerns are welcome. A crisp aphorism about not bringing problems to the boss only reinforces that reluctance. It tells people, in so many words, that their job is to cope, not to name the underlying issue.

Problem-solving in today’s organizations

The second issue with “Don’t come to me with problems” is just as important but less obvious: It misunderstands how problem-solving actually works in modern organizations. Spotting problems is something individuals are good at. The customer service representative hears the same complaint five times in a week. A nurse notices that a piece of equipment is confusing and easy to misuse. A junior engineer keeps tripping over the same bottleneck in the code review process. We are excellent problem-spotters, especially when we’re close to where the work happens.

But individuals rarely have all the information, resources, or authority required to design and implement a solution on their own. In real organizations, consequential problems almost always cut across functional, geographic, or hierarchical lines. Fixing a recurring customer issue might involve product and operations, legal and finance, headquarters and the field. Improving a safety process might require coordination between frontline staff, supervisors, training, and compliance.

In this context, “Come to me with solutions” lands as: “Unless you can single-handedly architect the cross-functional remedy, keep quiet.” It tells the people best positioned to notice emerging issues that their observations are incomplete and therefore unwelcome. That’s how organizations sleepwalk into preventable failures. The lone-hero model of problem-solving is a poor fit for complex, interdependent systems. It encourages a subtler form of waste as well: Teams invest energy in work-arounds that not only don’t solve the problem, but also give rise to dynamics that worsen the problem over time.

High-performing teams are not defined by the absence of problems; they’re defined by the speed and candor with which problems surface. The faster people in an organization can make sense of a shared reality, the faster the organization can respond.

An alternative

What should leaders say instead? I recognize that the phrase captures a legitimate sentiment—a desire for initiative instead of passive complaining. The question is how to cultivate that without shutting down the flow of vital information.

One option is: “Bring problems early, so we can approach them productively.” This shifts the emphasis from expecting ready-made solutions to the important work of understanding the problem as clearly as possible so as to develop possible solutions. Good questions in this conversation might include: What are you seeing? How often? What examples or data points do you have? What makes this concerning? Framing a problem clearly is itself a contribution. The goal is to bring the right people together to ask good questions and generate options.  

Another might be: “You don’t have to have the solution, but come ready to think with me.” This preserves the expectation of engagement and ownership. It’s not permission to dump vague discomfort on someone else’s desk but rather an invitation to collaborate.

Relatedly, a powerful reframing is: “Escalating a problem is an act of leadership, not disloyalty.” In many organizations, people worry that surfacing problems will make their team, their unit, or their boss look bad. They stay quiet out of a misguided sense of loyalty. As Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings wrote in his book, No Rules Rules: “It is tantamount to being disloyal to the company if you fail to speak up when you disagree with a colleague or have feedback that could be helpful. After all, you could help the business—but you are choosing not to.”

The same is true for problems. Explicitly reframing problem-raising as a contribution to the collective helps create psychological safety for speaking up. When people know they can raise concerns without having everything figured out, and that they will be expected to participate in the thinking, they’re far more likely to speak up early and energetically. The contrasting cultures that leaders’ approaches to problem-finding create are captured in the table below.

Contrasting cultures

Going forward

Words alone are not enough, of course. Leadership is more than simply swapping out slogans. If people bring messy problems forward early and are met with irritation or blame, they will learn the lesson quickly. To make these norms real, leaders must respond to problem-raising with curiosity, appreciation, and a genuine invitation to think together. That is how you teach people that their problems are, in Gen. Powell’s sense, your work.

The impulse behind “Don’t come to me with problems” is understandable. Most leaders don’t want to become complaint departments. But if you want a resilient, innovative organization, you need people to be expert problem-spotters and collaborative problem-solvers. 

It’s time to retire that well-worn aphorism. Take Powell’s reminder seriously—when people stop bringing you problems, you have stopped leading them. Saying “Bring me problems early and be ready to think together” is less catchy—but far more effective.

The $25 costume—listed as “Kids’ Glows Under Blacklight Circus Clown Halloween Costume Bodysuit”—had a black-and-orange harlequin pattern alongside a mask featuring an oversize, exaggerated smile. The product’s marketing photograph showcased a Black child wearing the costume while holding a pose that people said evokes segregation-era caricatures of Black people, which were performed by white people in blackface.

After posts on Threads, TikTok, and X quickly gained visibility on August 23, Target removed the costume—part of its “Hyde and Eek! Boutique” collection—from its website. According to Newsweek, metadata from the original listing indicates that the product had been available since earlier this summer.

“As a company, we know we got this wrong, and we are deeply sorry. The costume is offensive and should never have been part of our assortment. It is no longer available for sale,” the company said in statement on Monday. As of Monday evening, Target had not responded to requests for comment from Fast Company.

“This is what happens when you don’t have people in the room that look like us. You end up doing some shit like this,” a user noted on TikTok.

Target’s statement continued: “We know this is especially hurtful for our Black guests, team members, and partners. Removing the costume is an important first step, and the company is looking closely at how this happened and what needs to change to ensure this won’t happen again.”

The controversy also follows Target’s decision to roll back its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in 2025. The decision was met with backlash and boycott efforts from the public, some of which are ongoing as community organizers seek more concrete DEI commitments from the retailer.

“Aura farming”— internet slang for the act of cultivating clout by doing something that seems effortlessly cool—first gained traction in 2024 following a viral video of Rayyan Arkan Dikha, an 11-year-old Indonesian boy dancing atop a boat. Now it’s gaining traction as something of a spectator sport.

What is an aura farming battle?

Set up similarly to early-2000s dance battles, a crowd gathers while circling a couple of participants, each taking turns to show off their own “moves” (such as they are) in the hopes of earning the crowd’s loudest roar.

The repeated short moves and dances are farcical by design, and would in any other context not register as “cool.” And yet, by tapping into Gen Z’s absurd humor, the battles have skyrocketed in popularity, popping up in cities across Mexico, Brazil, and Costa Rica in just a week.

The battles have no clear objective besides earning attention from the crowd. And while some winners have earned small monetary prizes, the battles are often just done for the love of the game, with one common thread tying the battles together: the more bizarre, the better.

What happens at the battles?

In one case at the Instituto Tecnológico university in Monterrey, Mexico, one young man throws himself on the floor to do the worm. His competitor responds by repeatedly squatting and jumping.

In another battle hosted at the Universidad Panamericana in Mexico City, one participant smashes an egg on his forehead, another dressed as Ghostface from the Scream horror franchise joins in to dance, and another man dabs while using crutches. 

To make the phenomenon even stranger, in a battle hosted at Parque Mexico in Mexico City, singer Rosalía showed up to watch.

While these gatherings try to take absurdity to the next level, they aren’t the first bizarre internet trend to sweep through Latin America.

In 2008, the event now dubbed the “Punk vs. Emo Battle” took over one of Mexico City’s busiest intersections, where members of the punk and emo internet subcultures gathered in person as a physical manifestation of online tensions between the groups. Notably, the nearby police were unable to control the mob once a physical altercation began, with the “battle” only ending as members of the Hare Krishna movement intervened.

Still, despite being somewhat used to strange gatherings of the kind, many in the comments section, although amused, don’t seem to be impressed by the aura farming tournaments.

“The insults in the future will be: Your dad used to farm aura,” one user commented on an aura farming battle video posted to TikTok. Another added: “At least they are not doing drugs.”

Privately held Flock Safety is an Atlanta-based surveillance technology company that operates a nationwide network of automated cameras that record the license plate numbers and other characteristics of passing vehicles every day.

Police claim that the tech is an important crime-fighting tool. Recently, though, it’s also become emblematic of citizen’s concerns about the ramifications of mass surveillance. 

Flock is by no means the only company operating large-scale surveillance tools across the U.S. In fact, competitors like Axon, Vigilant Solutions (a subsidiary of Motorola Solutions), Genetec, and Jenoptik have all been cited by the ACLU as other installers of “creepy” license plate-reading cameras.

But Flock and its vocal founder and CEO Garrett Langley have become the undisputed center of a broader public outcry against mass surveillance—and the “Flocklash” is reaching a creative fever pitch.

Flock bottom?

Right now, Flock is facing mounting pressure from local governments, citizens, and artists to reconsider the ubiquity of its cameras. 

As Fast Company reported earlier this month, more than 50 agencies or jurisdictions have canceled, suspended, or rejected Flock contracts, or deactivated the cameras since the start of 2026 amid concerns that the data can be accessed for immigration enforcement or used in unauthorized tracking.

The pushback has been so intense that, on August 13, the company announced a flurry of new guardrails on its operations. 

According to an NPR review published on August 21, Flock cameras have become the target of widespread vandalism. In at least 36 states, NPR found records of the cameras being stolen, sawed down, covered in paint, and even shot at with guns. 

Meanwhile, some community members are opting to use art, protest, and social media to amplify the anti-Flock message as widely as possible. 

Earlier this month, photographer Brendan North began posting videos of himself creating protest art at his local Flock camera sites, which have collectively amassed several million views.

These demonstrations include pointing a mirror at a Flock camera with the phrase “Go Flock yourself,” having a toddler hold a bunch of red balloons next to a camera to frame “the innocence of a child against the heavy-handed overreach of the surveillance state,” and blindfolding a camera with the American flag.

“Surveil the rebel scum”

On August 20, an unidentified man showed up to a San Diego public safety committee meeting dressed as Darth Vader, where he proceeded to espouse his support of Flock.

“We must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the Rebel scum,” he said. One video of the meeting now has nearly 500,000 likes on Instagram. 

Producer and data scientist Benn Jordan has been speaking out about Flock and other surveillance companies of its ilk for months.

On August 21, he posted a video claiming that Flock blocked him from attending its annual conference, Flock Forward, and shared that, in retaliation, he set up a spy-movie-esque van outside the conference center full of its own surveillance equipment, which he used to watch and record data from the conference.

That video now has more than 700,000 likes. 

Watching the watchers

Most recently, on August 23, a group of protestors from the climate action group Sunrise Movement staged a demonstration outside the home of Chris Larsen, a cryptocurrency billionaire and a cofounder of Ripple Labs.

Larsen has worked to install private cameras across San Francisco in recent years, including by reportedly financially supporting the San Francisco Police Department’s Real-Time Investigation Center, which uses Flock technology.

At the protest, activists hoisted signs with phrases like “Does this make you feel safer, Chris?” and built their own paper surveillance cameras to “watch” the outside of Larsen’s property. 

“Billionaires like Chris Larsen think they can fund the end of privacy and think they won’t be watched for it,” Sunrise Movement campaign director Kidus Girma told Fast Company in an email. “Young people are showing that this isn’t true. Young people are getting creative and using their First Amendment rights to bring surveillance to millionaires and billionaires.”

Flock did not have an immediate comment on the recent backlash against the company.

In an interview with Fox News over the weekend, Flock CEO Langley called for a national “compromise” between promoting privacy and safety.

Based on our analysis of the Zillow Home Value Index, nationally aggregated U.S. home prices are up 1.1% year over year between July 2025 and July 2026. That year-over-year pace is up a tad from this time last year—back in July 2025, when the national year-over-year home price growth rate was +0.2%. And it’s up slightly from the recent year-over-year low of -0.01% in August 2025.

• 4 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (i.e., 1% of markets) had a falling year-over-year reading in the July 2017 to July 2018 window.
• 13 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (i.e., 4% of markets) had a falling year-over-year reading in the July 2018 to July 2019 window.
• 1 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (i.e., <1% of markets) had a falling year-over-year reading in the July 2019 to July 2020 window.
• 4 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (i.e., 1% of markets) had a falling year-over-year reading in the July 2020 to July 2021 window.
• 2 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (i.e., <1% of markets) had a falling year-over-year reading in the July 2021 to July 2022 window.
• 99 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (i.e., 33% of markets) had a falling year-over-year reading in the July 2022 to July 2023 window.
• 37 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (i.e., 12% of markets) had a falling year-over-year reading in the July 2023 to July 2024 window.
• 105 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (i.e., 35% of markets) had a falling year-over-year reading in the July 2024 to July 2025 window.
• 64 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (i.e., 21% of markets) had a falling year-over-year reading in the July 2025 to July 2026 window.

In much of 2024 and the first half of 2025, there was a notable increase in the number of housing markets slipping into year-over-year price declines as the supply–demand equilibrium (as measured by inventory) shifted more quickly toward homebuyers. Over the past 12 months, however, the list of declining markets has begun to stabilize and inventory growth has also decelerated.

Back in fall 2025, ResiClub told readers that we expected the number of markets with year-over-year price declines to gradually decrease a little in the first half of 2026. That’s exactly what we’ve seen. It’s still very much a soft nationally aggregated housing market—but the nationally aggregated burst of softening has let up.

Home prices are still climbing a little, year over year, in many regions where active inventory remains well below pre-pandemic 2019 levels, such as pockets of the Northeast and Midwest. In contrast, some pockets in states like Texas, Florida, and Colorado—where active inventory exceeds pre-pandemic 2019 levels by a solid clip—are seeing material corrections, modest home price pullbacks, or simply flat pricing.

Click here for an interactive version of the chart below.

Many of the housing markets seeing the most softness—where homebuyers have gained the most leverage since the pandemic housing boom fizzled out—are primarily located in Sunbelt regions or the Mountain West.

Many of these areas saw even greater price surges during the pandemic housing boom, with home price growth outpacing local income levels. As pandemic-driven domestic migration slowed and mortgage rates rose in 2022, markets like Tampa, Florida, and Austin, Texas, faced challenges, relying on local income levels to support frothy home prices.

That Sunbelt softening was further compounded by an abundance of new home supply in the Sunbelt. Builders are often willing to lower prices or offer affordability incentives to maintain sales, which also has a cooling effect on the resale market. As a result, some buyers who might have previously opted for existing homes are instead choosing new construction with more attractive deals—which added further upward pressure to resale inventory growth over the past few years.

Of course, while 64 of the nation’s 300 largest metro-area housing markets are seeing year-over-year home price declines, another 236 are seeing year-over-year home price increases.

Where are home prices still up on a year-over-year basis? See the map below.

Click here to view an interactive version of the map below.

Below is a historical chart showing the year-over-year change in home prices across the 50 largest metro housing markets, with the  yellow line representing the national aggregate, dating back to 2000.

While the “range” (see chart above) between the strongest and weakest metro-area housing markets right now is fairly normal historically speaking, the “bifurcation” (i.e., direction) itself—the share of markets with rising home prices versus those with falling prices—is wider than normal, given that national appreciation has stabilized into a softer market with growth barely above 0%. And the longer some markets remain in the “rising” camp while others stay in the “falling” camp, the wider the gulf can become between the relatively more resilient markets and the weaker ones.

For example, home prices in the Hartford, Connecticut, metro area are now 28.7% above their 2022 peak, while home prices in the Austin metro area sit 27.2% below their 2022 peak. Some of that “bifurcation” boils down to mean reversion, with many of the outright home price declines occurring in markets that overheated further during the pandemic housing boom.

Note: For the historical chart below, we analyzed the 200 largest markets rather than the 300 used above, as some markets ranked 201 to 300 lack complete data going back to 2000. When weighted by population (not visualized), the housing market appears slightly weaker than the chart below suggests—which aligns with the fact that, among just the 50 largest housing markets, 21 (42%) are currently posting negative year-over-year price growth, and nationally aggregated home prices are up just 1.1% year over year, using the Zillow Home Value Index.

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum and crypto-related stocks are up today, starting the week on a high note, amid worries about the growing U.S. deficit and inflation, according to CNBC.

That’s after last week’s rally had crypto prices soaring 20%, with Bitcoin up more than 21%, XRP surging over 46%, Ether up 28%, and Dogecoin up 30% for the week, as the assets broke out of their trading ranges.

The rally comes as the U.S. Treasury doubles down on its bond buyback program, and amid President Donald Trump’s continued push to pass the Clarity Act crypto bill, as Fast Company previously reported. (⁠Trump has prioritized crypto reform during his ​second term in office, aggressively promoting crypto-friendly reforms and initiatives, while the president and his family take a personal stake in crypto investments.)

Adding fuel to the fire, Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio warned investors of a possible debt crisis within the next three to five years. “I am confident that the government’s financial condition is at an inflection point,” Dalio wrote on LinkedIn, advising investors to “underweight debt assets like bonds, and [overweight] gold and a bit of Bitcoin.”

A look at the numbers: Bitcoin (BTC) was trading up 3.5% midday on Monday, at 79,912.92, just shy of $80,000, at the time of this writing; while Ethereum (ETH) was up over 2% to about $2,500, at 2,493.61. Both are hitting levels not seen in months, given cryptos’ mostly lackluster performance for much of 2026 so far.

Crypto treasury stocks are also up. Strategy (MSTR) and Strive (ASST) climbed 5% and 3%, respectively, while Bitmine (BMNR) was up 9% and Sharplink (SBET) was up over 6% at the time of this writing.

But on Monday, BTIG’s Jonathan Krinsky noted that in January 2023, Bitcoin surged some 20% in a three-day rally—but then later fell back to its earlier 200-day moving average, per CNBC.

Meanwhile, Kalshi traders think the Bitcoin rally will set the tone of the year’s end, with prices remaining at the current levels—but not soaring further ahead.