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Nearly every solopreneur starts their business saying “yes” to everything. After all, you’re trying to get clients and build a business. Revenue is unpredictable, and your brain treats every opportunity like it might be the last. But when you work for yourself, every “yes” comes at a cost. Agreeing to one project means declining another — or giving up time you can’t get back. Defaulting to “yes” is how solopreneurs end up overcommitted, underpaid, and working on projects that don’t move their business forward. Saying no is a business skill and, like any skill, it gets sharper with practice. Saying no to bad-fit clients Not every client who reaches out is…

Fake accounts have been around as long as social media. So when it was recently revealed that a “hot girl” MAGA personality named Emily Hart was actually a 22-year-old male medical student in India, it might have seemed a little mundane. Just another catfisher, another sock puppet, another scammer—the internet is full of them. Except this one had photos. And videos. And thousands of followers across multiple networks with some posts getting millions of views. Emily Hart was a full-on influencer, not just some anonymous egg. The person who created Emily confessed to Wired that while the account was active, he was making thousands of dollars every month from posting sof…

Sales are booming for Novo Nordisk’s new weight loss pill. In its first earnings report since the release of an alternative to its hit GLP-1 shot, Novo Nordisk’s outlook is looking a bit brighter. The company, which now makes Wegovy in pill form, raised its guidance for the year in light of the first quarter’s success. Novo reported 1.3 million prescriptions for its weight loss pill, which is now available in the U.S., in the first quarter of 2026. The drugmaker plans to launch the pill outside of the U.S. in the second half of the year, expanding the new medication’s reach considerably. “The strong Wegovy performance, combined with continued growth in Inte…

Yesterday, Giorgia Meloni posted to X an AI-generated photo of herself wearing only lingerie. The Italian prime minister published the image to warn others about how easy it is to create perfectly believable images and videos. Her warning: Never believe anything you see without thoroughly fact-checking it. After all, we live in the end of reality. “Deepfakes are a dangerous tool, because they can deceive, manipulate, and hit anyone,” Meloni said on X. “I can defend myself. Many others don’t.” She is right, even though the image is not technically a deepfake. It’s a fully AI-generated photo that features her face. Unlike early deepfakes, which simply switched t…

North America’s largest commuter rail system is facing a potential shutdown as a deadline nears to reach a deal with unionized workers to avert a strike. The Long Island Rail Road that serves New York City’s eastern suburbs has been negotiating for months on a new contract with labor officials representing locomotive engineers, machinists, signalmen and other train workers. A strike was temporarily averted in September when President Donald The President’s administration agreed to help. Those efforts ended without a deal, giving both sides 60 days — ending 12:01 a.m. Saturday — to again try to resolve their differences before the union was legally allowed to go on strik…

There’s a quiet trade-off happening inside high-growth companies right now. We’re moving faster than ever, and teams are more efficient. AI is handling work that used to take hours, and asynchronous communication means decisions don’t have to wait for meetings. On paper, it’s all an upside. But underneath the speed, something else is happening. Leaders are moving further away from their teams. Not intentionally and not dramatically—just gradually enough that you don’t notice it until alignment shifts: decisions that need to be revisited, priorities that aren’t as clear as you thought, or challenges surfacing later than they used to. The assumption that new…

I used to think I was a great salesperson because I had all the right answers. I knew my product inside and out. I could explain every feature, every benefit, every reason someone should say yes. And I did what most people do—I led with that. Confident. Certain. Ready to convince. And I lost deals I should have won. I remember one pitch early in my career like it happened yesterday. I walked into the room fully prepared. My slides circled the room like a victory lap. I spoke for ten minutes straight, laying out exactly why my offer was the perfect solution. When I finished, the client looked at me and said, “That’s nice… but that’s not what I’m looking for.” It was a …

When Bob’s Red Mill began in 1978, it was a flour company operated out of a literal red mill by one dedicated married couple. Since then, it’s grown into a grocery store staple with more than 200 products—and, along the way, its fascinating brand story has gotten lost amidst a sea of colorful, overwhelming packaging. To fix that, the company has spent three years on a full branding overhaul to bring all of its products back under one mill roof. Bob’s Red Mill began as the passion project of the late Bob and Charlee Moore, a husband and wife duo who started their own flour milling business as a way to introduce more whole grains into their family’s diet. And, according…

In 1985, Intel was in trouble. Japanese competitors were dominating the memory chip market that Intel had helped invent. Inside the company, leadership debated what to do. During one conversation, Andy Grove, then Intel’s president and COO, asked CEO Gordon Moore a deceptively simple question: “If we were replaced tomorrow, what would a new CEO do?” Moore didn’t hesitate. “He would get us out of the memory business.” The two men looked at each other and realized something uncomfortable. They already knew the answer; they just hadn’t acted on it. Intel exited the market that had defined its identity and doubled down on microprocessors, a decision that reshaped the comp…

After losing a boardroom power struggle with Apple CEO John Sculley, Steve Jobs was exiled to a small building across the street from Apple’s headquarters. It was May 1985. He and his colleagues called his new office “Siberia.” Corporate reports stopped flowing to his desk, and executives stopped calling, leaving him bored and lonely. “It was amazing to see how ostracized he was in the Valley,” recalled Susan Barnes, a Macintosh financial controller who had previously reported to him. “It was really cruel.” Jobs is remembered as the visionary who returned to Apple, the company he cofounded, in 1997, and saved it from near-bankruptcy. But before the comeback, he ma…

Meta and Ray-Ban are finally getting some serious competition. Warby Parker is launching its first-ever smart glasses, developed with Google and Samsung. Announced Tuesday at Google I/O, it could change the wearables market. Its new Intelligent Eyewear frames have speakers, cameras, and access to AI inside a light, flexible, dark green nylon frame that will be available as sunglasses and regular glasses. The glasses are powered by Google Gemini, the company’s AI assistant; and Android XR, Google’s unified operating system for ‘XR’ (extended reality) headsets and glasses. Warby Parker declined to share pricing, however Meta Ray-bans currently run from $390 to…

When Google’s Nano Banana image-generation tool first appeared in the wild in summer 2025, it quickly captured the internet’s attention for its ability to edit existing photos. The company also boasts one of the industry’s leading video models and has gained significant traction in AI media generation. Just this week, Google announced that users have generated more than 50 billion images with Nano Banana to date. However, like the rest of the industry, a lot of it is still fly-by use. People ask Google’s Gemini app to generate an image or short video clip and then move on. “These tools started as something you put a prompt into and then get an output out of, like a co…

The chat log era of artificial intelligence is coming to an end. Google has just released a new version of its AI assistant, Gemini, that radically rethinks the prompt-and-response interface that has been a mainstay of the first few years of widely available generative AI. Instead of users typing in questions or prompts and getting back detailed written answers—”the giant wall of text,” as Gemini’s UI/UX lead Jenny Blackburn puts it—Gemini will now respond with a wider variety of content, from rich visuals to interactive elements to magazine-like graphic layouts. Depending on the prompt or query, Gemini will organically respond with the most appropriate level of d…

When we talk about infrastructure for a local economy, most people picture roads, sewer pipes, broadband, or parks. But there is an invisible type of infrastructure that shapes where capital flows and which businesses are considered investable. These are the narratives shape how a city talks about itself and its people. Strong narratives rooted in abundance help attract institutional capital, spur innovation, and foster partnership and collaboration. When you treat narrative as an investable priority, you can reshape a city’s physical landscape. Seeking a quick return on investment, some fabricate narratives and relabel entire communities within cities without residen…

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has officially launched the TSA Gold+ program. While it sounds like a luxury program for travelers, it’s actually a major shift toward privatizing airport security. The TSA announced the move in an internal memo sent to employees on May 14. According to the TSA, the program is “the future of aviation security.” The site explains that the program is a “new public-private partnership aimed at modernizing aviation security at select airports across the United States” and says it will allow airports to opt-in to a “tailored security screening service unique to each airport’s needs and space configuration.” Those airports wi…

In a major salvo in the AI race, Google announced on Tuesday a slew of new and updated products at its I/O developer conference. These ranged from tools that deploy personal AI agents to code generators to search tools to a new “world model” for generating physically accurate video. Taken together, the releases paint a picture of Google’s current strategy for bringing AI to consumers and businesses. It’s a strategy that effectively leverages the company’s vast information infrastructure, built up through search, in ways that give it clear advantages over newer AI companies. New models Google DeepMind’s newest models are bigger and smarter, deeply multimodal, an…