What's on Your Mind?

The best recruiter I know is going to spend the next three months hiring without posting to a single job board website, like Indeed or LinkedIn. “LinkedIn?” She laughed. “You mean Facebook for thought leaders? No, I won’t be using any of those sites.” “Rosa” is head of HR for a large tech startup, and someone I trust to tell me what’s really going on in the world of professional recruiting and jobs — the unflinching truth. The last time we talked, she had finally taken back control of her company’s recruiting process, rescuing it from over-automation, misguided AI, and what she called “results-last” hiring. I’ve hired hundreds of people to work with me over m…

Shares in Palantir Technologies (Nasdaq: PLTR) are rising this morning, one day after the AI data analysis software company with significant U.S. government contracts reported better-than-expected Q4 earnings. Here’s what you need to know about Palantir’s latest results and its rising stock price. Palantir’s Q4 2025 beat Wall Street expectations Yesterday, Palantir announced its Q4 2025 earnings, and investors breathed a sigh of relief. For Palantir’s Q4, which ended on December 31, the company brought in $1.41 billion in revenue, signaling 70% year-over-year growth. The majority of that revenue comes from Palantir’s U.S. customers, which is split roughly even…

The rise of OpenClaw, a proactive agentic AI controlled through interfaces more familiar to the average user than tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code, which enthralled early adopters over the holiday period, has been one of the most seismic shifts in the AI world since the release of ChatGPT. By piggybacking on user-friendly interfaces paired with powerful AI agent technology, OpenClaw has pushed AI further into the public eye. Thousands have spun up their own AI agents using the tech, and many of those agents have ended up on Moltbook, a social network where AI agents can post and interact with one another. The platform, which looks a lot like Reddit, was developed by…

Firefox has a reputation as the browser of choice for power users who prefer to customize everything – and it just gave users one very important new option. While most other tech companies shove AI “enhancements” down their users’ throats, Mozilla is introducing a way to disable Firefox’s AI features outright – a boon for anyone searching for a safe haven from the AI software onslaught. Starting on February 24 with the Firefox 148 update, users will be able to toggle AI off in a new AI controls area in the desktop browser’s settings menu. To disable AI, you won’t even need to dig around and disable features one by one: Mozilla describes the forthcoming option as a “si…

TV host, producer, author, and United Nations Development Program Goodwill Ambassador Padma Lakshmi has some candid advice for business leaders when it comes to speaking out, showing courage, and staying true to themselves, particularly amid the The President administration’s violent immigration crackdown. A passionate voice at the intersection of food, culture, and identity, Lakshmi shares how she’s shaking up food media with her new series America’s Culinary Cup, and offers a refreshingly human take on modern work life. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team b…

Laying people off takes its toll. “Going back 25 years plus ago, I can still remember every situation that I had to do it in,” says Robert Kovach, a work psychologist and former corporate executive. The experience sticks with you, he says. Because it’s not just about “operational stress: Have I filled out the forms? Made the calls?” It’s also filled with “moral stress,” he adds. “Even when the decision is necessary, it can feel like a violation of your own personal values.” People laying off their coworkers often feel a clash between their responsibility to their company and their responsibility to be a good person to the people they’re laying off—parti…

It’s time to become an armchair expert on sports that you only think about every four years. In other words, the 2026 Winter Olympics have arrived. This year’s competition takes place in two Italian cities, Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, and the surrounding regions. It is not Cortina’s first rodeo, as the city hosted previously in 1956, while the country of Italy has hosted the games three times prior. The action kicked off on Wednesday, February 4, when the world’s best alpine skiers and curlers strutted their stuff. Despite the curling, the official Olympic Opening Ceremony takes place today (Friday, February 6). Here’s everything you need to know so you can …

If I had a dollar for every time a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum has been charged with fraud, I’d have $5. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it has happened five times. By now, the Forbes “curse” has been well documented, from Charlie Javice’s JPMorgan fiasco (who was on the Under 30 list in 2019) to crypto poster boy Sam Bankman-Fried perpetrating one of the biggest financial frauds in history (he appeared on the list in 2021). This week, another honoree has been hit with federal charges. Gökçe Güven, the 26-year-old founder and CEO of fintech startup Kalder, faces 52 years in prison after being charged with fraud, accused of cheating investors out of millions. …

News that the Washington Post had laid off hundreds of workers and scrapped several sections of the storied paper altogether stunned the journalism community last week. The Post cut roughly one-third of its staff, reduced local coverage, and completely destroyed its sports and international departments. The paper is owned by Jeff Bezos. The Amazon founder, who has a staggering net worth of approximately $250 billion, bought the Post for $250 million in 2013. The newspaper has consistently lost more money than it has made since the 2020 election, yet has long been considered a stalwart of American dailies. But last week, The Post’s editor-in-chief Matt Murray told …

Integrity, understood as a disposition to behave in prosocial, ethical, and principled ways rather than corrupt or self-serving ones, is among the strongest and most consistent predictors of job performance and leadership effectiveness. The reason is far from mysterious. Leadership, whatever its context, is a collective enterprise. No meaningful goal, from building empires to running companies, has ever been achieved alone. Across history, not just in humans but also other animals, cooperation has depended less on raw power than on trust. Ancient trading societies flourished precisely because reputation constrained behavior: merchants in Phoenician city-states, mediev…

The Epstein Files are dominating nightly news broadcasts and newspaper front pages. But in the media ecosystem there’s another format that’s proving a massive draw to news consumers: a podcast run by a non-journalist and entirely generated by AI. The Epstein Files is an investigative documentary podcast that, at the time of writing, has published 97 episodes—new episodes get uploaded twice daily—and notched up more than 700,000 downloads in a matter of days. That puts it in the top 10 rankings of podcast series on Apple Podcasts, and in the top 30 on Spotify. But it’s created by Adam Levy, an entrepreneur with a background in building data products and content creatio…

When I worked a corporate job, I was often in charge of purchasing decisions. At one company, my team had inherited a lot of homegrown solutions. I saw the limitations of these products and was quick to replace them if the budget allowed. In corporate settings, “build vs. buy” is a well-known decision framework. Companies weigh the cost of developing something in-house against purchasing an outside solution. It’s often simple math: how much time and resources does it take to maintain this internally versus what does it cost to buy or outsource? Solopreneurs face the same decision constantly. However, the stakes are a lot higher when it’s your own time and own mo…

Women’s sports continue to thrive. Record-breaking WNBA viewership, a flood of new brand investment, and now Unrivaled: the women’s basketball league built by players, for players. Commissioner Micky Lawler pulls back the curtain on what it really takes to launch a high-stakes sports startup in the full glare of the public eye. The question is no longer whether women’s sports can compete. It’s how fast they can grow. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scalepodcast, Rapid Responsefeatures candid conversations with today’s top business le…

Time capsules are designed to be resilient by nature. But no time capsule has survived as long as designers hope “America’s Time Capsule” will. The time capsule, designed for the semiquincentennial of the U.S. founding, is being created by America250, the nonpartisan, congressionally mandated group organizing commemorations for this year. The plan is to bury the time capsule underground in Philadelphia at Independence National Historical Park on July 4, and for it to be opened in another 250 years, in 2276. The problem is time capsules, which are typically buried underground, and exposed to the elements, don’t really last that long. “We’ve unburied some time …

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Anthropic’s stance on autonomous weapons may not survive the future Much of the AI world is watching closely as Anthropic tangles with the Pentagon over how the government can use the Claude models. Anthropic has a $200 million contract with the Pentagon, but the contract says the military can’t use the AI company’s models as the brains for autonomous weapons or for mass surveillance of Americans. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insists, after the fact, that the military should be a…

In recent months, fans of Burger King appear to have fallen out of love with the chain’s signature sandwich, the Whopper. Social media has been full of complaints about the quality of ingredients and even completely deformed burgers. In response, the burger chain said this week that it is rolling out a revamped Whopper. Here’s what’s changing, and where and when you can get yours. Why is Burger King revamping the Whopper? In short, customers became unhappy with the quality of the chain’s flagship burger in recent years. Criticisms range from the lackluster quality of ingredients in the burger to soggy buns to even smashed burgers (no, not in a good way). …

One of generative AI’s earliest applications remains among its most controversial: AI art. Its proponents celebrate the chance to create the images in their head, no time or traditional skills necessary. Its critics argue that AI images lack the soul of human-made art, steal the work of other artists without permission, and take opportunities away from working artists. AI-generated art often draws ridicule across social media, whether it’s being used for advertising, like Gucci’s recent series of AI-generated posts, or in the fine art world, like the immersive AI-generated works of Refik Anadol, which caught flak on X last week after being featured on 60 Minutes. (“T…

Rental housing construction is slowing down in the United States. The cost of common construction materials is a big reason why. According to a new report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, construction material costs have skyrocketed in recent years, adding to a wide range of conditions that are slowing the production of rental housing. The report, “America’s Rental Housing 2026,” finds that there was a 42% increase in the overall material costs of multifamily residential construction over the five-year period from 2020 to 2025, covering essential building materials like gypsum board, ready-mix concrete, and lumber. It’s a huge jump …

Never in human history has there been a greater concentration of wealth than in Silicon Valley. The three most valuable corporations in the world have their headquarters in the region, within a few miles of one another, in addition to many other unfathomably wealthy people and companies. It would logically follow that such a place would have some of the world’s finest architecture, as we’ve seen in previous centers of economic power. Think: Beijing in the Ming Dynasty, Venice in the Renaissance, New York and Chicago in the early 20th century. But no, Silicon Valley looks like just about any other American suburb (with a few notable exceptions). The future is inv…

At the turn of the 20th century, the steel magnate and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie donated $5.2 million to New York to build libraries across the city. Leading architects of the time designed the branches, 67 in all, to look and function like civic temples with elaborate Beaux-Arts detailing, welcoming entrances, dignified reading rooms, and open stacks where patrons could freely browse. They quickly became important, and beloved, neighborhood establishments and remain so today. After more than a century of use, and ad hoc upgrades and adaptations that are also dated, the buildings are due for upgrades. Last year, the New York Public Library (NYPL) completed a $17…

Human beings are complicated creatures, but we are also relentless forecasters. We spend much of our lives trying to infer the future from the past. Investors scrutinize market data to anticipate tomorrow’s returns. Meteorologists analyze yesterday’s weather to predict next week’s storms. And most of us, at some point, wonder where our own lives are headed. There is a reason for this impulse. A future that is completely predetermined would make life dull. But a future that is entirely random would make life impossible. After all, randomness means that past events provide no information whatsoever about what will happen next. If that were truly the case, planning would…