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Barry Adams recently published “Google Zero is a Lie” in his SEO for Google News newsletter, arguing that the narrative of Google traffic disappearing is false and dangerous. His data backs it up. Similarweb and Graphite data show only a 2.5% decline in Google traffic to top websites globally. Google still accounts for nearly 20% of all web visits. The widely cited Chartbeat figure showing a 33% decline? It’s skewed by a handful of large publishers hit by algorithm updates. Publishers who abandon SEO in the face of this panic are making a self-fulfilling prophecy, ceding traffic to competitors who keep optimizing. He’s right. And he’s looking at the wrong problem. Humans are still clicking Google results. What has changed is that a growing share of your visitors isn’t human at all. The tipping point already happened Automated traffic surpassed human activity for the first time in a decade, per the 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report. Bots now account for 51% of all web traffic. Not “soon.” Not “by 2027.” Now. That number includes everything from scrapers to brute-force login bots. But the fastest-growing segment is AI crawlers. AI crawlers now represent 51.69% of all crawler traffic, surpassing traditional search engine crawlers at 34.46%, Cloudflare’s 2025 Year in Review found. AI bot crawling grew more than 15x year over year. Cloudflare observed roughly 50 billion AI crawler requests per day by late 2025. Akamai’s data tells a similar story: AI bot activity surged 300% over the past year, with OpenAI alone accounting for 42.4% of all AI bot requests. So while Adams is correct that human Google traffic hasn’t collapsed, something else is happening on the other side of the server logs. Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with The take-versus-give ratio Cloudflare published crawl-to-referral ratios for AI bots. Look at these numbers. Anthropic’s ClaudeBot crawls 23,951 pages for every single referral it sends back to a website. OpenAI’s GPTBot: 1,276 to 1. Training now drives nearly 80% of all AI bot activity, up from 72% the year before. Compare that to traditional Googlebot, which has always operated on a crawl-and-send-traffic-back model. Google crawls your site, indexes it, and sends 831x more visitors than AI systems. The deal was simple: let me read your content, and I’ll send you people who want it. That deal is fraying even on Google’s own turf. Queries where Google shows an AI Overview see 58-61% lower organic click-through rates, according to Ahrefs and Seer Interactive studies covering millions of impressions through late 2025. Google’s newer AI Mode is worse. Semrush data shows a 93% zero-click rate in those sessions. AI Overviews now trigger on roughly 25-48% of U.S. searches, depending on the dataset, and that number keeps climbing. And when Google’s AI features do cite sources, they’re increasingly citing themselves. Google.com is the No. 1 cited source in 19 of 20 niches, accounting for 17.42% of all citations, an SE Ranking study of over 1.3 million AI Mode citations found. That tripled from 5.7% in June 2025. Add YouTube and other Google properties, and they make up roughly 20% of all AI Mode sources. So the old deal is being rewritten even by Google. AI crawlers from other companies skip the pretense entirely: let me read your content so I can answer questions about it without ever sending anyone your way. The agentic shift The bot traffic numbers are already here. The next wave is bigger: AI agents acting on behalf of humans. In 2024, Gartner predicted that traditional search engine traffic would drop 25% by 2026 as AI chatbots and agents handle queries. That prediction is tracking. Its October 2025 strategic predictions go further: 90% of B2B buying will be AI-agent intermediated by 2028, pushing over $15 trillion in B2B spend through AI agent exchanges. This isn’t theoretical. Salesforce reported that AI agents influenced 20% of all global orders during Cyber Week 2025, driving $67 billion in sales. Retailers with AI agents saw 13% sales growth compared to 2% for those without. Google is building for this with initiatives like the Universal Commerce Protocol for agent-led shopping. Gartner says 40% of enterprise applications will have task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. eMarketer projects AI platforms will drive $20.9 billion in retail spending in 2026, nearly 4x 2025 figures. Think about what that looks like in practice. An AI agent researches vendors for a procurement team. It doesn’t see your hero banner. It doesn’t notice your trust badges. It reads your structured data, compares your specs to those of three competitors, and builds a shortlist. That “visit” might show up in your analytics as a bot hit with a zero-second session duration. Or it might not show up at all. Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. What agentic SEO actually looks like So what do you optimize for when the visitor is a machine making decisions for a human? It’s not the same as traditional SEO. And it’s not the same as the AI Overviews optimization most people are focused on right now. AI Overviews are still Google. Still one search engine, still largely the same ranking infrastructure, still (mostly) one answer format. Agentic SEO is about being useful to software that’s pulling from search APIs, crawling directly, and using LLM reasoning to make recommendations. That software doesn’t care about your page layout. It cares about whether it can extract what it needs. I think a few things start to matter a lot more. Structured data becomes load-bearing Schema markup has always been a “nice to have” for rich snippets. When an AI agent compares your product to three competitors, structured data lets it read your specs without having to guess. Think product schema, FAQ schema, and pricing tables in clean HTML. These go from SEO hygiene to core infrastructure. Dig deeper: How schema markup fits into AI search — without the hype Content needs to answer questions AI agents don’t search for “best CRM for small business.” They ask compound questions: “Which CRM under $50/user/month integrates with QuickBooks and has a mobile app with offline capability?” If your content only answers the first version, you’re invisible to the second. Freshness and accuracy get audited differently A human might not notice your pricing page is 8 months stale. An AI agent cross-referencing your pricing against competitors will flag the discrepancy. Or worse, use the outdated number in its recommendation and cost you the deal. Your robots.txt policy is now a business decision Blocking AI crawlers feels protective, but it means AI agents can’t recommend you. Allowing them means your content trains models that may never send you traffic. There’s no clean answer. But pretending it’s just a technical setting is a mistake. New IETF standards are emerging to give publishers more granular control, but they’re not widely adopted yet. Dig deeper: Technical SEO for generative search: Optimizing for AI agents The measurement gap Most analytics setups can’t tell the difference between a human visit, a bot crawl, and an AI agent evaluating your site on someone’s behalf. GA4 filters most bot traffic. Server logs show the raw picture, but take work to parse. Even then, figuring out whether an AI agent’s visit led to an actual sale is basically impossible right now. This is where the “Google Zero” framing does real damage. If you’re only measuring organic sessions from Google, you’re blind to a channel that doesn’t show up in that number. Your traffic could look stable while an AI agent steers $50,000 in annual spend to your competitor because their product schema was more complete. I don’t think we have good measurement for this yet. Nobody does. But ignoring the problem because Google sessions look fine is like checking your print ad response rate in 2005 and deciding the web wasn’t worth paying attention to. See the complete picture of your search visibility. Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform. Start Free Trial Get started with What to do about it I don’t have a playbook for this. It’s too new. But I can tell you what we’re doing at our agency. Audit your structured data like it’s your storefront: Evaluate whether your website’s schema is present and well-formed. Look into structured data, content structure, and technical health. Make sure product, service, FAQ, and organization markup is complete, accurate, and current. This is table stakes. Answer compound questions: Look at your top landing pages. Do they answer the specific, multi-variable questions an AI agent would ask? Or just the broad keyword query a human would type? Check your server logs: Look for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and other AI user agents. Understand how much of your traffic is already non-human. If you’re on Cloudflare, their bot analytics dashboard makes this easy without parsing raw logs. You’ll probably be surprised either way. Make a conscious robots.txt decision: Understand the trade-offs, and make it a business decision with your leadership team. Start tracking AI citations: Tools like Semrush, Scrunch, DataForSEO, and others can show when AI platforms mention your brand. The data is directional, not precise. But it’s better than nothing. Don’t abandon Google SEO: Adams is right that Google traffic is still massive and still valuable. The agentic web doesn’t replace Google. It adds a new layer. You need both. The real question The “Google Zero” argument pits one extreme against another, even as the actual shift is quieter and more important. The web is becoming a place where the majority of visitors are machines. Some send traffic back. Most don’t. Some of them make purchasing decisions on behalf of humans. That number is growing fast. The SEOs who do well here won’t be the ones arguing about whether Google traffic moved 2.5%. They’ll be the ones who figured out how to be useful to both human visitors and the AI agents acting on their behalf. We’ve spent 25 years optimizing for how humans find things. Now we need to figure out how machines find things for humans. That’s not Google Zero. We don’t have a name for it yet. But it’s already here. If you want to go deeper on GEO and agentic SEO, I’m teaching an SMX Master Class on Generative Engine Optimization on April 14. It covers structured data implementation, AI visibility measurement, content optimization for AI systems, and the practical side of everything in this article. View the full article

Meeting comes after The President criticised allies and indicated reopening the strait may not be a priority for US in Iran warView the full article

The great cynic did not expect Iran to fight out of convictionView the full article

Venture capital firms know their dollars go a lot further here than in Silicon ValleyView the full article

Bill Hunt explains why enterprise SEO performance improves when accountability matches authority across content, technology, and governance. The post Who Owns SEO In The Enterprise? The Accountability Gap That Kills Performance appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

Google posted a new blog post named Inside Googlebot: demystifying crawling, fetching, and the bytes we process alongside episode 105 of the Search Off the Record segment named Google crawlers behind the scenes.View the full article

German group’s pharma business expected to generate most of its revenues from US after strategic shiftView the full article

You can now update your store's name and / or domain name directly in Merchant Center within Microsoft Advertising. View the full article

Your team is busier than ever. Calendars are packed, inboxes are overflowing, and everyone is racing from one meeting to the next. So why aren’t the breakthroughs happening? Here’s the paradox: We’ve optimized for activity, not creativity. According to Microsoft research, people now spend 60% of their workday on communication tasks alone. That’s meetings, emails, and messages. Another study from Dropbox found that 46% of knowledge workers say they don’t have enough time for creative work, and only 8% of employees regularly propose new ideas. The problem isn’t that your team lacks creativity. It’s that we’ve scheduled every minute for execution and left zero time for the thinking that makes execution worthwhile. Time to think isn’t a luxury. It’s a strategic input. The neuroscience is clear Your brain operates in two states. There’s the reactive, task-focused “beta” state where you’re responding to emails and attending back-to-back meetings. Then there’s the reflective “alpha” state, where creative insights actually happen. Research published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience shows that alpha brain wave activity is the signature of creative ideation. When your team is stuck in beta mode all day, they’re optimized for execution, not innovation. No wonder the big ideas aren’t coming. According to the same Microsoft study, the average worker now faces 275 interruptions per day. If your calendar looks like a bar code and you’re fielding constant pings, you’re being held hostage by other people’s urgency. Your team can’t shift into alpha if they’re always reacting. So what do you do about it? Here are five ways to build thinking time into your team’s workflow without sacrificing productivity. 1. BLOCK THINKING TIME ON THE CALENDAR If it’s not on the calendar, it doesn’t exist. Treat thinking time like any other meeting. Block 1-2 hours per week where your team can work on a problem without interruption. No emails, no messages, no checkins. This isn’t “free time.” It’s focused time for strategic thinking, problem-solving, or exploring a challenge that’s been stuck on the back burner. The key is to model this yourself. If leaders don’t protect thinking time, the team won’t either. 2. AUDIT YOUR MEETINGS RUTHLESSLY Here’s a thought experiment: if 275 interruptions per day is the new normal, how many of those are actually moving the work forward? Most meetings could have been a message. That daily standup? Could’ve been an update thread. The seven-person status review? Could’ve been a dashboard. Start asking: “Does this need to be a meeting, or does it just feel productive?” Kill the meetings that don’t need to happen. Shorten the ones that do. Batch your check-ins. Spoiler: you’ll never catch up on everything. But you can protect the time that actually matters. 3. GET PEOPLE WALKING Research consistently shows that physical movement enhances creative thinking. A comprehensive 2024 research review found that even low-intensity activities like walking at a natural pace improve divergent thinking, the type of cognition essential for generating novel ideas. Steve Jobs was famous for his walking meetings. Pixar’s campus was designed to force spontaneous encounters around a central atrium, which encouraged movement and collisions between teams. The lesson? Get people out of their chairs. Walking meetings, stand-up check-ins, or simply encouraging your team to take a lap around the block can unlock ideas that would never surface in a conference room. 4. ALLOW EXPLORATION OF UNRELATED INTERESTS The most valuable ideas often come from unexpected connections. Research shows that workplace curiosity directly enhances both incremental and radical creativity, which drives innovation outcomes. When people are allowed to explore interests beyond their immediate job function, they bring fresh perspectives back to their core work. This doesn’t require a formal innovation program. It can be as simple as not penalizing curiosity. Encourage your team to read widely, attend events in adjacent fields, or spend some work time on self-directed learning. Cross-pollination of ideas is where breakthroughs happen. 5. MAKE IT A CULTURAL NORM Bill Gates famously took “Think Weeks twice a year. He’d disappear to a cabin with nothing but books and his thoughts. No phone, no meetings, no distractions. One of those Think Weeks produced the 1995 “Internet Tidal Wave” memo that pivoted Microsoft’s entire strategy. You don’t need to send your team to a cabin, but you do need to signal that thinking time is valued, not just tolerated. Celebrate the ideas that come from it. Reference them in team meetings. Reward the person who took time to solve a problem no one asked them to solve. If thinking time only happens when everything else is done, it will never happen. Here’s the shift We’ve built a work culture that equates busyness with productivity. But innovation doesn’t come from doing more. It comes from thinking better. The teams that win in the next decade won’t be the ones who work the hardest. They’ll be the ones who protect the space to think clearly, connect ideas, and see what everyone else is too busy to notice. So find that hour this week. Block it. Use it. See what happens when your team has room to breathe and think. I say this with zero hyperbole: it might be the highest-leverage thing you do all year. View the full article

British prime minister says closer ties between London and Brussels are ‘in our long-term national interest’View the full article

LinkedIn is one of the most powerful platforms for recruiting top-tier talent. It’s also one of the easiest places to waste budget if campaigns aren’t structured correctly. Many recruitment campaigns fail because they prioritize visibility over intent. More impressions don’t equal better hires. Broad targeting and generic messaging often lead to an influx of unqualified applicants, driving up cost-per-hire and slowing down hiring timelines. The most effective LinkedIn recruitment strategies focus on one thing: attracting and converting high-intent candidates while filtering out poor-fit applicants before they ever click. Let’s break down exactly how to do that. Shift your strategy: Optimize for intent vs. reach The biggest mistake advertisers make on LinkedIn is targeting based solely on job titles, industries, and years of experience. While this may generate volume, it rarely produces efficiency. Instead, high-performing campaigns are built around intent-based targeting — reaching candidates who are qualified and more likely to consider a new opportunity. This requires a layered approach: Core fit: Job titles, skills, and certifications. Behavioral signals: Open-to-work status, group memberships, and engagement with industry content. Career friction indicators: Burnout-prone roles, companies experiencing layoffs, and limited growth environments. By combining these layers, you move beyond “who they are” and begin targeting why they might be ready to make a change — which is where real performance gains happen. Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up. The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need. Start Free Trial Get started with Use ad creative to pre-qualify candidates Your ad creative isn’t just there to attract attention. It should actively filter your audience. One of the most effective ways to control cost-per-hire is to discourage unqualified candidates from clicking in the first place. Strong recruitment ads follow a structured approach: Call out a specific pain point or identity: “Burned out from long shifts in healthcare?” Clearly define who the role is for: “This role is designed for licensed RNs with 3+ years of experience.” Highlight meaningful value: Think flexibility, compensation, career growth, or mission. Set expectations upfront: “Not an entry-level position” or “Requires managing enterprise accounts.” This combination of attraction and exclusion ensures that the candidates who do click on your ads are far more likely to convert. Dig deeper: LinkedIn Ads on a budget: How one playbook drove sub-$10 CPL Structure campaigns by candidate intent level Rather than running a single campaign, high-performing LinkedIn strategies segment audiences based on intent. High-intent (bottom funnel) These are active job seekers who offer the highest conversion opportunity. Following this structure: Target: Open-to-work users, recent job seekers, retargeting audiences. Messaging: Direct response (“Apply now”). Outcome: Highest conversion rates and lowest cost-per-hire. Warm passive talent (mid funnel) These candidates aren’t actively applying but are open to change. Target: Skills, competitor companies, niche groups. Messaging: Career upgrades, better lifestyle, growth opportunities. Outcome: Scalable pipeline of qualified candidates. Cold passive talent (top funnel) These are long-term potential candidates to start building your pipeline, with the intent to move them to the middle of the funnel and eventually the bottom of the funnel. Target: Broader audiences and lookalikes. Messaging: Employer brand, culture, “day in the life.” Outcome: Reduces future acquisition costs over time. Control costs through smarter bidding and optimization LinkedIn’s ad platform can quickly become expensive without proper controls. Start with manual CPC bidding to maintain control, then test automated delivery once performance data is established. More importantly, optimize for the right metrics. Focus on qualified applications instead of clicks. Track downstream actions, such as interview and hire rates. Be prepared to make fast decisions. Ads with high click-through rates but low application rates often indicate poor alignment. Ads that generate many applications, but few interviews signal weak pre-qualification. Efficiency comes from eliminating wasted spend earlier, rather than later. It conserves ad spend and minimizes overlapping audiences and hitting the wrong targets. Dig deeper: LinkedIn Ads retargeting: How to reach prospects at every funnel stage Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Improve conversion rates with a two-step application process A common but costly mistake is sending candidates directly to long, complex application forms. Instead, use a two-step funnel: Pre-qualification landing page. Role overview and expectations. Compensation transparency. Clear “who this is (and isn’t) for.” Application. Short form or LinkedIn Easy Apply. This approach sets expectations, filters candidates, and significantly improves application quality — often reducing cost-per-hire by 30-50%. Use retargeting to capture missed opportunities Not every qualified candidate applies on the first interaction. Retargeting allows you to re-engage high-intent users who have already shown interest. Build audiences from: Career page visitors. Job post viewers. Video viewers (50%+ engagement). Then serve follow-up messaging such as: “Still considering a move?” “Last chance to apply” Employee testimonials or success stories. Retargeting campaigns are often the most cost-efficient part of your entire strategy. Advanced strategies to increase ROI Once the fundamentals are in place, there are several advanced tactics that can further improve performance: Competitor targeting: Target employees at competing companies and position your opportunity as a clear upgrade — whether through compensation, flexibility, or culture. Skill-based campaign segmentation: Instead of grouping all candidates together, build campaigns around specific skills or certifications. This reduces competition in the ad auction and often lowers cost-per-click. Selective use of Message Ads: Message ads can be effective for senior or hard-to-fill roles — but only when targeting is highly refined. Otherwise, they can quickly become cost-prohibitive. Here’s an example of a successful LinkedIn InMail message that recently drove over 70% high-intent applications for an HVAC sales client: Message body: Hi [First Name], This might be a stretch — but your background in HVAC sales caught my attention. We’re hiring experienced sales reps who are tired of unpredictable commissions and weekend-heavy schedules. This role is built for reps who: Have 3+ years in HVAC or home services sales Are comfortable running in-home consultations Want a more stable, high-earning structure What’s different: No weekend appointments Pre-qualified, inbound leads (no cold knocking) Six-figure earning potential with consistency That said, this isn’t a fit for entry-level reps or those new to sales. If you’d be open to a quick 10-minute conversation to see if it’s worth exploring, I’m happy to share more. If not, no worries at all — appreciate you taking a look. — [Name] Stating upfront the need for “experienced sales reps” immediately establishes relevance and increases response rates while reducing irrelevant replies. Focusing on what matters to potential candidates, such as no weekend appointments and compensation structure, speaks to the audience’s needs versus the company’s. Closing the conversation with the reminder that this isn’t an entry-level position weeds out wasted conversations and reduces cost-per-hire. Dig deeper: LinkedIn Message Ads: Everything you need to know See the complete picture of your search visibility. Track, optimize, and win in Google and AI search from one platform. Start Free Trial Get started with Intent beats reach in LinkedIn recruitment The most effective LinkedIn recruitment campaigns rely on better strategy. When you focus on intent-based targeting, pre-qualification within ad creative, funnel segmentation, and conversion optimization, you create a system that attracts the right candidates while minimizing wasted spend. Ultimately, reducing cost-per-hire is about reaching the right people, at the right time, with the right message. View the full article

NASA is going back to the moon, and you can watch the launch live. On April 1, the agency will stream the launch of its historic Artemis II mission. Four astronauts—commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen—will be aboard the spacecraft for NASA’s first crewed moon mission since Apollo 17 in 1972. NASA’s livestream will start at 12:50 p.m. ET on its YouTube channel and NASA+. The launch window opens at 6:24 p.m. ET and lasts for two hours. (There are launch opportunities every day from April 1 to April 6. At the time of this writing, conditions look good for launch on April 1.) “Certainly all indications are right now we are in excellent, excellent shape,” launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said at a press conference on March 30. According to the U.S. Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron, which provides official forecasts for the launch, the weather will be 80% favorable. Reid WisemanVictor GloverChristina KochJeremy Hansen After Artemis II launches, the plan is to test out systems in Earth orbit for 24 hours before firing Orion’s main service engine; this engine burn will slingshot the crew around the moon. They’ll have a three-hour lunar flyby, during which they could be the first humans to observe the far side of the lunar surface with their own eyes. According to lead flight director Emily Nelson, if the Artemis II launch is successful, the crew will travel 252,799 miles away from Earth, which will be the farthest humans have ever traveled. (The current record, 248,655 miles, is held by the Apollo 13 astronauts.) The spacecraft will splash down in the Pacific Ocean about 10 days after launch. Among the other firsts of the Artemis II mission: Glover will be the first Black person to travel to the moon; Koch will be the first woman to do so; and Hansen, from Canada, will be the first non-U. S. citizen to accomplish the feat. Artemis II is the second flight of a program aimed at building a sustainable presence on the moon. It’s the first crewed mission (Artemis I, an uncrewed test flight, splashed down in December 2022). Artemis II is designed to check out the Orion capsule’s life support systems, the spacesuits, radiation shielding, and more. The next mission of the program, Artemis III, will test out the moon landing systems in Earth orbit, before a moon landing in 2028 with Artemis IV. View the full article

For many tweens of the 2000s, Club Penguin was the place to be. Players created penguin avatars, dressed them up, and roamed a virtual world of igloos, ski lodges, and mini-games. There were puffles, Tamagotchi-like pets to care for, and bustling servers where you could chat with friends, surf through a mine, or lob a virtual snowball at a stranger. At its peak, the game drew hundreds of millions of users and offered an early taste of social media for a generation of kids. Disaster struck in 2017, when Disney, which owned the platform, shut it down, citing declining popularity and falling revenue. The company pointed users to a new game, Club Penguin Island, but that, too, was discontinued soon after. Since then, several attempts have been made to revive the Antarctic metaverse. Club Penguin Online was eventually overrun with racist and antisemitic content, while the unsanctioned Club Penguin Rewritten surged during the pandemic before being taken offline, leading to arrests in London. Still, Club Penguin hasn’t disappeared. A volunteer team of coders and moderators now runs Club Penguin Legacy, which has been online for more than four years. Fast Company spoke with two members of that team, who say they’re focused on preserving both the nostalgia and the safety-first moderation that defined the original. Today, their labor of love supports roughly a million users. “We want to honor what made the game so meaningful when we were growing up playing it. So, you know, trying to honor how the game felt, how people interacted, and the community that it created,” Karalyn, a director and developer for Club Penguin Legacy, tells Fast Company. “We’ve always been adding new events, parties, and other content.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity. How did you get into this? Karalyn: I joined the team back in January of 2023; I was the director for the game in 2024 and 2025. I have a degree in electrical engineering, but do software engineering as my main goal. Mey: I joined the team in January 2024 as a developer, and ended up in more of a lead developer role later that year. I am self-taught with programming and most of the skills that I use on this team, but I’m really proud to be part of it and happy to be here. Is this your full-time job? Mey: For both of us, it’s definitely close to a full-time job. It’s not our main job, so it is more of a labor of love, but it’s something that we definitely put a lot of time and effort into. We have about 15 people. It’s a slew of moderators, designers, software engineers, community support representatives. How do you go about bringing an old game like this back to life? Karalyn: For the technical aspect, it’s not just creating the same gameplay and creating that same game engine. You have to think about actually having it ready for production and having it ready to serve a whole bunch of users. If somebody wanted to re-create it . . . you have to have the core mechanics for the game. There’s a lot of talented engineers out there that I’m sure can kind of reverse engineer how to do something like that. Because Club Penguin emphasized safety so much, that was something that was one of our top priorities. So having a whole team of moderators to ensure safety in the game was something that you had to think about as well. It’s not just the actual code that has to be engineered, but like the whole production of what they were doing. A lot of us grew up playing Club Penguin. We were fresh home after school to log in and explore this exciting, magical world. It wasn’t just a game. It was more like a community. And so I think when the original shut down and that space disappeared . . . there are not that many spaces that are balancing simplicity and safety and social connection. Mey: It really depends on the scale of the game. Our game is a world with over a million users, with over a thousand people at times playing together. But some games out there are, like single-player, very simple, and there are a lot of tools, even for hobbyists, to kind of tackle that level of game. How does this stay afloat? Do you take donations? Karalyn: We don’t actually take any money from our community. It’s entirely self-funded. We’ll never ask people to pay. There are no advertisements, no memberships, nothing like that. It’s completely free to play. We try to keep it pretty lean. We have a small team, and we’ve had to make infrastructure improvements in order to continue to stay lean and reduce operating costs so that we can still serve the thousands of players that we’re seeing daily. How many users are people who played the original versus those who are coming to this for the first time? Karalyn: We definitely see a mix of players. I think it highlights what Club Penguin Legacy is doing right. Because on one side, you have people who grew up with the original game, and they know the nostalgia, the familiarity, the comfort, and they are familiar with that lore that we have. And then we also have a good mix of people who never experienced the game before, but they’re here because the game offers them a sense of connection, escapism. How much time are people spending on Club Penguin Legacy? How long does a typical session last? Karalyn: Some people want to log in. They want to do their daily tasks. They got to feed their puffles. They want to check out the catalog and see if there’s anything new. But for a lot of people, they will stay on for an hour or two, chatting with friends, catching up, and just kind of remembering that sense of community. Mey: It’s kind of nice to go into our game and see the same faces day after day, like you can join pretty much any time of the day and see some people sitting around town talking. There’s a lot of our core community that really just kind of has it as a social tool in the background for them. Do you know how many puffles are still alive on Club Penguin Legacy? People are going to read this who played the original and wonder what happened to their puffles. Mey: There are currently 213,749. Meta seems to be giving up on the metaverse. OpenAI is shutting down Sora. It’s interesting that a lot of platforms die, but Club Penguin is surviving. Mey: Our game is a metaverse of sorts, for sure. For a lot of other kinds of platforms, there’s one thing we have over them, which is that they didn’t have their start in 2005, 2008. They don’t have that strong background that we get to fall back on. A lot of them are having to keep up with new trends and new changes in what’s popular and what makes sense, like AI. A lot of people, like a lot of our older players, obviously, are willing to stick with it for what we already have. And I think a lot of our newer players come in and recognize that they don’t have to worry about us suddenly changing and then losing something that they found. View the full article

Jackie, the world-famous Big Bear bald eagle, has been melting hearts and educating the public about her species since 2015, thanks to a web camera run by the California nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV). A little more than 10 years later, her admirers have the chance to give back. FOBBV and the San Bernardino Mountains Land Trust (SBMLT) have teamed up to raise money to purchase the property with the goal of preserving the open space. These 62 acres, located on the north shore of Big Bear Lake, are vital not only for Jackie but also for her mate Shadow and their offspring. Developer RCK Properties wants to put 50 custom homes and 55 boat slips instead, in a project dubbed Moon Camp. In order to prevent this, $10 million must be raised in six months, with a July 31 deadline. Adding another layer of complexity, Sandy Steers, the former executive director of FOBBV, a director of the land trust, and a driving force behind the purchase deal, passed away shortly after finalizing the agreement. Fast Company sat down with Jenny Voisard, media and website manager at FOBBV, and Peter Jorris, president of the land trust. The pair discussed how this purchase would benefit the environment, the current state of their fundraising efforts, and the history of Bald Eagles in Big Bear. The fight to preserve Moon Camp The land trust was formed in 1995 when residents banded together to stop another development. FOBBV was formed under similar circumstances in 2001, to fight against the development of the Moon Camp property. Steers was at the forefront of this movement, becoming the organization’s executive director. The almost 25-year-old battle has been complex, with many highs and lows, ranging from lawsuits to denied green-light approvals. Although the land trust and FOBBV are different organizations, the two often have similar goals. SBMLT has been wanting to preserve the Moon Camp property even before FOBBV existed. In 1997, the organization sat down with the Forest Service. It asked, as recalled by Jorris, “If money was no obstacle, if the Forest Service had unlimited resources and every landowner was a willing seller of their property, what would the Forest Service want to add to its ownership in the overall forest?” “That became our master plan,” he added. “And so Moon Camp became one of those very early on.” Since FOBBV is a nonprofit and SBMLT is a land trust, it makes sense that the two would partner to save the Moon Camp property. “A land trust is an organization that finds ways to purchase land for various reasons to keep it in open space, as opposed to seeing it go into some form of development,” Jorris explained. “In our particular case, we operate within a national forest, and it just so happens that the San Bernardino National Forest was created way back in 1891. Much of the land within its boundaries was already in private ownership.” The Moon Camp property sits just one mile away from Jackie and Shadow’s nest. The shoreline property is an important fishing and perching ground for the eagles. If the development happened, the eagles’ routine would be disrupted. “The disturbance will probably cause them to leave the area,” Voisard mused. Beyond the eagles, there are other potential negative environmental impacts. The Ash Gray Indian Paintbrush, a rare plant present on the property, is only found in the San Bernardino Mountains. Flying squirrels also make their homes in the area. Further, the development would increase traffic on a one-lane highway, which could be problematic in the case of wildfires evacuations. The $10 million price tag may seem steep, but it’s the current market value of the property. Neither SBMLT nor FOBBV want to cause RCK Properties financial harm. “We’re not obstructionists. So we want it to be fair for them,” Voisard explained. Stephen Foulkes, vice president of RCK Properties, declined to speak on the record with Fast Company, but did confirm the purchase agreement. Both the land trust and FOBBV want to preserve the forest, and the flora and fauna that call it home. It’s also important to honor the work that Steers poured into this project, even in her final days. It is hard to overstate how important this is for the organizations. “It means everything,” Voisard says. “This was everything that she fought for. Sandy Steers put Big Bear Valley on her shoulders, all of the nature and wildlife, and wanted to protect it. And so we’re going to make sure it is.” A fundraising update and future fundraising plans During the first phase of fundraising, an official website was created to eliminate confusion. The revenue generated came from small donations. The eagle web cameras are so popular that they have attracted 2.5 million followers across FOBBV’s social media platforms, and was even featured on popular national programs like NBC’s Today show. So it is not surprising that over $900,000 was raised in the first two weeks. As of publication, that number has increased to just under $1.6 million, which is roughly 16% of the funding goal. The second phase of fundraising hopes to attract larger corporate or even celebrity donors. Both organizations have several leads but welcome more. A brief history of the Big Bear eagles and Sandy Steers Steers, a biologist and former NASA employee, moved to the valley around 2000. She quickly became involved in protecting the natural wonders around her, including working with the Forest Service to monitor bald eagles. Prior to 2009, bald eagles used Big Bear Valley as their winter escape. Around that time an eagle couple, Ricky and Lucy, decided to make the valley their full-time home. Jackie was hatched in the 2011-2012 season while Steers watched from afar with her binoculars. “Sandy loved Jackie so much and was so connected to Jackie. She would stand out in the freezing cold and weather and just stare at her for hours with a spotting scope,” Voisard says. “When I think of Jackie, I think of Sandy.” The genesis of the idea for the web cams came because Steers wanted to see inside the eagle’s nest and was determined to make this happen. “She organized and worked really hard to not only raise the funds for it, but to understand how to build a system and design a system that would be safe for wildlife and humans,” Voisard stated. “It’s in the middle of the mountains, 145 feet up a tree, and so it’s very extensive and expensive and required a lot of permitting.” All her hard work paid off. The first camera was live in 2015 with a second in 2021. Viewers were able to see Jackie fall in love with Mr. B, her first mate. They were also able to witness Shadow wooing her away from him, which is not normal eagle behavior. Eagles typically mate for life, but Shadow had some smooth moves. Jackie and Shadow have successfully raised several chicks and are still going strong. This season, Jackie and Shadow laid two eggs, which were sadly eaten by ravens. Thankfully two more came about a month later. Now the world gets to wait and see the fate of these potential chicks. Their fans can get an inside look into the nest and help save their habitat to ensure the safety of future generations as well. View the full article

Central bank warns conflict likely to increase tensions in private credit markets and hit economic growthView the full article

To help small aerial robots navigate in the dark and other low-visibility environments, my colleagues and I developed an ultrasound-based perception system inspired by bat echolocation. Current robots rely heavily on cameras or light detection and ranging, known as lidar, or both. But these sensors fail in visually challenging conditions, such as smoke, fog, dust, snow, or complete darkness. I’m a scientific engineer who develops bio-inspired microrobots. To solve this challenge, my research team looked at nature’s experts at navigating in poor visibility: bats. They thrive in dark, damp, and dusty caves and can detect obstacles as thin as a human hair using echolocation while weighing as little as two paper clips. They emit sound waves and listen to weak echoes reflected from objects. However, enabling this sensing on aerial robots is extremely challenging because propellers generate a lot of noise. It is a bit like trying to listen to your friend while a jet engine is taking off next to you. To overcome this issue, we present two key ideas. First, a physical acoustic shield inspired by bat’s ear cartilage reduces propeller noise around the acoustic sensors, which act like the robot’s ears. Second, a neural network called Saranga recovers weak echo signals from very noisy measurements by learning patterns over time, inspired by how bats process sound. Together, these enable the robot to estimate obstacle locations in 3D and navigate safely using milliwatt-level sensing power. Why it matters These types of drones are very useful for search and rescue, especially in confined, dynamic, and dangerous environments, because they’re small and inexpensive. Search-and-rescue operations often happen in environments where visibility is very poor, such as forest fires, collapsed buildings, caves, or dusty outdoor conditions. In these scenarios, traditional sensors like cameras and lidar often become unreliable. Bats don’t rely only on vision; instead they use echolocation to perceive the world. Ultrasound sensing doesn’t depend on lighting conditions and works in smoke, dust, and darkness. Our work shows that it’s possible to bring this capability to aerial robots despite strong onboard propeller noise. Sonar boosted by noise shielding and machine learning promises to enable a new class of small, low-cost robots that can operate in environments where current systems fail. This research can enable highly functional, autonomous, tiny aerial robots for critical humanitarian applications, such as search and rescue, combating poaching, and cave exploration. AI-enabled sonar navigation could lead to safer, faster, and more cost-effective robots for time-sensitive operations where human or larger helicopter access is limited. This is a step toward being able to deploy swarms of aerial robots, much like groups of bats, to explore hazardous environments and search for survivors. Breakthroughs in mathematical modeling, neural network design, and sensor characterization will enable other low-power applications for these drones, such as environmental monitoring. Our work can reduce power by 1,000 times, weight by 10 times, and cost by 100 times compared to current solutions. What other research is being done Most aerial navigation systems rely on cameras, depth sensors, or lidar, which degrade in low visibility. Radar works in these conditions but is power-intensive for small drones. Prior work has explored ultrasound sensing mainly on ground robots, but applying it to aerial robots has been difficult due to propeller noise and weak signals. What’s next We are working on improving flying speed, sensing range, and system size. We are also exploring new bio-inspired designs and combining ultrasound with other types of sensing. Ultimately, our goal is to build reliable, low-power aerial robots that can operate reliably in dynamic environments and enable real-world deployment in search and rescue. The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. Nitin Sanket is an assistant professor of robotics engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. View the full article

Meta is making font design as easy as writing a prompt with its newest AI tool. On March 27, the company rolled out new features within its stand-alone Edits app for editing photos and short-form video, including “AI Style” for fonts, which lets users customize text themselves. It’s like a modern-day version of the classic WordArt style in Microsoft Word, but with AI text prompts. The feature is a bit tucked away within the “Styles” tab, but users can find it when editing text by tapping the “Restyle” icon between the icons to write and choose a font. A list of suggested prompts shows what’s possible. The loading screen shows an animated plus-sign pattern. Suggestions that auto-populate the prompt box with terms like “flaming fire,” “3d rainbow,” and “overgrown cushion moss” show up visually as promised, while other, more detailed auto-prompts are also true to form. Tapping a “pop art” suggestion fills the prompt box with more detailed instructions that read, “pop art style font like something from a comic book, with posterized shading, bold colors, thick outlines, and big shapes break out of the letters and a burst in the background.” Sure enough, the text ends up looking like something out of a comic book. Tapping “forest” produces a text style based on the prompt “twigs, leaves, and lots of white, purple, and yellow wildflowers blooming out of the letters.” When writing your own prompt, the output is better than you might expect, but it’s not foolproof. Sometimes the generator has a hard time understanding simple instructions and takes a few tries. The preset options work best. Meta has added significantly to its fonts and text style options over the years as creators turned to third-party design software and apps to customize their content. In 2020, it expanded its number of available fonts in Instagram Stories from five to nine. Currently there are 14 fonts on Instagram alone, while the Edits app has more than 200. Even if it’s not perfect, AI Style for fonts increases the amount of text customization available to creators, and it also shows how far AI has come. As it’s gotten better at rendering realistic-looking hands, AI has also improved at creating legible typography. View the full article

Recently, one of us was guest-teaching a humanities class on artificial intelligence. He asked students a simple question. Had they noticed themselves becoming more “attached” to their favorite chatbot? “For example,” he asked, “do you find yourself saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to the chatbot more than you used to?” Nearly every head nodded. “Why?” he asked. One student raised her hand. “So if AI does take over,” she said, “it’ll remember that I was nice to it.” The class laughed—but not entirely. The fear and hype around AI When we see public conversations about AI, they tend to swing wildly between hype and catastrophe. On one end, we see promises of unprecedented productivity and creativity. On the other hand, there is no shortage of warnings about mass unemployment, loss of human agency, and even the extinction of our species. In a national survey we conducted in December of more than 1,600 Americans, roughly four in 10 reported being very concerned about AI’s existential threat to humanity. The level of concern is comparable to how many feel about climate change. Notably, this anxiety cut across age, income, race, gender, and political affiliation. These fears deserve serious attention. Governments and technology companies should continue rigorous testing, oversight, and safeguards. They need to make sure that there is responsible development of large language models. But focusing exclusively on worst-case scenarios risks obscuring a quieter—and possibly more consequential—question. Is AI helping people become more purposeful? AI and purpose To explore that question, we introduced a new measure in a survey of U.S. adults: The “AI for Meaningful Purpose Scale,” or AMPS. The scale asks whether people feel that AI helps them pursue goals that matter to them, develop skills they find meaningful, and stay connected to their values and sense of direction. For example, is AI helping teachers spend more time with students rather than on paperwork? Is it helping caregivers navigate complex health systems? Is it giving older adults new opportunities to create, learn, and connect? And is it helping younger adults—who are now the most anxious generation in modern history—create a sense of direction that feels both authentic and achievable? The generational divide was striking. Younger adults—Gen Z and Millennials—were roughly twice as likely as Gen Xers and Baby Boomers to say that AI supports these deeper aims. Men were twice as likely to report a high AMPS score as women. This is a gap that likely reflects differences in access, encouragement, and early design choices rather than inherent differences in interest or capability. These disparities are not destiny—but they are early signals. If AI becomes a force multiplier for purposeful living, it won’t do so automatically or equitably. How AI can impact wellbeing What surprised us most, however, was how strongly AMPS scores tracked with broader indicators of well-being. People who scored high on AMPS were more than twice as likely to report a strong sense of personal agency, social connection, and hope about the future. In other words, they were more likely to be flourishing. This doesn’t mean AI is magically making people happy. But it does suggest that when people use AI in ways aligned with what matters most to them, they feel more capable and more directed. One of the most intriguing findings emerged when we looked at how people hold competing views of AI. Older generations who were highly concerned about AI’s existential threat were less than half as likely to use it in the service of what mattered most to them. Among younger adults, however, concern about AI didn’t predict disengagement. Gen Z and Millennials were just as worried about AI’s risks as their elders. However, they were still actively using it to learn, grow, and pursue purpose. This shows us that younger generations appear more willing to hold two seemingly contradictory truths at once: That AI may pose serious dangers, and that it can still be a powerful tool for living well. This capacity to live inside tension—neither naïvely optimistic nor paralyzed by fear—may turn out to be one of the most important skills of the AI era. What the future of AI will look like The future of AI won’t be determined solely by what machines become. How humans choose to use them, and toward what ends, will impact and shape how they develop. If we treat AI only as a threat to manage or a tool for efficiency, we miss an opportunity. However, if we use it thoughtfully, AI can amplify not just productivity, but purpose. It can give people a sense of agency, and also bring hope and connection in a time when all three are in short supply. The real question, then, is not whether AI will change our lives. It already has. The question is whether we will design—and teach people to use—AI in ways that strengthen our sense of meaning and purpose rather than erode it. View the full article

Apple was founded 50 years ago today, on April 1, 1976, by two scruffy twentysomethings named Steve—Steve Jobs and Steve “Woz” Wozniak—but not in a garage, as legend has it. On that date, Ron Wayne, a 41-year-old senior designer whom Jobs met at Atari, took a two-page partnership agreement down to the Santa Clara County registrar’s office, and Apple was born. That agreement gave each of the Steves 45% of the company, and Wayne the final 10%, according to the new book, Apple: The First 50 Years, by reporter David Pogue, who has covered the company for 41 years. “That year, they were thrilled to sell 150 of those Apple I boards,” Pogue writes. Five decades later, in 2026, “its annual revenue approached $400 billion a year—more than Meta, Netflix, and Intel combined.” So, how did we get here? Fast Company spoke with Pogue, who says Jobs is a big part of the answer—but not for the reason you might think. While the general consensus is that from 1985 to 1996, “Apple didn’t do anything during those dark years,” Pogue argues that those 11 years when Jobs was gone were crucial to creating the products that define Apple’s success today. During this time, they came out with the PowerBook, and they released QuickTime, which is essentially the basis of video streaming today, Pogue says. The author dispels more myths in his massive 548-page book, too. For example, this wasn’t the Steves’ first rodeo—in fact, Apple was Woz’s and Jobs’ fourth business venture. Also, the tablet came before the phone; John Sculley did not fire Jobs; and Jobs didn’t write the famous “Think Different” ad, nor did he name the Macintosh. Apple and AI “As we speak, there is a general perception that Apple missed the AI wave,” Pogue tells Fast Company. In June 2024, Apple promised a new version of Siri, as part of Apple Intelligence, “but coming up on two years later, Apple still hasn’t delivered.” On Monday, Bloomberg reported Apple is shifting its AI focus to hardware and services. The news follows a previous report that the company plans to open Siri to outside artificial intelligence assistants; it is expected to use the Extensions feature in iOS 27 as a key part of its strategy. What could that look like in the future? According to Pogue, it could be a new version of Siri that has access to all your texts, emails, and more—and can figure out from that, “what time do I need to pick up my mom?” in the blink of an eye, and then let you know, “you need to leave at 1:30 p.m.” Perhaps Apple’s AI story will end up being: “We aren’t always first, but we are usually the best,” as Tim Cook told Pogue. What’s in store for Apple in the next 50 years? If we look at what is next for Apple, Pogue says the emphasis is on hands-free devices: smart glasses, smart AirPods, or possibly pendants that would have a camera. View the full article

You earn qualifications, polish your résumé, climb the ladder, grow your salary, and build your reputation. You’ve done everything you’re supposed to, so you (understandably) expect to feel on top of the world. Yet you remain unsatisfied despite accomplishing everything that you thought you wanted. That sense of “What’s next?” is surprisingly common. According to a recent study by Headway app, 77% of people consider themselves successful, yet 81% also admitted feeling behind in some area of their lives. The cause of your internal discontent A lack of effort or having more to achieve isn’t the cause of your dissatisfaction. It stems from not doing what you really want to do. We often give professional progress high priority, but success holds different meanings for each of us. Some people see it as growing their investment portfolio, while others view it as making memories. The Headway survey found that 33% still felt financially behind, despite their achievements. Likewise, 11% say they lack life experiences, 10% wish they had stronger relationships, and 10% are unhappy with their health. When you achieve something significant, that little “but” at the back of your mind can point you toward what you really want to work on. Why you need to avoid the comparison trap People often lose sight of their wants and start measuring themselves against others, especially when social media offers a constant reminder of how everyone is getting ahead. Most of us subconsciously know that it’s all staged, but our brains don’t automatically make that distinction. Instead, status anxiety—the innate desire to fit in and the fear of being perceived as unsuccessful—pushes us to chase the version of success that we see others striving toward. In my book, Beyond Belief, I explain how our deep-rooted assumptions often shape our behaviors. However, these beliefs aren’t always in our best interests. We believe success is achieving what everyone else is achieving, so we do what they’re doing. It’s performative, and despite providing external success, it doesn’t feel that way internally. How to be successful and satisfied If you’re accomplished on paper but dissatisfied in practice, the issue usually lies in how you define success. You need to align your ambitions and actions and consider whether your beliefs allow you to recognize the progress you’ve already made. The following steps should provide a good starting point: Question what success means to you Many of us assume that we should want certain goals and that success looks a particular way. However, that isn’t true, and it won’t make you happy. When achievements leave you feeling unfulfilled, you should question whether you’re pursuing success on your terms or someone else’s. Is a high salary worth more to you than a career you love? Would you rather gain professional experience or life experience? Is starting your own business a more exciting prospect than landing a job within the Fortune 500? There’s no right answer. Success is subjective, and figuring out what you truly want can help you to pursue something that genuinely makes you feel something. Stop focusing on a single aspect of life We have a habit of treating one aspect of life as the only metric that matters. But they all contribute to our satisfaction. When you focus too intensely on one aspect, you inevitably neglect others. Sure, you might achieve everything you strive for, but you’ll still feel that something is missing (because something is). Reaching the boardroom won’t compensate for chronic health struggles, and money can’t buy you more time with your loved ones. You may reach your goal faster with intense focus, but what’s the cost? It’s incredibly telling when 42% of people question whether they’ve lost more than they’ve gained pursuing their ambitions. Reframe how you think about progress Our thoughts shape our behavior, and having a positive mindset can make all the difference. If your attention is firmly on what you haven’t achieved yet, satisfaction will always feel out of reach. There will always be something more, and that leads to negative thoughts, like “I should be further along, and I need to work harder.” It’s a far better use of your energy to focus on what you have achieved: “I’ve accomplished so much, and I can overcome any challenge.” After all, which way of thinking is more likely to energize you and make all your effort feel worthwhile? Stop putting a time limit on success We tend to measure our achievements against those of others our own age. In fact, 81% say they feel behind their peers in at least one aspect of life. And when reality doesn’t keep up with your arbitrary timeline, even progress can start to feel like failure. Success doesn’t follow a fixed schedule, and being a year or two older doesn’t take anything away from your accomplishments. If you’re learning, growing, and progressing, you’re succeeding. Age doesn’t change that. View the full article

Telling the truth is good for business. A 2024 research paper shows that an honest culture can boost financial performance by over 20%. And in a 2004 article by MIT Sloan Management Review, 76% of staff say the honesty of a business affects their decisions on where to work. We know it matters to organizations. After all, words like “honesty,” “integrity,” and “truthfulness” appear in more than 65% of all corporate value statements. Unfortunately, just 19% of staff trust that their leaders are telling the truth, according to a 2024 report. Trust is at historic lows, in part because, despite us all saying truth and honesty matter, it’s never been easier to lie and get away with it. The data show that most of us lie daily. One experiment even found 60% of people lie once every 10 minutes. From AI deep fakes and hallucinations to social media bubbles and rampant political misinformation, we’re living in a world where lies abound, and truth seems rarer every day. Telling the truth is a behavior, not a value. You’re either doing it, or you’re not. So how do leaders make truth-telling cultures happen in their business? Here are five practical strategies I’ve seen work with teams and clients globally. 1. Lead by example There’s no point waiting around for others to go first. If you want a workplace where truth happens, start by doing it yourself. I see workplaces where everyone agrees that they need to have hard, honest conversations, but then sit in awkward silence when it comes time to do it. We don’t have the right to expect from others behaviors that we ourselves are not engaging in. And not lying isn’t enough, you need to spell out the truth. Ask yourself: what is the most important conversation in my team that isn’t happening? Then find an opportunity to start that conversation. 2. Remove disincentives Never expect someone to tell the truth when their job depends on them not telling the truth. For example, if the leader fires someone for telling them news that is factually true (but unfavorable to the leader or organization), this creates a disincentive for the next person in that job to tell the truth. Every interaction teaches people how to behave. If we put disincentives in place for telling the truth, don’t be surprised when people act in line with them. 3. Make it safe Speaking up to tell the truth can be scary. This is true even when lives depend on it. Junior pilots often don’t speak up in cockpits when things go wrong because they’re too scared. They’d literally rather crash into a mountain than speak up honestly to a more senior person. Often, what makes truth-telling scary is fear about people’s reactions. I was with a client once where a staff member said they couldn’t have honest conversations because “last time they spoke up and told the truth, someone called them a b*tch.” If you want a culture of truth-telling, it’s up to you to work and take the fear away. 4. Remember the good news Remember, telling the truth doesn’t only have to be about serious, hard conversations. In many workplaces, good, “happy” truths go unsaid just as much as negative ones. That might mean a piece of genuine positive feedback about a job done well, sharing that you’re proud of an accomplishment, or even telling a colleague how happy you are to be on their team. Not many people say these truths out loud, but they offer fertile ground to build a habit of speaking honestly. If you’ve established a culture where people articulate friendly facts openly, they’ll be more open to it when the news is harder to hear. 5. Start small The Japanese art of Kaizen (continuous improvement) suggests that if change is hard, you’re doing too much. If you want to build a truth-telling culture, don’t start with the difficult high-stakes conversations. Start with a smaller, safer territory. Maybe that’s a conversation about a minor piece of feedback, rather than a massive performance issue. Maybe it’s a small, but not catastrophic mistake with a client. Or a minor missed target, rather than an end-of-days scenario. Like every skill, telling the truth is easier the more practice you get. Practice when the stakes are low, and it’s easier when things get tough. The benefits of telling the truth don’t accrue when we make it a “value” and put it on a poster on the wall. The benefits accrue when it lives and breathes as a behavior. That is what we mean by making truth happen. View the full article

Modern leadership is defined by paradox. Leaders are expected to set clear direction while remaining open to challenge. To move quickly with decisive action while also taking people with them. To hold authority while fostering shared ownership and to deliver results without eroding trust. These demands are not occasional tensions; they sit at the heart of the role. Under this sustained pressure, many leaders have a tendency to reach for dominance. Dominance can feel efficient. It centralizes control, projects certainty and offers a reassuring sense of direction when the ground feels unstable. In moments of volatility, it can look like strength. Yet dominance carries hidden costs. When you position yourself as the one with all the answers, you inevitably carry all the responsibility as well. Decisions begin to bottleneck around you. You inadvertently train your team to bring problems to you for a solution, rather than feeling empowered to work them through for themselves. Over time, the burden becomes heavy because the very authority that once felt empowering becomes isolating as everyone looks to you for direction. There is a subtler cost too. When performance is driven primarily by the desire to please the leader, motivation shifts in quiet but significant ways. People focus on delivering what they believe will satisfy that leader, rather than uncovering what might truly serve the organisation. Creativity narrows. Ownership diminishes. Energy is invested in managing upwards rather than stepping forward with initiative. Compliance increases but inspiration gradually fades. The leaders who genuinely inspire operate differently. They exert strong influence without exerting dominance, and in doing so, they expand rather than restrict the capacity of those around them. They lead with Graceful Power. The cost of always being right Several years ago, I worked with a highly successful senior executive whose decisiveness and commercial acuity had propelled him into positions of increasing responsibility. On paper, his team performed well. Targets were met. Results were strong. Yet employee turnover was creeping upwards and morale was low. His team described him as intelligent, sharp and impressive—but also intimidating. They waited for direction rather than taking initiative. They filtered information before sharing it. They focused on gaining his approval instead of proposing bold alternatives that might challenge his view. Meanwhile, he was exhausted. He struggled to switch off. If something went wrong, he felt it was ultimately his responsibility to fix it. In trying to demonstrate strength and control, he had made himself indispensable—and increasingly alone. Through coaching, he did not diminish his authority; he expanded it. He became clearer about where his contribution added real value and how he could engage his team in working collectively towards shared organisational goals—and he showed up in ways that consistently reinforced those priorities. He stopped answering every question first and instead began asking, “What do you think?” He acknowledged when he didn’t yet have a solution and invited others into the problem. The results did not deteriorate. They improved. His team became more candid and more willing to take ownership. Innovation increased. Most strikingly, people described feeling energised rather than managed. He had not become less powerful. He had become more inspiring. Redefining power for modern leadership Graceful Power is not a softer version of leadership. It is a more elevated and expansive one. It is the ability to exert strong influence without relying on force—to replace control with composure, aggression with conviction and hierarchy with shared purpose. At its heart are three interwoven qualities: congruence, courage and compassion. Together, they enable leaders to embrace and balance the tension between competing demands, rather than narrowing into one side of the paradox and quietly avoiding the discomfort of holding both. Graceful Power does not eliminate tension. It strengthens your capacity to remain steady within it—creating the clarity and confidence that inspire others to act. 1. Congruence: authority grounded in alignment Congruence forms the foundation of Graceful Power. Congruent leaders are clear about their values and intentional about their impact. Their words and actions align, creating a sense of coherence that others can rely on. This coherence builds trust—not because the leader is flawless, but because they are consistent. When people understand what you stand for and see that reflected in how you behave, they feel steadier around you. They are more willing to speak up, to challenge ideas constructively and to take intelligent risks. Dominant leadership often compensates for inner uncertainty. Congruence removes the need for that compensation. Authority becomes quieter, less reactive and more grounded. When leaders are aligned, they no longer feel compelled to control every outcome in order to feel secure. Responsibility can be shared without a loss of status. Trust begins to replace compliance, creating the conditions in which inspiration can grow. 2. Courage: mastering fear rather than masking it Dominance frequently disguises fear—fear of being wrong, of losing status or of appearing weak. Under pressure, our nervous system interprets uncertainty as threat and defaults to fight, flight or freeze. Some leaders respond by tightening control, becoming overly assertive or shutting down dissent. These reactions can look decisive, yet they are often driven by anxiety rather than clarity. Leaders with Graceful Power recognise this response in themselves and learn to regulate it, so that fear informs their judgement without dictating their behaviour. From that place of awareness, courage looks different. It is the willingness to act in alignment with your principles despite discomfort—and to do what stretches you, not just what feels natural or safe. Courageous leaders initiate difficult conversations with calm authority. They admit uncertainty without drama. They resist the temptation to over-direct when patience is required, and they speak plainly when avoidance would feel easier. When a leader models this kind of courage, it does more than steady the room. It signals that growth is expected and supported. It invites others to take intelligent risks, to speak candidly and to stretch themselves in turn. This shared expansion is where inspiration begins. 3. Compassion: performance through human connection Compassion is often mistaken for leniency. In reality, when practised with clarity and conviction, it strengthens performance. Compassionate leaders listen not simply to respond, but with a genuine desire to understand what others are experiencing and what matters most to them. They communicate with equal clarity, so that people understand not only what is expected, but why it matters. Instead of driving performance through pressure, compassionate leadership drives performance through belief. It separates the person from the problem, expressing confidence in someone’s potential while holding them accountable for improvement. When people feel respected, understood and valued, their motivation shifts. They are no longer striving primarily to avoid disappointing the leader; they are striving to contribute meaningfully to something shared. That shift—from compliance to ownership—is where inspiration is set alight. From dominance to shared ownership Graceful Power integrates congruence, courage and compassion in real time. Congruence anchors the leader in what matters most. Courage enables them to step into what stretches them. Compassion ensures that their strength strengthens others. Instead of bearing the burden of having all the answers, the leader creates the conditions in which answers can emerge collectively. Instead of concentrating responsibility around themselves, they expand ownership across the team. In that expansion, trust replaces compliance. Ownership grows. People feel respected, valued and clear about how their contribution connects to a shared purpose. The paradox of modern leadership is not resolved by choosing between strength and human connection. It is resolved by expanding your leadership so that both can coexist—confidently, consistently and deliberately. In a world that grows more complex and interconnected by the day, dominance may still command attention, but it rarely inspires commitment. The future belongs to leaders who can hold complexity with composure, act with conviction and remain deeply grounded in their humanity—and in doing so, set others alight. That is Graceful Power. View the full article

Google's John Mueller answered a question about the nature of core updates: Are they rolled out in steps or all at once then refined? The post Google Answers Why Core Updates Can Roll Out In Stages appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

You’re a solopreneur, so you’re in charge of everything. You set your own hours, choose your clients, and decide how your business runs. Nobody needs to approve your decisions. The worst part of solopreneurship is also that you’re in charge. Every decision, every approval, every process runs through one person: you. And when you stall, so does everything else. The same control that makes solo work so appealing can also become the thing that holds your business back. If your business can’t function without your hands on every single detail, you’ll hold yourself back. At some point, you have to figure out how some aspects of your business can run without you. Where solopreneurs get stuck Bottlenecks don’t usually feel like bottlenecks. They feel like “just how things are.” You’re a solopreneur, so you’re supposed to do everything yourself . . . right? You’ve hit a bottleneck when you have no more time to give to your business. And as a result, you can’t grow or dedicate your energy to high-value work. A few scenarios are common in solo businesses. You have overly manual processes. You’re copying data between apps, setting up new projects from scratch, or holding your to-do list in your head. Mundane, menial tasks eat up hours of your time. You hold on to tasks you’ve outgrown. Solopreneurs often keep doing work they could hand off—bookkeeping, scheduling social posts, organizing documents—because they believe no one else will do it well enough. These tasks are necessary, but that doesn’t mean they’re the best use of your time. You are the decision bottleneck. When you’re the only person who can approve, review, or sign off on something, work stalls whenever you’re busy or indecisive. This gets especially expensive if you work with contractors, a social media manager, or a virtual assistant. If they can’t move forward without your input, their waiting time becomes a cost to your business. How to clear the way Once you’ve identified where things have slowed down, you can start to make changes. Here are some fixes to try. Automate the repetitive stuff. If a task follows the same steps every time, you might be able to automate it. I use automation tools to automate roughly 1,500 tasks per month in my business. Even at a conservative estimate of 10 seconds per task, that’s four to five hours of my time saved. When you automate tasks in the apps you use, you don’t get “stuck” when you have a heavy workload. Delegate with clear guardrails. If you bring on a project manager, assistant, or contractor, you need to take one of two approaches so you don’t become the bottleneck. You either need to give them really repetitive work that doesn’t require decision-making, or you need to empower the person to make decisions—and then get out of their way. Either way, you set up the work so the other person can move forward without waiting on you. Build in decision deadlines for yourself. Solopreneurs don’t have managers pushing them to decide. If you tend to sit on decisions (whether to acquire a new tool, make a pricing change, or take on a client), give yourself a deadline. Indecision can cost you opportunities, so force yourself to move forward one way or the other. Your solutions have to be practical For one week, pay attention to the tasks that require you specifically. If someone or something else (a tool or an automation) could handle it, that task is a candidate for removal from your plate. Sometimes removing bottlenecks comes with a hard cost. You have to pay for a tool or pay for someone to help you. The solution has to fit within your budget. But there’s another approach that’s free. Let stuff go. You can’t do everything. When you audit your week, figure out whether anything can be safely removed altogether. Not automated or passed off to another person. Just completely dropped. Sometimes the most effective fix for bottlenecks is realizing that a task wasn’t necessary in the first place. View the full article

What do you do if you want to eat fish, but you hate the idea of harming wild animals? Or if you’d like a nice lox and bagel, but you’re concerned about mercury and microplastics—or the broader climate risks of industrial fishing. What are your options? One San Francisco startup has an answer: Grab cells from a salmon, grow them in giant tanks in a lab-like setting filled with a warm bath of nutrients that mimic the inside of a real fish, and then coax them onto veggie-based scaffolds to form a piece of premium fish that’s never touched an ocean. That’s the vision driving Wildtype, a lab-grown fish company based in San Francisco’s trendy Dogpatch neighborhood. I stopped by, met Wildtype’s cofounder Dr. Aryé Elfenbein, and tried some of the company’s lab-grown salmon firsthand. The Fishery From the outside, Wildtype’s headquarters look like a nondescript industrial building. The only identifying mark is a stylized, W-shaped sign. Inside, though, it more closely resembles a high-end sushi restaurant. Elfenbein—a curly-haired, enthusiastic, practicing cardiologist with a deep passion for fish—greeted me warmly at the door and took me inside. I was immediately drawn to a multistory glass window at the center of the cavernous room. Behind it were gleaming stainless-steel tanks, resembling the kind of kit you might find at a microbrewery. That’s fitting, as Wildtype’s space used to host a beer-brewing operation. And the connection runs deeper. Elfenbein told me he dislikes the term “lab-grown fish” and prefers the term “cultivated.” I get it. The moniker “lab grown” evokes Frankenstein-esque visions of sparking lighting generators and people in biohazard suits wielding test tubes. Dr. Arye Elfenbein Elfenbein’s objection to the “lab grown” terms runs deeper, though. As a scientist, he’s been in plenty of labs. And he was quick to point out that Wildtype’s operation doesn’t require the kind of clean-room, negative-pressure, super-advanced environment you’d find in a true bioscience lab. It’s more akin, again, to a microbrewery, Elfenbein explained. Except instead of brewing beer, Wildtype is brewing fish. After visiting the tanks, Elfenbein led me over to a bespoke wooden sushi bar, beautifully decorated with cookbooks and ephemera from the sea. He then set about preparing me some fish to try out. A Single Fish Elfenbein explained that when the company first started making its cultivated fish, a pound of product might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce. Although it doesn’t require a lab, the process is scientifically complex. It begins with cells taken from a real salmon—in fact, one specific baby salmon whose cells were extracted years ago. Elfenbein told me that they initially thought they’d need to harvest cells from lots of individual fish in order to get their process right. After some work in the early days, Elfenbein told me that Wildtype has “not needed to return to the animals.” For over seven years, the single sample from a single fish has been enough. The company had purchased lots of salmon, anticipating the need to harvest multiple cell lines. When that turned out to be unnecessary, they kept the extra fish as pets. Elfenbein told me that he knows, as a scientist, he isn’t supposed to get attached to his subjects. But in spending time with Wildtype’s fish, he started to recognize that different individuals had different preferences and ways of behaving. It hammered in the idea that even a salmon is a unique, individual animal, and that killing one for food means ending a life. After harvesting cells, Wildtype grows them in a special nutrient solution. The specific type of harvested cells can become fat cells, muscle tissue, connective tissue, and more. By altering the nutrient solution, the company can coax the cells to adopt each of these unique identities. With a variety of cell types ready to go, Wildtype uses a plant-based scaffolding to coax the cells to assemble themselves into a piece of actual fish. Interestingly, Elfenbein told me the cells seem pre-programmed to do this—give them the right scaffold, and they’ll handle much of the assembly process on their own. With more time to grow, the fish gets tastier. Elfenbein likened the process to aging a fine wine. The Path to Walmart The details of the various solutions and scaffolds used are the product of years of work at Wildtype. The end result is a piece of actual fish, made from real salmon cells, with the marbled fat, connective tissue, and flavor of conventional salmon. Elfenbein told me that in blind taste tests, people can’t tell the difference between their cultivated fish and the fish from the ocean. That makes Wildtype’s product markedly different from meat alternatives, which currently dominate the market for non-meat meat. Brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible use plant cells and fats, processing them to resemble meat. Wildtype’s cultivated fish, in contrast, is made from real fish cells. That makes it far closer to the real thing than a plant-based substitute. That proximity has already stirred up trouble in certain circles. As Elfenbein pulled out a fancy Japanese knife (he’s spent significant time in Japan) and started preparing the fish I was about to taste, he told me, “What I’m about to do right now could land me in jail in multiple states.” Indeed, several states have already preemptively banned cultivated or lab-grown meat or fish. This bewilders Elfenbein. His product is American-made, he told me, in contrast to most commercial fish, which is farmed abroad. And he’s not a rabid animal rights protestor—just a scientist who thinks he can do something in a better, more efficient, less harmful way. That should endear Wildtype to protectionist-minded types. But apparently, the specter of artificial meat is too much for some people to stomach. Elfenbein told me that, interestingly, his biggest supporters in multiple states are hardcore libertarians. “I’d never be caught dead eating this weird San Francisco stuff,” they apparently tell him. “But if a man wants to eat something, he should be allowed to eat it!” Thankfully, in San Francisco and multiple other states, Wildtype’s product (which has received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration) is perfectly legal. It’s currently offered at several high-end fish restaurants and sushi bars in California and other Western states. In the early days, Elfenbein said, Wildtype focused on producing sashimi-grade raw salmon for these kinds of sushi bars. Now, though, they’ve pivoted to something different—smoked salmon. Why? Elfenbein told me that there’s something uniquely special about lox on a good bagel. And beyond that, Wildtype doesn’t want to only serve high-end spots. The company’s dream, Elfenbein told me, is to have their product sold at Walmart. That would make cultivated fish a mainstream product, and expand the company’s impact dramatically. Just as organic food made the jump from niche, hippie product to mass-market commodity, Elfenbein hopes cultivated fish will do the same—with the attendant benefits to animals and the environment. The Moment of Truth As we spoke, Elfenbein opened a package of entirely ordinary-looking smoked salmon, cut several slices, put it on top of crackers with some pickled onions and cream cheese, apologized for not having good-enough bagels to serve me, and then put down a lovely plate of dainty little morsels on the bar in front of me. I bit into one. It tasted like fish. My first impression was that it had a bit less of the connective tissue than conventional smoked salmon, giving it a bit less pull than the traditional stuff. As I ate more, though, I had a harder and harder time telling it apart from the smoked fish I eat every weekend. Wildtype smokes it in-house using a special wood blend, and the thin format of smoked salmon likely makes it easier to grow than a big hunk of sashimi. It was tasty. But most of all—save for my knowledge of how it was produced—it was unremarkable. It just tasted like a nice slice of lox. Nothing more and nothing less. That surprised me. I was expecting something goopy or incomplete—like when a vegan friend serves you a dish made with tofu and insists, incorrectly, that “this tastes just like the real thing!” I expected to have to squint a bit—visually and culinarily—to believe I was really eating salmon. Wildtype’s fish wasn’t like that at all. It just tasted like fish. Again, that’s exactly Wildtype’s goal. It’s ironic that it takes years of work from highly trained scientists and an industrial building full of equipment to duplicate a process that nature does entirely unassisted every day. But it’s a common story in San Francisco. Decades of research and training result in machines and processes that mimic biology—but with benefits. Indeed, I rode to Wildtype’s headquarters in an AI-powered Waymo that had been meticulously trained by armies of researchers to do something that humans do with their brains every day, only better. Beyond the taste of Wildtype’s cultivated fish, there is a laundry list of benefits to fish that don’t come from the ocean. It has far less environmental impact than wild-harvested or farmed fish, Elfenbein told me. I could literally look behind me while I ate and see exactly where my fish came from—and no diesel-exhaust-spewing trawler had to set out to sea to get it to me. Wildtype’s fish is also free from parasites, microplastics, mercury, and many of the other contaminants lurking in much of America’s commercial salmon. And of course, there’s the core benefit of not killing animals. Elfenbein told me that Wildtype exists in a strange gray area when it comes to animal rights. The product is not technically vegan, because it’s derived from animal cells. Yet many vegans choose to eat it, and many animal rights activists and organizations are quietly cheering on Wildtype’s work. Elfenbein told me that when lifelong vegans come to try Wildtype’s cultivated fish, he has to warn them: “If you’re eating fish for the first time ever, you’re probably not going to like it!” Salmon of any variety is an acquired taste. But more and more vegans are willing to acquire it via Wildtype’s products, Elfenbein said. Even a local middle school has stopped by to sample it. That got me curious as to the choice of product: Why grow fish in the first place? Elfenbein told me that, as a cardiologist who still practices in the ICU, he felt the world didn’t need more meat loaded with saturated fat or cholesterol. Fish is healthy, but most Americans don’t eat enough of it. It’s also pricier than ground beef or chicken, which makes the economics of running a cultivated fish company work better. Elfenbein shared that the cost of producing Wildtype’s cultivated fish has dropped dramatically. If the company’s processes were scaled up and run by appropriate staff members in an appropriate facility for mass production—not by highly trained, highly paid scientists in the heart of the West Coast’s most expensive city—the cost of their fish could match or even beat the conventionally harvested sort. That’s the goal at Wildtype: Deliver a product that competes on price and quality, but that is otherwise mass market enough that you might eat it without even realizing you’ve done so. There are still many hurdles to cross before Wildtype gets there. But in meeting Elfenbein and trying the product, I can see an everyday consumer topping their bagel with fish grown in a massive (non-lab) lab, adding a bit of nice cream cheese, and wolfing it down without batting an eye—or wondering if an animal was killed. View the full article