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Our data scientist has uncovered loads of fascinating numbers about social media performance this year. The best times to post based on engagement, how often you should be posting on various platforms to maximize your reach, what the impact of replying to your comments actually is, and a whole lot more — Julian Winternheimer has been busy! But this might be his most important analysis yet. We give you: ✨ The Most Used Emojis in Social Media Posts in 2025. ✨ According to his analysis of millions of posts, these are the most-used emojis in social media posts this year. OK, OK, it’s probably not the most important, actionable study we’ve ever done… and it probably won’t help shape your social media strategy in the way that all our other studies have done. But it’s fun. And it’s a fascinating snapshot of this social media moment in time, too. Is your most-used emoji on the list? Mine is right at the top! Before you ask, I know my overuse didn’t sway the data. Julian based this analysis on the number of Buffer users who used the emoji this year, rather than total emoji use — so folks who are particularly attached to certain emojis, like me, didn’t influence the numbers too much. Jump to a section: The top emoji in social media posts in 2025 The full lineup: Top emojis used in social media posts in 2025 Top emojis of 2025 by platform Instagram LinkedIn TikTok X/Twitter Facebook Threads YouTube Pinterest Bluesky Mastodon What changed throughout 2025 From feels to function More social media data The top emoji in social media posts in 2025It wasn’t even a close race: ✨ sparkles dominated social media content in 2025. Over 207,768 Buffer users used sparkles in their posts this year, making it the most popular emoji by a significant margin. The 👉 pointing finger came in second place, with use by 131,783 users. So the ✨ was 57.7% more popular than 👉. In third place was another of my favorites, the 🔥 fire emoji, used by 125,665 users in 2025. It’s not hard to understand why ✨ was so much higher than the other top contenders. Sparkles convey excitement, newness, or emphasis without feeling overly casual or emotional — which is probably why it works across everything from LinkedIn posts to Instagram captions. The full lineup: Top emojis used in social media posts in 2025Based on our analysis of Buffer's posting data, here are the emojis that organizations used most frequently this year: ✨ Sparkles👉 Backhand index pointing right🔥 Fire✅ Check mark button💡 Light bulb🚀 Rocket🌟 Glowing star👇 Backhand index pointing down🎉 Party popper❤️ Red heart📍 Round pushpin💪 Flexed biceps💬 Speech balloon👀 Eyes🔗 Link🚨 Police car light🌿 Herb🌍 Globe showing Europe-Africa💥 Collision✔ Check mark📅 Calendar🎯 Direct hit⚡ High voltage🤔 Thinking face➡ Right arrow🙌 Raising hands🧠 Brain💫 Dizzy💙 Blue heart🌱 SeedlingIsn’t it interesting that the top emojis aren't the laughing faces or hearts you see dominating consumer usage? The creators and brands that use Buffer’s social media content tend to be much more tactical. Functional emojis dominate this list, pointing emojis direct attention, and checkmarks indicate completion or approval. Fire signals something trending or important, while light bulbs introduce ideas. These emojis are less like emotional expressions and more like visual punctuation — a way to guide the eye, emphasize key points, and structure information in crowded feeds. As a writer, I found this really fascinating! It’s worth noting that several of these emojis are also favored by LLMs, which suggests the use of AI tools to help write captions and posts. I couldn’t find a scientific analysis of the most used emojis by tools like ChatGPT for a direct comparison. But, an interesting article on ChatGPT’s ‘style’ by The Washington Post, which analyzed over 300,000 publicly shared messages by the chatbot, found that the most used emojis were ✅ the check mark button (#4 on our list) and the 🧠 brain emoji (#27). Top emojis of 2025 by platformIt gets even more interesting when you break things down by platform. While ✨ sparkles won overall, each platform has its own distinct emoji culture when it comes to professional content. Instagram✨ Sparkles👉 Pointing right🔥 FireInstagram remains the most emoji-friendly platform — more users had emojis in their posts than any other platform — with sparkles leading by a huge margin. The Instagram algorithm rewards visually engaging content, and emojis are part of that visual language. LinkedIn✨ Sparkles👉 Pointing right✅ CheckmarkWhat's fascinating about LinkedIn is how tight the race is between the top three. Users are clearly experimenting with emoji use on the platform, finding ways to make professional content feel more approachable without sacrificing credibility. TikTok✨ Sparkles🔥 Fire👀 EyesThe eyes emoji jumping to #3 on TikTok makes perfect sense. It's all about watch time on this platform, and 👀 literally says "look at this." Users posting on TikTok understand they're competing for attention in a different way than on other platforms. X/Twitter✨ Sparkles🔥 Fire👉 Pointing rightThe fast-moving nature of X means emojis need to communicate instantly. Fire and pointing emojis do exactly that — they signal urgency, importance, or direction without requiring additional context. Facebook✨ Sparkles👉 Pointing right✅ CheckmarkFacebook's emoji usage mirrors its role as the platform with the broadest reach. Users stick with universally understood emojis that work across diverse age groups and contexts. Threads✨ Sparkles🔥 Fire👇 Pointing downAs the newer platform in the mix, Threads shows similar patterns to X but with slightly more use of directional emojis. YouTube✨ Sparkles🔥 Fire👉 Pointing rightYouTube's emoji usage reflects its role as a community-building platform. YouTubers use sparkles to highlight new uploads, fire to signal trending content, and pointing emojis to direct viewers to links in descriptions or pinned comments. Pinterest✨ Sparkles👉 Pointing right🔥 FirePinterest perfectly embodies the "sparkles aesthetic" — the platform is all about inspiration and aspiration, and ✨ captures that energy. Pinners use it to emphasize beautiful imagery, DIY ideas, and save-worthy content. Bluesky✨ Sparkles👉 Pointing right🎉 Party popperWhat's interesting about Bluesky is that the party popper 🎉 makes the top three. Bluesky is still pretty new (even though it recently hit the 40-million user mark), so I get the celebratory vibe. Mastodon✨ Sparkles👉 Pointing right🎉 Party popperLike Bluesky, Mastodon shows 🎉 in the top three, which makes sense for a platform built on community values and celebrating decentralized social media. What changed throughout 2025The graph above shows the rank of the top 10 emojis month-to-month (we ran the data up to the end of November). Looking at emoji rankings over time throughout 2025, a few trends stood out: Sparkles ✨ maintained its #1 position consistently throughout the entire year. This emoji has essentially become the default way to add emphasis or visual interest to professional content across platforms. The fire emoji 🔥 saw some interesting fluctuations, dropping in ranking during early 2025 before climbing back up. The rocket 🚀 was another that rose and fell throughout the year — it dropped from #2 in January to #9 in November (apparently folks weren't quite as ready to launch as the year rolled on.) Several emojis showed remarkable consistency, suggesting they've become established parts of professional social media language rather than trendy choices. From feels to functionMy key takeaway from all these numbers is pretty clear: emojis are functional, not just decorative or expressive. As a writer, I find it fascinating how we’re adopting emojis for formatting, structure, and punctuation, as well as to convey tone. A secondary takeaway: in 2025, our posts all needed a little extra ✨ More social media dataHow to Grow on Social Media in 2026: A Data-Backed StrategyConsistent Posting Means 5x More Likes, Comments, and Shares: StudyReplying to Comments Boosts Engagement by 5-42% on These Major PlatformsDoes X Premium Really Boost Your Reach? An Analysis of 18M+ PostsView the full article

Threshold to increase to £2.5mn from April after backlash, following original proposal of £1mnView the full article

This week's Ask an SEO addresses where keyword optimization ends and keyword stuffing begins in modern search and AI-driven systems. The post Ask An SEO: What Is The Threshold Between Keyword Stuffing & Being Optimized? appeared first on Search Engine Journal. View the full article

You know the scenario: You have a bunch of unread emails . The more that come in, the more anxious you get—and the more you procrastinate on sorting through them. How do you decide which ones to reply to and in what order? Even when the amount of unreads isn't overwhelming, your choice can determine how your workday will go. In general, you should choose a side between a last in, first out (LIFO) or first in, first out (FIFO) approach—and, in my opinion, the best choice is LIFO. What are LIFO and FIFO?LIFO and FIFO are terms that come from the financial world—respectively, they stand for “last in, first out” and “first in, first out.” They’re often used by accountants to describe inventory but can refer to anything where items are coming “in,” like, well, emails. In this context, it refers to the practice of responding to either your oldest or your newest unreads first, then working your way in the opposite direction from there. Why is LIFO better than FIFO for email management?LIFO, or the practice of answering the most recent emails before older ones, is more common than FIFO for good reason: Your most recent emails are the ones most likely to be time-sensitive, relevant, or actively blocking someone else’s work as they go unanswered. Meanwhile, the older a message gets, the higher the odds are that the window for a perfect response has already closed. At that point, stressing over it doesn’t magically make you more punctual, it just slows you down. Focusing on what’s right in front of you helps you stay responsive and on top of your current workload, which is usually what your job (or life) actually rewards. "But what if I left the older ones too long?" you worry. Don't—if something from the past is truly urgent or important, you’ll get a follow-up and, even though that might be embarrassing for you, it’ll bump the older content at hand into LIFO territory anyway. LIFO essentially relies on the idea that the older problems will sort themselves out or be brought back to your attention if they have to be. It’s like giving yourself grace on what you missed and focusing instead on what you can take care of right now. It works best if you rely on it when you have to, but commit to dealing with incoming mail in a more timely way going forward. If you miss too many emails and have to get too many follow-ups, your reputation will take a hit. That's why LIFO works best in general: Once you create the habit of responding to the last-in, you'll eventually stop having first-in messages at all. Of course, there might be times when you don’t get a follow-up or really do miss something important from the past. One day a week or so, use the time that you’ve blocked out for your email management to work in FIFO mode, going through your emails reverse-chronologically to make sure you didn’t miss anything big. Using FIFO too consistently can have negative consequences, though. If you’re always working on tasks from the past, you risk missing newer, more urgent ones that need immediate attention. Save it for one day every once in a while and use your time to handle pressing matters on a day-to-day basis. An important element of either strategy is timing. Make sure to block out time for email management every day, ideally using a scheduling tactic like timeboxing. Dedicating specific, uninterrupted time to your inbox management makes it more doable and ensures you’ll actually handle the emails in the first place, whereas answering them sporadically through the day opens you up to the possibility of being distracted or procrastinating more frequently. If you're struggling to adopt a LIFO mindset, consider the "one-touch" method. With this more intense approach, you commit to opening every email as soon as you get it. It will force you to build a habit that results in you never letting any email get away from you. Open the email, respond to it, and either delete or archive it, depending on if you’ll need it later. If it requires no response, even better. Schedule any required tasks into your to-do list, then keep on moving. You're more likely to get the task done when you need to simply by virtue of being readily aware of it because you opened the message as soon as it came in. View the full article

Brand-agency partnerships look very different today than they did even a few years ago, and by 2026 that gap will only widen. Internal marketing teams are more sophisticated, digital channels are more specialized, and the role agencies play is no longer one-size-fits-all. As a result, the companies that get the most value from agency relationships aren’t always the biggest spenders. They’re the ones that are clear about what they need and what they don’t. That clarity starts with understanding the true role an agency should play inside your organization. Too many partnerships struggle because expectations and responsibilities were never properly aligned from the start. When that foundation is off, even strong execution can fall flat. After working with thousands of businesses across various industries and growth stages, we consistently observe that agency success falls into two distinct partnership models, primarily shaped by company size and internal marketing maturity. Model 1: Execution-first partnerships (large companies) If your company generates more than $50 million in annual online revenue, you likely already have a strong internal marketing team. Strategy, goal-setting, and planning live in-house. What you need from an agency is deep platform expertise and consistent, high-level execution. At this stage, agencies function as specialist operators that: Activate the roadmap your team has already defined. Optimize performance inside specific channels. Bring advanced technical knowledge that would be inefficient to replicate internally. When something underperforms, a strong agency partner doesn’t rush to tactics. They help determine whether the issue lies in execution, shifting market conditions, or a broader strategic blind spot – and they bring the data needed to support course correction. Model 2: Integrated growth partners (small to mid-size companies) For companies under $50 million in annual online revenue, the agency relationship is different. Internal teams are often lean, stretched, or still developing core digital expertise. In these cases, agencies don’t just execute – they help shape the entire growth strategy. Here, the right agency partner becomes an extension of the marketing department that can: Guide platform selection. Develop cross-channel strategies. Execute campaigns. Provide direction on tools, tracking, and infrastructure. The relationship is more integrated because it has to be. For many growing businesses, agencies offer access to senior-level expertise at a fraction of the cost of building a full in-house team. That tradeoff often creates the best possible balance between speed, strategy, and financial reality. Dig deeper: How to hire an SEO agency: The definitive guide Finding the right agency partner Most companies approach agency selection the wrong way. Here’s how to improve your odds of finding a partner that actually fits your needs. Ditch the RFPs Many large companies use the request for proposal (RFP) process to solicit potential partners. However, RFPs often favor vendors that excel at paperwork over those that prioritize performance. From an agency perspective, if you don’t already know you’ve won an RFP, you’re not going to win it. They act more as rubber stamps for a decision that has already been made. Large companies should instead leverage their connections. If you’re running a large internal marketing department, you probably already know dozens of professionals who could provide referrals. Use that network to find firms doing great work, then reach out to them directly. Smaller businesses should talk to their peers about trusted marketing vendors and then check reviews to validate those recommendations. No agency is perfect, and every agency will have some dissatisfied clients. But if you see patterns of negative reviews emerge, you should stay away. Request an audit Once you’ve identified a few potential partners, ask them to audit your current marketing setup. In most cases, digital marketing agencies conduct these audits for free. Keep in mind that during an audit, many agencies will point out what you’re doing wrong. But the goal is to receive honest, constructive feedback that offers insight into what’s working and what’s possible. The audit process will look different depending on the company’s size. For larger companies, agencies should only audit the platforms they’ll be working on. Smaller companies need a broader audit across the entire marketing funnel. These agencies won’t be working in a vacuum. Every element of marketing is interrelated, so they’ll need to know who manages each stage of the funnel and whether they’re doing a good job. Companies of all sizes should collect audits from multiple sources. This enables you to compare recommendations and understand if the partnership will be a good fit. Large companies need partners that can integrate with their internal processes. Smaller companies need to pick vendors with people they actually want to work with. Both considerations are critical in ensuring long-term success. Setting achievable goals Once you’ve selected the right agency partner, it’s time to define your goals. It’s an unfortunate reality that most business leaders set marketing goals that don’t align with their business goals, which puts agency partners in an untenable position before the relationship even gets off the ground. Good agencies should challenge your goals before you even sign a contract. They should push you to dream bigger or rein you in if your expectations are unrealistic. If a potential client in the beauty space says they want a tenfold return on ad spend (ROAS) while jumping their non-brand spend from $20,000 to $100,000, a good agency should know enough to push back. Your potential partner should understand the economics of your business and help ensure your marketing goals align with your business goals. Often they don’t, which is where good agencies add immediate value. Dig deeper: How to find your next PPC agency: 12 top tips Get the newsletter search marketers rely on. See terms. Maintaining a productive partnership Once the work begins, you need to keep your agency accountable. Here’s how. Contract length Larger companies typically sign 12-month contracts with their agency vendors. They value stability and performance, and longer contract terms provide agencies with the time needed to establish themselves within the marketing operation. Smaller companies can’t afford to bind themselves to an underperforming agency for an entire calendar year. If you’re hiring an agency partner at a smaller company, opt instead for a three-month agreement that automatically renews to month-to-month. Challenge and conflict are healthy The most productive business-agency partnership often involves some conflict from time to time. Great partners will challenge your thinking regularly, which can sometimes create discomfort. But if everything is always smooth sailing, you probably aren’t growing or improving. The goal instead is to have productive conversations that involve healthy disagreement and constant refinement. Ongoing accountability If you’re overseeing a brand-agency partnership, you should establish regular reviews that compare progress to the opportunities identified in the agency’s initial audit. For smaller companies, quarterly reviews make sense. They align with the contract structure and allow you to recalibrate budget allocation. Larger companies might review monthly or quarterly, depending on spend and complexity. However, context here matters. You need to understand if your industry is growing or shrinking to judge your agency’s work. For example, if your industry is down 10% year-over-year and your sales are flat, you’re outperforming your competitors. Often, the agency or brand can obtain this information from their representatives on platforms such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or Meta. Innovation and testing Great agency partners will proactively bring new growth ideas to the table, which is particularly valuable for smaller businesses. Large companies also benefit from outside ideas and should establish dedicated budgets for testing. After all, if your agency isn’t investing at least a small portion of the budget into new, untested ideas, brands will find themselves falling behind competitors that are. Innovation isn’t just about testing what works today. It’s about understanding what’s coming next. Great agency partners should help you see what’s coming 6-12 months out, and prepare your marketing to meet those new conditions. Businesses need an agency’s expertise, which becomes insight over the longer term. Without it, they’ll be flying blind. Dig deeper: How to onboard an SEO agency the right way When to make an agency change Not every brand-agency partnership succeeds, even with the best intentions. If your gut is telling you something isn’t working or that something could be working better, here are a few red flags that might indicate it’s time to make a change. Your business isn’t growing Your marketing efforts should revolve around finding new-to-brand customers. Full stop. If your business isn’t growing and your industry is stable or growing, that’s a big red flag that marketing isn’t working. Once an agency stops being a partner in growth, it’s time to make a change. Your agency isn’t pushing innovation The marketing ecosystem is constantly changing: Customer needs evolve. Platforms update features. New tools emerge that upend old processes. If your agency isn’t bringing new ideas or exploring new ways to reach customers, your marketing is stagnating. In these instances, an outside audit can reveal deficiencies and potential opportunities. Your agency can’t explain performance If your agency can’t contextualize your performance – good or bad – within the broader marketing ecosystem, it’s a strong indication they don’t understand your sales funnel. Channel experts should know how their performance is affected by upper-funnel activities and how those activities affect bottom-funnel activities. Marketing agencies for smaller businesses should know enough about the entire marketing operation and understand how performance in one area impacts another. Dig deeper: Avoiding cookie-cutter SEO: 8 red flags to watch out for The marketing reality check The best marketing in the world won’t help a bad business grow. A good company, combined with good leadership and a good agency, is the secret sauce of successful growth. If one of those elements is missing, marketing will never accomplish what you hope it will. Getting great results within a brand-agency partnership isn’t about huge marketing budgets or fancy advertising awards. Instead, it’s about understanding what role your agency should play, and choosing a partner equipped to fill it. When your needs align with an agency’s specific capabilities, that’s where the real growth happens. Choosing an agency partner isn’t a one-time decision. It’s an ongoing process that includes accountability, perpetual refinement, and, sometimes, healthy disagreement. While this process certainly isn’t easy, it’s worth getting right. View the full article

Some Google Ads MCC, Manager Accounts, are seeing channel performance reporting. This does not seem to have been rolled out to all advertisers yet, but Mike Ryan noticed it was rolling out on some of his MCC accounts.View the full article

Say what you will about Crumbl Cookies. It’s always sure to get a reaction. Earlier this month, when a sudden swirl of social media rumors began to suggest that the polarizing bakery chain was closing down, some of the online reactions were downright gleeful. “Too sweet and too expensive!” went one typical comment. The chatter was so loud that Crumbl cofounder Sawyer Hemsley took to TikTok to dispel the rumor, explaining that the fast-growing chain is just moving offices as it prepares for its next wave of expansion. But while reports of Crumbl’s demise may be premature, the chain has in fact closed a number of locations over the last few years following a period of accelerated growth. Here’s what to know: Is Crumbl Cookies still growing? According to Rhonda Bromley, Crumbl’s VP of public relations, Crumbl now has 1,103 locations in the United States and 25 in Canada, up from just 326 at the end of 2021. And the Utah-based chain will indeed continue to expand its footprint next year. “We have no plans for growth to stop and will be opening many more stores in both the United States and Canada in 2026,” Bromley tells Fast Company. Which Crumbl Cookies locations have closed? At the end of 2021, Crumbl hadn’t closed any of its locations, which speaks to the rapid, social media-fueled growth that it had famously experienced in its early years. But over the last few years, at least 19 locations have closed, according to a Fast Company review of media reports, online review platforms like Yelp, and Crumbl’s own store locator. The shuttered stores, which were located across 10 states, are listed below. A Crumbl spokesperson confirmed the closures. California 481 Madonna Rd Ste D San Luis Obispo, CA 93405 550 Woollomes Ave Ste 105 Delano, CA 93215 2750 41st Ave Ste E Soquel, CA 95073 12274 Palmdale Rd Ste 102 Victorville, CA 92392 8126 E Santa Ana Canyon Rd Ste 167 Anaheim, CA 92808 32545 Golden Lantern Ste C Dana Point, CA 92629 Connecticut 360 Connecticut Ave Unit 4 Norwalk, CT 06854 Colorado 1805 29th St Ste 1136 Boulder, CO 80301 3480 Wolverine Dr Ste G Montrose, CO 81401 Florida 1695 W Indiantown Rd Ste 22-23 Jupiter, FL 33458 Georgia 2615 Peachtree Pkwy Ste 210 Suwanee, GA 30024 Illinois 1441 N Wells St Chicago, IL 60610 1530 E Lake Cook Rd Wheeling, IL 60090 Ohio 3038 Westgate Mall #20 Fairview Park, OH 44126 34330 Aurora Rd Solon, OH 44139 Pennsylvania 3741 West Chester Pike Ste 103 Newtown Square, PA 19073 604 228th Ave NE Sammamish, WA 98074 Tennessee 8068 Hwy 100 Nashville, TN 37221 Utah 4211 Pony Express Parkway Suite 130, Eagle Mountain, UT 84005 It’s not unusual for restaurant chains to close locations even as they grow their overall footprint, as some stores will inevitably underperform or could succumb to other unfavorable location-specific factors. A Crumbl spokesperson did not directly respond to the question of why these stores have closed. Why did people think Crumbl was closing for good? Some of the online rumors appear to have been spread by AI-powered social media accounts that post misinformation for engagement, as Reddit users pointed out in the Crumbl subreddit. At the same time, a Bloomberg Businessweek story this month took a decidedly unflattering view of the brand and raised questions about its ability to sustain hypergrowth. The story may have added fuel to the rumors that Crumbl’s days are numbered. Crumbl, which was founded in 2017, is known for its substantial social media presence. It has almost 11 million followers on TikTok alone, so it makes sense that rumors about the company would spread quickly across the internet. Also, as stated earlier, controversy around Crumbl is not exactly new. It was more than a year ago that food blog Delish.com posed the question: “Has the Crumbl backlash begun?” We’ll let you decide the answer for yourself. View the full article

Google Ads added a new channel control for Demand Gen to show ads in Google Maps. Some advertisers see the ability to select Maps as a placement in Demand Gen.View the full article

You quit the 9-to-5 to have more control over your time. You wanted flexibility, autonomy, and the freedom to structure your days around your life instead of someone else’s schedule. Yet here you are, apologizing to a client for not responding to a message immediately. Feeling guilty on a Tuesday afternoon when you’ve only worked for four hours that day. Checking Slack at 9:00 PM because that’s been your routine for most of your working career. Many solopreneurs don’t realize they’ve inadvertently recreated corporate life until they’re already living it. You traded a demanding boss for a dozen demanding clients. You swapped mandatory meetings for back-to-back Zoom calls. That freedom you craved? Doesn’t exist in your solopreneur world. To find actual freedom as a solopreneur, you have to recognize that you’re following a corporate playbook—and make a conscious decision to change. Identify your ‘corporate workday’ habits Corporate habits are deeply ingrained. We’ve worked that way for so long that they just feel like “how work is supposed to be done.” For me, it was the instant email (or Slack) response. In my corporate job, quick replies signaled that I was on top of things, engaged, and reliable. When I started freelancing, I brought that habit with me. If a client sent me an email, I’d reply immediately—even if I was in the middle of the grocery store. Here’s something to try: What would happen if you took an entire day off, unplanned? Not a vacation day you scheduled weeks in advance, but a spontaneous decision to step away from your client work on a Wednesday. Does that break your clients’ expectations around your response time? Does the idea make you feel a bit squeamish? Those feelings are your corporate habits talking. To embrace your freedom, you have to undo the rigid 9-5, “always on” mentality. Structure your work for outcomes, not time spent Corporate life is built around a 40-hour workweek. Even if you finish your work in less time, you’re often expected to fill the bucket of the workweek with more work. As a solopreneur, if you price your work by the hour, you’re invariably still tied to the amount of time you work—which has its limits. You’ll have more freedom if you can earn the same amount (or more!) even if you work less. Clients pay you for your expertise and outcomes, not the number of hours you put in. Over time, you’ll get more efficient, and each project will require fewer hours. You’ll have a shorter workweek (if you choose), and can break free from a 9-5 schedule even more. Build systems that protect your boundaries Corporate life often has no boundaries. Someone else dictates your workload, schedules your meetings, and approves your PTO. I’ll never forget the time a CEO texted me on a Saturday morning because he found a typo on a blog post and wanted me to fix it right that minute. No boundaries. When you work for yourself, you might assume boundaries will naturally emerge. They won’t, unless you choose to define and enforce them. The easiest way to do this is to build systems that make boundaries automatic. Turn off notifications. Set up email filters. Block off time for deep work and use a calendar scheduling app so clients can’t meet with you during that time. Boundaries are necessary if you don’t want to feel like you’re constantly working or letting other people control your schedule. Don’t let yourself fall back into old habits It’s easy to fall back into corporate habits because they feel familiar. It can be uncomfortable to shake things up at first. You should regularly review your work habits to see if you’re falling back into patterns that aren’t serving you or your business. You have to be intentional about the hours you work and how you interact with clients. The way to build a sustainable solo business is to find a schedule that works for you. Maybe you still follow a mostly 9-5 schedule, even if you’re more flexible with your days. Maybe you work best late at night or before the sun rises. Any of those decisions is fine, as long as you’re in control of when and how work gets done. View the full article

Google Search has been sending 25 percentage points less traffic to news publishers over the past two years, according to the folks over at Newzdash. In 2023, Google Web Search made up over 51% of traffic from Google surfaces to news publishers; that number is now down to 27%.View the full article

Google is testing prefilling the search bar in a new Chrome tab, with teasers to encourage you to search deeper with AI Mode. Google is putting in the search box, "Research a topic," "Write something new," "Ask Google," and "Make a plan."View the full article

Newly released DoJ documents point to deep ties between influential men and late sex offenderView the full article

Have you seen those Google Discover notifications that pop up and seem like news notifications from the Google app but what they do is drive you into Google AI Mode. I find them incredibly annoying, because every time I click on it, I think I am going to a news article but instead, I am given an AI-generated AI Mode answer.View the full article

Industrial metal has passed $12,000 a tonne as rally continuesView the full article

It’s easy, for me at least, to be cynical about the state of design. Our visual environment can feel bland, everything from brands to buildings homogenized around similar styles. The ever-impending AI takeover can make the future of this work uncertain. My reading around design this year tended to focus on two things: looking back and looking ahead. In looking through design history, I was looking for glimpses of alternative ways of designing: the experimental, the absurd, the weird. And in looking forward, I was searching for hope in a dark time, for answers on how design, and the design industries, move beyond the stasis I feel like we’re in. The intersection of these interests is an attempt to understand what design is, what it has been, and what it could be next. The books that were my favorite this year are the books that show design as something fun, experimental, future-looking, and constantly in flux. The Invention of Design by Maggie Gram Maggie Gram’s excellent new book, The Invention of Design, is one of those books I’m surprised didn’t already exist, and now I don’t know how I’ve lived without it for so long. This is not a history book of famous designers or trends or movements but rather an intellectual history of how the “idea” of design came to be what it is today. Charting the major conceptions of design from beauty to problem solving, thinking to experience, Gram, a designer and historian, presents design as an inherently optimistic endeavor but one that often fails to live up to its promises. A *Co-*Program for Graphic Design by David Reinfurt What does it mean to teach graphic design today? Or better yet: what does graphic design even mean today? The designer and educator David Reinfurt thinks through these questions in this casual and conversational book built around three courses he’s taught and developed at Princeton University over the last decade. Jumping back and forth through design history, moving across formats and mediums, and inviting a range of voices to participate in the conversation, Reinfurt shows that graphic design continues to be an expansive, ever-shifting space in which to think about ideas and how they move through the world giving us a flexible framework to think through teaching the next generation of designers. The House of Dr. Koolhaas by Francoise Fromonot Perhaps the strangest book I read this year but also most delightful, Francoise Fromonot’s The House of Dr. Koolhaas is the first book from Gumshoe, a new series from Park Books that approaches architecture criticism as if it were a detective novel. Written and packaged like the pulpy genre—complete with over-the-top illustrated covers and cliff-hanging chapters—Fromonot does a close reading of Rem Koolhaas’s Villa Dall’Ava, untangling its place both in Koolhaas’s work and in the larger architectural media context. Propulsive, insightful, expansive, and highly illustrative, I can’t wait to see what buildings the series tackles next. Buildings For People and Plants by WORKac In this focused, highly visual monograph, the New York-based architecture office WORKac presents ten built projects that together can be read as the thesis for the firm’s ideas. Founded in 2003 by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, WORKac has worked across scales and contexts and styles but in this book, a coherent body of work emerges, showing how the studio has engaged with color and form, civic interests, and sustainability. Sparse on text and heavy on photographs (almost 200, total), Andraos and Wood make the case for an architecture that engages with the world—an architecture for people and plants, if you will—and they show us how they’ve done just that. Could Should Might Don’t by Nick Foster Nick Foster, futures designer, former design director of Google X, and self-described “reluctant futurist” writes in his great book that when we imagine the future, we often imagine images made by other people and those images have become strangely homogenized. Foster thinks that’s a problem. Through breezy chapters, he probes how we imagine the future, how it becomes reality, and most importantly, who has a stake in that future. In doing so, he makes the case for a more rigorous, thoughtful, and provocative way to think about the future and how we get there. Archigram: The Magazine You can’t talk about avant-garde architecture without talking about Archigram, the British collective that drew upon their interests in everything from pop art to Buckminster Fuller. Over 15 years, the collective also published Archigram, a lo-fi, experimental, and freewheeling magazine to share their ideas. Long hard to find, this gorgeously packaged box set includes facsimiles of all ten issues, including flyers, pockets, and pop-ups, alongside an excellent reader’s guide that features writing from Archigram founder Peter Cook, architecture writer Reyner Banham, and tributes from Kenneth Frampton, Norman Foster, and more. It might be a stretch to call this a “book” but it’s a worthy collectable for anyone interested in experimental architecture, design history, publishing, and zine culture. Enshittification by Cory Doctorow In 2023, the science fiction writer and pioneering blogger Cory Doctorow coined a term that seemed to perfectly describe the moment we seem to be stuck in: “enshittification.” Writing about online platforms, Doctorow described enshittification as the gradual worsening of so many services we’ve come to rely on. Two years later, he’s expanded that into a full book, looking at everything from Facebook to the iPhone App Store, to Twitter while also making the case that we, as users, can take back the internet we are losing. Though not explicitly a book about design, designers will certainly see themselves in these pages as Doctorow shows how the design of so many services have shifted from solving problems for users to padding the pockets of shareholders View the full article

I’ve been fortunate that we've closed down for the last week of the year for the last eight years that I’ve been at Buffer. We kicked off this at the end of 2016 and have kept up every year since then. Closing down for the last week of the year is an opportunity to pause and recharge. It’s like a reset, except across the whole company. I love telling people about this practice at Buffer because they have so many questions about how we continue to operate while closing down for a week. As we work with many small businesses and creators who can sometimes struggle with working over the holidays, it feels especially important to share how we’re going about this. So in this post, I’ll cover what it means to close down for a week as a business whose customers are always using it, why we do it, and specifically how our largest teams manage this time off while still caring for our product and our customers. Let’s dive in! Jump to a section: What does it mean to close down for a week? What does this look like in practice? How our Advocacy team handles a week closed How our Engineering team handles a week closed A few questions from our community about closing down for a week What does it mean to close down for a week? At the end of every year, we close down for the year's final week. The exact definition of “closed down” varies from company to company – some businesses will completely shut down operations while others will only close particular sections of their business. This gives everyone at the company some extra time to rest, and it creates an environment where no one is worried about missing out on projects or updates while they’re offline because we’re all offline. We’ve done this sort of thing before, closing down for an extra long weekend in the summer, and it’s always been refreshing for our team. When I say that we’re closed, that means that most of the company is off (I’ll elaborate in the next section), we aren’t releasing new features or changing our product at all, we aren’t publishing new blog posts, and it is intentionally a time of rest. In our business, creating tools for small businesses and creators building a brand online, this time of year is also reliably slow. So unlike some other industries that may pick up over the holidays, we can lean into rest by closing the company during a naturally slower period. What does this look like in practice?For most teams at Buffer, closing for the holidays means a full disconnect. Our two largest teams, Engineering and Customer Advocacy have to create systems where we can still serve our customers and ensure Buffer is operational while also making space for additional rest. So here’s how Engineering and Advocacy tackle the week off. How our Advocacy team handles a week closedOur Advocacy team is a group of absolute pros who are taking care of our customers. This year, they’ve helped solve over 50,000 customer support requests and sent over 105,000 replies with an average first response time of just four hours, 38 minutes (business hours). Over the years that we have been closing, they have figured out the right balance to ensure we can still help customers while also giving our Advocates that extra rest. To start, we take steps to make this period visible to our customers. They post a clear message stating that we’re shut down for the holidays in all the main channels where we communicate with customers. Those include a banner for people who are in Buffer, an auto-reply to customer support email, a pinned tweet on our account, and several other places. This year, the message reads: The Buffer team is observing a company-wide holiday shutdown from December 24 to January 1. While our response times will be a little slower than usual, a dedicated crew of Customer Advocates are working as quickly as possible to respond to customer messages. Happy Holidays! ✨ Each Advocate is working one full day or two half days. We stagger our coverage across the close-down period to ensure we have the optimal number of people online on the days we expect to be busiest. This year, we have people online on Dec 24, we have a few hours of coverage on Dec 25, and we have people online on Jan 1. We ask all Advocates to work full weeks (five days) in the two weeks following the holiday period to ensure we kick off the new year with the inbox in great shape and customers being helped as quickly as possible. The team has in place a clear schedule, expectations when people are online with how to prioritize their work and get back to customers, and guidelines for emergencies. (We have those guidelines in place all the time, but it’s always good to review ahead of the holidays.) How our Engineering team handles a week closedSimilar to Advocacy, for our engineers, we need to have some coverage of engineers who are on call in case something happens. For Engineering, their break looks different because they are on call, meaning they are available if something breaks, rather than fully online during this time. That means that the load of being on call can be spread among fewer people because the likelihood of them needing to be online is lower. The way that the on-call schedule works is that there are several specialized or senior members of the team who are immediately placed in all of the on-call spots. Then we ask for volunteers from the rest of the engineering team to be on-call throughout the week. A few questions from our community about closing down for a weekWe reached out on social media to see what questions people had about closing down for a week, and we got a few good questions. Here’s our response: Do clients find this frustrating or ever complain?We haven’t heard major complaints or frustration about this in the past, and if ever things have not gone as planned, we’ve adjusted our plan for the following year. We make sure to be very transparent that we’re taking this time off across our communication channels. We still have our Advocacy team spending some time online and can reply to anything urgent. Did this impact your bottom line at all?No, we intentionally choose a slow time for us to be closed. So it’s the right time to take a break without any major impact. In addition, since the Advocacy team is still monitoring for urgent customer requests and the Engineering team is on call, we can still jump on any issues that pop up, and our customers still have support. I’d love to know about the benefits your company has seen and how it positively impacts employees!The biggest benefit we’ve seen from closing down for the holidays is that our team is more rested and refreshed. It’s a unique opportunity for everyone at Buffer to take a break, rather than it happening in spots throughout the year. It means the energy levels in the first few weeks of the year are always really high for us. Taking this week off for all of us at once also gives us a greater opportunity to relax because no one needs to think about projects that are moving forward without them or missing out on team communication. After all, we’re all offline. This is great for us as a team, which translates into being great for our product and our customers. Do you take breaks from work or your business, and if so, what’s your approach? We’d love to hear from you on Bluesky or Discord. View the full article

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. The average price net of incentives of new-builds sold by Lennar—America’s second largest homebuilder—came in at $386,000 in Q3 2025. That’s down -10.2% from $430,000 in Q4 2024 and down -21.4% from $491,000 in Q3 2022. While last quarter Lennar acknowledged that it will no longer be as aggressive in prioritizing volume over margin going forward, the giant homebuilder said that doing so (i.e., volume > margin strategy) over the past few years helped it gain market share while some other builders were more conservative. “During the past three years of difficult market conditions, we have maintained volume, we’ve grown market share, and we’ve re engineered our operating platform for a better and more efficient future when the market bottoms and normalizes, we’re extremely well positioned with very strong market share in strategic markets, and our margin is leveraged to the upside,” Stuart Miller, co-CEO of Lennar, said on the homebuilder’s December 17 earnings call. While there’s undoubtedly weakness in the housing market—in particular in pandemic era boomtowns in Texas and Florida—Lennar’s headline drop in home prices might be giving the impression of a greater home price correction than the homebuyer is actually seeing. See, Lennar’s average selling price, net of incentives, reflects the average selling price after incentives are deducted—it is not the actual price paid by the typical homebuyer before incentives. While some of the average selling price decline is due to outright price cuts and some to a mix shift toward smaller homes, the biggest driver is aggressive incentive spending—primarily through mortgage rate buydowns. To isolate the impact of incentives, ResiClub reverse-engineered Lennar’s sales-price math. ResiClub estimates that in Q3 2022, Lennar spent roughly $12,074 in incentives on a typical home sale. By comparison, in Q4 2025, typical incentive spending by Lennar had risen to about $62,837 per home. When accounting for incentive spending, the typical Lennar homebuyer in Q3 2022 paid around $503,074. In Q4 2025, the typical Lennar homebuyer paid about $448,690—roughly 10.8% less than in Q3 2022, which marked Lennar’s peak quarter. With incentives now accounted for, the outstanding question—which ResiClub can’t answer just yet—is how much of that 10.8% decline reflects mix shift versus outright declines in home prices? “As you may recall, last quarter, I noted that declining interest rates could signal the start of a market recovery. Unfortunately, that turnaround has not yet materialized. As [mortgage] rates slowly moderated in September, eased more in October and remained flat in November, the customer response remained fairly tepid, suggesting that a combination of affordability and consumer confidence issues were continuing to limit demand,” said Miller on the earnings call. Miller added that: “While traffic was consistent, customers were both hesitant and limited by what they could afford to purchase. With that said, our fourth quarter results show the continued softening of market conditions and affordability. Sales volumes have been difficult to maintain, and required additional incentives to achieve our expected pace and to avoid an unintended buildup of excess inventory.” View the full article

One April night eight years ago, two tech leaders sat down with a former Forest Service employee at Terroir, a natural wine bar in San Francisco. Then they started sketching out a plan that would eventually reshape California’s housing policy. Landmark housing reforms that passed in the state in 2025, one that allows more housing to be built near transit stops, and another curbing the use of environmental law to block new housing—and which many believed would never succeed—can be traced back to that night, five bottles of wine, and crucial backing from Silicon Valley executives. An unlikely new leader Brian Hanlon, the Forest Service employee, was an unlikely leader for a new housing movement. Hanlon moved to the Bay Area in 2010 after dropping out of a PhD program, and got a job managing grant paperwork for USFS. He wasn’t planning to work on housing; he considered becoming a winemaker. But he soon saw the impact of California’s housing policy directly. When he first arrived in the area, apartments were still relatively affordable. Within a year, he saw demand spike: every open house he visited had 20 to 30 people competing for the same apartment. Over the next couple of years, as rents in the city continued to rise, Hanlon got involved with rental advocacy groups, but quickly saw the limitations. He felt advocates weren’t engaging with what he saw as a basic problem: restrictive policy made it too difficult to build housing, and the shortage of housing—not just landlords trying to extract higher rents from renters—was what was driving up prices. “Even then, I was like, ‘It’s not landlord greed.’ There aren’t enough homes. Landlords are just as greedy in Houston, Texas, or wherever else,” he says. “I kind of got excommunicated from that movement because I believed in more housing.” A friend introduced him to Sonia Trauss, a math teacher who had started advocating for new housing development at planning meetings—a YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) counterpart to the resistance to new construction that was common in San Francisco, which is commonly characterized as NIMBY (“not in my backyard”). This resistance came largely from two separate, but sometimes aligned, groups: first, homeowners who believe new constructions of apartments around their homes will lower the resale value, obstruct their views, and otherwise affect “the neighborhood character”; and second, advocates for low-income tenants who believe that the new construction pushed by the YIMBY movement in gentrifying working-class neighborhoods will accelerate the damaging process of pricing out long-time residents. The first group is more powerful politically at the state level, but at the start of Hanlon and Trauss’s advocacy in San Francisco, many of the fights were with the second, leading to vitriolic conflict in the city (and online). Trauss faced intense criticism for comparing tenant advocates to The President voters during a speech at hearing. And in one incident, Hanlon was at a public film screening about the eviction crisis, talking with a resident who was fighting a plan to demolish his apartment building, when an activist forced him out of the event, screaming “Get the fuck out!” As the conflicts continued in San Francisco, Hanlon decided he needed to do more than tackle one planning meeting—and one building—at a time. After he and Trauss secured some funding, they founded a nonprofit, California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund, and filed a lawsuit against a Bay Area suburb for not building enough housing. They lost the suit, and Hanlon realized that they needed to change direction. “I was like, alright, well, we’re going to fail as a nonprofit if we don’t change the law,” he says. Rewriting the law With help from a likeminded developer he’d met, Hanlon brought together a group of land-use attorneys, planners, and other developers and explained why the lawsuit had failed and how he wanted the law to change so cities would have to allow more construction. Hanlon copied the existing law into Microsoft Word, rewrote it based on feedback from the group, and then gave it to a lawyer to draft a real version of a potential bill. Then he started heading to Sacramento, meeting with anyone who’d talk. A lawyer from the Building Industry Association told him that he was wasting his time. “I’m like, alright, thanks for your feedback,” he says. “And then I just kept going.” At the time, he had little money and few connections. At a housing conference, he entered a contest to meet the new chair of the state’s Department of Housing Development—the competition involved guessing the number of Monopoly houses in a giant jar. “I remembered a little bit of middle school geometry or something, and I just looked at the jar and did the right math and guessed the right number of houses,” he says. He won a lunch with Ben Metcalf, the new chair, and peppered him with questions about housing reform in the state. Meanwhile, he was starting to make more connections in the tech industry. Trauss had already gotten some support from tech CEOs like Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppleman, who saw that the housing shortage could hurt their industry since it was so hard for employees to find a place to live. Like others, he’d read a viral article in TechCrunch from Kim-Mai Cutler explaining how housing policy restricted development. “That story really helped put everything in perspective—like, oh, this is actually by design,” Stoppleman says. “[It was] many years of decisions to specifically constrain housing production, density, and growth. That created a real point of frustration as a person leading a business with thousands of employees here in the Bay Area.” Hanlon met Zack Rosen, CEO of the WebOps platform Pantheon, on Twitter. “I got in a fight with him on the internet,” Rosen says. “I got into one of those things where it was back and forth, back and forth, and by the third time, I’m like, man, I don’t know what I’m talking about.” He suggested to Hanlon that they meet up for coffee, and they became friends. Rosen, too, wanted to invest in a solution to the housing crisis. “The tech industry didn’t create these terrible housing policies, they predate us,” Rosen says. “However, the success of our industry and these terrible housing policies are a train wreck. The net effect of that train wreck is immiseration for the state of California—you know, teachers teaching [while] homeless in San Francisco. I mean, it’s insane. So for me, it was like, look, the tech industry has a special responsibility to help solve it.” A few weeks later, Hanlon ran into Rosen in Sacramento, along with Nat Friedman—the former CEO of GitHub, now head of Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, who had come to Sacramento to talk about housing with an assemblymember. They started walking through the capitol building, and knocked on the door of the governor’s office, where they managed to wrangle a meeting with staffers on the fly. Policymakers wanted to act, but the issue was complex, and they needed help understanding what laws could truly help. On the drive back home, Rosen started thinking about partnering with Hanlon. Making a bet on a new startup nonprofit They stayed in touch, and nearly a year later, Rosen, Friedman, and Hanlon met at the wine bar to talk about the potential for a new nonprofit. They talked for hours, closing out the bar. Hanlon pitched them on the vision of a new housing advocacy organization for the state that would work on new policy, build coalitions and a grassroots movement, and massively scale up homebuilding. At the time, Hanlon was still working on a shoestring budget, helping shepherd a housing bill called SB 167—based on what he’d drafted earlier—through the committee process. “Imagine all that we could do if I had a real team and a real budget?” he said. They didn’t know exactly how the new organization would work. “We ended up with more questions than answers,” says Rosen. “But we had a direction. We had a strategy.” They were sold on the idea. “It was reminiscent to me of the beginnings of a great startup,” he says. “It just felt like hey, here’s this obvious idea. No one’s doing it. Is it possible to do? Absolutely. Is it incredibly difficult to do? Absolutely. Let’s go do it.” Within a couple of months, they had raised hundreds of thousands for the project. Hanlon resigned from his previous nonprofit with Trauss. Rosen joined the new organization, California YIMBY, as a cofounder. It’s something that probably only would have happened in San Francisco. “I don’t think I ever would have raised this sort of philanthropic capital just given my profile—I’m some guy who was working for the Forest Service and moved to the Mission because I was really into wine, fixed gear bikes, and shows,” Hanlon says. “That doesn’t sound like someone I’d want to make a big bet on to try to rebuild the built environment of the world’s fourth largest economy.” But his vision resonated with them, and with friends of Friedman’s who gave to the new nonprofit. “Brian’s a mile a minute—very fast on his feet, very thoughtful, had clearly done tons of research, knew his stuff,” says Stoppleman. “It was a really unique strategy that he was laying out. For me, it’s exciting to meet people at that stage when they’re just getting going. Obviously brilliant, lots of energy, a lot of passion, probably some naivete. There is a parallel, 100%, to the startup world.” The tech leaders who put in money also were willing to try something new. “I don’t mean to just make a paean to enlightened tech leaders, but I will say, San Francisco’s entrepreneurial tech leaders don’t treat the status quo or entrenched power as immutable reality,” says Hanlon. “They treat it as problems to be solved and building a new future. And that’s rare and uncommon . . . I think there’s this real sense that we’re not on this Earth for very long, it’s good and right to work quickly to solve your problems. And also, that failure isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is not trying, or trying and not being ambitious.” Sweeping changes in policy After the nonprofit was founded in 2017—as a 501(c)(4) organization, so it’s allowed to lobby full time—it led advocacy for SB 167, a bill that made it harder for cities to fail to comply with state laws designed to force cities to approve more housing. The organization also fought for new laws that make it easier to build ADUs and “missing middle” housing like duplexes. But the biggest victories, after earlier failed attempts, came this year. First, the state passed a set of laws that reform CEQA, the California’s environmental law, which has sometimes been used as a method to stop development. Some housing now has a faster review process under the law. When the nonprofit first began working on CEQA reform, they were told that it was impossible. This fall, the state also passed SB 79, a law that legalizes large apartment buildings near major transit stops throughout the state—even when local laws restrict density or height. That can help significantly shrink the state’s housing shortage. In L.A., alone, by one estimate, it will eventually zone for 1.46 million new housing units. Along with CEQA reform, it was something they’d first talked about at the wine bar. “That was really was got Nat and Zack excited that night,” Hanlon says. Earlier attempts to pass the law, including a bill introduced in 2018, helped change the conversation about housing. Academics had long argued for more housing near transit, but this type of policy was new. “That’s the first bill, to my knowledge, that had actually been commensurate with the scale of the problem to actually solve it,” Hanlon says. It died quickly in committee, but got people talking in other cities. In New York City, the planning office held a meeting to discuss it. Other advocacy groups in other states started considering new changes to state policy. The latest version of the bill barely passed. It’s likely the only bill in the history of the state, Hanlon says, to become law after “rolling” the first two policy committee chairs, meaning it passed over their objections. The bill had to make it through nine votes, and then the governor’s vote. At each step, it barely made it. “This was incredibly, incredibly hard fought.” Still, he says, despite fierce opposition to the bill, including citizen protests and formal opposition from dozens of city councils, the debate was less heated than it had been in the past. Previous bills had faced widespread, statewide activism in large town halls and protests—many of which were organized by Livable California, a group of homeowners founded by a former oil executive that fights zoning changes and regulations that would make it easier to build apartments—along with a deluge of op-eds and even a study with false data that argued that Los Angeles could meet its housing needs with vacant apartments. Now, the ideas behind the YIMBY have now become more mainstream. Policymakers have largely accepted the idea that the housing shortage is a supply problem, and that policy has held back development. “YIMBY benefits from being correct,” says Rosen. “It’s real. It’s substantive. It’s right. It also benefits from taking what should be an obscure issue like zoning, and turning it into something that’s real and personal for people—housing. And that was clear from the beginning.” When the YIMBY movement started to take off, “what wasn’t clear was how you would translate that movement that was getting attention into change of government that would enable a boom in housing,” he says. “There’s a huge leap between those things. We’ve got a long list of modern-day political movements that capture attention and don’t deliver the outcome. It’s not that any of the work of translating attention in a movement into outcomes is like rocket science. But it’s tremendously difficult work. And it’s very deliberate kind of work, very strategic work. It’s very stage sequenced. To me, it feels like kind of like scaling a company.” The work isn’t done. The next big battle, Hanlon says, is the steep fees that local governments impose on new developments, which can make building infeasible even when other barriers are taken away. But 2025 has “absolutely been a breakthrough year,” says Rosen. “We have a lot left to do. But I don’t know that there’s going to be a political lift that heavy.” View the full article

AI tools like ChatGPT are reshaping mortgage marketing, forcing lenders to rethink SEO, brand authority and how they show up as consumers turn to generative search for answers. View the full article

A new extension for Chrome stops AI slop from invading your life. Called Slop Evader, it is a temporal firewall that modifies your Google search queries to exclude any results indexed after November 30, 2022. That is the day the ChatGPT asteroid hit the open web, upending culture and reality as we know it. Installing Slop Evader is easy: just add it to Chrome, toggle it on, and suddenly, the scroll of generative garbage vanishes. You are back in the “old” internet knowing that every article you read is not the product of simulated intelligence. It’s an enticing idea, especially given that the latest estimation is that more than 50% of all new articles on the internet are now generated by AI. But the digitally Amish lifestyle has an obvious flaw: You aren’t just evading slop; you are evading legitimate news, scientific breakthroughs, and culture itself. Which, on second thought, maybe is a good idea too. The Chrome extension works on a premise that is 50% brilliant, 50% useless, and 100% depressing. Slop Evader is a powerful statement, but not exactly a solution. It’s a vacation from the permanent doubt that comes from clicking on anything these days. Kill AI switch It doesn’t seem the AI slop will stop. Europol predicts that by 2026, 90% of online content could be synthetically generated. We are no longer surfing a web of human knowledge; we are drowning in a sea of hallucinations. We don’t need gimmicks. We need a way to access information without risk of being deceived by machines. We need a built-in toggle in every browser and platform to turn off the machine-generated trash. Since AI can no longer be detected by software, our only hope lies in proving what is real, not spotting what is fake. There are already some efforts to do exactly that. For images, videos, and sound, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authentication (C2PA) has proposed a digital birth certificate for every pixel and sound wave you encounter. The technology already exists to cryptographically sign media at the point of capture, creating an unbroken chain of custody from the camera lens to your screen. When I spoke to Ziad Asghar—SVP of product management at Qualcomm—to talk about the end of reality, he told me that fake audio and video content is a big concern for everyone. “As these [AI] technologies become more prevalent, this is going to be a challenge,” he says. He was right two years ago, he is even more right today. We need content that works like NFTs, using blockchain-like certificates to prove a video or an article wasn’t hallucinated by a GPU. Qualcomm has successfully integrated C2PA support directly into its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile platform. The chip uses cryptography to sign the actual pixels of your photos the moment you snap them. Sony, Canon, and Leica have also rolled out firmware updates that sign images right at the point of capture. If you shoot with a Sony Alpha 9 III or a Canon EOS R1 today, you can generate a tamper-evident digital birth certificate for that file. The problem is that most platforms shred this information when you upload. There are exceptions. TikTok supports C2PA and tells users what content was actually captured by a camera. Google has started integrating C2PA into its Search and Ads platforms, allowing the ‘About this image’ tool to verify provenance. And LinkedIn has the best option: The company says that it overlays an icon on C2PA-signed images that users can click to inspect the edit history. So it can be done. If there was another certification standard for other types of content—like this article—and if every platform supported the standards in full, users would be able to push the Kill AI switch. But, of course, you know where this ends. Yeah, it will never happen The same tech giants adopting these standards are simultaneously playing a cynical double game. While Meta and TikTok claim to be cracking down on AI slop by downranking third-party generated content, they are aggressively pushing their own AI tools. TikTok limits the reach of external AI videos while actively encouraging you to use its in-app AI filters. Meanwhile, Meta says it will “throttle down” AI content promotion, but they give users AI tools to create an eternal tsunami of slop. They aren’t trying to save the internet from AI. They are trying to secure their own monopoly on AI pollution. They want to ensure that the only slop you consume is the premium, high-margin slop they generated for you. It is all about revenue domination. If you use Midjourney, you are a spammer. If you use Meta AI, you are a “creator.” We can’t expect the companies profiting from AI creation to give us tools to deactivate the very content we create on their platform. So it seems, for now, our best (and imperfect) bet is something like Slop Evader—a time machine to transport you to a simpler time. View the full article

When the Department of the Interior announced on Monday that it was suspending the leases of five offshore wind farms that are currently under construction, it blamed national security concerns. Military experts say that’s an excuse. “I think it is all made up,” says Dave Belote, a retired Air Force colonel who previously led the Department of Defense’s energy siting clearinghouse at the Pentagon and who currently consults with onshore wind companies about military issues. “I’ve got 15 years of experience that I will stack against the Secretary of Interior to say that is all made up to please a president that just irrationally hates ‘windmills.’” Each of the five projects—two off the coast of New York, and others in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Rhode Island—went through a yearslong vetting process that closely involved the Department of Defense, now renamed the Department of War. (After the administration threatened some of the wind farms earlier in the year, New York Governor Kathy Hochul reportedly negotiated with the The President administration and even agreed to approve a natural gas pipeline in exchange for saving one of the wind farms—but those efforts may now have been in vain.) Any potential military issues were already fully considered, says Belote. When it announced the new cancellations, the Department of Interior cited radar issues. But that’s already well known—and the Department of Defense has known how to deal with it for more than a decade. Spinning wind turbines do interfere with radar, but wind project developers currently pay for a software patch that edits that interference out of NORAD’s radar scope. With a bigger investment, the radar itself could be upgraded to eliminate the issue without relying on the patch. The military needs to know how to deal with wind turbines regardless of whether they’re in U.S. waters. China, for example, has 129 offshore wind farms. “They are concentrated along the shorelines in the most militarily significant areas around Shanghai and around Taiwan Strait,” says Belote. “If any American is launching from a carrier or Guam or Japan or Korea and pointed west at the Chinese shoreline, that man or woman in the fighter cockpit or bomber cockpit is going to have to deal with a whole bunch of spinning wind turbines on their radar scopes or head of displays. So the whole idea that we can neither train nor detect threats in the presence of small numbers of offshore wind turbines is ludicrous.” The administration has also cited unspecified “classified” issues, but Belote says—as someone who has considered all possible issues that could theoretically occur—that those issues don’t exist. “There’s no there there,” he says. (The Department of Defense said it could not immediately respond to Fast Company‘s request for a comment on the issue.) On the East Coast, Belote argues that the military could even make use of the infrastructure on offshore wind turbines because they already have power, fiber optics, and security that could improve communications in military exercises. There’s also a bigger national security argument: wind is a critical domestic energy source at a time when the country needs to rapidly ramp up production. “Energy security is national security,” Kirk Lippold, a retired Navy commander, wrote earlier this year. “America’s coastal regions host nearly 40% of our population, and offshore wind offers a direct and effective way to provide these areas with utility-scale energy. This is not just about power—it’s about ensuring that those economic centers remain online amid geopolitical instability or supply chain disruption. When we cede control of our energy future—whether to geopolitical rivals, volatile oil markets, or outdated infrastructure—we weaken our ability to defend American interests at home and abroad.” A group of retired senior military officials echoed the same arguments in an open letter to Secretary Burgum in May. Because of the strain that data centers are putting on the grid, “it has never been so important that our country is energy independent,” they wrote. “When we rely on energy from foreign countries, it leaves us vulnerable to global market shocks outside of our control.” Collectively, the offshore wind projects could power more than 2.5 million homes and businesses. They also could help tackle soaring energy bills for consumers. It’s not clear what will happen next. The The President administration also tried to stop Rhode Island’s Revolution Wind project earlier in the year, but a court stepped in and the project resumed construction. “When the The President Administration imposed a stop work order on Revolution Wind several months ago based on similarly vague assertions regarding national security, the courts found that order was unlawful and stopped the The President administration’s effort to obstruct the build-out of clean, affordable power,” says Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. “The administration is now trying to unlawfully stop these five projects which are creating thousands of jobs and making electricity more affordable, including Revolution Wind. We will see what happens in the courts.” Even if the administration fails again in court, another pause will make it harder for the projects to survive. When Revolution Wind previously stopped work, it reportedly cost the developer more than $2 million a day. View the full article

Lego has a nostalgia problem. I do, too. Like Hollywood and its eternal cycle of remakes, the Danish company has found a bottomless treasure pot full of GenX and Gen Z people willing to burn their credit cards to turn their golden memories into bricks. By my count, 2025 alone brought a record-setting 16 sets related to old Lego properties and external IPs, shattering 2023’s previous peak of 9 sets. Whether that’s considered a problem or not depends on who you ask. You can argue that we (the people who keep buying these sets) are all the ones who have the problem. The Danish are just milking it. Building Lego soothes kids and adults alike but, when you are putting together these nostalgia-sets, there is an additional satisfaction factor. It’s part of you, it’s what you know, like that old song that plays in your head from time to time and you have the urge to play on your headphones. As you assemble it, you can’t help but enjoy the way in which the Billund designers have abstracted the original objects and created details and features that seem impossible to reproduce at pixel-size brick resolution. Lego won’t share sales figures but, privately, insiders have hinted that these sets bring in lots of revenue, especially because they are large and complex with many pieces and high price tags. The year-over-year increase of new sets seem to confirms this: Between 2014 and 2022, the company released an average of 3.7 sets per year tapping into ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s themes. That number has more than doubled. From 2023 through 2025, Lego produced 31 nostalgia-focused sets—a dramatic acceleration that establishes a new baseline. Many of these sets are part of the Lego Icons line, which launched in 2020 as a way to tap into the growing appetite from Lego’s adult customers. Other sets come through the Lego Ideas, launched in 2008, a sort of Kickstarter-ish platform that asks fans to submit designs for official Lego sets. These are then voted on by the community and a handful become commercial products each year. Until 2024, it was an open design call but that year Lego launched explicitly decade-targeted design challenges. First came the “Turn Back Time—80s Challenge,” which generated more than 290 submissions. The challenge proved so successful that Lego immediately launched a “Build Your Nostalgia—90s Throwback” competition for 2025. Rather than waiting for the nostalgia to happen organically, Lego is now actively soliciting it because it works. Now, if you are like me—or my son, who is definitely not a Gen X but is growing up in Gen X culture—you may be wondering what’s cool this year. Well, that’s why I’m here, my friends. These are the best at every price point all the way up to the crazy nuts $1,000 Death Star (now, if you buy that one, then you will have a very real problem of the financial kind). Home One Starcruiser This is a tiny reminder that Star Wars Original Trilogy sets remain a cornerstone of Lego’s nostalgia strategy. Released January 2025 for $70, this 559-piece Rebel Alliance frigate appeared in Return of the Jedi as part of the climactic Endor battle. It’s a compact set designed for anyone who wants a manageable Star Wars display without a 7,541-piece Millennium Falcon commitment. That it came out on the very first day of 2025 signals how central Star Wars remains to Lego’s calendar. The Simpsons: Krusty Burger This year also brought a new Simpson set. Homer’s favorite fast-food joint comes to life with 1,635 pieces. The Krusty Burger has been serving fictional beef since the show’s early ’90s heyday, and Lego has captured every detail: the oversized signage, the drive-through window, and a small buildable Krusty the Clown figure. It’s the kind of set that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is—a shrine to a show that defined a generation’s sense of humor. At $210, it’s a reasonable price point for 1990s pop-culture archaeology. The set includes minifigures of Homer, Marge, Krusty, and the rest of Springfield’s best and finest. Williams Racing FW14B & Nigel Mansell After releasing Ayrton Senna’s McLaren last year, this is Lego’s tribute to one of Formula One’s most dominant seasons: 1992, when British driver Nigel Mansell piloted the Williams FW14B to legendary status. With 799 pieces and priced at $80, this is the kind of nostalgia that doesn’t rely on Hollywood but will appeal to the GenX and GenZ generations. The model includes working steering and suspension details that make it feel less like a toy and more like precision engineering translated into plastic. Blacktron Renegade This one is pure Lego archaeology and made a lot of people happy back in the late ’80s. The Blacktron theme launched in 1987 and became one of the company’s most iconic design languages—a line of villainous space vehicles with electric lime-yellow and black color schemes that defined entire childhoods, opposite from the late ’70s good guys of the Galaxy Explorer. The Blacktron Renegade, $100, resurrects that aesthetic with precision. Minifigure Vending Machine This one emerged from Lego’s Ideas platform, and it is a meta-nostalgic deep cut. The 315-piece set is essentially a tribute to Lego’s own 1980s and ’90s theme history. The vending machine dispenses minifigures, but the real genius is that it functions as a shrine to classic Lego design eras. It’s designed to celebrate the Classic Space, Pirates, and Castle themes that defined childhoods. Priced at $100, it’s Lego essentially building a monument to itself, self-referencing nostalgia so dense that it risks becoming an emotional black hole. Gremlins: Gizmo The 1,125-piece set captures Gizmo, the Mogwai creature from Gremlins, in brick form. The process of bringing Gizmo to life required Lego’s design team to solve problems that shouldn’t exist. How do you suggest fur texture with plastic bricks? How do you create a nose that reads as a nose without being literal? Lego senior model designer Chris McVeigh told me how he tackled the fur question by using a specific element he originally developed for Lego’s 2023 Architecture set of Himeji Castle: a small 2×2 plate with an upturned corner. “I decided to use that to give the effect of wispy hair flowing off the model,” McVeigh says. For the nose, he experimented with half-circle and full-circle plates, ultimately landing on a 2×2 round plate with subtle cutouts. “It’s one of the exciting things about Lego,” McVeigh explains. “The brain fills the blanks.” At $110, it’s priced in the mid-range for a detailed character build, which is appropriate for a creature that required months of design refinement to get exactly right. The Goonies This 2,912-piece behemoth, priced at $330, recreates an iconic scene from Richard Donner’s 1985 adventure film. Born from Lego’s “Turn Back Time—80s Challenge,” where it competed against more than 290 other submissions, the set includes buildable structures and minifigures of the main Goonies characters. It doesn’t get more cultish than that. Captain Jack Sparrow’s Pirate Ship OK, so this one is early aughts but, with Jerry Bruckheimer and Johnny Depp, it feels ’90s to me. Released in September, it’s backordered everywhere, becoming one of the company’s hottest hits. The $380 set brings Jack Sparrow and the Black Pearl to life with 2,862 pieces, recreating the iconic pirate ship from the 2003 film The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, complete with detailed rigging, a functioning ship’s wheel, a working cannon, and a brig with torture implements. Multiple minifigures come with the set, including Jack Sparrow, Barbossa, Elizabeth Swann, and Will Turner. Star Trek: U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D This was a shocker for Lego aficionados, who are used to living in a Star Wars dominated world. Just for that, it became the champion of 2025 nostalgia releases with 3,600 pieces. Priced at $400, it reproduces the Starship Enterprise-D from TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which aired from 1987 to 1994 and defined what Star Trek meant to millions of people who never watched the original. The model measures 23.5 inches long and includes a working saucer separation function—a feature so technically ambitious it required serious engineering. It has all the crew (nine minifigures), including Captain Picard. It’s also bundled with set 40768, the Star Trek Type-15 Shuttlepod, a 261-piece GWP that features opening wing doors and a detailed interior LCARS display. Lego Game Boy The $60 set recreates the original 1989 Nintendo Game Boy in brick form with impressive accuracy. The measurements are almost identical to the original and it includes posable directional buttons, a pressable A/B button cluster, and a buildable cartridge slot. The set even includes minifigure-scale versions of classic Game Boy games like Tetris and The Legend of Zelda printed on the buildable cartridges. It’s also my favorite set because you can actually make it into a real Game Boy using this kit. Death Star This is no Lego Set. At 9,023 pieces and $1,000, this is a bloody actual moon. It is so big it must actually have its own gravity field. It is also the most expensive Lego set ever made, breaking the previous record held by both the Millennium Falcon UCS ($850) and the AT-AT UCS ($850). Released back in October, this Death Star is a cross-section cutaway of the Empire’s most infamous space station that features little vignettes from A New Hope and Return of the Jedi: the detention block, trash compactor, tractor beam control room, Moff Tarkin’s boardroom, and the Emperor’s Throne Room where Luke and Vader’s final confrontation takes place. It stands 27.5 inches tall and it is 31 inches wide. The build includes 38 minifigures—including three different Luke Skywalkers—Tatooine outfit, Stormtrooper disguise, and Return of the Jedi’s Jedi Knight—two Han Solos, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, Grand Moff Tarkin, and even the internet-famous ‘Hot Tub Stormtrooper’ from the Lego Star Wars video games. Lego Ideas X-Files: The Truth Is Out There This set is not released yet, but it was announced in 2025 as the winner of Lego’s “Build Your Nostalgia—90s Throwback” challenge. While it is currently in development with no official release date or price yet confirmed, the design won a competitive fan vote against four other finalists: Edward Scissorhands, The Fifth Element, Jumanji, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer—all quintessential ’90s intellectual property. The fact that the X-Files won tells you everything about which generational cohort Lego is chasing right now. It’s also a great fit for our times, as the show that defined paranoia and skepticism for everyone born between 1970 and 1990. View the full article

US president claims Danish territory is needed ‘for national security’View the full article

By the end of October, David, who works at a roughly 2,000-person finance firm in New York, already knew he’d be working during the holiday season this year. Usually at the office, he learned he’d at least get to work remotely between December 26 and January 1—with the way the financial calendar fell, it was inevitable that he couldn’t just disappear for clients (like institutional investors and family offices) during that time. He says the schedule doesn’t really bother him. “I’m not in a trench in the middle of a battlefield here. I’m not laying bricks,” he says. “It’s not terribly unrealistic work that they’re asking us to do.” Mainly, he’s expected to respond to emails and move forward client processes already in the works. David (who, like other employees Fast Company spoke with, is using his first name only to avoid professional repercussions) is one of many office workers who stay on the clock during winter holidays. Per a 2023 CalendarLabs survey of more than 1,000 full-time U.S. employees, 24% reported planning to work on Christmas Eve, 12% on Christmas Day, and 27% on New Year’s Eve. Exclusive data from 2024 and 2025 shared with Fast Company by Stanford University economics professor Nicholas Bloom show that these figures tend to be higher for remote workers, 13.3% of whom work on Christmas Day compared to just 1.9% of those who work in person, while nearly 39% of remote employees work the day after Christmas, versus 16% who work in-office. Many employers don’t explicitly require office workers to clock in during this Christmas through New Year’s period, at least not in a typical 9-to-5 fashion. But a few main factors drive people to do it anyway: They have time-sensitive tasks, their higher-ups continue to work so they feel the need to mirror that behavior, and, during this precarious economic time, they fear not showing up could lead to a layoff. “The pattern I see in organizations is consistent,” says Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of the future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. “Coverage needs do not stop, and many knowledge workers stay online in some capacity because of deadlines, client expectations, end-of-year close—or simply because they feel they will fall behind if they disconnect.” “There’s always an expectation that you have some level of availability” While it’s obvious why those working in retail or delivery don’t quit from late December through the new year, some knowledge workers still have time-sensitive tasks during the season. “In litigation, things come up and you have to deal with them,” says Thomas, an attorney working at a law firm in New Jersey. Last December, he had a hearing scheduled for the day after Christmas and had to prepare on short notice. Other times, lawyers will work through the end of the year to meet billable hour requirements. Software engineers, meanwhile, may find themselves suddenly on call to put out code-based fires, and marketing professionals could face unexpected publicity nightmares. David, because he works with high-net-worth clients who tend to retreat to second (or third, or fourth) homes during the holidays, had been told early in his career that work gets quieter when this happens. But he’s found that the opposite plays out. “[That’s] when people have the most questions, because that’s when they actually read their mail or their statements,” he says. “There’s always an expectation that you have some level of availability.” Though these time-sensitive needs are reasonable drivers for clocking in, Robert Kovach, a work psychologist who’s long advised senior executives, says working during this season is often “less about the work that needs to be done . . . it’s about [the worker’s] identity.” Working at this time of year “almost becomes a proxy for commitment, ambition, indispensability,” he says. People do it to signal that they’re reliable and valuable. Responsiveness rewarded Again, this usually doesn’t come down to formal office policies. The “strongest drivers” for people to work during holidays “tend to be culture signals and incentive structures,” says Tsipursky. Leaders “reward responsiveness,” for example, by publicly praising those who reply quickly during holidays and using phrases like “We can count on you” during performance reviews. That responsiveness can look like anything from hourly Slack check-ins to responding same day to emails. Typically, says Kovach, bosses don’t “mandate” this, they “model” it, like by sending emails at 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Per Ryan, a software engineering manager in New York, “no one is asked to work” during this time of year at his company, “but people feel committed to their outcomes and delivery.” And even though tech companies, in his experience, “rarely set schedules for the holidays . . . outside of on-call support,” many employees still work in the competitive industry. “The real standard becomes ‘Do not disappear,’ even if no one says that out loud,” Tsipurksy says. That can lead to anxiety-fueled holiday working, often compounded by fears of layoffs that happen all too frequently this time of year. “After the efficiency layoff trend that started with Twitter and Elon [Musk] and continued to wipe the industry, roles are scarce and competition has naturally increased,” says Ryan. Expectations in his industry, he adds, are high among both peers and management, and people tend to meet them by working harder and more. Plus, there’s the added fear of “AI taking white-collar jobs,” says Kovach. “In the economic climate we’re in right now, fear is a big [driver for wanting] to be seen as being productive.” This could help explain why remote workers work more this time of year—and during holidays and weekends in general, as Bloom’s research revealed, during which remote workers’ office activity can exceed those working in person by up to 41.5 percentage points. Since they’re not literally seen by higher-ups, they spend more time making themselves seen via emails time-stamped on January 1, or slack messages that role in on December 24. Some people enjoy holiday working: “‘Future You’ appreciates ‘Present You’” Required or not, plenty of people like heading into the office during holidays. A friend of mine who works at a health insurance company calls it a chill time to come in. In the past, it even paved the way for her to get unique, one-on-one time with a “very high up” superior—she got to give them a solo presentation while everyone else was off. Then there are people who don’t enjoy the holiday season. They may not have much family or they may get depressed at this time of year, so work offers a positive distraction. Of course, not everyone celebrates Christmas, and they may prefer saving vacation days for other occasions. Younger workers told Fast Company that they plan to have kids in the future but don’t yet, so they figured they’d put in their time during the holidays now, build up goodwill, and take vacation when their situations change down the line. “When I take days off, I don’t know what to do with myself,” says David, so he finds himself checking his phone for office-related notifications. One of his big pros for working during holidays is that afterward, “you don’t come back to a giant hornet’s nest of things you need to do,” he says. “’Future You’ appreciates ‘Present You’ for keeping the machine moving.” However, these pros are easier to come by in office cultures that aren’t fueled by passive-aggressive pressure. When leaders do things like schedule “optional” meetings between Christmas and New Year’s Day, set immediate post-holiday deadlines, or repeatedly send follow-ups to unanswered messages, it sends a clear message—that “silence has consequences,” Tsipursky says. In healthier office environments, “companies set explicit expectations, plan coverage rotations, and protect true time off,” Tsipursky says. Just as leaders can model working too much over the holidays, so can they set a positive example for stepping away. “If a senior person disconnects visibly, everyone else gets permission,” Kovach says. Ultimately, superiors can confuse being available with being valuable. Taking time off during holiday periods is often the mental reset people need to work more productively when they return. “What [leaders] have to be really careful about,” Kovach says, “is they’re not unconsciously equating responsiveness, or being on, with performance.” View the full article

How should leaders prepare for AI’s accelerating impact on work and everyday life? AI scientist, entrepreneur, and Pioneers of AI podcast host Rana el Kaliouby shares her predictions for the year ahead—from physical AI entering the real world to what it means to onboard AI into your org chart. El Kaliouby cuts through today’s biggest AI headlines, bringing to light the insights that will matter most in the months to come. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. Let’s look ahead to 2026. You sent me some fascinating thoughts about AI’s next-phase impact on business, and I’d love to take you through them. The first one was the rise of what you called relationship intelligent AI. So everybody’s worried that AI is going to make us less human and take away our human-to-human connections. There is definitely a risk of that. But I think the thing I’m most excited about for 2026 is how AI can actually help us build deeper human connections and more meaningful human experiences. And the way this happens is through AI that can really help you organize your relationships and your network and surface connections that you need and maybe make warm introductions to you. I love connecting with people, but my relationship data is a mess. It’s all in my brain. Some of it is in LinkedIn, some are on WhatsApp. I take a lot of notes when I meet new people and I use an AI note taker. It’s just a mess. It’s very disparate data sources. And I always think of this scene in, do you know The Devil Wears Prada? Have you seen? Oh, that’s exactly what I was thinking of. The character is kind of whispering in your ear. Exactly. It was Anne Hathaway [as Andy], and she was with Meryl Streep [as Miranda] at this gala. And this guy and his partner were moving toward Miranda and she [didn’t rememeber their names]. And Andy whispers in Miranda’s ear: “He’s the ambassador and his new wife.” And I was like, “That’s exactly what I need. I need an AI version of Anne Hathaway.” And it’s now doable with LLMs because it’s all this unstructured, messy data that an AI can take all of that, contextualize it, and hopefully be that AI chief of staff for you. Is that like a product? Is that something that you would have to do to turn your chatbot, whatever, your Claude or your ChatGPT into that? Or is it a new product that you think is going to come out that will make that easy for you? There are already a number of new companies that are starting in this space. So one company’s called VIA.AI, it’s a Boston-based company. They do this for sales professionals and BD professionals who have to do this for their work. There’s a company called Goodword that I’m very excited about. They’re doing this for just the average person. Like you and I, we have very strong networks, but how can we organize it? So I’m excited about that one. There’s a company called Boardy that does this for investors and founders. So it’s becoming a thing, and I’m excited to see how these companies take off in 2026. They’re all fairly new, so it’ll be interesting to see how they evolve. Yeah, and whether they can stay ahead of some of the bigger chatbots that may just try to integrate some of this capability into the products they already have. That’s always the case in this kind of evolution of technology: What’s a feature and what’s a company, right? What’s an independent service? Absolutely. When I’m looking at these companies and I’m diligencing them, that’s a key question that I ask. Is this something that the next version of ChatGPT or Gemini is just going to implement? And if the answer is yes, then that’s obviously not a defensible company. But a lot of times there’s this additional moat of data and algorithms that you need to sit on top of these LLMs. And I believe in this relationship intelligence space, I don’t think this is something that just a kind of an off-the-shelf LLM can do. It really needs to know you. It needs to know your data, it needs to know your relationships. And you have to trust it enough to share all that data with it, right? Absolutely. That’s your proprietary data, whether it’s about your business or about you individually. Exactly. And I don’t want this to all go up to OpenAI’s cloud. I want to trust that I have control over these really private relations. If you and I have a conversation about our kids, I don’t necessarily want that to now sit in a general OpenAI cloud and be used to train the next ChatGPT. So that safety and security, appreciating the privacy and the importance of this data, is really key. Another business change you expect in 2026 is the insertion of AI into the org chart. This is about who manages AI, like performance reviews and team culture impacts? Yeah, so this goes back to the thesis that there’s this shift in how AI is creating value, and it’s not a tool anymore. Well, it is a tool. It’ll always be a tool, but it’s not a tool that helps you get work done faster. It could actually take an end-to-end task and get it done for you. And I’ll give a few examples. So I’m an investor in a company called Synthpop, and instead of building a tool that helps healthcare administrators accelerate or really become efficient in how they do patient intake, it just takes the task of patient intake. It does the thing end to end. And so if you then imagine what that means for a hospital or a clinic, it will have a combination of human workers collaborating and working closely with AI coworkers. And so then the question becomes, well, who manages these hybrid teams? Sometimes it’s a human manager, sometimes it’s an AI manager. I’m also an investor in a company called Tough Day, and they sell you AI managers. And then how do you do performance reviews for these hybrid teams? How do you build a culture? Like at Affectiva, my company, culture was our superpower. How do you build a culture when some of your team members are AI and some of your team members are humans? So I think that is going to spur a lot of conversation around how do you build organizations that are combinations of digital agents and human employees? As you talk about this merging of AI agents and humans in work, it brings up that looming question about the impact of AI on jobs and employment. And some numbers are coming out now that make it seem like, “Oh, it’s bad for jobs.” There are other numbers coming out that are like, “Oh, we’re actually hiring more people because of it.” Do you have a prediction about what is going to happen with that in 2026? Is AI going to take over roles that have been done by humans that quickly? We had a really fascinating roundtable discussion at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference and the headline was like, “Is AI killing entry-level jobs?” And actually, a lot of the Fortune companies and also AI companies that were around the table were basically saying, “No, we’re hiring more entry-level jobs. They’re just not the same jobs that we were traditionally seeing.” And also the career ladders have changed. So my prediction is we’re going to see an entirely different organization where I think if you are able to come in an entry-level position, for example, but work very closely with AI and be AI-native and be AI fluent and be able to wear multiple hats, I think that’s going to go a long way. As opposed to this very siloed job trajectory where you come in, this is your little task, and then you do more of it, and then you go up the career ladder. I think that’s going to change. I think young people are looking for different ways of working, and I think AI is changing all of that anyway. Will there be jobs that will go away? I think so. I can’t remember who said this line, but it’s now very popular: “It’s not AI that’s going to take your job. It’s going to be somebody who knows how to use AI.” And I believe that to be true. View the full article