I once worked for a client who hired our agency to help them solve what they considered to be their biggest brand-related challengepoor customer experience, which had them losing contracts. During our first meeting at the clients building, my direct contact gave me a tour of every corner of the office, explaining what each department was responsible for and introducing me to key players in the business.
At a pause in the tour, she stopped in front of a large poster hanging from the wall, pointed at it dramatically, and said, This is the cause of all of our problems.
The poster was bright and well-designed. In bold letters, it proclaimed: Around here, the customer always comes first! The poster was meant to be a motivational reminder about the importance of treating customers wellbut it clearly had some unintended consequences.
The unintended consequences of putting customers first
All of the employees working here feel like their opinions dont matter and that their needs will always be put last, even if the customer is wrong or being unreasonable in their demands, my contact told us.
The poster, of course, was not the problem. The problem was how it made employees feellike second-class citizens in their own workplace. She went into detail about the culture of the company, the low morale among the team, and how employees had no real love for the organization or its customers. As it turns out, poor customer service was not the companys biggest brand-related challenge. It was a symptom of a much greater problemthat of poor employee engagement.
Somewhat paradoxically, because the company had a culture of putting the needs of customers first, they actually made their customer experience worse. Why? Because the employees who were tasked with providing remarkable customer experience were themselves having a poor experience in their workplace.
How your employees feel is how your customers will feel
The way your employees feel is the way your customers will feel, writes workplace facilitator and author Sybil Stershic. And if your employees dont feel valued, neither will your customers. By promoting a culture where customers always come first, the company had worsened its level of customer experience. The companys employees didnt feel valued and, as a result, neither did its customers.
Virgin Group founder Richard Branson puts it a different way: Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your clients.
Building a customer-centric business is an honorable and noble endeavor. After all, happy customers are the reason that the lights stay on in any business. But building a customer-centric business at the expense of employees happiness, mental health, work-life balance, and overall needs can only lead to mediocrity in the workplace.
The benefits of putting employees first
Theres clear evidence that putting customers first by prioritizing company culture, employee engagement, and the overall employee experience has a sweep of benefits, too. Research has shown that:
Organizations that score in the top 25% on employee experience receive double the return on sales of organizations in the bottom 25%.
More than 80% of workers at companies that perform well financially are either highly or moderately engagedcompared to just 68% at low-performing companies.
Organizations with highly engaged employees also get a higher return on investment per employee, with highly engaged employees responsible for an increase of 26% of revenue per employee, along with 13% greater returns to shareholders.
Clearly, the level of engagement in your organization has a real and meaningful impact on your bottom line. If you want to build a highly successful company, you cant sacrifice employee engagement in pursuit of customer satisfactionno matter how noble that pursuit may be.
Yes, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction are both critical to the success of your business, but the order in which you pursue these two important elements matters. The most effective path to having satisfied customers is to first have satisfied employees. When employees feel respected, trusted, and valued, they will pass on these sentiments to customers, leading to the type of remarkable customer experience that turns casual consumers into raving (and paying) fans of the brand. But when they feel disrespected, mistrusted, or undervalued because you put customers needs ahead of theirs, you can be pretty confident that your customer experience will worsen, not improve.
If youre not satisfied with the level of customer experience that your employees are delivering, try rearranging your priorities by first focusing on happier employees. You may just find that the level of your customer experience will improve organically.
For the past year and a half, there’s been a simmering concern over what AI is going to do to the workforce. Last week, that concern boiled over in a big way following back-to-back news stories: First, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei set off alarm bells by predicting that AI would wipe out half of entry-level jobs and massively drive up unemployment. As if on cue, Business Insider announced it was laying off 21% of its staff.
While the two obviously aren’t directly related, the one-two punch landed hard in the media business, which faces an existential threat to its business model (in a nutshell, AI answers mean less traffic than search). But like all demographics, it’s important to remember that the media isn’t a monolith. While AI summaries mean rapidly changing audience habits for all publishers, BI‘s move emphasizes that digital-native brands are particularly vulnerable.
In her memo to BI staff, CEO Barbara Peng said the company was “going all-in on AI,” explaining that the layoffs were part of a broader strategic shift and that, going forward, the publication would need to reduce its dependence on traffic in general. In addition to cutting click-dependent areas like its commerce business, BI would launch live journalism events, double down on subscriptions, and encourage all its journalists to embrace AI tools.
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This is far from the publication’s first move on this course. Not long ago, the company had ambitions to become a general interest brand, but after changing its name to Insider in 2021, it switched back to Business Insider less than three years later. Since then, the publication has been investing more in unique voices and talent instead of the volume content that fueled the company’s rise in the 2010s, when media brands like Vice, Quartz, and Buzzfeed were dominant.
The old media playbook meets a new world
The thing about BI, though, is that it was one of the few success stories to come out of that era. The publication sold to Axel Springer for $343 million dollars back in 2015, just before the bottom fell out of the scale media market. Perhaps that’s why it took BI so long to adapt. It’s been shedding its workforce for a couple of yearsnow roughly half the size of its 2022 peak of 1,000 people, according to Press Gazette.
Now AI is forcing the issue. Peng’s memo says that 70% of BI‘s business suffers from “traffic sensitivity,” a euphemism for content designed to attract eyeballs on the open web by appearing in search, social, or feeds. Who are those people? How do you keep them coming back or transacting with your brand? In the media model BI was built for, it didn’t matterit only mattered how big the number was on any given day.
Now BI is doing exactly what any media consultant would recommend: adopting tactics like paywalled subscriptions, events, newsletters, and first-party data. It’s the right strategy, but for BI the moves are reactive retreats rather than proactive bets. That doesn’t mean they’re bad ideas, but BI‘s DNA was born out of a different era. It has a brand, but is it strong enough to make the transition that AI demands?
I don’t mean to pick on BI, but I do think it exemplifies why digital media companies from the 2010s are likely going to have the hardest time in the AI era. Legacy mainstream outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have built moats with their strong journalism and diverse revenue streams. On the other end, smaller digital upstarts like 404 Media, The Ankler, and The Free Press are finding success by cultivating talent, getting scoops, and offering unique perspectives.
It’s the brands in betweenthe ones that followed the same playbook as BInow scrambling to re-architect themselves to meet this moment. Ziff Davis (owner of PCMag, Mashable, and IGN) is similarly feeling pressure, as seen in its lawsuit against OpenAI, arguing that its strategy of publishing evergreen, free content on the internet to maximize clicks has made it particularly vulnerable to substitution by AI.
Experimentation isnt transformation
As evidence of the BI‘s all-in bet on AI, Peng talked about AI-powered features like its site search and dynamic paywall. She also mentioned that 75% of the staff were now using AI tools, specifically ChatGPT Enterprise, with the aim to get the figure to 100%. The note encourages “bold experimentation,” and says they’re building prompt libraries and sharing everyday AI use cases among staff.
However, this description of AI initiatives, while directionally solid, sounds like it’s still in the early stages. Contrast that with an AI-forward newsroom like Reuters, which has built modular tooling tailored to newsroom workflows, under a clear “reduce, augment, transform” framework. It’s great that they’re moving forward, but without a focus on systems, transformation will be piecemeal. And while the choice of ChatGPT is expected given the company’s partnership with OpenAI, pushing a single AI model over all the others is inherently limiting.
For other digital media brands who fear death or downsizing, BI‘s approach is instructive. It’s urgent to rethink dependency on traffic, and even the lens of measuring success through traffic. Certainly, ad impressions are the KPI driving all this, and it’s not going to go away overnight (or ever, really). But a long decline seems inevitable. Shifting focus from traffic to metrics that measure impact, engagement, and loyalty is step one. That’s the path to cultivating direct reader relationshipsessential to building media brands that are sustainable in the AI era.
BIs shift is a step n the right direction, but survival wont come from cost-cutting or tool adoption alone. The digital media brands that make it through this next wave will be the ones that know who theyre for and what makes them worth returning to. That means being willing to rethink how things get made in the first placeand why.
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The NBA’s Orlando Magic looked to the past for inspiration for its rebrand. The team, which Forbes valued last year at $3.2 billion, unveiled a new logo, wordmarks, uniforms, and court this week, and the new look is a contemporary take on the team’s original uniforms from 1989 to 2000.
It was a time when players like Shaquille O’Neal and Penny Hardaway wore pinstripes and the team made one of its two franchise appearances in the league finals. It’s also a fan-favorite era.
Shaquille O’Neal (No. 32) and Penny Hardaway (No. 1) in action versus the Houston Rockets at Orlando Arena in 1995 [Photo: John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images]
We heard from the fans loud and clear over many years about bold pinstripes, Shelly Wilkes, EVP of marketing and social responsibility for the Magic, told In the Zone on iHeart Radio. People have such passion around our original uniforms.
Orlando Magics logo progression through the years. Top, from left: 1989-2000 and 2001-2010; bottom, from left: 2011-2025 and the brand-new design unveiled this week [Images: Orlando Magic]
Nostalgia sells in pro sports. The Toronto Raptors recently brought back its old Raptor mascot for a special 30th-edition logo, while in other leagues, teams like the MLB’s Milwaukee Brewers and the NFL’s New York Jets introduced their own retro-inspired logos in recent years because of the built-in brand equity from a team’s golden age. Team rebrands don’t always land, and iterating on well-known, beloved assets is a safer bet than trying something new.
For NBA teams, though, it’s not as simple as bringing an old uniform out from the archives to wear again. That’s not allowed via licensing rights, Wilkes said of agreements between the team and partners like the NBA and Nike. You can’t go back. But you can modernize an old idea.
The rebrand process began in 2021 with multiple agencies and many early concepts that didn’t resonate. There were 14 different logos, each with multiple variations. Out of more than 30 uniform designs, the team narrowed it down to the final three, in blue, white, and black. All of them have pinstripes and retro-inspired trim, and the new Magic and Orlando wordmarks swap out the letter A for a star designed to look like it’s in motion. One of the jerseys features Chicago Bulls great Michael Jordans Jumpman logo (Jordan Brand partnered with the NBA in 2020), and all feature the Disney logo for the team’s uniform sponsor.
[Image: Orlando Magic]
Wilkes said the timing of the new logo and uniforms is the result of a pivotal moment in franchise history, but the final designs were submitted to the NBA and Nike in 2023, to give you an idea of the multiyear process involved in rebranding a professional team. That’s a long lead time, but by building a new brand informed by fan feedback and team history, the Magic ensured its new era has a visual identity that feels both classic and fashion-forward and aims to stand the test of time.
Herman Miller has brought a new archival piece from the founding director of its textile division back into production.
The Girard Stool by Alexander Girard is a four-legged, 18.6-inch-tall stool that can be used as a footrest or seat. It comes with multiple options for geometric, patterned textile upholstery designed by Girard as well as Herman Miller’s current fabrics, fitting for a stool designed by someone who made more than 300 textile designs for Herman Miller from 1952 to 1973.
[Photo: Herman Miller]
First designed in 1967, the modernized Girard Stool was redesigned for sustainability, with recycled aluminum and bio-based foam, and it’s not the first archival furniture of Girard’s that Herman Miller has brought out of its vaults. In January, the furniture manufacturer brought back the Girard Flower Table, a scalloped-edge, blossom-inspired table, while the Girard Color Wheel Ottoman that the designer made comes in monochromatic color schemes. In 2023, they reintroduced a collection of original posters by Girard.
Herman Miller’s Michigan-based parent company MillerKnoll reported a slight 0.4% year-over-year net sales increase on its March earnings call, and the company has found success in updating its bestsellers, like a sustainable update to its iconic Eames Lounge Chair last year. Reissuing archival pieces is a model Ikea has also played into, proving that sometimes a classic concept just needs a modern remake.
Tom Brady’s post-football career has been as methodical as his two-minute drill, and arguably more lucrative. The seven-time Super Bowl champion has systematically built a business empire spanning wellness (TB12), apparel (Brady Brand), and media (Religion of Sports), among other things, along with ownership stakes in the Las Vegas Raiders and Birmingham City FC.
And then, of course, theres the 10-year, $375 million deal he signed in 2024 to serve as lead NFL analyst for Fox Sports.
Now he’s adding another vertical to his portfolio: organic snacks.
GOAT Gummies, Brady’s latest venture, launched this week exclusively with instant-delivery company Gopuff. The organic, vegan gummies represent Brady’s characteristic obsession with optimizationthis time applied to what he calls “better for you” indulgences.
Brady, who is also an investor in Gopuff, worked directly with the product team to refine the gummies’ flavors, perfect their textures, and ensure the product aligns with his TB12 philosophy of plant-based, organic nutrition that made him a freakishly effective athlete well into his forties.
Brady sat down with Fast Company to discuss his latest venture, his new life as an investor and entrepreneur, and his strategic process for vetting new opportunities.
The interview has been edited and condensed.
First things first: Why gummies, and why Gopuff? How did this collaboration come about?
I originally started using Gopuff when I moved to Florida and got introduced to the two guys who started the company on a Zoom call during COVID. I love what they’ve created, and now they’ve become friends. Ive learned that this business is crowded and you need things that really cut through, and I like partnering with smart, forward-thinking people, and everyone at Gopuff is that. So we said we wanted to create some products, I looked at things that I enjoy, and I enjoy gummies. I’m very intentional about what I put in my body, even in retirement. So it came down to creating a healthier option. What can my kids eat? What can their friends eat when they come over? So we started with these gummies. Hopefully, there will be other products in the future.
How has your approach to evaluating business opportunities evolved, and whats your due diligence process now?
I still love sports. I still love hard work and that “no take no prisoners” mindset. I love that. But I had to create that specific lifestyle because I was a professional athlete and my body was my asset. Now Ive realized that not a lot of people want to live the way I live. So now I want to make people just a little bit better. How can we make things that are a little bit better for you, that taste good, that are sustainable? If you want to be a little bit healthier, let me give you options. If you want to have a better health productwhether that’s something to drink or something to eatwe’re going to do that.
What do you remember from your Merrill Lynch internships during college, and how did that early business experience shape your philosophy as a businessman and entrepreneur?
I worked 10-hour days at Merrill Lynch. I’d sit in on financial product meetings and I would make mock portfolios and track them. Every day, I thought, Man, I’m going to get into business if this football thing doesn’t work out. I do believe that if I were focused on business 23 years ago, I could have been pretty good at that as well. I’m very fortunate that football worked out, but I think the same traits really apply. Youve got to work hard. You need discipline. Youve got to double down on the fundamentals. Youve got to have the right amount of EQ and IQ. You have to be resilient. Youve got to find ways to outlast the competition. That’s sports, but that’s also business.
What are the biggest lessons you’ve learned about entrepreneurship from the many successful people you’ve met over 25 years?
I feel like I’ve been fortunate over a long period of time to meet so many different people from so many walks of life. I love people who have visions and operate with great communication. I think all great entrepreneurs are great teachers who make things as simple as possible for people to understand. It’s easy to make things complicated. The best entrepreneurs make things simple.
What’s been the most challenging part of transitioning from football to managing multiple business ventures in retirement?
I think organizing the day and being very efficient with the day. When you don’t have the structure of the game, it’s a little more challenging. Being a couple of years out now from playing, I have a little bit better structure. I’m going to build out an office. Ive got a great team of people who can actualize a lot of the vision that we set forth. Whats constantly in my brain is . . . trying to make things simpler for myself, too. Because now in broadcasting, when youve got 30 million people watching, you need to be as simple as possible, but you still need to educate. The entrepreneurial mindset helps because it really comes down to, How can I explain things in the simplest way possible to get my point across?
If you were starting over today as an entrepreneur, where do you see the biggest opportunity for impact?
I think I can make the most impact in leadership training, mentality, overcoming adversity, teaching resilienceall the things that make people successful. How do you find success in your life? Well, first you have to visualize it and you have to create a plan. You need to have discipline around that. How can we get people with great mindsets who are resilient in whatever business they’re in to overcome whatever adversities they’re going to face so that they can actualize their potential? How can they reach their dreams, and how can I play a role in helping them do that?
One of my idols was Steve Young, and he always says, “Make sure you pay it forward.” Ive been so fortunate to have people come into my life to teach me at very important times. So now it’s like, How do I take the lessons I learned and give back? How do I pay it forward? Thats what I love.
Whats the message you teach when youre out there paying it forward?
I have a certain standard, and it’s no bullshit. People don’t get better by doing nothing. You don’t sit around your couch, wasting your time, bitching about other people. That ain’t gonna work. Get off your ass. Go do something. Find something you love to do, and work hard at it. No excuses, no bullshit. Keep grinding. Find a way.
Getting federal approval for permits to build bridges, wind farms, highways, and other major infrastructure projects has long been a complicated and time-consuming process. Despite growing calls from both parties for Congress and federal agencies to reform that process, there had been few significant revisionsuntil now.
In one fell swoop, the U.S. Supreme Court has changed a big part of the game.
Whether the effects are good or bad depends on the viewers perspective. Either way, there is a new interpretation in place for the law that is the centerpiece of the debate about permittingthe National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, known as NEPA.
Taking a big-picture look
NEPA requires federal agencies to document and describe the environmental effects of any proposed action, including construction of oil pipelines, renewable energy, and other infrastructure projects.
Only after completing that work can the agency make a final decision to approve or deny the project. These reports must evaluate direct effects, such as the destruction of habitat to make way for a new highway, and indirect effects, such as the air pollution from cars using the highway after it is built.
Decades of litigation about the scope of indirect effects have widened the required evaluation. As I explain it to my students, that logical and legal progression is reminiscent of the popular childrens book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, in which granting a request for a cookie triggers a seemingly endless series of further requestsfor a glass of milk, a napkin, and so on. For the highway example, the arguments went, even if the agency properly assessed the pollution from the cars, it also had to consider the new subdivisions, malls, and jobs the new highway foreseeably could induce.
The challenge for federal agencies was knowing how much of that potentially limitless series of indirect effects courts would require them to evaluate. In recent litigation, the question in particular has been how broad a range of effects on and from climate change could be linked to any one specific project and therefore require evaluation.
With the courts ruling, federal agencies days of uncertainty are over.
Biggest NEPA case in decades
On May 29, 2025, the Supreme Court (minus Justice Neil Gorsuch, who had recused himself) decided the case of Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, the first major NEPA dispute before the court in 20 years.
At issue was an 85-mile rail line a group of developers proposed to build in Utah to connect oil wells to the interstate rail network and from there transport waxy crude oil to refineries in Louisiana, Texas, and elsewhere. The federal Surface Transportation Board reviewed the environmental effects and approved the required license in 2021.
The report was 637 pages long, with more than 3,000 pages of appendices containing additional information. It acknowledged but did not give a detailed assessment of the indirect upstream effects of constructing the rail linesuch as spurring new oil drillingand the indirect downstream effects of the ultimate use of the waxy oil in places as far-flung as Louisiana.
In February 2022, Eagle County, Colorado, through which trains coming from the new railway would pass, along with the Center for Biological Diversity appealed that decision in federal court, arguing that the board had failed to properly explain why it did not assess those effects. Therefore, the county argued, the report was incomplete and the board license should be vacated.
In August 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed and held that the agency had failed to adequately explain why it could not employ some degree of forecasting to identify those impacts and that the board could prevent those effects by exercising its authority to deny the license.
The railway developers appealed to the Supreme Court, asking whether NEPA requires a federal agency to look beyond the action being proposed to evaluate indirect effects outside its own jurisdiction.
A resounding declaration
Writing for a five-justice majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered a ringing, table-pounding lecture about courts run amok.
Kavanaugh did not stop to provide specific support for each admonition, describing NEPA as a legislative acorn that has grown over the years into a judicial oak that has hindered infrastructure development. He bemoaned the delay upon delay NEPA imposes on projects as so complicated that it bordered on the Kafkaesque.
In his view, NEPA has transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool employed by project opponents. He called for a course correction . . . to bring judicial review under NEPA back in line with the statutory text and common sense. His opinion reset the course in three ways.
First, despite the Supreme Court having recently reduced the deference courts must give to federal agency decisions in other contexts, Kavanaugh wrote that courts should give agencies strong deference when reviewing an agencys NEPA effects analyses. Because these assessments are fact-dependent, context-specific, and policy-laden choices about the depth and breadth of its inquiry . . . (c)ourts should afford substantial deference and should not micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness.
Second, Kavanaugh crafted a new rule saying that the review of one project did not need to consider the potential indirect effects of other related projects it could foreseeably induce, such as the rail line encouraging more drilling for oil. This limitation is especially relevant, Kavanaugh emphasized, when the effects are from projects over which the reviewing agency does not have urisdiction. That applied in this case, because the board does not regulate oil wells or oil drilling.
And third, Kavanaugh created something like a no harm, no foul rule, under which even if an [environmental impact statement] falls short in some respects, that deficiency may not necessarily require a court to vacate the agencys ultimate approval of a project. The strong implication is that courts should not overturn an agency decision unless its NEPA assessment has a serious flaw.
The upshot for the project at hand was that the Supreme Court deferred to the boards decision that it could not reliably predict the rail lines effects on oil drilling or use of the oil transported. And the fact that the agency had no regulatory power over those separate issues reinforced the idea that those concerns were outside the scope of the boards required review.
A split court
Although Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that she would have reached the same end result and upheld the agency permit, her proposed test is far narrower.
By her reading, the federal law creating the Surface Transportation Board restricted it from considering the broader indirect effects of the rail line. But her finding would be relevant only for any federal agencies whose governing statutes were similarly restrictive. By contrast, Kavanaughs course correction applies to judicial review of NEPA findings for all federal agencies.
Though the full effects remain to be seen, this decision significantly changes the legal landscape of environmental reviews of major projects. Agencies will have more latitude to shorten the causal chain of indirect effects they consider, and to exclude them entirely if they flow from separate projects beyond the agencys regulatory control.
Now, for example, if a federal agency is considering an application to build a new natural gas power plant, the review must still include its direct greenhouse gas emissions and their effects on the climate. But emissions that could result from additional gas extraction and transportation projects to fuel the power plant, and any climate effects from whatever the produced electricity is used for, are now clearly outside the agencys required review. And if the agency voluntarily decided to consider any of those effects, courts would have to defer to its analysis, and any minor deficiencies would be inconsequential.
That is a far cry from how the legal structure around the National Environmental Policy Act has worked for decades. For lawyers, industry, advocacy groups, and the courts, environmental review after the Eagle County decision is not just a new ball gameits a new sport.
J.B. Ruhl is a professor of law and director of the Program on Law and Innovation and co-director of the Energy, Environment and Land Use Program at Vanderbilt University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Major announcements around the VisionPro headset are expected next week and may even confirm tantalizing rumors that a lighter model of the high-end XR device is coming next year. Whatever Apple reveals at WWDC, we can expect another round of analyst predictions that this time, mass adoption of head-mounted displays is finally happening.
As Apple, Meta, and other major players continue to struggle with taking the technology mainstream, its worth addressing the virtual elephant in the room:
Theres reason to suspect that XR headsets barrier to success isnt just about cost, headset weight, lack of content, eye strain, or other frequently cited issues. Neuroscience suggests that the sensory experience of XR can’t compensate for the value of sharing a physical environment with our screensespecially when it comes to how we form knowledge and memory.
Experiments with XR for Full-Time Computing
About 10 years ago, I started spending long sessions in VR (48 hours daily over several weeks) to see how it might affect my sense of time and attention. I began with the HTC Vive, which was comfortable and fun. Later, I tested the Apple VisionPro with a full virtual workstation of monitors and displays. I was curious whether XR could improve focus and research. It felt like a very different thing to use VR all day, versus a brief demo in a museum or Apple showroom.
Early on, I had to stand and move constantly throughout the day. It was exhausting, though it made for a great workout (SUPERHOT was one of my favorites). But this kind of motion-based interaction didnt translate well to daily work tasks. Tossing data around in 3D like in Minority Report might make for compelling cinema, but it’s far less practical over time.
When the VisionPro arrived, I was excited to use it while seated. A friend set me up with a massive virtual workspace, and I genuinely appreciated the focus it provided when I was digging into something newsay, reading a dense Wikipedia article.
Still, when I set up my home office last year, I chose two large physical monitors at eye level and a sit/stand desk. As enjoyable as VR was, the process of setup and adjusting the space took more time and energy than docking a laptop. And even though I was initially thrilled to be in a virtual workspace, I found myself feeling more distant from the real world. I wanted to go outside more, and didnt feel like looking at any screen at all by days end.
I also noticed the difference in eye strain from screens so close to my face. I prefer to work near a window where I can shift my gaze into the distance. That rhythm of looking away and refocusing helps me process thoughtsespecially after encountering something new.
The Trouble With Losing Touch
I asked my colleague Dr. David Sisson, a neurophysiologist, why XR adoption hasnt matched media hype. He reminded me that audio and visual inputsthe primary senses XR taps intoarent the full picture.
Then theres the matter of touch in XR.
Without touch, theres no intimacy. Youre not really interacting with whats going on, David told me. You can hit a balland hear the crack in VRbut youre not feeling anything other than a little jerk in the controller that makes you feel like theres some inertia happening.
In short, headsets deprive us of the tactile and physical context that supports memory formation. Contrast that with playing a console game: you’re anchored in a physical space, hands on colorful controllers, with the screen at a distance. If you’re like me, you vividly remember not just the game, but the exact couch you sat on and the friends or family who played with you.
The Neuroscience of Virtual Experience
This sense of placeness goes beyond just touch. As David explained, [C]hemical senses are not a part of [the VR experience] . . . Theres a well-considered idea, a linkage between olfaction, smell between memorythat youre living that out of the [VR] picture entirely.
Attempts at incorporating virtual smells into XR exist, but it’s unclear whether theyre effectiveor even desirable. Recent research supports what French literature has long told us: smell powerfully evokes memory. Studies show scent not only enhances recall but may also support learning across other sensory areas.
While XR devices like VisionPro do re-create home and office setups and allow for vast screen real estate, they lack a true sense of location. Evolution shaped our brains to operate differently depending on whether we’re traveling or at home. Researchers call this the encoding specificity principleour memories link closely with the environment where they were first formed.
With a headset on, our minds dont fully orient to a place, and so we never quite settle in. Apple offers a vast virtual workspace you can take on the go, but that benefit comes at the cost of the sensory richness and physical grounding of a real-world setup. Neuroscience, not just practicality, suggests that working in a physical spacewith monitors, windows, textures, smells, and distanceoffers deeper engagement and memory retention.
Putting the Pro in VisionPro
To be clear, XR headsets excel in specific contexts like rehabilitation or short bursts of fully embodied interaction, where body motion tracking is vital. Some content creators might find immense value in a distraction-free, multiscreen virtual studio.
But thats not a mass-market audience.
XR evangelists may continue promoting VisionPro as the breakout device, but weand Apple, for that mattershould remember that Pro isnt just branding. It reflects the narrow set of advanced use cases that justify immersion.
For most of us, computing still works best in a physical world that engages all five senses. And thats not something XR can replicateat least, not yet.
Emily Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington where she is also Faculty Director of the Computational Linguistics Master of Science program, affiliate faculty in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, and affiliate faculty in the Information School.
Alex Hanna is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and a lecturer in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley. She has been featured in articles for the Washington Post, Financial Times, The Atlantic, and Time.
Whats the big idea?
The AI Con is an exploration of the hype around artificial intelligence, whose interests it serves, and the harm being done under this umbrella. Society has options when it comes to pushing back against AI hype, so there is still hope that we can collectively resist and prevent tech companies from mortgaging humanitys future.
Below, co-authors Emily Bender and Alex Hanna share five key insights from their new book, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Techs Hype and Create the Future We Want. Listen to the audio versionread by Emily and Alexin the Next Big Idea App.
1. The tech thats driving the current wave of AI hype is built on a parlor trick
Chatbots like ChatGPT are impressive technology, but maybe not in the way you think. They cannot perform the range of functions they purportedly fulfill, but rather, they are designed to impress us. The key to their parlor trick lies in how people utilize language. You might think its a simple matter of decoding what the words say, but the process is both far more complex and far more social.
We interpret language by relying on everything we know (or guess) about the person who said the words, and whatever common ground we share with them. Then we make inferences about what they must have been trying to convey. We do this instinctively and reflexively. So, when we encounter synthetic text of the kind that comes out of ChatGPT and its ilk, we interpret it by imagining a mind behind the text, even though there is no mind there. In other words, the linguistic and social skills we wrap around AI outputs are what make it so easy for the purveyors of chatbots to fool us into perceiving chatbots as reasoning entities.
2. AI is not going to take your job, but it will make your job a lot worse
Much of the purpose of AI technology serves to remove humans from the equation at work. The story of the Writers Guild of America strike is instructive here. In 2023, the Writers Guild of America East and West (or the WGA), the labor union representing Hollywood writers, went on strike for several reasons, including a demand to raise the pay rate that writers receive from streaming services.
They also wanted to ensure that they wouldnt be reduced to babysitters for chatbots tasked to write scripts based on harebrained ideas from movie and television producers. John Lopez, a member of the WGAs AI working group, noted that writers could be paid the rewrite rate for dealing with AI-generated content, which is much less than the pay rate for an original script. Weve seen the threat of image and text generators drastically reduce the number of job opportunities for graphic designers, video game artists, and journalists. This is not because these tools can adequately perform the tasks of these professionals, but they perform well enough for careers to be cut short and for workers to be rehired at a fraction of what they had been paid before, just so that they can fix the sloppy outputs of AI.
They perform well enough for careers to be cut short and for workers to be rehired at a fraction of what they had been paid before.
Furthermore, systems that get called AI are often a thin veneer that hides the tried-and-true corporate strategy of outsourcing labor to people in the Majority World, also called the Global South. Many of these workers moderate online content, test chatbots for toxic outputs, and even remotely drive vehicles that are advertised as being fully automated. Luckily, workers have been able to push back, both by concerned labor action, industrial sabotage (especially through creative tools for artists, like Nightshade and Glaze, which prevent their work from being used for training image generation models), and political education.
3. The purpose of the AI con is to disconnect people from social services
Because we use language in just about every sphere of activity, and because the synthetic text extruding from machines can be trained to mimic language, it can seem like we are about to have technology that can provide medical diagnoses, personalized tutoring, wise decision making in the allocation of government services, legal representation, and moreall for just the cost of electricity (plus whatever the companies making the chatbots want to charge). But in all these cases, its not the words that matter, but the actual thought that goes into them and the relationships they help us build and maintain.
AI systems are only good for those who want to redirect funding away from social services and justify austerity measures. Meanwhile, those in power will be sure to get services from actual people, while foisting the shoddy facsimiles off on everyone else. The head of Health AI at Google, Greg Corrado, said he wouldnt want Googles Med-PaLM system to be part of his familys health care journey. That didnt stop him from bragging about how it supposedly passed a medical licensing exam. It didnt. But more to the point, designing systems to pass multiple-choice exams about medical situations is not an effective way to build useful medical technology. In these domains, AI hype takes the form of specious claims of technological solutions to social problems, based, at best, on spurious and unfounded evaluations of the systems being sold.
4. AI is not going to kill us all, but climate change might
There was a time in Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. when an idiosyncratic, yet serious, question was posed to people working on technology or tech policy: What is your p(doom)? p(doom) refers to probability of doom, or the likelihood that AI would somehow kill all of humanity. This doomerism is predicated on the development of artificial general intelligence (or AGI).
AGI is poorly defined, but the basic idea is a system which can do a variety of tasks as well as or better than humans. Unfortunately, doomerism has serious purchase with some technologists and policymakers, and is predicated on a body of unseemly ideologies, including effective altruism, longtermism, and rationalism. These ideologies take the moral philosophy of utilitarianism to the extreme, suggesting that we need to discount harm in the present to save the billions of trillions of humans who will live in some undefined future. These ideologies are eugenicist in their origins and implications.
Doomerism has serious purchase with some technologists and policymakers.
eanwhile, we are likely to fail to meet the Paris Agreements goal to limit the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and AI is making this problem worse. The data centers that host these tools are generating vast amounts of excess carbon, semiconductors used for their parts are leeching forever chemicals into the ground, and backup generators are projected to cause more respiratory illnesses in the poorest parts of the U.S. and elsewhere. Not only are robots not going to take over the world, but their production is going to make the climate crisis much worse.
5. None of this is inevitable
The people selling AI systems and the hype around them would like us to voluntarily give up our agency in these matters. They tell us that AI, or even AGI, is inevitable, or at least that systems like ChatGPT are here to stay. But none of this is inevitable.
We do have agency, both collectively and individually. Collectively, we can push for regulations that prevent AI tech from being used on us and for labor contracts that keep us in control of our work. On an individual level, we can refuse to use AI systems. We can be critical consumers of automation, being sure we understand whats being automated, how it was evaluated, and why its being automated.
We can also be critical consumers of journalism about technology, looking for and supporting work that holds power to account. And finally, we can and should engage in ridicule as praxis, meaning having fun pointing out all the ways in which synthetic media extruding machines are janky and tacky.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
In my last Fast Company column, I shared my reasons for manufacturing my electric trucks in the U.S. Im not alone. While near-shoring to North America has been underway for several years, the current tariff shifts and shipping complexities make U.S. manufacturing a higher priority still.
However, there were 292,825 factories in the U.S. as of 2021. Of those, 846 employ 1,000 people or more. Some of these are my engineering firms clients, giving us a front row seat to the complexity of retrofitting an existing factory to full U.S. manufacturing. While building a new factory is expensive and lengthy, these companies tasks are more difficult still.
There are good reasons for making the shift as quickly as possible. Moving to most or fully U.S. manufacturing brings higher visibility, faster response time, and higher resilience to supply chain disruption, as well as greater protection from tariff shifts and geopolitical change.
But if youre early in the process, heres my advice for your transition:
Determine a priority ranking for the refining and raw materials you shift to in-country and North American sourcing. Give highest ranking to categories including defense, high value items (such as steel, aluminum, and rare minerals, etc.), and consumer safety items (such as pharmaceutical components, etc.).
Be more strategic in the offshore suppliers you continue using for non-advanced manufacturing by prioritizing closer and more geographic-friendly locations for production and shipment such as Mexico and Argentina.
Utilize government-backed capital, where possible, for extracting/mining minerals and metals such as lithium, red mud, magnesium, etc.
Beyond the high-ranking product categories, move to domestic suppliers for primary materials such as steel, aluminum, cement, and plastics. Likewise, reduce offshoring of technical staff as well as raw materials, where possible.
Use all means possible to become power independent through solar production, micro-grids, and nuclear power production.
Consider creating a 4-year completion bonus for military vets. Hire vets wherever possible, as they make great workers and entrepreneurs.
Likewise, we can press for future policy changes that best support Made in America manufacturing, as follows:
Encourage ship building in the U.S., as well as creating new means of automated freight transit.
Work towards transformation plans for government-funded R&D to include more attractive loans, rebates, and grants, as well as programs for tax-free status for intellectual property during commercialization, to incent and support organizations making the shift.
Consider energy rebates to U.S. manufacturers and distributors to make American manufacturing more cost-effective and viable.
Create policies to include the cost of offshore staff in tariff calculations. Expand trade relationships with Caribbean nations for products such as sugar, avocados, bananas, etc.
Avoid or even ban foreign ownership of the food supply chain.
Create fair competition for government contracting.
Make health supplements and homeopathic medicines tax deductible, to promote a healthy workforce.
While it may not be readily evident, these policy changes are related to successful reshoring. In all, we need larger scale, lower costs, and more automated and simplified mechanisms for product manufacturing. These issues, in my experience, are as equally important as the raw materials we require. We need increased support for niche manufacturing. In my opinion, we also need deregulation, and increased access to land (particularly in the west; the federal government owns great quantities of the available land, which is choking available supply).
I believe we need better education, self-reliance, health, and incentive structures to get the capital, entrepreneurs, and workers for Made in America manufacturing. Whos with me?
Matthew Chang is the founding partner of Chang Robotics.
Layoff announcements from U.S. employers have increased 80% to 696,309 job cuts through May of this year, compared to the 385,859 cuts announced throughout the first five months of 2024, according to the latest layoffs report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Federal government agencies have been most impacted by planned job cuts in 2025, with 284,827 job reductions year to date, compared to 36,325 U.S. government job cuts announced during the same period last year.
Retail is the second-leading industry in job cuts this year, with 75,802 cuts since the start of 2025. That’s a 274% increase in retail job reductions compared to the same period last year, when U.S. companies announced 20,276 layoffs.
Why are companies laying off workers?
According to the report, DOGE-related efforts remain the leading reason given for job cut announcements this year. This includes reductions in federal employee and contractor roles, and private nonprofit layoffs resulting from federal funding cuts.
Market and economic conditions were the second-most cited explanation for announced U.S. layoffs, followed by store closings.
In a news release discussing the layoff report, Andrew Challenger, senior vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas said, “Tariffs, funding cuts, consumer spending, and overall economic pessimism are putting intense pressure on companies’ workforces. Companies are spending less, slowing hiring, and sending layoff notices.”
Retail store closures are trending upward
Store closings being among the top reasons cited for U.S. retail layoffs is unsurprising. Fast Company has written extensively about retail store closings throughout the U.S., from companies like Kohl’s, Macy’s, and JCPenney.
While some retailers have chosen to shutter the doors of some locations, others have filed for bankruptcy protection and announced company-wide store closures.
In January 2025, Joann Fabrics filed for bankruptcy for a second time. The fabric and crafts store previously filed for bankruptcy protection in March 2024. Similarly, Rite Aid publicized its decision to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on May 5. The retail pharmacy first filed for bankruptcy in October 2023.
Hiring efforts are up slightly, yet remain sluggish
As for hiring efforts, U.S. companies have announced 79,741 planned hires through May of this year, an increase of 57% from the same period last year. However, planned hiring announcements remain historically low compared to pre-pandemic and early-pandemic years.
