Andy Sauer is no stranger to making waves in the beverage business. As the CEO of Garage Beer, he defied the odds by turning a small craft brewery into a national name, despite competing in an industry dominated by legacy players. Now hes looking to shake things up in another popular beverage category: the soda aisle.
Sauers latest venture is a product called Roxberry, which hes dubbing the first modern kids soda. The brand launched earlier this month at more than 2,200 Walmart stores, 450 Krogers, Meijer and Harris Teeter locations nationwide, and a handful of independent grocers. This soda is unlike the sugary drinks most consumers remember from childhood: Its made primarily of carbonated water and fruit and veggie juice, contains just 5 grams of sugar from natural sweeteners, and has no artificial colors, flavors, or sweeteners. A four-pack costs $5.99.
In an era when a new category of better-for-you (BFY) soda brands for adults, like Poppi and Olipop, has exploded in popularity, Sauer says the options for kids have largely remained siloed in two main categories: Either they can drink the same brands we grew up with, like Capri Sun or Kool-Aid, which are packed with ingredients many parents would rather skip; or theyre stuck with healthier, less visually exciting options, like seltzer water. Roxberry aims to be a third option thats a win-win for kids and parents.
Two-hit wonder
Sauer has experience turning a nascent RTD brand into a household name. Garage Beer, which he acquired in 2021 and relaunched in 2023, has shown triple-digit year-over-year growth, with sales increasing more than 500% in the 12 months ended in early April 2025, he says. Its now valued at around $200 million and is continuing to grow, despite an overall slump in the beer industry, according to a September report from The Wall Street Journal.
In large part, Garage owes its success to a savvy marketing strategy: Its sleek branding, consistent dialogue with its target audience, and catchy slogan (beer-flavored beer) make it feel like an approachable craft beer for the everyman. Sauer is taking those lessons to Roxberry, which is prioritizing an in-depth brand story and centering everything on the phrase Fizz for kids.
That old phrase, Marketing is saying one thing a hundred times rather than a hundred things one time is very true for this brand as well, Sauer says.
The idea for Roxberry struck back in 2022. With four kids of his own at home, Sauer noticed that his family frequently butted heads in the beverage aisle. His kids were interested in classic sweetened fruit drink brands like Kool-Aid, but he was hesitant to buy them due to their high quantities of sugar.
And so Roxberry came to lifefirst as a powdered mix-in before pivoting to a canned ready-to-drink format that mimics the soda brands kids already covet the most. The sodas initial launch comes in the three most popular flavors in kids beverages overall: strawberry lemonade, citrus, and fruit punch.
We did a lot of work to find out which fruits and veggies come naturally with a better mouthfeel, better sweetness, Sauer says. Working with raw strawberries, raw lemon, raw carrotthose things are going to give you more of a sweet flavor naturally so that you don’t have to add a lot to it.
Kool-Aid Man energy
The first thing parents might notice when they see Roxberry on store shelves is that it looks nothing like the modern BFY brands theyre used to. According to Emily Heyward, chief brand officer at the agency Red Antler that led Roxberrys design, thats the point.
When we built the brand for Roxberry, it was before the explosion of the Poppis and the Olipops, but I think they’ve tapped on something similar, which is that a lot of better-for-you brandsespecially in the kids spacesignal that theyre healthier just by being more boring, Heyward says. They strip out color, theyre matte instead of glossy, theyre very plain, to show that theyre different from the old-school brands that we grew up with.
The result, Heyward says, is that most of the healthy options for kids on grocery store shelves just dont look very exciting. To combat this trend, Sauers brief was to bring back that Kool-Aid Man energy to the space. Red Antlers answer to that prompt is a brand that looks like it came straight from a sci-fi kids cartoon.
From the quirky flavor names Ocean Potion, Pink Lava, and Galaxy Gulp to the anthropomorphic characters and alien landscapes on the packaging, everything about Roxberrys look suggests that its not just a beverage, but also its own universe.
All of those characters that you seeand you just see them in little spots on the canthey have backstories, they have personalities. We went so deep, not because we’re planning to launch a TV show tomorrow, but because we wanted to ensure that we really had that richness,” Heyward says.
For example, Heyward adds, one character named Chomp Chomp is described as loud, erratic, and entrepreneurial; an instigator who lives in the skies, makes deliveries, and creates crop circles. Even if this character is never officially named, she believes the lore gives the brand depth.
While the majority of the Roxberry package is designed to entice shoppers with its bright, character-based imagery, smaller cues, like the phrases No fake stuff and 5g sugar signal to parents that the beverage is not a typical soda. In essence, both Heyward and Sauer agree: Roxberry is designed with kids in mind first and parents second.
We were looking at the love we all had for these character-driven brands growing up, and how they felt like part of our pop culture universe,” Heyward says. “Well, why has that gone away? There are brands for adults that have tapped into that nostalgia a little bit, but I think that the kids brands have really played it safe.” Roxberry’s high-octane look gives the healthier-for-you kids beverage category a much-needed branding sugar rush.
Minneapolis is currently inundated with two kinds of iceboth of which make it hard for residents to move about the city.
The bone-chilling winter cold has left icy deposits on streets and sidewalks, while the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has run roughshod over them in what the Department of Homeland Security calls “the largest DHS operation ever.”
As anyone whos ever set booted foot in Minnesota in winter can attest, gravity and overconfidence are no match for one of the worlds most slippery surfaces. Given the abundance of cameras that tend to follow ICE agents, it was perhaps inevitable that there would be multiple viral videos of agents absolutely biffing it on literal ice throughout the Twin Cities. The surging popularity of these videos, though, suggests ICEs critics are getting a lot more out of them than cold comfort.
Midwestern progressives may have cheered such content no matter the context, but given recent events, the videos have taken on deeper resonance. Minneapolis has been at the center of a political firestorm since December, when President Trump seized on reports of social services fraud in the city, perpetrated in part by Somali Americans, to denigrate the areas entire deeply rooted Somali community.
On January 6, DHS announced it was deploying as many as 2,000 agents into the city to crack down on fraud and, of course, undocumented immigrants. By the following afternoon, an agent had shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in broad daylight.
In the days since Goods killing, tensions have erupted in Minneapolis and rippled across the country. Massive protests have sprung up throughout the Twin Cities, as well as from New York City to Portland, Oregon. Local politicians and national figures like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called out Trump for lying about what happened to Good, while Minnesota and Illinois have sued his administration to block the surge of federal agents.
For now, though, the DHS incursion into Minnesota continues, disrupting the normal flow of day-to-day life in the Twin Cities. ICE is reportedly conducting door-to-door raids in some areas, and in one highly publicized incident, agents violently detained two U.S. citizens, one of whom is 17 years old, while they were working a shift at Target. (Both were later released, reportedly with injuries.)
After agents started showing up at local schools, several districts have switched to remote learning. Some restaurants have closed their doors indefinitely, while touring acts have postponed shows in the city, citing the welfare of attendees. In fact, the only people who seem to want to visit Minneapolis at the moment are MAGA influencers hoping to squeeze some content out of the carnage.
Given the dark, authoritarian overtones of DHSs citywide siege, its no wonder viewers are rejoicing in videos of ICE agents busting ass.
@typicalelliott ThislllllIce attacks Ice making ice fall. Ice proceeds to shoot ice #ice Richard Strauss-Valzer from Der Rosenkavalier –
First, came the clip in which a pair of agents ate it on an icy sidewalk together, causing one of their rifles to dischargethankfully hurting no bystanders. Then there was the video of an agent running down the street at full speed before hitting a slick thicket of ice, as captured from multiple angles. And lets not forget the agents who apparently could not get any locals to help them unstick their car from a snowy curb and wobbled around doing so themselves. Its all classic slapstick, practically begging for the Benny Hill theme song to be dubbed over it.
As these clips proliferate online, another genre of viral video has emerged out of Minneapolis in tandemone that helps explain just what else the ice-fail videos are accomplishing. These videos could be called a learning series, since they depict agents approaching protesters and asking if they havent learned anything yet from recent events. (Learned what? a protester responds in one of the videos, before an agent smacks the phone out of her hand.)
These videos appear to illustrate ICE agents expectations: that anyone disapproving of them shuld be cowed into respect and obedience. If protesters remain unfazed instead and continue mouthing off, the agents seem to suggest, well, who knows what could end up happening? Perhaps the same fate that met Good when she proved insufficiently respectful and obedient. The president suggested as much in comments he made aboard Air Force One on Mondayevidence that the blasé attitude ICE agents have toward use of force comes right from the top.
Beyond doling out barely veiled threats, the agents in these videos also toe the party line that ICE is made up of hypercompetent heroes unfairly victimized by violent rioters. All they want is to surgically expunge criminal scum from the city, which they would accomplish easily, if only a well-coordinated domestic terrorist network would stop weaponizing vehicles at them.
This is where the falling-down videos, and attendant memes, come in handy. These videos decidedly do not make ICE look like hypercompetent heroes. They make them look like the buffoons they are.
They undercut the agents warrior self-mythology, reducing them to doofuses who dont realize winter ice might mean an attack of the killer sidewalks. The gleeful spread of these embarrassing clips sends the same message as the D.C. sandwich-thrower last summer and the wave of inflatable animals at the “No Kings” protests last fall. They help defang the vast threat represented by masked agents of state, rendering them eminently fallible. And the popularity of the videos also contradicts the preposterous notion that, as Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino said on Fox News this week, “90% of the public are happy to see us.”
Sure, its a small victory, but one that offers a strong reminder to the public to believe their eyes, not the spin from the administration.
It might also help ensure thatwhether from Minnesotas natural elements or its fired-up citizenryICE agents will continue getting a chilly reception as long as they remain in the state.
Have they not learned this lesson yet?
Hiring in 2026 won’t look much like hiring even two years ago. If you don’t pay attention, you will get left behind. I was a retained search consultant for 25-plus years. I’ve written executive and board résumés for the last 10 years. I’ve never seen so much change in candidate sourcing happen so quickly.
CEO priorities and expectations have shifted. AI is reshaping how candidates get surfaced. Résumé sameness has skyrocketed. Candidate shortlist cycles have accelerated.
For you to be visible, your résumé has to do more than describe your work. It has to hit leaders’ priorities, satisfy automated systems’ tests, and make sense. The following five trends show you what that means and how to stay ahead of it:
Trend 1: Résumé Content Must Address CEO Priorities
Late-2025 surveys found four top-of-mind priorities for CEOs as we head into 2026. Those topics map to compelling information for your résumé’s experience section. I list them below. Then, I frame the question that decision-makers want your résumé to answer. Finally, to inspire you, I share examples of subjects you might use in impact bullets.
CEO Priority: AI Adoption & TransformationThe question: Can this person operationalize AI and meet ROI hurdles?Impact Examples:
Introduced AI-assisted steps into a workflow.
Led a cross-functional effort to apply AI to a core business process.
Built an AI governance framework.
CEO Priority: Geopolitical & Economic UncertaintyThe question: Can this person make decisions that protect shareholder value during volatility?Impact Examples:
Used business intelligence tools to identify and report risks.
Redesigned a process to protect profit margins.
Repositioned the organization in response to geopolitical, regulatory, or economic shifts.
CEO Priority: Talent ManagementThe question: Can this person shape and prepare our teams for an AI future?Impact Examples:
Implemented AI-driven talent sourcing methods.
Adopted the 4B workforce model (buy, build, borrow, bot) to design a future-ready team.
Owned the talent workstream for enterprise AI adoption.
CEO Priority: Business Model ReinventionThe question: Can this person drive adaptation and growth to keep us competitive?Impact Examples:
Contributed insights that improved a product, service, or customer experience.
Developed or scaled a new offering.
Determined where the organization should invest, expand, or exit to maintain long-term viability.
Trend 2: The Rise of the Reader Trio (ATS, AI, Human)
For years, you’ve written for applicant tracking systems, recruiters, and hiring managers. And you still will. But in 2026, more organizations will use AI to source candidates and expand talent pools. While an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) looks for keywords, AI looks for patterns.To benefit from AIs ability to expand talent pools, you’ll need to learn those patterns and embed them in your résumé. Examples include: showing you’re ready for promotion to the next level; writing about repeated records of success; and describing challenges you’ve handled that also exist in other industries.
Trend 3: Work Context Becomes Critical
Beyond CEO concerns, your trio of readers wants to know where you’ve operated. If you havent already, now is the time to add company descriptions to your résumé. Basics include size, ownership, industry, footprint, and systemic challenges. Readers need to see adjacencies to their worlds to predict your effectiveness.
Trend 4: Generic, AI-Written Résumés
Next, I talked with many recruiters over a few days at the Unleash World HR conference in Paris in October. I wanted to learn how they use AI to find people. They wanted to talk about the crushing tsunami of generic résumés they receive.
While AI might up-level a bad résumé to average, always keep a human in the loop to stand out. Make it yours. Otherwise, your readers’ eyes will glaze over from the sameness. Plus, AI continues to generate word salad and logical inconsistencies. The narrative sounds good on the surface, but it doesnt hold up to scrutiny. Recruiters catch those faux pas, so dont make them.
Trend 5: Candidate Shortlist Velocity and Résumé Readiness
Finally, a Siemens recruiter claims that LinkedIns AI cut his time-to-shortlist by at least 20 times. That means an accelerated recruiting cycle, with prepared candidates getting first looks. If you need time to update your résumé, you might get left behind.
Career visibility in 2026 won’t happen by accident. It will be because you built a résumé that meets the moment: substantive, AI-savvy, and ready before anyone asks for it.
Leaders typically spend January prepping for the year ahead. But thats difficult when youre eight months pregnant, and your baby has zero concern for your deadlines.
Ive lost count of how many times people have asked how long Ill be away, whether Ill be checking my emails, or what support Ill need when I return. People often expect leaders to have all the answers, but the truth is: I dont know yet.
Lucky for me, that uncertainty worked to my advantage. It forced me to change my approach from setting goals to building flexibility. This has resulted in a team that is autonomous and adaptable, whether Im in the room or away on leave.
You dont have to have all the answers
According to a report by Careers After Babies, 98% of moms want to return to work after having a child. However, less than a quarter actually do. Early parenthood is unpredictable, and theres no way of knowing how itll unfold. While Im committed to my career, Im under no illusions that March might bring me sleepless nights, and the months ahead may be full of doctors appointments. I might have no time to work at all.
That isnt a challenge you can plan your way through. Sure, you might end up returning after six weeks. But if you set yourself that deadline and you end up delaying, you may end up feeling like youve failed and start to question your leadership when youre actually managing two of the most demanding roles there are.
But you do have to be ready for anything
When you dont know the outcome, you need to prepare for every possibility. That means focusing on building flexibility and developing resilience, because systems that can cope with volatility and deal with change dont rely on a single timeline or person.
At Woofz, were focused on setting out clear decision ownership, so everyone understands where to turn for support, and also how to train our teams to handle pivots and take on new responsibilities when we need to. We aimed to create a team capable of thriving even when conditions change, without constant oversight.
Resilience doesnt just help organizations get through difficult moments. It actively improves long-term performance. Research from software and consultancy firm MHR Global found that 82% of the most resilient organizations rank highly for customer satisfaction, while 76% score highly for employee engagement. Overall, resilient businesses are far more confident in their ability to outperform competitors across growth, profitability, reputation, innovation, and adoption. And the flexibility that this culture of autonomy and adaptability provides will allow me to be flexible too, as I deal with the birth of my child.
How to embed flexibility within your organization
If you dont have flexibility embedded in your organization, the following can be helpful:
Encourage cross-training: Let your team experiment and explore new skills, or take on “side quests” as we like to call them, even if it doesnt support their primary role. If only one person knows how something works, thats a risk. Theres high value in having people who can step in when a problem arises, and the person whose job it is to fix it is unavailable.
Give your team some slack: Its okay to set deadlines and timelines, but if you dont leave room for issues to arise and situations to change, thats a problem. When theres no time to adjust (and you inevitably miss deadlines), you start to associate change with failure.
Plan for scenarios, not certainties: You cant set one plan and expect the universe to deliver. There are many potential outcomes to any given situation, so it helps to agree in advance how you would respond to each one. When you anticipate change rather than react to it, it becomes way less scary.
Take a momentary step back: Make yourself unavailable for a day and see where the system wobbles. Its useful to identify where dependencies lie, what gaps exist, and where there isnt a clear sense of ownership. Pinpointing issues while the stakes are low gives you time to fix them before the system breaks down and youre not there to step in.
Not knowing is part of the job
The concept of the all-knowing leader is such a myth. Many leaders talk big, but the fact that 44% of founders suffer from imposter syndrome says it all. Were human, and nobody has it all figured out. Most of the time, were putting on a brave face and hoping for the best.
If the experience of managing pregnancy and leadership has taught me anything, its that admitting I dont know yet isnt a weakness. Like early parenthood, startups are full of unknowns. What separates good leaders isnt their ability to eliminate uncertainty, but how they equip their teams to respond when difficulties arise and circumstances inevitably change.
The housing market just crossed an important thresholdone thats especially good news for anyone who might be planning on buying a home any time soon.
The massive wave of COVID-19-era mortgages with ultra-low rates were a huge boon for many homebuyers, but the housing market hasnt been the same since. A huge swath of homeowners in the U.S. suddenly had mortgage interest rates well below 4%and very little incentive to sell their homes for less affordable options with todays higher rates.
That dilemma has created a nightmarish scenario for the U.S. housing market. Many potential buyers and aspiring first-time homeowners remain priced out due to high home prices and higher interest rates. With more homeowners staying put whether they want to or not, housing inventory dried up considerably, shrinking the pool of options for home shoppers.
Thats beginning to change. According to new data from Realtor.com, the share of U.S. homeowners with mortgage rates over 6% is now greater than the share hanging onto those ultra low sub-3% rates. In the third quarter of 2025, 21% of outstanding mortgages carried a rate above 6% compared to the 20% of mortgages with rates below 3%. That change signals a meaningful shift from the gridlock thats defined the last few years in the U.S. housing market.
Mortgage rates above 6% now represent a larger share of outstanding loans than the ultra-low rates that defined the pandemic-era housing boom, Realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale said in a press release. This crossover reflects a gradual resetting as some households trade in low-rate mortgages for higher-rate loans or enter the market for the first time, even as rate lock-in continues to limit the pace of inventory recovery.
Lasting impact of low rates and lock-in
Those ultra-low rates are on their way out, but many homeowners still have rates well below what theyd be offered today. According to the new data, over 50% of mortgages still have rates at or below 4% and almost 70% have rates of 5% or lower. As long as that remains the case, the average homeowner might see their monthly mortgage payment spike by as much as $1,000 if they sold their home and took on a mortgage with todays rates.
Still, the new mortgage data is a promising sign. Rates are very unlikely to get as low as they did during the early days of COVID-19 again in our lifetimesparticularly now that we know just what a lasting disruptive impact the low rate homebuying frenzy had on the market at large. The period between July 2020 and September 2021 is the only time that the U.S. 30-year fixed mortgage rate has gone below 3% since those records began being kept in the early 1970s.
The high cost of buying a home is more salt in the wound for many Americans, who have seen the price of everything from groceries to used cars soar in recent years. With little relief in 2025, the unaffordability crisis seems to be on everyones mind lately. If interest rates settle down and the present trends continue, at least the housing market might be getting back to something a little closer to normal this year.
Even with rates still elevated, modest mortgage rate decreases into the low-6% range could encourage additional home buying activity, Hale said. Further easing in inflation and mortgage rates would be key to unlocking more seller participation, helping to relieve price pressure and competition in an under-supplied market.
Fujifilms newest camera model, the Instax Mini Evo Cinema, is a gadget thats designed for the retro camera craze.
The device is a vertically oriented instant camera that can take still images, videos (an Instax camera first), connect with your smartphone to turn its photos into physical prints, and capture images in a wide range of retro aesthetics. Its debuting in North American markets in early February for $409.95.
Fujifilms new model taps into a younger consumer bases growing interest both in retro tech and film photography aestheticsa trend thats been driven, in large part, by platforms like TikTok. The Instax Mini Evo Cinema turns that niche into a clever feature called the Gen Dial: a literal dial that lets users toggle between decades to capture their perfect retro shot.
[Photo: Fujifilm]
How the Gen Dial works
Almost everything about the Instax Mini Evo Cinema screams nostalgia, from its satisfying tactile buttons to its vertical orientationand thats by design.
According to Fujifilm, the cameras silhouette is inspired by the 1965 Fujica Single-8, an 8-millimeter camera initially introduced as an alternative to Kodaks Super 8. While the Instax Mini Evo Cinema does come with a small LCD display, its main functions are controlled with a series of dials, buttons, and switches, which Fujifilm says are designed to evoke the feel of winding film by hand, add to the analog charm, and expand the joy of shooting and printing.
The most innovative of these is undoubtedly the Gen Dial. While there are plenty of existing editing apps and filter presets to give a photo a certain vintage look in-post, this may be the first instant camera to actually brand in-camera filters by era.
[Photo: Fujifilm]
The dial is labeled in 10-year increments, from 1930 to 2020. To choose an effect, users can simply click to the era theyd like to replicate, then shoot and print. According to the company, selecting 1940 will result in a look inspired by the vivid color expression of the three-color film processes, for example; 1980 pulls cues from 35-millimeter color negative film; and 2010 evokes the style of early smartphone photo-editing apps (throwback!).
“Overall, our goal with Mini Evo Cinema is to deepen options for creative expression,” says Ashley Reeder Morgan, VP of consumer products for Fujifilm’s North America division. “Beyond video, the Gen Dial provides an experience to transcend time and space over 100 years (10 eras), applying both visual and audio to the mini Evo Cinema output.”
From left: 1940, 1980, and 2010 styles [Photos: Fujifilm]
For amateur photographers looking to achieve a certain vintage aesthetic without spending endless hours in Adobe Lightroom or fiddling with complicated camera settings, its the perfect intuitive solution.
Retro cameras get a TikTok-driven boost
For Fujifilm, the Instax Mini Evo Cinema is part of a broader, internet-driven revival of the brands camera division.
While Fujifilm previously spent years moving away from its legacy camera business to focus on healthcare, its $1,599 retro-themed X100V camerawhich went viral on TikTokrecently triggered a resurgence in its sales. The companys most recent financials, released in September, show that its imaging division (which includes cameras) experienced a 15.6% revenue increase year over year, which Morgan says is attributable to the success of its instant and digital cameras.
“Overall, we have been thrilled to see younger generations rediscovering the joy of photography, whether instant, analog, or digital,” Morgan says.
The X100Vs popularity online is likely driven by Gen Z and Gen Alphas interest in retro tech aesthetics (see: Urban Outfitters iPod revival), as well as a more general resurgence in film photography in recent years. Analog cameras are having a moment, and companies like Polaroid and Fujifilm are cashing in.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the market for artificial intelligence and its associated industries are over inflated. In 2025, just five hyperscalersAlphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracleaccounted for a capital investment of $399 billion, which will rise to over $600 billion annually in coming years. For the first nine months of last year, real GDP growth rate in the U.S. was 2.1%, but would have been 1.5% without the contribution of AI investment.
This dependence is dangerous. A recent note by Deutsche Bank questioned whether this boon might in fact be a bubble, noting the historically unprecedented concentration of the industry, which now accounts for around 35% of total U.S. market capitalization, with the top 10 U.S. companies making up more than 20% of the global equity market value. For such an investment to yield no benefit would be a failure of unprecedented proportions.
In their book Power and Progress, Nobel Prize-winning economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson narrate the calamitous failure of the French Panama Canal project in the late 19th century. Thousands of investors, large and small, lost their fortunes, and 20,000 people who worked on the project died for no benefit. The problem, Acemoglu and Simon write, was that the vision for progress did not include everyoneand failure to incorporate feedback from others resulted in poor quality decision making. As they observe, what you do with technology depends on the direction of progress you are trying to chart and what you regard as an acceptable cost.Fast forward 150 years and a significant chunk of the U.S. economy is similarly dependent on a small coterie of grand visionaries, ambitious investors, and techno-optimists. Their capacity to ignore their critics and sideline those forced to bear the costs of their mission risks catastrophic consequences. Trustworthy AI systems cannot be conjured by marketing magic. We must ensure those building, deploying, and working with these systems can have a say in how we direct the progress of this technology.
Mistrust and a general lack of optimism
The data suggests that there is an urgent need to chart a new course. Even a generous analysis of the market for generative AI products would likely struggle to show how a decent return on the gargantuan investment in capital is realistic. A recent report from MIT found that notwithstanding $30 billion to $40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, 95% of organizations are getting zero return. It is difficult to imagine another industry raising so much capital despite producing so little to show for it. But this appears to be Sam Altmans true superpower, as Brian Merchant has documented extensively.
This is coupled with significant levels of mistrust and a general lack of optimism from everyday people about the potential of this technology. In the most comprehensive global survey of 48,000 people across 47 countries, KPMG found that 54% of respondents are wary about trusting AI. They also want more regulation: 70% of respondents said regulation is necessary, but only 43% believe current laws are adequate. The report concludes that the most promising pathway towards improving trust in AI was through strengthening safeguards, regulation, and laws to promote safe AI use.
This, most obviously, sits in stark contrast with the position of the Trump administration, which has repeatedly framed regulation of the industry as an impediment to innovation. But the trust deficit cannot simply be hyped out of existence. It represents a significant structural barrier to the take up and valuable deployment of emerging technologies.
One of the key conclusions of the MIT report is that the small subset of companies that actually saw productivity gains from generative AI products were doing so because they build adaptive, embedded systems that learn from feedback. Highly centralized decisions about procurement were more likely to result in employees being required to use off-the-shelf products unsuited to the enterprise environment and generating outputs that employees mistrusted, especially for higher-stakes tasks, resulting in work arounds or dwindling rates of usage. The problem is that these tools fail to learn and adapt. In turn, there are too few opportunities for executives to receive that feedback or incorporate it meaningfully into model development and adaptation.
The narrative spun by politicians and media commentators that the AI industry is full of visionary leaders inadvertently points to a key cause of why these products are failing. Trust in AI systems can only be earned if feedback is both sought and acted onwhich is a significant challenge for the hyperscalers, because their foundational models are less capable of adapting and responding to unique and varied contexts. Unless we decentralize the development and governance of this, the benefits may remain elusive.
The workers’ view
There are useful ideas lying around that could help navigate a different path of technological progress. The Human Technology Institute at the University of Technology Sydney published research about how workers are treated as invisible bystanders in the roll out of AI systems. Through deep, qualitative consultations with nurses, retail workers, and public servants to solicit feedback about automated systems and their impact on their work.
Rather than exhibiting backward or unhelpful attitudes to AI, workers expressed nuanced and constructive contributions to the impact on their workplaces. Retail workers, for example, talked about the difficulties of automated systems that disempowered workers, and curtailed their discretion: unlike a production line, retail is an unpredictable environment. You have these things called customers that get in the way of a nice steady flow.
A nurse noted how “the increasing roll-out of automated systems and alerts causes severe alarm fatigue among nurses. When an (AI system) alarm goes off, we tend to ignore or not take it seriously. Or immediately override to stop the alarm.
One might think that increased investment in such systems would contend with the problem of alarm fatigue. But without worker input, its easy to miss this as a problem entirely. The upshot is that, as one public servant put it, in workplaces whre channels for worker feedback are absent, a necessary quality of employees was “the gift of the workaround.”
Traditionally, this kind of consultation and engagement would happen through worker organizations. But with the rate of unionization slipping below 10% in the U.S., this becomes a problem not just for workers but also employers, who are left with few methods to meaningfully engage with their workforce at scale.
Some unions are nonetheless leading on this issue, and in the absence of political leadership, might be the best hope of making change. The AFL-CIO has developed a promising model law aimed at protecting workers from harmful AI systems. The proposal focuses on limiting the use of worker data to train models, as well as introducing friction into the automation of significant decisions, such as hiring and firing. It also emphasizes giving workers the right to refuse to follow directives from AI systemsessentially, building in feedback loops for when automation goes wrong. The right to refuse is an essential failsafe that can also cultivate a culture of critical engagement with technology, and serve as a foundation for trust.
Businesses are welcome to ignore workers views, but workers may end up making themselves heard in other ways. Recent surveys indicate that 31% of employees admit to actively sabotaging their companys AI strategy, and for younger workers, the rates are even higher. Even companies that fail to seek feedback from workers may still end up receiving it all the same.
Our current course of technological progress relies on narrow understandings of expertise and places too much faith in small numbers of very large companies. We need to start listening to the people who are working with this technology on a daily basis to solve real world problems. This decentralization of power is a necessary step if we want technology that is both trustworthy and effective.
Reddit is now the fourth most visited social media platform in the U.K., overtaking TikTok.
The online discussion platform has seen immense growth over the past two years, reaching 88% more internet users in the U.K., thanks to a combination of shifting search algorithms and social media habits.
Three in five Brits now encounter the site while online, according to Ofcom, up from a third in 2023. The U.K. now has the second largest user base behind the U.S., according to company records shared with the Guardian.
Reddit has also witnessed a drastic demographic change over the same period. More than half of the platforms users in the U.K. are now women and one-third are Gen Z women, many of whom turn to the platform for forums dedicated to skincare, beauty, and cosmetics.
A change in Googles search algorithms last year, prioritizing content sourced from discussion forums, is partly behind the platforms growth. Reddit has since become the most-cited source for Google AI overviews, after inking deals with Google and OpenAI, placing the platform at the lucrative intersection of traditional search and AI discovery.
Thats combined with the ways we search online evolving in recent years. Many internet users bypass Google altogether and instead seek out human-generated reviews and opinions on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, or Reddit.
Gen Z are very open to looking online for advice around these life stage moments, like leaving home and renting for the first time, which happens a little bit later for some of this generation, Jen Wong, Reddits chief operating officer, told The Guardian. Its a very safe place to ask questions about balancing a cheque book, or how to pay for a wedding.
Rival platforms like YouTube and Facebook have become subsumed with AI-generated slop, and the percentage of Americans using X since Elon Musk took over has dropped drasticallysince overtaken by Redditaccording to new findings from Pew Research.
Here, Reddit stands out as one of the last remaining platforms that holds a semblance of the small community-run forums of the early internet. Users follow topics of interest rather than influencers. Everyone is anonymous rather than at the mercy of an algorithm.
Rather than offering answers it thinks users want to hear, or serving an endless stream of spam, bots and slop, the human-centred discussion threads that remain at its core invite curiositythe foundation the internet was built upon in the first place.
Amanda Lee McCarty, sustainability consultant and host of the Clotheshorse podcast, remembers fixing a tear on her Forever 21 shirt with a staplerjust long enough to get through the workday before tossing it out.
In the early 2000s, when fast-fashion brands began flooding the market, clothing became so cheap that shoppers could endlessly refresh their wardrobes. The garments were poorly made and tore easily, but it hardly mattered. They were designed to be disposable, encouraging repeat purchases.
“It didn’t seem worth the time and effort to repair the top,” she recalls. “And besides, I didn’t have any mending skills at the time.”
[Photo: Levi’s]
McCarty isn’t alone. Starting in the early 1900s, schools trained studentsmostly girlsin the art of sewing and mending clothes in home economics classes. Students learned how to operate sewing machines to create tidy hemlines and sew buttons by hand. But by the 1970s, partly due to the feminist critique that home economics classes reinforced traditional gender roles, these courses slowly began getting cut from public schools.
There are now several generations of Americans with no sewing skills at all. In a recent study conducted by Levi’s, 41% of Gen Zers report having no basic repair knowledge, such as fixing a tear or sewing on a buttonwhich is double the rate of older generations.
[Photo: Levi’s]
This also coincided with clothes getting cheaper, thanks to a global supply chain and low-wage labor in developing countries. Suddenly, clothes were so inexpensive that even the poorest families could buy them instead of making them. Eventually, as McCarty illustrates, they were so cheap that there was no point in even mending them.
Today, the average American throws away 81.5 pounds of clothing every year, resulting in 2,100 pounds of textile waste entering U.S. landfills every second. This transformation of the fashion industry has led directly to the environmental disaster we now find ourselves in: Manufacturing billions of clothes annually accelerates climate change, and discarded clothes now clog up landfills, deserts, and oceans.
Levi’s believes that one step in tackling the crisis is to teach Gen Z how to mend. The denim brand, which generates upward of $6 billion a year, has partnered with Discovery Education to create a curriculum aligned with educational standards that teaches high schoolers how to sew a button, mend a hole or tear, and hem trousers. This curriculum, which launches today, is available for free and will be shared with teachers across the country who can incorporate it into a wide range of coursesfrom STEM to civics to social studies.
[Photo: Levi’s]
“Needle-and-Thread Evangelism”
The idea took hold during a poker night. Paul Dillinger, Levis head of global product innovation, noticed that a button had popped off a friends Oxford shirt. Oliver said he didnt have time to throw it away and put on a new shirt, Dillinger recalls. It was an illustration of everything thats wrong with the current paradigm. And it could be fixed with a little needle-and-thread evangelism.
Dillinger, who trained as a fashion designer and is a skilled garment maker, spent 20 minutes teaching the groupmen in their mid-twentieshow to sew the button back on. Since then, hes made a habit of preaching the gospel of mending with everyone in his orbit, including his colleagues at Levis.
[Photo: Levi’s]
One of them was Alexis Bechtol, Levis director of community affairs. She saw an opportunity for the company to scale that education beyond informal demos. Bechtol helped spearhead the Wear Longer program and the partnership with Discovery Education, which specializes in developing age-appropriate lesson plans aligned with state and federal standards.
Levi’ and Discovery Education worked together to create a curriculum that teaches students the foundations of mending a garment by hand without a sewing machine. There are four lesson plans that are each designed to take up a single classroom period and are flexible enough to be incorporated into courses across disciplines.
Kimberly Wright, an instructional design manager at Discovery Education who worked on the curriculum, says the lessons arent positioned as a revival of home economics. Instead, theyre framed as practical, transferable skills relevant to a wide range of careers. Were seeing a resurgence in skills-based learning, Wright says. Across the country, theres a shift toward not just making students college-ready, but career-ready.
The initiative is funded through Levis social impact and community engagement budget rather than its marketing arm, although the curriculum will be branded with the Levis logo. Dillinger believes that it is valuable for Levi’s to be associated with mending, because it emphasizes that its products are designed to be durable and long-lasting.
“Levi’s wants to be the most loved item in your closet, the thing you wear most often,” he says. “If we empower our customers to sustain this old friend in their closet, it creates brand affinity.”
[Photo: Levi’s]
A Small Fix for a Larger Systemic Problem
At its core, the curriculum aims to challenge Gen Zs perception of clothing as disposable. In theory, mending keeps garments out of landfills. Its about extending the life cycle of your product so you dont have to buy something new, Bechtol says.
Gen Z is coming of age in a world dominated by ultra-fast-fashion players like Shein, where clothes are cheaper than ever. Mending is no longer an economic necessityand in some cases, it can cost more in time and money than a garment is worth. Levis is trying to reframe mending as something else: a creative act that allows wearers to personalize their clothes. Over time, Dillinger says that personal investment changes how people value what they own.
Once youve invested time and care into repairing a garment, it shifts the value equation, he says. It becomes more like a plant or a petsomething youre responsible for sustaining.
There’s no doubt that mending is a crucial part of the sustainable fashion movement. McCarty, who once stapled her shirt, now repairs her clothing to extend its life. But she points out that the fashion industry’s bigger problem is flooding the market with cheap clothes and encouraging constant consumption.
While individuals can buy less and wear clothes longer, she says brands must take responsibility for producing fewer, more durable products. “It’s sort of like putting a Band-Aid on a bleeding wound and calling it fixed, when there are larger issues to deal with,” she says.
[Photo: Levi’s]
McCarty extends this critique to Levi’s itself. While some Levis products are durable, she notes that the company also produces large volumes of lower-end jeans for retailers like Target and Kohls. These garments are often made with synthetic fabrics that are harder to repair and wont biodegrade. “Levi’s is selling far more volume in lower-end jeans than they do in premium,” she says. “Some of these products are just not repairable.”
Still, McCarty believes the Wear Longer program could meaningfully educate Gen Znot only about mending, but also about the broader consequences of overproduction. Dillinger agrees. “Once you become a participant in the life of the garment, it becomes harder to ignore the broader industrial reality of how clothes are made,” he says. “You’re not participating in a similar set of tasks to the people who made the clothes.”
Ultimately, Dillinger sees mending as a form of empowerment. Teaching young people how to repair their clothes gives them agencyto extend what they own and to engage with fashion more critically.
“The sooner we respect kids as emerging adults with agency, the sooner they can make more responsible decisions for themselves,” he says.
You know the feeling: Youre replying to emails, navigating open tabs, responding to direct messages, when suddenly, it happensyour standing weekly 2 p.m. gets canceled abruptly. Giving everyone 30 minutes back today, the organizer says. A rush courses through your nervous system: Youre free.
Nothing about this recurring meeting is particularly onerous or necessarily stressful. And yet, at this moment, you feel like a burden has been lifted. Maybe you even audibly sigh in relief.
That sudden sense that all is right in the world has a psychological cause, Dr. Wilsa Charles Malveaux, a psychiatrist in Los Angeles, explains to Fast Company.
A neutralized threat in the brain
Our body is responding to the release of stress, Charles Malveaux says.
Between jobs, families, social obligations, and more, many of us feel overextended. At work, in particular, it can feel as though theres no option to say no to something, like having to attend a meeting. So when a meeting gets canceled, It takes the responsibility of havingor wantingto say no away, which leads to that sense of relief, Charles Malveaux says, noting that biologically, Were getting a sense of I can breathe again.
Were programmed to anticipate threats, primarily through the amygdala, the structure in our brain that senses and responds to fear. Once it activates your fight-or-flight system, the brain releases cortisol, which often lingers after a threat so that we remember how to recognize it and respond for the future, Charles Malveaux says.
So, weekly catch-ups, as harmless and banal as they may be, could actually activate an elevated sense of threat tied to anxieties around being on time, or having to show up and present a certain way in a meeting, she adds. When you no longer have that, you feel that release.
But the reason why a particular meeting may trigger someones internal threat system depends on the individual.
An invitation for introspection
Beyond the joy of suddenly having extra free time to plow through piled-up tasks or ditch work early, there may be additional insights you can glean about yourself when certain meetings get canceled.
Its probably not all of our meetings getting canceled that makes us experience an absolutely electric sense of newfound freedom, Charles Malveaux says. Its probably just some of them. If were really paying attention to what adds stress to our day-to-day work life, and what does not, it could lead to some helpful introspection.
Maybe certain meetings make us feel pressure to perform, or maybe theres a colleague in that weekly meeting who triggers us. We can use that kind of personal examination to gather information and potentially move more mindfully throughout our workday.
Understanding what types of meetings push us into an emotionally heightened state can help us approach them with a better attitude. Or, in the right environment, we may be able to approach our employers with those concerns and insightssomething that could shift the companys culture across the board.
Its a two-way street: Employers need to be receptive to the idea that all-hands-on-deck-style meetings, for example, may not be the healthiest option for everyone.
Long-standing gripes
Meetings in general remain a contentious aspect of professional life.
Data shows that many of them truly do waste time and drain workers to be less productive. As the workplace at large has been reexamined and reimagined in the post-pandemic era, redesigning meetings has become more of a topic of discourse. Sometimes a meeting can just be an emailand if removing it from workers calendars can lower stress levels, why not do it?
Building a work culture that understands the difference between necessary and unnecessary meetings is a top-down issue, Charles Malveaux says. After all, theres only so much most workers in an organization can do to control the problem.
Employers and upper-level management should really look at what is actually necessary for optimal function and performance of your organization, versus control, which is a way a lot of people erroneously use meetings, she says.
A reframe
That may be easier said than done, and the fact of the matter is that a lot of us will still be sitting through meetings wed rather avoid as part of being in the workforce. Dealing with the resulting stress is all about energy management, Charles Malveaux suggests. Energy management is a fairly individualized journey, and includes keeping track of the things that drain us, versus those that fill us back up, and making sure we book time for the latter, she says.
If youre consistently finding yourself immensely relieved every time a meeting gets canceled, it might be worth zooming out and making sure your energy is being refilled elsewhere in your lifeand not just being depleted constantly at work.
Doing an hour or so of something we hate or dont want to participate in is going to feel a lot different from an hour of something that invigorates us, Charles Malveaux says, noting, Making sure that we tune into those things that make us feel good and then schedule time for [them] is key, and it takes intentionality on the individuals part. Making space for breaks can help keep burnout at bay, whether its just five minutes of silence in your car or a walk in a nearby park.
Sounds like the perfect way to spend the time gained from that canceled meeting.
