The image in the tweet may have been blurry, but its message was unmistakable.
On Sunday afternoon, the official X account for the Democrats responded to news that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth allegedly had a second Signal group chat about missile strikes in Yemen by demanding that Hegseth be removed from his role. Hegseth, who has not admitted wrongdoing, replied to the tweet with a pugilistic dispatch attacking the Dems agenda.
So far, so 2025thats when things took a turn.
Instead of disputing the specifics of Hegseths reply, whoever controls the Dems social media escalated to DEFCON 3-level shitposting. The account tweeted a bleary, double-vision image of an iPhone home screen, with the caption: Petes POV. It was clearly a nod to the many allegations of alcohol abuse that Hegseth faced on his rocky path to confirmation back in January.
Pete's POV: pic.twitter.com/xJo81xCcaP— Democrats (@TheDemocrats) April 21, 2025
It was also way spicier than the party of they-go-low-we-go-high tends to get. But this is just the latest sign that the Dems are ready to fight back against the GOPboth on and off social media.
Its about time.
Since Donald Trump resumed his presidency earlier this year, the official White House social media account has been markedly aggressive and joyfully cruel. Rather than merely echo Trumps enthusiasm for deporting undocumented immigrants, for example, the WH account on X has made a series of joking tweets about it. The account recently posted a mock-ASMR video about deporting immigrants, deportation-themed Valentines Day cards, and even a Studio Ghibli-style AI rendering of a woman sobbing after her capture by ICE.
In many ways, this account has mirrored the IDGAF antagonism of this administrations constant chaosall the DOGE firings and budget cuts, tariff recklessness, executive orders, academic shakeups, and anti-DEI initiatives that have proved so destabilizing.
The White Houses X account also adds its own special dimension to that onslaught, though, by giving Dems yet another thing they must officially comment on. While Democrats struggle to get their arms around the flurry of MAGA activity on any given day, the WH account might tweet, say, an AI image of Trump as a literal king. High-profile Democrats like Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and New York Governor Kathy Hochul then have to take time and attention away from whatever messaging they had in mind that day and respond to Trumpthereby ceding the day’s agenda to him.
This game of attention and power unfolds online 24/7, with the deck stacked in Trumps favor. For too long this year, Dems didnt seem to know how to score an advantage.
The message is the medium
Although VP candidate Tim Walzs pugnacious Theyre just weird messaging about GOP politicians last August energized young voters, the results of the 2024 presidential election seemed to scare Democrats into playing it safe.
Even as a February 2025 Harvard CAPS/Harris poll revealed that 64% of registered Dems believe their party should “oppose everything” Trump does, many Dem leaders complied instead. Perhaps convinced that the JD Vance couch memes cost them some swing voters, prominent Democrats like Governor Gavin Newsom of California kicked off the second Trump era with misguided appeals toward bipartisanship.
The tendency toward acquiescence hit a nadir in mid-March, when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed to help Trump avert a government shutdown of his own making, without getting any real concessions in return.
At that point, Dems didnt need the White House to mock Schumer onlinetheir own base did plenty of that on their own.
Fight or flight
Something has changed since then, however. Somewhere between the tens of thousands of people showing up to individual stops on Bernie Sanders and AOCs Fight Oligarchy tour and the hundreds of thousands who came out for the recent Hands Off protests, more and more elected Democrats seem to have internalized that their people want to see them fight back.
Starting with Senator Cory Bookers bladder-bruising 25-hour filibuster speech on April 1, Dems have commanded attention with bold action. The next day, Senator Richard Blumenthal held a shadow hearing to highlight Trumps slashing cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Senators Jamie Raskin and Adam Schiff then joined forces a week later for a similar event, this one about Trumps alleged abuses of the law. Newsom has since sued Trump over his spate of tariffs, while Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador last week to meet with a constituent who was wrongly deported to a terrorist prison.
That wrongly deported man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, has lately become a flashpoint in Trumps presidencyespecially since first federal courts and then the Supreme Court ruled that he should be returned to the U.S.
Trumps team was likely counting on Dems to back off from the topic, to avoid being tarred as defending the rights of an alleged terrorist, no matter how flimsy the allegations. They almost certainly did not expect Garcia to become synonymous with the need for due process, inspiring no less than Joe Rogan to defend him.
Trolling with the punches
All the attention that Dems are now putting on Garcia has placed Trumps team on the backfoot.
When the White Houses X account sent out a trolling tweet about Garcia the other day, it was addressed directly to Van Hollen. Much like what the White House has done with its social media activity all year, Van Hollen forced the other side to respond. He successfully seized control of the conversation.
Now, as the Dems continue fighting back, their social media presence seems ready to take off its gloves in lockstep. Hours after the tweet nodding toward Hegseths reputation for alcohol abuse, the account trolled a White House post about Easter with a headline about egg shortages, and started a cheeky countdown for Hegseths seemingly imminent firing.
Not all negative messaging at this moment may be a net positive for Dems. House Rep Jasmine Crockett, whose inventive insults are often internet gold, was nearly censured in March for referring to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, as Governor Hot Wheels. Although that insult was not well received on either side of the aisle, it shows Crocketts willingness to push the envelope and test how much tolerance go-high Democrats have for go-low tactics.
The Democrats reply to Hegseth on X suggests that the party is finally loosening its strict adherence to norms, in an era when their opponents are veering ever further from normalcy.
Its a sign that Democrats in 2025 may just be ready to fight fire with firerather than pointing at the flames and declaring them too hot.
From the first time I saw Blade Runner and heard Rutger Hauers Roy Batty describe C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate, Ive wondered what it would be like to see beyond the limits of human vision. What would it feel like to have eyes that could see what we can’t normally see? I envied animals who can see light frequencies in the infrared and superheroes with X-ray vision that let them see like a NASA telescope. And today, I envy five regular human beings who, after having their eye cones temporarily rewired with a laser, were able to perceive a new color outside the typical range of the human eye.
They called this color oloa name derived from the binary code 010, representing the cones in the eye that are activated during its perception thanks to that rewiring. It defies any comparison to anything humans have seen because, well, nobody has seen it except these five lucky individuals. As described in new research published in the scientific journal Science Advances, the subjects of this wild experiment agreed to describe it as a blue-green of unprecedented saturation.
How our eyes work
Most humans see the world through three types of light-sensitive cells in the retina, called cones. These detect red, green, and blue light, allowing us to distinguish roughly one million to 10 million colors. Thats enough to spot the difference between a ripe strawberry and a bruised one, or to admire a sunsets gradient. But a rare fewalmost always womenare born with a fourth cone type. These tetrachromats can see up to 100 million colors, spotting nuances invisible to the rest of us. For example, where a trichromat sees a single shade of green grass, a tetrachromat might perceive dozens of subtle variations. Yet even among those with the genetic mutation, true tetrachromacy is rare. The brain must adapt to process this extra input, and most screens cant display these additional hues.
The people in the experiment didnt gain the ability to see millions of new colors. Instead, they glimpsed one artificial hue, like a single note added to a familiar song. The effect lasted only as long as the lasers fired, requiring subjects to stare unblinkingly at a fixed point. A twitch or glance away shattered the illusion.
Researchers were able to bypass biology limitations using a system called Oza nod to the emerald goggles in The Wizard of Oz. First, they mapped individual cones in participants retinas using high-resolution scans, labeling each as red, green, or blue. Then, they fired precise laser pulses100,000 times per secondat specific green-sensitive cones, while tracking minuscule eye movements 960 times per second to keep the aim steady. Normally, activating green cones also triggers neighboring red or blue ones, muddling the signal. But Ozs precision isolated the green cones, sending the brain a code it had never decoded before. The result was olo.
What Olo means for humans
The implications stretch far beyond novelty. By selectively activating or disabling cones, researchers could simulate eye diseases, such as macular degeneration, and test therapies in real time. For color-blind individuals, Oz might trick the brain into perceiving missing colors by rerouting signals from surviving cones. James Fong, a UC Berkeley researcher who was one of the first coauthors in the study, told LiveScience that it could even probe whether humans can learn to interpret entirely synthetic colors: It may be possible for someone to adapt to a new dimension of color.
Right now, however, Oz remains a lab curiosity. The system relies on million-dollar lasers, supercomputers, and participants willing to sit motionless for hours. The experiments targeted only peripheral visiona speck the size of a fingernail at arms lengthbecause the retinas central zone, where vision is sharpest, has cones too tightly packed for current lasers to hit accurately. Scaling this to full sight would require mapping millions of cells and tracking eye movements with zero lag, which is a target quite far from what our current technology can achieve.
Our method depends on specialized lasers and optics that arent coming to smartphones anytime soon, Fong told LiveScience. For now, olo exists only in flashesa fleeting crack in the door to a stranger universe.
The fate of Googles vast empire is now in the hands of a federal judge in Washington, D.C., as hearings begin to determine whether the tech giant should be broken up for maintaining an illegal monopoly in search.
If the court rules against Google, the outcome could send shockwaves through the tech industry. The company might be forced to divest major assetspotentially including its Chrome browser or even the Android operating system. While the government has taken similar antitrust actions in the past, it’s been more than 25 years since a household name faced a breakup of this scale.
So, what happened to the companies that were split upor nearly split upunder government pressure? Lets take a look back.
Microsoft
In 2000, Microsoft came dangerously close to being forced to separate its Windows operating system from its Office suite after a court found it had illegally stifled competition in the personal computer market. However, the breakup order was overturned by an appeals court the following year.
Still, the monopoly ruling left a lasting mark on Microsoft. The company could no longer block PC makers from distributing software from competitors, paving the way for Google and others to grow. As web browsers became increasingly central to the computing experience, that shift proved critical.
AT&T
The government made multiple attempts to break up AT&T, starting in 1913, but didnt succeed until 1984. The result was the dissolution of Ma Bell into several smaller regional companiesknown as the Baby Bellsincluding US West, Ameritech, Nynex, and BellSouth, which handled local calling. AT&T retained control of its long-distance network but soon faced competition, driving prices down. To put it in perspective: A three-minute coast-to-coast call in 1987 cost $3.08 (about $8.45 today). Now, long-distance calls are typically unlimited and included in your monthly plan.
Those Baby Bells grew up and became a strong competitor for AT&T, too: Nynex, GTE, and Bell Atlantic merged to become Verizon, whose market cap is now roughly equal to that of AT&T.
Standard Oil
The John Rockefeller energy company was broken up in 1911, one of the first dissolutions of a giant monopoly. It was split into 34 different companies, including Exxon Mobile, Chevron, and BP.
That breakup changed the oil industry, sparking competition that has continued through today. It also changed the landscape for antitrust, introducing the “rule of reason,” which says businesses are anticompetitive only if they work against the public interest. That’s the rule judges are considering today as they weigh whether to break up Big Tech companies.
IBM
IBM could have been an early cautionary tale for todays Big Tech giants. In 1969, facing a looming antitrust suit, the company chose to preemptively unbundle its hardware and software businesseseffectively treating them as separate entities. At the time, IBM commanded 70% of the computer market.
This voluntary separation helped the company avoid an antitrust judgment, though it still spent years in court and tens of millions of dollars in legal battles. Missteps with subsequent product launches further eroded its market share and leadership. But the rise in competition ultimately lowered costs and helped spark the personal computer revolution. As legal scholar Tim Wu noted in 2018, Apple as we know it might never have existed without the governments prosecution of IBM.
“If IBM had been completely unwatched by regulators, by enforcement, doing whatever they wanted, I think IBM would have held on and maybe wed still be using mainframes, or somethinga very different situation,” he said in an interview with Vox.
American Tobacco
Before Big Tobacco became a catchphrase, there was American Tobaccoa company deemed so dominant that in 1911 it was found in violation of antitrust laws.
Unlike other breakups, however, the dissolution of American Tobacco had little real impact on market dynamics. The newly formed companiessuch as R.J. Reynolds and Liggett & Myerscontinued to dominate, forming an oligopoly. With just a few players controlling the industry, prices remained largely unaffected by competition. Instead, increased marketing budgets drove a rise in consumer use.
Last week, news broke that the Trump administration intends to propose zeroing out Head Start in the upcoming budget. While many peoples immediate concern is rightfully for the hundreds of thousands of children and families whose lives would be upended, attacks on programs that exclusively serve low-income Americans are a popular tactic because that population votes at low rates. In this case, however, the administration has picked an atrocious target: Even setting the immorality of causing so much harm aside, you benefit from Head Start programs whether or not you or anyone you know has ever stepped foot in one.
Head Start (and Early Head Start, its companion program for children younger than 3) has enjoyed bipartisan support for almost 60 years and serves multiple functions: Sites provide important opportunities for child development, offer medical screenings for kids, connect families with local resources, and can serve as community hubs. They are also a critical source of free childcare for more than 700,000 families.
Who are the 700,000 Head Start families?
Who are Head Start families? They consist of many of the people we called essential just five years ago: grocery store stockers, home healthcare aides, hospital custodians, even staff in the childcare programs that serve middle- and high-income families. They are rural families; in many rural counties, Head Start is literally the only childcare program around. They are military families; there is even an on-base Head Start at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs. They are agricultural workers who pick the produce that appears in your supermarket; in fact, more than 26,000 children of seasonal farm workers attend a Head Start.
Imagine for a moment that Congress goes along with the administrations proposal. All of these families lives will be thrown into chaos. As anyone who has a child can tell you, theres no abundance of alternative affordable childcare options out there. Instead, people will do what they need to do, sacrificing their well-being along the way: Theyll cut back hours, work laddered shifts, find care of questionable quality that leaves them anxious and distracted. They may even drop out of the labor force altogether.
Crippling system already in crisis
Indeed, it may be helpful to reframe the headline here as Trump administration seeks to shutter more than 3,000 childcare programs, and then to consider just how absurd such an action would be. After all, the childcare shortage in the U.S. is already harming the stability of family life and the economy. President Donald Trump himself declared in 2019, In more than 60% of American homes, both parents work. Yet many struggle to afford childcare, which often costs more than $10,000 per year. And it’s devastating to families, frankly.
Fewer choices and longer waits
Whats more, the 700,000 families who will lose their childcare if Head Start goes away will not simply disappear. Instead, they will be thrust into the failed market for private childcare services, introducing yet more competition for scarce slots and scarce aid dollars. All Head Start families qualify for, but generally do not utilize, childcare subsidies available through a federal block grant program intended to serve both low- and moderate-income families (i.e., those making up to 85% of state median incomearound $82,000 for a state like Michiganor below, though states can and do set their limits lower). That subsidy program is already so underfunded it can reach only one in six eligible households. Take away Head Start, and existing waitlists and enrollment freezes will only get worse.
The administrations ostensible logic for squashing Head Start requires entirely eliding the childcare role Head Start plays. The budget document states, This elimination is consistent with the Administrations goal of returning education to the States and increasing parental choice. The Federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations, and performance standards for any form of education. Ignoring for a moment the glaring factual inaccuracies (Head Start merely requires sites to adopt some form of reasonable curriculum, not a specific one, and local agencies or groups apply to get funding for locations where they wish to host Head Start classrooms), this is a feint.
There is no commensurate increase of early care and education grants to states being proposed to offset Head Start elimination, so parents will simply have fewer choices. In this respect, the educational content of Head Start is immaterial, and getting drawn into a debate over Head Starts effectiveness is a distraction. Hypothetically, the administration could apply this exact same reasoning to shutting down the hundreds of schools and child development centers that are run by the Department of Defense, all of which come with curricula and performance standards. But of course they wont propose that, because while some military families are struggling due to administration policies, such a large-scale cut would leave tens of thousands of service members with no access to care.
Head Start is not a perfect program. There is a worthwhile conversation to be had about how Head Start may need to evolve if and when the nation moves toward a more comprehensive family policy that includes universal childcare and early learning alongside structural reforms that break down barriers keeping families in poverty. But this is not, in the end, really about Head Start itself. If America is to be strong and prosperous in an uncertain era, the well-being of American families must be placed front and center. There is no American familyand therefore no American businessthat would be untouched by the ripple effects of abruptly gutting Head Start, and doing so would set the country on course for a future marked by yet more scarcity. The administration must turn back.
Electric vehicles have seen a lot of success in recent years, but there are still some concernsfrom range anxiety to insufficient charging infrastructurethat limit their overall adoption. Hybrids dont have those same worries, and hybrid sales have been gaining momentum as the growth of EV sales has slowed. Thats caused some carmakers to pull back on EV offerings and prioritize hybrids instead.
But now a company called Horse Powertrain is offering an alternative to carmakers who are hesitant to go fully electric while still allowing them to develop EVsand keep their EV production lines. Called the Future Hybrid Concept, its essentially a way for automakers to retrofit a battery electric vehicle into a plug-in hybrid. That means automakers could have one production line that makes a variety of powertrains, both developing EVs and also offering hybrid versions.
[Photo: Horse Powertrain]
Horse Powertrain is a joint venture by French auto manufacturer Renault and Chinese conglomerate Geely (Geely subsidiaries include Volvo and Polestar) created to develop low-emission hybrid and combustion systems. Horse Powertrain is unveiling its Future Hybrid Concept at the Shanghai auto show this week.
The Future Hybrid Concept is one compact unit that includes an internal combustion engine, an electric motor, and a transmission. This allows automakers to hybridize their existing battery electric vehicles, the company says, to meet fluctuating customer demands while also “eliminating the need for multiple platforms and production lines.
The Future Hybrid Concept can bolt directly onto an EVs subframe with minor modifications, per Horse. This means that carmakers could manufacture both EVs and hybrids on one assembly line, reducing complexity. Currently, hybrids are often assembled on the same production lines as internal combustion vehicles, and EVs on another, because of the distinct components they need.
Some manufacturers have found ways around this: Honda, for instance, upgraded its Ohio factories so that gas vehicles, hybrids, and EVs can be manufactured on the same lines. But for other automakers that have yet to make those upgrades, or that have prioritized EV innovation but now want to diversify their offerings, Horse Powertrain says its retrofit concept can fit into existing operations. It would also eliminate most of the tooling and unique assembly steps hybrids need, the company says, so that manufacturing lines can be simplified.
Through our innovation, we can deliver a full hybrid powertrain system that seamlessly integrates onto a battery electric vehicle platform, Matias Giannini, CEO at Horse Powertrain, said in a statement.
The Future Hybrid Concept system includes an onboard charger, and could work with a variety of fuels, including gas, ethanol, methanol, and other synthetic fuels. The first vehicles using Horse Powertrains Future Hybrid Concept are expected to be on the road as early as 2028. Horse Powertrain already has 17 production plants and five R&D centers across Europe, Asia, and South America, and expects to produce 5 million powertrain engines annually.
Ive always been a doer. I move fast, I love learning new things, and I dont sit still for long. Productivity has been a faithful companion throughout my career, and I attribute much of my success to one key trait: the courage to take actioneven when things seem uncertain or complex.
I trace this mentality back to a moment in my childhood. I was about 11 years old, growing up in the Netherlands, where a bicycle isnt just a toyits your main mode of transportation. One day, I had my first flat tire and it was raining (as it always is). I felt defeated and immobile. No bike meant no freedom, no way to get from A to B.
I walked home, and my dad, calm as ever, looked at me and said, No problem, lets fix it. Fix it? This was 1984. There was no YouTube tutorial. No step-by-step guide. Just a deflated tire, some tools, and a kid who had no idea what he was doing.
We sat together with a bucket of water to find the hole, sandpaper, and glue to patch it, and metal tools to remove and reinsert the tire. Step by step, we repaired it. He didnt do it for mewe did it together.
That day changed my mindset. I realized that if I can fix this, I can fix anything. From that moment on, Ive believed that most problems are solvable, most obstacles are temporary, and most fears are exaggerated.
How I honed my growth mindset
That mindset was tested often. I wasnt the strongest student. I worked hard at a demanding public high school, but the grades didnt come easy. Worse, many of my teachers seemed to doubt meor at least, didnt hide it well.
Except for one: Mr. Bosman, my physical education teacher. He had an infectious energy and a simple motto. Every time he introduced a new exercise, hed explain, demonstrate, wait for confirmation, and then shout a single wordhis command, his mantra: Do! (but in Dutch of course)
That word stuck with me. It was the only positive affirmation I got from a teacher in those years, and it became my philosophy. When in doubt? Do. When overwhelmed? Do. When uncertain? Still . . . do. Dont sit still, action over inaction wins always.
Fast-forward to my corporate career at The Baan Corporation (a software company that is now part of Infor Global Solutions), I remember meeting Jan Baanthe companys visionary founder. I was just 25, eager, and still finding my professional rhythm. I asked him how he managed to get so much doneand so well.
He told me, Michel, I try to make 20 decisions in a day and still leave time to correct two of them. Thats better than making two perfect decisions and missing out on the other 18. Thats when it clicked for me. Perfection is slow and paralyzing. If I want to move forward, I need to take action while being willing to learn and correct my mistakes in the process.
Why action-oriented leaders win
In my work as an executive coach, I meet many bright, capable, ambitious leaders who still hold onto the opposite mindset. They’re carrying around the weight of things people said to them years ago. Whether thats Im not ready, Im not qualified enough, or Someone else can do it better.
But most of the messages have little merit, and I encourage people to focus on taking action instead.
A recent study published in Current Psychology found that leaders who rely on internal trait-based resourceslike resilience, self-discipline, and adaptabilityare better equipped to manage stress and perform well in complex, high-stakes environments. Its important to note that those qualities arent built by sitting still. Leaders need to sharpen them through movement, iteration, and learning by doing.
Another study in the International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal showed that self-leadership and mindfulness training measurably improve a leaders confidence and decision-making. Its not perfection that builds capabilityits repetition, awareness, and the courage to act even when clarity is incomplete.
This mindset also aligns with modern neuroscience. The brain rewards progresseven small winswith dopamine, which motivates us to keep going.
Final thought: action drives culture
When leaders adopt a bias for action, they dont just transform themselvesthey create a ripple effect. They inspire teams to take initiative. They build cultures where progress trumps perfection, where learning is constant, and where speed is a strategic advantage.
Momentum, after all, is contagious. Decisive leadership removes bottlenecks, boosts morale, and accelerates performance. But hesitation at the top leads to confusion, disengagement, and organizational drag. And once you lose momentum, its hard to rebuild.
Action creates clarity. Action builds confidence. Action fuels momentum. So dont wait for perfection or permission. Just start doing.
I was strolling up the hill in Greater Boston to a French cooking class. The rich aroma of melting butter and fresh herbs greeted us as it wafted through the chilly fall air. My friend Sylvie and I were eager to learn the art of soufflé-making.
The French instructors asked for everyones background. When Sylvie said she was from France, they pressed her to be specific: Which part of France? When they learned she hailed from Strasbourg, the Parisiennes exchanged disapproving glances. Sylvie eyed their silent, snooty disdain.
It got worse. When Sylvie started asking about techniques, we received curt responses and pronounced sighs. We left feeling as deflated as a collapsed soufflé.
The French instructors may have mastered the art of French cooking but failed miserably in practicing humility toward Sylvie. They could have done so by celebrating Sylvies hometown as a region with its own culinary specialties. In snubbing Sylvie, the instructors missed an opportunity to demonstrate the rich diversity of soufflés across geographies and to toast the diversity of participants in the cooking class.
Humility is based on a common theme: Train your focus on others, not on yourself.
The importance of managing your ego
Early in my Silicon Valley career, I had the good fortune to work for Bart, a humble leader who left his ego at the door. Bart regularly sought out employees at all levels for their input on new products and improving the company. He collaborated with individuals and other stakeholders, so they could see what made sense for the business. He asked customers crucial questions and listened carefully to their answers.
Bart never threw his weight around. Instead, he was a role model for how to be in a position of power while ensuring each employee felt heard, included, and invited to showcase their influence. Humility requires you to check your ego and ensure that you dont let it dictate your actions.
Seek and embrace feedback
Later in my career while running my diagnostic equipment business, we hired a head of research and development. This professional came with an impressive pedigreehis PhD and postdoctoral research were from some of the top schools in the world.
With his vast knowledge, accomplishments, and experience he easily could have asserted himself. You know, that arrogant person who knows best, never admits hes wrong, and isnt open to suggestions. Weve all met that individual.
But our new head of R&D was actively soliciting feedback on products from collaborators, customers, and salespeople across the globe with less education. In the end, he was able to integrate input from a broad mix of stakeholders into our products. He always showed his gratitude for ideas people gave him and considered many of them for possible future use.
Listen more than you speak
William is a strength and conditioning coach friend of mine who trains professional and amateur athletes. He says that one of the most common phrases he hears from his clients is You really understand me. He believes that this is because he allows his clients to do most of the talking. They feel heard and understood, he says, because he signals hes listening intently.
According to him, the following practices are key to being a good listener:
Practice active listening without planning your response. If you predict what the other person is about to say, your response could miss the mark. Respond only after the person youre speaking with is done talking.
Show genuine interest in others’ perspectives. Our natural tendency is to blurt out what we think. Resist the urge. Instead, draw the other person out through thoughtful questions.
Dont interrupt or dominate conversations. This is arguably the hardest to do because we want to be heard. Keep your lips together when you feel compelled to interject. Learn to sense when to yield the conversation to another person. You dont want the reputation of being that person who doesnt know when to stop talking.
Ask thoughtful follow-up questions. Think through your follow-up question before you ask it. If youve been listening carefully, a question will come to mind with little effort.
Dont underestimate the impact of curiosity
Theres a concept called epistemic humility, which refers to a trait where you seek to learn on a deep level while actively acknowledging how much you dont know.
Approach each interaction with curiosity, an open mind, and an assumption youll learn something new. Ask thoughtful questions about others experiences, perspectives, and expertise. Then listen and show your genuine interest in their responses. Let them know what you just learned. By consistently being curious, you demonstrate youre not above learning from others.
Juan, a successful entrepreneur in the healthy beverage space, approaches life and grows his business with intellectual humility. Hes a deeply curious professional who seeks feedback and perspectives from customers, employees, advisers, and investors.
Juans ongoing openness to learning led him to adapt faster to market changes in his beverage category: He quickly identifies shifting customer preferences as well as competitive threats, then rapidly tweaks his product offerings to keep competitors at bay. He has the humility to realize he doesnt have all the answers and embraces listening to key voices that help make his business even more successful.
A final reflection
Being humble makes us more approachable and respected. With humility, we value others perspectives. The French soufflé instructors lost their class participants respect because far from practicing humility, they served up snobbery along with their lessons on creating the perfect soufflé.
Humility isn’t about diminishing oneself. It’s about having a balanced perspective about yourself while showing genuine respect and appreciation for others. And if youre open to the journey, the growth and self-awareness will enrich your life and the lives of those around you.
Its easy to get swept up in headlines predicting the end of the design industry as we know it. Its true: AI tools can now generate in seconds what once took days for teams of designers. So its no longer a question of whether these tools will be usedbut how, why, and by whom. If design as we know it is being automated, what remains? And what becomes more valuable?
In the 1930s, cultural critic Walter Benjamin argued that mechanical reproductionphotography, film, the printing presswas transforming not just how art was made, but how it was perceived. His concern wasnt just about losing originality or craft; it was about losing aurathe sense of presence that comes from a works connection to time, place, and purpose. When something can be reproduced endlessly, that connection starts to dissolve. And in the post-internet world, its all but collapsedcontext has become slippery, distributed, and flattened. The role of creative direction, then, is to restore that lost dimensionalityto place things, to anchor them in context.
The craft of execution is no longer a differentiator. For surface-level visuals, speed and quantity now rule. But this shift reveals something deeper: When production is automated, the designers role becomes less about making and more about meaning.
Ive felt this shift firsthand. At the outset of my career, I spent hoursdaysin Photoshop extending backgrounds, removing objects, and meticulously cutting out product images for e-commerce sites. It was repetitive, yesbut also meditative. There was a quiet satisfaction in working with images by hand, pixel by pixel. That kind of technical work is now (thankfully) almost entirely automated. Although I miss blocking off an afternoon to push pixels, the ability to delegate those tasks means I no longer need to dedicate time to erasing shadowsI spend that time deciding what the image should say in the first place.
Not all design disciplines are equally affected by AI. Those who work with material, scale, and spacebook designers, muralists, sign painters, mosaicistscontinue to operate through tacit knowledge and touch. Their work still resists automation because its rooted in place and presenceit has aura. But even in brand design, something similar holds true: The more a designers value is bound to personal taste, knowledge of context, and aesthetic judgment, the more durable it becomes.
Its tempting to hold onto the idea of the designer as auteur, untouched by context. But that belief overlooks how meaning is actually made: not by the author alone, but in conversation with culture, with tools, with audience. Mistaking authorship for authority leads to stagnation. If you’re a designer today, your ability to thrive depends on shifting your creative identity from executor to editor, and from technician to translator. The cost of not adapting isnt just irrelevance. Its being indistinguishable from the tools themselves. As Chris Braden, my former CCO at Public Address, has said: In nature, things that don’t move are dead.
Virgil Abloh, Pyrex Vision Rugby Flannel (2012). Abloh bought Ralph Lauren shirts from outlet stores, screen-printed PYREX 23 across the back, and sold them at a premium, reframing authorship through minimal intervention. [Image: Pyrex Vision]
Which is why creative direction matters more now than ever. If designers are no longer the makers, they must become the orchestrators. This isnt without precedent. Rick Rubin doesnt read music or play instruments. Virgil Abloh was more interested in recontextualizing than inventing. Their value lies not in original execution but in framing, curation, and translation. The same is true now for brand designers. Creative direction is about synthesizing abstract ideas into aesthetic systemsshaping meaning through how things feel, not just how they look.
This opens up a new kind of opportunity for ideas to come from more rigorous placescritical theory, art history, cultural analysiswithout being stripped of their richness. AI can absolutely help translate complex ideas into accessible ones. But its the designer who chooses which ideas to bring forward, how to apply them, and why they matter in a given moment. Thats not just a function of intelligenceits a function of intuition, authorship, and taste.
Taste isnt just personal preference. Its an evolving, often unstable frameworkshaped by experience, exposure, and the cultural momentthat informs how we make aesthetic judgments. Its not fixed, nor is it singular. What feels resonant in one context may fall flat in another. Taste is less about knowing whats right and more about understanding whats relevantwhat aligns, what disrupts, what works now. In a world of infinite possibilities, taste becomes less of a crown and more of a compass.
Top to bottom: Thorlo by High Tide NYC (2023), Artworld by Mouthwash Studio (2020), Ilford by an unknown designer (1997). Theyre nearly identical, yet each feels novel within its own context. [Image: courtesy of the author]
Its no longer enough to know whats trending from scrolling your various feeds. As Abloh understood, when originality becomes obsolete, novelty comes from recombination, from juxtaposition: from having a point of view. If your value lies in how you seeand how you help others seethats not just algorithm-resistant. Its literally irreplaceable.
AI is a toolbut like all technologies, its not neutral. It reflects the choices of its makers and transforms every system it touches. It influences markets, media, and belief. It expands whats possible while quietly reshaping how meaning is made. And its impact on creative work is especially complex. Its a medium, a system, a collaborator. It can generate, iterate, and surprise. But it cant decide what mattes. It cant assign meaning. It cant make a choice. AI responds to input. Creative direction is that input.
This shift raises real questions for the future of design education and hiring. What does a portfolio look like when visuals are no longer enough? Increasingly, it might look less like a finished book and more like a screenplay: a series of prompts, iterations, references, and decisions that show how a designer directed a process, not just executed an outcome. The goal isnt to hide the machine but to show how its been used with intention.
Were moving into an era where synthesis and judgmentnot just executionare the creative differentiators. AI will continue to evolve, and yesit will replace certain tasks and even entire roles. But it wont replace curiosity. It wont replace intuition. And it wont replace the ability to decide what matters.
Take a look at your to-do list. Does it seem never-ending? The thing about task lists is that they are filled with specific things you need to accomplish. Combine that with an ever-expanding inbox, and you have a recipe for busy work days.
While you may get many things done, you may not feel like they are adding up to a more significant contribution to the mission of your workplace or your own big-picture goals. To ensure that the specific things youre doing lead to important outcomes, you need some time in your schedule to reflect on the big-picture goals you have and their relationship to the actions youre taking day-to-day.
Here are a few things you can do to clear the mental space to make sure your days are not just busy, but productive.
The value of unstructured time
Ensuring that your daily activities lead up to something more substantial will not happen by magic. Instead, you need to regularly save some time that is not devoted to the particular tasks that are already on your task list.
There are several purposes for this time. You want to reflect on whether the things that take up most of your time are related to the most important goals both for you and the organization. Chances are, there are many things you have to do each day that do not contribute significantly to that mission.
Identify some of the activities that soak up your time that are not that productive. Are they necessary? Are there things youre doing that you can put further down the list of priorities? Do you need to talk to your supervisor about some of the things that clutter your calendar?
Are there things you should be doing to make your contribution that are not happening? You also want to have a list of activities youre not doing that you need to be doing. Youll need to figure out how to add more of those into your daily and weekly schedule.
Finding a space to make space
One problem with trying to take a big-picture view of things is that you are likely to be surrounded by reminders to take care of the next task. You probably have documents on your desk and your computer desktop that need to be completed. You have an email inbox with a constant drip of new messages crying out to be answered. You have DMs from team members asking for information.
That can make it difficult to disconnect enough to create the mindset you need to think about strategic issues. It can be helpful to use physical distance from your most pressing tasks to think strategically.
Consider taking a walk or going to a conference room at your workplace that has a whiteboard. The distance has two benefits: First, it separates you from the specific reminders of the tasks at hand; second, psychology research suggests that physical distance can actually help you think more abstractly about your work. When you think more abstractly, youre better able to ignore the specific tasks and focus on the primary accomplishments youd like to achieve as well as the general barriers that may stand in the way of success.
Drawing your big-picture goals
When talking about strategic goals, we often use phrases like achieving a vision or seeing the future. Yet we also tend to lay out our goals in written documents. Sometimes, it can be helpful to take the language of envisioning more literally.
Sketches and diagrams may be helpful for changing the way you think about your desired contribution. So many of our workplace tools involve writing (like email, instant messages, and meeting agendas) that we get locked into needing the right words to describe what we want to bring about.
Grab a big sheet of paper or use a whiteboard. Leave the words behind at first and just sketch out processes, concepts, or prototypes. Dont worry if you dont think youre good at capturing likenesses. The power of sketches and diagrams comes from being able to use space as an element of your thinking to engage the massive amount of brain real estate devoted to vision more deeply.
Anthropic, Menlo Ventures, and other AI industry players are betting $50 million on a company called Goodfire, which aims to understand how AI models think and steer them toward better, safer answers.
Even as AI becomes more embedded in business systems and personal lives, researchers still lack a clear understanding of how AI models generate their output. So far, the go-to method for improving AI behavior has focused on shaping training data and refining prompting methods, rather than addressing the models internal thought processes. Goodfire is tackling the latterand showing real promise.
The company boasts a kind of dream team of mechanistic interpretability pioneers. Cofounder Tom McGrath helped create the interpretability team at DeepMind. Cofounder Lee Sharkey pioneered the use of sparse autoencoders in language models. Nick Cammarata started the interpretability team at OpenAI alongside Chris Olah, who later cofounded Anthropic. Collectively, these researchers have delivered some of the fields biggest breakthroughs.
Goodfire founder and CEO Eric Ho, who left a successful AI app company in 2022 to focus on interpretability, tells Fast Company that the new funding will be used to expand the research team and enhance its Ember interpretability platform. In addition to its core research efforts, Goodfire also generates revenue by deploying field teams to help client organizations understand and control the outputs of their AI models.
Goodfire is developing the knowledge and tools needed to perform brain surgery on AI models. Its researchers have found ways to isolate modules within neural networks to reveal the AIs thoughts. Using a technique they call neural programming, they can intervene and redirect a models cognition toward higher-quality, more aligned outputs. We envision a future where you can bring a little bit of the engineering back to neural networks, Ho says.
The company has also been collaborating with other AI labs to solve interpretability challenges. For example, Goodfire has helped the Arc Institute interpret the inner workings of its Evo 2 DNA foundation model, which analyzes nucleotide sequences and predicts what comes next. By understanding how the model makes its predictions, researchers have uncovered unique biological conceptspotentially valuable for new scientific discoveries.
Anthropic, too, may benefit from Goodfires insights. “Our investment in Goodfire reflects our belief that mechanistic interpretability is among the best bets to help us transform black-box neural networks into understandable, steerable systemsa critical foundation for the responsible development of powerful AI,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement.
According to Ho, Goodfire has also been fielding requests from Fortune 500 companies that want to better understand how the large language models they use for business are thinkingand how to change faulty reasoning into sound decision-making. He notes that many within businesses still see AI models as another kind of software, something that can be reprogrammed when it produces incorrect outputs. But AI works differently: It generates responses based on probabilities and a degree of randomness. Improving those outputs requires intervention within the models cognitive processes, steering them in more productive directions.
This kind of intervention is still a new and imprecise science. It remains crude and at a high level and not precise, Ho says. Still, Goodfire offers an initial tool kit that gives enterprises a level of control more familiar from traditional deterministic software.
As companies increasingly rely on AI for decisions that affect real lives, Ho believes the ability to understand and redirect AI models will become essential. For instance, if a developer equips a model with ethical or safety guardrails, an organization should be able to locate the layer or parameter in the neural network where the model chose to bypass the rulesor tried to appear compliant while it wasnt. This would mean turning the AI black box into a glass box, with tools to reach inside and make necessary adjustments.
Ho is optimistic that interpretability research can rise to the challenge. This is a solvable, tractable, technical problem, but it’s going to take our smartest researchers and engineers to solve the really hard problem of understanding and aligning models to human goals and morals.
As AI systems begin to surpass human intelligence, concerns are growing about their alignment with human values and interests. A major part of the challenge lies in simply understanding whats happening inside AI models, which often think in alien, opaque ways. Whether the big AI labs are investing enough in interpretability remains an open questionone with serious implications for our readiness for an AI-driven future. Thats why its encouraging to see major industry players putting real funding behind an interpretability research lab. Lightspeed Venture Partners, B Capital, Work-Bench, Wing, and South Park Commons also participated in the funding round. Menlo Ventures partner Deedy Das will join Goodfires board of directors.
While most of the tech world now rushes ahead with the development and application of generative AI models, concerns about the inscrutable nature of the models often get brushed aside as afterthoughts. But that wasnt always the case. Google hesitated to put generative models into production because it feared being sued over unexpected and unexplainable model outputs.
In some industries, however, such concerns remain very relevant, Das points out. There are extremely sensitive use cases in law, finance, and so on, where trying to deploy AI models as we know them today is just not feasible because you’re relying on a black box to make decisions that you don’t understand why it’s making those decisions, Das says. A good part of [Goodfires] mission is just to be able to do that.
