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One more reminder about our upcoming online event: On Thursday, March 27, at 1 p.m. ET, my colleague Max Ufberg and I will host The AI Tools We Love Right Nowand Whats Next, exclusively for Fast Company Premium subscribers. Well discuss the AI-assisted productivity tools that are actually helping us get our jobs done, and where wed like to see the whole category go. Fast Company Premium subscribers can RSVP here. And if you arent yet a subscriber, heres where you can become one. Hope to see you there! Its the Worlds Most Innovative Companies week at Fast Company. Our annual ranking of organizations across 58 industries is live on our site, and bursting with bright ideas that are changing business, society, and, well, life. I hope youll take a look. My primary contribution to this massive undertaking was writing a cover story about our No. 1 company, Waymo. The feature looks at how the self-driving pioneers robotaxi service went from an unlikely skunkworks project at Google to a commercial service now serving 200,000 riders a week, and what might be next. Read it, and youll hear from Waymos co-CEOs, Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov, along with others inside and outside the company. But along with all the fresh interviews I did, I revisited one I conducted in September 2013. Thats when I sat down with Google cofounder and then-CEO Larry Page for a Time magazine story. The piece focused on the companys moonshot strategy of assigning itself improbably ambitious projectsespecially a division it had started, Calico, that was charged with investigating ways to extend the human life span. (Its still at it.) At the time, Waymo wasnt yet Waymo. Announced less than three years earlier, the effort was a mysterious research project within the Google X lab. The company was secretive enough about the whole thing that when I took a brief highway trip in one of its self-driving cars near the Googleplex in Mountain View, it was with the understanding that my Time article wouldnt detail my impressions. (Almost a dozen years later, I can finally spill my guts: I thought it was incredible.) I knew that story should touch on Googles autonomy project, and that speaking about it with Page was a rare opportunity. Even then, he granted as few press interviews as his PR team would let him get away with. My contacts at the company warned me that he might fall silent or even walk out in mid-conversation. When the day came, Page turned out to be both engaging andas far as I could tellengaged. But his handlers didnt exaggerate his dislike of talking to the press. My interview turned out to be among the last he gave. After creating Alphabet as a new holding company optimized for managing moonshots and handing Googles reins over to Sundar Pichai, he pretty much retired from public life altogether. What he thinks about Waymos present momentum, Im not sure. Back in 2013, however, Page told me quite a bit about the origins and goals of Googles self-driving initiative, explaining that it stemmed from his own interest in the technology, which had been percolating since the mid-1990s. He stressedagain and againthat he was in a hurry to see autonomous cars become an everyday reality. He might even have been happiest if someone had pulled off the feat before Google was in a place to give it a try. I was at Stanford as a grad student when I became interested in that, he told me. Nothing really changed between [then] and when we started working on it. I’m sure computers got better, and sensors got better, but there’s no reason why people couldnt have been working on it 10 years earlier, for real. Now, it should be noted that Googles self-driving project didnt spring out of nowhere: Its founder, Sebastian Thrun, current co-CEO Dolgov, and others involved with the effort over the years contributed to Stanfords entries in a series of Grand Challenges put on by the U.S. Department of Defenses DARPA lab from 2004 to 2007. But those competitions were races among experimental autonomous vehicles conducted in the desert and other isolated environments. By moving quickly to test its self-driving cars on public roads, Google really did give the technology an abrupt shove toward reality. Ten years earlier, it would’ve been harder, Page allowed. It would’ve cost twice as much as it does now. But that’s not a major cost. I’m sad that it didnt get done earlier. My key insight is that there are just such opportunities out there to do things faster and do things that matter to people. What’s limiting those things getting done is people wanting to pursue them, and being organized about it, and understanding the opportunities. According to Page, one of his primary roles as CEO was to identify moonshots such as teaching a car to drive itselfthough he added that he considered his indispensability to this process as a limiting factor. A bunch of these things we’re working on have come from me, he said. It actually kind of worries me, because I wish that we had a more scalable process to do that. That’s a big part of what [Google] X is doing, to both think about more possible ideas and also have a deep technological understanding of what’s possible. Still, the question remained: Why Google? The company had made its bones and its fortune with its namesake search engine. Its most successful follow-ups, such as Gmail, were in closely related areas. Even the Google+ social network, which was in the process of flopping when Page and I spoke, wasnt far removed from the companys comfort zone. But on paper, it wasnt obvious why a search company might be poised to disrupt the transportation industry in the most fundamental way imaginable. Page did point out that some of Googles existing skills and intellectual property could be applied to the autonomy challenge: We have a lot of technologies for 3D modeling of the world that we developed, to really make Street View work and to make all of Google Maps work. Mostly, though, he argued that wildly disparate moonshots might be easier to get right than products requiring thoughtful integratio with existing Google mainstays. More than anything else, it was his and cofounder Sergey Brins willingness to connect dots that other corporate leaders didnt see that made something like self-driving cars make sense within the company. What I’m saying is we have people who can apply [their expertise] to a variety of projects, he said. And I find that to be more scalable than some of what you might think of as our core businesses. During our interview, Page noted that in some industries, it takes 20 years to go from idea to something real, bringing up the time span as a problem to be solved rather than an unavoidable fact. Rather than investing his full attention to steering Waymo and other new initiatives through to completion, he ended up stepping down as Alphabet CEO in 2019. He remains on the companys board but is also launching an unaffiliated AI startup, The Informations Jessica Lessin and Erin Woo report. Still available in only a few cities, Waymo is following the 20-year trajectory that Page found so frustrating. Yet it may remain the Alphabet moonshot with the biggest shot at changing the world. Its a testament to his vision that its journey continues well after he moved on. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if youre reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. Im also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company A new Cybertruck recall is the umpteenth chapter in Teslas history of design issuesTeslas woes dont and wont stop, as the Cybertruck once again highlights its poor quality and design. Read More Do school phone bans actually work? Not really, a new study saysResearchers found no improvement in student well-being or academic performance at schools that restrict cellphone use. Read More Dinosaur time is the viral new way to eat your greensTired of smoothies and salads? One TikTokers chaotic spinach hack is both unhinged and strangely effective. Read More Google buys Wiz: How the cybersecurity startup went from $0 to $32 billion in just over 5 yearsGoogles acquisition of the cloud security unicorn marks its largest deal everand a historic milestone for Israels tech scene. Read More Nvidias Vera Rubin represents a big bet on real-time AI reasoningThe companys new chips are built to meet generative AIs growing demand for real-time reasoning capabilities. Read More The rise of the AI managerAs AI agents become high-performing digital teammates, the professionals who learn to lead them will define the future of work. Read More
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During one of the hardest nights of Rachel Plattens lifeamidst postpartum depression, debilitating chronic pain, and mental health challengesshe glimpsed the light at the end of the tunnel. I was in my studio and reached the apex of I cant take it anymore, she says. The bottom wasnt there. I just kept falling. In that moment, this wail came out of me that turned into a song. I was crying, mercy to anyone who would hear me, to whatever God that was out there. Something was writing through me, she continues. I realized: Is there a purpose or meaning in all of this suffering? Am I being dragged down, like I was with ‘Fight Song,’ letting my roots go deep so that my rise can be tall again? I was in just as much pain the next morning. But that little seed of hope was planted that maybe theres a future ahead of me that Im living right now. Today, that seed has flourished into Plattens first album in seven years, I Am Rachel Platten, as well as an inspired mission of mental health advocacy. An award-winning singer-songwriter, Platten and her music is celebrated as a beacon of resilience, most notably with “Fight Song,” which has been streamed over a billion times. Her latest album captures her experience of parenthood, mental health, depression, and the strength discovered in the rising. She continues to bravely share her story through her North American Set Me Free tour, which began on March 17. Here, Platten shares how she alchemized pain into purpose, developed tools to gain agency over mindset, and discovered the question that transformed her creative process. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was illuminating to listen to Set Me Free and discover that its about self-liberation. What did you free yourself from and how do you keep doing so in your art and life? First, what is funny to me, is that I wrote that way before I could ever know what it felt like. My songs are often glimpses of what will be. Its almost like I prescribe myself the medicine that I’ll need in the future or the feeling that I’ll feel. So, I didn’t know what that felt like at the time. I felt a little bit like an imposter. It’s almost like the song, when I wrote it in 2020, should have been: I dont really care what you say or think about me She says, caring deeply. Now I actually feel that, and that took an insane mental breakdown to get to. Freedom to me feels like exactly that: Knowing who I am and being in a place where I can speak my truth. I don’t feel like I have to hold back. I know how to have boundaries, protect my inner child, and carry myself in the world where I’m not apologizing for my existence. Its not going along with what you say I should care about or what makes a happy life. That was a major wake-up for me. Think about how you feel when you get an award, approval, or recognition. For me, that feeling is buzzy, excited, and a little unstable. Think about how you feel when you are deeply proud of yourself. When you can recognize, put a hand on your heart and say, I approve of you and I’m proud of you just for being you. That feeling is calm and steady, solid, and stable. Why are we taught that we should chase the first one, when the second one is so much better? That’s my goal now: How do I get more and more of that second feeling? In discussing this album, you said: I dont need my beautiful body of work to be anything other than what it is. How do you create from an intuitive space and silence the internal and external voices? My second record on Columbia Records was very much the latter and informed by how I wanted to change people’s minds about who they thought the Fight Song girl was. I was trying to prove something in the art. Other than a couple of songs on that record, I didn’t get to write from that freedom. I slowly stopped writing from a place of: What does anyone need from the Fight Song girl? I changed from that to: I’m hurting so much. How can my music serve me, the way it serves so many other people? When I wrote from that place, it removed any kind of outside expectation, because I was like a starving soul in there, desperate for some soothing. The music and creativity became like filling a dry well. It changed from a laborious process of overanalyzing the words or rhymes and became an intuitive songwriting where it flowed more. That hadnt always been the case; Fight Song took me two years to write. I labored over that second verse so much. I wrote 10 different verses until I got the one that you hear on the radio. Now, I do create from a place of joy and freedom. Asking yourselfWhat do I need from my art?and notWhat does the world need from my art?is the question that really shifts it. Robert Henri said, The object isnt to make art. Its to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable. What is that state for you? Do you do anything differently now that enhances your creative inspiration? Music is funny, because it goes from a deeply inward, private place to a very outward, extroverted place. We phase in between them. That’s what I do. Right now, I’m in the outward place and the creativity isn’t flowing like it was. But, I am also not asking it to. I know where I’m at in my cycle. I feel like Im a volcano in a way. I erupt with creativity. Then, I’m dormant. I used to judge the dormancy and feel like there was something wrong with me if songs weren’t flowing. I have taken all the pressure off my creativity and songwriting. I know that I am privileged to do that because I had success that supports me and my family. I understand that when I was in my twenties, and struggling to come up as an artist, it might not have felt like that. But, I wish that I could go back to that girl who was suffering and trying so hard and say to her: Enjoy it a little more. Try to trust the wave and ocean of creativity and how it’s going to come and go. Don’t push it when it’s not. Id certainly be disciplined. But, I’m a lot more patient with it. I trust now that if the muse wants to come, then I’ll start writing. You shared that to actually change something has to start with radical acceptance of what is. Real change only happens once you say yes to what is actually here. What helps you choose the path of acceptance? First, I want to attribute that quote to Tara Brach, who is an amazing psychiatrist. She has a practice called RAIN, which is an acronym that helped me so much: Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture. I dont know if its a choice. Its more of a shrug and dropping in, like: Yes, Im suffering. Yes, Im depressed. Yes, this hurts. This is a witness seat. Rather than the human seat, it’s choosing the seat behind you, who’s watching you, and saying: I’m watching a play. Thats what’s happening with this actor right now. It’s less of a choice and more changing your point of view. So much power and relief can come from that, because then youre not having the second arrow of shame, grief, or guilt about what you’re experiencing. The first arrow is the pain that you’re feeling. The second arrow is the judgment of the experience that you’re having. Its removing the secod arrow and removing half the pain in a way. There is a lyric in Bad Thoughts that says: Just because I think something doesnt make it true. How do you distinguish between the voices in your head? What has been most impactful in changing the dialogue and relationship that you have with yourself? I am a little ninja now when it comes to trying to get into my mind. I imagine myself with goggles and a headlamp, like: Who’s running the show today? There’s all these different competing voices, that’s inside all of usall of these different selves. Here’s the most beautiful part: I don’t need to understand what all the mess is in there. It’s like changing the seat again into the witness. Sometimes, I just need to witness it to remember: If I’m watching it, then I’m not it. I imagine this visual idea of me getting on a bus and in the drivers seat is whichever version of me that shouldn’t be driving. I imagine myself as the bus driver, being like: I’m going to take the wheel. You can still be on this bus, but you have to sit down and get your seatbelt on. You’re too young to drive. I’m calm and resourced. It helps me navigate my mind and remember that those are just waves. I’m the ocean. Mental health has become a driving part of your mission. What role do you want it to play in your life’s work? It feels like a narrowing, but it’s actually an expansion. It feels clear to me that this is where I’m going. Music feels like the vehicle. But, I feel like my life’s work is going to transcend music. Chasing the music industry, Grammys, and approval from tastemaker magazines is a fleeting thing. I’m not writing about how a guy hurt me. I’m writing about my mind and how I’m understanding it, the dark night of the soul, and the hero’s journey. It feels simple to me that I’m not supposed to try to fit in or be approved of by that anymore. I’m going to go in this direction and be of service. A theme of our conversation is the surprises on your journey these last six years, some from pain and others from joy. How do you feel about the surprises? Looking back, I feel a little bit of wonder that the thing that hurt so muchthat I cursed, sobbed, and had panic attacks aboutwas the gift that led to my songs Mercy or Bad Thoughts or being able to speak about mental health in such an informed way. That’s the place I’m in now. If you catch me next week, I might be back in: This Earth school sucks. It really hurts. But right now, for whatever reason, we’re meant to talk on this day when I’m looking back with a sense of gratitude and deep awe at how all of those things that seemed so unfair were actually giftsnot happening to me, but for me.
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If you’re trying to keep an eye on March Madness but you still need to get some actual work done, Google’s Picture-in-Picture Extension feels like a secret weapon. This free Chrome browser extension lets you move any video into a resizable, floating window that sits on top of anything else you’re doing. It’s perfect for keeping the games on in the background while still doing other things on your computer. How to use the Picture-in-Picture Extension Start by downloading the picture-in-picture extension from the Chrome Web Store. In addition to Google Chrome, it also works with most other Chromium-based browsers, including Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, Arc, and Microsoft Edge. Once you’ve installed the extension, here’s how to use it: Start playing a video. Click on the puzzle piece icon near the top-right corner of your browser. Click on the Picture-in-Picture Extension button. (You can also optionally click the pin icon so the extension appears right next to your address bar in the future.) Alternatively, you can skip the previous two steps by pressing Alt+P in Windows or Option+P on a Mac. Drag the floating video player to a convenient spot on your desktop, and drag the corners of the player to resize it. To exit picture-in-picture mode, click the “X” or “Back to tab” buttons in the floating window. Watch several games at once Chrome’s Picture-in-Picture Extension works only with one video at a time, which isn’t ideal for March Madness. The work-around is to use more than one web browser, each with its own Picture-in-Picture Extension. For instance, you can use Google Chrome to play one game, Microsoft Edge to play another, and Vivaldi to play a third. You’re limited only by the number of web browsers you’ve installed and how many simultaneous videos your computer can handle. What about Safari and Firefox? Apple’s Safari browser has its own picture-in-picture mode, no browser extension required: Right-click the audio icon on any tab that’s playing video. Select “Enter Picture-in-Picture.” This works only with one video at a time, so you’ll need to use additional browsers to watch multiple games. Mozilla Firefox has as built-in picture-in-picture mode as well, and it even works with multiple videos. Hover your cursor over any video, then click the small picture-in-picture icon that pops up. A word of advice, though: Keep the sound down, or you may have trouble getting anything done.
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