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The new Pentagon press corps gathered last week for their first in-person briefing. Thats since almost all credentialed reporters from traditional media companies surrendered their passes in October to protest new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s strict media policy. Refusing to sign a 21-page Pentagon document that in effect banned journalists from trying to solicit any kind of information that was not pre-approved, the Pentagon instead issued passes to a newly credentialed corps of influencers, conspiracy theorists, and conservative commentators who happily agreed to the strict rules. The handpicked press corps were active on social media last week as they documented their first few days on the jobs. The Fake News is OUT, Wade Searle, who works for LifeSiteNews, a right-wing Catholic publication, posted on X. LifeSiteNews is IN. The A-Team press corps has taken over type beat, 23-year-old MAGA influencer Lance Johnston posted. He also uploaded a slideshow of photos of himself posing with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. Others were otherwise occupied fighting over the desks of former press corp reporters. The Pentagon cubicle that used to belong to @DanLamothe is now mine, RC Maxwell, a reporter at the conservative outlet RedScare, posted on X, referring to a journalist at The Washington Post. Out with the propagandists and hacks. In with the truth tellers who love America. Conservative influencer Cam Higby and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer also shared photos of themselves claiming to be sitting in Lamothe’s old spot. The Post reporter shared a compilation of the images on X, writing, “Y’all are going to have to work this one out for yourselves.” During the three-day event, the new press corps didnt miss an opportunity to take shots at their predecessors. MSM Journalists wreaked havoc on the Pentagon during their time in the building, posted Higby on X. He claimed that the adversarial media created a hostile work environment for staff, echoed by Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson who spoke of former press corp members waltzing into her office and eavesdropping on officials meetings. The new press corp instead brought the heat and kept the public informed on issues relating to national security. Hegseth answered my questions. Its off the record so no details but I am very pleased with his leadership, John Konrad, a former ship captain and social media personality, reassured his X followers Wednesday. Last week also saw the release of the long-awaited inspector generals report on Hegseths sharing of highly sensitive military attack plans on the unclassified app Signal earlier this year. JUST IN: Advisor to @SecWar tells @RedState the IG report on SignalGate is an exoneration given that it proves no laws were broken, no classified information was shared, and the mission was a success, Maxwell posted on X. That is despite the report explicitly saying that Hegseth’s actions could have led to U.S. soldiers being harmed. The new press also kept the public informed with reports of festivities in the Pentagon. SANTA @ PENTAGON, Higby posted. Today Secretary of War Pete Hegseth introduced the children of Americas warfighters and civilian DoW staff to Santa, escorted in an armored military vehicle. Two soldiers in elf hats rapelled from the building as the vehicle arrived. Johnston also captured the Pentagon Christmas tree lighting party for the publics benefit. Last week, The New York Times sued the Pentagon and Hegseth over limits on press reporting. They alleged that the ban seeks to restrict journalists ability to do what journalists have always done ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements.
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E-Commerce
For many who grew up visiting older relatives during the holidays, memories of childhood Christmas are swathed in a warm glow that feels like the calling card of the season: a combination of colorful bulbs, lit candles, and soft lamplight. In recent years, though, it feels like the holiday season has traded its cozy tones for a much cooler, even sterile color palette. As it turns out, thats not just a quirk of our rosy collective memory. David Andora, a multidisciplinary creative whos worked in branding, production design, specialized lighting, and parade events, set out to understand why Christmas looks so different today. He discovered that, with the advent of LED technology, classic holiday lighting has become something of a lost art. When LED lights started becoming the norm for Christmas lights, which happened quite a while ago, one of the things that was completely missing was that warm, peachy glow that came off of those incandescent painted big bulbs, Andora says. Each year I would go to the big box resellers, look at the new Christmas lights, and wonder, Why is no one making these? [Photo: courtesy Tru-Tone] So, he decided to do it himself. Andoras company, Tru-Tone, caters to a growing audience of customers who want the look of retro Christmas without any of the accompanying fire hazards. The company declined to share exact sales numbers with Fast Company, but its seen major demand since its founding in 2020, experiencing growth of about 50% over the past several consecutive years. A 25-light set of Tru-Tone bulbs costs about $65, making them significantly pricier than similar options at big box stores (a 100-count strand at Home Depot that retails for about $50). Tru-Tones secret, Andora says, comes down to a fairly simple design trick that pairs modern LED technology with a vintage lighting technique. [Photo: Tru-Tone] Why are today’s Christmas lights so bad? During his research process, Andora found that the Christmas light manufacturing process has changed drastically since the mid-20th century. In that era, almost all holiday lights were incandescents, or bulbs that emit light via heat. The actual light source was all one colora warm white hueand, to make it colorful, American manufacturers like GE (one of the largest holiday light makers at the time) would add translucent bulbs with color washes on top. This combination created the peachy glow that defines Christmas nostalgia. There was just one major drawback to incandescent Christmas lights: they were hot. Like, really hot. Your parents were constantly warning you to never leave the tree lit unattended, Andora says. If you left the room, the tree had to be turned off because there were all these horror stories of trees burning people’s houses down with these blazingly hot light bulbs. LED lights began to replace incandescents in the late 90s, and manufacturing largely moved overseas to China. Unlike incandescents, almost all LED holiday lights on the market rely on colored LED diodes, rather than color-washed bulbs, to produce their final look. Colors from an LED diode are deeply saturated, “pure” colors emitted from a very narrow spectrum of colored light, whereas white incandescent light filtered through a colorful bulb produces a wider spectrum of light. This difference in the breadth of light spectrum is what makes many LED bulbs appear harsher and more electronic (even if they’re trying to recreate a “warmer” appearance), whereas vintage incandescents have a blurry, glowing look. [Photos: courtesy Tru-Tone] For Chinese manufacturers, this process makes sense, Andora says. Producing lights that draw their color from the LED itself is much simpler and more cost-effective than the incandescent technique, on top of LEDs being significantly more environmentally friendly. In addition, he says, Chinese manufacturers typically dont hae the same nostalgic associations with peachy tones that American consumers do, meaning that modern LED bulbs are also considered more aesthetically appealing. “The nostalgia for warm-colored Christmas lights is very Western, not part of the region where these lights come from. The factories view the colored-diode lights as easier, less costly, and more beautiful,” Andora says. “Very little development of these products is coming from the U.S. Most of this happens from the factories, and provides a catalog to resellers, also shaping what we see for sale here.” To recreate the vintage Christmas look, he would need to both rethink todays design process and convince manufacturers to adopt a new process. [Photo: courtesy Tru-Tone] How Tru-Tone recreated the vintage incandescent look Tru-Tone started as a passion project from a basement in Michigan. Andora spent a year experimenting with his prototype before landing on a final product that he felt looked almost identical to the real thing. To recreate vintage incandescents, Tru-Tones products use the same basic process as the original lights. Every light is a warm white LED that’s fitted with a tinted bulb on top to produce the actual color. Inside the bulb, the light itself is created by warm white LED “filaments”an array of very tiny LED’s used to mimic a tungsten wire filamentwhich create their warm white color with a color-tuned phosphor coating. Andora says this technique already exists in modern household lighting to produce a warmer effect, but Tru-Tone is the first to bring it to holiday lighting, likely because it adda an extra layer of inefficiency to the manufacturing process. To capture the nostalgic magic of vintage Christmas lights, Andora experimented with theater gels to perfect each bulb’s color wash. He used archival incandescent light samples from a range of periods, dating from the ’50s all the way to the ’90s. Once Andora had an actual product, the real challenge was convincing an overseas manufacturer to sign on. Hiring a manufacturer was made even more complicated by the fact that Andora hand-designs all of Tru-Tones packaging (and its delightfully retro website) to resemble vintage advertisements, which, he says, often included font alignment inaccuracies and printing errors that lend them a certain charm. Today, he provides manufactures with a full packet of informationtranslated to Chineseexplaining Tru-Tones premise and assuring bulb manufacturers and packaging printers that the brands quirks are intentional. You see a lot of vintage-style design these days that I joke is Old Navy-style retro, Andora says. It’s really just retro font, and that’s the end of itthe design isn’t as authentic. I think that what makes us special is that I try to really make things feel like you pulled it out of your grandmother’s attic. [Photo: courtesy Tru-Tone] The return of a nostalgic Christmas When Tru-Tone launched its first small batch of lights via social media in 2020, they sold out within two weeks. Since then, the brand has been steadily expanding and adding new product lines while navigating the typical growing pains of a new small business. One of the main problems its faced, Andora says, is not having enough stock to keep up with demand. While that struggle has diminished as he’s developed some “good relationships” with overseas manufacturing partners over the years, Tru-Tone is still actively sold out of several popular items. In the future, Andora says, he’d love to begin manufacturing in the U.S.though that’s currently more of a pipe dream than an actionable reality, given the lack of infrastructure for such an undertaking in the states. Andora believes that interest in vintage Christmas aesthetics is currently on the riseand big box retailers seem to agree. According to a Home Depot spokesperson, demand for nostalgic holiday aesthetics is one of the major trends theyre noticing this year. Thats evident on TikTok, where a search for vintage Christmas yields hundreds of aspirational videos, DIY concepts, and nostalgia-core clips. And Pinterest data shows that searches for “nostalgic christmas aesthetic” are up 1,130% this November compared to last November, while “colorful vintage Christmas” and “vintage retro Christmas” are up 1,500% and 100%, respectively. Customers are turning away from the bright white, blue, and millennial grey aesthetics in favor of a classic Christmas, and Tru-Tone is on the leading edge of that shift. I think that mid-century design, especially related to Christmas, is definitely reaching a peak, Andora says. After with the grey and beige interior trend, people are looking for more color in their lives, and the Christmas holiday is the perfect time for people to really want cozy, colorful, comfy vibes.
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When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built Apple in a garage, the incumbents they were up against were slow-moving hardware companies. When Jeff Bezos started Amazon, Barnes & Noble wasn’t pouring billions into machine learning or cloud infrastructure. This doesn’t mean that it was easy for these entrepreneurs to change the face of whole industries. It was not. But it was at least possible. Back then, giants could be out-innovated because they were bureaucratic, cautious, and often blind to the potential of what the upstart start-ups were building. The situation is very different today. The startup landscape has changed radically. Where once it was populated by bootstrapping innovators who hoped to build giants from tiny seeds, today many of the most promising opportunities are gobbled up by firms that can deploy billions of dollars in resources long before they start making revenue. Often, these companies are funded by giants themselves, whether thats the enormous PE and VC firms that dominate the Silicon Valley landscape or existing tech hyperscalers, who work hard to ensure that their dominance wont be threatened by some offbeat newcomer. Microsoft, for example, now owns approximately 27% of OpenAI’s newly restructured for-profit entitya share valued at roughly US$135 billionafter investing some US$13.8 billion across the early life of the AI firm. Amazon, meanwhile, has invested $8 billion into the AI startup Anthropic and supported it with extensive infrastructure-building. Not to be left behind, Alphabet has channeled around $3 billion into Anthropic as well. The established giants are also pouring almost unimaginable resources directly into their own innovation efforts. A 2025 report found that five of the biggest US tech companiesAlphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoftinvested $227 billion in R&D in 2024, which is more than the US government’s total non-defense R&D budget; indeed, it is more than the annual R&D investments of most countries. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity? ","dek":"Faisal Hoques books, podcast, and his companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms to align purpose, people, process, and techturning disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/faisalhoque.com","theme":{"bg":"#02263c","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420512,"imageMobileId":91420514,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} These investments have predictable effects. Over the last decade, the research output of the big tech companies has dramatically outpaced that of other researchers (typically academics at universities). Crucially, from a commercial perspective, this kind of fundamental research leads to patents that can then be monetized. A recent report from the World Intellectual Property Organization found that large corporations dominate patent applications for AI-related applications and techniques. In contrast to previous times, the giant corporations are now also the disruptorseither directly or through their substantial investments in other companies. These giants are doing deep research, filing patents, and pouring resources into new ventures. An entrepreneur today is not competing with a handful of people with big ideas and small resources. In most major markets, tiny startups now have no choice but to get into the ring to duke it out toe-to-toe with an 800-pound gorilla. The game has changed on a fundamental level. Entrepreneurship today The old assumption was that entrepreneurs could out-innovate big companies, using their small size and agility to pivot twice before the traditional lumbering beasts could even begin to turn. But the statistics show that this assumption no longer holds. Entrepreneurs are not able to out-spend, out-compute, or out-research the giants. Yes, a privileged few entrepreneurstypically those with deep connections in Silicon Valleycan still raise enormous sums and aim to reshape entire industries. But for most founders, that path simply isn’t available. And here’s what often goes unsaid: it doesn’t need to be. You don’t need billions in seed funding or a Rolodex of prominent venture capitalists to build something valuable. What you need is expertise so deep that no one can challenge you. This article is about a different pathone that any entrepreneur can take, whether in tech or far beyond it. The principles here apply to healthcare, construction, professional services, manufacturing, and countless other fields where deep expertise creates real value. The new entrepreneurial opportunity lies not in disrupting entire industries, but in becoming the undisputed authority in a problem space in which your specialized knowledge defines your competitive advantage. This isn’t about slipping under the radar or being too small to notice. It’s about being so specializedso clearly the expertthat you effectively build a moat around your niche. Here are three things that can help entrepreneurs do just that. Become the domain expert The most reliable path to taking ownership of a market niche is simple: become the domain expert. As an expert, you know the vocabulary, you know which problems are just annoying and which are also important. You know the workarounds people use when traditional systems fail and you know the ways in which those systems normally do fail. As a domain expert, you aren’t selling a vision of the future. You are selling the fact that you have spent years in the trenches and you know things that cannot be learned from market research or Google searches or AI queries. You are selling something that differentiates you from the big corporations that cater to mass audiencesexpertise that is both narrow and deep. The kind of expertise that can’t be replicated by a team of generalist engineers, no matter how many resources they throw at the problem. Start Here: Pick one domain you know well and spend a week documenting three problems that matter intensely and that cannot be solved by a generalist solution. Define your specialization ruthlessly Your job isn’t to find the biggest market. It’s to find a market where your expertise gives you an unassailable advantageone in which even well-funded competitors couldn’t match your depth of understanding. So, instead of “I have a vision for transforming healthcare,” it’s “I spent 10 ears as a hospital administrator and I know exactly why the equipment maintenance scheduling system creates safety risks that nobody’s addressing.” Or, instead of “I’m going to disrupt construction,” it’s “I worked on 50 residential job sites and I understand why tool checkout tracking breaks down and costs contractors thousands per project.” A trillion-dollar company is not going to deploy a team of 40 engineers to solve a scheduling quirk faced by 10 mid-sized hospitals. Meta is not spinning up a new product line to solve equipment-tracking failures on residential construction sites. Alphabet isn’t obsessing over the peculiarities of compliance reporting in boutique insurance firms. And even if they did, they couldn’t match the hard-won expertise of someone who has lived these problems for a decade. So you can. Start Here: Write down your idea. Then ask: “Could a well-funded generalist team outcompete me here?” If yes, go deeper into your specialization until the answer is no. Solve the specific problem from end to end Giants build platforms. They build tools. They build solutions designed to work reasonably well for millions of different users with millions of different needs. By necessity, that means they solve problems partiallythey will get their many different customers 70% of the way to a solution and then leave them to figure out the final stretch. As the true expert, you can do something they never will: solve the customers specific problem from end to end. When you’ve spent years living inside a specific domain, you understand not just the obvious pain points but the second-order complications, the upstream causes, the downstream consequences, the workarounds people have layered on top of broken systems. You see the complete picture. That means you can deliver a complete solutionone that doesn’t require your clients to bridge the gap between what the tool does and what they actually need. That depth commands a premium. Clients aren’t paying for a product that they can use to solve a problem; they are paying you for the solution itself, built by someone who understands their reality. Start Here: Think about the problem you solve. What’s the gap between existing solutions and what your clients actually need? That gap is where your expertise livesand where your value lies. You can still win You don’t need venture capital connections. You don’t need billions in seed funding. You don’t need to be in tech. What you need is expertise so deep and specialized that you can own the specialized problems the industry giants cant even see. Instead of trying to disrupt whole industries, the winning move today is to leverage domain expertise so you become the irreplaceable authority in a space so specialized that competition becomes irrelevant. The giants will keep chasing the billion-dollar markets. Let them. Your expertise is your moat and, if you use it correctly, they will never be able to cross it. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity? 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