When an X user recently pointed out the eye-popping increase in billionaires wealth since 2015, entrepreneur Mark Cuban, a billionaire himself, responded with his opinion on why, but he urged followers to consider a different question:
Why are we not giving incentives to companies to require them to give shares in their companies to all employees, at the same percentage of cash earnings as the CEO? Cuban said.
It is the right question to be asking. Because while the debate over wealth inequality continues, the solution has been hiding in plain sight for decades.
The top 10% of U.S. households now control 67% of all wealth, while the bottom half holds just 2.5%. The typical American worker approaches retirement with about $4,000 in savings, which is less than the cost of one month in an assisted living facility. That imbalance is not sustainable, economically or socially.
The fix does not require new legislation or another corporate responsibility pledge. It lies in a proven model that has been quietly transforming companies and communities for 50 years: employee ownership.
From Silicon Valley to Main Street
Silicon Valley figured this out long ago. Equity compensation has been the foundation of the tech sectors innovation economy since the 1970s. Stock options allowed startups to attract world-class talent without paying top-tier salaries, align employee incentives with company performance, and build wealth for workers who might otherwise never own an asset.
Yet outside of tech, broad-based ownership remains rare. Fewer than 7,000 U.S. companiesmostly in traditional sectors like manufacturing, construction, and distributionoperate under an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). The results, however, mirror the Valleys success.
Employee-owned firms grow more than 2% faster per year than their peers and are half as likely to go bankrupt. During the 2008 financial crisis, they laid off workers at only one-third the rate of conventional firms. For employees, the impact is just as powerful. ESOP participants hold 92% higher median household wealth, twice the retirement savings, and 33% higher median income than comparable workers.
This is not philanthropy. It is a durable, market-tested strategy that drives growth, resilience, and equity at the same time.
The Timing Could Not Be Better
Today, several powerful trends make this the perfect moment to bring ownership to scale.
A massive generational handoff is underway. Ten thousand baby boomers retire each day, many of them owners of successful small and midsize businesses with no succession plan. Transferring ownership to employees keeps those businesses rooted in their communities, preserves good jobs, and rewards founders with fair market value.
The retirement crisis demands new solutions. With average savings at historic lows, workers need wealth-building tools that go beyond 401(k) plans. Ownership creates an asset base that compounds over time, restoring what traditional pensions once offered.
Labor shortages are reshaping industries. As skilled workers grow scarce, companies that offer ownership will win the competition for talent, not only by paying well but by giving people a reason to stay.
Economic volatility favors resilience. Employee-owned companies outperform during downturns because people at every level have a stake in the outcome. Ownership builds both financial and cultural strength.
Beyond Good Intentions
America has no shortage of programs designed to help workers. What it lacks is awareness and adoption of the ownership mechanisms that allow employees to share in the value they create. As long as labor and ownership remain separated, inequality will continue to deepen.
When employees have an equity stake, their focus shifts from completing tasks to building lasting value. They think like owners because they are owners, and that mindset fuels innovation, strengthens loyalty, and creates a powerful cycle of trust and accountability.
The impact case is clear, and the business case is even stronger. Broad-based ownership builds companies that last. It keeps wealth circulating within communities instead of extracting it, and it turns employees into long-term investors in the enterprise they help build.
The Moment to Act
We are standing on the edge of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine capitalism for shared prosperity. Employee ownership will not fix every inequity in our economy, but it addresses one of the most fundamental: who benefits from the value a company creates.
Cubans challenge should not disappear into the social media ether. It should become a call to action for policymakers, investors, and business leaders to make employee ownership the standard, not the exception.
America does not need another wealth redistribution debate. It needs a wealth participation strategy.
Employee ownership represents capitalism at its best: fair, inclusive, and fiercely competitive. It aligns profit with purpose and ensures that the people who build our companies share in their success. If we scale it now, we can turn todays inequality into tomorrows shared prosperity.
You’ve heard the gospel: AI is going to change everything. Good, great, grand.
But when youre staring down a deadline and 80 unread emails, you don’t need philosophy, you need a cheat sheet.
The fastest way to master AI isn’t by watching lectures, it’s by finding a way to replace an hour of your grind with a 10-second prompt. Here are five specific, repeatable ways to automate your most time-consuming professional tasks.
Grab your chatbot of choice (Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Copilotwhatever floats your boat) and let’s get to work.
Writing
Staring at a blank page. Tedious, formulaic first drafts. Enough.
You are a professional. You shouldn’t be spending an hour drafting a boilerplate email to a client or writing the first three paragraphs of a report. Thats grunt work.
Instead, master constraint-based prompting. This is where you tell the AI exactly what to write and how to write it, forcing it to follow your specific, professional rules.
Heres a prompt example:
“You are a [job title]. Draft a [document type (memo, email, etc.)] to [target audience]. The tone must be [tone]. The three key takeaways are [list three specific bullet points]. The final memo should be around [length in words] and include a subject line.
Post-meeting action items
Sifting through long transcripts and meeting notes for action items?
You’re doing it wrong. Let the AI do the heavy lifting of synthesis.
Its time to leverage deliverable-based prompting. Instead of asking for a summary, ask the AI to produce specific, structured outputs from a large body of text, such as a meeting transcript or a dense PDF.
For example:
“Analyze the following [meeting transcript/document]. Do not summarize the entire text. Instead, produce three distinct outputs: 1) A table listing all action items, the person responsible, and the deadline mentioned. 2) A list of three open questions that were not resolved. 3) A short, two-sentence email subject line for the follow-up.”
In less than a minute, you can transform raw data into a clean, actionable task list.
Research
To turn generative AI into a true, trusted research assistant that can search and cross-reference information scattered across multiple work files requires using tools that let you upload your own content, such as Googles NotebookLM or similar features in other platforms.
This is called contextual grounding, and it involves uploading a handful of annual reports, project documents, or extensive research files. Check with your organization first to see if there are any rules against this.
Heres a prompt you can use:
“Based only on the uploaded documents, what is the biggest discrepancy between the Q4 2024 revenue projection [from Document A] and the actual Q1 2025 marketing spend [from Document C]? Explain the gap in three bullet points, referencing the specific document where the information was found.”
This lets you stop relying on the AIs general knowledge and start using it as a hyperefficient analyst for your own private data, generating insights that would take hours to gin up on your own.
Brainstorming
Thanks to AI, hitting a creative wall or falling victim to groupthink during brainstorming is nothing like it used to be.
While your brain thinks linearly, AI can think exponentiallybut you have to force it to show its work.
Employ critical reasoning prompting, also called “chain-of-thought.” This forces the AI to debate, critique, and explore alternatives before settling on an answer.
A sample prompt formula:
“I have an idea for a new product feature: [describe the feature]. Before you propose a name for it, I need you to first: 1) Act as a skeptical customer and list three reasons why this feature is useless. 2) Act as a competitor and list three ways they could easily copy and neutralize the feature. 3) Only after those two steps, propose three distinct, benefit-driven names for the feature.”
This forces the AI to act as a constructive adversary, getting you to a better, more robust idea much faster.
The low point in Palantirs very first quest for investors came during a pitch meeting in 2004 that CEO Alex Karp and some colleagues had with Sequoia Capital, which was arguably the most influential Silicon Valley VC firm. Sequoia had been an early investor in PayPal; its best-known partner, Michael Moritz, sat on the companys board and was close to PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who had recently launched Palantir. But Sequoia proved no more receptive to Palantir than any of the other VCs that Karp and his team visited; according to Karp, Moritz spent most of the meeting absentmindedly doodling in his notepad.
Karp didnt say anything at the time, but later wished that he had. I should have told him to go fuck himself, he says, referring to Moritz. But it wasnt just Moritz who provoked Karps ire: the VC communitys lack of enthusiasm for Palantir made Karp contemptuous of professional investors in general. It became a grudge that he nurtured for years after.
[Image: Avid Reader Press]
From The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State by Michael Steinberger. Copyright 2025. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc.
But the meetings on Sand Hill Road werent entirely fruitless. After listening to Karps pitch and politely declining to put any money into Palantir, a partner with one venture capital firm had a suggestion: if Palantir was really intent on working with the government, it could reach out to In-Q-Tel, the CIAs venture capital arm. In-Q-Tel had been started a few years earlier, in 1999 (the name was a playful reference to Q, the technology guru in James Bond films). CIA Director George Tenet believed that establishing a quasi-public venture capital fund through which the agency could incubate start-ups would help ensure that the U.S. intelligence community retained a technological edge.
The CIA had been created in 1947 for the purpose of preventing another Pearl Harbor, and a half century on, its primary mission was still to prevent attacks on American soil. Two years after In-Q-Tel was founded, the country experienced another Pearl Harbor, the 9 11 terrorist attacks, a humiliating intelligence failure for the CIA and Tenet. At the time, In-Q-Tel was working out of a Virginia office complex known, ironically, as the Rosslyn Twin Towers, and from the twenty-ninth-floor office, employees had an unobstructed view of the burning Pentagon.
In-Q-Tels CEO was Gilman Louie, who had worked as a video game designer before being recruited by Tenet (Louie specialized in flight simulators; his were so realistic that they were used to help train Air National Guard pilots). Ordinarily, Louie did not take part in pitch meetings; he let his deputies do the initial screening. But because Thiel was involved, he made an exception for Palantir and sat in on its first meeting with In-Q-Tel.
What Karp and the other Palantirians didnt know when they visited In-Q-Tel was that the CIA was in the market for new data analytics technology. At the time, the agency was mainly using a program called Analysts Notebook, which was manufactured by i2, a British company. According to Louie, Analysts Notebook had a good interface but had certain deficiencies when it came to data processing that limited its utility.
We didnt think their architecture would allow us to build next-generation capabilities, Louie says.
Louie found Karps pitch impressive. Alex presented well, he recalls. He was very articulate and very passionate. As the conversation went on, Karp and his colleagues talked about IGOR, PayPals pioneering fraud-detection system, and how it had basically saved PayPals business, and it became apparent to Louie that they might just have the technical aptitude to deliver what he was looking for.
But he told them that the interface was vitalthe software would need to organize and present information in a way that made sense for the analysts using it, and he described some of the features they would expect. Louie says that as soon as he brought this up, the Palantir crew got out of sales mode and immediately switched into engineering solving mode and began brainstorming in front of the In-Q-Tel team.
That was what I wanted to see, says Louie.
He sent them away with a homework assignment: he asked them to design an interface that could possibly appeal to intelligence analysts. On returning to Palo Alto, Stephen Cohen, one of Palantirs co-founders, then 22 years old, and an ex-PayPal engineer named Nathan Gettings sequestered themselves in a room and built a demo that included the elements that Louie had highlighted.
A few weeks later, the Palantirians returned to In-Q-Tel to show Louie and his colleagues what they had come up with. Louie was impressed by its intuitive logic and elegance. If Palantir doesnt work, you guys have a bright future designing video games, he joked.
In-Q-Tel ended up investing $1.25 million in exchange for equity; with that vote of confidence, Thiel put up another $2.84 million. (In-Q-Tel did not get a board seat in return for its investment; even after Palantir began attracting significant outside money, the company never gave up a board seat, which was unusual, and to its great advantage.)
Karp says the most beneficial aspect of In-Q-Tels investment was not the money but the access that it gave Palantir to the CIA analysts who were its intended customers. Louie believed that the only way to determine whether Palantir could really help the CIA was to embed Palantir engineers in the agency; to build software that was actually useful, the Palantirians needed to see for themselves how the analysts operated. A machine is not going to understand your workflows, Louie says. Thats a human function, not a machine function.
The other reason for embedding the engineers was that it would expedite the process of figuring out whether Palantir could, in fact, be helpful. If the CIA analysts didnt think Palantir was capable of giving them what they needed, they were going to quickly let their superiors know. We were at war, says Louie, and people did not have time to waste.
Louie had the Palantir team assigned to the CIAs terrorism finance desk. There they would be exposed to large data sets, and also to data collected by financial institutions as well as the CIA. This would be a good test of whether Karp and his colleagues could deliver: tracking the flow of money was going to be critical to disrupting future terrorist plots, and it was exactly the kind of task that the software would have to perfrm in order to be of use to the intelligence community.
But Louie also had another motive: although Karp and Thiel were focused on working with the government, Louie thought that Palantirs technology, if it proved viable, could have applications outside the realm of national security, and if the company hoped to attract future investors, it would ultimately need to develop a strong commercial business.
Stephen Cohen and engineer Aki Jain worked directly with the CIA analysts. Both had to obtain security clearance, and over time, numerous other Palantirians would do the same. Some, however, refusedthey worried about Big Brother, or they didnt want the FBI combing through their financial records, or they enjoyed smoking pot and didnt want to give it up. Karp was one of the refuseniks, as was Joshua Goldenberg, the head of design. Goldenberg says there were times when engineers working on classified projects needed his help. But because they couldnt share certain information with him, they would resort to hypotheticals.
As Goldenberg recalls, Someone might say, Imagine theres a jewel thief and hes stolen a diamond, and hes now in a city and we have people following himwhat would that look like? What tools would you need to be able to do that?
Starting in 2005, Cohen and Jain traveled on a biweekly basis from Palo Alto to the CIAs headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In all, they made the trip roughly two hundred times. They became so familiar at the CIA that analysts there nicknamed Cohen Two Weeks. The Palantir duo would bring with them the latest version of the software, the analysts would test it out and offer feedback, and Cohen and Jain would return to California, where they and the rest of the team would address whatever problems had been identified and make other tweaks. In working side by side with the analysts, Cohen and Jain were pioneering a role that would become one of Palantirs signatures.
It turned out that dispatching software engineers to job sites was a shrewd strategyit was a way of discovering what clients really needed in the way of technological help, of developing new features that could possibly be of use to other customers, and of building relationships that might lead to additional business within an organization. The forward-deployed engineers, as they came to be called, proved to be almost as essential to Palantirs eventual success as the software itself. But it was that original deployment to the CIA, and the iterative process that it spawned, that enabled Palantir to successfully build Gotham, its first software platform.
Ari Gesher, an engineer who was hired in 2005, says that from a technology standpoint, Palantir was pursuing a very ambitious goal. Some software companies specialized in front-end productsthe stuff you see on your screen. Others focused on the back-end, the processing functions. Palantir, says Gesher, understood that you needed to do deep investments in both to generate outcomes for users.
According to Gesher, Palantir also stood apart in that it aimed to be both a product company as well as a service company. Most software makers were one or the other: they either custom-built software, or they sold off-the-shelf products that could not be tailored to the specific needs of a client. Palantir was building an off-the-shelf product that could also be customized.
Despite his lack of technical trainingor, perhaps, because of itKarp had also come up with a novel idea for addressing worries about civil liberties: he asked the engineers to build privacy controls into the software. Gotham was ultimately equipped with two guardrailsusers were able to access only information that they were authorized to view, and the platform generated an audit trail that indicated if someone tried to obtain material off-limits to them. Karp liked to call it a Hegelian remedy to the challenge of balancing public safety and civil liberties, a synthesis of seemingly unreconcilable objectives. As he told Charlie Rose during an interview in 2009, It is the ultimate Silicon Valley solution: you remove the contradiction, and we all march forward.
In the end, it took Palantir around three years, lots of setbacks, and a couple of near-death experiences to develop a marketable software platform that met these parameters.
There were moments where we were like, Is this ever going to see the light of day? Gesher says. The work was arduous, and there were times when the money ran short. A few key people grew frustrated and talked of quitting.
Palantir also struggled to win converts at the CIA. Even though In-Q-Tel was backing Palantir, analysts were not obliged to switch to the companys software, and some who tried it were underwhelmed.
But in what would become another pattern in Palantirs rise, one analyst was not just won over by the technology; she turned into a kind of in-house evangelist on Palantirs behalf. Sarah Adams discovered Palantir not at Langley, but rather on a visit to Silicon Valley in late 2006. Adams worked on counterterrorism, as well, but in a different section. She joined a group of CIA analysts at a conference in the Bay Area devoted to emerging technologies. Palantir was one of the vendors, and Stephen Cohen demoed its software. Adams was intrigued by what she saw, exchanged contact information with Cohen, and upon returning to Langley asked her boss if her unit could do a pilot program with Palantir. He signed off on it, and a few months later, Adams and her colleagues were using Palantirs software.
Adams says that the first thing that jumped out at her was the speed with which Palantir churned data. We were a fast-moving shop; we were kind of the point of the spear, and we needed faster analytics, she says.
According to Adams, Palantirs software also had a smartness that Analysts Notebook lacked. It wasnt just better at unearthing connections; even its basic search function was superior. Often, names would be misspelled in reports, or phone numbers would be written in different formats (dashes between numbers, no dashes between numbers). If Adams typed in David Petraeus, Palantirs search engine would bring up all the available references to him, including ones where his name had been incorrectly spelled. This ensured that she wasnt deprived of possibly important information simply because another analyst or a source in the field didnt know that it was Petraeus.
Beyond that, Palantirs software just seemed to reflect an understanding of how Adams and other analysts did their jobsthe kind of questions they were seeking to answer, and how they wanted the answers presented. She says that Palantir made my job a thousand times easier. It made a huge difference.
Her advocacy was instrumental in Palantir securing a contract with the CIA. Similar stories would play out in later deploymentsone employee would end up championing Palantir, and that persons proselytizing would eventually lead to a deal.
But the CIA was the breakthrough: it was proof that Palantir had developed software that really worked, and also the realization of the ambition that had brought the company into being. Palantir had been founded by Peter Thiel for the purpose of assisting the U.S. government in the war on terrorism, and now the CIA had formally enlisted its help in that battle.
Palantirs foray into domestic law enforcement was an extension of its counterterrorism work. In 2007, the New York City Police Departments intelligence unit began a pilot program using Palantirs software. Before 9/11, the intelligence division had primarily focused on crie syndicates and narcotics. But its mandate changed after the terrorist attacks. The city tapped David Cohen, a CIA veteran who had served as the agencys deputy director of operations, to run the unit, and with the citys blessing, he turned it into a full-fledged intelligence service employing some one thousand officers and analysts. Several dozen members of the team were posted overseas, in cities including Tel Aviv, Amman, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, London, and Paris.
The rationale for the N.Y.P.D.s transformation after September 11th had two distinct facets, The New Yorkers William Finnegan wrote in 2005. On the one hand, expanding its mission to include terrorism prevention made obvious sense. On the other, there was a strong feeling that federal agencies had let down New York City, and that the city should no longer count on the Feds for its protection. Finnegan noted that the NYPD was encroaching on areas normally reserved for the FBI and the CIA but that the federal agencies had silently acknowledged New Yorks right to take extraordinary defensive measures.
Cohen became familiar with Palantir while he was still with the CIA, and he decided that the companys software could be of help to the intelligence unit. In what was becoming a familiar refrain, there was internal resistance. For the average cops, it was just too complicated, says Brian Schimpf, one of the first forward-deployed engineers assigned to the NYPD.
Theyd be like, I just need to look up license plates, bro; I dont need to be doing these crazy analytical processes. IBMs technology was the de facto incumbent at the NYPD, which also made it hard to convert people.
Another stumbling block was price: Palantir was expensive, and while the NYPD had an ample budget, not everyone thought it was worth the investment. But the software caught on with some analysts, and over time, what began as a counter terrorism deployment moved into other areas, such as gang violence.
This mission creep was something that privacy advocates and civil libertarians anticipated. Their foremost worry, in the aftermath of 9/11, was that innocent people would be ensnared as the government turned to mass surveillance to prevent future attacks, and the NSA scandal proved that these concerns were warranted.
But another fear was that tools and tactics used to prosecute the war on terrorism would eventually be turned on Americans themselves. The increased militarization of police departments showed that defending the homeland had indeed morphed into something more than just an effort to thwart jihadis. Likewise, police departments also began to use advanced surveillance technology.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor of law at George Washington University who has written extensively about policing and technology, says that capabilities that had been developed to meet the terrorism threat were now being redirected on the domestic population.
Palantir was part of this trend. In addition to its work with the NYPD, it provided its software to the Cook County Sheriffs Office (a relationship that was part of a broader engagement with the city and that would dissolve in controversy). However, it attracted much of its police business in its own backyard, California. The Long Beach and Burbank Police Departments used Palantir, as did sheriff departments in Los Angeles and Sacramento counties. The companys technology was also used by several Fusion Centers in Californiathese were regional intelligence bureaus established after 9/11 to foster closer collaboration between federal agencies and state and local law enforcement. The focus was on countering terrorism and other criminal activities.
But Palantirs most extensive and longest-lasting law enforcement contract was with the Los Angeles Police Department. It was a relationship that began in 2009. The LAPD was looking for software that could improve situational awareness for officers in the fieldthat could allow them to quickly access information about, say, a suspect or about previous criminal activity on a particular street. Palantirs technology soon became a general investigative tool for the LAPD.
The department also started using Palantir for a crime-prevention initiative called LASER. The goal was to identify hot spotsstreets and neighborhoods that experienced a lot of gun violence and other crimes. The police would then put more patrols in those places. As part of the stepped-up policing, officers would submit information about people they had stopped in high-crime districts to a Chronic Offenders Bulletin, which flagged individuals whom the LAPD thought were likely to be repeat offenders.
This was predictive policing, a controversial practice in which quantitative analysis is used to pinpoint areas prone to crime and individuals who are likely to commit or fall victim to crimes. To critics, predictive policing is something straight out of the Tom Cruise thriller Minority Report, in which psychics identify murderers before they kill, but even more insidious. They believe that data-driven policing reinforces biases that have long plagued Americas criminal justice system and inevitably leads to racial profiling.
Karp was unmoved by that argument. In his judgment, crime was crime, and if it could be prevented or reduced through the use of data, that was a net plus for society. Blacks and Latinos, no less than whites, wanted to live in safe communities. And for Karp, the same logic that guided Palantirs counterterrorism work applied to its efforts in law enforcementpeople needed to feel safe in their homes and on their streets, and if they didnt, they would embrace hard-line politicians who would have no qualms about trampling on civil liberties to give the public the security it demanded. Palantirs software, at least as Karp saw it, was a mechanism for delivering that security without sacrificing privacy and other personal freedoms.
However, community activists in Los Angeles took a different view of Palantir and the kind of police work that the company was enabling. An organization called the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition organized protests and also published studies highlighting what it claimed was algorithmic-driven harassment of predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods and of people of color. LASER, it said, amounted to a racist feedback loop. In the face of criticism, the LAPD grew increasingly sensitive about its predictive policing efforts and its ties to Palantir.
[Photo: Ryoji Iwata/Unsplash]
To Karp, the fracas over Palantirs police contracts was emblematic of what he saw as the lefts descent into mindless dogmatism. He said that many liberals now seemed to reject quantification of any kind. And I dont understand how being anti-quantitative is in any way progressive.
Karp said that he was actually the true progressive. If you are championing an ideology whose logical consequence is that thousands and thousands and thousands of people over time that you claim to defend are killed, maimed, go to prisonhow is what Im saying not progressive when what you are saying is going to lead to a cycle of poverty?
He conceded, though, that partnering with local law enforcement, at least in the United States, was just too complicated. Police departments are hard because you have an overlay of legitimate ethical concerns, Karp said. I would also say there is a politicization of legitimate ethical issues to the detriment of the poorest members of our urban environments.
He acknowledged, too, that the payoff from police work wasnt enough to justify the agita that came with it. And in truth, there hadnt been much of a payoff; indeed, Palantirs technology was no longer being used by any U.S. police departments. The New York City Police Department had terminated its contract with Palantir in 2017 and replaced the companys software with its own data analysis tool. In 2021, the Los Angeles Police Department had ended its relationship with Palantir, partly in response to growing public pressure. So had the city of New Orleans, after an investigation by The Verge caused an uproar.
But Palantir still had contracts with police departments in several European countries. And since 2014, Palantirs software has been used in domestic operations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, work that has expanded under the second Trump administration, and earned criticism from a number of former employees.
In 2019, when I was working on my story about Palantir for The New York Times Magazine, I tried to meet with LAPD officials to talk about the companys software, but they declined. Six years earlier, however, a Princeton doctoral candidate named Sarah Brayne, who was researching the use of new technologies by police departments, was given remarkable access to the LAPD. She found that Palantirs platform was used extensivelymore than one thousand LAPD employees had access to the softwareand was taking in and merging a wide range of data, from phone numbers to field interview cards (filed by police every time they made a stop) to images culled from automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs.
Through Palantir, the LAPD could also tap into databases of police departments in other jurisdictions, as well as those of the California state police. In addition, they could pull up material that was completely unrelated to criminal justicesocial media posts, foreclosure notices, utility bills.
Via Palantir, the LAPD could obtain a trove of personal information. Not only that: through the network analysis that the software performed, the police could identify a person of interests family members, friends, colleagues, associates, and other relations, putting all of them in the LAPDs purview. It was a virtual dragnet, a point made clear by one detective who spoke to Brayne.
Lets say I have something going on with the medical marijuana clinics where theyre getting robbed, he said. I can put in an alert to Palantir that says anything that has to do with medical marijuana plus robbery plus male, black, six foot. He readily acknowledged that these searches could just be fishing expeditions and even used a fishing metaphor. I like throwing the net out there, you know? he said.
Braynes research showed the potential for abuse. It was easy, for instance, to conjure nightmare scenarios involving ALPR data. A detective could discover that a reluctant witness was having an affair and use that information to coerce his testimony. There was also the risk of misconduct outside the line of dutyan unscrupulous analyst could conceivably use Palantirs software to keep tabs on his ex-wifes comings and goings. Beyond that, millions of innocent people were unknowingly being pulled into the system simply by driving their cars.
When I spoke to Brayne, she told me that what most troubled her about the LAPDs work with Palantir was the opaqueness.
Digital surveillance is invisible, she said. How are you supposed to hold an institution accountable when you dont know what they are doing?
Adapted from The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State by Michael Steinberger. Copyright 2025. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc.
In the modern working world, employees have a lot on their minds. From stressing about high costs of living and pressing political issues, there are no shortage of worries to go around. But worries at work are stacking up, too, with many feeling uncertain about their future employment in the face of AI.
While workplaces are seeing some benefits to automating tasks with AI, there’s another not-so-secret problem with the technology taking off: employee anxiety. In part, that’s because workers are deeply stressed about being replaced, but there are also learning curves that come with working alongside the technology.
Also notable, one recent study found that AI is making workers’ jobs harder in another way. It messes with managers’ expectations, meaning they end up giving employees more work that they expect completed in less time.
Holding space for AI-xiety
In the face of such significant change, some say that leaders have a new job to do: They need to hold space for all the anxiety around AI, or, AI-xiety, if you will.
Heidi Brooks, a leadership expert and senior lecturer in organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, tells Fast Company that because anxiety is now “a central part of the workplace experience,” leaders need to meet the moment.
But it’s not necessarily about trying to calm or settle worries, and it’s definitely not about ignoring them altogether. Instead, it’s about being present.
“Presence isnt just about showing upits about how you show up, Brooks explains. “Its the groundedness, the way you stay in touch with people in the midst of ambiguity or distress, without rushing to fix or smooth things over.”
Brooks adds that while it may feel more comfortable to avoid the worries, “choosing to stay steady in the face of uncertainty is a quiet but powerful form of leadership.”
Communication is key
As concerns around AI are booming, at the same time issues like burnout are skyrocketing. It’s no secret that many employees are feeling unsettled. That means bosses need to do more than just say they’re there for workers.
As Brooks puts it, “Presence is in the eyes of the beholder. Therefore, employees have to feel that from you.
“Communication, in this anxious context, becomes more than just information-sharing. Its a form of containment, Brooks says. Silence can promote fear, and in the absence of communication, people can fill the gaps with worst-case scenarios.” Therefore, even if leaders aren’t necessarily sure themselves how to fix the issues employees are worried about, keeping communication open is, in itself, still an effective tool.
Recent research supports the expert’s insight, too: A recent survey on frontline workers in the AI age found that while only 17% of said their organization is transparent about AI integration, 63% said communication about the technology is essential.
If you explain it, well accept it, one worker said. If you dont, well resist.
Brooks says employers don’t need to have all the answers to be good communicators and to calm fears.
“Its not about false certainty,” she explains. Its about helping people feel less alone in the uncertainty, and perhaps even inviting them to be part of the learning process by inviting their voice.”
Leaders need check-ins, too
Undoubtedly, leaders are in a new era, too. They have big challenges ahead of them as they learn to work with automation. Brooks says leaders are also learning to “hold space for human experience . . . as we find our way forward” in the AI age.
But not only do leaders have to worry about their teamsthey also need to check in with themselves, especially around their own anxieties and struggles when it comes to new technology.
“Its a good time not only to be intentional about touching base with people on your teams, but for you to do the same for yourself,” Brooks says. Leaders, then, also need the space to air their own fearsin addition to being a sounding board for others.
Brooks adds, “When we can be real about naming what we are going through, we are often wiser together, because we can discuss whats happening and learn our way forward.”
A snaggle tooth. A gap in someones smile. A birthmark or mole. What do each of these facial features have in common? They all have wabi-sabi.
Thats according to TikToks latest trend, which has users highlighting their imperfections and labeling them wabi-sabi.”
Not to be confused with the sushi accompaniment, wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic philosophy that finds beauty in imperfection and the natural process of agingsomething we could all use a little more of in the age of preventative facelifts.
The concept celebrates imperfection and the natural wear and tear that occurs with the passage of time, whether thats a gently worn step, a chipped mug, or smile lines.
A sound featuring the term has since gone viral on TikTok, introducing many to the idea for the first time. Nearly half a million videos have been posted under the viral audio, originating from the animated sitcom King of the Hill.
In one episode, the character Bobby Hill picks up a rose and says, I like how mines a little off-center. Its got wabi-sabi. That clip has since been repurposed by users celebrating everything from crooked teeth to aquiline noses as wabi-sabi.
As with any concept that takes off on TikTok, some of the subtlety of the original philosophy has been lost as it spreads online. Yet, in an age of unrealistic beauty standards, looksmaxxing, and aesthetic micro trends, one that celebrates individuality and acceptance of perceived flaws is a step in the right direction.
In 2019, The New Yorker declared it “The Age of Instagram Face.” Six years on, Dazed wrote We have entered the age of TikTok Face. Aesthetic inflation or the normalization of more and more extreme cosmetic interventions over time, defined by Flesh World writer Jessica Defino, has eaten our collective brain.
In just the past few weeks, headlines about the skinny BBL (thats Brazilian butt lift, for the unitiated) and facelifts at 28 demonstrate the pervasiveness of the pursuit of aesthetic perfection. Its a vicious feedback loop that also bleeds into our offline reality, with plenty of research finding a correlation between time spent online and desire for plastic surgery.
If youve noticed the faces you see online slowly morphing into one and the same, you are not losing your mind. These days, we could all stand to embrace more wabi-sabi.
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Zillow economists just published their updated 12-month forecast, projecting that U.S. home pricesas measured by the Zillow Home Value Indexwill rise 1.5% between October 2025 and October 2026.
Heading into 2025, Zillows 12-month forecast for U.S. home prices was +2.6%. However, many housing markets across the country softened faster than expected, prompting Zillow to issue several downward revisions. By April 2025, Zillow had cut its 12-month national home price outlook to -1.7%.
In late spring, Zillow stopped issuing downward revisions. In August, it revised its 12-month outlook to +0.4%. In September, the forecast increased to +1.2%, and in October Zillow upgraded its 12-month national home price forecast to +1.9%.
This month, Zillow revised down its 12-month outlook for U.S. home price growth just a tad to +1.5%.
While Zillows national home price forecast is no longer negativeit isnt exactly bullish either.
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Among the 300 largest U.S. metro-area housing markets, Zillow expects the biggest home price increase between October 2025 and October 2026 to occur in these 15 metros:
Atlantic City, New Jersey +5.3%
Rockford, Illinois +4.8%
Concord, New Hampshire +4.6%
Knoxville, Tennessee +4.3%
Saginaw, Michigan +4.3%
Jacksonville, North Carolina +4.2%
Kingston, New York +4.2%
Fayetteville, Arkansas +4.1%
Green Bay, Wisconsin +4.1%
Torrington, Connecticut +4.1%
New Haven, Connecticut +4.0%
Hartford, Connecticut +3.9%
Hilton Head Island, South Carolina +3.9%
Manchester, New Hampshire +3.8%
Norwich, Connecticut +3.8%
Among the 300 largest U.S. metro-area housing markets, Zillow expects the biggest home price decline between October 2025 and October 2026 to occur in these 15 metros:
Houma, Louisiana -7.8%
Lake Charles, Louisiana -7.3%
New Orleans -4.7%
Shreveport, Louisiana -4.3%
Lafayette, Louisiana -4.2%
Beaumont, Texas -4.0%
Alexandria, Louisiana -3.9%
Odessa, Texas -3.0%
Monroe, Louisiana -2.7%
Punta Gorda, Florida -2.7%
Austin -2.6%
Chico, California -2.5%
Corpus Christi, Texas -2.4%
San Francisco -2.2%
Texarkana, Texas -2.2%
U.S. home prices, as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index, are currently up 0.01% year over year. If Zillows latest 12-month outlook (+1.5%) comes to fruition, it would represent a small acceleration nationally.
Below is what the current year-over-year rate of home price growth looks like for single-family and condo home prices. The Sunbelt, in particular Southwest Florida, is currently the epicenter of housing market weakness.
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In a report published in October, Kara Ng, a senior economist at Zillow, wrote, A year ago, 6 of the nations 50 largest metros were buyers markets; this September, buyers have the edge in 15 metros. Zillows market heat index shows the strongest buyers markets are Miami, New Orleans, Austin, Jacksonville, and Indianapolis. Thats due, in large part, to a surge of new construction in many of those areas in recent years. The hottest markets for sellers are in the Northeast and Bay Area: Buffalo, Hartford, San Jose, San Francisco, and New Yorkplaces where builders face some of the most stringent land use restrictions.
As best I can tell, the über-wealthy believe the world as we know it is ending, that there wont be enough to go around, and that this means they need to accumulate as much money and land as possible in order to position themselves for the end of days.
The way they do that is with an induced form of disaster capitalism, where they intentionally crash the economy in order to have some control over what remains. So the function of tariffs, for example, is to bankrupt businesses or even public services in order to privatize and then control them. Stall imports, put the ports out of business, and then let a sovereign wealth fund purchase the ports. Or as is happening right now: Use tariffs to bankrupt soybean farmers, who have to foreclose on their farms so that a private equity firm can purchase the farmland as a distressed asset, then hire the farmers who used to own and work that land as sharecroppers.
The über-wealthy, in collaboration with the current White House administration, are engaged in a controlled demolition of this civilization because they realize the pyramid is collapsing and they dont have faith that there will be enough left to feed and house everyone. The best they can do is earn a ton of money, buy a lot of land, control an army, and get people accustomed to seeing that army deployed. Thats what were watching on TV and on our city streets.
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It’s no coincidence that AI is emerging at this same moment in our civilizations history. As Lewis Mumford observed, new technologies are often less the cause of societal changes than they are the result. Culture is like a standing wave, creating a vacuum or readiness for a new medium or technology. If we really are at the end of capitalismthe end of this 800- or 900-year process of abstraction, exploitation, and colonialismthen we would also, necessarily, be at the end of the era of employment. I will get to why I think that may ultimately be a good thing, but lets go through the scenario thats running through everyones heads right now, and then find our way through to what I think are better days.
The spreadsheet people
Yes, AI is coming for our jobs. Not the super-creative ones, or the high-touch human ones, but the ones that maintain administrative control over everything. The majority of your jobs, dear Fast Company readers. All the people in the mortgage departments, the insurance companies . . . the spreadsheet people, the PowerPoint people. Doomers say its 90% of jobs, but lets say its just half of office jobs taken by AIs and, of course, blue-collar jobs taken by robots.
The problem with that, from a business perspective, is if you have no employees earning money out there in the world, then who will be your consumers? Even Henry Ford, despite his enthusiasm for fascism, understood that workers commoditized by his own assembly lines still needed to earn enough money to buy a Ford car. But how are AI billionaires going to continue to make money if there are no gainfully employed people capable of buying AI services from themor at least buying products from the companies that do purchase AI services?
And this is the weird part; in their vision, it won’t be by selling products to people, but selling stuff to the AIs themselves. It’s a tricky idea, but once you wrap your head around it, it all makes perverse sense. In today’s economy, a small number of wealthy people and corporations employ us and sell to us. They don’t really need to care what species we are, or whether we are human or android, as long as we are producing value for their companies and then purchasing products from them.
We already see how AIs can replace us as workers. But how could AIs also become the new population of consumers? They dont have time off to spend money. What do AIs need? To do their jobs better.
The humans dont matter
Instead of retailers selling food and clothes and entertainment to human consumers, tech companies will be selling energy, memory, network access, and processing power to the AIs so that they succeed in their jobs working as agent contractors for other corporations. The AIs will earn crypto for completing their agentic tasks, and then spend it with technology companies who provide them the resources they need to function.
As far as the owners of the companies are concerned, there’s no difference between a population of human employees with whom you have no contact and a population of artificial employees with whom you have no contact. The only game that matters is the competition with the other big companies for the agents business. The humans don’t matter.
So, assuming this tech-bro dream comes true, we end up with a small elite of big-business owners living in luxury with a small number of human servants, and a huge population of AIs doing the work and consumption. And, of course, in their vision for how this plays out, the rest of us humans become so disenfranchisedespecially the ones who live in citiesthat we will need to be kept under control until we presumably die out. We are simply not needed.
The good news
Sounds like a nightmare for most of us, but it also offers clues to an emancipatory vision for the end of employment. So lets consider that good option: For close to 1,000 years, growth-based capitalism has depended on real human beings doing work while a small elite extracted value from that work at ever greater degrees of leverage. In order to get that leverage, capitalism abstracted again and again and again. Each level of abstraction further removed from the people and places actually providing or creating the value. There’s a mineral in the ground. There’s a company mining the mineral, and another company selling the mineral. There’s yet another company investing in the company selling the mineral, there’s a stock company leveraging that investment, there’s a derivative on the stock, and a derivative on the derivative, and a platform trading the derivatives, and so on.
Or, more simply, there’s a person who needs to live in a house, but they just rent from someone who owns the house. Thats called the rentier. But the rentier has a mortgage on the house, and pays up to the bank, which pays up to another investor that owns the security, and so on and so on.
Thats the pyrmid of capitalism, with each investor or participant trying to move further up and away from the mineral or labor or living person into the abstraction of pure financial instruments. And this pyramid has simply grown too top-heavy to support itself. Theres only so much one can leverage up there before it comes tumbling down.
Total abstraction
AI, at least theoretically in the minds of crazy tech billionaires who believe AGI is genuinely around the corner, allows them to move on from the employment, exploitation, and colonialism of people, and simply level up in what they believe is a simulation anyway. We humans are discarded as capitalism moves up into a layer of total abstraction. It becomes the video game it was destined to become, with the humans replaced by non-player characters represented by digital icons or NFTs instead of flesh-and-blood mammals.
Our real-world economy only had so much stuff anyway. We matter-based entities cant scale as much as they need, so they leave us behind while they move into a layer of total and absolute abstraction. They live in a realm made entirely of digital representations, themselves manufactured by digital agents in exchange for digital currencies. It works because at least the AI agents value that crypto as much as the billionaires need them too. Instead of just 9 billion human customers, they get trillions of AI customers. We are not required.
But this is a good thing. Its akin to an enslaved population being released by the owners who no longer have use for them. We were not born to be their employees. As Ive explained in some of my books, the whole concept of employment was invented as a way of preventing us from getting wealthy. In the late Middle Ages, right before this capitalism was invented, people in Europe were starting to do really well. They learned how to make and trade stuff at local markets. They were doing so well that people were only working two or three days a week, and got taller than at any time until the 1980s.
Thats when the aristocracy came up with the idea of a chartered monopoly, and made it illegal for people to be in business for themselves. They had to become employees of one of the chartered companies, or face a penalty of death. Thats when we started working for companies instead of ourselves, and ended up in an economy built to favor those monopolies over small businesses.
A moment of transition
So the end of this scheme is not necessarily a bad thing. We simply have to return to the real economy that isnt worth capitalisms attention. Human commodities like food and housing are no longer asset classes worthy of their time, so theres no point in making growth-based markets for them. We can instead look at them as the commons-based resources they areoptimize for distributed flourishing instead of extraction and profit.
Yes, there will still be competition for energy. The AI economy would probably end up needing a bunch of nuclear power plants and better ways of dealing with all those spent fuel rods (if any of that AI scenario even becomes a reality). The current state of the technology doesnt fill me with hope for much more than a fierce market correction.
To me, its less important whether it happens than that we take advantage of this moment of transition. The ultra-rich have accepted the end of capitalismor at least the end of capitalism that depends on human labor and consumption for its survival. So its time we accept we are no longer valuable to the capitalist extraction machine and begin to look instead at how we are valuable to one another.
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In 2023, Pop-Tarts changed the world of brand mascots forever when it sacrificed the life of a Strawberry Pop-Tart and fed its remains to the Kansas State football team as a reward for winning the Pop-Tarts Bowl game. The weirdly macabre stunt got 4 billion media impressions, and in the eight weeks following the game, parent company Kellanova sold 21 million more Pop-Tarts than in the eight weeks before the game.
Riding on that success, the brand upped its ambitions and brought three flavors to the Pop-Tarts Bowl last year, letting the winning teams MVP choose which one was toasted and eaten (Iowa States quarterback, Rocco Becht, picked Frosted Cinnamon Roll). Now Pop-Tarts has announced that its dramatically expanding its edible mascot lineup for the next big game, scheduled to be played in Orlandos Camping World Stadium on December 27th.
Six edible Pop-Tarts mascotsthree on Team Sprinkles and three on Team Swirlswill be up for mass consumption, with fans voting ahead of time on which team should be sacrificed.
For Pop-Tarts, its a significant jump in both sacrificial anthropomorphic breakfast pastry and the stakes for its brand stunt strategy. Many viewers will undoubtedly be giddy at the prospect of doubling the number of mascots involved, but there’s a cost to escalating the premise so much in such a short period of time: Pop-Tarts is now entering into an unnecessary arms race with itself.
When I posed this theory to the brands VP of marketing, Leslie Serro, she didn’t agree. Expanding from three to six edible mascots this year isnt about an arms race; its about evolution, she says. Serro tells me that they concluded after last year’s success that fans have an “insatiable appetite for the playful and unexpected nature of the Pop-Tarts Bowl.” Thus, the doubling down from three to six mascots and “raising the stakes.”
To be fair, will I be looking for social clips from the game on the 27th, in that dead zone between Christmas and New Year’s? Sure. Serro’s got me there. But will I feel as sick as if I ate six Pop-Tarts rather than just one (or even three)? Yes.
Let me explain why Pop-Tarts, which so brilliantly spoke to the culture two years ago, risks toasting all that goodwill.
Mascot Power
Its easy to see why Pop-Tarts would want to crank up the mascot machine and get even more brand characters into the game (albeit to kill and eat them). A 2021 whitepaper by the Moving Picture Council found that long-term campaigns featuring a character increased market share 39.2%, compared with 29.7% for campaigns without a character; it also boosted profit gain 34.2% (versus 29.7%).
A report by System1 found that 2025 Super Bowl ads with brand characters performed better than those featuring celebrities. For example, an M&M’s 2023 Super Bowl spot starring Maya Rudolph underperformed because people didn’t make the connection between Rudolph and the brand. As a celebrity, she could’ve been selling anything. Scores then soared once the M&Ms characters returned in a second spot. Mascots arent just cute and fun. They create a faster route to being memorable, and being memorable tends to directly influence what we buy.
Two key factors in any successful mascot are longevity and consistency. Just think about the lifespan of some of the most iconic mascots: The Michelin Man was created in 1898! Tony the Tiger was born in 1952. Mr. Clean’s mascot came around in 1957. Chester Cheetah of Cheetos fame first dropped in 1986. And the Energizer Bunny started banging that drum in 1989. Both the Aflac Duck and Geicos Gecko have been flogging insurance since 1999. Even Duolingos Duo, often considered a new-wave TikTok darling brand mascot, has been around since 2011. These are brand assets built for the long game.
Pop-Tarts is attempting to do something similar. Six months before the 2023 Pop-Tarts Bowl, the brand unveiled its new cast of characters, the “Agents of Crazy Good, as an update to characters from its Crazy Good ads of the early 00s. The Agents were described as representations of the beloved toaster pastries brought to life, including Frosted Strawberry, Brown Sugar Cinnamon, Hot Fudge Sundae, and a squad of Bites. The ingenious crew come fully frosted and ready to challenge expectations for where the brand can show up next.
Funnily enough, in tying the Agents back to the Crazy Good doodle characters from 20 years ago, Pop-Tarts is at least trying to conjure a new history of consistency. (Side note: Bring these ads back!)
Beyond Breakfast
The original goal of introducing Pop-Tarts as edible mascots, and even sponsoring the college bowl game in the first place, was to expand our purchase intention beyond breakfast and into the rest of the day. To go from breakfast to snack. The brand saw college football as the perfect vehicle to take that message.
The edible mascot came about as the brand knew it had to contend with a laundry list of branded College Bowl games, each with their own brand mascot gimmick (Dukes Mayo dumping mayonnaise on the winning coach, or Kellanova sibling Cheez-It’s mascot Ched-Z officiating a wedding during a game time-out).
100% real love at first bite!Congrats to our newlyweds for tying the knot! #CitrusBowl pic.twitter.com/jhHq1H3nd7— Cheez-It Citrus Bol (@CitrusBowl) December 31, 2024
According to Serro, last years Pop-Tarts Bowl drove nine times more share of voice than 20 other non-Kellanova Bowl games combined, a 275% increase in social engagements versus 2023, and the highest brand search in more than 15 years on game day. The brand also sold millions more Pop-Tarts in the month following the game than the month before it.
The brand could have stuck with the single edible mascot for a few years, then slowly, methodically, year after year, started adding more characters and concepts. In my opinion, this would build more familiarity, anticipation, and, by extension, enthusiasm.
But where do we go from here? If its 6 edible mascots this year, do we jump to 10 or 12 in 2026? When will the numbers game cease? Maybe it goes full Bud Bowl, and we have two full football squads of Pop-Tarts on the field playing for the right to be enthusiastically toasted and devoured. Glorious.
To be clear, I love this idea, and it’s a prime example of a marketer cleverly finding “white space” in a saturated marketing landscape and eventizing something, seemingly out of nothing. In that way, it’s kindred to FanDuel’s “Kick of Destiny” work in the last three Super Bowls. It also turned things up a notch, going from Rob Gronkowski as a single kicker during a live commercial break to Peyton and Eli Manning facing off in a special pregame show. Both 2024 and 2025 attracted about 2 million participants on FanDuel, so the evolution appears to have worked.
With Pop-Tarts, the edible mascot barely became a tradition before it was hurriedly super-sized and multiplied. As a result, Pop-Tarts may have just bitten years off the gimmicks lifespan by so quickly feeding into our cultures insatiable appetite for newer, bigger, now now now. Its a reflection of a broader issue in brand culture, where marketers are churning through ideas so quickly that nothing is given the time to become truly iconic.
Its also possible the brand needs to cash in its Bowl hype on a short timeline, given it signed a one-year title sponsorship deal for 2023, then exercised its two-year extension option last year. Serro wouldn’t provide details on whether the brand will extend its Bowl investment beyond this year. “While we cant share much just yet, lets just say we love football and the way it brings fans together,” she says.
But based on its popularity so far, and if they play their breakfast pastry cards right, the horizon for edible mascots could be incredibly long. They could star in ads, and then dip into real life as pop-culture nomads, showing up at any given extravaganzastate fairs, movie premieres, music festivals, the Super Bowluntil the end of time. Lets face it, with a yearslong legacy like that, the people would . . . ahem . . . eat it up, and we’d have the Energizer Bunny of deliciously suicidal brand mascots.
This week, politics, memes, and protest movements kept colliding with the economy, turning everything from Black Friday shopping to stock charts into a referendum on power and attention.
Investors who spent the last couple of years riding AI and crypto gains are getting a reminder that gravity is still in charge, as once-screaming-up charts now introduce terms like death cross and profit-taking. Retailers are heading into the holidays knowing that some shoppers are planning not to spend at all, on purpose. And on the cultural front, a single insult from the president is now ricocheting around social networks, while a local New York election is being framed as a national story about socialism, faith, and economic justice.
Here is what actually moved the week in business.
Housings long plateau: Moodys maps a decade of flat real home prices
Moodys Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi expects the U.S. housing market to spend the next decade slowly working off the excesses of the pandemic era, with prices rising roughly in line with inflation and no real gains once you adjust for it. After the massive run-up in prices and the mortgage rate shock, he sees existing home sales staying frozen for years as affordability gradually improves. Moodys projects nominal home prices will climb about 23.5% between December 2025 and December 2035, with modest declines likely in parts of the South and West and more stability in the Northeast and Midwest. Zandi also points to long-term headwinds like restrictive immigration that could limit construction labor, and to higher Treasury yields that may keep mortgage rates closer to 6%.
Quiet, Piggy turns into a meme war the president cannot control
A clip of President Donald Trump saying Quiet, Piggy to Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey aboard Air Force One went viral and quickly turned into a memetic insult aimed right back at him. Users on Bluesky and X are now quote-posting Trump and his allies with the phrase, often pairing it with unflattering photos or AI-generated images of Trump as Miss Piggy or yelling at Miss Piggy. The reaction taps into Trumps long record of calling women pigs, dogs, and slobs, and his years of attacking journalists in order to discredit negative coverage. That history makes this latest jab feel especially juvenile and very on brand, fueling frustration that fellow reporters did not push him harder in the moment.
XRP sinks as profit-taking and macro fears hit crypto again
XRP, the token tied to Ripples XRP Ledger, has dropped to around $2.13, more than 26% below where it was three months ago and well off its July peak of $3.65. The decline comes even after the launch of three XRP exchange-traded funds, including Canary Capitals XRPC, which has already fallen about 11% as large holders reportedly sold 200 million XRP within two days. Analysts say the pullback is part of a broader risk-off mood as investors worry about a possible tech and AI bubble, economic uncertainty, and the odds of future rate cuts. Bitcoin is under similar pressure, recently flashing a death cross that has reinforced bearish sentiment and wiped out its gains for 2025.
Epsteins Bubba email becomes NSFW merch and a headache for platforms
The release of more than 23,000 pages of Jeffrey Epstein’s estate documents has spawned a wave of NSFW Trump-and-Clinton-themed merchandise on Etsy and Amazon. Sellers are zeroing in on a 2018 email in which Epsteins brother jokes about photos of Trump blowing Bubba, a line that has sparked online speculation about the two former presidents, even as both deny any wrongdoing and the documents do not explicitly implicate them. The email has become fodder for T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, and other items built around suggestive slogans and winks at Big, Beautiful Bill. A few designers have pushed into more creative or graphic territory, including artwork styled after the film Brokeback Mountain.
Netflixs 10-for-1 stock split shocks casual chart watchers, not investors
Netflix shares appear to have fallen more than 90% on some charts, dropping from over $1,100 to around $111. But the move comes from a 10-for-1 stock split rather than an actual collapse in value. For existing shareholders, nothing fundamental has changed, since each old share was simply divided into 10, and holders received nine additional shares for every one they already owned. Netflix says the goal is to make shares more accessible to employees in stock purchase and option programs, where a four-digit price can be a psychological and financial barrier. Lower nominal prices can also make the stock more approachable to smaller retail investors who balk at four-figure tickets.
Holiday boycotts aim to turn non-spending into a political weapon
Two overlapping campaigns, Mass Blackout and We Aint Buying It, are calling on Americans to sit out Black Friday and the surrounding shopping days to protest Trump-era policies and corporate alignment with them. The Mass Blackout boycott urges people to stop shopping, streaming, and even working, if they can, from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving through the day after Cyber Mondaywhile still supporting small, local businesses with cash. The We Aint Buying It boycott focuses on Target, Home Depot, and Amazon, citing everything from DEI rollbacks to alleged cooperation with ICE and tax cut lobbying. Organizers frame the actions as economic noncooperation in an economy where the wealth gap keeps widening and the system works for the wealthy by design.
Bitcoin’s death cross deepens anxiety, makes token roughly flat for 2025
Bitcoin has fallen from October highs above $124,000 to around $94,000, giving back its year-to-date gains and putting the token firmly in bear market territory. The slide has been accompanied by a classic technical warning sign known as a death cross, when short-term moving averages drop below longer-term ones on a chart. That pattern has added to fears that the current downturn could deepen, even as some analysts note that previous death crosses have lined up with local bottoms rather than full-scale collapses. Other cryptocurrencies are followingsuit, with a major market index down in line with Bitcoin over the past week. The broader backdrop is a mix of profit-taking by long-term holders, institutional outflows, and macro worries that make speculative assets a tougher sell.
Zohran Mamdani becomes conservative medias new favorite villain
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has not taken office yet, but conservative media has already cast him as its latest symbol of everything wrong with the left. Commentators on Fox News, Newsmax, and elsewhere have called him a communist, a Marxist, and a jihadist sympathizer, often blurring the line between socialism and communism while attacking his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America and his Muslim faith. The New York Post ran a string of attention-grabbing covers about him ahead of the election and is now monetizing those images as merch, further cementing his role as a polarizing figure. Right-leaning outlets describe Mamdani’s agenda as fundamentally at odds with American values, while progressive watchdogs say he is being used much like Nancy Pelosi or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were before him, as a stand-in for the entire Democratic Party.
Verizon cuts 13,000 jobs to reorient around customers
Verizon is laying off more than 13,000 employees, roughly 20 percent of its non-union management workforce, as part of a major push to streamline operations and free up money to invest in customer experience. In a memo to staff, new CEO Dan Schulman said the companys cost structure has become a drag, creating friction that slows Verizon down and frustrates customers. The carrier reported about $33.8 billion in third-quarter revenue and continued growth in prepaid wireless subscribers, but it is losing higher-value postpaid lines and facing intense competition from AT&T, T-Mobile, and others. Alongside the layoffs, Verizon plans to sharply reduce outsourced labor and has created a $20 million Reskilling and Career Transition Fund to support affected workers.
Techs roller-coaster week leaves investors dizzy
Thursday turned into a full roller coaster for tech investors. Nvidias blowout earnings pushed its stock up nearly 5% early in the day and briefly lifted the entire Magnificent Seven, thanks to better-than-expected revenue, strong profit, and a bullish fourth-quarter forecast. But fears of an AI bubble and fading confidence in a December Fed rate cut quickly erased those gains, sending the major tech names and the Nasdaq composite into sharp intraday swings. By Friday morning, rate-cut odds had risen again, and several of the big players were inching back into positive territory, even as Nvidia slipped.
Sometimes, a simple summary is all you need.
Me? Im a man of many words. (Understatement of the century, I know.) I appreciate interesting writing, where language matters and a persons personality shines through in the prose.
But lets be real: 99% of the articles you encounter on this musty ol web of ours arent exactly awe-inspiring. Theyre a means to an end. The same is true for most videos, too.
And in any such scenario, you arent in it for the pleasure of reading or viewing and being entertained. You just want to get the gist of whats happening without wasting any time wading your way through unimaginative drivel.
The next time you find yourself facing that predicament, todays Cool Tools discovery will be exactly the advantage you never knew you needed.
This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures!
Simple summaries, served up swiftly
So, first things first: In this day and age, theres no shortage of supposedly smart AI-powered systems offering to summarize stuff for you.
Such systems are built into almost every browser at this point, not to mention most AI chatbots and an awful lot of regular ol apps as well.
But a free stand-alone service called Kagi Summarize is a cut above the rest in some pretty significant ways, both practical and philosophical.
And youll need less than a minute to get it going.
Choose your own adventure:
On any device, you can simply head over to the Kagi Summarize websiteand then paste any article or YouTube link (or even a block of plain text!) into the box on that page.
Note that you will need to sign in with an email address or a Google, Microsoft, Apple, or GitHub account in order to use this web versionbut its completely free once you do, and the service never spams you or sells your info.
Better yet: On a phone or tablet, you can install the free Kagi Summarize Android app or Kagi Summarize iOS appand then save yourself a step by sharing any article or video there directly from another app, using the standard system-level sharing option.
This is also free and doesnt require any kind of sign-in or account to use.
Summoning Kagi Summarize is as simple as sharing anything into the app, on mobile.
Either way you go, youll end up with a quick n simple bulleted breakdown of your items key points for easy skimming.
Kagi Summarize can give you bulleted breakdowns for easy skimmingand that’s just the start.
And thats just the tip of the iceberg.
On the desktop front, you can switch between that default Key Moments view and a more narrative Summary option, and you can use a Discuss Further command to interactively ask specific questions about the material and get instant answers.
And on mobile, you can move between those same setups along with a super-simplified Explain Like Im 5 approachand you can change the length of your summaries to get more or less detail.
You’ve got all sorts of options for how your summaries turn out.
Kagi Summarizes mobile version also has some interesting options for customizing the appearance of your summaries to make em easier on the eyes, in whatever style you prefer.
You can even control the appearance of your summaries to make ’em as pleasant as possible for your personal preferences.
So why is this better than other summarizing tools, you might be wondering? Id point to three specific reasons:
It works with anything, anywherewithout tethering you down to one specific browser or program you have to use to access it.
It offers some genuinely nice extras in the way of customization and control, which makes the summaries much more useful in returnsince you can experience em in whatever form, length, and visual appearance you find most appealing.
And its focused fiercely on privacy. The underlying organization, if you arent familiar, is a Google search alternative thats all about (a) quality of experience and (b) avoiding any collection of any personal info. Kagi Summarize follows that same philosophy and promises to keep all your activity anonymous. The mobile apps dont even ask for a single permissionwhich is pretty darn rare in this day and age.
Privacy is a key part of the Kagi Summarize setup.
To summarize: Its useful, its customizable, its free, and it doesnt do anything with your data.
If you think youll ever find a scenario where itd be helpful to have something summarized, this one is well worth keeping around.
Kagi Summarize is available on the web as well as in a more fully featured Android app and iOS app, for mobile use.
Its completely free to use.
And its creator is adamant about the fact that it doesnt collect or share any significant data. The desktop site requires you to sign in, while the mobile apps dontbut neither requires any privacy compromises.
Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
