Minnesota continues to be the beating heart of nationwide anti-ICE movements with The Day of Truth and Freedom. Today, January 23, hundreds of businesses across the state are closing their doors in protest after community groups, faith-based organizations, and unions came together to call for an economic blackout.
Minnesotans are coming together in moral reflection and action to stand together against the actions of the federal government against the state of Minnesota, a declaration reads on the organizing website, ICE Out of MN.
The day-long protest follows a series of tragedies that stem from the Department of Homeland Securitys January 6 deployment of 2,000 officers to Minneapolis. One day later, an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, and just this past Tuesday, ICE detained five-year-old Liam Ramos and his father in their driveway. The family has an active asylum case and had no order of deportation, yet the father and son are now in a Texas detention center.
What is the Day of Truth and Freedom?
According to ICE Out of MNs statement: The ICE surge that cost the life of Renee Nicole Good is violating the Constitutional and human rights of Americans and our neighbors. It is time to suspend the normal order of business to demand immediate cessation of ICE actions in MN, accountability for federal agents who have caused loss of life and abuse to Minnesota residents and call for Congress to immediately intervene.
The Day of Truth and Freedom’s demands are as follows:
ICE must leave Minnesota now.
The officer who killed Renee Good must be held legally accountable.
No additional federal funding for ICE in the upcoming Congressional budget and ICE should be investigated for human and Constitutional violations of Americans and our neighbors.
Minnesota and national companies should cease economic relations with ICE and refuse ICE entry or using their property for staging grounds.
Minnesota-based publication Bring Me The News has an ever-evolving list of all the businessesfrom bookstores to cafesthat are closed on Friday.
The list also includes businesses that will remain open, but are taking action, such as donating some or all of their profits to organizations like the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota and the recently launched Immigrant Rapid Response Fund.
How individuals are participating in the Minnesota economic blackout
Organizers are further calling for individuals living in Minnesota to not work (unless involved in emergency services), go to school, or do any shopping for the day, instead focusing on community, conscience, and collective action.
The Day of Truth and Freedom also includes a march at 2 p.m. CT from the Commons downtown, and a 3 p.m. CT rally at the Target Center. Interested participants can reserve a free rally ticket on the ICE Out of MN website.
Anyone who lives outside of Minnesota can take part in solidarity through a scheduled event or by organizing one. The ICE Out for Good website hosts a growing database of events taking place, provides a space to create an event, and has an event-planning toolkit.
ICE Out for Good also encourages individuals to push businesses to speak out against ICE, such as Minneapolis-based Target, Delta, Home Depot, and more. It offers links to contact these businesses, alongside ones to reach members of Congress.
Organizations that support anti-ICE activism
The Day of Truth and Freedom movement isnt specifically asking for donations, but anyone who is inclined to support the cause can donate to organizations including:
Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota
Immigrant Rapid Response Fund
National Immigrant Justice Center
American Civil Liberties Union
Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee
Organized Communities Against Deportations
Amica Center for Immigrant Rights
In a hypothetical nuclear war involving Russia, China and the United States, the island of Greenland would be in the middle of Armageddon.The strategic importance of the Arctic territory under the flight paths that nuclear-armed missiles from China and Russia could take on their way to incinerating targets in the United States, and vice versa is one of the reasons U.S. President Donald Trump has cited in his disruptive campaign to wrest control of Greenland from Denmark, alarming Greenlanders and longtime allies in Europe alike.Trump has argued that U.S. ownership of Greenland is vital for his “Golden Dome” a multibillion dollar missile defense system that he says will be operational before his term ends in 2029.“Because of The Golden Dome, and Modern Day Weapons Systems, both Offensive and Defensive, the need to ACQUIRE is especially important,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Saturday.That ushered in another roller-coaster week involving the semiautonomous Danish territory, where Trump again pushed for U.S. ownership before seemingly backing off, announcing Wednesday the “framework of a future deal” on Arctic security that’s unlikely to be the final word.Here’s a closer look at Greenland’s position at a crossroads for nuclear defense.
ICBM flight paths
Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs, that nuclear adversaries would fire at each other if it ever came to that tend to take the shortest direct route, on a ballistic trajectory into space and down again, from their silos or launchers to targets. The shortest flight paths from China or Russia to the United States and the other way would take many of them over the Arctic region.Russian Topol-M missiles fired, for example, from the Tatishchevo silo complex southeast of Moscow would fly high over Greenland, if targeted at the U.S. ICBM force of 400 Minuteman III missiles, housed at the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana and the Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming.Chinese Dong Feng-31 missiles, if fired from new silo fields that the U.S. Defense Department says have been built in China, also could overfly Greenland should they be targeted at the U.S. Eastern Seaboard.“If there is a war, much of the action will take place on that piece of ice. Think of it: those missiles would be flying right over the center,” Trump said Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Pituffik Space Base
An array of farseeing early warning radars act as the Pentagon’s eyes against any missile attack. The northernmost of them is in Greenland, at the Pituffik Space Base. Pronounced “bee-doo-FEEK,” it used to be called Thule Air Base, but was renamed in 2023 using the remote location’s Greenlandic name, recognizing the Indigenous community that was forcibly displaced by the U.S. outpost’s construction in 1951.Its location above the Arctic Circle, and roughly halfway between Washington and Moscow, enables it to peer with its radar over the Arctic region, into Russia and at potential flight paths of U.S.-targeted Chinese missiles.“That gives the United States more time to think about what to do,” said Pavel Podvig, a Geneva-based analyst who specializes in Russia’s nuclear arsenal. “Greenland is a good location for that.”The two-sided, solid-state AN/FPS-132 radar is designed to quickly detect and track ballistic missile launches, including from submarines, to help inform the U.S. commander in chief’s response and provide data for interceptors to try and destroy warheads.The radar beams out for nearly 5,550 kilometers (3,450 miles) in a 240-degree arc and, even at its furthest range, can detect objects no larger than a small car, the U.S. Air Force says.
Expert sees holes in Trump’s arguments
Pitching the “Golden Dome” in Davos, Trump said that the U.S. needs ownership of Greenland to defend it.“You can’t defend it on a lease,” he said.But defense specialists struggle to comprehend that logic given that the U.S. has operated at Pituffik for decades without owning Greenland.French nuclear defense specialist Etienne Marcuz points out that Trump has never spoken of also needing to take control of the United Kingdom even though it, like Greenland, also plays an important role in U.S. missile defense.An early warning radar operated by the U.K.’s Royal Air Force at Fylingdales, in northern England, serves both the U.K. and U.S governments, scanning for missiles from Russia and elsewhere and northward to the polar region. The unit’s motto is “Vigilamus” Latin for “We are watching.”Trump’s envisioned multilayered “Golden Dome” could include space-based sensors to detect missiles. They could reduce the U.S. need for its Greenland-based radar station, said Marcuz, a former nuclear defense worker for France’s Defense Ministry, now with the Foundation for Strategic Research think tank in Paris.“Trump’s argument that Greenland is vital for the Golden Dome and therefore that it has to be invaded, well, acquired is false for several reasons,” Marcuz said.“One of them is that there is, for example, a radar in the United Kingdom, and to my knowledge there is no question of invading the U.K. And, above all, there are new sensors that are already being tested, in the process of being deployed, which will in fact reduce Greenland’s importance.”
‘Golden Dome’ interceptors
Because of its location, Greenland could be a useful place to station “Golden Dome” interceptors to try to destroy warheads before they reach the continental U.S.The “highly complex system can only work at its maximum potential and efficiency if this Land is included in it,” Trump wrote in his post last weekend.But the U.S. already has access to Greenland under a 1951 defense agreement. Before Trump ratcheted up the heat on the territory and Denmark, its owner, their governments likely would have readily accepted any American military request for an expanded footprint there, experts say. It used to have multiple bases and installations, but later abandoned them, leaving just Pituffik.“Denmark was the most compliant ally of the United States,” Marcuz said. “Now, it’s very different. I don’t know whether authorization would be granted, but in any case, before, the answer was ‘Yes.'”
John Leicester, Associated Press
Shares in Intel Corporation (Nasdaq: INTC) are plunging in pre-market trading this morning. The stock price fall comes after the chipmaker reported its Q4 2025 earnings after the closing bell yesterday. But its Intels forecast, rather than its latest results, that seems to be driving the stock price’s fall. Heres what you need to know.
Intel reports Q4 earnings
Yesterday, Intel reported its Q4 2025 and full fiscal 2025 results. For its full fiscal 2025, the company reported $52.9 billion in revenue. That compares with the $53.1 billion in revenue the company brought in during its fiscal 2024.
But what investors were mainly interested in were the companys Q4 2025 results and its Q1 2026 forecastthe quarter Intel is now operating in.
For Intels Q4 2025, the company reported revenue of $13.7 billion. That was down about 4% from the $14.3 billion the company reported in the same quarter a year earlier. The companys Non-GAAP earnings per share (EPS) were 15 cents. That was an increase from the 13 cents Non-GAAP EPS the company achieved in its Q4 a year earlier.
As noted by CNBC, Intels EPS of 15 cents and revenue of $13.7 billion both beat LSEG estimates, which were 8 cents and $13.4 billion, respectively.
However, despite these beats, Intel shares fell sharply, with the stock down more than 13% in pre-market trading as of the time of this writing.
Intel unable to meet AI data center demand
There are two primary reasons for Intels pre-market share price plunge this morning. The first is its Q1 revenue and adjusted EPS forecast. The company said it expects revenue during its first quarter to reach between $11.7 billion and $12.7 billion. It said its adjusted EPS is expected to come in flat.
As CNBC notes, Intel’s Q1 revenue forecast range is mostly below the $12.51 billion analysts were expecting. The companys adjusted EPS of 0 cents is also below the 5 cents analysts were expecting.
But what has spooked investors the most is the comments Intel made about the demand for its server chips that are used in AI data centers. The good news is that the demand for these chips is extraordinarily high. The bad news, Intel announced, is that the company is unable to meet this demand.
As Reuters notes, Intel decides years ahead of time on its manufacturing output, and the company was caught off guard by the AI data center boom. That means Intel is essentially leaving money on the table because it is unable to supply all the chips its customers are demanding.
If theres a bright side to Intels forecast, its that the company expects its Q1 supply to be at the lowest level, before improving in Q2 and later.
INTC stock plunges after earnings
After Intels disappointing Q1 forecast, shares in the company sank after hours yesterday and remain highly depressed as of the time of this writing.
Currently, INTC shares are down more than 13.6% in pre-market trading to $46.92 per share. Yet while investors are clearly disappointed in Intels Q1 forecast and the companys current inability to meet customer demand, its still worth noting that Intel shares have had a terrific run as of late.
As of yesterdays close, before todays pre-market price drop, INTC shares have seen their price surge by a staggering 47% since the year began. Over the past twelve months, INTC shares have jumped more than 148% as of yesterdays close.
What investors will be looking for now is signs that Intel can boost its manufacturing capacity to meet customer demand and thus fully take advantage of the AI boom engulfing the economy.
TikTok has finalized a deal to create a new American entity, avoiding the looming threat of a ban in the United States that has been in discussion for years on the platform now used by more than 200 million Americans.The social video platform company signed agreements with major investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX to form the new TikTok U.S. joint venture. The new version will operate under “defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurances for U.S. users,” the company said in a statement Thursday. American TikTok users can continue using the same app.President Donald Trump praised the deal in a Truth Social post, thanking Chinese leader Xi Jinping specifically “for working with us and, ultimately, approving the Deal.” Trump add that he hopes “that long into the future I will be remembered by those who use and love TikTok.”Adam Presser, who previously worked as TikTok’s head of operations and trust and safety, will lead the new venture as its CEO. He will work alongside a seven-member, majority-American board of directors that includes TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew.The deal ends years of uncertainty about the fate of the popular video-sharing platform in the United States. After wide bipartisan majorities in Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed a law that would ban TikTok in the U.S. if it did not find a new owner in the place of China’s ByteDance, the platform was set to go dark on the law’s January 2025 deadline. For a several hours, it did. But on his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep it running while his administration sought an agreement for the sale of the company.“China’s position on TikTok has been consistent and clear,” Guo Jiakun, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson in Beijing, said Friday about the TikTok deal and Trump’s Truth Social post, echoing an earlier statement from the Chinese embassy in Washington.Apart from an emphasis on data protection, with U.S. user data being stored locally in a system run by Oracle, the joint venture will also focus on TikTok’s algorithm. The content recommendation formula, which feeds users specific videos tailored to their preferences and interests, will be retrained, tested and updated on U.S. user data, the company said in its announcement.The algorithm has been a central issue in the security debate over TikTok. China previously maintained the algorithm must remain under Chinese control by law. But the U.S. regulation passed with bipartisan support said any divestment of TikTok must mean the platform cuts ties specifically the algorithm with ByteDance. Under the terms of this deal, ByteDance would license the algorithm to the U.S. entity for retraining.The law prohibits “any cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm” between ByteDance and a new potential American ownership group, so it is unclear how ByteDance’s continued involvement in this arrangement will play out.“Who controls TikTok in the U.S. has a lot of sway over what Americans see on the app,” said Anupam Chander, a professor of law and technology at Georgetown University.Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX are the three managing investors, each holding a 15% share. Other investors include the investment firm of Michael Dell, the billionaire founder of Dell Technologies. ByteDance retains 19.9% of the joint venture.
Associated Press writers Chan Ho-him in Hong Kong and Didi Tang in Washington contributed to this report.
Kaitlyn Huamani, AP Technology Reporter
For much of the modern corporate era, brand has been treated as surface area. A story told outward. A set of signals designed to persuade, attract, and differentiate. When companies spoke about brand, they were usually talking about perception: how they looked in the market, how they sounded, how they were received.
That framing made sense in a world where markets moved a little more slowly, organizations were stable, and leadership could afford to separate strategy from culture, product from meaning, execution from belief.
That world no longer exists.
Todays organizations operate in a state of near-constant volatility. Strategy shifts quarterly. Teams scale overnight. Culture is tested publicly, in real time. And leadership is no longer judged solely by results, but by coherence and meaning. Do the choices make sense? Do the values hold under pressure? Does the organization know how to behave when the playbook runs out?
In this environment, brand cannot remain a visual wrapper. It must become something more fundamental.
It must become an operating system.
When Brand Stops Being a Story and Starts Being Structure
An operating system doesnt exist to impress. It exists to coordinate behavior, allocate resources, and make complex systems usable. It governs whats possible, whats prioritized, and what happens when things break.
This is the shift now underway in the most forward-thinking organizationsbrand moving from expression to infrastructure.
In this new paradigm, brand is no longer just what the company says. Its how the company defines itself. It shows up in how leaders frame trade-offs, how teams resolve tension, how products evolve, and how culture responds to stress.
The question is no longer Is the brand consistent? but Is the brand functional? Does it help people make better decisions faster? Does it reduce friction? Does it offer clarity when data runs out and vision or judgment takes over?
If it cant be used under intense pressure and scrutiny, it isnt an operating system at all.
The End of the Brand Deck Era and What Comes Next
This evolution didnt happen because brand teams failed. It happened because organizations asked brand to do the wrong job.
For years, brand was tasked with alignment theater: values posters, messaging frameworks, tone-of-voice documents. Useful artifacts, yes, but largely disconnected from how power, priorities, and incentives actually worked inside the business.
Meanwhile, leadership teams struggled with a different problem entirelyfragmentation. Smart people pulling in different directions. Strategy decks multiplying ideas while conviction thinned. Culture initiatives proliferating without changing behavior.
The gap between what the brand claimed and how the organization actually operated grew wider.
In that gap, trust eroded, employees disengaged, decision-making slowed. And companies found themselves saying the right things while doing the wrong ones.
Brand-as-operating-system emerges as a response to that gap. Not as a creative flourish, but as a leadership correction.
Brand as a Shared Logic System
What does this look like in practice? When brand functions as an operating system, it becomes a shared logic layer across the organization. It provides a common mental model that helps teams answer questions like:
What kind of decisions do we make here?
What do we prioritize when values collide?
How do we act when theres no precedent?
What does good actually look like for us?
This is where brand moves beyond language and into behavior.
Hiring becomes more precise. Not just about skills, but about belief alignment. Innovation becomes more focused. Not just novel, but meaningful.
Culture becomes less performative. Not whats celebrated on slides, but whats rewarded in practice.
The organization stops asking people to remember the brand and starts enabling them to use it.
Why This Is a Leadership Problem, Not a Marketing One
Brand-as-OS doesnt install itself. It has to be architected, and that responsibility starts at the top.
Brand-as-OS only works when leadership owns it, models it, and enforces it. This is where many organizations stall. Its easier to approve a campaign than to commit to a worldview. Easier to delegate brand than to live inside it.
But brand is not neutral. Every organization already has an operating system. The only question is whether its intentional or accidental.
Our Future of Brand Report 2026 reveals a clear pattern: companies that treat brand as infrastructure, embedded in systems, rituals, and strategic choices, outperform peers who treat it as a job left to the marketing department.
What sets these companies apart isnt better branding. Its leadership that understands brand is the connective tissue between culture, vision, and execution.
At Motto, weve seen this firsthand. In companies led by visionaries who treat brand not as a communications tool, but as a cultural code. Leaders who hold brand in the same regard as financial health or product strategy, because they understand its tied to both. And when that code is clear, everything else becomes faster, sharper, and more aligned.
What emerges isnt language for the website or a better logo. Its a set of convictions that govern how the company behaves, especially when the answers arent obvious.
The company doesnt just look different; it is different.
The Cost of Not Making the Shift
Organizations that fail to treat brand as infrastructure will continue to suffer from the same symptoms, no matter how many initiatives they launch.
Theyll hire exceptional talent only to frustrate it. Theyll produce beautiful work that lacks cohesion. Theyll talk about alignment while reinforcing ambiguity.
Most dangerously, theyll confuse activity with progress.
In contrast, companies that build brand as an operating system gain something far more valuable than consistency. They gain velocity. Because when people share a belief system, they dont need permission for every move. They can act with confidence, even in uncertainty.
The Next Frontier of Leadership
Leadership in the coming decade will not be defined by charisma or control but by coherence. The ability to create systems that make sense to the humans inside them.
Bran-as-operating-system is not a trend. Its a response to complexity. A way of giving organizations a spine when everything else is in flux.
The leaders who understand this wont hand off brand to marketing and hope it holds. They wont treat vision, culture, and brand as separate lines of effort, but as one integrated system of belief, behavior, and direction. Theyll design for alignment from the inside out, not just to look good but to operate better.
Because the future of brand leadership belongs to those who do more than tell the story. They architect the system. They run the code. They build companies where vision is felt, culture is lived, and brand is the connective tissue in it all.
Not just brands with something to say. Brands built to lead.
Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Companys Plugged In.
On January 16, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniakknown to all as Wozreceived the James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award, an honor bestowed each year by the Tech Interactive, a science museum in San Jose, California. The ceremony and a conversation between Wozniak and comedian Drew Carey capped a gala event in which several organizations were named laureates for using technology to improve the world.
Their creations include a brain-computer interface (BCI) that helps people with disabilities communicate, a forum that lets patients who have received BCI implants shape the technologys best practices and ethics, a headset that uses ultrasound therapy to treat mental conditions, and a device that provides people with Parkinsons disease the ability to walk more confidently. Until he took the stage himself, Wozniak sat in the audience with his wife, Janet, watching presentations about each honoree with rapt attention.
In a conversation after the event, Wozniak marveled at what hed seen. They were creating something to solve a problem they had with the world, and that’s where you get the best products, he said. He likened the honorees ingenuity to his own implementation of color graphics on 1977s Apple II, a killer feature at a time when other microcomputers could barely draw pictures in black and white. Rather than adding to the machines cost and complexity, he explained, his approach took no chips at all. I mean, it was just so far out of the box. It violated all the rules of mathematics on color TV.
From left: Tech for Global Good Celebration honorees Jay Sanguinetti of Sanmai Technologies, Sidney Collin of NexStride, Steve Wozniak, Andreas Forsland of Cognixion, and Ian Burkhart of BCI Pioneers Coalition in San Jose, California, on January 16, 2026. [Photo: Don Feria]
Wozniak has spent close to half a century being celebrated for his technical brilliance and irreplaceable role in bringing computing to the masses. Just three years after starting Apple with Steve Jobs (and, briefly, Ron Wayne), he received the Association for Computing Machinerys Grace Murray Hopper Award. Six years after that, he and Jobs won the National Medal of Technology, resulting in a memorable photo opp with President Ronald Reagan. He said last weeks award was particularly meaningful to him because it reflected his efforts as a humanitarian rather than solely as a technologist.
Those efforts have often focused on culture and education in Silicon Valley. A native of San Jose, Wozniak provided funding that was instrumental to bootstrapping the 27-year-old Tech Interactive as well as the citys Childrens Discovery Museum. (The latter is located on a street named Woz Wayyet another of Wozniaks many tributes.) In his memoir, iWoz, he writes about paying for computer labs in local schools and fulfilling a cherished dream by teaching computing skills to fifth graders. Even earlier, he donated the very first Apple computer to a teacher named Liza Loop.
After Apple employees dating to its days as a garage startup werent cut in on its 1980 initial public offering, Wozniak gave them a meaningful percentage of his personal stock, purely because it felt like the right thing to do. He was also a principal founding donor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an essential advocate for civil rights in the digital age. The list of his good deeds goes on, and is not thoroughly documented: In conversations with people who have known him for decades, Ive heard multiple stories about his unpublicized support for other worthy causes.
All along, Wozniak has remained on Apples payroll. (One of the best things about attending product launches at Apple Park is observing him mingling with the preshow crowd, otherwise made up of journalists, creators, influencers, and Apple PR people.) But its been more than 40 years since he wound down active work at the company. Though hes since been involved in several startupsin areas ranging from remote controls to space junkhis post-Apple life has mattered in ways that have nothing to do with money or power. His desire to leave society better than he found it is one big reason why.
Its not tough to connect the dots between the Woz who engineered the Apple-1 and Apple II when he was in his mid-twenties and Woz the 75-year-old humanitarian. He does so himself, arguing your personality settles down between 18 and 23 years old. From then on, youre the same person. (Having reassessed his priorities after surviving a small plane crash in 1981, he does allow that something like a horrible shock or near-death [experience] might have an impact.) His interest in inventing stuff, he told me, began as a form of self-expression that helped him overcome being painfully shy: The only way I could do anything to communicate was to design something cool. And people, other geeks, would talk to me about it.
Steve Wozniak accepts the James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award from presenter Katie Ferrick. [Photo: Don Feria]
Apples first machines grew out of Wozniaks desire to own a computer himself, at a time when no computer was built or priced for consumers. That led to him wanting to help other people own them, an early sign of his fundamental generosity of spirit. At first, that meant sharing the Apple-1 schematics so that other hobbyists could assemble their ownin part because he couldnt convince his pre-Apple employer, HP, that PCs might become a pretty decent business.
I proposed it five times, he remembers. I got turned down. No computer company really felt it was going to go anywhere.
Fortunately for Wozniak, and us, others showed more foresight. Essential support came from Paul Terrell, whose Byte Shop computer store became Apples first dealer, and Mike Markkula, the companys first angel investor and, later, its CEO. It took a couple of people like that to really give us a chance, Wozniak says.
(What about Steve Jobs? Discussing their time together at AppleJobs resigned after a board fight in 1985, the same year Wozniak moved onWozniak calls him a good talker, a good promoter, a good marketer of the Apple II but also points out the failure of the companys third and fourth computers, the Apple III and Lisa. As Jobss Mac got off to a sluggish start, he notes, the Apple IIs continuing popularity provided the company with a lifeline. Wozniak waxes more enthusiastic about the iPod, a crucial element of Apples comeback after Jobs returned: It wasn’t a computer, but he knew what people wantedhe knew people.)
In this century, the Apple II has remained admired and loved in equal measurewhen I helped assemble a list of the greatest PCs of all time, we ranked it No. 1. Even so, the world may underappreciate the degree to which it reflected Wozniaks outlook on life. It certainly delivered on his life philosophy, which he calls the secret of being a good person: Happiness equals smiles minus frowns. Im not sure if a single offering from todays Silicon Valley outperforms the 49-year-old Apple II on that score, and AI is only making matters more fraught. Maybe thats a lesson for todays product designers: Be more like Woz.
One other trait sets Wozniak apart. In an industry brimming with self-serious workaholics, he is a lifelong prankster, a pastime he discussed onstage with Carey last week. (My takeaway: Never, ever let Woz talk to Siri on your iPhone.) I asked him if theres a link between his mischievous streak and his philanthropic one. He wasnt sure. But he stressed that humor and creativity are deeply intertwined.
If you can make jokes, you can look at the world in different ways, he told me. They just come together naturally. His own life proves his point, and were all richer for it.
Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on fastcompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.
More top tech stories from Fast Company
You probably shouldnt click that email unsubscribe link. Heres what to do insteadIts tempting to click on unsubscribe to defend yourself from spam emails. But that can sometimes make things worse. Heres a safer way to take control. Read More
This ingenious weightless camera is changing live sports foreverNorwegian startup Muybridge has rocked pro tennis. Next up: soccer, hockey, F1even emergency medicine. Read More
Intel admits consumers don’t care about ‘AI PCs’yetTurns out most folks just want better battery life and faster graphics. Who knew? Read More
2026 will be the year Cybertruck diesTesla CEO Elon Musk overpromised sales of 250,000 Cybertrucks annually by 2025. The company has reached barely 8% of that target. Read More
Google Glass, Amazon Fire, Friendster: Why great ideas from successful companies failHere are the traps companies fall into. Read More
37signals has a fix for boring, complex, AI-infested productivity apps: FizzyThis personality-filled organizational app has a radically different philosophy than Trello, Jira, and Asanaand youd better believe thats by design. Read More
I like to say that my job as a charity auctioneer is the ultimate sales role. I stand onstage night after night encouraging people to give money, playing off the audience to push them to bid higher, in the name of charity. If theres one thing the stage has taught me, its that flexibility is everything. The faster you can adapt and offer a solution, the more successful youll be whether youre selling a product or an idea. Here are three of my favorite sales secrets.
1. THE POWER OF SUGGESTION
One of the quickest ways to lose someones attention is to tell them how you think your product should work for them. If a donor has offered their mountain house as the ultimate ski vacation house and I walk onstage and announce that Im selling a ski house, Ive immediately eliminated half the room as potential buyers of this lot simply because half of the room probably doesnt ski. Add to that, if you dont like to ski, what is the appeal of renting a house where you sit around in a cold climate with nothing else to do. If I get onstage and position it as a mountain house for all seasons, I open it up to the entire audience again. A mountain house has countless uses, and skiing is just one of them.
When you give people multiple ways to imagine using something, you invite them into the story. You expand the possibilities rather than narrowing them. In sales, and leadership, suggestion opens minds. Assumptions shut them down.
2. THERES MORE THAN ONE WAY TO GET FROM LONDON TO PARIS
Be open to different paths to agreement. Before a sales pitch, or before stepping onstage, I like to play a simple game: How else could this be used? Ill ask friends, colleagues, or clients how they see value in the same item.
Take a piece of jewelry, for example. It could be a gift to yourself, a gift for a friend, or something to pass down to your daughter. Or, for the men in the audience, an opportunity to be the guy who brings home a surprise gift just because, or a future birthday, anniversary, and Valentines Day gift. For those who are single, an opportunity to have something when you meet the girl of your dreams. When I understand all the ways someone might emotionally connect to an item, I can meet them where they are instead of forcing them down a single path.
3. BEFRIEND YOUR UNDERBIDDER
Every auction has a winner and a runner-up. Its one of the few places where not everyone gets a trophy, but that doesnt mean anyone has to walk away feeling like they lost. The same is true in sales. No matter how prepared or enthusiastic you are, a deal wont always close. What will be remembered is how the other person felt in the process.
As Im about to drop the gavel, I keep eye contact with the underbidder until the very last second, watching for any sign they might reengage. If its clear theyre done, I acknowledge them publicly, often asking for a round of applause for a strong underbidder.
Why? Because people who feel respected and appreciated are far more likely to come back. In auctions, in sales, and in leadership, making someone feel good, regardless of the outcome, keeps the door open long after the deal is done.
Sports are entering a new era and it could be powered by artificial intelligence. Jeremy Bloom, CEO of the X Games, is placing a bold bet on AI to revolutionize how competitions are judged and scored. From reducing human error to enhancing fairness and accuracy, AI judges could redefine the future of professional sports. But can machines truly replace human judgment on the worlds biggest stages?
Consistent with the general trend of incorporating artificial intelligence into nearly every field, researchers and politicians are increasingly using AI models trained on scientific data to infer answers to scientific questions. But can AI ultimately replace scientists?
The Trump administration signed an executive order on November 24, 2025, that announced the Genesis Mission, an initiative to build and train a series of AI agents on federal scientific datasets to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.
So far, the accomplishments of these so-called AI scientists have been mixed. On the one hand, AI systems can process vast datasets and detect subtle correlations that humans are unable to detect. On the other hand, their lack of commonsense reasoning can result in unrealistic or irrelevant experimental recommendations.
While AI can assist in tasks that are part of the scientific process, it is still far away from automating scienceand may never be able to. As a philosopher who studies both the history and the conceptual foundations of science, I see several problems with the idea that AI systems can do science without or even better than humans.
AI models can learn only from human scientists
AI models do not learn directly from the real world: They have to be told what the world is like by their human designers. Without human scientists overseeing the construction of the digital world in which the model operatesthat is, the datasets used for training and testing its algorithmsthe breakthroughs that AI facilitates wouldnt be possible.
Consider the AI model AlphaFold. Its developers were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the models ability to infer the structure of proteins in human cells. Because so many biological functions depend on proteins, the ability to quickly generate protein structures to test via simulations has the potential to accelerate drug design, trace how diseases develop and advance other areas of biomedical research.
As practical as it may be, however, an AI system like AlphaFold does not provide new knowledge about proteins, diseases, or more effective drugs on its own. It simply makes it possible to analyze existing information more efficiently.
AlphaFold draws upon vast databases of existing protein structures.
As philosopher Emily Sullivan put it, to be successful as scientific tools, AI models must retain a strong empirical link to already established knowledge. That is, the predictions a model makes must be grounded in what researchers already know about the natural world. The strength of this link depends on how much knowledge is already available about a certain subject and on how well the models programmers translate highly technical scientific concepts and logical principles into code.
AlphaFold would not have been successful if it werent for the existing body of human-generated knowledge about protein structures that developers used to train the model. And without human scientists to provide a foundation of theoretical and methodological knowledge, nothing AlphaFold creates would amount to scientific progress.
Science is a uniquely human enterprise
But the role of human scientists in the process of scientific discovery and experimentation goes beyond ensuring that AI models are properly designed and anchored to existing scientific knowledge. In a sense, science as a creative achievement derives its legitimacy from human abilities, values, and ways of living. These, in turn, are grounded in the unique ways in which humans think, feel and act.
Scientific discoveries are more than just theories supported by evidence: They are the product of generations of scientists with a variety of interests and perspectives, working together through a common commitment to their craft and intellectual honesty. Scientific discoveries are never the products of a single visionary genius.
For example, when researchers first proposed the double-helix structure of DNA, there were no empirical tests able to verify this hypothesisit was based on the reasoning skills of highly trained experts. It took nearly a century of technological advancements and several generations of scientists to go from what looked like pure speculation in the late 1800s to a discovery honored by a 1953 Nobel Prize.
Science, in other words, is a distinctly social enterprise, in which ideas get discussed, interpretations are offered, and disagreements are not always overcome. As other philosophers of science have remarked, scientists are more similar to a tribe than passive recipients of scientific information. Researchers do not accumulate scientific knowledge by recording factsthey create scientific knowledge through skilled practice, debate and agreed-upon standards informed by social and political values.
AI is not a scientist
I believe the computing power of AI systems can be used to accelerate scientific progress, but only if done with care.
With the active participation of the scientific community, ambitious projects like the Genesis Mission could prove beneficial for scientists. Well-designed and rigorously trained AI tools would make the more mechanical parts of scientific inquiry smoother and maybe even faster. These tools would compile information about what has been done in the past so that it can more easily inform how to design future experiments, collect measurements and formulate theories.
But if the guiding vision for deploying AI models in science is to replace human scientists or to fully automate the scientific process, I believe the project would only turn science into a caricature of itself. The very existence of science as a source of authoritative knowledge about the natural world fundaentally depends on human life: shared goals, experiences, and aspirations.
Alessandra Buccella is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University at Albany, State University of New York.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
If one of your New Years resolutions was to spend less time on devices and get more “cultured,” the Metropolitan Opera is here to helpeven if you dont find yourself in New York City.
On Saturday, January 24, 2026, at 1 p.m. ET in select theaters, it will premiere a special “Live in HD” presentation of its recent production, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
Lets take a look at the plot and the artists involved, before we get into more details on the logistics of how to see it.
What is ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ about?
Although this work is considered a modern opera, the action in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay takes place during World War II. Two Jewish cousins work together to create an anti-fascist superhero, the “Escapist.” They hope the comic book adventures they write inspire others to fight against Nazism.
The three distinct settings where the plot unfolds allow the audience to experience New York City, Prague, and a comic book reality.
Who wrote ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’?
The opera The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is based on a book of the same name, written by Michael Chabon. This critically acclaimed historical fiction novel was a New York Times bestseller and a 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner. That means if you made a reading goal for 2026, seeing this opera almost counts toward it.
Adapting it for the stage was no easy feat, but Gene Scheer tackled the libretto while Mason Bates composed the score. It is not your grandmas opera, as one of the genres Bates works in is electronic dance music.
Bartlett Sher helmed the production, with sets designed by 59 Studio. The costumes were designed by Jennifer Moeller and choreography was created by Mandy Moore.
[Photo: Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera]
What did critics think of ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’?
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clays original run took place from September 21 through October 11, 2025. The performance that will be presented on January 24 was actually recorded on October 2, 2025.
The opera received mostly positive reviews from critics, who praised the strong set design, visuals, and performances. However, some reviewers believed the libretto and compositions were lacking in depth.
TheatreManias David Gordon mused: Kavalier & Clay feels unlike anything Ive ever seen at this storied old palace. Cinematic in scope, fast paced in its delivery, and propelled by a digestibility that you dont often get in the world of opera, its a perfect introduction for new audiences who are looking to test the waters of opera or want an interesting date night.
Opera Wires David Salazar called the production Shers finest opera production to date. He goes on to say that the use of new technology has never been more polished or enticing in any opera the Met has produced thus far.
[Photo: Evan Zimmerman/Met Opera]
Some other critics were not afraid to give notes, such as Edward Sava-Segal from Bachtrack. To him, it was a production of extraordinary visual invention strapped to a score that seldom ventures beyond the predictable. As an event it impresses; as a new cornerstone for the repertory, it falls short. In other words, he enjoyed the production but not the new work itself.
Vultures Justin Davidson agreed with Sava-Segal’s statement. Additionally, he praised mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierces work as Rosa and baritone Andrzej Filończyks turn as Joe Kavalier.
How to catch ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ in theaters
To form your own opinion on the production, all you have to do is buy a ticket and enjoy the show.
The Met has created a handy “find a theater” tool here, available on its website, to see where this event is happening.
