The fiercest space race is not about getting back to the moonits about allowing you to post a TikTok or watch Netflix on your phone anywhere around the globe, from the Atacama Salt Flats to the Khongor sand dunes in the Gobi Desert. To make this happen, two distinct design philosophies are at war, as companies build out the infrastructure needed to ensure every phone on the planet is permanently connected to the internet.
On one side is Elon Musks SpaceX/Starlink and the copycat companies that have followed in Starlinks wake. Their approach is to invade space with tens of thousands of small satellites, creating a network of objects that blanket low Earth orbit. On the other side is a small Texas-based company called AST SpaceMobile, which believes it can provide better service with fewer than 100 gigantic satellites in space.
Both companiesalong with Amazon and a handful of Chinese organizationswant to dominate worldwide wireless communications. The satellite constellation with the fastest service, widest coverage, best compatibility with 5G cellphones, and lowest operational costs will own how we communicate for years to come. Which approach prevails will have serious impact not only on the future of the internet but also the health of our planet.
A new space race era
Musk set off a new space race with his desire to rule low Earth orbit. SpaceX, which owns Starlink, launched its first satellite in 2019, providing broadband internet access to anyone with a large Starlink antenna and modem on the ground. Since then, it has put more than 9,000 satellites into orbit. The company projects it will eventually have a constellation of 34,000 satellites. After Starlinks initial launch, competitors followed suit, including Jeff Bezos and his Project Kuipernow called Amazon Leoand the Chinese, whose plans include two large satellite constellations.
But theres a fundamental problem with this mega-constellation design: Musks plan for space internet is a flawed, wasteful, and dangerous game of orbital Russian roulette.
The crowded sky, a 30-minute exposure taken in June 2025 [Photo: Alan Dyer/VWPics/Universal Images Group/Getty Images]
Scientists worry that Starlinks projected 34,000-satellite constellation will cause irreparable damage to the atmosphere. A large-scale constellation also dramatically increases the possibility of a space collision that could start a catastrophic chain reaction, destroying orbital networks that are crucial for our survival as a species.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and spaceflight historian at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has been documenting satellite launches in his newsletter, Jonathan’s Space Report. He believes there may be other, better ways to achieve global coverage via satellitesif we need to be doing it at all.
I do personally have a preference for smaller numbers of larger satellites, he tells Fast Company. One of the reasons is the risk of space collisions. If you have 10 times as many satellites, you have 100 times as many close misses. So from that point of view alone, consolidating on a smaller number of satellites seems wiser.
A more efficient alternative
Thats where Musks biggest competitor comes into play. AST SpaceMobile has developed a direct-to-cell technology that utilizes large satellites called BlueBirds. These machines use thousands of antennas to deliver broadband coverage directly to standard mobile phones, says the company’s president, Scott Wisniewski.
This approach is remarkably efficient: We can achieve global coverage with approximately 90 satellites, not thousands or even tens of thousands required by other systems, Wisniewski writes in an email. McDowell agrees that AST SpaceMobile’s approach is more efficient and less wasteful.
The key is its satellites size and sophistication. ASTs first generation of commercial satellite, the BlueBird 1-5, unfolds into a massive 693-square-foot array in space. Today, the company has five operational BlueBird 1-5 satellites in orbit, but its ambitions are much bigger. On December 24, 2025, AST launched the first of its next-generation satellites from Indiacalled Block 2and this one broke records. The BlueBird 6 has a surface of almost 2,400 square feet, making it the largest single satellite in low Earth orbit. The company plans to launch up to 60 more by the end of 2026.
[Photo: AST SpaceMobile]
This large surface area is essential for gathering faint signals from standard, unmodified mobile phones on the ground, Wisniewski explains. It is essentially a single, extremely powerful and sensitive cell tower in the sky, capable of serving a huge geographical area.
This design philosophy directly addresses the two greatest threats posed by the mega-constellation model. First, with only about 90 Block 2 satellites needed for global coverage, the sheer volume of material being launched and deorbited is orders of magnitude less than the tens of thousands planned by Starlink and others. With a 7- to 10-year lifespan, AST SpaceMobile’s satellites are designed to last longer than Starklinks satellites, which have a lifespan of about 5 years. This combination of factors drastically reduces the potential for atmospheric pollution.
Additionally, a smaller number of satellites dramatically lowers the risk of orbital collisions. Fewer satellites in orbit inherently reduces the probability of collisions and the creation of space debris, promoting a more sustainable orbital environment, Winiewski says. It is a solution built on precision engineering rather than brute numerical force, a testament to a different way of thinking about the problem.
As McDowell puts it, from a space traffic point of view, Fewer, bigger satellites is probably better. It is a design choice that prioritizes sustainability and risk mitigation.
A reckless, brute-force plan
The core idea behind Starlinks direct-to-cell service is one of brute force. It is the digital equivalent of carpet-bombing: Saturate low Earth orbit with tens of thousands of relatively small, cheap, and disposable satellites. Each one acts like a tiny cell tower in the sky, talking to the phone in your pocket. Because they are in a low orbit, the lag is minimal, and the signal is strong enough for a standard phone. Its a simple concept, but its elegance is deceptive. In reality, it has the elegance of a sledgehammer.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a payload of 24 Starlink internet satellites soars into space after launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base on July 18, 2025; seen from Santee, California. [Photo: Kevin Carter/Getty Images]
Starlinks model relies on a constant cycle of replacement. The satellites are programmed to fall back to Earth after about five years, burning up on reentry. This is where the first major problem arises.
“When they burn up, they don’t just vanish,” McDowell explains. They turn into dust, alumina dust, aluminum oxide particles. These particles are very good at destroying ozone.
The long-term effect of depositing tons of this material into the upper atmosphere every single day is a terrifying unknown. We are, in effect, conducting an uncontrolled experiment on the protective layers of our own planet. McDowell notes that while a single rocket launch causes temporary, localized ozone damage, the continuous reentry of thousands of satellites creates a persistent, global problem that has never been studied on this scale.
SpaceX aggressively dismissed these concerns in 2021 in a legal battle with Viasat, a rival space internet service for home, business, and military use. Its legal defense directly attacked the scientific premise that burning satellites create harmful amounts of aluminum oxide. SpaceX has been ignoring warnings about potential ozone depletion since 2024.
However, the company has tried to address light pollution. When faced with an outcry from the astronomy community about its satellites brightness, it iterated on the design. First came DarkSat, an experimental coating that proved ineffective. Then came VisorSat, a deployable sunshade that blocked light from reflecting off the brightest parts of the satellite.
A comparison of different generations of Starlink satellites [Image: SpaceX]
McDowell tells me that now SpaceX is using a dielectric mirror film that reflects less light back to Earth. They have made a significant effort to reduce the brightness, and the newer Starlinks are substantially fainter than the early ones, McDowell says. But they are still bright enough to be a problem for the big survey telescopes like the Vera Rubin Observatory.
These mitigation efforts, while commendable, address only one symptom of the problemlight pollutionand do nothing to solve the more fundamental issues of atmospheric pollution and orbital crowding. The problem is compounded by the fact that everyone is now copying the SpaceX model. Amazon’s Project Leo plans to launch more than 3,200 satellites.
Beijing and some Chinese companies are planning two separate mega-constellations, Guowang and G60 Starlink, totaling nearly 26,000 satellites. We’re just at the beginning of this . . . so that gets very worrying because now it’s not just one company, it’s a whole bunch of companies, McDowell warns. To add to his worries, just this week the Chinese government has applied for launch permits for 200,000 satellites.
To be clear, AST SpaceMobile’s approach is not without its own controversies. The sheer size of the companys satellites makes them incredibly bright in the night sky, a significant source of frustration for ground-based astronomers. McDowell confirms that when it launched in 2022, ASTs prototype satellite, BlueWalker 3, became one of the top 10 brightest objects in the night sky for a while.
It’s a serious issue, and we are working directly with the astronomy community to mitigate our impact, Wisniewski says. The company is exploring solutions like anti-reflective coatings and operational adjustments to minimize the time its satellites are at maximum brightness. However, McDowell is not aware of anyone working with AST SpaceMobile, and the company didnt provide any specifics.
According to McDowell, the size and brightness is a trade-off he believes is reasonable. Although the BlueBirds are scary bright, there aren’t that many. So I kind of prefer that approach, he says. As long as they don’t turn around then and say, Actually, we need 30,000 of these as well.
A ULA Atlas V-551 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, carrying the first 27 satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper, in April 2025. [Photo: Manuel Mazzanti/NurPhoto/Getty Images]
A game of orbital Russian roulette
Beyond the environmental concerns lies an even more immediate existential threat: Kessler Syndrome. Popularized by the movie Gravity, it is a scenario that keeps space experts like McDowell up at night. The theory, proposed by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978, describes a domino effect where a collision between two objects in orbit creates a cloud of debris. Each piece of that debris then becomes a projectile that can cause another collision, creating even more debris, until low Earth orbit becomes an impassable minefield of hypervelocity shrapnel.
The more satellites you have, the more the chance of a collision, McDowell states plainly. And the problem is once you have the first collision, the debris from that is now threatening all the other satellites.
SpaceX has engineered a highly automated collision avoidance system for Starlink, and McDowell acknowledges its sophistication. The companys satellites constantly monitor their trajectories and can autonomously fire their thrusters to dodge potential impacts. They do thousands of maneuvers a month, he says, which is a testament to both the system’s capability and the terrifyingly crowded environment it operates in. In total, Starlink satellites have performed 50,000 evasive maneuvers since 2019.
But while SpaceX claims that its satellites are 100% safe, the facts tell us that they are not foolproof. Even with a 99% success rate for deorbiting, a 1% failure rate on a 30,000-satellite constellation means you’re adding 300 dead, multi-hundred-kilogram satellites to orbit every five years, McDowell says. That’s 300 uncontrollable bullets waiting to start the Kessler Syndrome.
A catastrophic chain reaction could, in a matter of hours or days, wipe out the essential satellite networks that underpin modern civilization. This isn’t just about losing your GPS navigation on the way to a new restaurant. It’s about the collapse of global finance, weather forecasting, communications, and critical military and disaster-response systems. We are talking about a technological regression of decades, a scenario McDowell finds increasingly plausible as more mega-constellations are launched. Its a high-stakes gamble with civilization’s essential infrastructure.
Theres also a direct-hit danger for people on the ground. A few Starlink satellites have already failed in orbit, becoming uncontrollable space junk that fell back to Earth. Theres at least one report of a piece of a satellite hitting a building in Canada. The latest reported incident took place on December 17, 2025, when a Starlink satellite experienced an anomaly, losing communication and causing a propulsion tank vent, rapid orbital decay, and the release of debris in low Earth orbit. In a 2023 report to congress, the Federal Aviation Administration said theres a real risk of falling Starlink debris injuring or killing someone by 2035.
The Shenzhou-20 launches from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on April 24, 2025. [Photo: Li Xin/Xinhua/Getty Images]
Space junk is also a problem for rockets. In early November, three taikonauts returned after being stranded on Chinas Tiangong space station for nine days. They couldnt use the spaceship that was going to take them to Earththe Chengdou-20because it had been struck by orbital debris. The China Manned Space Agency said its astronauts found “tiny cracks” in a small window of their Shenzhou-20 spacecraft.
The hit was not fatal, but things could have gone very wrong. The Chinese, however, seem undeterred. Beijing will be launching hundreds of thousands of satellites that mirror Starlinks design, contributing to the problem and increasing the risk to themselves and everyone else.
Why AST SpaceMobile could win
Right now, Starlink doesnt provide direct-to-cell broadband; instead, it provides only text and limited data connections. This low-speed connectivity requires a line of sight with the satellite, as SpaceX states on its site. Starlink, despite its leading market position in the internet satellite business, is still playing catch-up on the direct-to-cell front, and it may never be able to close the gap with AST.
Musks company has two big strikes against it. First is the hardware in orbit. To provide broadband to phones it needs a next-generation Starlink V3 satellite, which doesnt exist yet. SpaceX has no reliable way to launch it, anyway. At an estimated 4,400 pounds, the V3 satellite is too big and heavy for the workhorse Falcon 9 rocket to deploy in economically viable numbers.
The entire business model for Starlink V3 hinges on the success of Starship, Musk’s next-generation, super-heavy-lift launch vehicle. But Starship remains in development, having yet to achieve the consistent opertional launch cadence required to deploy and maintain a constellation of thousands of V3 satellites.
But even if SpaceX manages to finish Starship and Starlink V3 satellites on time, theres a second, even bigger hardware problem: The broadband connectivity wont work unless the cellphone has a special modem chip. Yes, my space cadets, you will need to buy a new phone to enjoy Starlink connectivity, while AST works with any current, unmodified phone. None of these new Starlink-enabled phones exist or have been announced yet. According to SpaceX CEO Gwynne Shotwell, the company is now working on this chip.
[Rendering: AST SpaceMobile]
Were working with chip manufacturers to get the proper chips in phones, she told the audience at World Space Business Week in Paris back in September. Expecting phone manufacturers to incorporate Starlinks proprietary modem in their phones feels like a tall order. Especially when manufacturers like Apple have their own direct cell-to-space plans. It seems unlikely that Tim Cook will tie his companys crown jewel to Musks whims. Or make the phones even more expensive.
However, that doesnt matter, because even if Musk had 15,000 V3 satellites and the Starships ready to launch, the problem will remain the same: You will need phones with Starlink modems in them for broadband. And the line-of-sight problem will persist. The broadband works only when the phone can look at the satellites in the sky.
This is why Musks promised direct-to-cell broadband timeline is speculative. In fact, while he said it would be ready in 2026, according to SpaceX, testing of the first phones equipped with Starlink chips is scheduled for this year, with an aim to complete its V3 direct-to-cell satellite constellation in 2027. It is a promise built on a promise, a technological if dependent on a logistical when. Meanwhile, AST SpaceMobile is preparing to launch new operational satellites on existing rockets.
AST SpaceMobile has already proven its technology works, with six working satellites now transmitting at typical 5G speeds directly to regular phones. This doesnt mean that it has a guaranteed win against Starlink or any of its competitors. While it has the capital to execute its planwith the backing of investors like AT&T, Alphabet, Rakuten, Vanguard, BlackRock, and Mexican magnate Carlos Slim, who owns the largest telecom operator in Latin Americaand superior technology, it needs to execute dozens of launches.
This confidence in the technology explains why the stock has skyrocketed 333% in a year, but the doubts about potential execution problems also explain why the stock experiences wild swings. With every news of a launch or a delay of a launch, the stock can swing 10% or 20% up and down. Thats why the market treats AST as a high-risk, high-reward battleground. It can be a trillion-dollar business or explode on the launchpad if the company doesnt put all those satellites up in 2026.
The coup de grâce
This technological and philosophical divergence has not gone unnoticed by Elon Musk. Seeing a direct threat to his ambitions, he has engaged in a campaign to undermine AST SpaceMobile with baseless accusations, claiming that its satellites are a danger in low Earth orbit because of their size.
At the same time, Musk is battling his own problems in low Earth orbit. China has already denounced two near misses with Starlink satellites that triggered its space station to perform emergency evasive maneuvers. On January 2, SpaceX was forced to move 4,000 satellites to a lower orbit after new research by Chinese scientists highlighted the companys recklessness and the very real risk of collision.
Moreover, Musk desperately tried to stop the Federal Communications Commission from granting AST access to the necessary spectrumthe range of radio frequencies it needs for its satellites to connect with cellphones on Earthclaiming it would be catastrophic for his service because the powerful signals from AST’s large satellites could interfere with Starlink’s user terminals. In response, AST SpaceMobile asserts that its system is designed to coexist with other networks and operates fully within the internationally agreed-upon limits established to prevent such interference. The FCC agreed and allowed AST to use the spetrum.
And that move, if every logistical aspect executes to plan, gives AST an absolute slam dunk against Musk.
Think of the radio spectrum as a giant highway in the sky with a limited number of lanes. Carrying data back and forth, ASTs trucks have the rights to travel through a huge number of these lanes thanks to partners like AT&T and Verizonroughly 35 MHz of what the industry calls the “golden low-band spectrum. It also acquired an extra 45 Mhz low-band spectrum from a bankrupted communications company called Ligado. Thats a massive 80 MHz.
And remember the companys patented magic sauce we mentioned earlier? Thats ASTs secret weapon to make this highway work: a chip that glues the different radio bands together into one massive pipe, capable of delivering peak speeds of 120 megabits per second to phones (comparable to your typical 5G connection).
[Rendering: AST SpaceMobile]
SpaceX and its partner T-Mobile have very few lanes available right now: only 5 MHz. Thats like comparing an 80-lane superhighway to a 5-lane street. To try to fix that, Musk has spent $17 billion to acquire 50 more lanes: 50 MHz of S-band spectrum from another bankrupt communications company, EchoStar. The problem is that physics dictates that higher-frequency radio waves, those that SpaceX is operating on, do not penetrate solid objects as effectively as lower-frequency waves. Thats why Starlinks space-to-cell service will require line of sight to work.
Meanwhile, AST claims its system will work indoors and outdoors, penetrating buildings in a similar way to a regular cell signal. Wisniewski claims that a phone will connect through one wall and work through your cars roof because of two factors: It uses a low-frequency radio connection, and its satellites are big enough to listen and talk to the phones on the ground, even behind obstacles.
This scenario has yet to be proven by AST or a third party. Only line-of-sight broadband with regular phones has been tested successfully. However, if it works inside cars and buildings like Wisniewski claims, the user experience will be seamless. A phone will have service where it didn’t before, delivered through an existing provider like AT&T or Vodafone.
Should we really do this?
But what if were looking at this cell-to-space race the wrong way?
“I hear from friends who go hiking in faraway places, look up at the sky, and say, ‘Wow, you just never see an empty sky anymore, McDowell tells me with a hint of sadness and worry. Musk, Bezos, Wisniewski, the Europeans, and the Chinese would argue that we need ubiquitous cheap internet everywhere in the world, for civilian and military applications. Sure, there’s a lot of money to be made and there’s a genuine need to serve communities in remote places without having to invest in ground infrastructure. But do we really need to stream TikTok from space?
“I don’t necessarily have a position on that,” McDowell says. “My position is that even if that’s the case, it shouldn’t be just the U.S. that decides that. It should be decided by all of the countries in the world, because they’re all affected whether they’re space powers or not.”
Hes right. And if we all decide that we do need this, we should also all agree on the best solution to minimize the impact on humanity. The smarter solution. The most technologically advanced.
A year after President Trump took office, clean energy is still growing in the U.S. In 2025, nearly all new power added to the grid came from solar, wind, and batteries. In September, for example, solar made up 98% of new capacity. And in 2026, the U.S. Energy Administration projects that all net new generating capacity will come from renewable energy and batteries.
Thats despite obvious policy challenges. On his first day in office, after declaring an energy emergency, Trump paused permitting for some wind projects and promised to boost fossil fuels. A few months later, the administration ordered an offshore wind project to stop construction; other stop-work orders followed.
In July, Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which phased out a longstanding tax credit for building clean energy projects. The EPA ended the Solar for All program, designed to bring solar power to low-income homes and reduce electric bills. After a memo from the Department of Interior that effectively paused permitting for wind and solar projects on public land, the DOI cancelled a massive solar project in Nevada that would have powered 2 million homes. The administration also pulled grants for R&D on new clean energy tech.
Some states and developers have fought back and won lawsuits, but the attacks keep coming. Revolution Wind, a large offshore wind farm that’s under construction off the coast of Rhode Island and nearly complete, was issued a stop-work order in August by the Trump administration; a preliminary injunction from a judge in September let the work continue, but a second stop-work order came again in December. This week, the developer got another preliminary injunction to continue construction.
Unsurprisingly, the policy uncertainty has hurt clean energy businesses. “We saw some smaller companies go under because financing became challenging,” says Sean Gallagher, senior vice president of policy at the Solar Energy Industries Association. Offshore wind developments are struggling to survive the administration’s repeated attacks.
By some estimates, as much as 117 gigawatts of solar and battery storage projectsenough to power nearly 100 million homesare at risk of not coming online in the next couple of years because of new challenges in getting federal permits. But at the same time, many clean energy developers are fully booked with new projects.
The demand from data centers is “unabated,” says Jim Spencer, president and CEO of Exus Renewables North America. “As much as we can deliver, they’re buying it.” Last week, the company closed a $400 million credit facility to build out new solar and wind projects$150 million more than it initially expected to get from banks.
Like other developers, Exus is rushing to begin new solar and wind projects before July, the deadline to still be able to qualify for the tax credit. Projects also need to be completed by 2030 to qualify. To grandfather in developments that are still in the planning stage, Exus and others are buying equipment like solar panels earmarked for specific projects.
Ending the credits is creating a temporary surge in new clean energy projects. “Particularly after the bill was enacted, you saw a lot of activity as people tried to accelerate projects to take advantage of the tax credits that were remaining,” says SEIA’s Spencer. An analysis from S&P Global suggests that the deadline could boost new solar capacity in 2030 by 35% compared to what would have happened otherwise. Still, “while a surge in the near term is likely, how long that tail lasts and to what degree is still highly uncertain,” says Mike O’Boyle, policy team director at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan energy and climate think tank.
Developers are also looking for ways to cut costs and make projects economic without the tax credit. “In two years, we’re going to be living in a different environment,” Spencer says. “Okay. “And I think that there’s a lot of creative minds working on how to ensure that that growth continues.” It’s also theoretically possible that the political environment will shift in elections in 2026 and 2028 and that incentives could be put in place again.
Some large companies have slowed investment, but say that they still have a long-term commitment to renewable energy in the U.S. Engie, a France-based electric utility company that has invested between $2-4 billion in the U.S. in recent years, told Fast Company in a statement that its current investment strategy is more selective.
“We expect materially lower annual investment in response to continued permitting, trade and policy uncertainty which impact large long-term investment in wind, solar and battery projects,” the company said. But long term, it sees “strong opportunity” driven by the driven by rising electricity demand from data centers and AI.
That enormous demand is one more argument for the Trump administration to support renewable growth. “Energy prices are going up, despite rhetoric from the administration,” Spencer says. “And the rise in energy prices is directly tied to policies that the administration’s implementing. They have the ability to enable, rather than restrict, addition of new supply to the grid, which would reduce prices and improve customers’ lives.”
Lets do a thought exercise. If the role of the chief marketing officer is to oversee marketing and the role of the chief operating officer is to oversee operations, while the chief financial officers responsibility is to safeguard the organizations finances, then whats the responsibility of the chief executive officer? Surely, its more than overseeing executions or leading executives, yet the CEO naming convention doesnt give much insight as to what the role is or what its responsible for. This gets even more convoluted when an organization has both a CEO and a president. Whos responsible for what? Clearly, a president presides over the organization or nation stateits right there in its etymology. But, perhaps, the CEO nomenclature needs a bit more clarity. After over 200 in-depth CEO interviews at the Yale School of Managements Program on Stakeholder Innovation and Management since 2020, Jon Iwata has an interesting take on the matter.
According to Iwata, the former IBM senior vice president and chief brand officer and now lecturer at Yale, the job of the CEO involves the challenge of refounding the company. That is, the founder started the organization for a reason, be it a year or a century ago, with a thesis about the business and why it exists beyond the category. Simon Sinek refers to this as a companys why; I like to think of it as the companys conviction. Its what they believe and are willing to stand for, even if it means losing business. I find conviction to be much more action-oriented because your organization can have a why but veer away from it in the face of inconvenience. However, you cant be convicted if you arent willing to stand for it. Through this lens of refounding, the CEOs job is to maintain the integrity of the founders intended conviction and align it to a holistic operating system within the organization. That operating system, of course, is culture.
Like any culture, the ideology of a companys conviction informs the way the organization sees the world and how it engages in it. Over time, as an organization grows and each incremental team member grows further and further away from the founder and their intentions. Consider a start-up with five employees. Its likely that the sixth employee gets to spend a substantial amount of time with the founder and hear her preach the gospel of the organizations conviction. The sixth-hundred employee, on the other hand, after the companys 50th year of operation, not so much. Therefore, there must be a vehicle to evangelize the enduring convictions of the organization. Thats the responsibility of the CEO.
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This isnt merely a matter of proximity; its also a factor of context. Take the fictional start-up that grows into a multinational organization sixty years later. Over the course of those decades, the world around the organization changes substantially, which exerts force on how the organization behaves. Societal norms shift. Social expectations evolve. New technologies bloom. The result of these changes subsequently require change from the organization as well. For instance, there was once a time when child labor was considered acceptable, but society changed (thankfully), which necessitated a corresponding organizational change. While these adjustments happen outside the organization, its incumbent on its leadership to not merely blow in the wind of change but also stay anchored in its conviction, negotiating the tension between the present (todays context) and the past (the founders intention).
The founder constructed the organizations point of view of the world in a world that no longer exists. Therefore, as the world around the organization changes and evolves, so, too, must the organization. What does the organization believe and what does that mean today? Its the CEOs responsibility to not only regurgitate the convictions of the organization but also recontextualize them for a contemporary world. Like the United States of America was founded 250 years ago on a conviction and a set of policies articulated in the Constitution, these ideas had to be recontextualized for a modern day. Hence, why we have amendments. The same goes for organizations.
This is the job of the CEO, to reenvision the founding beliefs of the organization in a contemporary context and imbed this refounding conviction into the operating system of the organizationits culture. So, perhaps, a more apt title for the CEO would be the chief envisioning officer, the leader whose responsibility is to envision the founders intentions in todays world and activate the company to behave accordingly. This isnt merely a grammatical subversion, but an entire paradigm shift.
Hear more about the idea of refounding in our conversation with Jon Iwata on our latest episode of the FROM THE CULTURE podcast.
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Fifty minutes into a training session at a gym in lower Manhattan, Im doing burpees and clean-and-jerks while Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brownall 6 feet, 5 inches of himis bear-crawling into pushups, then slamming a medicine ball to the ground from overhead.
I was lured to this TMPL gym off Astor Place because Brown is a lifelong fitness nut, and hed shoehorned this workout in on Monday morning between arriving from L.A. the night before and departing again that afternoon.
But Brown also wanted me to experience Beyonds radical new launch, its first product that is not a savory meal option, the way a target customer would: post-workout, desperate for a functional recovery drink. After Browns trainersknown as Coach K and Domput me through multiple rounds of kettlebell squat jumps and casually suggested that I add another 40 clean-and-jerk reps with just the bar to, you know, tighten my form, I was ready to chug anything liquid and cold.
The product Brown handed me was from Beyonds new line of drinks, called Immersefor the way he says its ingredients immerse the consumer in the remarkable nutrition of plants. They come in 12-ounce cans that are sold in two protein strengths (10 and 20 grams) and three lightly carbonated flavors: lemon-lime, peach-mango, and orange-clementine. Starting today, they’re available on the Beyond Test Kitchen site for $29.95 for a 12-pack of the lower-protein version and $34.95 for a 12-pack of the higher-protein version, with retail rollout coming soon. Each can delivers seven grams of fiber, plus electrolytes, and a full days worth of vitamin C. The protein comes from yellow peas, though Brown says that Beyond plans to add other plant proteins next, such as fava beans.
How Beyond went liquid
Immerse represents the second category departure in six months for Beyonda notable pivot for a company that has been battered by changing consumer tastes. Last July, Beyond broke from its 17-year history as a meat-substitute pioneer to relaunch as a complete-protein brand, dropping Meat from its name and introducing Ground, a versatile Swiss Army knife of plant proteins designed to work in any dish, any time. The shift into functional beverages extends that same philosophy: plant proteins liberated from the center of the dinner plate.
The idea is to unlock whats in plants and minerals, and get that to consumers in a form theyll use, he explains, instead of trying to represent them as something else. Immerse is the first ready-to-drink product to combine protein, fiber, and electrolytes in such a high formulation, and the company hints these beverages are the opening salvo in a broader line of functional products, saying that some are in the works.
[Photo: Beyond]
Beyond has been flirting with the beverage category for longer than youd think, ever since Brown tried making a plant-protein water back in the 2010s. But he says the recovery-drink idea was born out of personal need.
Brown is obsessive about plant protein, generally consuming it at every meal, and often in between. For years, he drank post-workout protein shakes, and to these he would add a scoop of psyllium husk, for fiber. But the formulation filled him up.
I wanted to feel light, Brown says. And the science just wasnt there yet; he recalls jugs of early prototypes he kept under his desk and protein that kept separating. Back then, perfecting a beverage line wasnt mission-critical for Beyond anyway. Worth billions at the time, the company was the darling of Silicon Valley, beloved by Hollywood stars, Wall Street, and seemingly every fast-food chain on the planet.
But then alt-meats novelty started to wane, and the pandemic drove up input and distribution costs, making these products feel like more of a splurge to price-conscious shoppers. By 2024, Beyonds market cap had slid to $500 million.
Around that time, the recovery-drink concept reemerged. Brown would visit his son at the University of Missouri, where he was playing guard on the schools basketball team, and swing by the locker room, where hed see three separate types of recovery drinks being offered to players: electrolytes for hydration, cherry juice for antioxidants, Core Power-brand shakes for protein. That was . . . a lot of liquid? Brown wondered, Why not one drink that could achieve all three?
In Beyonds early attempts, sediment settled at the bottom of cans. The advances that the company made in solubility “were the big thing, Brown explains. Now, you can drink 20 grams of protein and 7 grams of fiber, and it feels like a regular liquid. In the process, Beyond scientists also worked to minimize calories and keep fat at zero. (A comparable 12 ounces of a Core Power chocolate shake contains 22 grams of protein, but has 50% more calories and almost 3 grams of saturated fat, and raises cholesterol rather than lowering it the way soluble fiber does.)
It turned out that the sports nutrition space could reward Beyonds scientific strengthsprotein density, nutritional optimizationrather than punishing it.
And Browns excitement is now fixating on a nutrient that isnt even protein. It’s a different ingredient in Immerse, a tapioca fiber derived from the cassava plant. It helps lower LDL cholesterol, feeds good gut bacteria, regulates blood sugar response, and triggers satiety hormones including PYY andyou guessed itGLP-1. Brown is doubly excited, because he says research suggests that if eaten together, the combination of this fiber and the psyllium husk he adds to his own protein shakes (and uses in the Beyond Ground products) can synergistically deliver both immediate and long-term improvements to gut and heart health.
The FDA says that tapioca fiber may help reduce heart disease risk as part of a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet. Beyond contends the Immerse drinks are therefore great for muscle recovery, gut health, immunity, and people with lactose intolerance.
The power of plants
Were these drinks great for me?
After my workout at TMPL, no magic was going to fix my stiff back, neck, and legs. But as far as the high fiber goesequal to three cups of spinach, or half a can of black beansI was an interesting test case.
As a type 1 diabetic, I wear a continuous glucose monitor in my arm that records my blood sugar 24/7. A perfect glucose is 100 milligrams per deciliter of blood, though even non-diabetics routinely swing between 70 and 140 during the day. The night after trying Immerse, mine traced a straight line between 90 and 110. Causation, or coincidence? Its impossible to say with a sample size of one. But the functional properties designed for athletic recovery have established ancillary benefits, like steadying metabolic responses.
The new drink lin “also takes us outside of whats become a very political thing, Brown adds, moving past the science to address Beyonds deeper corporate strategy, one that bypasses the culture-war baggage attached to putting protein at the center of the plate.
Beyond, along with the company’s top rival, Impossible Foods, and other alt-meat proponents, say the multibillion-dollar beef industry has spent years secretly and not-so-secretly smearing alt-meats as unhealthy, ultra-processed, and too fake. The results have been brutal. Beyonds own sales dropped by nearly 5% in 2024, and then by another projected 14% for 2025. Shares, which peaked above $230 after its 2019 IPO, slid to penny-stock levels before meme traders staged a 1,300% rally in October that evaporated within days. The company has restructured debt and cut staff while working to stabilize its finances.
Meanwhile, demand for animal proteins helped JBS and Cargill post record revenue and a 44% profit increase despite the highest-ever beef prices and worst cattle shortage in years.
Impossibles CEO Peter McGuinness has even threatened to stick actual beef into the Impossible Burger.
Then, days before TMPLs trainers kicked our butts, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. flipped the national food guidelines upside downgoing all-in on red meat and full-fat milk while demoting whole grains, but still advising Americans to, somehow, reduce their intake of saturated fat. The Trump administration immediately described it as the most significant change in federal nutrition guidance in the history of our nation, and commemorated the move by announcing it would sell RFK-autographed food posters for $400 from a government-run website.
For years, Beyond has supported work being done by Stanford Medicine researcher Christopher Gardner to evaluate a plant-based diets effects on cardiovascular health. Gardner is of the 20 nutrition experts the federal government has tapped to review evidence for the new dietary recommendations. Last week, Gardner said that the Trump guidelines go against decades and decades of evidence and research.
Brown, like many Americans, feels like we are living in Upside-Down World. But hes not deterred from pushing plants. After all, the new pyramid does put peas at the very topeven if theyre shown in a bag labeled frozen.
What excites Brown, despite the chaos, is that the past few years have helped him refocus on what plants can do that meat cannot.
Much of Beyonds past was invested in making plants emulate meatin ways previous generations would have thought impossible. Now hes highlighting plants distinct nutritional advantages, including their fiber content, something essential to human health that animal products lack. Plants also deliver protein in a lower-calorie format. Immerse packs 20 grams of protein into just 100 calories, a 20% protein-to-calorie ratio. David protein bars swept America last year, hitting $100 million in sales, because they deliver 28 grams of protein for every 150 calories, an 18.7% ratio.
Watching Brown power through his final set at TMPLa guy who had five knee surgeries by his 20s and just took the Beyond corporate team on a grueling hike to celebrate the Immerse launchyou see how much thought he has put into obsessing over making his body perform. Its hard not to wonder if the company is catching up to its founder.
He jokes that this time, critics looking for ingredients to attack will have to target the water in the cans: Theyll have to say, ‘Theres too much H2O in that water!
** NEEDS JUSTIN POT BYLINE **
Have you ever opened your favorite music-streaming app and wondered why all your playlists have the same five songs? It can be annoying, even if they happen to be five songs youre really into right now.
And, make no mistake, they will be five songs youre really into right now, because thats how many of these services workand its not because everyone else has the same taste in music as you. For instance, any Spotify playlist that says created for in the header is catered to the individual user, based on their listening history. Theres nothing wrong with that, necessarilyit can be nice to know youre going to hear songs you like. But there are downsides.
Mostly, this feature makes it hard to discover new music. Maybe you want a little bit of an idea of whats going on in the broader culture. Maybe you love discovering new songs. Music-streaming services have a tendency to stick the same songs into every playlist and radio station, but theres a way to get out of the same ol song rut.
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!
Time to escape the algorithms
Ive actually got two Cool Tools to share with you today.
Both of these tools will help you escape the music-streaming algorithms so that you can discover and listen to new music.
You can start using either of them in an instant.
1 The first tool is called Spoqify, and it creates a clean version of any Spotify playlist or radio station so you can listen to music like an anonymous user.
Spotify, without the suggestion-controlling historywhat a novel concept!
The easiest way to use Spoqify is through a browser. To get started, simply:
Copy the URL for any playlist or radio station on Spotify
Change the t in spotify.com to a q
Paste that new URL into a browser
The service will instantly create a playlist for you containing what Spotify would show you if it had no prior knowledge of your listening habits. You can now listen to the updated playlist and even save it to your library.
Though it is a bit of a workaround, you can still use Spoqify if youre on the Spotify app. Granted, its not as simple (youll need to install a tool called Spicetify), but it allows you to listen to Spoqify without ever leaving the service.
(Also, is anyone else getting confused with all the Spotify/Spoqify references?!)
2 If you dont use Spotify or you dont want to mess with URLs, you could always check out Playlist Generatortodays second Cool Tool. This separate service lets you search for any song, artist, or album and creates a list of similar songs. It reminds me of Pandora, back in the day.
Once you generate your playlist on Playlist Generator, just click on the Transfer buttonand you’ll be taken to their partner site, where you can export your playlist to any number of streaming services. Or, if you want to listen on Spotify, you can connect Playlist Generator with Spotify to save a list directly to your library.
Playlist Generator is a little like Pandora back in its heyday.
Ive been enjoying both of these services, though I recommend combining tools like these with a good community radio station, if your town has one. Theres nothing like real human DJs for finding new music.
Both of the services mentioned here will work in any web browser.
Theyre also both completely free.
You can use both Spoqify and Playlist Generator without creating accounts, though you can connect your Spotify account to Playlist Generator if you want. Playlist Generator does also collect some information, but the sites privacy policy makes clear that it doesn’t sell or share your personal information in any shady-seeming ways.
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.
Over a long and industrious career, the investor George Soros developed a theory he calls reflexivity. The basic idea is that expectations dont form in a vacuum. They are shaped, in part, by our perceptions of what other people believe. The more widely an idea is accepted, the more likely we are to accept it ourselves and that, in turn, reinforces the collective wisdom.
If many believe that, say, the stock market will go up or that AI will create an economic boom, were more likely to believe it too. That belief then drives behavior: investors buy stocks, companies pour money into AI, and the prediction begins to fulfill itself. All of this only adds fuel to the fire. Nobody wants to get left out of a good thing.
Soros made a lot of money betting against reflexivity because once the pattern of self-reference and self-reinforcement takes hold, things are bound to overshoot. Expectations drift far beyond underlying realityand eventually snap back. It seems something similar is brewing. As big institutions accumulate unprecedented power, a growing backlash seeks to take power back.
The rise and fall of Porters competitive advantage
For decades, the dominant view of business strategy was shaped by Michael Porter’s theory of competitive advantage. In essence, he argued that the key to long-term success was to dominate the value chain by maximizing bargaining power over suppliers, customers, new market entrants, and substitute goods.
Yet as AnnaLee Saxenian explained in Regional Advantage, around the same time that Porters ideas were gaining traction among CEOs in the establishment industries on the East Coast, a very different way of doing business was gaining steam in Silicon Valley. The firms there saw themselves not as isolated fiefdoms, but as part of a larger ecosystem.
The two models are built on very different assumptions. The Porter model saw the world as made up of transactions. Optimize your strategy to create efficiencies, extract the maximum value out of every transaction and you will build a sustainable competitive advantage. The Silicon Valley model, however, saw the world as a web of connections and optimized their strategies to widen and deepen linkages.
If you see your business environment as neatly organized into specific industries, everybody is a potential rival. Even your allies need to be viewed with suspicion. So, for example, when a new open source operating system called Linux appeared in the 1990s, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer considered it a threat and immediately attacked, calling it a cancer.
Yet even as Ballmer went on the attack, the business environment was changing. As the internet made the world more connected, technology companies found that leveraging that connectivity through open source communities was a winning strategy. Microsofts current CEO, Satya Nadella, declared that the company now loves Linux. Ultimately, it recognized that it couldnt continue to shut itself out and compete effectively in a networked world.
Preferential attachment, power laws, and network collapse
Phil Knight built Nike into exactly the type of business Porter imagined. It created an impressive marketing machine built on partnerships with famous athletes, dominance of retail channels, including its own proprietary outlets, and an optimized supply chain that kept costs to a minimum. The company was a paragon of sustainable competitive advantage.
Then, in the early 1990s, writer and activist Jeffrey Ballinger published a series of investigations about Nikes use of sweatshops in Asia. People were shocked by the horrible conditions that workersmany of them childrenwere subjected to. In many cases, factory owners lived outside the countries where the facilities were located and had little contact with employees.
As the network scientist Albert-László Barabási and his colleagues discovered, this is exactly the type of asymmetric vulnerability that even the most powerful fall prey to. A firm like Nike becomes dominant because of a phenomenon called preferential attachment, sometimes also called the Matthew effect. Essentially, the rich get richer.
What happens is that once a node in a network builds a small advantage over competitors, it is more likely to attract new connections than smaller players. That creates a power-law distribution in which the network is dominated by large hubs that are exponentially larger than their competitors.
Yet the sweatshop scandal threatened to reverse that process, making rivals without scandals marginally more attractive to consumers than Nike. That shift, however small at first, could cascade, allowing rivals to strengthen relationships with suppliers and retailers, widening and deepening their corporate networks at Nikes expense.
At first, Knight was defiant, but ultimately, even he recognized he needed to give in. As he would later write in his memoir, Shoe Dog, We had to admit. We could do better. Going beyond its own factories, the company established the Fair Labor Association and published a comprehensive report of its own factories.
Backlashes, old and new
Today, we live in a new era ofbig business dominance. Just seven companies dominate the U.S. stock market. The economist Thomas Philippon and his colleagues have documented how the growing dominance of large firms across increasingly consolidated industries has led to a decrease in competition in the United States. A Federal Reserve report had similar findings.
Weve been here before. The Gilded Age in the late 19th century was marked by enormous investment in a breakthrough technology: railroads. Vast fortunes were made and a breed of oligarchs like Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Rockefeller created industry trusts that allowed them to dominate the United States, both commercially and politically.
Yet every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution. The Gilded Age was soon followed by the Progressive Era and the rise of the muckrakers epitomized by Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, and McClures Magazine, who exposed corruption and exploitation on a massive scale and shifted the political winds. New legislation and enforcement tools, such as the Sherman Antitrust Act, led to a leveling of the playing field.
Today, we are seeing similar signs. The Australian government has banned social media for children under 17. Frustration with the low-quality content that AI has flooded the internet with led The Economist to name slop as its Word for the Year. Elon Musks effort to bring Silicon Valley management techniques to government with DOGE was a massive failure, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Against this backdrop is a growing New Brandeis movement, which seeks to reinvigorate antitrust efforts and restore competitive markets. After gaining traction during the Biden Administration, it has mostly been dormant since, but things can change quickly.
Larger risks amid lesser resilience
In 2008, when the global financial crisis hit, the world was a relatively stable place. While the U.S. was still engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, those were fairly low-level conflicts at that point. The U.S. federal deficit was $450 billion and the U.S. national debt was $10 trillion, both less than a third of what they are now.
Today, the world is a very different place. Beyond the worsening economic situation, we have the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. Russia, China, and other bad actors are engaged in a massive information war against the West, fueling populist surges and political turmoil in Western nations. The Atlantic Alliance, once a force for stability, is in shambles.
Many would argue that, today, we are in a new Gilded Age, in which powerful industrialists, unbeholden to the rule of law, regularly engage in predatory behavior, but their actions are often shielded from view by technology, buried in complexity. When they are called before Congress, the peoples representatives seem lost, unable to meaningfully challenge their power.
And much like the Gilded Age was marked by continued cycles of government-sponsored overinvestment and financial panics, today we are likely on a path to an AI bubble that will rival the massive panics we had in 1873 and 1893. Unfortunately, unlike during the 2008 financial crisis, our capacity to manage the fallout will be greatly diminished.
Clearly, we are on a path that is taking us into rough waters. As Soros described, once the pattern of self-reference and self-reinforcement has taken hold, systems dont correct gently. They overshootand the eventual snapback is rarely orderly or kind. Correction will not come from markets alone. It will come through backlashpolitical, social, and institutionalwhen those left bearing the costs decide the system no longer serves them.
When I was a product marketing leader for a corporate regional bank, I found myself getting annoyed during an all-day strategy meeting. My frustration came from hearing the same voices, sharing the same old ideas. I wondered why other people, especially the women in the room, werent speaking up. I remember thinking, Well, you could be the one to speak up.
I felt nerves jump in my throat and doubt sink heavily in my stomach. Who was I to speak up? I thought that others in the room were smarter than me since they had higher titles and more experience. Looking back now, I realize that I had a big problem, a Pedestal Problem. I silenced my ideas because I was intimidated by the HiPPO in the room, the highest-paid persons opinion. I had them on a pedestal, thinking they knew better than me, therefore there was no room for my ideas or expertise
Since that day, I have seen this play out among thousands of leaders. One example is my client Melinda, an executive director who silenced her gut and trusted her CEOs judgment on hiring a new sales leader for the organization. One year in, after various missed sales targets and employee complaints, she realized her gut was right all along.
AUTHORITY BIAS STIFLES INNOVATION
A very human instinct to defer to the person who seems smarter can quickly become a structural issue within organizations. Psychologists call this authority bias, which leads us to accept information or instructions from perceived authority figures without critically evaluating the content.
Pedestalling leaders can lead to dangerous outcomes, like Theranos and Ubers corporate scandals. Superhumanizing their founding CEOs, Elizabeth Holmes or Travis Kalanick, actually led to them being dehumanized. It created an allure of perfection that prevented employees from seeing and connecting to their leaders as real people. One study found that when employees strongly deferred to leaders’ authority (or viewed leaders as untouchable), they were more likely to go along with unethical behavior rather than speak up. This problem can also interrupt feedback loops that fuel brand identity snafus like the billboard ad for Match, which advertised a woman with freckles and the tagline, If you dont like your imperfections, someone else will. If someone spoke up before the ad went live, it may have prevented them from offending millions of people with freckles and the inevitable public apology.
To pull down the pedestal and bring people together to the table as equals, its not about training our teams to present more confidently. Instead, leaders need to recognize the authority bias they carry, simply because of their position, title, or even their charisma.
Here are three ways that leaders can foster genuine team connection, and unlock the ideas that keep organizations relevant.
RECONNECT WITH YOUR CURIOSITY
I have studied this pedestal problem for nearly a decade, and I still have to be careful not to fall into the trap myself. In the past, during the Q&A portion of workshops or speaking events, I would simply answer the questions presented to me. However, I realized that participants could put me on a pedestal, without stopping to consider that I often knew little about them or their situation. Now, when they ask me a question, I curiously respond with questions like, Whats been your current approach? or What options are you considering? Nearly every time they respond with a unique idea or insight that benefits the entire room, and they get a boost of confidence to trust their gut and try the idea.
Transferring this to your everyday 1:1 meetings, how often are you simply answering questions from your team? What new ideas could be heard if you responded curiously, starting with the two questions above?
DON’T BE THE EXPERT, FACILITATE THE EXPERTISE
My client, Kara, a chief marketing officer, frequently complained that her team was too quiet during feedback and brainstorming meetings. Kara was a founding employee known for ideating a billion-dollar product in the organization. While she was burned out from carrying the creative load, her team always deferred to her judgment.
I challenged Kara to see that her team had put her on a pedestal. I encouraged her to shift away from being the expert, and instead facilitate the expertise in the room. Kara knew shed hired great talent, and so she implemented some approaches to cultivate greater involvement. Before meetings, she invited quieter team members to share publicly in the meeting, she started rotating who led meeting agendas, and she started allowing for uncomfortable silences in meetings to benefit those who needed reflection or courage to speak up. In just one month, Kara already noticed a shift. Her load was reduced, new voices were emerging, and her team was energized because they now had ownership over the new marketing strategies they would be testing and implementing.
EQUALIZE YOUR CONNECTION WITH OTHERS
One f the biggest near-failures in my career came from assuming that because I had a good relationship with my team, the new training team members from the two banks we acquired would naturally align with our existing chemistry and processes. After several weeks of urging new team members to follow our long-standing training methods, and missing their feedback, one member invited me to pay a site visit to watch their training operation in action. I was humbled. They had several more creative training techniques and they were more efficient than us.
This experience taught me that while I had relationships with my team, we werent on equal footing. To truly connect, I needed to get out of my office more and into their world. This is why CEOs of Uber and Starbucks frequently visit the frontline, to reestablish a more equal connection to team members that facilitates two-way feedback. When leaders connect with their teams as equals, they dismantle the pedestal that keeps honest feedback and innovation out of reach.
CONNECT OTHERS TO THE FUTURE
One of the best CEOs I worked under viewed the team as people who would cocreate the future with him, not simply execute his vision. I distinctly remember his self-awareness, because during town halls, he acknowledged that while he had a vision, he didnt know exactly how wed get there. In these town halls, he called out team members by name, recognizing that their unique perspectives were essential to making the vision successful. When leaders over-plan the future, they unintentionally send the message that theres no space for input. In my work, I have found that the most impactful leaders dont sell the how, they sell the what. He called others to focus their energy on how they could contribute to shared future goals instead of pointing their attention toward achieving his goals.
To prevent smart people from quieting their ideas, which leave products undeveloped, policies outdated, status quos unchanged, and cultures mediocre, leaders hold the responsibility to pull the pedestal. Equalizing their connection with their teams creates a safer place for new voices to emerge because they feel seen, heard, and understood.
Last year, various surveys, including reliable indicators, have highlighted a significant decline in reading habits over the past decades.
The most striking evidence is not simply that people read less, but that their capacity for deep reading is weakening. According to OECD data, the proportion of 15-year-olds who fail to reach minimum reading proficiency has now risen to nearly one in four across advanced economies, with sharp declines in tasks requiring inference, evaluation, and integration of information across texts.
In the United States, NAEP scores show that average reading performance among 13-year-olds has fallen to its lowest level in decades, reversing long-standing gains. Laboratory studies mirror these trends: experiments comparing print and screen reading consistently find that readers of digital texts score 1030% lower on comprehension and recall, particularly for longer and conceptually demanding material.
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Eye-tracking and cognitive load research further indicates that frequent digital readers engage in more skimming, less rereading, and shallower semantic processing. Crucially, these effects are not confined to weaker readers. Even highly educated adults now report shorter attention spans for long-form text and greater mental fatigue when reading complex arguments, suggesting that the decline of reading reflects not a loss of literacy, but an erosion of the cognitive endurance and attentional discipline that deep reading uniquely develops.
Not just children
To make matters worse, various robust data indicators show that adults are spending less time reading, especially for pleasure. For instance:
(1) A large time-use study analyzing diary data from over 236,000 Americans found that the share of adults who read for pleasure on an average day dropped from about 28% in 2003 to just 16% in 2023, a roughly 40% decline over two decades.
(2) That same research showed a steady annual fall of about 3% per year in the prevalence of daily leisure reading among U.S. adults.
(3) An earlier report by the World Economic Forum indicated average daily reading time in the U.S. declined from about 23 minutes per day in 2004 to around 16 minutes by 2019, even before the most recent decades drop.
(4) In the U.S., fewer adults now report reading books for pleasure: about 48.5% of adults said they read at least one book in the past year in 2022, down from 54.6% in 2012.
A real concern?
Should this really concern us? Perhaps not. After all, reading is just one medium through which humans have ingested information and exercised their minds, including for deep thinking. For most of history, knowledge travelled orally rather than silently on the page. Ancient cultures relied on storytelling, poetry, and song to preserve and transmit complex ideas: Homers epics were memorized and performed long before they were written down; Greek philosophy unfolded through dialogue rather than textbooks; and entire moral, legal, and scientific traditions were passed across generations through ritualized speech, music, and debate. From this perspective, the book is a relatively recent cognitive technology, not an eternal prerequisite for intelligence (consider that Socrates and his fellow philosophers were concerned by the invention of writing, thinking it may atrophy memory).
And today, once again, new media promise alternative routes to learning and thinking: immersive simulations, virtual and augmented reality, AI tutors, and even speculative neuro-technologies all claim to enhance understanding, creativity, or memory without requiring sustained reading at all. Perhaps these tools will indeed make us more knowledgeable or even smarter. Needless to say, not all reading is cognitively ennobling. Wading through a disposable airport romcom is unlikely to stretch the mind more than an unscripted, curious conversation with a stranger at a bar. The real question, then, is not whether reading is declining per se, but whether whatever replaces it can cultivate the same depth of attention, reflection, and intellectual effort that serious reading has historically demanded.
Digital diversions
To be sure, every person is different and even among those who are reading less, former reading time may be recycled or reutilized in many different ways. That said, there is a clear trend to devote more time and attention to the very technologies that have increasingly monopolized our focus over the past two decades. Time-use and media-consumption data strongly suggest that leisure reading has been displaced not by other cognitively demanding activities, but by screen-based media. In the United States, Bureau of Labor Statistics time-use surveys show that average daily reading for pleasure fell from about 23 minutes in the early 2000s to roughly 16 minutes by 2019, while time spent on digital devices and television increased steadily. Over the same period, social media use expanded rapidly: Pew Research Center reports that adult social media adoption rose from around 5% in 2005 to over 80%, with many users spending multiple hours per day on these platforms. Globally, Digital 2024 data indicate that adults now spend about 2.5 hours per day on social media and more than 6.5 hours per day consuming digital media overall, compared with a small and declining fraction of time devoted to reading books or long-form text.
While time spent reading traditional text has declined, many adults are substituting other sustained listening activites that share some cognitive benefits of reading; for example, Edison Researchs Infinite Dial reports that the share of Americans ages 12 and older who listen to podcasts weekly has grown from about 11% in 2013 to over 60% in 2024, with average weekly listening around seven hours, suggesting deeper engagement than typical short-form scrolling. Audiobook consumption has also risen sharply: the Audiobook Publishers Association and APA Foundation data show that nearly 50% of American adults listened to an audiobook in the past year, with frequent listeners averaging more than 6 hours per week, offering another way to engage with complex narrative and informational content. These trends indicate that although reading declines are real, listening to long-form spoken content (whether through podcasts or audiobooks) is increasingly filling part of the gap, providing extended attention to ideas, storytelling, and analysis in ways that resemble some of readings cognitive and reflective benefits.
Unique benefits
And yet, cognitive and developmental psychology remind us of the distinctive benefits of traditional reading, especially when it comes to thoughtful immersion and deep processing of text. Decades of research converge on at least five lessons worth remembering.
First, sustained reading strengthens attention and cognitive endurance, training the ability to concentrate for extended periods without external stimulation, a capacity that is closely linked to academic achievement and complex problem-solving.
Second, reading supports deeper comprehension and critical thinking: compared with fragmented or audiovisual media, linear text promotes inferential reasoning, abstraction, and the integration of ideas across time.
Third, regular reading expands vocabulary and conceptual knowledge, which in turn predicts reasoning ability (especially verbal and crystallized intelligence), learning speed, and even long-term occupational outcomes.
Fourth, reading fiction in particular has been shown to enhance perspective-taking and social cognition, improving peoples ability to understand others emotions, intentions, and mental states.
Finally, early and sustained exposure to reading plays a foundational role in brain development, literacy, and self-regulation, with long-lasting effects on educational attainment and cognitive resilience across the lifespan.
None of this means that reading is the only route to thinking, or that newer media are inherently inferior, but it does suggest that some cognitive benefits are unusually hard to replicate without sustained engagement with text.
And if you made it this far, thank you for reading this.
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Foldable phones have spent years trying to justify themselves. Some were too fragile, others too bulky, and most felt like solutions in search of a problem. The Galaxy Z TriFold is Samsungs clearest attempt yet to answer a more reasonable question: Can one device replace the phone-tablet combo without becoming a chore to carry?
Coming to the United States later this month, the TriFold folds twice, opens into a 10-inch screen, and closes back into a pocketable form. Its an assertive design, but not a novelty play. Samsung seems very aware that this kind of device only makes sense for a specific kind of user.
[Photo: Emily Price]
The double fold is the trick, but the software does the real work
The headline feature is the dual hinge. Closed, the TriFold behaves like a premium smartphone. Open it fully, and it becomes a genuinely usable tablet-size workspace.
That space matters. You can run three apps side by side, resize them, and keep them anchored even when calls or notifications interrupt. Samsungs task bar lets you jump back into complex layouts without rebuilding them, which is a small thing until youve lost your place mid-task one too many times.
We had a chance to try the phone first hand at a Consumer Electronics Show (CES) preview. The first time you open the device, the folding mechanism, in particular, stands out. Fully open, you might not even notice youre holding a phone rather than a tablet. The three separate screens blend together seamlessly.
Samsung has also added guardrails. The phone will warn you if youre folding it the wrong way when you go to put it awaywhich feels less like hand-holding and more like protecting an expensive mistake.
Editing photos is where the bigger screen actually shows off
The TriFolds size gives Samsungs photo tools room to breathe, especially its generative editing features. Blake Gaiser, head of smartphone product management, says the difference is immediately obvious once you start using them.
We’re really well known for what we call generative editingbeing able to remove things from a photo, Gaiser told me during a demo this week. He took a photo that included a person, and then was able to select and remove that person from the photo in seconds. It understands everything that I want to pick out here, and I’m able to take all the pixels out of that.
He points to something thats easy to miss on smaller screens: cleanup details. Not only did it take the person out, but it took their shadow out as well, he said. So now I can look at both side by side each other, and you can see the shadow that she had there is gone.
Being able to zoom in on before-and-after images simultaneously sounds minor. But for people who actually edit photos regularly, its the difference between trusting the result and hoping for the best.
[Photo: Emily Price]
This is very much not meant for everyone
The TriFold is not designed for everyone. Samsung isnt pretending otherwise. Gaiser is blunt about the intended audience. It is for your top productivity people, he says.
That philosophy shows up most clearly in DeX (short for desktop experience), Samsungs desktop-style interface. On the TriFold, DeX treats the device like a full monitor. You can resize windows freely, stack them, snap them into place, and even create multiple desktops that remember their layouts.
So if I’m consistently looking at news articles and Samsung apps because I’m working on a piece or whatever, I could set those up in their own desktop, Gaiser said. Even when I clear the memory and everything, it remembers that setup.
Gaiser has been using the TriFold as part of his own daily setup, and not always as the primary device.
The two key things that I’ve done with this personally, in the three months that I’ve had this device: I have just a portable stand that I put it on, wireless keyboard, mouse, use it like a PC, he said. Or in my hotel room, I had my PC and I had this set up as a second monitor.
The TriFold supports wired and wireless display output, including 4K when wired, making it less of a stretch to imagine it replacing a second screen for travel or temporary setups.
Built sturdier than it looks
Triple-folding phones raise obvious durability questions. Gaiser acknowledges the complexity.
Because we have two different hinges on here. You have two different pivot points, he said. The phone uses magnets to keep it shut, but also to give the third screen a gentle pop after you open the first, making it easier to lift.
Samsung also leaned heavily into materials, using ceramic glass fiber, a titanium lattice, and carbon fiber reinforcements to protect the folding display. Gaiser was candid in comparing it with competitors.
[Photo: Emily Price]
Power without cutting corners
Under the hood, the TriFold runs on a customized Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, includes a 200-megapixel camera, and uses a 5,600 milliamphour battery spread across its three panels. That complexity is invisible to the userwhich is the point. The phone lasts through a full day of heavy use and charges quickly enough not to feel precious.
Samsung also worked with Adobe to create a subscription-based Lightroom-specific app that behaves like its desktop counterpart, reinforcing the idea that this device is meant for people who actually produce things on their phones. The phone will come with a free trial.
How it stacks up against other foldables
Huawei Mate XT
Huawei was the first with the Mate XT, proving that trifold hardware was possible. Availability is limited, software support is complicated outside certain markets, and it feels more like a statement piece than an everyday device.
Concept triple-folds from other brands
Several manufacturers have shown trifold concepts at trade shows. Most trifold devices are still prototypes, and thats fine. Building one is hard. Making one that survives daily life, and the bumps that come with it, is even harder.
Samsungs advantage isnt that it folded a phone twice. Its that its spent years figuring out hinges, software behavior, durability testing, and what users actually tolerate. The TriFold feels like the result of that learning curve rather than a shortcut.
So who should even consider this?
Samsungs own answer is narrow. Gaiser calls the target audience the top 1% heavy users.
Productivity tools, multi-window users, your ultra-top users, he said. Its not for everyone.
That honesty helps. The Galaxy Z TriFold isnt trying to convince casual users to upgrade. Its aimed squarely at people who already push their devices hard and want fewer things in their bag. Its not flawless, not cheap, and not subtle. But its also the clearest signal yet that foldables are moving out of the experimental phase and into something more practical, even if only for a small slice of users.
2025 was a banner year for cryptocurrencies on many fronts. Global regulation eased. Stablecoins powered $46 trillion in annual transactions. And major shifts in U.S. government policy spurred wider adoption. But with that expansion came a notable bump in crypto fraud.
A new report from Chainalysis, a blockchain data platform based in New York City, estimates that $17 billion in crypto was stolen last year through fraud and scams. Impersonation scams, where criminals pretend to be trusted entities or use fake tokens or websites to trick victims into sending them crypto, were up a jaw-dropping 1,400% year over year.
And while it’s much too early to gather any conclusive data for 2026, the year got off to an inauspicious start. Earlier this month, the FBI warned about the use of Bitcoin ATMs, saying the devices are a magnet for scammers to convince people to send money (their entire life savings, in some cases) overseas. And just this week, the fintech firm Betterment confirmed that hackers had broken into its systems earlier this month and used the data to send a fraudulent crypto note to users, which funneled money to a wallet controlled by the attacker.
Meanwhile, former New York Mayor Eric Adams launched a new crypto token on Monday that he said would combat antisemitism and promote blockchain education. It quickly lost 81% of its value, bringing about accusations of a “rug pull” across the crypto community.
Chainalysis warned in its report that this could be just the beginning of another year of new highs. “As we move into 2026, we expect further convergence of scam methodologies as scammers adopt multiple tactics and technologies simultaneously,” it wrote.
Early projections by Chainalysis indicate scammers in 2025 received at least $14 billion on-chain, a transaction that occurs directly on the blockchain (compared with a speedier and cheaper but riskier off-chain transaction). That’s a big jump from last year’s initial estimate at the same time of $9.9 billion.
Ultimately, the 2024 number settled at $12 billion following recalculations. The 2025 total is projected to come in above $17 billion, as more bogus wallet addresses are uncovered in the coming months. That would make last year’s rise in crypto scam losses the biggest since 2020 to 2021, when they doubled. Subsequent years have been fairly flat, hovering between $12 billion and $13 billion.
Scams were not only happening more frequently last year, the people perpetrating them were also pocketing more each time. The average scam payment in 2025 was $2,764, a 253% increase over 2024’s $782.
“The 2025 data reveal the extent to which cryptocurrency-enabled scams are becoming more sophisticated, organized, and efficient,” Chainalysis wrote. “There are no silver bullets to tackling such entrenched, industrial-scale scamming activity, and to be effective, a multipronged response is required.”
Impersonation scams were the biggest driver of losses. Not only were the number of those sorts of cons significantly higher, but the average amount people paid to the groups behind them was up 600%. Crime syndicates in East and Southeast Asia drove many of these, the report says, with forced labor compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and other regions forcing trafficking victims to operate the scamsthe most prolific of which was a phishing scam that targeted users of the E-ZPass toll collection system with a fake “outstanding toll.”
Artificial intelligence is becoming a weapon of crypto scammers as well. The technology’s ability to leverage large language models and deepfake technology makes the schemes more realistic. As a result, scams that used AI vendors to create on-chain links averaged a haul of $3.2 million, compared with $719,000 for those without.
While fraud was on the rise last year, there were some victories by law enforcement. Police in the U.K. recovered 61,000 in stolen Bitcoin. And TerraUS and Luna crypto developer Do Kwon, a Stanford graduate known by some as the cryptocurrency king, pleaded guilty in August to fraud charges stemming from the collapse of Terraform Labs, the Singapore-based firm he cofounded in 2018. Customers lost $40 billion in that fraud, a figure that exceeded the total losses of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. Kwon was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
