Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! Im Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
Being a life sciences CEO is not for the faint of heart. Drug discovery and patent approvals are costly and time-consuming, and even if an executive can steer a company to clinical trials, theres a very small chance the product will be commercialized. One study says that 90% of clinical drug development fails because the treatment didnt have its intended impact, had the wrong formulations, or harmed patients. You have a business challenge, a science challenge, a clinical trial challenge, and a regulatory challenge, says Kevin Conroy, CEO of the colorectal cancer screening company Exact Sciences. Its like solving a complex puzzle, and theres simply no guarantee of success.
When companies do solve that puzzle, the rewards can be huge: As Modern CEO went to press, Exact Sciences announced it was selling to Abbott in a deal valued at $21 billion.
Still, biotech and health technology companies are now confronting an additional burden: simmering science skepticism. Pew Research Center found that in 2024, 76% of Americans believed that scientists act in the publics best interest, up slightly from 2023 but down 10 points from pre-pandemic levels. A new survey from Pew shows that 24% of parents of school-age children question whether vaccines have undergone enough safety testing.
Rebuilding trust in science
Some lawmakers are fanning the flames. Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for changes in the ways vaccines are tested. The White House has cut budgets at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, and moved to terminate federal funding to universities, all of which participate in the funding of medical and science research.
Conroy says the current environment is a call to action to the biosciences industry to help rebuild trust with the public and lawmakers. How can we in this field show success that brings back a stronger belief in science, in data, in clinical studies, in evidence generation? he asks. I think its our responsibility to do that.
According to Conroy, Exact Sciences isnt facing any societal or political headwinds. It makes a colon cancer test (if youre a certain age, youve probably been served ads for its Cologuard Kit) that will screen five million people for cancer this year. Science skepticism hasnt touched cancer screening, he says. People on the left and right are touched equally by cancer.
Still, Exact Sciences and other science companies have benefited from an ecosystem of government-funded research, rigorous approvals, and endorsements that make the U.S. a biotech innovation powerhouse. Exact Sciences was founded in 1995 by an engineer who wanted to develop an alternative to colonoscopies, but the company struggled for years to develop a test. Conroy joined in 2009 after meeting with David Ahlquist, a Mayo Clinic physician who had spent 20 years researching noninvasive colon cancer detectionresearch funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, and the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science.
Exact Sciences collaborated with Ahlquist on an approach that tests a patients stool for abnormal DNA or blood cells that might indicate the presence of colon cancer. Cologuard received FDA approval in 2014, after a huge clinical trial involving 10,000 patients; that same year the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it intended to cover the test, and the American Cancer Society included the test in its colon cancer screening guidelinesa key recommendation that helped build public trust in the at-home kit.
Exact Sciences would not be here without federally funded research at the Mayo Clinic, Conroy says.
Follow the data
Conroy notes that all businesses can gain from a scientific approachrunning experiments, conceding when something doesnt work (even if youve invested time and money in the research), and following the data. At Exact Sciences, such rigor extends beyond the lab. Before the company launched its kits, the team tested two different product designs for sample collectiona scoop and a container. The team thought consumers would favor the scoop, but research showed 85% of users preferred the container.
We would have made a big mistake if we had trusted our gut, Conroy says. A lot of times youre so passionate as a CEO, you skip all of those steps and just bulldoze your way toward the answer youd like to see. Im as guilty of that as the next CEO.
I asked Conroy how biotech executives can help restore trust in science and rally support for the broader system of grants and research funding now under fire. He notes that he travels to Washington from Exact Sciences headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin, every quarter to meet with lawmakers, largely to advocate for early detection of diseases but also to talk about innovation and discovery. Every CEO in this field should be doing the same thing. Its too important for Americas competitiveness, he says.
Deadline extended
Were extending the deadline for Modern CEO of the Year nominations by a few days. If you or someone you know has had a standout 2025, please fill out this nomination form by November 28. Well name the Modern CEO of the Year on December 29.
Read more: science in focus
This Sam Altmanbacked CEO is using AI to get drugs to market faster
The most innovative biotech companies of 2025
Why Jennifer Doudna is one of the 10 most innovative people of the last 10 years
Every good salesperson knows the 7-step process in which you identify and qualify a prospect to understand their needs, then present your offer, overcome objections, close the sale and follow up. Its proven so consistently effective that its concepts have been the standard for training salespeople for decades.
Many business leaders come up through sales and marketing, so it shouldnt be surprising that they try to use similar persuasion techniques for large-scale change. They work to understand the needs of their target market, craft a powerful message, overcome any objections and then follow-through on execution.
Unfortunately, thats a terrible strategy. The truth is that the urge to persuade is often a red flag. It means you either have the wrong people or the wrong idea. Effective change strategy focuses on collective dynamics. Rather than trying to shape opinions, youre much better off empowering people who are already enthusiastic about the idea and working to shape networks.
The power of persuasion
Experts have a lot of ideas about persuasion. Some suggest leveraging social proof, to show that people have adopted the idea and had a positive experience. Others emphasize the importance of building trust and using emotional rather than analytical arguments. Still others insist on creating a unified value proposition.
For 35 years, psychologist Robert Cialdini researched which types of communication were effective and which were not. He found that influence is based on six key principles: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. More recently, Wharton Professor Jonah Berger has used data analysis to come up with his SPEACC framework.
In recent years, a number of conversation-based practices, such as Deep Canvassing, Street Epistemology, and the Change Conversation Pyramid, have emerged that focus on a method called technique rebuttal. These focus on listening empathetically to build rapport and identifying common ground, then encouraging the target to engage in metacognition to examine how they arrived at their own conclusions.
These all are, for the most part, worthwhile and can be effective. However, its also important to remember that the first two steps in the sales process are identifying and qualifying prospects so that when you are presenting your offer, it is to people who are eager, or at least open, to what youre trying to sell. Nobody would recommend wasting time and effort on trying to sell to those who have no interest in buying.
Yet with large-scale change, thats not an option. Your environment will include the entire spectrum, from active supporters to active resistors. That means that for a significant portion of people, persuasive techniques will not be effective.
The limits of communication
We like to think that our minds work like computers, taking in evidence through our five senses and then processing that information in our brains to arrive at conclusions. Persuasion techniques tend to focus on glitches in that machinery in the form of cognitive biases, in order to get us to see things in another light.
Yet we are wired to be social creatures. As we engage in collective action with others, we form group identities and seek to build status amongst our own tribe. Part of achieving the status we desire is showing loyalty and adherence to collective principles, so we take steps to signal to others that we remain loyal members in good standing and expect the same of them.
Thats why we are greatly shaped by the people around us. Decades of studies indicate that we tend to conform to the opinions and behaviors of those around us and this effect extends out to three degrees of relationships. So not only do our friends friends influence us deeply, but their friends toopeople that we dont even knowaffect what we think.
Thats why communication strategies will always be limited. We can carefully craft messages to align with the influence techniques of Cialdini and Berger, listen with empathy and employ the methods of technique rebuttal to successfully persuade someone to come to our way of thinking. But when they go back and get embedded in their social networks once again, theyre very likely to return to their earlier way of thinking.
To wit, when David McRaney, while researching his book How Minds Change, sought out people who left cults or turned their backs on conspiracy theories he found that, invariably, the change in their opinion was preceded by a significant change in their social networks.
Why incentives backfire
Another common persuasion tactic is the use of incentives, based on the belief that changing incentives will automatically change behaviors. However, incentives frequently fall short and can even backfire dramatically. Sometimes this is due to the same identity and dignity issue that make people resistant to influence techniques, but also because people often act in unpredictable ways that arent immediately obvious.
Consider what happened in an experiment where daycare centers imposed fines for parents who were late picking up their children. Instead of cutting down on late pickups, they increased. As it turned out, parents saw the fine as a fee for convenience which they were happy to pay.
There is also significant evidence that extrinsic incentives crowd out intrinsic and reputational motivations. For example, in an experiment in which subjects were asked to solve a puzzle, those who were paid a flat fee were much more likely to continue to work during free time than those who were paid for each puzzle solved.
Yet there is one kind of incentive that does seem to work consistently and it taps into the same forces of group identity that make people resistant to other forms of influence. Its called prosocial behavior. We are more likely to perform when we understand and identify with who our work benefits than when they are given financial incentives or fed some slogan.
In a study by Adam Grant, the performance of call center employees more than doubled when they had regular conversations with people who benefited from their work. Lisa Earle McLeod and Elizabeth Lotardo report in an article in Harvard Business Review that similar results have been found in studies of lifeguards, hospital workers, and sales teams.
Going to where the energy is
Transformation efforts often center on communication, aiming to build awareness, desire, and knowledge about change, while building a sense of urgency and excitement. So leaders craft persuasive messages and broadcast them widely. Yet, after months of happy talk, they often find their efforts not only fell on deaf ears but also provoked deep, intense resistance.
The truth is that change isnt about persuasion, but collective dynamics. Decades of research has shown that change spreads through peer networks rather than communication campaigns. Or, as network science pioneer Duncan Watts once put it to me, ideas propagate through easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people.
Thats why you need to be wary about the urge to persuade. You want to go where the energy already is, not try and create and maintain it yourself. Find people who are already enthusiastic, empower them to succeed and they can bring in others, who can bring in others still. As Watts research has found, even a small initial shift can cascade into massive transformation.
The evidence is clear: You dont need to win over everyone at once. If you find yourself spending most of your energy trying to convince the skeptical or overpowering resistance, you are either focusing on the wrong people or you have the wrong idea. Instead of trying to push through, you need to regroup, reassess and identify where your efforts can be better placed.
More children are cashing in their Make-A-Wish requests to meet their favorite content creators, with creator wishes more than doubling in the past decade.
Make-A-Wish Foundation has been granting life-changing wishes for children with a critical illness since 1980. Now, alongside A-Listers and sports stars, YouTubers and TikTokers are also flooding requests, Axios reported.
Requests to meet content creators make up 32% of the wishes granted within the entertainment industry, per Axios, the second largest source of requests behind the music industry.
Several of the creators say they’ve been granting wishes for years and more than 50 creators and influencers became first-time wish-granters in the last year to keep up with demand.
As parents and children realize meeting their favorite streamer, TikToker, or YouTuber is an option, its becoming more and more common. In October, Make-A-Wish, Disney, and MrBeast hosted YouTube and some of the worlds top creators, at Disneyland Resort to grant wishes for 40 children.
This shift is unsurprising given the growing influence of content creators. It used to be that if you asked a classroom of kids what they want to be when they grow up, youd get answers like pop star and football player. A 2024 survey of 910 U.S. Gen Alpha kids (ages 12 to 15) by social commerce platform Whop found that nearly a third want to be YouTubers, while one in five aspire to become TikTok creators. Given the chance, they also want to meet their heroes.
“Digital creators have built strong, loyal communities based on authenticity and common interests, Jared Perry, chief revenue officer at Make-A-Wish America previously shared in a statement. When this connection is used to rally behind a cause like Make-A-Wish, it can generate significant donations and lead to long-term relationships with an entirely new audience.”
Content creators also leverage their own platforms to engage followers in charitable causes. MrBeast, for example, is well-known for his philanthropy through his 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, Beast Philanthropy. Through his Beast Philanthropy channel, he has, in just the past year, given away $1 million of toys, donated $1 million worth of brandnew teeth, and funded a gym for adaptive athletes. The organization donates 100% of the revenue from its content and merchandise.
Make-A-Wish relies on fundraisers, donors, and partners to make sick childrens wishes come true. “By becoming ambassadors of Make-A-Wish, and featuring our mission regularly in their content, creators can inspire sustained support and make a meaningful difference,” Perry continued.
As a parent, shopping for holiday gifts for your kids can be a dilemma. Of course you want to surprise the little ones with exciting presents, but you also know that most flashy toys wont hold their attention for very long. Theyll likely lose interest in them within a few days and youll be stuck with plastic toy cluttering up their rooms, destined for the donation bin. In addition to being a waste of money, its terrible for the planet.
What if you could surprise them with something thats both beautiful and practical? Heres some ideas for gifts that theyll be able to use for years.
[Photo: State]
A purse of their own
State, $60
At some point, your child will need their own bag to carry a little bit of pocket money or a snack. But if you get them a purse or tote, theyre likely to leave it behind somewhere. The solution: a cute bag you can strap onto them. States fanny pack is thoughtfully sized for a childs body and comes in great designs like rainbow sequins. It is cleverly designed to go over their shoulder, so it is always in front of them.
[Photo: Minted]
New art for their room
Minted, prices vary
Why not upgrade your childs room with a piece of art they love? Minted offers a wide range of designs that are child-friendly, but wont make you cringe. You could have fun picking a design together. You can order it as a framed poster print, or a canvas. Its something that theyll always associate with their childhood bedroom.
[Photo: Original Duckhead]
A colorful, artistic umbrella
Original Duckhead x Meri Meri Umbrella, $36
Kids love playing in the rain, and they love having their very own umbrella. Original Duckhead, a brand known for its durability and quality, has made a collection of kids umbrellas with the brand Meri Meri. The designs are fun, colorful, but also tasteful. Pick from cherries and smiley faces, dinosaurs, or rainbows. Theyll be perfect to stash in a backpack for a rainy walk back from school.
[Photo: Away]
A suitcase for all their adventures
Away, $250
If you have upcoming travel, why not get them a suitcase theyll love. This one from Away is designed from the same durable materials as the adult bags, but theyre perfectly sized for the under 7 set. Your kid will love packing it and wheeling it through the airport themselves. For the holidays, it comes with a Paw Patrols design in pink and blue.
[Photo: Petite Plume]
Pajamas fit for a prince or princess
Petite Plume, $60
Holiday pajamas have become a trend, but who wants to wear Santa jammies in January? Petite Plume offers gorgeous, high quality nightgowns and pajamas that are so soft and beautiful, your kid will be excited to see them under the tree. (Some of the nightgowns are pretty enoughthat your child might want to wear them to school.) They come in classic designs, like toile and stripes, that can be worn all year around.
[Photo: Baublebar]
A blanket for sleepovers and picnics
Baublebar, $78
While you may not think your child will get excited about a blanket, wait till they see these. Theyre designed in child friendly patterns and colors, and you can customize it with their name. Its the perfect thing for them to bring to sleepovers or the park, or just to decorate their room.
As I said in previous articles, executives like to say theyre integrating AI. But most still treat artificial intelligence as a feature, not a foundation. They bolt it onto existing systems without realizing that each automation hides a layer of invisible human work, and a growing set of unseen risks.
AI may be transforming productivity, but its also changing the very nature of labor, accountability, and even trust inside organizations. The future of work wont just be about humans and machines collaborating: It will be about managing the invisible partnerships that emerge when machines start working alongside us . . . and sometimes, behind our backs.
The illusion of automation
Every wave of technological change begins with the same illusion: once we automate, the work will disappear. However, history tells a different story. The introduction of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems promised end-to-end efficiency, only to create years of shadow work fixing data mismatches and debugging integrations. AI is repeating that pattern at a higher cognitive level.
When an AI drafts a report, someone still has to verify its claims (please, do not forget this!), check for bias, and rewrite the parts that dont sound right. When an agent summarizes a meeting, someone has to decide what actually matters. Automation doesnt erase labor; it just moves it upstream, from execution to supervision.
The paradox is clear: The smarter the system, the more attention it requires to ensure it behaves as expected.
A new McKinsey report calls this the age of superagency, where people spend less time performing tasks and more time overseeing intelligent systems that do. The smarter the system, the more attention it requires to ensure it behaves as expected.
The rise of the hidden workforce
A recent analysis found that more than half of workers already use AI tools secretly, often without their managers knowledge. Similarly, another investigation warned that employees are quietly sharing sensitive data with consumer-grade chatbots, exposing companies to compliance and privacy risks.
This is the new silent workforce: algorithms doing part of the job, unseen and unacknowledged. For employees, the temptation is obvious: AI offers instant answers. For companies, the consequences are dangerous.
If those silent partners are consumer-grade models, employees might be sending confidential data to unknown servers, processed in data centers located in countries with different privacy laws. Thats why, as I warned in a previous article about BYOAI, organizations must ensure that any questions employees ask, and any prompts they use are directed to properly licensed, enterprise-grade systems.
The problem isnt that employees use AI. Its that they do it outside the data governance.
When intelligence goes underground
Unapproved AI use creates more than data risk: it fractures collective learning. When employees each rely on their own AI assistant, corporate knowledge becomes fragmented. The company stops learning as an organization because insights are trapped in personal chat histories.
The result is a paradoxical kind of inefficiency: everyone gets smarter individually, but the institution gets dumber.
Organizations need to treat AI access as shared infrastructure, not a personal tool. That means providing sanctioned, well-audited systems where employees can ask questions safely without leaking intellectual property or violating compliance. The right AI model, as Microsoft knows extremely well, is not just the most powerful one: Its the one that keeps your data where it belongs.
The hidden human labor of ‘intelligent’ workflows
Even when AI use is authorized, it introduces a layer of invisible human effort that companies rarely measure. Every AI-assisted workflow hides three forms of manual oversight:
Verification work: humans checking whether outputs are correct and compliant
Correction work: editing, reframing, or sanitizing content before publication
Interpretive work: deciding what the AIs suggestions actually mean
These tasks arent logged, but they consume time and mental energy. They are the reason that productivity statistics often lag behind automation hype. AI makes us faster, but it also makes us busier: constantly curating, correcting, and interpreting the machines that supposedly work for us.
The ethics of invisible labor
Invisible labor has always existed: in care work, cleaning, or customer service. AI extends it into cognitive and emotional domains. Behind every smart workflow is a human ensuring that the output makes sense, aligns with brand tone, and doesnt violate company values.
If we ignore that labor, we risk creating a new inequality: those who design and sell AI systems are celebrated, while those who quietly fix their errors remain invisible. Productivity metrics improve, but the real cost, the human vigilance keeping AI credible, goes unrecognized.
Even executives experimenting with AI digital clones admit they dont fully trust their virtual doubles. Trust, as it turns out, remains stubbornly human.
Managing the silent partnership
When AI becomes embedded in everyday workflows, leadership must evolve from managing people to managing collaboration between people and systems. That requires new governance principles:
Authorized intelligence only: Employees must use licensed, enterprise-grade AI systems. No exceptions. Every query sent to a public model is a potential data leak.
Data residency clarity: Know where your data lives and where its processed. The cloud is not a place, its a jurisdiction.
Transparency by design: Any AI-assisted output should be traceable. If an AI helped generate a report, label it clearly. Transparency breeds trust.
Feedback as governance: Employees must be able to report errors, hallucinations, and ethical concerns. The real safeguard against model drift isnt a compliance checklist, its a vigilant workforce.
AI without governance isnt innovation. Its negligence.
The cognitive supervision era
We are witnessing the emergence of a new human skill: cognitive supervision, or the ability to guide, critique, and interpret machine reasoning without doing the work manually. Its becoming the corporate equivalent of teaching someone how to manage a team they dont fully understand.
Training employees in this skill is urgent. It requires awareness of bias, logic, and the limits of automation. Its not prompt engineering, its critical thinking. And its what separates organizations that collaborate with AI from those that merely consume it.
The best companies understand this already. They are investing in education, not just tools, and treating AI literacy as strategic infrastructure. A recent profile of Vivens AI-employee clones revealed that the real question is not whether AI can replicate workers, but whether organizations can govern the replicas they create.
What executives must do now
If you lead a company, assume that AI is already part of your workflows, whether you approved it or not. The task ahead is not to prevent its use but to domesticate it responsibly.
Audit your AI exposure: Map where your people are already using tools.
Provide safe alternatives: If you dont, theyll use whatever works, secure or not.
Recognize hidden labor: Build metrics that reward verification, correction, and interpretation.
Make transparency cultural: No AI-generated output should hide its origin.
Done right, AI can become a trusted colleague, one that accelerates learning and amplifies creativity. Done poorly, it becomes a silent, unaccountable partner with access to your data and none of your ethics.
A quiet revolution
AIs arrival in the workplace is not loud or cinematic: Its silent, gradual, and pervasive. It hides behind polished interfaces, automating just enough to convince us its working on its own. But beneath that silence lies an expanding layer of human effort keeping the system ethical, explainable, and aligned.
As leaders, our job is to make that effort visible, measurable, and safe. The most dangerous AI is not the one that replaces people: its the one that quietly depends on them, without permission, oversight, or acknowledgment.
When AI becomes your silent partner, make sure its one you actually know, trust, and license properly. Otherwise, you may discover too late that the partnership was never yours at all.
At 3:20 a.m. on January 8, Steve Gibson and his wife were jolted awake by a phone call: the Eaton fire was approaching their home in Altadena, California, and they had to evacuate.
We left in about 15 minutes, Gibson says. So we only took our passports, our insurance papers, three pairs of underwear, and our little dog, Cantinflas. They thought that theyd be able to come back within a few hours. But they soon learned that their houseand their entire blockhad been destroyed.
They spent the next few weeks moving from short-term rental to short-term rental, and finally moved into an apartment, though they knew that insurance would only cover the cost temporarily. Then they faced the next challenge: what would it take to rebuild their home?
Cleared residential lots, with the San Gabriel Mountains in the background, in Altadena, California on August 21, 2025, [Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images]
More than 10 months after the L.A. fires, the rebuilding process in the fire zone is painfully slow. In Altadena, where more than 5,000 houses burned in the Eaton fire, only a few hundred are currently being rebuilt. (Only one, an ADU, has been completed as of mid-November.) But someincluding Gibsonsare moving faster than others because homeowners have turned to prefab construction.
Prefab companies like Villa, Cover, and Samara are all working on projects in the fire zone, as well as in the nearby burn areas in Pacific Palisades and Malibu. Some companies that initially focused on making backyard ADUs have expanded into full single-family prefab homes in the area, helping fire survivors rebuild more quickly. And as more homeowners choose prefab after the disaster, the approach could become a more mainstream option for new construction, even outside fire-prone areas.
Before the fire, I had never thought of a prefab home, Gibson says. The small house that he and his wife lost, where theyd lived for 24 years, was built in the 1920s. Theyd always lived in traditional homes. But when they started to research the timelines for a new traditional build, they were told it would take two or three years. A prefab home, in theory, could take months.
[Photo: David Esquivel/UCLA]
A faster way to build
The couple started working with a company called Cover, which builds components like wall panels in a factory in the nearby city of Gardena, and then assembles the pieces on the building site. After getting permits, building all of the parts for Gibsons house took roughly a month in the factory; assembling it on the lot is taking a little more than two months. Gibson and his wife hope to move in before the end of the year.
Top left: Gibson’s house, under construction. Lower right: a rendering of the final construction. [Images: Steve Gibson, Cover]
Prefab is much faster because we move most of the complexity into the factory, says Alexis Rivas, CEO of Cover. Our wall panels, floor panels, roof panels are made in the factory with insulation, with waterproofing, with a lot of the mechanical, electrical, plumbing, already fabricated. And then what’s happening on site is primarily assembly work.
[Image: courtesy Cover]
The design process can also happen quickly. While some companies, like Cover, offer more customization, others offer preset designs. And while traditional construction moves in a strict sequence, and a delay from one subcontractor slows down the whole process, factory-built homes run multiple production lines in parallel.
[Image: courtesy Cover]
Pouring the foundation and other site work can also happen at the same time. Insidethe factory, each step is also more efficient. Instead of having to reach at an awkward angle to install a duct in a ceiling, for example, a work station is set up ergonomically, and the work can happen faster.
Right now, relatively few homes have started construction in the fire zone. But more than 2,300 are at some stage of the permitting process, and next year, building a traditional house will also face the additional challenge of trying to find construction crews.
[Photo: Villa Homes]
“If you fast-forward six months, nine months, 12 months down the road, with a lot of construction activity, the labor base of trades and subcontractors is going to be really, really, really stretched,” says Sean Roberts, CEO of Villa, another prefab company working with homeowners in Altadena and Pacific Palisades.
[Photo: Villa Homes]
“That’s going to make building traditionally on site really hard, if you can even do it. That will drive cost up. It will drive speeds way slower. It will create a lot of uncertainty. So our approach is do it in the factory. The benefit of that is the amount of labor that we need on site in Altadena basically acts as a force multiplier.”
Villa takes a different approach than Cover, building modules that arrive fully constructed rather than flat panels. “The blinds are on the windows, the appliances are init comes pretty much close to done,” Roberts says.
[Photo: Christopher Nelson/courtesy LA4LA]
A range of options
There are a wide range of prefab options for homeowners to pick from, both in terms of style and price. Because many homeowners aren’t necessarily familiar with prefab housing, UCLA’s cityLAB, a design research organization, has temporarily installed a showcase of six different homes on an empty lot in Altadena.
“Our sense was that folks are sort of arriving at this conversation with a bias,” says Ryan Conroy, cityLAB’s director of architecture. “Manufactured and prefab homes carry a sort of stigma often that doesn’t track with the quality of the building construction or the diverse architectural styles they come in, and really just the way technology has changed. In one sense, that needs to be seen for itself: folks need to be able to walk through. They need to understand the quality and the livability of some of the homes.”
[Photo: Villa Homes]
Many options, like Cover’s, have a modern aesthetic inspired by California’s Eichler and Case Study homes. Others, including some models that Villa designed specifically for Altadena, nod to the traditional 1920s Craftsman homes that were common in the neighborhood. Some are higher end. Villa’s are affordable, with the base cost before site work starting as low as $147,000. “These are simple homes,” says Roberts. “These are not high-end, luxury builds. But they are representative of what the neighborhood was.”
[Photo: Villa Homes]
The more affordable options can help homeowners who don’t have enough insurance coverage to rebuild an exact replica of the home they lost. In a couple of cases, prefab home companies are donating some homes to fire victims who couldn’t otherwise afford to rebuild.
Many of the options are more sustainable than what was lost. Cosmic, a startup that uses a mobile “micro factory” to build homes with robots, is building ultra-efficient all-electric homes in the fire zone. Like other new construction in California, everything comes with solar on the roof to help reduce emissions and electric bills. The new builds are also safer in fires. Cover, for example, builds with steel instead of wood.
Some projects are also using prefab to rebuild multifamily buildings. Beacon Housing, for example, recently got a grant from the Altadena Builds Back Foundation and Pasadena Community Foundation to build a small prefab bungalow court with 14 units for low-income residents. The bungalows will be built by Clayton Homes, which makes manufactured housingwhat used to be known in the past as a trailer home, though the quality is very different now.
The UCLA team also created a guide that homeowners can use to learn about relative costs and timelines and how prefab construction works, including the fact that it can offer more certainty. “I think what’s as attractive as this sort of expedited format is actually just knowing exactly when it will be done, which doesn’t necessarily track with traditional construction,” Conroy says.
[Photo: David Esquivel/UCLA]
A long road to rebuildbut a turning point for the industry
Even with faster construction timelines, prefab homes still face challenges. Although the local government has tried to streamline the post-fire paperwork processfor example, L.A. County set up a one-stop center for permitting in Altadenabuilders told me that they still face bureaucratic delays. On some blocks, depending on how much infrastructure was destroyed in the fire, homeowners might face other delays connecting to utilities. Others may need to do more work to remediate their lot to make it safe to build.
But several prefab projects are underway in Altadena, and it’s likely that many more people will choose that path. “This is a multiyear effort here,” says Roberts. “But doing at least some portion of the rebuild with factory-built homes is going to help get the community back up on its feet a heck of a lot faster than doing everything traditionally and on site.”
As it expands, it could help the industry become more mainstream. “This feels like a catalytic moment for the industry,” says UCLA’s Conroy. “More than anything, its a chance to pull prefab into a building scale that actually matches how infill gets built across Southern California. Before the fires, prefab was basically split: either a single ADU box, or big multifamily projects with enough repetition to justify the factory work. Now we’re seeing builders get comfortable using prefab for larger single-family homes and smaller multifamily projects, and that familiarity is what will push prefab beyond the burn area.”
The line had just died down at Hong Kongs Apple flagship store on Canton Road when I arrived on what happened to be the release day for the iPhone Pocket, the companys new and very buzzed-about design collaboration between Apple and Issey Miyake Design Studio. I purchased it immediatelya short one in Sapphire blue, as the cross-body version was already sold out.
I observed neither pomp nor circumstance with the overwrought packaging, which I shed on the spot despite its velum-bound elegance and prominent Miyake branding. I was on a working vacation after all, and so I simply looped the Pocket around the strap of my nylon cross-body bag and went about my day in a city whose entire experience is all but governed by smartphone technology. I was going to have to use the thing, not just look at it.
Awkwardness ensued. Bouncing around on my thigh beneath the weight of my phone, the Pocket felt like a surprising, unwanted appendage. An attempt to access the Mass Trasnsit Railway (MTR) system by tapping my phone through the Pocket failed, which meant I had to remove the phone from the pocket altogether. (I accidentally dropped my phone while trying to quickly slip it back into the Pocket amidst the throngs of fellow passengers hustling past me.)
[Photo: Apple]
On a quick trip to Shenzhen, China the following day, I experienced a moment of panic before I realized that my Pocket hadnt been pickpocketed, but rather I had simply intuitively placed my phone in my bag, its familiar location, rather than fiddling with my newest accessory.
[Photo: Apple]
At an eyebrow-raising $229.95 for the crossbody version and $149.95 for the shorter version, the limited-edition iPhone Pocket might simply be dismissed as an overpriced marketing gimmick, despite Apples long history of collaborating with luxury fashion brands. In my case, I am an inveterate fan of the late Issey Miyakes work, which I collect in various vintages and frequently wear.
I can simply look at the iPhone Pocket and see its potential for abject failure as a functional design object, and yet the Issey lover in me deeply appreciates the way his studios clothing and accessories challenge commonly held notions around how a piece of cloth should behave. Miyakes designs are infamous, in part, for the way they play against the body, allowing the wearer exceptional freedom in how they position the garment.
There is no right way to wear Miyake. The iPhone Pockets pleats not only allow the accessory to morph in shape according to its contents, but it allows that alteration to remain visible. (Similarly, the shape of the ubiquitous Lucent bag, for example, is designed to distort as the bag is filled with objects.)
[Photo: Apple]
The relationship between Apple founder Steve Jobs and Issey Miyake himself is the stuff of legend: Miyake personally designed the black, mock-neck turtleneck that Jobs infamously paired with his Levis 501 jeans and New Balance shoes. Jobs, like many tech executives since, preferred to adopt a uniform as a means of reducing the cognitive load associated with choosing ones clothing on a daily basis. Indeed, many Miyake megafans, myself included, are drawn to the kind of strangely unique uniformity one may achieve in wearing his clothing. The Pleats Please line, in particular, can be styled endlessly and sits effortlessly against the body in a way that begs for common wear.
[Photo: Apple]
The iPhone Pocket, in contrast, offers frictionand a lot of it. The Miyake Design Studio team knows it, too: Recently quoted in The New York Times, Yoshiyuki Miyamae, the studios design director, said that design should be leaving things a little bit less defined to allow more creativity from the user side. He also questioned whether the American market was ready for such a development. While its true that Americans are less likely to follow the trend of wearing their phones across their bodies, as is commonly seen in Asia, the iPhone Pocket simply looks strange in a way that may brstle against more practical sensibilities.
[Photo: Apple]
The sensationalization of the iPhone Pocketit has already been panned by the popular press and meme-ified across the internetposes a stranger version of the initial fervor that surrounded the iPhone itself. (The last time I waited in line to purchase something from Apple was in San Francisco, the day the first iPhone was released!) People dont quite know what to make of it yet, even though Apple does hold a precedent in its 2004 iPhone Sock, a much cheaper and similarly intentioned, if less intentionally designed object.
As Miyake Design Studio apparently planned, the onus for the design success of the iPhone Pocket seems to be placed squarely on its owner, which isa risky proposition given the tension it poses, as an object, with the sleek minimalism of Apples design philosophy.
In terms of branding, it could be argued that the heavier lift lies with Miyake over Apple, as Miyake holds strong name recognition in Asia, where the iPhone Pocket sold out immediately and where the demand for phone accessories is markedly higher. Its 1994 Pleats Please line has enjoyed a recent surge in popularity in the United States, yet Miyake is a far cry from a household name in America. Apple, on the converse, has a built-in, global audience for everything it produces.
[Photo: Apple]
Will the iPhone Pocket catch fire, or will it slip into design obscurity alongside so many other tech accessories gone by? Now freshly arrived back in New York City, Ive looped my Pocket yet again onto a sturdy leather bowler handbag along with a few other small charms for added flair. Im willing to give it another try, and am ready for the conversation (and the criticism) that will inevitably follow me.
As I uploaded a 1940s photo of my grandpa Max and hit a few buttons in Googles Veo 3 video generator, I saw a familiar family photo transform from black and white to color.
Then, my grandpa stepped out of the photo and walked confidently toward the camera, his army uniform perfectly pressed as his arms swung at the sides of his lanky frame.
This is the kind of thing AI lets you do nowvirtually bring back the dead.
As a hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch this weekend highlighted, though, just because we can reanimate our departed loved ones, that doesnt necessarily mean we should.
Grilling the dog
The sketch, which The Atlantic has already called SNLs Black Mirror Moment, features Ashley Padilla as an aging grandmother in a nursing home.
Her family membersplayed by Sarah Sherman and Marcello Hernándezvisit her on Thanksgiving, and use an AI photo app to bring her old family photos to life as short videos.
At first, things go well. Padillas character marvels over a black and white image of her father waving as he stands in front of a spinning ferris wheel.
But then, things go hilariously, predictably wrong. A photo of family members at a barbecue turns into a horror scene when the fictional AI app has Padillas father (played by host Glen Powell) roast the family dog, which happens to have no head.
As other photos come to life, Padillas father pays a bowling buddy to perform a lewd act, and in a baby photo, her mothers torso splits from her body and floats around the frame as a nuclear bomb explodes in the background.
The sketch is hilarious because its so relatable. Anyone who has played with AI video generators knows that they can make delightfully wonky assumptions about the laws of physicsoften with spectacular results.
In my testing of AI video generator RunwayML, for example, I asked the model to create a video of a playful kitten at sunset.
Things start out cute enough, until the kitten splits in two, with its front half attempting to exit stage-right as its back half continues adorably cavorting around.
Show me the movements
Video generators make these errors because of the way theyre trained. Whereas a text-based AI model can learn by reading essentially every book, website, and other piece of textual data ever published, the amount of training-ready video content is far more limited.
Most AI video generators train on videos from social media platforms like YouTube. That means theyre great at creating the kinds of videos that often appear on those platforms.
As Ive demonstrated before, if you want people knocking over wedding cakes or having heated arguments with their roommates, video generators like Veo and Sora excel at making them.
For less commonly posted scenes, though, the available training data is far more limited.
Most online videos, for example, show interesting things happening. People rarely post hour-long clips of themselves casually walking around (or to SNLs example, holding a baby or grilling a hot dog) on YouTube or Instagram.
Those videos would be so terminally boring that no person would want to watch them. Yet copious amounts of video of these kinds of boring, everyday activities are exactly what AI companies need to properly train their video generators.
This has created a fascinating market for such clips. Companies like Waffle Video are popping up to serve the need, paying creators to film themselves doing things like chopping vegetables or writing specific words on pieces of paper for AI training.
Until AI companies can get their hands on more videos of these kinds of mundane actions, though, AI video generators will struggle to mimic them.
Ironically, video generators are currently great at showing fanciful, dramatic actions. Ask them to make the kinds of everyday scenes you might find in an old black and white family photo, though, and you get Fido on the barbie.
Reanimate grandma?
All that brings us to the question: should you use todays AI tools to reanimate your dead loved ones?
My best advice: wait a bit.
AI video tech is advancing incredibly quickly. The first tools that added movement to family photoslike Deep Nostalgia from My Heritage, which launched in 2021used machine learning to perform their wizardry.
The tech felt revolutionary at the time. Today, it looks primitive compared to the full motion scenes like the one of my Veo-animated grandpa.
And even with those advances, Veo and its ilk are still in their avocado chair moment.
Image generators have improved tremendously as their creators have gotten better at training them. Video generators will see similarly vast improvementsespecially as AI companies invest millions in buying bespoke training data of everyday movements.
Personally, I brought photo of my grandpa to life because I thought the real Grandpa Max would find it amusing. Ive resisted reanimating photos of more recently departed loved ones, though, for many of the reasons implicit in SNLs sketch.
Family photos are intimate things. Its nice to see your late loved one smile and wave at you. Seeing them split in two or explode in a nuclear fireball, though, would be disturbingand something you couldnt unsee once youve conjured it up from the depths of Sora or Veos silicon brain.
Until AI models can be trusted to avoid these kinds of distributing, random visual detours, we shouldnt trust them with our most prized memories.
A splitting kitten is amusing. A splitting grandma, less so.
When entrepreneurs list their principal reasons for launching a company, small business owners often cite being their own boss, flexibility in setting their working hours, and turning a commercial concept into reality as their main motivations. Now, new data identifies another incentive that may convince future entrepreneurs to take the plunge. According to a recent analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the average self-employed person earns significantly more income during their career than people who work for someone else.
However, the reports findings also note the widely varying levels of income among small business owners, and the length of time usually required before stronger earnings start flowing in. Those details may lead some less enterprising prospective entrepreneurs to stick with punching a clock after all.
The analysis by the Minneapolis Fed differs from most research on small business owners, which often relies heavily on survey responses. The shifting makeup of participants in those inquiries often produces widely contrasting results, creating what Minneapolis Fed authors likened to the parable of the blind men and an elephant: Each poll was essentially touching only one part of the body, and led to researchers drawing different and incomplete conclusions.
To establish a more complete picture of the nations entrepreneurs, the Minneapolis Fed used U.S. tax and Social Security Administration data from 2000 to 2015. That allowed it to determine the income those small business owners collectively generated for themselves, and identify why they stuck it out with companies that were often slow to reach profitability. And that wasnt due to setting their own hours.
(W)e find that self-employed individuals have significantly higher income and steeper income growth profiles than paid-employed peers with similar characteristics, the report said, while also refuting frequent survey results that suggest many entrepreneurs stay in business for the perks of not having to answer to a boss.
Contrary to earlier studies based on surveys plagued by underrepresentation in the right tail of the income distribution, we find that non-pecuniary benefits of self-employment are not substantial when considering the source of most business income, it said.
What that means, in non-economist-speak, is that many entrepreneurs earn up to 70% more than people working for other employers over their careers, with their income increasing considerably faster than paid workers. That winds up vastly outweighing the advantages surveys often identify of founders setting their own work schedules or getting to ask employees to fetch their coffee.
The study found that during the 15-year period, a 25-year-old entrepreneur earned on average about $27,000 per year in 2012 dollars, while an employee of the same age made $29,000. About five years later, that income disparity had typically reversed, and then continued growing larger in small-business owners favor.
By age 55, our estimate is an average (entrepreneur) income of $134,000 in 2012 dollarsmuch higher than the estimate of $79,000 for the paid employed, the study said. It added that gap was probably even larger before government agencies adjusted small-business income declarations by 14% to 46% to account for presumed underreporting.
These dierences in profiles for the self- and paid-employed would be even more striking if we were to (re)adjust reported incomes to account for business income underreporting.
Not every small-business owner winds up earning as much as people working for salaries, howeveror as much as their more successful peers.
The study said about 80% of the total income of entrepreneurs it identified was generated by people earning $100,000 annually or more. That means a lot of small-business owners fared less well than the more affluent minority at the top. As a result, the authors said in wonky terms, a minority of self-employed people made even less than workers working for someone else.
IRS data shows that many of the primarily self-employed earned less over the sample years than paid-employed peers with similar characteristics, but in the aggregate this subgroup has a much lower share of the total income than those that earned more than their peers, it noted.
The Minneapolis Fed noted some other interesting observations in its findings.
One was that many entrepreneurs continued working salaried jobs, or had other income coming in as they supported their still unprofitable new ventures. Those supporting funds improved the cohorts overall positive revenue figures, even during early lean years.
In other words, when starting a new business, owners rely on other sources of labor earnings, through either paid employment or other business enterprises, it said. Thus, even though most businesses have losses, few owners have negative individual incomes.
Another significant detail was what the authors said was their use of official data to create a more precise collective financial portrait of entrepreneurscontrasting the results of many surveys that may simplify the motives and activities of limited samples of small-company owners.
(T)he literature on entrepreneurship has an array of narratives, describing the typical business owner in many possible ways: as a gig worker seeking flexible arrangements, a misfit avoiding unemployment spells, an inventor seeking venture capital, a tax dodger misreporting income, it said, before noting its own use of official income statistics collected from millions of entrepreneurs. This data provides new insights into the central questions of the entrepreneurship literature and will hopefully prove useful for researchers interested in calibrating models of self-employment and business formation.
Bruce Crumley
This article originally appeared on Fast Companys sister publication, Inc.
Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
As it faces a growing number of lawsuits alleging it helps facilitate child sexual exploitation, online gaming platform Roblox has unveiled a new age verification system. That system, however, could open it up to a different sort of criticism.
The popular app, which has roughly 151 million users, announced last week that it plans to require a facial age check for all users who utilize the Roblox chat system. User verification can be accomplished by either submitting a government ID or by submitting a selfie, which AI will examine to estimate the age of the user.
The verification will begin rolling out in early December in select markets (which do not include the U.S.) and expand globally in January 2026.
“This initiative is designed to provide even more age-appropriate experiences for all users, which we believe will improve interactions for users of all ages on Roblox,” Roblox Chief Safety Officer Matt Kaufman said in a statement. “Enforcing age checks allows us to implement age-based chat, which helps users better understand who theyre communicating with and limits chat between minors and adults.”
Roblox is facing at least 35 lawsuits that allege users met and abused children on the platform. (More than one-third of the platform’s users are under the age of 13.) Attorneys general in Kentucky and Louisiana filed separate lawsuits accusing the company of harming children earlier this year. And a California judge, earlier this month, denied Roblox’s attempt to force one father’s dispute into a private resolution.
Roblox already has parental controls and blocks photo sharing and the exchange of personal information. It also uses a mix of human and AI to moderate text and voice interactions.
Under the new system, though, users who verify their age will only be allowed to chat with others in a similar age range (unless they are classified a “Trusted Connection” with people they know). Those age groups will be broken into six categories: Under 9, 9 to 12, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18 to 20, or over 21. (Chat will not be offered to users under 9 years old, unless a parent provides consent after an age check.)
Because families have kids of all ages, Roblox says it will soon roll out solutions for direct chat between parents and children younger than 13 or between siblings in different age groups.
Submitting age verification is still optional, but will be required for any user who wishes to utilize the system’s chat feature, which is a popular component with users.
Roblox says submitted selfies will be completed through the app using a smartphone’s camera. It also tried to get ahead of possible security concerns, saying “images and video for age checks completed through Facial Age Estimation are processed by our vendor, Persona, and deleted immediately after processing.”
Still, some parents could be wary of letting their young children submit photos to the company, given the number of lawsuits and the polarizing nature of facial recognition.
In 2021, Facebook abandoned its facial recognition program, which suggested name tags for people in pictures, following privacy watchdog warnings and European Union regulators cracking down on the practice. (The company brought back facial recognition tools last year to assist with reclaiming compromised accounts.)
Even Senate Republicans have expressed wariness over facial recognition software, proposing a limit on that technology in U.S. airports (though the bill has not found momentum so far). Folks dont want a national surveillance state, but thats exactly what the TSAs unchecked expansion of facial recognition technology is leading us to,” said Oregons Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley, a cosponsor of the bill, in May.
Roblox says its age checks won’t stop with the current program. Early next year it will require age checks to access social media links on user profiles, communities, and experience details pages.
