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.
Should I take this project? Say yes to the new job offer? Stick with this plan or walk away? Every choice we make can feel huge. And every path has its own set of risks and rewards. There are always more questions for every life-changing decision. Sometimes the pros-and-cons lists feel more like busywork than progress. You check off the boxes, stare at the lists, and still end up confused, stuck in the same mental loop. Thats why I rely on the rule of 3 framework to make tough decisions. I hope it helps you clarify your life-changing choices.
How it works
Whenever youre stuck, force yourself to create three paths: B, C, and D.
Why not A? A is usually the default for most people. The thing youre already doing. The path of least resistance. It doesnt need your help. What you need are alternatives.
Then comes the second step, and this is where most people stop thinking too soon. Now, for each path, think through:
First-order effects
Second-order outcomes
And third-order consequences
And then, and this matters, choose the path with the most meaningful but least life-changing consequences.
Why the two-option path doesnt work
When you only have two options, your brain keeps going back and forth. Right vs wrong. Safe vs risky. Smart vs stupid. You stop being logical. Theres a term for it: binary bias or black-and-white thinking. We do it all the time. Two choices feel better. But they are not. Theyre restrictive and create a lot of unnecessary pressure.
Most decisions are not binary, and there are usually better answers waiting to be found if you do the analysis and involve the right people, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, says.
Three options open things up. Adding a third option reduces your emotional load and improves perceived control. You feel less trapped. And more capable. For example, if you are thinking about changing jobs. This is how it usually goes.
Option 1: Quit and leap.Option 2: Stay and suffer.
Now try the Rule of 3.
Path B: Quit and take a new role in a similar field.Path C: Stay for six months and skill up aggressively.Path D: Go part-time or freelance while testing something new.
Of course, none of these options is perfect. Thats why the next stage of the process is even more important: the consequences.
1st, 2nd and 3rd order effects
It simply means keep asking, and then what? First-order effects are immediate. What happens right away when you make the decision? Second-order effects come next. What does that lead to? Third-order effects are longer-term. Who do you become if this path continues?
I will now apply the effects to the job-changing example.
Path B: Quit and take a similar role.
First-order: New environment. Relief. You may stop dreading Mondays.
Second-order: You become more confident. Now, you know youre employable. You can actually change jobs.
Third-order: You might stay on the same path longer than you want.
Now Path C: Stay and upgrade your skills
First-order: You may feel frustrated for a while. You will need a lot of discipline for this path.
Second-order: You will get leverage to open your options.
Third-order: You redefine yourself from stuck to building a career. You may become indispensable to your employer.
The mistake most people make
Most people pursue the best outcome. Thats a trap. The future is uncertain. Youre probably guessing what could work. Everyone is. Once you are done with the effects, choose the path with the least life-altering effects. The one that teaches you something. Keeps doors open. And doesnt completely make your life worse if youre wrong.
Its my risk psychology approach.
People regret irreversible decisions more than bad ones. We hate closing doors we didnt mean to close. Thats why picking the path that means a lot to you but wont burn bridges matters.
Make better decisions with the least panic.
This framework works when you are emotionally attached to the decision you are about to make. When youre stressed, your brain throws logic out of the window. The rule of 3 gets you back on the rational path. It takes you from reacting to responding to life. It helps you answer the most important question. Which future can I live with?
You can use this rule anywhere. Money decisions. Relationship decisions. Creative decisions. A big purchase. Even small ones. Do I say yes to this commitment? What are the effects, and what are my options? And what path can I live with and still function? Force the three paths.
Pursue the consequences in places most people ignore. Then, opt for the choice that makes life better without disrupting your entire life.
Use it to pick a path with tolerable unknowns
The rule of three doesnt remove uncertainty. Nothing does. Youre never picking certainty. Youre picking a path with tolerable unknowns. Good decisions come from better processes. The 3 rule takes away the emotional attachment that drains the life out of you.
Most of our hard decisions become unbearable because we want a perfect choice. The one that proves we are smart and avoids regret. So you panic. Or overthink. Some people let time decide for them.
Which is still a decision, by the way.
I use the rule of three to pick a direction.
Adjust where necessary. And keep moving. I want forward motion without self-destruction. You dont need to outsmart the future. Just stop putting so much pressure on yourself. Most choices dont need courage. They need structure. Three paths. Three consequences. It makes overthinking your options almost impossible.
AI is no longer just a cascade of algorithms trained on massive amounts of data. It has become a physical and infrastructural phenomenon, one whose future will be determined not by breakthroughs in benchmarks, but by the hard realities of power, geography, regulation, and the very nature of intelligence. Businesses that fail to see this will be blindsided.
Data centers were once the sterile backrooms of the internet: important, but invisible. Today, they are the beating heart of generative AI, the physical engines that make large language models (LLMs) possible. But what if these engines, and the models they power, are hitting limitations that cant be solved with more capital, more data centers, or more powerful chips?
In 2025 and into 2026, communities around the U.S. have been pushing back against new data center construction. In Springfield, Ohio; Loudoun County, Virginia and elsewhere, local residents and officials have balked at the idea of massive facilities drawing enormous amounts of electricity, disrupting neighborhoods, and straining already stretched electrical grids. These conflicts are not isolated. They are a signal, a structural friction point in the expansion of the AI economy.
At the same time, utilities are warning of a looming collision between AIs energy appetite and the cost of power infrastructure. Several states are considering higher utility rates for data-intensive operations, arguing that the massive energy consumption of AI data centers is reshaping the economics of electricity distribution, often at the expense of everyday consumers.
This friction between local resistance to data centers, the energy grids physical limits, and the political pressures on utilities is more than a planning dispute. It reveals a deeper truth: AIs most serious constraint is not algorithmic ingenuity, but physical reality.
When reality intrudes on the AI dream
For years, the dominant narrative in technology has been that more data and bigger models equal better intelligence. The logic has been seductive: scale up the training data, scale up compute power, and intelligence will emerge. But this logic assumes that three things are true:
Data can always be collected and processed at scale.
Data centers can be built wherever they are needed.
Language-based models can serve as proxies for understanding the world.
The first assumption is faltering. The second is meeting political and physical resistance. The third, that language alone can model reality, is quietly unraveling.
Large language models are trained on massive corpora of human text. But that text is not a transparent reflection of reality: It is a distillation of perceptions, biases, omissions, and misinterpretations filtered through the human use of language. Some of that is useful. Much of it is partial, anecdotal, or flat-out wrong. As these models grow, their training data becomes the lens through which they interpret the world. But that lens is inherently flawed.
This matters because language is not reality: It is a representation of individual and collective narratives. A language model learns the distribution of language, not the causal structure of events, not the physics of the world, not the sensory richness of lived experience. This limitation will come home to roost as AI is pushed into domains where contextual understanding of the world, not just text patterns, is essential for performance, safety, and real-world utility.
A structural crisis in the making
We are approaching a strange paradox: The very success of language-based AI is leading to its structural obsolescence.
As organizations invest billions in generative AI infrastructure, they are doing so on the assumption that bigger models, more parameters, and larger datasets will continue to yield better results. But that assumption is at odds with three emerging limits:
Energy and location constraints: As data centers face community resistance and grid limits, the expansion of AI compute capacity will slow, especially in regions without surplus power and strong planning systems.
Regulatory friction: States and countries will increasingly regulate electricity usage, data center emissions, and land use, placing new costs and hurdles on AI infrastructure.
Cognitive limitations of LLMs: Models that are trained only on text are hitting a ceiling on true understanding. The next real breakthroughs in AI will require models that learn from richer, multimodal interactions from real environments, sensory data and structured causal feedback, not just text corpora. Language alone will not unlock deeper machine understanding.
This is not a speculative concern. We see it in the inconsistencies of todays LLMs: confident in their errors, anchored in old data, and unable to reason about the physical or causal aspects of reality. These are not bugs: they are structural constraints.
Why this matters for business strategy
CEOs and leaders who continue to equate AI leadership with bigger models and more data center capacity are making a fundamental strategic error. The future of AI will not be defined by how much computing power you have, but by how well you integrate intelligence with the physical world.
Industries like robotics, autonomous vehicles, medical diagnosis, climate modeling, and industrial automation demand models that can reason about causality, sense environments, and learn from experience, not just from language patterns. The winners in these domains will be those who invest in hybrid systems that combine language with perception, embodiment, and grounded interaction.
Conclusion: reality bites back
The narrative that AI is an infinite frontier has been convenient for investors, journalists, and technologists alike. But like all powerful narratives, it eventually encounters the hard wall of reality. Data centers are running into political and energy limits. Language-only models are showing their boundaries. And the assumption that scale solves all problems is shaking at its foundations.
The next chapter of AI will not be about who builds the biggest model. It will be about who understands the world in all its physical, causal, and embodied complexity, and builds systems that are grounded in reality.
Innovation in AI will increasingly be measured not by the size of the data center or the number of parameters, but by how well machines perceive, interact with, and reason about the actual world.
In the world of social impact and sustainability, 2025s word of the year could have been headwinds. It became a euphemism for everything from political pressure and regulatory changes to economic uncertainty, AI disruption, and social upheaval.
But in many ways, headwinds is an understatement for what impact and sustainability leaders across the corporate and nonprofit sectors navigated in a year of budget cuts and evolving risk factors. For much of the past year, leaders across the corporate and nonprofit sectors have been recalibrating approaches to advancing their missions against these trends. In 2026, well start to see those new approaches in action.
Based on interviews with dozens of experts, here are five big shifts to pay attention to over the next year in social impact and sustainability.
1: Evolving the sustainability narrative
One of the most visible shifts to note is that social impact and sustainability are becoming much less, well, visible. For years, companies have been making bold commitments, setting lofty goals, and engaging in the kind of storytellingbut not always following through, a trend that finally led Merriam-Webster to add greenwashing to its dictionary in 2022.
2025 felt like a correction, as companies reacting to a changing landscape of risk and political attention ushered in a period of greenhushing, where companies were reluctant to talk about their sustainability initiatives. As Andrew Winston of Winston Eco-Strategies puts it, “The biggest issue in the U.S. is the very strong desire of leadership teams to keep their heads down and say nearly nothing about sustainability. The work seems to be mostly continuing, but it’s certainly not great for morale or moving at speed and scale if your bosses are telling you to hide out.”
Thats why 2026 is likely to bring another narrative correction that grounds sustainability storytelling in business performance and operational rigorwhich has always been where sustainability is heading. The best companies arent just making pledges, theyre building and executing solutions that scale, measure, and return value, says Dave Stangis at Apollo. Seeing capital, innovation, and outcomes align always gives me optimism.
2: Adopting a new leadership mindset
An organization laser-focused on delivering results also requires a laser focus from its leaders. As Alison Taylor of Ethical Systems notes, the rapid-fire disruption of 2025 made this focus hard to find: Many of sustainability’s core assumptions no longer apply, and there is a need for a reframe of the profession. The practitioners I talk to are struggling with terminology, legal risk, and threats to their roles. While it is true that much great work is going on behind the scenes, it is difficult for most leaders I speak to to maintain organizational momentum, simply because there is so much fire fighting to do.
2026 will bring new fires to fight, but the demand for results and focus will give rise to a new mindset for leaders. Kristen Titus of the Titus Group predicts that leaders will emerge from this period of uncertainty and paralysis with a renewed willingness to engage: Clients, customers, and employees are hungry for engagementand they’re craving moral leadership. Those that step forward with clarity and courage will help define the next chapter of impact and sustainability.
3: Aligning rapid response with long-term goals
One strategy that helps impact leaders maintain their focus involves finding ways to connect their communities immediate needs with long-term business strategy.
Uncertainty demands agility, as Laura Turner, VP and Head of Community Impact at TIAA points out: Most companies hold flexible funding that can be adapted for unexpected needs. When the government shutdown hit, TIAAs first-generation college student program pivoted quickly, redirecting funds to local food banks. That flexibility isn’t just nice to have anymore, it’s essential for navigating uncertainty.
For many organizations, balancing immediate and long-term needs also means AI-proofing their impact strategy. Royal Bank of Canada, for example, is leveraging business expertise and resources around AI adoption to support nonprofit partners in keeping pace with innovation. There is a broad consensus that AI and digital innovation can drive the biggest economic transformation in a generation. And yet, at this very same moment, the non-profit sector faces unprecedented strain and ongoing barriers to funding and technical training. Without intentional support, the sector risks falling behind. said Kara Gustafson, President of the RBC Foundation USA.
4: Putting well-being first
All of this uncertainty and disruption has taken a toll on professionals in this space in 2025. In 2026, well-being will become a core function of impact strategyboth as a response to workforce and community needs.
Haviland Sharvit, Executive Director of Susan Crown Exchange (Susan Crown Exchange and TIAA, above, are clients of mine), predicts that more companies and nonprofits will meet the moment with an impact strategy focused on youth well-being in the age of AI: Rapid advances in technology and AI offer powerful opportunities for learning and connection. Yet impact leaders face rising youth mental health strain, widening digital inequities, advancements that have outpaced youth protections, and the erosion of real human connection. Well see a shift toward promoting and safeguarding youth wellbeing in an AI-driven world, more attention on responsible tech, and greater investment in human connection.
5: Investing in community
Amid all of this disruption, we asked leaders what gives them hope, and a common refrain emerged: we find hope in each other.
Community is, and will continue to be, everything. In real and virtual rooms all over the countryand across impact networks like Trellis, UN Global Compact, NationSwell and many moreleaders spent 2025 reflecting, commiserating, and charting a new course forward.
The last prediction Ill offer is one of my own: impact networks and convening spaces will grow rapidly in 2026, as new communities of practice emerge and existing communities grow. With all of the growth and learning 2026 has in store, finding safe spaces for reflection, knowledge sharing, and collaboration is a top priority for impact leaders.
