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.
Leaders juggle a lot of demands and priorities. However, most CEOs tell me theyre highly attentive to company culture, change management, and workforce transformation in the age of AIall areas that their chief human resources officers (CHROs) or chief people officers (CPOs) are tackling, too, notes Jennifer Wilson, cohead of the global Human Resources Officer practice at leadership advisory firm Heidrick & Struggles.
The only other seat besides CEO that has a cross-enterprise view is the chief human resources officer, Wilson says. The best CHROs these days are weighing in and shaping strategy around big corporate issues.
Yet CHROs are rarely tapped for the CEO role. Heidrick & Struggless data shows that only 16 CEOs at Americas 1,000 largest companies by revenue have previous HR experience.
An overlooked role
Most of those executives worked in HR as part of their climb up the corporate ladder. General Motors CEO Mary Barra, for example, was a vice president of global human resources at GM for two years between roles as a vice president of global manufacturing engineering and a promotion to senior vice president of global product development. Joanna Geraghty, CEO of JetBlue Airways, was the CPO of the airline for four years after serving as associate general counsel and before moving to an executive vice president role overseeing customer experience.
More unusual is the case of Leena Nair, who was the CHRO at Unilever when Chanel, the privately held luxury brand, recruited her to be its global CEO.
At a time when chief financial officers, chief technology officers, and even lawyers are moving to the CEO role, Tami Rosen, chief development officer and a board member at Pagaya, an AI-powered fintech, and former CPO at Atlassian, says overlooking HR executives is a miss. For too long, CHRO and CPO roles have been miscast as operational or administrative when in reality they are the only seats with a true 360-degree view of the company, driving strategy, mission, culture, risk, performance, and people, she says.
The CEO’s support system
Megan Myungwon Lee was CHRO andvice president of corporate planning and strategic initiatives when she was promoted to chairwoman and CEO of Panasonic North America in 2021. Lee says Osaka, Japanbased Panasonic has a history of viewing HR, finance, and strategy as a three-legged stool supporting the CEO. In Japan, if you hire a person, its a $3 million investment because people usually retire with the company, she notes. Its not a variable cost.
Lee says her experiences in HRPanasonic initially hired her as a bilingual secretaryexposed her directly and indirectly to all aspects of the company. It has also shaped her leadership style. Being a leader is like [being] a parent in that you lead with empathyguiding, setting boundaries, and making tough decisionswhile always asking,How would I want someone to treat my own children in this situation?
Boards of directors may disregard CHROs in their CEO succession planning for any number of reasons: Some want their chief executive to have client-facing experience; a tech company may prioritize a leader with an engineering background. But Pagayas Rosen says boards ignore HR talent at their peril. More CHROs and CPOs should be elevated to CEO because theirs is the most well-rounded role in the company, connected to the business, the strategy, the culture, and every team, she says.
Does your team elevate HR pros to the top?
Does your company have a CPO or CHRO who is a candidate to succeed the CEO? If so, what are the reasons why your company may elevate them? Id like to hear your stories. Send them in an email to stephaniemehta@mansueto.com.
Read more: human resources
Meet Beth Galetti, the woman behind Amazons explosive growth
Why Tesla and FedEx pay this staffing firm millions of dollars
The most innovative HR companies of 2025
When the Los Angeles wildfires swept through the city earlier this year, experts flocked to the internet to dissect the anatomy of a fire-resistant building. Many of them ended up describing bunker-like architecture with boxy buildings, sparse landscape, and lots of concrete. A new building in Malibu offers a more nuanced approach.
Malibu High School, which opened in August, is located in an area that Cal Fire (the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) recently designated as a very high fire hazard severity zone. This means that the school, which has replaced a nondescript building from the 1950s, had to comply with stringent fire safety regulations.
[Photo: Here and Now Agency]
The new school is distributed across two connected buildings. It was constructed entirely of noncombustible materials like concrete shear walls and floors, steel columns and beams, and fire-rated glass. It is surrounded by a newly built fire road to allow easy firetruck access, and drought-resistant landscaping. Still, it looks less like a fortified concrete bunker, and more like the kind of airy, low-lying buildings you might find elsewhere in Malibu.
“The messages the building sends about your safety is much more like a community center,” says Nathan Bishop, lead architect and principal at local firm Koning Eizenberg Architecture. “It’s about making it feel like a social place to hang out and just be.”
[Photo: Here and Now Agency]
A balanced approach to fire-resistant architecture
Malibu High School, part of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, is nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains. It is located near a ring of coastal shrubs that is notoriously flammable but is also protected by the California Coastal Act as Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area (ESHA.)
In 2018, the area was hit by the Woolsey Fire, which destroyed over 1,600 structures, and burned nearly 97,000 acres in Ventura and Los Angeles counties. The former high school building, which stood on the same site, narrowly survived, but according to Bishop, the “shared memory” of Woolsey was present in everyone’s mind. “There are still teachers who haven’t replaced their houses because they burned down,” he said.
It’s no surprise, then, that fire resiliency was part of the architects’ mandate from the very beginning, when they won an RFP to redesign the school in 2019. The challenge was ensuring the school didn’t look like a bunker.
[Photo: Here and Now Agency]
To lighten the visible footprint of the building, the architects positioned solar panels over a canopy so they could cast shadows on the building’s glazed facade. This helped reduce solar gain while allowing the building to have more glass to balance the concrete. The panels, which remain quite visible, help the building achieve its net-zero goals, but they also help communicate the value of sustainability to students.
The team used textured concrete that makes the building feel like it is part of the hillside, and copper panels that add some color and texture. They also implemented a dedicated air filtration system for wildfire events. “[The school] is fortified and strong, but not in a defensive way,” says Bishop, noting the school can now serve as a community wildfire shelter.
The open design ensured the building feels like it belongs on the rugged hillside of Malibu. The surrounding drought-resistant landscape, by San Diego-based Spurlock Landscape Architects, further anchors the school with a coastal landscape that doubles as a fuel modification zone. This is meant to reduce the risk of wildfire by thinning or replacing combustible vegetation.
The landscape architects used California-native plants like aloe vera and agave interspersed with locally sourced rock mulch. They laid out the plants so they would grow from low succulents closer to the building to larger canopies on the outer perimeter. Since many buildings catch fire from what is closest to them, the areas nearest to the building are mostly hardscape. (The January 2025 wildfires didn’t reach as far north as the high school, which was therefore spared.)
[Photo: Here and Now Agency]
Rethinking the American high school
By the time Koning Eizenberg Architecture got involved in 2020, Malibu High School had been seeing enrollment issues for years. (The school enrolled about 440 students in 2021, compared to nearly 1,000 in 2017.)
To compete with nearby private schools, where enrollment issues haven’t been as stark, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District wanted to rethink not just the building but also the way high schoolers studied inside it.
Instead of organizing the school by academic departments, the high school follows a more distributed model where “everything is everywhere,” as Bishop puts it. Science labs abut art studios and teacher rooms are scattered around the campus instead of concentrated in a single building. The distributed model allowed the architects to abolish the archetypal silos that have become high school movie tropesscience geeks hang out here; jocks hang out thereand foster more encounters between different disciplines.
[Photo: Here and Now Agency]
“There is something about rethinking the story of the American high school, and the social fabric of the American high school,” says Bishop.
Before they moved into the new building, high schoolers shared the old building with local middle schoolers, where they studied in nondescript classrooms. Now, each classroom is adjacent to an outdoor space, creating a “fuzzy edge that lets the life of the building spill out,” says Bishop. Students in marine biology class go down to the beach to collect samples. Those in pottery class bring their wheels into the courtyard. Meanwhile, the preserved ESHA acts as a learning lab, where students can learn about ecology.
Instead of cutting off the building from its surroundings, the architects carefully integrated it within the landscape, proof that students can learn from nature instead of turning their back on it.
Now that AI can control your web browser, the next frontier might be to take over your entire computer.
At least that’s what Seattle-based startup Vercept is trying to do with Vy, a currently free Windows and Mac app that can manipulate your mouse and keyboard to automate tedious or repetitive tasks. You just tell it what you’re trying to do, and then it takes control. Vy first launched as a beta for Macs in May, but has now been rebuilt and is available for Windows as well.
My experiments with Vy have yielded mixed results. If you’ve ever yelled at ChatGPT for failing to follow instructions, that frustration becomes magnified when AI is piloting your entire computer — tasks you might want to automate might just be done faster manually. Still, I can see some areas where an AI computer agent could be useful, which is why other companies (including Microsoft) are pursuing the same goal.
I spent a lot of time waiting
Kiana Ehsani, Vercept’s CEO and co-founder, says Vy is more human-like than the agent features in AI web browsers such as Perplexity Comet and ChatGPT Atlas.
While those browsers reportedly work by inspecting the underlying structure of web pages, Vy takes frequent screenshots to analyze what’s happening on your screen. It then executes mouse or keyboard commands to mimic the way you’d control the computer yourself. Ehsani says people are using it to automate Excel work, extract data from the web for sharing into apps like Slack, or figure out how to use new software.
“We want to have a model that understands your screen and takes action very similarly to how you do it,” Ehsani says.
This ends up taking a while, though, as each individual action requires Vy to take a screenshot and upload it to its servers for analysis. Everything from opening an app to clicking a menu button requires another screenshot and more time waiting for a response — so a routine that takes 10 seconds for a human might take Vy five minutes.
Vy has a couple ways to mitigate this. One option is to run tasks in “Background” mode, which lets you keep using your computer while Vy does its work in an invisible browser window. Vy’s capabilities are limited in this mode, though, as it can interact with files and web pages but can’t control other apps. (I had some impish fun getting Vy to fulfill various Microsoft Rewards tasks on my behalfperforming daily Bing searches, filling out various quizzesbut felt guilty about how much compute power must’ve been burned along the way.)
The other option is to schedule tasks for when you’re not around. For instance, I set up a daily routine for 7 a.m. that minimizes any open windows on my desktop, opens Obsidian, moves it to the center of the screen, and loads my to-do list. Watching Vy do this in real-time is excruciating, but scheduling it to run before I sit down at my computerthereby forcing me to confront my to-do listis pretty helpful.
Ehsani hopes that on-device AI will speed things up in the future. Instead of having to constantly upload screenshots and download instructions, the goal is for Vy to process everything directly on the computer, though it’s unclear when that might happen or how powerful a PC you’d need.
It needs a lot of hand-holding
Getting Vy to perform tasks on your computer can be a bit like bossing a child around, in that it’s liable to ignore or misinterpret your instructions.
A quirk of Obsidian, for instance, is that if you load the app while it’s already running, it will load an entirely new instance of Obsidian with a menu for choosing which notebook vault to open. To keep this from happening in my to-do list scenario, I asked Vy to only click the Obsidian icon on the Windows taskbar, which would load any existing instance of Obsidian instead of launching a new one.
But every time I tested the routine, Vy kept ignoring my instructions and would try to click the Obsidian icon on the desktop, thereby opening a new window. I would interrupt the assistant and tell it to focus on clicking the taskbar icon, but it had trouble finding it and kept trying to open the app in other ways. At one point it even clicked the Windows Start menu to launch Obsidian from there.
Ultimately I had to edit my workflow with clear instructions to never click the desktop icon, never open the Windows Start menu, and avoid using other methods to open Obsidian outside of the taskbar. I also had to lay out explicit guidance to look for a purple crystal icon that appears next to other icons in the taskbar. All told, I spent about 20 minutes troubleshooting this tiny routine that mostly involved minimizing some windows and clicking a button.
Vy does have an alternative “Watch and repeat” tool for creating workflows, in which it records your screen while you perform the desired steps. But this was even less reliable in my experience. When I tried setting up my Obsidian automation this way, Vy didn’t minimize any of my open windows and instead just moved its own app to the middle of the screen.
It raises some privacy and security concerns
Watching Vy take persistent screenshots of my desktop was also a reminder of how much personal info could wind up on Vercept’s servers. Every time Vy takes a screenshot, it captures everything on your screen, even if it’s unrelated to the task.
Until I started asking Vercept about its data retention policies, the company did not publish them on its website. Vercept now says it keeps screenshots for six months unless you delete the underlying chat manually. Either way, it keeps data for up to 30 days for safety purposes.
Ehsani says it doesn’t capture screenshots when Vy isn’t actively working on a task, and doesn’t perform any post-processing on screenshot contents. Still, a few people at Vercept have full access to users’ data, including their screenshots.
“There is a trade-off here,” Ehsani acknowledges.
As with any agentic AI system, Vy risks making users vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, in which an attacker hides malicious instructions in web pages, emails, or calendar invites. Vercept says it has some ways to mitigate thisfor instance, by instructing Vy to watch for signs of malicious behaviorbut no AI system has a foolproof answer to this problem yet.
It seems inevitable anyway
Despite the potential problems and limitations, AI agents that control your devices are coming. Microsoft already has a mode for its Copilot Windows assistant that can scan what’s on your screen and provide guidance, and it’s testing a “Copilot Actions” feature that can perform tasks on your behalf.
Other developers are also pursuing this idea. Github is full of experimental AI control projects, and commercial alternatives include NeuralAgent and Screenpipe. Vercept is notable among tese efforts for having raised a $16 million seed round in January, with backers including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean.
Ehsani says the goal is to expand beyond just a single computer. An Android app is also in the works, and she hopes that you’ll eventually be able to give Vy instructions on your phone and have it carry the actions out on your computer, or vice versa. “One of our main visions is getting rid of mouse, keyboard, and touchscreens altogether,” Ehsani says.
For now, at least, the natural speed at which humans can click around a desktop gives them the edge.
As the U.S. and China battle over technology, tariffs, and global influence, one question still looms for Europeans: what is Europes edge?
That was the question recently posed by 21st Century, a Copenhagen-based think tank that collaborates with policymakers and thought leaders to explore the future of Europe. According to Johanna Fabrin, managing director and partner at 21st Century, the answer lies in the EUs regulatory backbonethink GDPR-level data protection, rigorous environmental standards, and foodsafety rules. From a consumer perspective, knowing that if something is made in Europe, there will not be arsenic in it, there’s that trust that is important, she says.
To convey that trust, the team has proposed a Made in Europe label that would signal quality, safety, and adherence to European standards. Similar to the CE label, which signifies that a product meets EU health, safety, and environmental protections, companies could display it on products to help consumers make informed decisions. The ultimate goal? To elevate the European brand as one that is trusted.
[Image: courtesy Dada Projects]
‘Debrandifying’ the label
Made in Europe was developed in collaboration with British studio Dada. But it is more than a labelits a certification. “A symbol of trust,” says Alice Shaughnessy, head of operations at Dada.
[Image: courtesy Dada Projects]
Shaughnessys team worked hard to “debrandify” the design so it reads less like a corporate logo and more like a stamp of approval. They cycled through dozens of proposalsfrom a wordmark spelling out “EUR” to the words “Made in Europe” set into a circlebefore landing on twelve stars arranged in the shape of a lowercase “e”.
[Images: courtesy Dada Projects]
By referencing the quintessential European symbol found on the EU flag, the design creates a clear association with the European institution. It conveys clout while remaining instantly recognizable. “It was important for us to be able to sit within that hall of great European design in some small way,” says Shaughnessy.
Like all initiatives developed by 21st Century, the label is intended as a blueprint that sparks conversation. The team has built a “living ecosystem” of use cases that show how the label could integrate into daily lifefrom a simple logo on a fruit sticker to an embossed mark on the side of a leather chair.
[Image: courtesy Dada Projects]
The label was designed to pair with Digital Product Passportsa QR code the EU will require by 2027 for categories like batteries, textiles, electronics, and furniture. Eventually, it could subsume existing certifications like CE, acting as an umbrella label that is relatable and easy for consumers to understand. Instead of decoding what B-Corp or CE means, you would see ‘Made in Europe’ and immediately associate it with European values like sustainability, ethical production, and consumer protection.
[Image: courtesy Dada Projects]
Building on a momentum
This isnt the first time the idea of a European made in label has surfaced. Back in 2014, the European Parliament backed a proposal for source-country labeling, including a voluntary Made in the EU tag. But the proposal stalled due to political resistance and fragmented enforcement.
Now, Fabrin and Shaughnessy argue, the conditions are different. For one, Europes leverage on the geopolitical stage is rising: Russias war on Ukraine has renewed interest from candidate countries like Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine; Brexit has made the EU passport all the more desirable; and growing disillusionment with the American brand has made some companies turn to the EU for answers. Fabrin says she is hearing it firsthand as some IT consultants ask for CRMs based in Europe because of GDPR regulations. This kind of momentum usually motivates the European Commission to act quite quickly, she says.
[Image: courtesy Dada Projects]
The biggest hurdle may be adoption: smaller businesses will need incentives to retrofit supply chains for this label. But 21st Europes vision is not to wait for lawits to catalyze a movement. Countries like Canada and Denmark have already started to take action with their own versions of made in labels. If large corporations like, say, Lego, were to adopt the mark voluntarily, it could inspire smaller companies to think about the label as a positioning exercise. [Were] thinking about the European brand as a long-term investment, says Fabrin, and a Made in Europe label is one contributor to building that brand.
“Parasocial” is the Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year. That feeling that you and Harry Styles would instantly become friends if you ever bumped into each other? Yes, thats parasocial.
The term dates back to 1956, coined by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl to describe how TV watchers formed para-social relationships with those on their screen.
The word has taken on even greater meaning in the age of social media, where we have unparalleled access to the lives of influencers, online personalities, and celebrities via phones.
Take Taylor Swift and Travis Kelces engagement. The news triggered mass hysteria online, with many displaying genuine raw emotion for a couple theyve never even met. Or British singer Lily Allen, whose latest album West End Girl details a breakup and sparked a parasocial interest in her love life, according to the Cambridge Dictionary.
Its not just celebrities. This year, the dictionary noted a surge in those looking up the word after the Youtube star IShowSpeed blocked an obsessive fan, identified as his “number 1 parasocial. A number of popular female streamers have spoken publicly about dealing with stalking, some resorting to hiring security while navigating online fame.
Oftentimes these parasocial relationships are built unintentionally. After spending so many hours consuming content from influencers and content creators, its only natural that fans feel a sense of kinship and emotional attachment, even if its one-sided. So strong are some of these parasocial ties, a 2024 study revealed that parasocial relationships with YouTubers more effectively filled emotional needs than relationships with “real” acquaintances or colleagues.
However, it can bleed into something darker.
Add artificial intelligence into the mix and things get even more complex. Many confide in AI tools like ChatGPT as they would friends or romantic partners. By September of 2025, the Cambridge Dictionary definition of parasocial was updated to include the possibility of a relationship with an artificial intelligence.
Colin McIntosh, Cambridge Dictionarys chief editor, said the word captures the zeitgeist of 2025, as the publics fascination with celebrities and their lifestyles continues to reach new heights. He noted in a statement: Its interesting from a language point of view because it has made the transition from an academic term to one used by ordinary people in their social media posts.
The other words shortlisted this year were pseudonymization, which spiked in interest this year in relation to discussions around protecting personal data. Also memeify as it relates to internet culture.
The dictionary added 6,000 new words this year, including internet neologisms like delulu, skibidi and tradwife. Looking ahead, words to watch include glazing, vibey, bias, breathwork, and doomspending.”
In 2021, Prada created Candy, an influencer designed to sell perfume. With an appearance rendered using then-state-of-the-art tools, Candys not-quite-real vibe felt straight out of the Silicon (Uncanny) Valley. It was peppy, but cartoonlike, and it was hard to see how Candy could sell perfume it could never smell.
Since then, technologies have greatly improved. A brand can now render any persona with a product, create movies with that model persona animated in a realistic way, and show them demonstrating products. By creating their own influencers, brands can keep their advertising budgets down and generate profits. Its possible that the virtual influencers will come for even more human-influencer jobs as the financial opportunities continue to grow.
Long before the internet, the idea of influencing existed as sales. People have sold things to others since currency began, and while it takes labor, time, and effort to persuade others to buy what one is selling, different types of techniques and tactics emerged over the years to varying degrees of success.
The rise of social media channels such as Facebook, X, Pinterest, and especially Instagram, enabled broader reach for those unable to afford network advertising. As a result of this shift, brands began to outsource marketing to people using these models to share and demonstrate their products and services through brand partnerships. In a short time, the influencer industry has exploded in growth: The global influencer marketing platform market size is set to grow from around $23.6 billion this year to roughly $70.9 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights. Influencing has become an aspirational profession for one in three people ages 18 to 30and for those who succeed, a substantial income awaits.Influencers are successful due to their relatability, charm, resonance, and the ways they represent a lifestyle or objects that others wish to emulate, replicate, or possess. Martha Stewart, an early influencer, started with books before harnessing television and print media to convince thousands that they could also realize the fantasy that she portrayed. Her partnerships with Target, Macys, QVC, and Kohler, brought her endorsements of products, tools, and decorations, into homes, creating a multichannel, multisensory impressionand earned her a $400 million fortune.
Celebrities like Paris Hilton, the Kardashians, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Brooke Shields may not invent what they sell, but they successfully promote products to their fans, building upon the parasocial (one-sided) relationships that fans project onto them. Influencing has gotten increasingly personal over time, with Influencers extending their reach to give us peeks into their homes and lives.
But influencers can also be regular people with the attributes and willingness to invite their followers into their lives. Influencers with no celebrity status, but the ability to be persuasive salespeople for brands, are plentiful.
Virtual influencers already exist with varying degrees of success and popularity, ranging from animated characters to realistically modeled personas. With the kind of money that is up for grabs, some businesses are creating AI personas or are considering applying these technologies to replace human influencers to maximize profits.
Or will they? A sense of agency is what defines successful human influencers. We dont know what they are going to do, or how they are going to do itand that novelty is appealing. Part of what attracts us to influencers are their stories, their lived experiences, and their families. These, in turn, create a brand message that attracts endorsements and piques our interest. Without a story and background, an influencer’s sponsored post is just an ad similar to any other.
There is, of course, a price to being an influencer. Megs Mahoney Dusil is the co-owner of the Purse Forum, a premier destination for handbag, jewelry, and brand communities. In The Price of Influence: When Your Life Becomes Your Brand, Dunsil reflects on 20 years of being influential, observing that for her, kids and tragedy were the highest performing topics for platform traffic. She describes the performative aspect of being an influencer as emotional labor in disguise, a tightrope of constant negotiation between the person you are and the persona you project.
Good or bad, Dusils realization may pave the way for humans and AI to form influencer partnerships, where their demonstrations and emotional connections are combined with software tools and renderings to provide a quasi-real experience. Human influencers could keep their profits (and their privacy), by using software like Synthesia, Vidyard, Rephrase AI, Adobe Substance 3D, and others to generate facsimiles of themselves, without having to reveal all. They could also benefit from the cost savings of realistic software tools, too, saving money and time on travel by creating the environment they present in a home studio. Time will tell if virtual influencers will make a difference as to how we are persuaded. We already see influencers through mediated channels, so it wont be that different for us to have a window into the fantasy of a digitally realized influencer hearth, rather than their actual home.
But will we be comfortable buying products sold to us by beings that arent real? We might. We already have been acclimated to fantasy advertising campaigns. This would just circle us back to celebrity territory where the parasocial relationships we have with the personas selling us things, are those one-sided ones that we project onto them, and are not real.
As with most jobs lately, its likely that AI will come for influencers, but with some savvy vibe-coding, influencers may be able to retain their brand partnerships, privacy, and income.
It looks a little like a sleek window AC, but a new device from Chinese appliance giant Midea is actually a reversible heat pump that can both cool and heat a homeand its designed to heat efficiently even when the temperature outside drops as low as 22 degrees below zero.
The heat pump, called the Midea PWHP, just launched commercially after years of development. Over the last few weeks, Ive been testing it in freezing temperatures in upstate New York. It works better than my gas furnace, and uses less energy. And the form factor and cost could help heat pumpswhich already outsell gas furnacesspread even faster.
A new type of heat pump
Like other heat pumps, the PWHP transfers warmth from the outdoor air to heat your space, using relatively little energy. But the new heat pump is designed to be much easier to install than other versions, which reduces the overall cost and complexity of switching.
The inspiration for the idea originally came from New York City, where the state and local government launched the Clean Heat for All Challenge in 2022which offered the potential of a contract with the city’s public housing authority, which controls more than 177,000 apartments within 335 housing developmentsas the city looked for ways to decarbonize apartment buildings.
[Photo: Midea]
Right now, most heat pumps come in one of two formats: mini splits that are installed in the wall, or central units that can connect to ducts and replace a gas or oil furnace. Both work well, but theyre time-consuming and can be expensive to install. Putting in a mini-split often involves adding new wiring, since older homes dont have the right voltage, and cutting holes in the wall. One unit might take a day of work and require multiple licensed tradespeople. Replacing a gas furnace in a house typically takes a couple of daysand can also . In a large old apartment building in New York, the challenges are multiplied.
Midea started working on the challenge in its Louisville office, which focuses on R&D. Were essentially a startup with the worlds largest appliance manufacturer as the backer, says Brian Langness, a senior project manager at the Midea America Research Center. (Gradient, a startup, also separately worked on a different design for a window heat pump for New York.)
Midea began designing a new unit to meet the citys strict requirements: sized to fit in a window, quiet to run, with reliable heating in very low temperatures that wouldn’t need backup from electric resistance heat. It also couldn’t require electrical upgrades, needed to have a saddle shape that wouldnt block views, and had to be easy enough to install that it could theoretically be a DIY job.
Engineering the PWHP
The design team sprinted to adapt heat pump technology to the new format, working closely with the company’s manufacturing team in China. “It was a 24-hour design cycle,” says Langness. “They would work on the design while we were sleeping. We’d wake up in the morning, and we’d ask the things that needed to be worked on. That was really the way that we were able to get this done in such a short amount of time.”
While there are some other window heat pumps on the market, they don’t work in very low temperatures. To make it possible for a compact, self-contained unit to work well in cold weather, Midea designed a brand new compressor, changing components and modifying algorithms. (The company owns its own compressor manufacturer, making this step easier.)
[Photo: Midea]
The compressor monitors the outside temperature and only runs as much as it needs to. “Older style compressors were either on or off,” says Langness. “This one modulates that power to ensure that you’re hitting that sweet spot to make sure that you’re maintaining the room’s comfort, but not consuming an unnecessary amount of energy.”
By the summer of 2023, they had installed 36 prototypes at a city-owned public housing complex in Queens. Tenants started testing the units as air conditioners, and then as heaters the following winter. “Because of the timeframe, the residents were basically our field test engineers,” Langness says.
Based on feedback from tenants, the team tweaked the design. The unit has a flat top that acts like a windowsill, and one tenant had a cat that kept jumping on it and turning the device on and off; the engineers added a child safety lock. After some extreme cold weather, they also modified how the system runs so it ramps up more slowly to a specific temperature, making it more efficient.
Earlier this month, after a successful pilot, New York’s housing authority took out the pilot units and started installing 150 units of the final design. Midea also started selling the units to consumers through its distributors, at prices ranging between $2,800 and $3,000. Eventually, the company may sell the product directly at big box stores like Home Depot or Lowe’s.
Real-world performance
Although the unit was designed so that it could theoretically be installed by anyone, in the initial launch, Midea’s distributors will work with professional installers to ensure the installation is correct. (I worked with AI Global Enterprise, a New York City-based distributor, and an HVAC company called Halco to install the review unit for this article.)
But because it doesnt require electrical upgrades or other major steps, its a simple and quick job. The unit is heavy, but uses shock absorbers to lower itself gently into place after it’s set in the windw. After some experience, NYCHAs staff could install three units in as little as 45 minutes, Langness says.
When I started testing the heat pump, the first thing I noticed was how comfortable the room felt. I recently moved into a 180-year-old former schoolhouse in upstate New York, and it’s not exactly energy efficient. The house has no added insulation, though its double brick walls with an air gap provide some natural temperature moderation. When I crank up the gas heat to 72 degrees, some corners of the house still feel chilly. The heat pump, which gradually heats up surfaces like walls and floor, felt like it heated the room more evenly than my gas furnace can
I tested the heat pump in a back room with a fireplace, which isn’t connected to the central heat in the rest of the house. That was also the only place I could put it: the room was a later addition, and the rest of the house’s walls are so unusually thick that the heat pump’s u-shaped design wouldn’t fit over the other windowsills.
[Photo: Midea]
Of course, the heat pump would work even better in a well-insulated space. But when I turned up the heat with temperatures in the 20s outside, it soon felt toasty in the roomand more comfortable than the rest of the house. The fan was far quieter than the vents for my gas furnace, which are sometimes so incredibly loud that I have to turn off the heat temporarily when I’m in a meeting. The heat pump also has a “silent” mode that keeps the temperature up but makes the fan barely perceptible. While my furnace blows air through dusty vents, the heat pump keeps the air clean. The air also felt less dry than in my rooms with gas heat.
It uses relatively little energyless than a space heater, while heating a bigger area. In the pilot in the New York City apartments, the city noted that it saw an 87% drop in energy use and 50% drop in energy cost compared to the old steam radiators.
My only complaint is the size: the heat pump takes up quite a bit of room under a window, similar to an old-fashioned radiator. For homeowners who can afford the extra cost and time, a mini split on the wall might fit better in some rooms (some mini splits look better than others, like the stylish design from the startup Quilt).
The Midea PWHP is designed to heat a living space between 300 and 500 square feet, depending on the layout of the rooms. In my case, the back room is separated, but I could feel the heat moving into my adjacent kitchen. In NYCHA’s two-bedroom apartments, Midea installed three units, one in each bedroom and one in the living room.
A less expensive heat pump
Midea is focused primarily on supplying the heat pump for apartment buildings. When NYCHA first launched the challenge, it estimated that it would need more than 150,000 window heat pumps to meet its 2050 climate goals. The company is in active discussions with other housing authorities, including in Boston, about pilots modeled after the program in New York. Another pilot is about to begin in Canada.
The company isn’t actively pushing direct sales to consumers at this pointas of right now, to buy one, you have to email the company to be connected with a local distributor. But the product could be a good fit for some homeowners, landlords, or even tenants who want a temporary climate solution that they can bring with them when they move.
At $2,800 or $3,000, it isn’t cheap, though Midea says that the price will eventually come down as production scales up. And until the end of the yearwhen most clean energy tax credits will expire thanks to Trump’s policiesit’s eligible for a federal tax credit of up to $2,000 on qualified installations. State, local, and utility incentive programs, such as New York State’s Clean Heat program, can also help offset the cost. And the total cost is still less than typical mini split heat pump, which can cost as much as $8,000 with installation in some regions.
For some people who might not otherwise have decided to get a heat pump, it could be a first step to getting off fossil fuels. “We recognize that whole home heat pumps and mini splits are an investment,” says Matt Slimsky, VP of production at Halco, the company that installed my review unit. “This window unit is still an investment, but it’s a heck of a gateway.”
Ed Zitron peels off his green button-up shirt to reveal the gray tee beneath. Now properly uniformed, two cans of Diet Coke queued up before him, hes ready to record this weeks episode of his podcast, Better Offline, at audio behemoth iHeartMedias midtown Manhattan studio.
The topic on this July afternoon, as usual, is artificial intelligence. One of Zitrons guests, screenwriter, director, and producer Brian Koppelman, talks about paying $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro. When Koppelman earnestly asks, Do you not think AI is mind-bogglingly great at times? Zitrons answerNo!comes so quickly it seems to spring directly from his cerebral cortex.
It would have been startling if hed responded any other way.
As AI has become the tech industrys principal obsession, Zitronwho runs a public relations firm that represents technology companieshas developed an unexpected side hustle as one of its highest- profile naysayers. Ive tried all of these different things, and I still cant tell you with clarity what it is thats so amazing with these products, he tells me.
Countless people in and around the tech industry share Zitrons dim view of generative AIs usefulness, the billions of dollars that companies are pouring into the technology, and its voracious appetite for computing resources. But his take-no-prisoners punditry sets him apart from other noted gadflies such as cognitive scientist Gary Marcus.
On Better Offline and in his email newsletter, Wheres Your Ed At, hes particularly unsparing in his appraisal of CEOs such as Metas Mark Zuckerberg (a monster), OpenAIs Sam Altman (a con man), and Microsofts Satya Nadella (either a liar or a specific kind of idiot).
Zitron says that his work is motivated by [seeing] these bastards and what theyre doing, how much money theyre making doing it, and how shameless they are. He has his own name for the pursuit of growth above all other goals, regardless of its impact on customers and society at large: the rot economy. He believes the current AI boom will end in disaster.
When its very obvious the money isnt there, theres going to be a big, horrible correction with tech stocksa harmful one, he declares, referring to the fallout should AI companies not ever be profitable. I say this with a degree of trepidation, because its not going to be fun.
Zitrons influence in the AI conversation is palpable and still expanding. On Bluesky, where he has 169,700 followers, attorney and activist Will Stancil recently wrote, People love to say Im begging you to read something by an actual expert and they mean, specifically, Ed Zitron. Produced by Cool Zone Media, an iHeartMedia subsidiary specializing in podcasts of a progressive bent, Better Offline is regularly among the 15 most popular tech shows on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. A bustling Reddit forum spun off from the podcast attracts 74,000 people a week with links to news stories about AI and caustic, sometimes darkly funny conversations about them.
Wheres Your Ed Atits name riffs on Wheres Your Head At, a 2001 song by U.K. electronic music duo Basement Jaxxhas more than 80,000 readers, about 3,000 of whom receive bonus newsletters available exclusively to subscribers who pay $70 per year and up, an option Zitron added last June. His book on tech dysfunction, Why Everything Stopped Working, is due out in late 2026 or early 2027.
Yet as prolific as Zitron is, he doesnt feel remotely tapped out. As things get more brittle and chaotic, he says, theres only going to be more things for me to rifle through and explain to people.
Zitron didnt set out to build a mini media empire around AI doomerism. The West Londonborn tech enthusiast, a onetime video game journalist, founded his company EZPR in New York in 2012 and went on to write two books about public relations. When he sent out his first Wheres Your Ed At newsletters, in 2019, he focused on personal interests such as gaming, his Peloton, and the NFL draft. And then he didnt get around to publishing again for a year and a half.
Late in 2020, he caught COVID. Suddenly in need of activities to fill his time, he found his newsletter a welcome distraction. If Im not writing, I havent really thought through anything, he explains. So I just started writing every day. Increasingly, he turned his attention to the tech industrys ills, leading to the February 2023 piece in which he coined the term the rot economy. It quickly went viral.
Over time, Zitron has found a voice that comes off as entirely uncensored. He runs his newsletters by an editorfellow Brit and tech-skeptic newsletter author Matt Hughesbut you wouldnt know it from their style and substance. One particularly operatic recent example, last Julys The Haters Guide to the AI Bubble, marshals 14,500 words of facts, figures, and spicy commentary (Salesforces claims for its Agentforce AI are a blatant fucking lie) to argue that tech giants and startups alike are wasting billions pushing products built on vibes and blind faith. He also turned The Haters Guide into a four-part Better Offline series, where his accent and dramatic flair only heighten its impact. On Reddit, one fan called him the David Attenborough of AI critique.
Zitron says that his supremely pissed-off persona isnt just a schtick. Its just never come easily to me to pretend to be anything other than what I am, he stresses. His friend and fellow tech critic Molly White, author of the crypto-busting newsletter Citation Needed, agrees. Hes very passionate about the stuff that he is writing about, she says. I think it sort of consumes him and his attention.
Yet the full story of his relationship with AI is more complex. Along with savaging the technology in newsletters and on podcasts, he pitches its benefits to media outlets (including Fast Company) on behalf of EZPRs clients. Startups that hes repped range from technical assessment platform CodeSignal to Nomi, which touts its chatbots ability to serve as a virtual companion, girlfriend, or boyfriend.
Zitron rejects the idea that his two jobsAI basher and AI promoterpresent any fundamental tension or conflict of interest. At EZPR, he says, What Iadvocate for are companies with real purpose that do things their customers like, that build sustainable businessesbased on actualuse cases. Does his growing fame as a writer and podcaster benefit his PR firm? He allows that it helpsjournalists recognize his name and are more likely to open his emailsbut considers that a side effect. The point, he says, is to speak his mind on a topic he cares deeply about.
Evidence is mounting that some of the initial exuberance over generative AI was, in fact, irrational. A recent MIT study reported that 95% of enterprise pilot programs involving the technology hadnt shown a return on investment; another from Bain says that even by 2030 the tech industry might be $800 billion short of finding enough new revenue to fund the computing resources necessary to keep up with demand for AI. Speaking with reporters in August, OpenAIs Altman admitted the existence of a bubble. Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? he asked. My opinion is yes. Nonetheless, he added that OpenAI intends to invest trillions in additional data center infrastructure.
That same month, OpenAI released a new version of ChatGPT built atop GPT-5, the latest update to its large language model. Once widely anticipated as a giant leap forward, it landed with a thud once users tried it and deemed it less than transformative. To Zitron, it was a classic example of the companys puffery exceeding its product road map. Two years ago, people were talking about GPT-5 like it was going to be AI Jesus, he says. I feel that OpenAI likely had to get something out the door.
Arguing that Altmans stated plans for OpenAIsuch as building 250 gigawatts of data center capacity in eight yearsare impossible, Zitron continues to press the case that the company will run out of venture funding before reaching self-sufficiency. OpenAI is not building the AI industry, as this is capacity for one company that burns billions of dollars and has absolutely no path to profitability, he wrote in an October newsletter. This is a giant, selfish waste of money and time, one that will collapse the second that somebodys confidence wavers.
OpenAIs failure, he contends, could take out other companies such as cloud-computing provider CoreWeave. It would also inflict serious damage on giants such as SoftBank, which led OpenAIs $40 billion investment round last March, and Nvidia, whose chips power most of the worlds generative AI. Citing one VCs estimate that AI funding could dry up within six quarters, Zitron has said the industry could face total collapse in early 2027.
Even as the industry braces for a correction, Zitrons prediction that it will effectively cease to exist makes him an outlier. I just dont think that Ed makes a strong case that this is going to happen, says Timothy B. Lee, author of the newsletter Understanding AI. You dont need to buy Altmans utopian vision of intelligence too cheap to meter to accept the possibility that AI has a future. OpenAI going under would mean it never found a way to operate at a profit, regardless of any technological efficiencies, price adjustments, or new markets yet to come.
In his newsletter and on his podcast, Zitron projects an air of ferocious certitude. In person, he is willing to toy with the notion that his prognostications might not pan out. Characterizing himself as a brokenhearted romantic when it comes to tech, he says hed welcome being proven wrongand would write about it.
Itll be really annoying, and I really dont think itll happen, he emphasizes. But the only way to do this [work] honestly is to be prepared for that, to be willing for that to happen. As a commentator, Zitrons stock-in-trade is the gusto with which he dismantles assessments of AI he considers invalid. Now the only question is whether hell get to say he told us soor end up being his own ripest target.
At this falls prestigious New York World Spirits Competition, a wheated bourbon thats widely available for about $30 claimed the title of Best Overall Bourbon. The blind-tasting competition drew a crowded field of bourbons that included bottles that are typically impossible to findor exorbitantly marked up on shelves.
Among more than 100 contenders, including bourbon heavyweights like Blantons Gold Edition and W.L. Weller Full Proof, the reasonably priced Green River Wheated Bourbon landed the top title.
Green River Wheated is an approachable 90 proof (45% ABV) and a blend of 4- to 6-year-old barrels. The judging panel described it as a richly textured bourbon, opening with aromas of peppery spice followed by a palate of grains, oats, and creamy butterscotch layered with hints of oak. This all leads to a smooth, long finish where grain fades into soft honey, spice, and warm barrel notes.
As a fan of the bourbonand every Green River bottle Ive sampledI agree with the panels assessment, but add that theres also a tropical fruit note that brings a brighter layer of flavor to contrast with the darker oak tones.
Green River Wheated also claimed the Wheated category over fellow finalist Weller Full Proof. The Weller line of wheated bourbons has grown famous over the past decade as the next best thing to Pappy Van Winkle. Both brands are produced by Buffalo Trace and blended from the same base whiskey. Though theres a lot of hype surrounding Weller from the Pappy association, its a fantastic family of whiskeys in its own right. For the younger, cheaper Green River to best not just its Weller equivalent, Special Reserve, but the 114-proof bruiser of the family is quite an achievement.
What is wheated bourbon?
All bourbon is at least 50% corn. Most have a portion of rye and a smaller helping of malted barley. Wheated bourbon swaps out the spicier rye grain for wheat, which brings a sweeter character. Green River Wheated, for example, is 70% corn, 21% wheat, and 9% malted barley.
If youve tried more than a few bourbons in your life, youve tried a wheated brand. Makers Mark is about 16% wheat and an excellent example of the sweet fruit notes the gentle grain brings. Theres also a more rounded balance to these bourbons, as wheat replaces the sharper character of rye. This balance is a major factor in what helps the Van Winkle (and Weller) line stand out.
What does Green River Wheated bourbon taste like?
When I sip a dram of Green River Wheated, the predominant flavors I get are honey and caramel over a smooth vanilla oak backbone with that bright fruit note. Its subtle, but makes this bourbon stand apart from its peers as not merely tasty and smooth, but as complex and interesting as a much older bourbon.
At 90 proof, Id sip it neat but wouldnt judge you for adding a few ice cubesthis can stand up to a bit of water. However, if you prefer a higher-proof bourbon, theres a strong, older version, albeit not under the Green River family.
The Seelbachs Private Reserve Wheated Bourbon is a house label for the online spirits retailer. That doesnt sound impressive unless you know that its founder, Blake Riber, has one of the best palates in the industry for selecting and blending whiskeys. His Seelbachs Wheated is a 107-proof combination of not-quite 5-year-old and 7-year-old barrels of Green River Wheated. The younger whiskey brings that bright fruit, while the older adds depth.
Either are excellent buys, but with the holidays approaching, the Green River Wheated jumped out at me as an easy gift for the bourbon fans in your life, or in your office. If they havent heard of Green River, all the better. You get to share how this underdog of a bourbon recently beat the best at a major international spirits competition.
Matthew Allyn
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.
To a certain point, cars are fantastic inventions making it easy to get to far-flung places, opening doors for new places to live or work or play. But there’s a tipping point when the built environment and our lives are arranged around motor vehicles where the benefits start to come undone. Building to prioritize space-hogging cars brings a long list of negative externalities.
In Greek mythology, the god Dionysus granted King Midas his wish for the power to turn everything he touched to gold. Midas revels in the effortless wealthobjects, furniture, and even the ground beneath him turn to gold. The Midas touch was great right up until he wanted to eat or drink or just hug his daughter.
Theres a King Midas aspect to motor vehicles, this technological gift that promised and delivered abundance until it became a curse.
{"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"green","redirectUrl":""}}
Personal cars expanded opportunities like never before. Post-World War II America saw vehicle ownership explode from 25 million in 1945 to over 100 million by 1970. Having access to a family car made far-flung places viable for living, working, and playing, fueling a middle-class expansion across previously rural areas. An entire car-oriented ecosystem emerged.
The promise of freedom and wealth held until cities and suburbs began optimizing for vehicle throughput instead of local access and mobility.
When Everything Turns to Asphalt
Like Midas discovering he couldn’t eat golden food, we’re discovering that car-dependent places can’t sustain the human activities they were meant to enable. The same infrastructure that promised connection now isolates. What began as freedom morphed into obligation.
American cities now dedicate somewhere between one-third and one-half of their land area to streets, parking lots, and garages. In downtown Los Angeles, parking occupies more space than all the buildings combined. We’ve paved over so many of the destinations cars were supposed to help us reach.
The economic costs of car dependency are brutal at the household level. Transportation often ranks as the second-largest expense after housing, consuming up to 30% of household income. The “drive until you qualify” phenomenon pushed families toward affordable suburban housing, only to burden them with commutes that devoured time and money. Car loan defaults have jumped 50% in the last 15 years, and in 2024, car repossessions hit the highest number since 2009.
Meanwhile, the infrastructure itself demands constant funding. Roads, bridges, and parking structures deteriorate faster than municipalities can maintain them. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates a multi-trillion-dollar backlog in deferred transportation maintenance. Every lane-mile of road requires ongoing investment that property taxes in sprawling development patterns often can’t support.
The Isolation Paradox
Car dependence promised mobility but delivered immobility for anyone without a vehicle or unable to drive. Children lost independence because nothing is within walking or biking distance, and the elderly face isolation when they can no longer drive safely. People with disabilities, those who can’t afford vehicles, and those who simply prefer not to drive find themselves trapped in places without practical mobility alternatives.
The distances themselves became barriers. When corner stores give way to big-box retailers miles away, when schools require driving rather than walking, when social spaces exist only as isolated destinations rather than chance encounters, community itself attenuates. Neighbors pass each other at 45 miles per hour on six-lane arterials rather than at 3 miles per hour on sidewalks. The “third places” that anchored community life (cafés, parks, plazas, etc.) disappeared into the car-oriented strip malls and shopping centers.
The Health Toll
The King Midas curse extends to our bodies. Vehicle-oriented development correlates strongly with obesity, cardiovascular disease, and respiratory illness. When walking becomes impractical and driving becomes mandatory, physical activity disappears from daily routines. Air pollution from vehicles contributes to asthma, especially in children living near major roadways.
Traffic crashes kill 40,000 Americans annually, and injure hundreds of thousands more. Larger vehicles, faster vehicles, and inattentive driving create an increasingly deadly environment.
Breaking the Curse
King Midas eventually begged Dionysus to reverse his wish, washing away the golden touch. Like Midas, our situation is fixable.
People are rediscovering that neighborhoods can be planned and designed at a human scale that welcomes motor vehicles without squashing the good life. Zoning reforms that allow mixed-use development are the single most important starting point. When someone can walk to a store, bike to work, or take transit to social activities, the car returns to being a useful tool rather than an iron requirement. But that only happens if a local government legalizes a variety of land uses in neighborhoods.
Cars are fantastic inventions. The Midas predicament emerges when we optimize everything around them, when we mandate their use, and when we eliminate alternatives. A city where people can choose to drive, walk, bike, or take transit according to their needs is fundamentally different from one where driving is the only option.
The Midas story ends with the king learning wisdom through suffering. Weve suffered quite a bit from the built environment. But even in real life, things can get better in the end.
{"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"green","redirectUrl":""}}
