In December 2024, our survey with Harris Poll asked B2B marketers to share their top areas for investment in 2025. Artificial intelligence tools were at the top of the list. It also wasnt surprising to see the AI architects named Time magazines Person of the Year as the ripple effects of the technology continue across every sector. And in 2026, we will see B2B decision makers do something new: return to basics andembrace AI to reimagine whats possible.
This approach reveals a compelling duality in how marketers are planning for 2026. Theres a return to what weve always known while also betting big on AI as a force not only reshaping work, but rewriting todays B2B marketer and modern buyer playbook. According to our most recent Harris Poll survey, next year will bring a clear acknowledgement that while the fundamentals of marketing havent changed, the way we execute these absolutely will.
THE PENDULUM SWINGS BACK
For years, marketers have chased the next shiny object: new formats, new platforms, new channels. But the pendulum is swinging back. According to the survey, leaders say their biggest 2026 investments will focus on customer experience and brand buildingnot the newest social platform or the latest ad tech novelty.
Theres a collective realization happening. In an environment of AI-enabled disruption, the brands with the strongest emotional equity and deepest buyer trust will win. By doubling down on loyalty, automation, and reputation, organizations can differentiate and ensure that every marketing dollar contributes to sustainable, long-term growth. Loyalty isnt a metric anymore; its a moat.
But this return to what works doesnt necessarily mean a return to traditional tactics.
AI ISNT REPLACING STRATEGY
More than half of marketing decision-makers (55%) expect AI to reshape both the development and execution of marketing strategies. Thats not a subtle shift. It means strategy will move from something built in quarterly cycles to something that updates dynamically based on behaviors, signals, and real-time learning.
This shift requires marketers to embrace AI, not fear it. When positioned as a strategic input, AI enables strategy to evolve with the market and puts leaders in the strongest position to reach todays modern buyer at the right time and place.
AI becomes the connective tissue unifying audience data, creative insights, content intelligence, and activation. Audience understanding becomes dynamic as AI continuously interprets signals and behaviors to identify whos truly in-market. Content and messaging adapt in real time as AI learns what resonates across channels. Orchestration becomes predictive, determining where buyers are most likely to engage next and routing the right message to the right surface. Measurement shifts from backward-looking to forward-driving, surfacing early signals that guide creative, budget, and activation decisions.
The strategy itself becomes fluid, evolving, and continuously optimizing. Instead of asking, Is my strategy right? marketers will ask, Is my strategy learning fast enough?
ZERO-CLICK IS RESHAPING BRAND COMPETITION
Nearly half of marketing leaders (45%) believe AI-powered search and assistants will dramatically change how customers discover brands. That means marketers are beginning to understand a new reality: In 2026, competition happens before the click.
In a zero-click environment, the buyer journey is no longer linear. People are forming opinions inside AI Overviews, chat assistants, recommendation engines, and result pages that summarize expertise without ever sending traffic your way. The search click read evaluate journey marketers built their strategies around has been replaced by one where discovery and evaluation happen simultaneouslyoften without a website visit. Buyers may never land on your page, yet theyve already developed a perception of your credibility, authority, and relevance.
This shift demands a fundamentally different approach to visibility. Its no longer enough to create great content; brands must create signals. Reputation, authority, and consistency become the new KPIs, because AI systems rely on patterns across the broader ecosystem, not just what lives on your domain.
Zero-click environments reward brands that show up with clarity and coherence across every channel, not just the ones they own. The brands that win are the ones influencing the answer long before a user ever reaches a brand webpage.
This isnt a retreat from brand building; its an evolution of it.
AI DOESNT REPLACE THE BASICS, IT AMPLIFIES THEM
The survey findings tell a clear story: AI doesnt exempt marketers from doing the hard work of brand building; it makes that work even more essential. Rather than overshadowing fundamentals like loyalty, reputation, and customer experience, AI deepens their impact. It enables personalization at a level previously impossible and transforms audience understanding by replacing static personas with living intelligence.
With AI orchestrating channels dynamically instead of treating them as disconnected tactics, the longstanding divide between brand and performance marketing collapses. The two disciplines become interdependent, each strengthened by AIs ability to learn, predict, and adapt across the entire customer journey.
But recognizing AIs potential and operationalizing it are two very different things. The real competitive advantage in 2026 wont come from experimenting with a handful of tools; it will come from embedding AI across the full lifecycle, including strategy, creation, activation, measurement, and optimization. Marketers already feel this shift coming. AI is becoming the operating system of modern marketing, not an accessory.
The question for the year ahead isnt whether marketers will use AI; its whether they will scale it in a way that elevates the core principles that have always distinguished the strongest brands.
BACK TO BASICS, BUT SMARTER
The headline for 2026: AI is making the basics matter more. Marketers are rediscovering that trust, loyalty, and brand still determine winners, while embracing AI to execute those fundamentals with far greater intelligence, speed, and impact.
And next year, the brands that thrive will be the ones that combine timeless principles with transformative technologygoing back to basics, but this time with an engine powerful enough to take them further than ever before.
Great marketing and advertising have always been an art. AI doesnt diminish that; it simply elevates it.
Keith Turco is CEO of Madison Logic.
Say what you will about Crumbl Cookies. It’s always sure to get a reaction.
Earlier this month, when a sudden swirl of social media rumors began to suggest that the polarizing bakery chain was closing down, some of the online reactions were downright gleeful. “Too sweet and too expensive!” went one typical comment.
The chatter was so loud that Crumbl cofounder Sawyer Hemsley took to TikTok to dispel the rumor, explaining that the fast-growing chain is just moving offices as it prepares for its next wave of expansion.
But while reports of Crumbl’s demise may be premature, the chain has in fact closed a number of locations over the last few years following a period of accelerated growth. Here’s what to know:
Is Crumbl Cookies still growing?
According to Rhonda Bromley, Crumbl’s VP of public relations, Crumbl now has 1,103 locations in the United States and 25 in Canada, up from just 326 at the end of 2021. And the Utah-based chain will indeed continue to expand its footprint next year.
“We have no plans for growth to stop and will be opening many more stores in both the United States and Canada in 2026,” Bromley tells Fast Company.
Which Crumbl Cookies locations have closed?
At the end of 2021, Crumbl hadn’t closed any of its locations, which speaks to the rapid, social media-fueled growth that it had famously experienced in its early years.
But over the last few years, at least 19 locations have closed, according to a Fast Company review of media reports, online review platforms like Yelp, and Crumbl’s own store locator.
The shuttered stores, which were located across 10 states, are listed below. A Crumbl spokesperson confirmed the closures.
California
481 Madonna Rd Ste D San Luis Obispo, CA 93405
550 Woollomes Ave Ste 105 Delano, CA 93215
2750 41st Ave Ste E Soquel, CA 95073
12274 Palmdale Rd Ste 102 Victorville, CA 92392
8126 E Santa Ana Canyon Rd Ste 167 Anaheim, CA 92808
32545 Golden Lantern Ste C Dana Point, CA 92629
Connecticut
360 Connecticut Ave Unit 4 Norwalk, CT 06854
Colorado
1805 29th St Ste 1136 Boulder, CO 80301
3480 Wolverine Dr Ste G Montrose, CO 81401
Florida
1695 W Indiantown Rd Ste 22-23 Jupiter, FL 33458
Georgia
2615 Peachtree Pkwy Ste 210 Suwanee, GA 30024
Illinois
1441 N Wells St Chicago, IL 60610
1530 E Lake Cook Rd Wheeling, IL 60090
Ohio
3038 Westgate Mall #20 Fairview Park, OH 44126
34330 Aurora Rd Solon, OH 44139
Pennsylvania
3741 West Chester Pike Ste 103 Newtown Square, PA 19073
604 228th Ave NE Sammamish, WA 98074
Tennessee
8068 Hwy 100 Nashville, TN 37221
Utah
4211 Pony Express Parkway Suite 130, Eagle Mountain, UT 84005
It’s not unusual for restaurant chains to close locations even as they grow their overall footprint, as some stores will inevitably underperform or could succumb to other unfavorable location-specific factors.
A Crumbl spokesperson did not directly respond to the question of why these stores have closed.
Why did people think Crumbl was closing for good?
Some of the online rumors appear to have been spread by AI-powered social media accounts that post misinformation for engagement, as Reddit users pointed out in the Crumbl subreddit.
At the same time, a Bloomberg Businessweek story this month took a decidedly unflattering view of the brand and raised questions about its ability to sustain hypergrowth. The story may have added fuel to the rumors that Crumbl’s days are numbered.
Crumbl, which was founded in 2017, is known for its substantial social media presence. It has almost 11 million followers on TikTok alone, so it makes sense that rumors about the company would spread quickly across the internet.
Also, as stated earlier, controversy around Crumbl is not exactly new. It was more than a year ago that food blog Delish.com posed the question: “Has the Crumbl backlash begun?” We’ll let you decide the answer for yourself.
You quit the 9-to-5 to have more control over your time. You wanted flexibility, autonomy, and the freedom to structure your days around your life instead of someone else’s schedule.
Yet here you are, apologizing to a client for not responding to a message immediately. Feeling guilty on a Tuesday afternoon when youve only worked for four hours that day. Checking Slack at 9:00 PM because thats been your routine for most of your working career.
Many solopreneurs don’t realize they’ve inadvertently recreated corporate life until they’re already living it. You traded a demanding boss for a dozen demanding clients. You swapped mandatory meetings for back-to-back Zoom calls. That freedom you craved? Doesnt exist in your solopreneur world.
To find actual freedom as a solopreneur, you have to recognize that youre following a corporate playbookand make a conscious decision to change.
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Identify your corporate workday habits
Corporate habits are deeply ingrained. Weve worked that way for so long that they just feel like “how work is supposed to be done.”
For me, it was the instant email (or Slack) response. In my corporate job, quick replies signaled that I was on top of things, engaged, and reliable. When I started freelancing, I brought that habit with me. If a client sent me an email, Id reply immediatelyeven if I was in the middle of the grocery store.
Here’s something to try: What would happen if you took an entire day off, unplanned? Not a vacation day you scheduled weeks in advance, but a spontaneous decision to step away from your client work on a Wednesday. Does that break your clients’ expectations around your response time? Does the idea make you feel a bit squeamish?
Those feelings are your corporate habits talking. To embrace your freedom, you have to undo the rigid 9-5, always on mentality.
Structure your work for outcomes, not time spent
Corporate life is built around a 40-hour workweek. Even if you finish your work in less time, youre often expected to fill the bucket of the workweek with more work.
As a solopreneur, if you price your work by the hour, youre invariably still tied to the amount of time you workwhich has its limits. Youll have more freedom if you can earn the same amount (or more!) even if you work less. Clients pay you for your expertise and outcomes, not the number of hours you put in.
Over time, youll get more efficient, and each project will require fewer hours. Youll have a shorter workweek (if you choose), and can break free from a 9-5 schedule even more.
Build systems that protect your boundaries
Corporate life often has no boundaries. Someone else dictates your workload, schedules your meetings, and approves your PTO. Ill never forget the time a CEO texted me on a Saturday morning because he found a typo on a blog post and wanted me to fix it right that minute. No boundaries.
When you work for yourself, you might assume boundaries will naturally emerge. They won’t, unless you choose to define and enforce them.
The easiest way to do this is to build systems that make boundaries automatic. Turn off notifications. Set up email filters. Block off time for deep work and use a calendar scheduling app so clients cant meet with you during that time.
Boundaries are necessary if you dont want to feel like youre constantly working or letting other people control your schedule.
Don’t let yourself fall back into old habits
It’s easy to fall back into corporate habits because they feel familiar. It can be uncomfortable to shake things up at first.
You should regularly review your work habits to see if youre falling back into patterns that arent serving you or your business. You have to be intentional about the hours you work and how you interact with clients.
The way to build a sustainable solo business is to find a schedule that works for you. Maybe you still follow a mostly 9-5 schedule, even if youre more flexible with your days. Maybe you work best late at night or before the sun rises. Any of those decisions is fine, as long as youre in control of when and how work gets done.
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It’s easy, for me at least, to be cynical about the state of design. Our visual environment can feel bland, everything from brands to buildings homogenized around similar styles. The ever-impending AI takeover can make the future of this work uncertain. My reading around design this year tended to focus on two things: looking back and looking ahead.
In looking through design history, I was looking for glimpses of alternative ways of designing: the experimental, the absurd, the weird. And in looking forward, I was searching for hope in a dark time, for answers on how design, and the design industries, move beyond the stasis I feel like we’re in. The intersection of these interests is an attempt to understand what design is, what it has been, and what it could be next. The books that were my favorite this year are the books that show design as something fun, experimental, future-looking, and constantly in flux.
[Cover Image: Hachette]
The Invention of Design by Maggie Gram
Maggie Grams excellent new book, The Invention of Design, is one of those books I’m surprised didn’t already exist, and now I don’t know how I’ve lived without it for so long. This is not a history book of famous designers or trends or movements but rather an intellectual history of how the “idea” of design came to be what it is today. Charting the major conceptions of design from beauty to problem-solving, thinking to experience, Gram, a designer and historian, presents design as an inherently optimistic endeavor but one that often fails to live up to its promises.
[Cover Image: Inventory Press]
A *Co-*Program for Graphic Design by David Reinfurt
What does it mean to teach graphic design today? Or better yet: what does graphic design even mean today? The designer and educator David Reinfurt thinks through these questions in this casual and conversational book built around three courses he’s taught and developed at Princeton University over the last decade. Jumping back and forth through design history, moving across formats and mediums, and inviting a range of voices to participate in the conversation, Reinfurt shows that graphic design continues to be an expansive, ever-shifting space in which to think about ideas and how they move through the world giving us a flexible framework to think through teaching the next generation of designers.
[Cover Image: Chicago University Press]
The House of Dr. Koolhaas by Francoise Fromonot
Perhaps the strangest book I read this year, but also most delightful, François Fromonot’s The House of Dr. Koolhaas is the first book from Gumshoe, a new series from Park Books that approaches architecture criticism as if it were a detective novel. Written and packaged like the pulpy genrecomplete with over-the-top illustrated covers and cliff-hanging chaptersFromonot does a close reading of Rem Koolhaas’s Villa Dall’Ava, untangling its place both in Koolhaas’s work and in the larger architectural media context. Propulsive, insightful, expansive, and highly illustrative, I can’t wait to see what buildings the series tackles next.
[Cover Image: Park Books]
Buildings For People and Plants by WORKac
In this focused, highly visual monograph, the New York-based architecture office WORKac presents 10 built projects that together can be read as the thesis for the firm’s ideas. Founded in 2003 by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, WORKac has worked across scales and contexts and styles, but in this book, a coherent body of work emerges, showing how the studio has engaged with color and form, civic interests, and sustainability. Sparse on text and heavy on photographs (almost 200, total), Andraos and Wood make the case for an architecture that engages with the worldan architecture for people and plants, if you willand they show us how they’ve done just that.
[Cover Image: Macmillan]
Could Should Might Dont by Nick Foster
Nick Foster, futures designer, former design director of Google X, and self-described “reluctant futurist” writes in his great book that when we imagine the future, we often imagine images made by other people and those images have become strangely homogenized. Foster thinks that’s a problem. Through breezy chapters, he probes how we imagine the future, how it becomes reality, and most importantly, who has a stake in that future. In doing so, he makes the case for a more rigorous, thoughtful, and provocative way to think about the future and how we get there.
[Cover Image: Archigram]
Archigram: The Magazine
You can’t talk about avant-garde architecture without talking about Archigram, the British collective that drew upon their interests in everything from pop art to Buckminster Fuller. Over 15 years, the collective also published Archigram, a lo-fi, experimental, and freewheeling magazine to share their ideas. Long hard to find, this gorgeously packaged box set includes facsimiles of all 10 issues, including flyers, pockets, and pop-ups, alongside an excellent reader’s guide that features writing from Archigram founder Peter Cook, architecture writer Reyner Banham, and tributes from Kenneth Frampton, Norman Foster, and more. It might be a stretch to call this a “book” but it’s a worthy collectable for anyone interested in experimental architecture, design history, publishing, and zine culture.
[Cover Image: Macmillan]
Enshittification by Cory Doctorow
In 2023, the science fiction writer and pioneering blogger Cory Doctorow coined a term that seemed to perfectly describe the moment we seem to be stuck in: “enshittification.” Writing about online platforms, Doctorow described enshittification as the gradual worsening of so many services we’ve come to rely on. Two years later, he’s expanded that into a full book, looking at everything from Facebook to the iPhone App Store, to Twitter while also making the case that we, as users, can take back the internet we are losing. Though not explicitly a book about design, designers will certainly see themselves in these pages as Doctorow shows how the design of so many services have shifted from solving problems for users to padding the pockets of shareholders.
One April night eight years ago, two tech leaders sat down with a former Forest Service employee at Terroir, a natural wine bar in San Francisco. Then they started sketching out a plan that would eventually reshape Californias housing policy.
Landmark housing reforms that passed in the state in 2025, one that allows more housing to be built near transit stops, and another curbing the use of environmental law to block new housingand which many believed would never succeedcan be traced back to that night, five bottles of wine, and crucial backing from Silicon Valley executives.
An unlikely new leader
Brian Hanlon, the Forest Service employee, was an unlikely leader for a new housing movement. Hanlon moved to the Bay Area in 2010 after dropping out of a PhD program, and got a job managing grant paperwork for USFS. He wasnt planning to work on housing; he considered becoming a winemaker. But he soon saw the impact of Californias housing policy directly. When he first arrived in the area, apartments were still relatively affordable. Within a year, he saw demand spike: every open house he visited had 20 to 30 people competing for the same apartment.
Over the next couple of years, as rents in the city continued to rise, Hanlon got involved with rental advocacy groups, but quickly saw the limitations. He felt advocates werent engaging with what he saw as a basic problem: restrictive policy made it too difficult to build housing, and the shortage of housingnot just landlords trying to extract higher rents from renterswas what was driving up prices. Even then, I was like, Its not landlord greed. There arent enough homes. Landlords are just as greedy in Houston, Texas, or wherever else, he says. I kind of got excommunicated from that movement because I believed in more housing.
A friend introduced him to Sonia Trauss, a math teacher who had started advocating for new housing development at planning meetingsa YIMBY (yes in my backyard) counterpart to the resistance to new construction that was common in San Francisco, which is commonly characterized as NIMBY (“not in my backyard”).
This resistance came largely from two separate, but sometimes aligned, groups: first, homeowners who believe new constructions of apartments around their homes will lower the resale value, obstruct their views, and otherwise affect “the neighborhood character”; and second, advocates for low-income tenants who believe that the new construction pushed by the YIMBY movement in gentrifying working-class neighborhoods will accelerate the damaging process of pricing out long-time residents.
The first group is more powerful politically at the state level, but at the start of Hanlon and Trauss’s advocacy in San Francisco, many of the fights were with the second, leading to vitriolic conflict in the city (and online). Trauss faced intense criticism for comparing tenant advocates to Trump voters during a speech at hearing. And in one incident, Hanlon was at a public film screening about the eviction crisis, talking with a resident who was fighting a plan to demolish his apartment building, when an activist forced him out of the event, screaming “Get the fuck out!”
As the conflicts continued in San Francisco, Hanlon decided he needed to do more than tackle one planning meetingand one buildingat a time. After he and Trauss secured some funding, they founded a nonprofit, California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund, and filed a lawsuit against a Bay Area suburb for not building enough housing. They lost the suit, and Hanlon realized that they needed to change direction. I was like, alright, well, were going to fail as a nonprofit if we dont change the law, he says.
Rewriting the law
With help from a likeminded developer hed met, Hanlon brought together a group of land-use attorneys, planners, and other developers and explained why the lawsuit had failed and how he wanted the law to change so cities would have to allow more construction. Hanlon copied the existing law into Microsoft Word, rewrote it based on feedback from the group, and then gave it to a lawyer to draft a real version of a potential bill. Then he started heading to Sacramento, meeting with anyone whod talk. A lawyer from the Building Industry Association told him that he was wasting his time. “I’m like, alright, thanks for your feedback,” he says. “And then I just kept going.”
At the time, he had little money and few connections. At a housing conference, he entered a contest to meet the new chair of the states Department of Housing Developmentthe competition involved guessing the number of Monopoly houses in a giant jar. I remembered a little bit of middle school geometry or something, and I just looked at the jar and did the right math and guessed the right number of houses, he says. He won a lunch with Ben Metcalf, the new chair, and peppered him with questions about housing reform in the state.
Meanwhile, he was starting to make more connections in the tech industry. Trauss had already gotten some support from tech CEOs like Yelps Jeremy Stoppleman, who saw that the housing shortage could hurt their industry since it was so hard for employees to find a place to live. Like others, hed read a viral article in TechCrunch from Kim-Mai Cutler explaining how housing policy restricted development. That story really helped put everything in perspectivelike, oh, this is actually by design, Stoppleman says. [It was] many years of decisions to specifically constrain housing production, density, and growth. That created a real point of frustration as a person leading a business with thousands of employees here in the Bay Area.
Hanlon met Zack Rosen, CEO of the WebOps platform Pantheon, on Twitter. I got in a fight with him on the internet, Rosen says. I got into one of those things where it was back and forth, back and forth, and by the third time, Im like, man, I dont know what Im talking about. He suggested to Hanlon that they meet up for coffee, and they became friends. Rosen, too, wanted to invest in a solution to the housing crisis.
“The tech industry didn’t create these terrible housing policies, they predate us,” Rosen says. “However, the success of our industry and these terrible housing policies are a train wreck. The net effect of that train wreck is immiseration for the state of Californiayou know, teachers teaching [while] homeless in San Francisco. I mean, it’s insane. So for me, it was like, look, the tech industry has a special responsibility to help solve it.”
A few weeks later, Hanlon ran into Rosen in Sacramento, along with Nat Friedmanthe former CEO of GitHub, now head of Metas Superintelligence Labs, who had come to Sacramento to talk about housing with an assemblymember. They started walking through the capitol building, and knocked on the door of the governors office, where they managed to wrangle a meeting with staffers on the fly. Policymakers wanted to act, but the issue was complex, and they needed help understanding what laws could truly help. On the drive back home, Rosen started thinking about partnering wth Hanlon.
Making a bet on a new startup nonprofit
They stayed in touch, and nearly a year later, Rosen, Friedman, and Hanlon met at the wine bar to talk about the potential for a new nonprofit. They talked for hours, closing out the bar. Hanlon pitched them on the vision of a new housing advocacy organization for the state that would work on new policy, build coalitions and a grassroots movement, and massively scale up homebuilding. At the time, Hanlon was still working on a shoestring budget, helping shepherd a housing bill called SB 167based on what he’d drafted earlierthrough the committee process. Imagine all that we could do if I had a real team and a real budget? he said.
They didnt know exactly how the new organization would work. We ended up with more questions than answers, says Rosen. But we had a direction. We had a strategy. They were sold on the idea. It was reminiscent to me of the beginnings of a great startup, he says. It just felt like hey, here’s this obvious idea. No one’s doing it. Is it possible to do? Absolutely. Is it incredibly difficult to do? Absolutely. Let’s go do it. Within a couple of months, they had raised hundreds of thousands for the project. Hanlon resigned from his previous nonprofit with Trauss. Rosen joined the new organization, California YIMBY, as a cofounder.
Its something that probably only would have happened in San Francisco. I dont think I ever would have raised this sort of philanthropic capital just given my profileIm some guy who was working for the Forest Service and moved to the Mission because I was really into wine, fixed gear bikes, and shows, Hanlon says. That doesnt sound like someone Id want to make a big bet on to try to rebuild the built environment of the worlds fourth largest economy.
But his vision resonated with them, and with friends of Friedman’s who gave to the new nonprofit. “Brian’s a mile a minutevery fast on his feet, very thoughtful, had clearly done tons of research, knew his stuff,” says Stoppleman. “It was a really unique strategy that he was laying out. For me, it’s exciting to meet people at that stage when they’re just getting going. Obviously brilliant, lots of energy, a lot of passion, probably some naivete. There is a parallel, 100%, to the startup world.”
The tech leaders who put in money also were willing to try something new. I don’t mean to just make a paean to enlightened tech leaders, but I will say, San Francisco’s entrepreneurial tech leaders don’t treat the status quo or entrenched power as immutable reality, says Hanlon. They treat it as problems to be solved and building a new future. And that’s rare and uncommon.I think there’s this real sense that we’re not on this Earth for very long, it’s good and right to work quickly to solve your problems. And also, that failure isn’t the worst thing. The worst thing is not trying, or trying and not being ambitious.
Sweeping changes in policy
After the nonprofit was founded in 2017as a 501(c)(4) organization, so its allowed to lobby full timeit led advocacy for SB 167, a bill that made it harder for cities to fail to comply with state laws designed to force cities to approve more housing. The organization also fought for new laws that make it easier to build ADUs and missing middle housing like duplexes. But the biggest victories, after earlier failed attempts, came this year.
First, the state passed a set of laws that reform CEQA, the California’s environmental law, which has sometimes been used as a method to stop development. Some housing now has a faster review process under the law. When the nonprofit first began working on CEQA reform, they were told that it was impossible.
This fall, the state also passed SB 79, a law that legalizes large apartment buildings near major transit stops throughout the stateeven when local laws restrict density or height. That can help significantly shrink the state’s housing shortage. In L.A., alone, by one estimate, it will eventually zone for 1.46 million new housing units.
Along with CEQA reform, it was something they’d first talked about at the wine bar. “That was really was got Nat and Zack excited that night,” Hanlon says.
Earlier attempts to pass the law, including a bill introduced in 2018, helped change the conversation about housing. Academics had long argued for more housing near transit, but this type of policy was new. “That’s the first bill, to my knowledge, that had actually been commensurate with the scale of the problem to actually solve it,” Hanlon says. It died quickly in committee, but got people talking in other cities. In New York City, the planning office held a meeting to discuss it. Other advocacy groups in other states started considering new changes to state policy.
The latest version of the bill barely passed. It’s likely the only bill in the history of the state, Hanlon says, to become law after “rolling” the first two policy committee chairs, meaning it passed over their objections. The bill had to make it through nine votes, and then the governor’s vote. At each step, it barely made it. “This was incredibly, incredibly hard fought.”
Still, he says, despite fierce opposition to the bill, including citizen protests and formal opposition from dozens of city councils, the debate was less heated than it had been in the past. Previous bills had faced widespread, statewide activism in large town halls and protestsmany of which were organized by Livable California, a group of homeowners founded by a former oil executive that fights zoning changes and regulations that would make it easier to build apartmentsalong with a deluge of op-eds and even a study with false data that argued that Los Angeles could meet its housing needs with vacant apartments.
Now, the ideas behind the YIMBY have now become more mainstream. Policymakers have largely accepted the idea that the housing shortage is a supply problem, and that policy has held back development. “YIMBY benefits from being correct,” says Rosen. “It’s real. It’s substantive. It’s right. It also benefits from taking what should be an obscure issue like zoning, and turning it into something that’s real and personal for peoplehousing. And that was clear from the beginning.”
When the YIMBY movement started to take off, “what wasn’t clear was how you would translate that movement that was getting attention into change of government that would enable a boom in housing,” he says. “There’s a huge leap between those things. We’ve got a long list of modern-day political movements that capture attention and don’t deliver the outcome. It’s not that any of the work of translating attention in a movement into outcomes is like rocket science. But it’s tremendously difficult work. And it’s very deliberate kind of work, very strategic work. It’s very stage sequenced. To me, it feels like kind of like scaling a company.”
The work isn’t done. The next big battle, Hanlon says, is the steep fees that local governments impose on new developments, which can make building infeasible even when ther barriers are taken away. But 2025 has “absolutely been a breakthrough year,” says Rosen. “We have a lot left to do. But I don’t know that there’s going to be a political lift that heavy.”
A new extension for Chrome stops AI slop from invading your life. Called Slop Evader, it is a temporal firewall that modifies your Google search queries to exclude any results indexed after November 30, 2022. That is the day the ChatGPT asteroid hit the open web, upending culture and reality as we know it.
Installing Slop Evader is easy: just add it to Chrome, toggle it on, and suddenly, the scroll of generative garbage vanishes. You are back in the old internet knowing that every article you read is not the product of simulated intelligence.
It’s an enticing idea, especially given that the latest estimation is that more than 50% of all new articles on the internet are now generated by AI. But the digitally Amish lifestyle has an obvious flaw: You aren’t just evading slop; you are evading legitimate news, scientific breakthroughs, and culture itself. Which, on second thought, maybe is a good idea too.
The Chrome extension works on a premise that is 50% brilliant, 50% useless, and 100% depressing. Slop Evader is a powerful statement, but not exactly a solution. It’s a vacation from the permanent doubt that comes from clicking on anything these days.
[Screenshots: Slop Evader]
Kill AI switch
It doesnt seem the AI slop will stop. Europol predicts that by 2026, 90% of online content could be synthetically generated. We are no longer surfing a web of human knowledge; we are drowning in a sea of hallucinations. We dont need gimmicks. We need a way to access information without risk of being deceived by machines. We need a built-in toggle in every browser and platform to turn off the machine-generated trash. Since AI can no longer be detected by software, our only hope lies in proving what is real, not spotting what is fake.
There are already some efforts to do exactly that. For images, videos, and sound, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authentication (C2PA) has proposed a digital birth certificate for every pixel and sound wave you encounter. The technology already exists to cryptographically sign media at the point of capture, creating an unbroken chain of custody from the camera lens to your screen.
When I spoke to Ziad AsgharSVP of product management at Qualcommto talk about the end of reality, he told me that fake audio and video content is a big concern for everyone. “As these [AI] technologies become more prevalent, this is going to be a challenge,” he says. He was right two years ago, he is even more right today. We need content that works like NFTs, using blockchain-like certificates to prove a video or an article wasn’t hallucinated by a GPU.
Qualcomm has successfully integrated C2PA support directly into its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile platform. The chip uses cryptography to sign the actual pixels of your photos the moment you snap them. Sony, Canon, and Leica have also rolled out firmware updates that sign images right at the point of capture. If you shoot with a Sony Alpha 9 III or a Canon EOS R1 today, you can generate a tamper-evident digital birth certificate for that file.
The problem is that most platforms shred this information when you upload. There are exceptions. TikTok supports C2PA and tells users what content was actually captured by a camera. Google has started integrating C2PA into its Search and Ads platforms, allowing the About this image tool to verify provenance. And LinkedIn has the best option: The company says that it overlays an icon on C2PA-signed images that users can click to inspect the edit history.
So it can be done. If there was another certification standard for other types of contentlike this articleand if every platform supported the standards in full, users would be able to push the Kill AI switch.
But, of course, you know where this ends.
Yeah, it will never happen
The same tech giants adopting these standards are simultaneously playing a cynical double game. While Meta and TikTok claim to be cracking down on AI slop by downranking third-party generated content, they are aggressively pushing their own AI tools. TikTok limits the reach of external AI videos while actively encouraging you to use its in-app AI filters. Meanwhile, Meta says it will throttle down AI content promotion, but they give users AI tools to create an eternal tsunami of slop.
They aren’t trying to save the internet from AI. They are trying to secure their own monopoly on AI pollution. They want to ensure that the only slop you consume is the premium, high-margin slop they generated for you. It is all about revenue domination. If you use Midjourney, you are a spammer. If you use Meta AI, you are a “creator.
We can’t expect the companies profiting from AI creation to give us tools to deactivate the very content we create on their platform. So it seems, for now, our best (and imperfect) bet is something like Slop Evadera time machine to transport you to a simpler time.
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The average price net of incentives of new-builds sold by LennarAmericas second largest homebuildercame in at $386,000 in Q3 2025. Thats down -10.2% from $430,000 in Q4 2024 and down -21.4% from $491,000 in Q3 2022.
While last quarter Lennar acknowledged that it will no longer be as aggressive in prioritizing volume over margin going forward, the giant homebuilder said that doing so (i.e., volume > margin strategy) over the past few years helped it gain market share while some other builders were more conservative.
During the past three years of difficult market conditions, we have maintained volume, we’ve grown market share, and we’ve re engineered our operating platform for a better and more efficient future when the market bottoms and normalizes, we’re extremely well positioned with very strong market share in strategic markets, and our margin is leveraged to the upside, Stuart Miller, co-CEO of Lennar, said on the homebuilder’s December 17 earnings call.
While theres undoubtedly weakness in the housing marketin particular in pandemic era boomtowns in Texas and FloridaLennars headline drop in home prices might be giving the impression of a greater home price correction than the homebuyer is actually seeing.
See, Lennars average selling price, net of incentives, reflects the average selling price after incentives are deductedit is not the actual price paid by the typical homebuyer before incentives.
While some of the average selling price decline is due to outright price cuts and some to a mix shift toward smaller homes, the biggest driver is aggressive incentive spendingprimarily through mortgage rate buydowns.
To isolate the impact of incentives, ResiClub reverse-engineered Lennars sales-price math.
ResiClub estimates that in Q3 2022, Lennar spent roughly $12,074 in incentives on a typical home sale. By comparison, in Q4 2025, typical incentive spending by Lennar had risen to about $62,837 per home.
When accounting for incentive spending, the typical Lennar homebuyer in Q3 2022 paid around $503,074. In Q4 2025, the typical Lennar homebuyer paid about $448,690roughly 10.8% less than in Q3 2022, which marked Lennars peak quarter.
With incentives now accounted for, the outstanding questionwhich ResiClub cant answer just yetis how much of that 10.8% decline reflects mix shift versus outright declines in home prices?
As you may recall, last quarter, I noted that declining interest rates could signal the start of a market recovery. Unfortunately, that turnaround has not yet materialized. As [mortgage] rates slowly moderated in September, eased more in October and remained flat in November, the customer response remained fairly tepid, suggesting that a combination of affordability and consumer confidence issues were continuing to limit demand, said Miller on the earnings call.
Miller added that: While traffic was consistent, customers were both hesitant and limited by what they could afford to purchase. With that said, our fourth quarter results show the continued softening of market conditions and affordability. Sales volumes have been difficult to maintain, and required additional incentives to achieve our expected pace and to avoid an unintended buildup of excess inventory.
Lego has a nostalgia problem. I do, too. Like Hollywood and its eternal cycle of remakes, the Danish company has found a bottomless treasure pot full of GenX and Gen Z people willing to burn their credit cards to turn their golden memories into bricks. By my count, 2025 alone brought a record-setting 16 sets related to old Lego properties and external IPs, shattering 2023’s previous peak of 9 sets.
Whether that’s considered a problem or not depends on who you ask. You can argue that we (the people who keep buying these sets) are all the ones who have the problem. The Danish are just milking it.
Building Lego soothes kids and adults alike but, when you are putting together these nostalgia-sets, there is an additional satisfaction factor. Its part of you, its what you know, like that old song that plays in your head from time to time and you have the urge to play on your headphones. As you assemble it, you can’t help but enjoy the way in which the Billund designers have abstracted the original objects and created details and features that seem impossible to reproduce at pixel-size brick resolution.
Lego won’t share sales figures but, privately, insiders have hinted that these sets bring in lots of revenue, especially because they are large and complex with many pieces and high price tags. The year-over-year increase of new sets seem to confirms this: Between 2014 and 2022, the company released an average of 3.7 sets per year tapping into ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s themes. That number has more than doubled. From 2023 through 2025, Lego produced 31 nostalgia-focused setsa dramatic acceleration that establishes a new baseline.
Many of these sets are part of the Lego Icons line, which launched in 2020 as a way to tap into the growing appetite from Lego’s adult customers. Other sets come through the Lego Ideas, launched in 2008, a sort of Kickstarter-ish platform that asks fans to submit designs for official Lego sets. These are then voted on by the community and a handful become commercial products each year.
Until 2024, it was an open design call but that year Lego launched explicitly decade-targeted design challenges. First came the “Turn Back Time80s Challenge,” which generated more than 290 submissions. The challenge proved so successful that Lego immediately launched a “Build Your Nostalgia90s Throwback” competition for 2025. Rather than waiting for the nostalgia to happen organically, Lego is now actively soliciting it because it works.
Now, if you are like meor my son, who is definitely not a Gen X but is growing up in Gen X cultureyou may be wondering whats cool this year. Well, thats why Im here, my friends. These are the best at every price point all the way up to the crazy nuts $1,000 Death Star (now, if you buy that one, then you will have a very real problem of the financial kind).
[Photo: Lego]
Home One Starcruiser
This is a tiny reminder that Star Wars Original Trilogy sets remain a cornerstone of Lego’s nostalgia strategy. Released January 2025 for $70, this 559-piece Rebel Alliance frigate appeared in Return of the Jedi as part of the climactic Endor battle. It’s a compact set designed for anyone who wants a manageable Star Wars display without a 7,541-piece Millennium Falcon commitment. That it came out on the very first day of 2025 signals how central Star Wars remains to Lego’s calendar.
[Photo: Lego]
The Simpsons: Krusty Burger
This year also brought a new Simpson set. Homer’s favorite fast-food joint comes to life with 1,635 pieces. The Krusty Burger has been serving fictional beef since the show’s early ’90s heyday, and Lego has captured every detail: the oversized signage, the drive-through window, and a small buildable Krusty the Clown figure. It’s the kind of set that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it isa shrine to a show that defined a generation’s sense of humor. At $210, it’s a reasonable price point for 1990s pop-culture archaeology. The set includes minifigures of Homer, Marge, Krusty, and the rest of Springfields best and finest.
[Photo: Lego]
Williams Racing FW14B & Nigel Mansell
After releasing Ayrton Sennas McLaren last year, this is Lego’s tribute to one of Formula One’s most dominant seasons: 1992, when British driver Nigel Mansell piloted the Williams FW14B to legendary status. With 799 pieces and priced at $80, this is the kind of nostalgia that doesn’t rely on Hollywood but will appeal to the GenX and GenZ generations. The model includes working steering and suspension details that make it feel less like a toy and more like precision engineering translated into plastic.
[Photo: Lego]
Blacktron Renegade
This one is pure Lego archaeology and made a lot of people happy back in the late ’80s. The Blacktron theme launched in 1987 and became one of the company’s most iconic design languagesa line of villainous space vehicles with electric lime-yellow and black color schemes that defined entire childhoods, opposite from the late ’70s good guys of the Galaxy Explorer. The Blacktron Renegade, $100, resurrects that aesthetic with precision.
[Photo: Lego]
Minifigure Vending Machine
This one emerged from Lego’s Ideas platform, and it is a meta-nostalgic deep cut. The 315-piece set is essentially a tribute to Lego’s own 1980s and ’90s theme history. The vending machine dispenses minifigures, but the real genius is that it functions as a shrine to classic Lego design eras. It’s designed to celebrate the Classic Space, Pirates, and Castle themes that defined childhoods. Priced at $100, it’s Lego essentially building a monument to itself, self-referencing nostalgia so dense that it risks becoming an emotional black hole.
[Photo: Lego]
Gremlins: Gizmo
The 1,125-piece set captures Gizmo, the Mogwai creature from Gremlins, in brick form. The process of bringing Gizmo to life required Lego’s design team to solve problems that shouldn’t exist. How do you suggest fur texture with plastic bricks? How do you create a nose that reads as a nose without being literal? Lego senior model designer Chris McVeigh told me how he tackled the fur question by using a specific element he originally developed for Lego’s 2023 Architecture set of Himeji Castle: a small 2×2 plate with an upturned corner. “I decided to use that to give the effect of wispy hair flowing off the model,” McVeigh says. For the nose, he experimented with half-circle and full-circle plates, ultimately landing on a 2×2 round plate with subtle cutouts. “It’s one of the exciting things about Lego,” McVeigh explains. “The brain fills the blanks.” At $110, it’s priced in the mid-range for a detailed character build, which is appropriate for a creature that required months of design refinement to get exactly right.
[Photo: Lego]
The Goonies
This 2,912-piece behemoth, priced at $330, recreates an iconic scene from Richard Donner’s 1985 adventure film. Born from Lego’s “Turn Back Time80s Challenge,” where it competed against more than 290 other submissions, the set includes buildable structures and minifigures of the main Goonies characters. It doesnt get more cultish than that.
[Photo: Lego]
Captain Jack Sparrow’s Pirate Ship
OK, so this one is early aughts but, with Jerry Bruckheimer and Johnny Depp, it feels ’90s to me. Released in September, its backordered everywhere, becoming one of the companys hottest hits. The $380 set brings Jack Sparrow and the Black Pearl to life with 2,862 pieces, recreating the iconic pirate ship from the 2003 film The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, complete with detailed rigging, a functioning ship’s wheel, a working cannon, and a brig with torture implements. Multiple minifigures come with the set, including Jack Sparrow, Barbossa, Elizabeth Swann, and Will Turner.
[Photo: Lego]
Star Trek: U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D
This was a shocker for Lego aficionados, who are used to living in a Star Wars dominated world. Just for that, it became the champion of 2025 nostalgia releases with 3,600 pieces. Priced at $400, it reproduces the Starship Enterprise-D from TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which aired from 1987 to 1994 and defined what Star Trek meant to millions of people who never watched the original. The model measures 23.5 inches long and includes a working saucer separation functiona feature so technically ambitious it required serious engineering. It has all the crew (nine minifigures), including Captain Picard. It’s also bundled with set 40768, the Star Trek Type-15 Shuttlepod, a 261-piece GWP that features opening wing doors and a detailed interior LCARS display.
[Photo: Lego]
Lego Game Boy
The $60 set recreates the original 1989 Nintendo Game Boy in brick form with impressive accuracy. The measurements are almost identical to the original and it includes posable directional buttons, a pressable A/B button cluster, and a buildable cartridge slot. The set even includes minifigure-scale versions of classic Game Boy games like Tetris and The Legend of Zelda printed on the buildable cartridges. Its also my favorite set because you can actually make it into a real Game Boy using this kit.
[Photo: Lego]
Death Star
This is no Lego Set. At 9,023 pieces and $1,000, this is a bloody actual moon. It is so big it must actually have its own gravity field. It is also the most expensive Lego set ever made, breaking the previous record held by both the Millennium Falcon UCS ($850) and the AT-AT UCS ($850). Released back in October, this Death Star is a cross-section cutaway of the Empire’s most infamous space station that features little vignettes from A New Hope and Return of the Jedi: the detention block, trash compactor, tractor beam control room, Moff Tarkin’s boardroom, and the Emperor’s Throne Room where Luke and Vader’s final confrontation takes place. It stands 27.5 inches tall and it is 31 inches wide. The build includes 38 minifiguresincluding three different Luke SkywalkersTatooine outfit, Stormtrooper disguise, and Return of the Jedis Jedi Knighttwo Han Solos, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, Emperor Palpatine, Grand Moff Tarkin, and even the internet-famous Hot Tub Stormtrooper from the Lego Star Wars video games.
[Screenshot: Lego Ideas]
X-Files: The Truth Is Out There
This set is not released yet, but it was announced in 2025 as the winner of Lego’s “Build Your Nostalgia90s Throwback” challenge. While it is currently in development with no official release date or price yet confirmed, the design won a competitive fan vote against four other finalists: Edward Scissorhands, The Fifth Element, Jumanji, and Buffy the Vampire Slayerall quintessential ’90s intellectual property. The fact that the X-Files won tells you everything about which generational cohort Lego is chasing right now. Its also a great fit for our times, as the show that defined paranoia and skepticism for everyone born between 1970 and 1990.
When the Department of the Interior announced on Monday that it was suspending the leases of five offshore wind farms that are currently under construction, it blamed national security concerns. Military experts say thats an excuse.
I think it is all made up, says Dave Belote, a retired Air Force colonel who previously led the Department of Defenses energy siting clearinghouse at the Pentagon and who currently consults with onshore wind companies about military issues. I’ve got 15 years of experience that I will stack against the Secretary of Interior to say that is all made up to please a president that just irrationally hates windmills.
Each of the five projectstwo off the coast of New York, and others in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Rhode Islandwent through a yearslong vetting process that closely involved the Department of Defense, now renamed the Department of War. (After the administration threatened some of the wind farms earlier in the year, New York Governor Kathy Hochul reportedly negotiated with the Trump administration and even agreed to approve a natural gas pipeline in exchange for saving one of the wind farmsbut those efforts may now have been in vain.)
Any potential military issues were already fully considered, says Belote. When it announced the new cancellations, the Department of Interior cited radar issues. But thats already well knownand the Department of Defense has known how to deal with it for more than a decade. Spinning wind turbines do interfere with radar, but wind project developers currently pay for a software patch that edits that interference out of NORADs radar scope. With a bigger investment, the radar itself could be upgraded to eliminate the issue without relying on the patch.
The military needs to know how to deal with wind turbines regardless of whether they’re in U.S. waters. China, for example, has 129 offshore wind farms. “They are concentrated along the shorelines in the most militarily significant areas around Shanghai and around Taiwan Strait,” says Belote. “If any American is launching from a carrier or Guam or Japan or Korea and pointed west at the Chinese shoreline, that man or woman in the fighter cockpit or bomber cockpit is going to have to deal with a whole bunch of spinning wind turbines on their radar scopes or head of displays. So the whole idea that we can neither train nor detect threats in the presence of small numbers of offshore wind turbines is ludicrous.”
The administration has also cited unspecified “classified” issues, but Belote saysas someone who has considered all possible issues that could theoretically occurthat those issues don’t exist. “There’s no there there,” he says. (The Department of Defense said it could not immediately respond to Fast Company‘s request for a comment on the issue.)
On the East Coast, Belote argues that the military could even make use of the infrastructure on offshore wind turbines because they already have power, fiber optics, and security that could improve communications in military exercises.
There’s also a bigger national security argument: wind is a critical domestic energy source at a time when the country needs to rapidly ramp up production. “Energy security is national security,” Kirk Lippold, a retired Navy commander, wrote earlier this year. “Americas coastal regions host nearly 40% of our population, and offshore wind offers a direct and effective way to provide these areas with utility-scale energy. This is not just about powerits about ensuring that those economic centers remain online amid geopolitical instability or supply chain disruption. When we cede control of our energy futurewhether to geopolitical rivals, volatile oil markets, or outdated infrastructurewe weaken our ability to defend American interests at home and abroad.”
A group of retired senior military officials echoed the same arguments in an open letter to Secretary Burgum in May. Because of the strain that data centers are putting on the grid, “it has never been so important that our country is energy independent,” they wrote. “When we rely on energy from foreign countries, it leaves us vulnerable to global market shocks outside of our control.”
Collectively, the offshore wind projects could power more than 2.5 million homes and businesses. They also could help tackle soaring energy bills for consumers.
It’s not clear what will happen next. The Trump administration also tried to stop Rhode Island’s Revolution Wind project earlier in the year, but a court stepped in and the project resumed construction. “When the Trump Administration imposed a stop work order on Revolution Wind several months ago based on similarly vague assertions regarding national security, the courts found that order was unlawful and stopped the Trump administrations effort to obstruct the build-out of clean, affordable power,” says Ted Kelly, director and lead counsel at the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund. “The administration is now trying to unlawfully stop these five projects which are creating thousands of jobs and making electricity more affordable, including Revolution Wind. We will see what happens in the courts.
Even if the administration fails again in court, another pause will make it harder for the projects to survive. When Revolution Wind previously stopped work, it reportedly cost the developer more than $2 million a day.
In the world of the long-running kids show Cyberchase, Motherboard, a sort of digital queen and literal technocrat, is the beneficent but impaired leader of all of cyberspace. She iswe are to understanda legitimate ruler, yet faces constant attacks from the odious Hacker, a green-skinned android who dresses like a vampire and whose only goal is to sow chaos and eventually take control of Motherboards realm, which we might describe as something akin to a metaverse, or ever-expanding digital world.
Luckily, a trio of human kids named Inez, Mattie, and Jackiea squadvisit cyberspace frequently, where they embark on missions to help protect the ever-embattled Motherboard from her nemesis. Theyre frequently assisted by Digit, a robotic cybird that guides them through various missions.
Cyberchase is a publicly funded STEM-themed program created by the public television channel WNET Thirteen. Its been airing on PBS Kids since 2002. As such, every challenge the squad takes on can be answered with numbers, or at least some kind of mathematical concept. Sometimes, an episode involves a mission with subtraction, fractions, or even negative numbers! The whole point of the squads trials and tribulations is to teach children basic science, technology, engineering, and math concepts through adventures.
Sandra Sheppard, who created the show and now serves as executive producer, says its writers keep a close eye on how well U.S. students are doing with math concepts, especially as general math performance in the country continues to decline: Incoming freshmen at the University of San Diego increasingly need remedial math education, according to placement test performance, and national U.S. high school math performance has been sinking for years, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress. Parents report that social media continues to be a major distraction for kids.
In response, Cyberchase has adapted its content for the social media age, producing shorts that create snippets of its larger math lessons as well as online gaming content. For its upcoming season, slated to premiere in spring 2026, it has released its first seven-minute episodes, which are intended to find a midpoint between a full episode and short-form content.
Fast Company chatted with Sheppard about public television in the age of streaming and TikTok, the value of the PBS Kids brand, and how shes adapting a beloved shows math content to meet American kids where they are.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
[Image: Thirteen]
I have a very particular memory of learning about negative numbers before everyone else, and then revealing this secret knowledge that I had learned through Cyberchase. But I didn’t have a smartphone or a computer with the internet until high school. How can you possibly get kids to the show when youre competing with smartphones, chatbots, and TikTok?
Over the last decade, if not more, the approach to reaching kids is really very multi-platform, because we know kids are using multiple devices and watching in a myriad of ways. I think our partners at PBS Kids have been great in developing products and tools so that kids can really watch anywhere. Cyberchase is on the PBS Kids Video app and it streams everywhere, including YouTube. We also offer games, and that continues to be a really important part of the learning.
Thinking about getting our content where kids are watching is constantly on our mind, as is developing content for those platforms and experimenting on those platforms. That includes shorter-form content, vertical shorts, and different kinds of compilations.
Have you had more success with some platforms rather than others?
Probably most children watch our content on streaming. That being said, there still is a dedicated audience for linear broadcast. And it’s a very diverse audience. Across the platforms, full episodes continue to be the driver of engagement. That’s not to say short-form content isn’t popular, or compilations aren’t popular, but we find that kids are still really driven by story. A full episode is 22 minutes. We’ve been experimenting this coming season with seven-minute stories, a little more bite-sizeas long as they’re a full narrative, so kids can have that kind of rich experience of watching a full story.
Can you talk a little bit more about the seven-minute episodes?
They’ll be coming out in March. It allows us to focus on math concepts a little bit more simply in bite-size stories, and really focus on some of the characters that we know our audience loves. There are Buzz and Delete, our bumbling henchmen who are buddies and semi-lovable in their own right. We’ve got a whole series of shorts that feature them in these kind of friendship-oriented adventures.
We can, in a short time, focus on a single strategy of subtraction, or focus on how to estimate using weight and why that’s an important tool. That’s not to say we’re moving away from long form, but it’s fun to experiment in that space. Those will be released digitally on all the PBS Kids platforms and YouTube.
How do you compete with the whole of the internet using algorithm-driven engagement when trying to get kids to your math-based content?
The PBS Kids brand is a very safe and trusted brand. For young children, parents, and families, we still guide many of their viewing experiences. And I think they see us as a trusted source of content. That’s not to say that there’s not lots out there and that it hasn’t become more fragmented. There are loads of choices.
[Image: Thirteen]
How do you measure the sort of uptake of the idas for kids? Is that something you study to make sure that they’re understanding math? How does that work?
We do a lot of initial developmental research, where we put ideas in front of focus groups of kids and families and test them out as early scripts. That gives us the opportunity to tweak up front. But we’ve also done a number of studies with external evaluators to really look at: Are kids learning the specific content in the shows? The good news is that we are really kind of a proven research model in that kids do learn from the series.
Something I’ve heard anecdotally from people I know who teach math is that kids seem to really be struggling. Especially after the pandemic, it seems like American students are really doing poorly in math. Whats the role of Cyberchase in that?
There certainly have been some national reports from the National Center for Education Statistics and the American Education Panel that have shown some real concerns in terms of math knowledge and gaps. Post-COVID, there have been some widening gaps.
Interestingly, in this season we made kind of a renewed commitment to focusing on topics like subtraction, which can be a complex topic for young children. For some, addition comes more readily. Subtraction, especially as a kind of mental map exercise, can be challenging. We are embracing topics that could use some extra support.
We live in a world that is changing. We’re all inundated with data, some of it AI-driven, some of it not. We’ve also focused in the last couple of seasons on data science, not only collecting and representing data, but looking at it and making sense of it reasonably.
Another topic that we’re tackling this season is fractions. I think that’s a topic that for a lot of kids takes a lot of reinforcement. Patterns are a foundational topic in math and a foundational topic in programming. Giving kids more exposure to patterns, all kinds of patterns, too.
I’ll say one other theme that I’m really excited about is connecting math to civics and the community. Certainly some of that involves data, but we have a very special show that’s going to be released called Every Flipper Counts. Its set in this wonderful cyber site of Penguia where the penguins have to pick a new team captain for their belly bowll, and the squad comes in and they introduce voting as a fair way to decide. There’s a lot of math and figuring out how to set up a fair vote.
How have the cuts to public media impacted you?
As a station, were always looking at ways to be more relevant, more sustainable. We have some wonderful funders of Cyberchase who are very supportive. For decades, Cyberchase did receive funding from the National Science Foundation. And for the moment, that’s not happening. It’s a complicated time and we have to navigate a path forward and find new ways to be smart, be cost effective, and bring in new supporters.
Final question: Is Cyberchase the metaverse?
It is an imaginary cyber world. The metaverse term came later. It’s a whimsical, vast landscape of these wonderfully rich, imaginary cyber sites. Its given us, as writers, an unbelievable place to go.
