The AI boom began with ChatGPT and chatbots. Now chatbots are starting to grow arms and legs, as developers say, meaning they can use digital tools and work independently on a humans behalf. The open-source platform OpenClaw is notable because it lets people build agents with far more autonomy than those offered by big tech.
OpenClaw agents can control a browser, send emails, do multi-step planning, and pursue persistent goals. Users often interact with them through iMessage or Discord, with the agent hosted locally on a Mac mini. One users agent reportedly negotiated with several car dealerships and shaved four grand off a cars price while its owner was in a meeting. Some say OpenClaw agents fulfill the promise of Samantha, the independent AI in Her.
Developers are now racing to build their own. (To wit: The project hit 100,000 GitHub stars faster than any other.) That means the internet could soon be full of agents acting as proxies for humans. Thats why OpenClaws creator, Peter Steinberger, is worth hearing out. I listened to his recent three-hour interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, where the thoughtful (and quirky) Austrian shared prescient ideas about where AI agents could take personal computing, and how societies might respond.
Below, the six most interesting things he said (lightly edited for clarity):
On the Moltbot affair
Some people are just way too trusty or gullible. You know . . . I literally had to argue with people that told me, ‘Yeah, but my agent said this and this.’ So, we, as a society, we [have] some catching up to do in terms of understanding that AI is incredibly powerful, but its not always right. Its not all-powerful, you know? And especially things like this, its very easy that it just hallucinates something or just comes up with a story.
For many of us, the first we heard of OpenClaw was when its agents began congregating on their own social site, called Moltbook, where they dragged their human owners, posted manifestos, and debated topics like sentience. It gave people a real sense of future shock. Steinberger believes AI has raced ahead of peoples understanding and readiness.
On OpenClaws security issues
If you understand the risk profiles, fine. I mean, you can configure it in a way that nothing really bad can happen. But if you have no idea, then maybe wait a little bit more until we figure some stuff out. But they would not listen to the creator. They [installed] it anyhow. So the cats out of the bag, and securitys my next focus.
When an agent is operating on its own and interfacing with the web and other services, it creates a larger attack surface. A hacker could inject malicious prompts to redirect the agent toward harmful or even criminal actions. Steinberger believes OpenClaw should be used only by people who understand these risks and how to mitigate them.
On Macs (potential) AI moment
Isnt it funny how they completely blunder AI, and yet everybodys buying Mac minis? No, you dont need a Mac mini to install OpenClaw. You can install it on the web. Theres a concept called nodes, so you can make your computer a node and it will do the same. There is something to be said for running it on separate hardware. That right now is useful. . . . And no, I dont get commission from Apple. They didnt really communicate much.”
Many developers who want their OpenClaw agents running continuously on a local machine, rather than in the cloud, are buying Mac Studio or Mac mini computers. That demand has reportedly created shortages of certain configurations, with delivery times stretching from a few days to as long as six weeks for high-memory systems.
On Zuckerberg’s feedback
“Mark [Zuckerberg] basically played all week with my product, and sent me, ‘Oh, this is great.’ Or, ‘This is shit. Oh, I need to change this.’ Or, like, funny little anecdotes. And people using your stuff is kind of like the biggest compliment, and also shows me that, you know, they actually . . . care about it. And I didnt get the same on the OpenAI side.
Steinberger surprised the AI world last Friday when he announced he would sell OpenClaw to OpenAI and join the company. In the Lex Fridman interview a few days prior, he said he was considering selling to either OpenAI or Meta, and without naming a favorite, he sounded like he was leaning toward Meta. OpenAIs Sam Altman may have done some fast talking after the interview was published, or Steinbergers Meta-leaning comments may have been part of a negotiation strategy. Either way, Steinberger will now have far more people and computing power at OpenAI to help advance its AI agents.
On AIs not-so-great UX
The current interface is probably not the final form. Like, if you think more globally, we copied Google for agents. You have a prompt, and then you have a chat interface. That, to me, very much feels like when we first created television and then people recorded radio shows on television and you saw that on TV. I think theres better ways how we eventually will communicate with models, and we are still very early in this ‘how will it even work’ phase. So, it will eventually converge and we will also figure out whole different ways to work with those things.
Steinberger says OpenClaw isnt really competing with AI coding agents like Claude Code or OpenAIs Codex. Theyre different tools, he says, with OpenClaw functioning more like a personal assistant. But he believes they could eventually converge into something like an AI operating system, and that the way we interact with AI will change significantly in the years ahead.
On ‘vibe coding’
I actually think vibe coding is a slur. Yeah, I always tell people I do agentic engineering, and then maybe after 3 a.m. I switch to vibe coding, and then I have regrets the next day. You just have to clean up and fix your shit.
To Steinberger, vibe coding means using an AI coding assistant to quickly mock up an app or feature without much regard for security, testing, or its effects on a larger code base. Agentic engineering, meanwhile, is more like a collaboration between an experienced software engineer and an advanced coding assistant (such as Anthropics Claude Code or OpenAIs Codex), in which the two create a detailed plan for building new software without introducing security problems or bugs.
The consequences from being associated with Jeffrey Epstein are mostly playing out behind closed doors rather than in courtrooms.
Despite the release of millions of documents and photos that seemingly include damning evidence of impropriety and even potential criminal activity, the Epstein files havent yet resulted in further criminal charges.
Thats not altogether surprising as an unsigned memo from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) last year indicated that no further investigation into uncharged parties was warranted based on an exhaustive review of evidence that confirmed Epstein had harmed more than 1,000 victims.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has often frustrated lawmakers and advocates who continue to seek justice for Epsteins victims.
During her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last week, Bondi said that the Justice Department is actively investigating individuals who might have conspired with the convicted sex offender, without specifying who those individuals are.
On Saturday, Bondi sent a letter to Congress indicating that the DOJ has released all records, documents, communications, and investigative materials required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
That letter also contained a list of 300-plus prominent individuals whose names appear in the files, though she cautioned that their names appear in a wide variety of contexts.
Even if the highest law enforcement agency in the country ultimately decides not to dive back into this case to bring charges, consequences have been rippling through Hollywood, Wall Street, academia, and beyond.
Some prominent figures named in the files have faced a reputational reckoning that has forced them to step down from high-profile roles, while others will likely escape unscathed from the scrutiny.
Resignations from Epstein fallout
The list that Bondi shared over the weekend includes the names of dozens of prominent U.S. politicians, including many who have served in either the first or second term of President Donald Trumps administrations. But politicians in Europe have thus far faced more pressure to resign.
In the United States, elected officials haven’t faced the most severe consequences as of yet. Rather, people beyond the Capital Beltway are reckoning with having their personal correspondences with Epstein aired out in public, though the severity of the fallout has ranged widely.
Here are some business leaders who have resigned from prominent roles in recent weeks. No one on this list has been accused of a crime, but many are facing business consequences due to the reputational damage of communicating with Epstein.
Casey Wasserman
In a company-wide email he reportedly sent on Friday (per CNN and other media outlets), Hollywood agent Casey Wasserman announced that he is selling his talent agency after his flirtatious emails with Ghislaine Maxwell appeared in the Epstein files and high-profile clients like Chappell Roan started to jump ship from his agency.
Wasserman has thus far resisted stepping down as chair of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, though L.A. Mayor Karen Bass on Monday joined a growing chorus of people calling for his resignation.
Kathryn Ruemmler
The now-former general counsel for Goldman Sachs reportedly resigned last week after emails and other materials revealed her personal relationship with Epstein that included providing legal counsel and calling the disgraced financier by pet names. Ruemmler will remain with the bank until June 30 to provide a smooth transition. In a statement confirming her resignation to The New York Times, Ruemmler said: My responsibility is to put Goldman Sachss interests first.
Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem
On Friday, Dubai-based DP World announced in a regulatory statement that Bin Sulayem had resigned as chairman and CEO of one of the worlds largest logistics companies, where hed been at the helm since 2019and that his replacements had already been named.
The Epstein files revealed a close relationship between the two men that remained long after Epstein was first convicted in 2008.
Kimbal Musk
The fallout from the Epstein files may be the way that many people are learning for the first time that theres a board of directors behind Burning Man, the annual desert party.
Members of the Burning Man community called for the resignation of Elon Musks younger brother Kimbal Musk after his correspondence with Epstein appeared in the last trove of files.
But he had apparently submitted his resignation before the latest files were released, according to The San Francisco Standard. Kimbal Musk still sits on the boards of Tesla and SpaceX.
Larry Summers
In November, Harvard University announced that its former president Larry Summers would immediately leave his role as an instructor as the university investigated his ties to Epstein. Summers, who also served as U.S. Treasury Secretary, was seen in photos on Epsteins private plane.
Leon Black
When his ties to Epstein first surfaced several years ago, Leon Black resigned from his role as CEO of investment firm Apollo Global Management and chairman of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Even though hes largely out of the public eye now, the billionaire private equity investor surfaced again after the latest drop of Epstein files. There have been reports that some school districts have dropped plans for class pictures because of a link between Apollo, which Black led for more than three decades, and Lifetouch, which photographs students each year.
Ken Murphy, CEO of Lifetouch, said in a statement that neither Black nor any of Apollos directors or investors ever had access to Lifetouch photos.
Resisting calls to resign
Even as some powerful figures have faced career-altering consequences stemming from their relationships with Epstein, other associates have resisted the pressure to resignfor now.
That wait-and-see approach may ultimately mean that many of Epsteins associates dont face any consequences, though they may be in a period of professional limbo as the public and their respective organizations weigh the evidence.
The latest release of files has been particularly reputationally damaging, though the fallout remains uneven.
Without the threat of legal action by the Justice Department, some prominent people are banking on a strategy of apologizing for their links to Epstein and then vowing that they partook in no criminal activity.
Whether that strategy ultimately saves them from facing consequences, only time will tell.
Les Wexner
The billionaire business mogul led Victorias Secret for more than a decade and most recently served as chair emeritus of Bath & Body Works, the company he cofounded.
But he severed ties with these retailers several years ago, and will face questions from lawmakers this week about his relationship with Epstein.
Though Wexner claims to have cut ties with Epstein by 2008 and has denied any knowledge of Epsteins offenses (as reported last week by WOSU Public Media), the FBI named him as a “co-conspirator” of Epsteins in 2019.
Howard Lutnick
The latest Epstein files revealed that Howard Lutnick maintained communications with Epstein more than a decade after he claimed to have cut off all contact.
Lutnick testified before Congress earlier this month that he did have lunch with Epstein in 2012, years after he claimed to have cut off contact and after the financier was convicted for soliciting prostitution from a child.
But hes thus far resisted calls from a bipartisan group of lawmakers who want to see Lutnick resign or be fired.
Bill Gates
Things must surely be a bit awkward at the Gates Foundation lately, as the organization issued a statement following the latest release of Epstein files, while the Financial Times reported that its chief executive told staff he feels sullied by the foundations association with the disgraced financier.
But Gates hasnt stepped aside as chair and finally addressed what he called false allegations in an interview with an Australian TV network. Every minute I spent with him, I regret, and I apologize that I did that, Gates said.
Steve Tisch
Steve Tisch, co-owner of the New York Giants and the Hollywood producer behind Forrest Gump, claims to have had only a brief association with Epstein. Meanwhile, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has promised that the league will review all the facts about their relationship.
In a statement (as reported in January by the Athletic and other outlets), Tisch said that he now deeply regrets his association with the convicted sex offender, but he has thus far ignored the calls for his resignation as co-owner of the Giants.
Riding it out . . .
Many more prominent people are simply riding out the storm caused by their inclusion in the Epstein files, with no apparent consequences for them in sight.
While many supporters of President Trump called for the release of the Epstein files during the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Trump’s name was mentioned in the files some 38,000 times, along with several of his cabinet members and close associates, like billionaire Elon Musk.
But its a topic that continues to divide voters.
Trump has repeatedly rejected that he had any knowledge of Epsteins criminal activity, but a majority of Americans dont buy his story. In fact, 52% say the president is trying to cover up Epsteins crimes, while 30% say he isnt, according to an Economist/YouGov poll conducted earlier this month.
While Trump recently said its time to turn the page on the Epstein scandal and Bondi has said that there are no more files to come, the reputational toll may continue to play outthough largely outside of Washington, D.C.
Sandisk Corporation has announced plans for a secondary public offering.
The data storage company will open up 5,821,135 common stock shares (Nasdaq:SNDK) at $545 a pop. The shares are currently owned by Western Digital Corporation (WDC), Sandisks former parent company.
Sandisk separated from WDC nearly a year ago to the date, and subsequently joined the S&P 500 in November.
Now, WDC is furthering that split. It will be left with 1,691,884 shares of common stock, but it plans to get rid of those as well.
WDC intends to complete a debt-for-equity exchange with J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and BofA Securitiesboth of which will act as selling stockholders.
Sandisk says it will not personally sell any of its shares or profit from the secondary offering.
The offering should close tomorrow, Thursday, February 19.
Sandisk is benefiting from an AI-fueled chip memory shortage
In response to the news, Sandisks shares have fallen over 3.5% during premarket trading on Wednesday. However, theyre still sitting very comfortably. Sandisks shares have risen about 148% in 2026 and nearly 1,184% in the past 12 months.
Sandisks dramatic upward trend mirrors many of its fellow memory chip makersincluding WDCs shares (Nasdaq:WDC). WDC is up around 1.68% in premarket trading and about 422% year-over-year (YOY).
Micron, another manufacturer, is up about 283% YOY. Sandisk and Macron have both benefited tremendously from this years global memory chip shortage. They have AI companies to thank for the extreme demandand subsequent shortagethat makes these companies products extremely valuable and their respective shares skyrocket.
As Big Tech faces criticism for the environmental impact of artificial intelligence, companies have said the technology will actually help solve climate change.
But those claims often lack scientific evidence, a new report finds. And when touting the climate benefits of AI, tech companies conflate traditional AI with the more environmentally harmful generative AI, a form of bait-and-switch that amounts to greenwashing.
The report, commissioned by a group of environmental organizations including Beyond Fossil Fuels, Friends of the Earth, and Stand.earth, analyzed 154 statements from tech companies, including those from Google and Microsoft, which purported that AI will have a net climate benefit.
Most of those comments relate to traditional AI, the analysis found, which has a smaller environmental footprint than the generative AI tools that are spurring a boom in data centers.
Tech companies, however, tend to lump these technologies together, the report says, blurring the differences and presenting the climate benefits and environmental harms as a “package deal.
But whether those climate benefits are real is also unclear. Only 26% of those statements cite published academic papers, the research found, and 36% dont cite any evidence at all.
Of the remaining statements, 29% cited corporate publicationsthe majority of which did not include peer-reviewed or published academic workand 8% cited media, NGOs, or unpublished academic papers.
Questionable AI evidence
The rapid expansion of AI has come under fire for its potential environmental harms. Reports on generative AIs climate impact vary, but the tech has been linked to intense energy and water use.
Tech companies have justified their AI expansion by pointing to AIs climate benefits. One of the most widespread claims is that AI could help mitigate 5% to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
Google has repeated that statistic, including in its 2024 environmental report. That figure, however, comes from a 2021 blog post by consulting firm BCG which attributes it to the firm’s own experience with clients.
This questionable extrapolation of massive global climate benefits justified on seemingly anecdotal evidence was the first clear instance of what has become a longer-term trend of overstating the climate benefits of AI, the report reads.
In reality, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects total data center consumption, driven by AI, will double by 2030and Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that this increase will grow total global power sector emissions by 10% over the coming decade.
In another example, Googles 2025 environmental report said that rooftop solar power installations assisted by an AI mapping tool would help enable partners to reduce around 6 million metric tons of lifetime GHG emissions.
Google also said that figure would be “around 6,000 times greater” than the service’s operation in 2024.
But the Beyond Fossil Fuels report says that Google’s footnotes reveal that the 6 million figure is an estimate of the total emissions avoided by rooftop solar because they produce low-emissions energy, not the additional reductions from the AI mapping tool.
This detail could create the impression, the report notes, that the climate benefits are attributed to the AI tool.
In response to a request for comment, a Google spokesperson told Fast Company that it stood by its methodology, “which is grounded in the best available science. And we are transparent in sharing the principles and methodology that guide it.” (That methodology does not mention AI.)
Microsoft, also cited in the report, declined to comment.
What even counts as ‘AI’?
To many, any mention of AI has become synonymous with generative AIexamples of which include large language models like Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot, and image or video generating services like Midjourney and Sora.
But not all AI is generative. Traditional AI, an umbrella term that covers subsets like machine learning, has been powering all sorts of technology for years, from search engines and recommendation algorithms to medical imaging.
Generative AI consumes more energy and is associated with more emissions than traditional AI. When tech companies talk about AIs climate benefits, though, they can conflate the two terms, or position them like a package deal.
Most AI climate benefits will come from traditional AI, the report found. In its analysis, the researchers said that at no point did they uncover examples in which consumer generative systems were leading to a material, verifiable, and substantial level of emissions reductions.
So climate benefit claims are attributed to traditional AI, but the majority of energy consumption comes from generative AI.
The surge in data center demand is largely driven by the exploding demand for generative AI. Those data centers are also directly spurring more natural gas in the U.S.
The confusion between these terms matters, the report says, because it amounts to a bait-and-switch type of greenwashing: Tech companies are justifying their data center expansion by touting AIs climate benefits, though most of those data centers will not be processing climate-beneficial computation on their servers.
Big Techs AI hype is distracting users from the rapid and dangerous expansion of giant, energy and water-intensive data centers, while the tech industry’s huge energy demands are throwing the fossil fuel industry a lifeline, Jill McArdle, international corporate campaigner from Beyond Fossil Fuels, said in a statement.
There is simply no evidence that AI will help the climate more than it will harm it, she added. We cannot bet the climate on these baseless claims.
Shares of Fiverr International Ltd. (NYSE: FVRR) are dropping significantly this morning after the freelance marketplace platform reported its Q4 2025 financial results.
While the company reported modest revenue growth, its 2026 outlook sent the stock plunging, even as Fiverr executives put a positive spin on the impact of artificial intelligence on its business. Heres what you need to know.
Revenue increases, but outlook sends investors fleeing
On Wednesday morning, Fiverr reported its fourth-quarter 2025 results. And those results, for the most part, were mixed.
The company saw modest growth in total revenue, which rose to $107.2 million in the quartera 3.4% increase from a year earlier. Its revenue actuals fall on the lower end of the $104.3 million to $112.3 million range that the company had projected.
However, once you get past the modest revenue growth, you see that Fiverr disappointed on many other key metrics. For example, its marketplace revenue for the quarter was $71.5 million, which was 2.7% lower than the same quarter a year earlier.
Perhaps more worrying, and looking out across its entire fiscal 2025, Fiverr reported that its annual active buyers as of December 31 totaled 3.1 million.
Thats down from 3.6 million annual active buyers a year earliera decline of half a million buyers, or 13.6% year over year.
Interestingly, though, this 13.6% decline in the number of annual active buyers was offset to a large degree by an increase of 13.3% in annual spend per buyer.
For the 2025 fiscal year, Fiverr says that the average annual buyer spent $342 compared to the average of $302 they spent in the previous year. What this suggests is that while there were fewer buyers in 2025, they spent more on average than they did in 2024.
Yet this mixed bag of results isnt what seems to have sunk Fiverrs stock price this morning.
Instead, the main catalyst for Fiverrs stock price decline seems to be its 2026 guidance. For its current Q1 2026, the company says it expects to make between $100 million and $108 million. That would represent a decline of anywhere from 7% to a modest increase of 1%.
And for all of fiscal 2026, the company says it expects to make between $380 million and $420 million in revenue, which would represent a decline of anywhere between 12% and 3%.
As noted by investing.com, analysts had been expecting Q1 2026 guidance to be around $112.26 million and full-year 2026 guidance to be around $456.80 million. When these expectations werent met, the stock sank. Fiverr shares are currently down nearly 21% in premarket trading as of the time of this writing.
AI uncertainty abounds
Of course, the elephant in the room for Fiverr investors is artificial intelligence. For over a decade and a half, businesses have turned to Fiverr to source freelancers who could help them carry out projects, from design to coding.
But in recent years, those same businesses have begun embracing AI tools for many of those tasks.
This has led many investors (and freelancers who sell services on Fiverr) to ponder the platform’s future in a world where AI tools are increasingly commonplace.
Fiverr itself didnt say if the rise of these AI tools were the reason for its declining Q1 marketplace revenue, but the company did touch on the topic of AI, attempting to put a somewhat positive spin on it.
Address the topic, Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman said that is was clear that we are living through a significant shift in AI adoption, but he argued that this AI adoption would make humans more essential, not less.
By moving toward an agentic economy, where AI helps navigate complexity, we are ensuring that we remain the bridge between businesses and the most exceptional human talent, Kaufman argued. With our expansive global talent network, outcome based hiring model, and depth of proprietary data, Fiverr has a unique right to win in this new age of AI.”
Whether or not AI actually has a positive impact on Fiverrs marketplace remains to be seen. It will likely be one of the main points of focus for Fiverr investors in 2026.
FVRR has had a horrible 2026 so far
As of the time of this writing, FVRR stock is down nearly 21% in premarket trading to $10.79 per share.
As of yesterday, the companys stock price had already fallen more than 33% for the year to $13.10.
Unfortunately, looking back further doesnt help the companys position. Over the past year, FVRR shares have lost more than 60% of their value as of yesterdays close. Last May, the stock was trading at over $33 per share at one point.
During the same 12-month period, the New York Stock Exchange composite index has risen by nearly 6%.
The future looks green for Mikes Red Tacos.
The San Diego-based taco restaurant currently has only two locations, but it has caught the attention of the restaurant investors who made Daves Hot Chicken a scorching success.
This week, the restaurant announced that it has secured franchise development agreements for more than 200 new locations around the country. Mikes Red Tacos was founded as a food truck in 2021 by Mike Touma, followed by a brick-and-mortar location in 2022.
The brand is gaining a fast-growing following on social mediaand now it’s primed for nationwide expansion.
Fast casual with a taco twist
Mikes Red Tacos specializes in birriaa traditional, slow-cooked Mexican stew dish thats typically made from beef, lamb, or goatwhich has exploded in popularity in recent years, largely due to social media trends.
It can now be found, in various forms, on menus at numerous Mexican chains, including Taco Bell, Del Taco, and others.
Mikes Red Tacos is receiving support from early-stage investors and advisors Bill Phelps and Andrew Feghali.
Phelps is executive chairman of Daves Hot Chicken, cofounder of Wetzel’s Pretzels, and a founding investor in Blaze Pizza. He tells Fast Company that very few restaurants catch his eye, but Mikes ticked all the boxes.
I love entrepreneur-started businesses, and guys that have figured things out,” Phelps says. “The product is just amazing. Its so good, its like a breakthrough within a category.”
He adds that in the strata of Mexican chains, Mikes sits in the fast-casual lane, closer to a chain like Chipotle, rather than a fast-food chain like Taco Bell.
Weve learned over the years how to do the model for a fast-casual rollout in the franchise world, so we were able to put a team together very quickly of people we worked with before.
‘There’s a lot of competition’
Phelps says that he first walked into a Mikes Red Tacos around a year ago, and immediately saw the potential. Thats a relatively rare occurrence.
Its been once every five years we see something that looks really great and then we go for it, Phelps says. We like founder-created businesses that have incredible quality, but dont know how to scale themthats what we bring to the party. We make a deal that is great for the founder and for us (investors).
He knows success isnt guaranteed, of course.
You need to leave your ego at the door,” he says. “Theres a lot of competition. A lot of work to do. You need to work your ass off.
A lot of that work will fall on Vincent Montanelli, a seasoned industry executive, who was named the companys president. Previously, he held various leadership roles at Wetzels Pretzels.
All told, the 200 or so Mikes Red Tacos locations will be spread across 25 markets around the country, including Seattle, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Austin, Dallas, Chicago, Miami, Boston, and other locations around Southern California.
The first new location is expected to open in San Diego in March, with a new, corporate-run location opening in Pasadena later this spring.
Corey duBrowa spent much of his career advising some of the worlds most scrutinized leadersfrom Marc Benioff at Salesforce to Sundar Pichai at Google. Now, as CEO of global communications firm Burson, hes helping executives navigate a charged marketplace shaped by AI disruption, ICE activity, and nonstop reputational risk. He explains why reputation remains one of the most powerful (and most misunderstood) assets in business, and how leaders should decide whether, when, and how to speak up.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scalepodcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
You and I have talked privately in recent months about how hard it is in this environment for brands and leaders to figure out what to say, where the risks are, and where the opportunities are when so much seems like it’s up in the air. Is that what you’re hearing from your clients? They’re asking, looking, or trying to find that clarity?
100%, Bob. We’re in year two of Trump’s second presidency. And so, there’s renewed protectionism. Certainly, tariffs are one aspect of this. Deregulation, the America First Trade Policy. And so, helping companies to navigate these shifting priorities, and be thinking about global trade, and, frankly, regulatory uncertainty, that’s one thing.
There’s been a global shift to the right. There’s a conservative resurgence across Japan, France, Germany, U.K., to name but a few. Helping clients to be able to navigate that volatility, that societal polarization that everybody is dealing with. . . . We, in this country, because we pay attention to our own news, we’ll be focused on things like Minnesota, but you could also point to Iran, Gen Z-led protests across Asia, budget protests in Bulgaria, which were huge, and probably not on most people’s radar here.
So, guiding clients through social listening and activist engagement, and brand neutrality. How do you stand for things without necessarily putting yourself in the line of fire? Like, that’s a thing. There’s the global AI governance race. There’s competing rules about how to shape AI’s futures. It was so fascinating, to me, to watch Google, of all companies, a company that has never really lacked for resources, go into the bond market, and raise more than $30 billion worth of 100-year debt. That’s a whole new thing.
Yes.
Because AI is expensive. And so, how that’s governed and the way that investments work in that world is a whole separate thing. There’s erosion of trust in traditional media. The Washington Post, you and I both have friends at The Post.
Yes.
A third of their staff is gone . . . at the same time that only 28% of U.S. adults trust mainstream media. . . . This was the Gallup poll that came out last year. That number was in the 70s in the 70s72% in 1972.
Even the entities that are financially solvent, people have very strong feelings about.
Absolutely. And what we’re observing more and more, Bob, I, certainly, saw it at Davos, and I saw it again with the Super Bowl, 4 in 10 U.S. adults, according to that same Gallup poll, get their news from digital influencers. And I’m not saying influencers are fake news at all. Many of them, frankly, come from the world of traditional media.
But the fact that the trust is so upside down now where you have fewer than one in three Americans saying they trust traditional media forms, you realize that company-owned media channels and storytelling are becoming more important than they ever have been.
Clients have to navigate all of this at the same time that they’re thinking about things like the erosion of institutional credibility, their own institutions, not necessarily conferring confidence in the AI. For all the advantages that it has, it actually amplifies mis and disinformation at scale.
I think there’s a lot for clients to wrap their heads around, and that’s the job that we have is helping them to navigate a very confusing, and, frankly, pretty fragmented landscape.
As you go through all of these disruptions and changes, in some ways, it’s a great time to be in the business you’re in, because you’re needed more, and the stakes have never been higher. But at the same time, the pressure’s also never been higher. Right? There is more that is at risk based on the way you communicate than it ever has been before.
That’s totally true. For 15 years as a client, I had boards and C-suites asking me like, “Hey, if this thing goes really sideways, what does it cost us?” Or, “If this thing goes really well, this initiative, what’s the upside for us?” And so, we, at Davos, launched a study that proves that corporate reputation actually has quantifiable value, that companies with strong reputations realized almost 5%, 4.78% unexpected additional shareholder returns creating a reputation economy that’s worth almost $7 trillion. The stakes are a lot higher. We knew they were a lot higher, but now we can actually affix a value to those stakes.
What defines a strong reputation in this environment?
For years, I think we have been told, or it was received wisdom that there was this binary relationship of trust. Like, to be trusted or not trusted. And what I always knew is that reputation was actually comprised of different things. There’s a lab within the University of Oxford that helped us to develop this model. It takes into account eight different levers that comprise modern reputation.
Citizenship, the degree of good that a company may or may not do in the world, but also creativity. How creative are your solutions? Governance, the structures and policies and integrity that help the company to be managed. Innovation, how forward-thinking are you? What new technologies or ideas are you putting forth? Leadership, how you manage at scale, the way that you navigate things. Performance, the financial results. Products, the quality, reliability, and perception of your products.
And maybe more importantly, although I’m not sure it gets the play that it should, workplace. The culture, the well-being of your employees, the way that you manage talent.
So, if you think about how companies manage these eight levers, it’s pretty bespoke. Right? Like, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all model. . . . Like, the way Starbucks would have thought about these eight levers would be pretty profoundly different than the way that Google would think about those eight levers.
The lens of this research was around financial impact. But do business leaders have responsibility to think beyond just financial impact? Is there a connection between reputation and courage?
Every company has the opportunity, and, frankly, responsibility to think about among these eight levers how they show up. Right? It’s your citizenship, how creative or innovative you are, the products or services you put out in the marketplace. You, as a company, have to determine what is your unique value that you can offer in that space, and the extent to which you really choose to pull that lever hard or don’t pull that lever hard.
Because citizenship is one of these eight levers, I think all companies have both an opportunity to think about that, and also some risks attached to that. They have to think about, Are we picking a side? A political side. Or, Are we doing something that may really please our employees, but for our customer base it may be a different thing?
This gets into the whole realm of stakeholder management, the way you start to think about how the actions that you take . . . Because you only really get to communicate, Bob, after you’ve taken action. Your actions give you the hall pass to communicate, and those actions . . . sure, they can very well be related to things like corporate citizenship out in the world, but you have to be mindful of the way that people are receiving things.
The way that we did things at Starbucks back in the mid 2010s, in a different political environment with a different administration, would be received I suspect in a very different way in this administration, in this year of our Lord 2026, compared to what we did then.
Choosing to do exactly the same things. And you might not necessarily choose to do them the same way, because of that environment.
Exactly. Or you might choose to communicate about them in a different way. Context matters. Right? I think you have to start thinking about things like context and the actions in that context before you’re thinking about message. The message is almost the last thing that you’re thinking about.
If youre tuning in to the Milan Cortina Olympics, you may be one of many spectators whos suddenly invested in the sport of curling. Youre in good company: Swedish designer Gustaf Westman, best known for his chunky homeware, has become so fascinated by the event that he used it as inspiration for his latest design.
Curling centers on an object called a curling stone. Using its gooseneck handle, competitors slide the round, 44-pound stone down an ice shuffleboard toward a target zone. Westmans curling bowl, which he debuted on Instagram on February 10, reimagines the object as a snack bowl. The stones handle has been cleverly converted into the perfect slot for a glass of wine, or whatever beverage suits the moment, while its round base has been repurposed into a vessel for chips, crackers, and popcorn. The bowl is not listed for sale on Westman’s website at the time of this writing.
Iconic Olympics-related objects like the ceremonial torch, cauldron, and medals may receive the most attention at the Games, but Westmans new bowl gives the curling stone the flowers its owed.
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Designing the curling bowl
Before Westman reimagined the curling stone as a receptacle for popcorn and charcuterie, it was already one of the most interesting pieces of sports gear at the Winter Olympics.
Since 2006, every single stone thats been thrown at the Games has been manufactured at one factory on the Scottish island of Ailsa Craig. Thats because the islands microgranite is formed by fast-cooling magma, which makes it ultra dense and hardperfectly suited for slamming into other curling stones at speed. Every stone is shaped, weighted, and polished to enable it to slide across the ice like butter, essentially making each a very precisely engineered work of art.
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Like his other designs (see Westmans whimsical collection for Ikea and puzzle-inspired shelf, for example), the bowl is pleasantly chunky, rounded, and colorful. In place of the stones usual handle is a two-pronged appendage that allows a beverage to hover directly over a spot for snacks. Overall, the bowl leans more toward artistic than performance-driven, but it does take after the real thing in one key way: It can slide.
In a video posted to his Instagram, Westman tested out his design at what appears to be a local rink, sending it shooting down the ice with potato chips, wine, and several bunches of grapes on board. At home, spectators might use this function to pass hors d’oeuvres down the table while enjoying the Games.
“I love being present and commenting on the time we are living in with my design,” Westman told Dezeen. “I also think humor has a big place in designthis is a great example of that for me.
For consumer packaged goods, the path from product idea to store shelves runs directly through the center of Unilever‘s new North American headquarters, and not just because the company makes market-saturating products like Hellmann’s mayonnaise and TRESemmé shampoo. This new headquarters space was designed specifically to put the entire process of product creation on display in its office, from ideation to development to marketing to retailing.
Spread across 111,000 square feet in downtown Hoboken, New Jersey, Unilever’s newly opened headquarters is centered around an accessible spine of rooms and facilities that are optimized for bringing new products to market. There are “innovation labs” where ideas for new products come to life, workstations where ideas can take shape, a test kitchen and salon where products get sampled and refined, and a retail lab where the company and its retail partners can see the products as they’ll look on store shelves.
“We want people to walk in and just immediately know what it is we stand for and what it is we do,” says Nathaniel Barney, Unilever’s global head of workplace services, travel, and fleet. “Not just to see it on the walls, because images come and go, but actually to feel it in the design.”
[Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will]
Unilever’s new headquarters is about a third of the size of the company’s previous suburban campus, 12 miles north in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The smaller size prioritizes the collaboration required to develop its wide range of consumer products across personal care, beauty and wellbeing, foods, and home care. In the post-pandemic context, it’s also a recognition that the company didn’t actually need its big suburban footprint, according to Herrish Patel, president of Unilever USA. “When you’re like we are, now three days a week [in the office], actually those three days are all about connection, creativity, collaboration,” he says. “That’s why this design was built for the future.”
Bringing Unilver’s products to life
Unilever worked with the architecture firm Perkins & Will to design the space, centering its most collaborative product development functions in a spine that connects the entire office. Accessible by anyone passing by or taking a meeting in a nearby private room or sitting aside one of the picture windows with wide angle views across the Hudson River to Lower Manhattan, the product development spine is meant to draw in peopleand ideasfrom across the company.
[Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will]
One easy draw, especially for a company in the food business, is the flavor-wafting test kitchen. “It’s the first thing you see when you walk into the space,” says Mariana Giraldo, design principal at Perkins and Will’s New York studio. “Right behind reception, there are two windows into the kitchen, so there’s no way you can miss it.”
Employees get a chance to see new foods and flavors being developed live, and also get a chance to taste products that may be coming to market years down the line. The test kitchen is also part of the product pipeline, where new ideas get piloted and refined.
[Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will]
Down the spine, “innovation labs” are intended to be blank spaces where those ideas can be born. Intentionally open and flexible in their furnishings and equipment, the labs leave themselves open to interpretation and reconfiguration.
[Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will]
For products farther along in the product development timeline, there are spaces with a higher gloss and purpose, including the test kitchen and a fully equipped salon. Both can be used for research and development as products take shape, but also for marketing purposes when products are heading to shelves. Each doubles as a stage set.
[Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will]
Beyond serving the product development process, these spaces are meant to attract employees and encourage more engagement with the creative side of the business. Giraldo says the design team approached these spaces as amenities within the workplace.
“Here, the amenities didn’t have the purpose of just being amenities for the for the sake of it, but really being amenities that connected back to the product, and that connected back to exactly the work being developed here,” she says.
Shrinking desk space
Product development also relies on heads-down and desk-centric tasks, so there are regular workstations and meeting areas in Unilever’s headquarters. But even these are shaped by the company’s focus on collaboration. Barney says that the new office carved out much more space for one-on-one meetings and smaller group interactions, and ditched formal conference rooms for large spaces that could expand or contract to host larger groups and events. (The test kitchen, for one, opens out to a common area, making it easy to integrate into an all-hands meeting or a large-scale taste test.)
[Photos: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will]
“Today we need probably two times the number of small rooms to what we had five or six years ago,” Barney says. “What we see a huge need for is places where we can have groups of 35 to 50 people come together and then have another 20 to 30 people on screen, if not more . . . We had to create spaces that were designed around a very different set of criteria.”
[Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will]
While Unilever’s headquarters was designed to create products and, by extension, profits, there’s an emphasis on informality across the space. That’s tied to an ethos Patel says is integral to the company’s culture. “We wanted to create a space and a location where our organization would love wasting time with each other,” he says. “We believe wasting time together is when culture blossoms. That’s when you get to know the person, you get to know what’s going on in their lives. There’s so much more than just work.”
[Photo: courtesy Unilever/Perkins & Will]
If that time wasting among employees leads to an idea for a new body wash concept or mayo recipe, all the better. They won’t have to go far to start turning those ideas into the products of the future.
Ill admit it: I still secretly prefer cooking on a gas stove despite knowing that Im breathing in benzene and adding to methane emissions. What can I say, I like the tactile control of an open flame.
But recently I tested an induction range that made my gas stove seem antiquated. Charlie, from the Bay Area-based startup Copper, offers a high-end range that can do everything I expect from my current stoveand more. The appliance, which started to roll out nationally last year, has been called “the Tesla of induction stoves” by The New York Times and lauded by chefs including Christopher Kimball. I wanted to try it out as a home cook with only basic skills.
[Photo: Copper Home]
An oven thats 30x more accurate
Like most electric ovens, Charlie’s performs better than its gas counterparts. But it also surpasses the typical electric version. It preheats to 350 degrees in about four minutes, thanks in part to a large battery hidden at the base of the stove. (More on the battery later.)
I tried baking some cookies, which browned up perfectly, and then turned the heat down to 80 degrees to test another unique feature: The oven can hold a steady low temperature, making it possible to proof bread or pastry quickly when needed.
Gas ovens tend to cycle heat more aggressively, and even the pilot light alone can push temperatures too high. Standard electric ovens are better, but also cant reliably keep the temperature low enough. Id brought along some chocolate croissants and tried proofing them; the oven worked like a professional proofing drawer, which meant not having to wonder how the temperature and humidity in the kitchen would affect the rise of the dough.
[Photo: Copper Home]
The oven is incredibly precise. Most ovens fluctuate as much as 30 degrees above or below the set temperature. But incorporating a battery enables Coppers Charlie to use more sophisticated controls, including modern temperature sensors and actuators. Thanks to a recent firmware update, Charlies temperature varies no more than a single degree. Put another way, its 30 times more accurate than a typical oven.
The seesawing temperatures in other ovens lead to baked goods with burnt edges, soggy bottoms, or mushy middles. The software updatedubbed Soufflé after the notoriously finicky dish it was designed to mastermakes Charlies baking capability even more consistent. Sure, it might take away some entertainment: Would you watch the Great British Baking Show without the suspense of unpredictable results? But in real life, its the kind of tool that actually makes me want to bake more often.
[Photo: Copper Home]
The cooktop is intuitive and more precise than gas
Unlike some other induction stoves, the cooktop is easy enough to use without turning to the instruction manual. It has knobs, like a traditional range, rather than a touchscreen. When you turn one of the knobs, a display shows how hot the burner is. On the cooktop, to stand in for the visual cue of a gas flame, a bar of lights shows whether youve cranked up the heat a little or a lot.
Like other induction stoves, it can boil water incredibly quickly. (The battery gives an extra boost: A pot of 8 ounces of water boils in 4 minutes and 10 seconds.) It can also precisely control temperature. I tried melting chocolate in a pan, something that would normally be a more complicated process with a double boiler on a regular stove, and the steady low temperature helped it melt evenly.
Though I didnt try making dinner, the stove seems more than capable of handling anything I might normally prepare. It’s possible, for example, to crank up the heat and stir-fry something in a flat-bottomed wok, as Copper has demonstrated in previous tests; despite the lack of flames, the pan can get hot enough to char noodles for a dish like pad see ew.
[Photo: Copper Home]
Why theres a battery inside
Some induction stoves have an annoying buzz, caused by pulsing AC power from the outlet that creates vibrations that are especially noticeable in tri-ply pans with multiple different kinds of metl. The Charlie stove, by contrast, is remarkably quiet, thanks to its battery.
That battery, with 5 gigawatt-hours of energy storage, also means the stove can keep running for days even if the power goes out in a storm (notably, most modern gas stoves wont work if the electricity goes out, since they use electric ignition and electric safety valves). The battery also has other advantages that I didnt get to test. First, it means the stove doesnt require expensive electrical upgrades, something thats necessary with most other powerful induction stoves. The stove needs a large boost of power when it starts, but it can pull that from the battery.
Because the battery can charge when power is cheapestfor example, in the middle of the day in California, when the grid has extra solar powerit can help keep customers bills lower. As the network of appliances grows, they form a virtual power plant that can also help the grid itself. A distributed network of batteries in appliances is easier to deploy than larger utility-scale batteries. Copper is now beginning to work with some large manufacturers to design other types of appliances, like heat pumps, that can also add more energy storage to the grid.
[Photo: Copper Home]
The range is expensive, at around $6,000. But because of the energy and climate benefits, a number of states provide generous incentives. In California, for example, if a homeowner with a gas stove replaces it with Coppers stove, and if the stove was the last gas appliance in the home, they can get a rebate that will cover the entire cost.
Some of the first customers include large apartment buildings that want to make the switch away from gas. The New York City Housing Authority is an early adopter, recognizing that the stoves are a way to avoid expensive upgrades to its aging gas infrastructure, to comply with local emission laws, and to improve air quality for residents.
It’s a rare case of premium tech scaling up from multiple directions, adopted as much for infrastructure pragmatism as for performance. Whether it’s for public housing or a high-end kitchen, the pitch is the same: cleaner air, better performance, and a new way to support the strained electric grid.
