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Child psychologists tell us that around the age of five or six, children begin to seriously contemplate the world around them. Its a glorious moment every parent recognizeswhen young minds start to grasp the magnificence and mystery of the universe beyond their nurseries and bedrooms. That wondermenttheir very own aha” moments, and the questions they provokeare what truly make us human. And this summer, thanks to both the scientific triumphs of astronomers and the creative feats of pop culture, we are reminded once again that curiosity is our most powerful gift. Remarkably, the profound questions asked by our youngest philosophers continue to echo throughout our lives, returning again and again as the most compelling of all inquiries. Definitely discoverable, possibly livable Earlier this summer, the James Webb Space Telescopelaunched in 2021 and continually gathering data on planets beyond our solar systemidentified a previously unknown exoplanet. What made this discovery particularly groundbreaking is that, unlike earlier exoplanets detected indirectly by observing the dimming of starlight, this one was directly imaged. Even more exciting: according to NASA, this new exoplanetnamed CE Antliae and roughly 100 times the size of Earthis, based on its average temperature, theoretically capable of sustaining habitable life. I find this moment thrilling for many reasons. First, I hold the deepest admiration for the brilliance of NASA scientistsand the researchers whose work they built uponthat made this discovery possible. Second, it serves as a powerful reminder of the essential role government plays in pushing the boundaries of knowledge. These physical frontiers also invite us to explore existential ones. The possibility of a habitable planet offers a momentary escape from the noise of the daily news cycle, and reopens a question that has captivated us since ancient times: Are we alone? Simply looking up at the night skya universal giftplaces us in the company of Democritus, Epicurus, and later, the Persians, who speculated about extraterrestrial life as far back as 400 BCE. Its one of humanitys oldest questions, fueled by an innate curiosity that rarely yields immediate answers. Science has its own schedule Of course, were far from confirming whether this exoplanet has its own version of Uber or inhabitants with built-in AI. Science operates on its own timeline. To have directly observed an exoplanet only five years after Webbs launch could be seen as astonishingly fastor perhaps not, given the advanced tools now at our disposal, from machine learning to quantum computing. In todays attention economy, dominated by thumb-scrolling and short-form content, we risk losing sight of the long view that science requires. The rise of generative AI and its future successor, AGI, may well disrupt the pace of discovery. But even then, the scientific process will still demand patience and rigor. We must remember: it took nearly a century to confirm Einsteins theory of gravitational waves. The theory of continental drift was proposed in 1912, but not proven until the 1960s. Black holes were hypothesized in the early 1900s, yet the first image didnt arrive until 2019. One of the many reasons I advocate so strongly for STEM education is that children need to understand science as a processa patient, layered accumulation of insight. Humanitys oldest questionare we alone in the universe?likely wont be answered quickly. And even if it is, critical thinking and the scientific method remain essential. Yes, flashes of insight can transform history. But even those leaps must launch from a foundation of conventional wisdom. Science is a continuous journey of discoveryboth awe-inspiring and, at times, unsettling. Pop culture meets the whats out there question Movies and literature have long reflected our obsession with the unknownfrom 2001: A Space Odyssey and Contact to Dune. This summer, Alien: Earth premieres. Reading about this reimagining of first contact, I couldnt help but think of CE Antliae and how science and art intersect. The discovery of a potentially habitable planet pushes us to reconsider what we define as science fiction. There are many paths through which humanity seeks to understand its place in the universe. And we need both our most gifted scientists and our most imaginative artists to help us askand keep askingthe cosmic questions that first stirred our six-year-old minds and have never let go.
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E-Commerce
Its not just youwork kind of stinks right now. If youre struggling to get something done because too many people were involved, getting hung up by emotion and conflict in your workplace, or just swaying under the weight of too many tasks in one day . . . congratulations! Youre experiencing work intensificationthe gnarliest trend we dont talk about enough. Researchers in Europe have been looking at this phenomenon for many years. They pin it down to three things happening, often all at once. First, workloads are simply too heavytoo many tasks in too little time. Every job has a version of this. You might be invited to too many meetings or asked to pack too many warehouse pallets in an hour. Second, work is too interdependentit takes too many people to get any given task done. When Jamie Dimon famously complained about a single decision needing 14 committees for approval, interdependence was the issue. Third, workplaces have become emotionally challenging. For example, since COVID-19, rudeness toward frontline workers has increasedand folks are feeling it. To better understand how this issue was affecting workplaces, in April 2025 consulting firm Anthrome Insight partnered with Patrick Hyland, an organizational psychologist. We surveyed 1,000 workers ranging from entry-level employees to the C-Suite levels in five different industries. Our findings were striking. A quarter of respondents always or often felt overwhelmed and half felt overwhelmed at least some of the time. Over half (62%) were experiencing task overload. Over a quarter were getting whacked by bureaucracy and a lack of priorities. Almost a third were dealing with angry coworkers, bosses, and/or customers. The damaging effects of work intensification For employees work intensification drives burnout and negatively affects mental health. It may even be driving the record levels of executive turnover were seeing in the CEO and CFO roles. Work intensification can also impact productivity. On the surface, this seems a bit counterintuitive. Do more tasks, get more done, more productivity, right? Its the middle part of that sentence where things break down. Doing more tasks does not mean getting more done. First off: the tasks may be a bad idea to do in the first place. In an era when we spend up to 60% of our time on work about work (communication and coordination around what were actually trying to get done), our time is being wasted by some of the tasks we undertake. If work has intensified due to work about work, then were just consuming more empty work calories, and not engaging in healthy productivity. Work intensification also comes from a collapse of prioritizationand there too, productivity erodes fast. As the saying goes, when everythings important, nothings important. When too many tasks are coming through too quickly, the important ones are bound to get lost. Humans get cognitively overloaded. For instance, we struggle to remember lists longer than seven items in our heads (which is why American phone numbers are seven digits long). If you have 14 prioritiesall emphasizedyour brain is going to tap out. And it might tap out on the wrong task. Look at the other two dimensions of work intensificationexcess interdependence and highly emotional working conditionsand the productivity consequences become even clearer. No one ever made an organization more productive by making processes more complicated. We may also have some cultural myths from the startup world (or honestly movies) that workplaces where passionate bosses scream and pour their hearts out are more productive. Actually all that running around yelling just eats up even more cognitive space for the unlucky folks being yelled at. Ruminationwhere your brain cant stop going over a traumatic event over and overis a well-documented impact of bad emotional interactions at work. As one study found, rumination from unpleasantness at work can not only affect the sleep of employees, but of their partners too. All that yelling is not positioning anyone to work effectively. What to do bout work intensification Work intensification can seem daunting, but there are concrete strategies to combat it. At an individual level, this might mean more active conversations with leadership about your workload to hone in on whats crucial. It might mean politely opting out of overly complex processes when possible, or lessening your involvement with those processes. It might mean setting up some firewalls in between yourself and highly emotional situationsor having strategies to manage the ones you cant avoid. For example, its okay to not volunteer to mediate arguments at work, even if this is something you are capable of doing. You can ask meeting participants embroiled in a conflict to take it offline and not make the rest of the group spectators to an emotional exchange. Teams can tackle work intensification, too. Regular and clear conversations about roles, responsibilities, and whats actually on everyones plate can help mitigate overwork, process complexity, and even emotionally charged interactions. Discussing priorities is good work about worknot wasted time. Its okay to take a negative angleunderstanding the essence of strategy is what you dont do. If teams have a clear view on whats not worth doing and who doesnt need to be involved, work intensification can be reduced. Finally, organizations can combat work intensification with the right mindset shift. Start with the principles that not all work is good work, not everyone has to touch everything, and not everything has to be an emotional crisis, and a number of different decisions logically follow. We are plagued by bad myths: that overwork is to be cherished, that collaboration means everyone in the same room all the time, and that extreme emotions fuel extreme results. Once we understand that these behaviors dont really drive the right outcomesand in fact the opposite behaviors are actually more productivea whole new array of possibilities open up. As our research showed, simply being aware of the three components (excess tasks, excess interdependence, and excess emotion) and passionately combatting them makes one 119% more likely to feel highly effective. In other words, if you know exactly how work is breaking down, and you actively fight back . . . youre making real progress.
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E-Commerce
During Januarys unprecedented wildfires in Los Angeles, Watch Dutya digital platform providing real-time fire databecame the go-to app for tracking the unfolding disaster and is credited with saving countless lives. Six months out from the fires, Watch Dutys founder and CEO, John Mills, shares how his small nonprofit responded in the heat of the crisis and became a trusted sourceeven for government agencies. As wildfire season rages on and Texas recovers from devastating floods, Watch Dutys story underscores both our growing vulnerability to natural disasters driven by climate change and the power of community-based solutions to keep us safe and connected when it matters most. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, 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. As I understand it, Watch Duty is a nonprofit and it’s an app that gathers information largely from volunteers, right? From regular people who are monitoring fires? It’s like a community? Very much so. You can look at Reddit and Wikipedia in a similar way. The difference is, we do it live. We have about 200 volunteers, about 20 paid staff, about 10 of those are radio operators themselves. But the information really comes from fire service radio. So after going through a couple of disasters, you realize that there’s not a Starlink in every truck. The communication systems aren’t very good. The firefighters are in danger, and the only way to hear what’s actually going on is through them collaborating with each other in real time, through the radio. And so we hear: “Fire starting here, burning over this ridge. Tankers and dozers are coming. Holding the line to Highway 87. Now the wind’s picking up, the fire’s spotting over the ridge. It’s burning over so-and-so, houses are being impacted.” You hear this live. There is no data source for this. There’s not a place for this to happen without us. So that’s how we do what we do. And this community of volunteers, are they fire workers? Or are some of them just watching and sharing what they’re seeing? A lot of them were 30-, 40-year wildland firefighters, dispatchers, reporter types, sons and daughters of firefighters who grew up in the fire service with the radio chatting in the background. So it sounds like there was a community that was there that you tapped into. I understand you had to persuade them a little bit to see you as more than just a tech guy. That’s the beauty of this. We just saw the human behavior and helped enable them to do it better. One of the fires I went through, which was one of the big ones in 2020, when the sky turned red up in Northern California, I was watching them on Facebook and Twitter already doing this. So they were kind of regionalized. There was someone in Red Bluff, someone in Redding, someone in SoCal, someone in Sonoma, Napa. They were independently doing this. They knew each other. They would talk and collaborate a little bit, but they wouldn’t organize together. They weren’t adversarial, they just didn’t spend time really collaborating. The innovation was really [to] convince them all to work togetherthat I was not [just] a techie. That I lived here, like them, in the same danger that they did. The key was to convince them that I’m here to help. I’m part of this community. I’m not sitting in my laboratory in Silicon Valley trying to profiteer off of your disaster. And the information that they’re sharing, the app puts it into a more usable form or a more accessible form? Yeah, it’s a great question. We didn’t change their behavior. They were always listening to radios and speaking the language of the fire service and putting it on Facebook and Twitter. What happens behind the scenes is actually a lot more data. There’s a lot of signals coming in, and a lot of it is very tactical and minor, and we don’t want that to go out on Watch Duty. And so they’re collaborating in Slack. They’re all talking and listening. It’s very rare where there’s one person running an incident. There are many people in real time content editing: 15 acres heading north-northwest. Was it 50 or 15? Oh shoot, let’s wait for the next transmission, air attack’s about to be overhead.” “We’re going to get a size-up on the fire.” Then we deploy the information on Watch Duty. So in real time, they’re collaborating. Someone has the con, or control, and that person’s essentially incident commander. So of the folks who are on duty or running the event at that time, some of them may be volunteers and some of them may be your staff people? Yeah, it’s a mixed bag. Like many nonprofits, there’s paid staff and then there’s volunteers. And a lot of our volunteers are now either changing careers or having a second career, because first, they contribute and they listen, and then they start to report, and then they become a staff reporter or a regional captain in the area and help run and collaborate certain parts of a state or a region. And then many of them actually become full-time employees. During the fires I saw that Watch Duty passed ChatGPT as the No. 1 downloaded app. The traffic must have really caught you by surprise, just like the fire did. Yeah, it did. Here’s the sad part: We’ve been the No. 1 app in the App Store three times. This time was the worst, by far. Yeah, I mean, L.A.s own emergency alert system, there was one, but it was buggy. It was sending false alerts. So it wasn’t just L.A. residents that were using Watch Duty, right? It was government officials and firefighters and the helicopter pilots. Everybody seemed to be on it. Yes, the government also uses Watch Duty. We’re on all the big screens and all the emergency operation centers. We’ve done something that others haven’t been able to crack, and it’s a usable format. So whether you’re a little old lady or a hose dragger or a brush bunny, as firefighters refer to themselves as in the wildlands, they all use it and it’s done something that we didn’t see coming. We assumed that the government had all that information and they just weren’t telling us, not out of malice, but they’re busy, they’re trying to fight the fire. It’s very granular, the information we share, and then quickly we realize that we’re getting emails from tanker pilots and dozer operators and others telling us that we give them more information than overhead gives them. And that’s when we really realized this is a much bigger company than we ever thought possible. It’s strange. Is Watch Duty’s success, I don’t know, an example of te government’s failure or the failure of tax-funded technology? Or was there just no investment in this? Yeah, look, I mean, we work so closely with a lot of these government organizations and there’s failure abound. It’s everywhere. It’s how we voted as individuals. It’s the other software vendors who were selling lackluster products. It’s the government having no other options. There are so many points of failure here. It just really compounded that day and it was very apparent how necessary we were. It’s hard to just point blame at one person or one org. I know that’s what everybody wants is they want to blame the boogeyman so we can go fix it. And it’s not just climate change, it’s bad forest management. It’s like there’s so many things that are all working against us here. It’s making this problem extraordinarily bad.
Category:
E-Commerce
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