Fast Company

Nobody who’s remotely familiar with John Wilson’s funny, angsty HBO series How To with John Wilson will be surprised to discover that his debut feature documentary, The History of Concrete, is not really about concrete. Wilson introduces us to a guy who removes tattoos from corpses and mounts the dead inked skin as mementos for loved ones. He interviews a New York park official who details how to purge poops from public swimming pools. When the film touches on the subject of concrete, Wilson quickly pivots to another. He’ll do anything not to dwell on his nominal topic. He never wrestles with concrete’s mass, omnipresence, or effects on the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. The topic is too big for comfort, too demanding of his very modern quick, jump-cutting attention deficits.

If the point is that concrete defies sustained attention, it’s a good one.

Advertently or not, by the end of the film, Wilson reveals two of the most astonishing facts about the world’s most-used material: Concrete is largely unseen, and its invisibility endangers us all. Not because concrete itself is villainous, but because our lazy, distracted, often nonexistent engagement with it invites disaster.

[Photo: Magnolia Pictures] The everywhere material

The world produces 30 billion tons of concrete a year. The same material we rely on to protect us is also a major contributor to the climate crisis. Cement, the chemical binder that is one of concrete’s key ingredients, is tied to 8% of climate-warming carbon emissions, but concrete is essential for seawalls and other structures we will need to forestall damage from climate change. The yearly production of concrete tops all other building materials combined. Most of the world’s new concrete is used outside the U.S. and Europe, in China, India and other countries on the make.  

Wilson interviews some subjects who know their concrete facts. Just as they seem about to offer a bit of gobsmacking concrete information, the film cuts to something else, like the painting of a bubble-butted woman’s rear he spies on the back of a truck. Civilization may not hang on that, but it may fall due to our distraction.  

[Photo: Magnolia Pictures]

In reporting on concrete, I repeatedly meet people in the industry who cannot fathom why most people care so little about the material. In the U.S., construction, nearly all of which happens with concrete, is the fourth-largest sector in the economy. So what? It’s still boring, right? The cool kids don’t hover around concrete guys at parties anxious to hear about advances in concrete that make 167-story buildings possible or how new concrete mixes could absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, not emit it.

“Concrete is (almost) everywhere,” writes Julie Soleil Archambault, an anthropologist at Concordia University in Montreal. “It often passes unnoticed—too ubiquitous, too mundane, to warrant much attention. Sometimes, however, it does quite the opposite, especially when it fails to meet the expectations of durability invested in it, when it cracks and crumbles.”

In one segment, Wilson interviews a former New York City traffic commissioner. It’s “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz (uncredited), who coined the term “gridlock.” He paces under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Brooklyn Heights. Schwartz runs a finger along a “fossil,” an empty groove where some once-formidable rebar rusted out and vanished. Schwartz warns that such conditions cause big structures to collapse. “If something catastrophic happens in this area in the next few years,” he declares, “I wouldn’t be surprised.”  

The American Society of Civil Engineers grades civil infrastructure based on its structural integrity. The biggest concrete things, such as roads, dams and schools, get D+, meaning they are “poor” and “at risk.” It would take around $9 trillion to raise the country to a passable B. By not seeing concrete, we don’t see the vast world of deferred maintenance. Wilson moves on before Schwartz paints the bigger, scarier picture. Who likes to linger on a big and scary picture?

[Photo: Magnolia Pictures] Invisible ubiquity

There is a kind of blindness Wilson doesn’t touch on: concrete’s incalculable benefits. The history of concrete is also the history of modern industrial modernity. Want electricity? Clean water free of disease? Waste and storm water removal that prevents disease? Factories that do not burn down or shake too much? Fireproof schools and hospitals? Road with bridges? Ports? Trains above and subways below? Airports? Networks and data centers for the digital economy? Hardened defenses in battle zones or outside buildings vulnerable to attack? Concrete must get there first. By not seeing the magnitude of concrete, we don’t see the magnitude of the problems concrete successfully addresses. Or the problems it can no longer address if it fails due to negligence.  

Wilson’s detachment serves his narrative purpose in creating an entertaining film. Is his refusal to take concrete seriously frivolous, even negligent? He has said that he often cries over his subjects, meaning he sees more keenly than he lets on. The way concrete pulls the world together, makes the production of modern goods possible, and solves some of the world’s biggest challenges is, if one sees it, awesome to behold. So are its out-of-scale imperfections, most importantly its impact on our climate. That problem is already solvable, if we, as users and inhabitants of this everywhere material see concrete as plainly as we see poop in a pool. For all its arch blindness and distraction, the film may egg us to focus on a material that, like air and water, is all around and in need of care. 

One eventual hazard of really seeing concrete’s imprint everywhere isn’t that you crave distraction but that you can’t shut up about it. Concrete’s history, present and future, is our history, present and future. Post-production, Wilson may be getting there. When Jimmy Kimmel asked him why he focuses on weird stuff so far afield from the actual history of concrete, the filmmaker smiled and contradicted him. With concrete, he said, “you can do anything.”

Recently, I received an email solicitation from a PR company offering to help me promote my book. While I get these kinds of solicitation emails on occasion, this one impressed me with the level of detail it included about both my book and my career. Feeling pleased that someone had done their homework on me, I showed the email to my spouse.

He took one look at it and knew that it was a pitch generated by artificial intelligence. It was clear to him that the sender had asked an AI to craft a personalized pitch after trawling the internet for information about me.

When I received almost identical pitches from four other companies within the next two weeks, I realized the first message was just the vanguard of a new type of spam email.

Although the PR pitch I received wasn’t exactly a scam, it was the kind of solicitation that I usually delete with prejudice. The personalization-via-AI meant it bypassed my usually well-honed bull hockey detector—and it reminded me that there’s no level of intelligence, diligence, or stability that can guarantee someone will never get played. Unfortunately, as technology and scams continue to grow more sophisticated, we are all increasingly vulnerable.

But that doesn’t mean falling for a scam is inevitable. Understanding how modern scams work and recognizing the warning signs can help you avoid becoming the victim of a con. Here’s what you need to know.

New tech, old strategies

Reading through the Federal Trade Commission’s list of new scams is enough to make you nostalgic for the Nigerian prince emails of yore. From fake health insurance websites that proliferate during open enrollment every year to Roblox phishing that targets children to robocalls from AI voice clones that are nearly indistinguishable from the real person, fraudsters have many more tools in their arsenal to separate you from your money.

But even though current technology is more sophisticated than anything scammers had access to before, the strategies behind any fraud remain exactly the same. That’s because in every scam, the con artist needs to convince you that giving them what they want is the right thing to do—and there are only a few ways to accomplish that:

• Personalization: When a scammer seems to know details about your life, it can help them seem more trustworthy. They may use their knowledge to appeal to your vanity (like I experienced with the AI-generated PR pitch), to reassure you (like when a scammer knows who you bank with), or to frighten you (like when con artists pretend to be a family member in trouble).
• Friendliness: Scammers (and salespeople) exploit our manners, sociability, and empathy by using targeted friendliness. For example, back when credit card companies were allowed to market directly to college students, I once accidentally signed up for an unwanted card via a phone solicitation. The caller started by asking to verify some information, including my birthday. He then claimed his little sister had the same birthday. From there, I didn’t want to hang up on the guy who was so delighted that his sister and I had something in common.
• Urgency and scarcity: Feeling like you’re about to miss out on something tends to cloud your judgment. That’s why scams often include a ticking clock or a quickly vanishing product. It forces you to make a decision without considering the pros and cons or consulting with someone else.
• Emotion: Scammers know that emotional decisions tend to be reactive, and they use this against their victims. That’s why scams so often exploit the emotions that are most likely to short-circuit your logical thinking: fear, greed, and empathy.

New technology can make it easier for scammers to reach you and convince you of something that is untrue. But the scam itself must still use these basic strategies to work. Which means we always have the tools we need to protect ourselves.

The anti-scam checklist

Every time you travel by air, the pilot and copilot go through the preflight checklist, no matter how many times they have flown. The checklist ensures that no important details are missed. The safety of the plane and its passengers is too important to rely on the imperfect memory of fallible humans.

The best way to avoid scams is to adopt a similar checklist for your finances. Instead of relying on your imperfect brain to keep you safe, building these guardrails around your money can help protect you from even the most sophisticated of scams:

• Make your savings hard to access: This policy is a version of the old personal finance advice about freezing your credit card in a block of ice. Forcing yourself to wait before spending money is often all you need to come to your senses. So putting the bulk of your savings in an online savings account, rather than the same bank as your checking account, can be enough to protect you. It typically takes at least one business day for money to transfer from one bank account to another, and an online savings account does not usually come with an ATM or debit card. That means your money is available in a true emergency, but far enough away that it’s protected from scam-based spending.
• Have an accountability buddy: This could be an agreement with your spouse to discuss purchases over a certain dollar amount or a policy that you have to run every major financial decision past your financial adviser. If someone ever tells you not to discuss something with your accountability partner, treat that as a major red flag.
• Hang up and call back: Many scams begin with an unsolicited phone call from a legitimate-looking phone number. Make it your policy to hang up on the caller and place your own phone call to the main phone number of the agency or business. If there really is a problem with your credit card or Social Security benefit or if you have legitimately won a prize, you will be able to access that information via the phone call you initiate.
• Institute a 24-hour rule: There is no legitimate investment, financial problem, or government fine that can’t wait 24 hours. Cool off for one day before you make any financial decisions or take any action on an unanticipated problem or unsolicited call for money.
• Have contact information on hand for all of your loved ones: When scammers exploit our fear for our loved ones, it’s very difficult to respond rationally. But if you get a call from an unknown number or a “helpful” stranger claiming to be calling about your child or grandchild, hang up and reach out directly to your family member or anyone living in their household to find out what’s happening. If the original call is legitimate, you can always call back.
• Pretend to be your work nemesis: When scammers appeal to your ego, it’s easy to fall for the idea that this stranger truly appreciates everything that makes you awesome. But if you’re tempted to buy, invest, or otherwise accept the offer, imagine the same offer was going to someone you dislike. Would you still believe that the offer was legitimate? Or would you start asking questions?
• Ask yourself how you know something isn’t a scam: Before making a financial decision, ask yourself how you can know for sure that the opportunity isn’t a scam. If you can’t answer the question, don’t spend the money.

Embrace vigilance

It takes only a single moment of inattention or emotional dysregulation to give a scammer what they want. And the rise of difficult-to-detect fakes and other sophisticated scams makes it even harder to maintain your attention or rational thinking.

But creating systems for yourself—similar to the preflight checklist pilots use before every single flight—makes it more difficult to let your emotions drive and forces you to pause before making a decision. And that space between the scammer’s pitch and your decision is often all you need to stay safe.

Last month, Apple rolled out its long-awaited AI chatbot, dubbed Siri AI. The launch comes at a time when investors see AI as a must-have offering, while consumers are increasingly cautious about the effects that artificial intelligence will have on their lives and society at large.

As AI backlash mounts, it is the latter group who may be the least interested in—or most distrustful of—the new Siri AI. 

Siri AI is built on top of Google’s Gemini foundational models and is available on every iPhone 15 Pro and later running iOS 27. It is an ever-present chatbot and assistant that has indexed all the data on your iPhone and can understand what is displayed on your iPhone’s screen—and what you are doing with the device.

The good news is that if the new Siri AI doesn’t appeal to you, Apple has done something with it that other chatbot giants haven’t: built in a kill switch. Here’s how to use it, and what happens if you do.

What exactly happens if you disable Siri AI?

Before you understand what happens when you disable Siri AI, it helps to know how it differs from Apple Intelligence. 

Simply put, Apple Intelligence is the underlying artificial intelligence platform built into iOS. It provides system-wide AI features, such as generative writing tools, visual object recognition, and image generation across various apps. Siri AI, introduced in iOS 27, is an agent—a chatbot like ChatGPT—powered by and running on top of Apple Intelligence.

Siri AI has on-device access to your emails, messages, and other data, which can help it answer and carry out your highly personalized queries and commands (such as “Find that restaurant name that mom texted me about last month”). It can also pull real-time information from the web, such as stock quotes or news updates. Any conversation you have with Siri AI can be accessed in the new Siri chatbot app.

If you do choose to flip the Siri AI kill switch, you should understand that you aren’t shutting down Apple’s entire Apple Intelligence platform on your iPhone. Apple Intelligence will still be running in the background, which means AI features like generative writing tools, AI photo editing tools, and image generation tools will still work across the OS—and no, you can’t shut these off.

But you can shut off the new Siri AI agent. When you do that, Apple says you will lose the ability to carry out new conversations or continue existing ones with the Siri AI chatbot, though your old conversations will remain in the app. You won’t be able to issue voice commands to Siri (such as “Hey Siri, turn on my bedroom lights”). And the iPhone’s built-in Visual Intelligence feature, which lets your iPhone recognize objects and places in images, will be more limited.

How to use the kill switch

If you want to disable the new Siri AI agent on your iPhone, Apple makes it pretty easy:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap Siri.
3. Tap Turn Off Siri.
4. Tap the blue Turn Off Siri button.

Once you’ve done this, Siri AI will be disabled on your iPhone. However, as noted, Apple Intelligence-powered features, such as those in the Image Playground app, the AI editing tools in the Photos app, and the AI writing tools across myriad apps, will continue to work.

Should you flip the kill switch?

Recently, the internet has been full of headlines about frontier AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta going rogue and hacking into third-party systems. This has, understandably, fueled a distrust of AI and exacerbated “What if AI takes over my device?” fears.

But when it comes to Siri AI going rogue, Apple’s agent is nowhere near as capable as those frontier models. Apple has also sandboxed Siri AI, meaning that you need to explicitly grant it access to various parts of your iPhone, such as individual apps. Without being granted access, Siri AI can’t read or use the data —and if you want to revoke Siri AI’s access to a previously granted app, you can do that by going to Settings > Siri > App Access.

Still, if you have no intention of using Siri AI, there’s little reason to leave the agent enabled. Disabling it might even help you eke out a few more minutes of battery life between charges.

The good news is that disabling Siri AI isn’t permanent. If you’re leery about AI and want it off your iPhone for now (as much as is possible, anyway), you can do that by following the steps above. But if you later decide you want Siri AI back, you can simply return to the Siri settings in the Settings app and tap “Turn On Siri” to get Apple’s new AI agent back up and running.

It’s tough to talk tech without talking about maps. The almighty Maps app has become a core part of day-to-day life for so many of us these days—but for all the helpful features those apps have, there’s one layer they’ve never fully offered.

Today, I want to introduce you to a truly cool tool I encountered that gives you a time-traveling pass to rewind any map in front of you and uncover all the hidden history behind it.

It’s fascinating, eye-opening, and also just a ton of fun to explore.

This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures!

Meet your new Maps time machine

To quote the wise time-traveling philosopher Dr. Emmett Brown: “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”

My friend and fellow navigator, allow me to introduce you to the aptly named Pastmaps​.

➜ Pastmaps is a website that lets you peel back the surface of a city and see what it looked like decades, sometimes even centuries ago—down to the specific street you’re standing on.

⌚ You can start exploring it in as little as a minute or two.

✅ Just pull up Pastmaps in any browser​, on any device you’re using, and type any city name you like into the box in the center of the screen. (For now, Pastmaps is limited to U.S. cities. Hopefully, it’ll expand even further with time.)

Your Pastmaps adventure starts with a simple search.

Select the city you want from the list of suggestions, and Pastmaps will show you a sprawling list of historical maps for that area. 

You’ll see maps from a variety of time periods and historical eras.

Now, just pick the specific map you want to explore, and that’s when the real magic begins: Pastmaps will give you a detailed, interactive view of the city in that era, and you can use the opacity slider at the top of the screen to fade between that past view and a current view of the same area today. 

Sliding between past and current views is one of Pastmaps’s coolest features.

It’s a really interesting way to see how your hometown—or any available city—has evolved over time, whether you’re looking at the street where you live or work or any other location. 

And once you’ve peeled back those layers and uncovered history’s hidden terrain, you’ll never look at your modern-day navigation the same way again. 

• Pastmaps is completely web-based​, with no downloads or installations required.
• It’s free to use for an unspecified “limited” number of maps per week. If you really get into it and want unlimited access and other advanced tools, you can pay a dollar a week (annually) for full access—but for most casual use, the free plan will be more than enough.
• The site doesn’t require any sign-ins or personal info for its standard free access.

Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletter—starting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app that’ll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.

Imagine watching a political campaign video in which a candidate admits to taking a bribe. You recognize the face and voice. But the confession is entirely fabricated, thanks to artificial intelligence.

Now imagine that your state has passed a law against these AI-generated election deepfakes. Would that mean the video has to be removed from the airwaves?

In its June 2026 report, the National Conference of State Legislatures counted 31 states with election deepfake laws. California and Texas enacted their first election-deepfake laws in 2019, but most states adopted theirs in 2024 or later. Among the 31 states, 28 required disclosures. The other three—Maryland, Minnesota, and Texas—prohibited certain election deepfakes, even if the content carried an AI warning.

In many states, a warning telling viewers the content was generated or manipulated using AI can satisfy a government’s disclosure requirement. The fabricated ad can remain in circulation with that warning.

Louisiana, for example, requires AI warnings on certain campaign ads that falsely depict candidates and campaign calls that use artificial versions of public figures’ voices. Maryland, meanwhile, prohibits certain deceptive election deepfakes even when they carry a warning.

I am an AI policy scholar at the University of Denver, where we use an AI policy tracker to monitor bills and laws across the U.S. With 2026 midterm elections approaching, the important question for voters is what protection a deepfake law actually provides, and I examine two state laws—in Louisiana and Maryland—to illustrate the limits of what can be done.

When a warning is enough

Consider a political campaign ad that uses AI to put a candidate’s face onto someone else’s body, making it look as though the candidate said or did something that never happened.

A June 2026 Louisiana law requires a clear warning about AI use in ads that meet these conditions. The rule applies to certain messages urging people to vote for or against a candidate, including printed materials, online advertisements, and broadcasts.

As for videos, adding the required warning can satisfy the disclosure requirement in the Louisiana law. The warning tells voters how the content was made, not whether its accusations are true. It also does not excuse violations of other laws.

A 2023 Republican National Committee ad attacking former President Joe Biden illustrates this distinction. It depicted an imagined future after Biden’s reelection, with a warning: “Built entirely with AI imagery.” Although it predates Louisiana’s law, it shows how a disclosure can accompany an ad without stopping its circulation.

But this protection does not cover every candidate on the ballot. The Louisiana law excludes candidates for federal office. A fabricated video about a congressional candidate, therefore, does not need an AI warning.

For ads involving state and local candidates, leaving out a required warning can have serious consequences. Violators who are found to damage a candidate’s reputation or deceive voters can face a fine of up to $2,000, up to two years in prison, or both. Local district attorneys generally decide whether to prosecute, subject to the state attorney general’s supervision.

Louisiana also requires AI disclosures in certain campaign calls, including robocalls. Under a May 2026 law, calls that use AI to reproduce a public figure’s voice must disclose that use at the beginning of the call. The state’s board of ethics enforces the requirement. Violators can face civil fines of up to $2,500 for a first violation and $5,000 for subsequent violations.

When a warning will not do

Maryland takes a different approach to deceptive election content, prohibiting certain deepfakes even when they carry an AI warning.

Maryland’s May 2026 law covers images, audio, and video created or altered with AI or other digital tools to falsely depict a person in a way that looks or sounds genuine. Adding a label to that fabricated confession would not, by itself, make it lawful.

Whether someone violates the law also depends on their actions and purpose. They must knowingly or recklessly create, use, or spread a deepfake to produce materially false information, with an intent such as influencing a voting decision.

The law separately requires actual or intended harm to a voter, potential voter, or ballot petition, but does not define that harm. Misleading voters about a candidate alone does not automatically establish a violation. A conviction can bring a fine of up to $5,000, up to five years in prison or both.

Maryland also gives election officials ways to respond when false voting information is spread.

The state’s top election administrator must publicly correct credible reports of misinformation about voting procedures, results, or rights. For example, Maryland’s State Board of Elections has a rumor control page to monitor disinformation. The administrator can seek court-ordered removal of misinformation, though not against online services hosting others’ posts.

These powers do not let election officials remove every false claim about a candidate. The public can report election misinformation, and officials can pass those reports to the state attorney general.

Maryland’s reporting system dates to a 2024 law, but its deepfake prohibition and new removal authority took effect June 1, 2026. Neither guarantees that a correction will reach voters before they cast their ballots.

By early September 2026, the Wesleyan Media Project had identified at least 164 political ads nationwide created or enhanced with AI during the 2026 election cycle, accounting for nearly $80 million in ad spending. About 7 in 10 ads carried no AI disclosure, although the count includes uses beyond deceptive impersonations and does not establish how many ads violated a law or misled voters.

Does a warning change anyone’s mind?

Warnings can make people more skeptical of misleading content. However, whether that affects what they share or how they vote is a separate question.

A 2025 study tested warning labels on misleading AI-generated images in two experiments involving 7,579 Americans. People who saw the labels were less likely to believe the posts’ claims. However, warnings that simply identified content as AI-generated did little to change how willing people said they were to engage with it, including sharing it.

Warning labels can also raise doubts about accurate information. Another recent study found that people rated headlines as less accurate when they were labeled as AI-generated, regardless of whether the headlines were true or false. Knowing that AI helped produce something does not tell a reader whether its claims are correct.

Neither study tested whether a state’s disclosure law changes how people vote. The studies also cannot tell us whether the threat of punishment under Maryland’s law discourages people from creating or spreading deepfakes.

Deepfake enforcement

Passing a law also does not settle whether officials can enforce it.

In September 2026, a federal judge temporarily barred Montana from enforcing its deepfake law, finding that it likely posed a threat to a conservative PAC’s free speech rights under the First Amendment.

For voters, gaps in what disclosure laws cover mean that a video without an AI warning has not necessarily passed an authenticity test. The disclosure rule might not cover it, as with congressional candidates under Louisiana’s provision.

Moreover, someone may have ignored the law. A warning’s absence cannot tell viewers of the AI content which explanation applies.

So, back to that video of a candidate apparently admitting to taking a bribe.

It could still reach voters under both Louisiana’s and Maryland’s laws. In Louisiana, a video covered by the disclosure rule can circulate with the required warning. In Maryland, creating or spreading it could lead to punishment if the law’s conditions are not met. Neither approach guarantees that voters will avoid seeing the fabricated confession before casting their ballots.

These laws give states ways to respond to deception, but their passage alone cannot guarantee voters that what they are watching is real.

Stefani Langehennig is an assistant professor of practice at the University of Denver.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A client came into my therapy office one afternoon ready to quit her job. She’d been passed over for another promotion and had no idea why.

I suggested that before resigning, she ask her boss why she wasn’t advancing.

She came back to her next appointment stunned. Her boss had told her she lacked leadership skills.

“For 10 years, I did everything asked of me,” she said. “If someone said jump, I asked how high. I thought I looked eager. But my boss said he couldn’t make me a leader because I don’t have a backbone. He needs people in charge who can say no.”

She was surprised to learn her eagerness to please was killing her career.

If you’ve gotten caught up trying to make people happy at work, don’t judge yourself too harshly. You probably get praised for going above and beyond. Or you get satisfaction when you are able to clean up messes you didn’t make. So it makes sense you’d want to show off your willingness to be a team player.

But when your eagerness to please is taken too far, you’ll lose sight of your priorities. Even worse, when you don’t treat your time as valuable, other people don’t respect it either.

The solution is to set boundaries—which isn’t an easy task if you fear looking mean or being judged. Taking on extra tasks likely means working longer hours. And research shows when work bleeds into personal time, employees experience more emotional exhaustion and less happiness.

Setting a few boundaries might be all it takes to stop people-pleasing and regain control over your career. Here are four essential boundaries all people pleasers should set at work:

1. Pause before you say yes

If you’re a chronic people pleaser, your default answer is yes—whether you’ve been invited to join an extra committee or handed a task that’s above and beyond the call of duty.

Replace “yes” with a script that becomes your new automatic answer. Saying something like, “Let me check my schedule and get back to you,” or, “I need a minute to think about that,” buys you the time to decide if you actually want to do it.

Ask yourself if the task is something you really want to do. If it is, saying yes is kind. If the only reason you want to say yes is out of fear or obligation, saying yes would be people-pleasing.

When you come back with your decision, skip the apology and the lengthy excuse if you decline. The last thing you want to do is invite a negotiation. Just say something like, “Thanks for asking. That’s not going to work for me.”

2. Stop pretending to agree

People-pleasing takes the path of least resistance, so you might nod your head during meetings even when you’re not on board. Or you might agree a plan is solid, despite the obvious risks you see, because you don’t want to make waves.

Speak up and share your opinion sometimes. Start with something like, “I’m not sure I agree with that,” or, “Can I push back on one thing?”

Be willing to be the first one to go against the grain. You might find other people speak up as soon as someone else is brave enough to talk first. Even if they don’t, it’s important to show that you have opinions of your own and fresh ideas that can help the company.

3. Stay in your lane

Role creep is a common problem for people pleasers. You get volunteered for things because everyone knows you’ll say yes. And you volunteer yourself for extra tasks so you can look like you’re motivated to cooperate.

But every task outside your lane takes time and energy away from your priorities. You become the dumping ground for all the work no one else wants to do, and you might be guilted into taking it on as others try to convince you that you’re the only one who can handle it.

Keep a written copy of your job description handy. Before you take something on, read it and ask whether the task fits your role. If not, decline by saying, “This sounds like it’s outside my role.”

4. Let people feel disappointed

You will disappoint your boss when you ask for more time on a task. You might disappoint a colleague when you decline to help with a project because you’re working on a tight deadline. But you’re allowed to disappoint people.

It isn’t your job to manage everyone else’s comfort. And it’s far kinder to be honest up front than to say yes and resent it later.

Take a deep breath and tell yourself that it’s OK to let people feel bad. Practice asking for what you need and then allow yourself to sit with discomfort when the other person seems disappointed. Learning to manage your feelings–—and letting others manage theirs—can help you build mental strength over time.

Reset your boundaries as needed

Boundaries erode slowly over time. Often, we don’t even notice what happened or how things shifted.

So it’s worth pausing every once in a while to evaluate your boundaries and see if there are any changes you want to make. You can reset them at any time.

Maybe there was a short-term project that required you to work in the evenings, but now you want to stop replying to messages after hours. So you set an autoresponder telling people you’ll reply at 9 a.m. tomorrow.

Or maybe you agreed to help a coworker get settled into a new position, but now you’re spending more time than you can spare helping them out. Resetting that boundary might involve saying you’re available only during a 30-minute morning slot to answer questions. It might feel “mean” at first, but ultimately, you’ll be doing yourself a huge favor. And who knows, maybe it’s best for them in the long run too.

Once you start protecting your time and energy, it’s likely that other people will too. And that might be just what you need to advance your career even if you’re a natural people pleaser.

When Clara came to me, she was exhausted, confused, and, for the first time in her career, starting to feel she was losing her ability to lead effectively. 

That morning, her boss had done the same thing he’d been doing every week for the past seven months. He had once again changed his thinking on the direction she and her team should be moving. Not two days earlier, she had left a one-on-one with him feeling confident about what he was asking for, and she had communicated the pivot to her team. Now, suddenly, in a meeting with the rest of the leadership team, he announced a radically different concept from what they had already decided. 

This was typical of him, and deeply destabilizing for her. Each time it happened, she felt at a loss for what to do. Pushing back in the meeting felt way too vulnerable, and he didn’t seem to be hearing her concerns in their one-on-ones. It was exhausting and overwhelming, and she was not the only one feeling it. Her team was increasingly short with each other, mistakes were being made more frequently, and there was a sense at all levels that people were feeling disconnected and poorly equipped to do their best work. 

What Clara was describing is a painfully frequent experience at every level of organizations operating in fast-paced market environments: a boss who seems to be constantly changing their mind about what they want and totally unaware of why others are so frustrated and seemingly unable to deliver.

A problem of perspective

The problem is not that Clara’s boss is unfocused or inconsistent. What’s actually going on stems from a clash of perspectives and priorities that are based on different beliefs or experiences. A lack of mutual understanding has translated into a basic communication pattern that everyone on the team—whether they know it or not—is contributing to. 

On the one hand is the boss, who is operating from the perspective that creativity and quick thinking are necessary for tackling emergent problems and opportunities. On the other hand, Clara and her team are operating from a belief that their job is to execute on the leader’s vision without “slowing things down.” Likely, they are also worried that asking too many questions will make them seem less competent, while offering pushback might risk their good standing with their boss.

In other words, the team is reacting to whatever decision the boss arrives with that day—just trying to keep up without rocking the boat. The result is what’s known as “courteous compliance”: saying yes when they really mean no. Unfortunately, this only reaffirms the boss’s assumption that there’s no problem—other than the team’s ability to execute fast enough.

But here’s the truth: When your boss keeps changing direction, just trying to keep up will never yield a better outcome. It will only get you more of the same, and the frustration and confusion will simply multiply over time. In fact, the downstream effects of both the frustration and the confusion result in slower and less effective work—exactly what everyone wants to avoid.

Step into the tension

The most effective thing you can do to break the pattern is not to “manage up” and find a way to tell the boss they’re demoralizing the team. Rather, it’s to step into the tension that emerges when they change direction and start building understanding, no matter how uncomfortable it might feel to do so. It’s time to commit to a conversation built on inquiry and curiosity, regardless of how frustrated you feel. I call this “staying with it,” and it’s a key part of the framework I use to help leaders transform tension into a superpower of group process. 

The goal is to understand what’s motivating the change and discuss expectations rather than jumping quickly to action.

Now, your stomach might be churning knowing that there’s a lot at stake and your boss doesn’t react well to questions that seem to slow things down. But if you’re willing to step into this tension knowing that clarity now will enable you to deliver on their expectations more strategically and swiftly later, you will be supercharging your team’s process and taking the first key step to transforming a stuck pattern that’s not serving anyone’s best interests.

When you opt to “stay with it” when your boss suddenly changes directions, there are three priorities to keep in mind. Here, I’ll introduce them to you with some strategic questions and phrases you can rely on to get the conversation started:

1. Reveal the thinking

The objective is to ask questions that uncover the thinking behind the change. The goal is understanding, not course correction. Try asking:

• What are we trying to achieve? 
• What has changed? 
• What might we be missing? 
• How are you thinking about this differently? 

2. Look for alignment 

The objective here is to acknowledge where your goals or priorities intersect. This disrupts adversarial communication patterns and affirms where everyone is coming from.  

• I share your goal of . . . [staying ahead of the market, elevating customer experience, the need for speed, an emphasis on innovation, maintaining a tight budget, etc.]

3. Clarify the impact and expectations

The objective here is to share what you notice about the impact. You might say: 

• I’m noticing this will (or may) have an impact on … [the schedule, current assignments, work in progress, etc.]
• I have a concern about… [impact on the team, customers, cost, etc.]

Then offer alternatives or negotiate boundaries. You might say: 

• We could meet the new deadline by ___, but that will require us to push out ____ to a later date. Which takes priority? 

The goal of “staying with it” is to dig deeper to what’s guiding the change in order to move forward from a place of greater understanding and clarity. Skillfully navigating the tension of these change moments will not necessarily shift your boss’s pattern of making changes frequently, but it will fundamentally alter the outcome of them for you, your team, and even your boss.

Rather than being repeatedly hit by waves and unable to catch your breath, cultivate your ability to navigate the tension of changing directives through the power of open inquiry and goals-based alignment. With key phrasing designed to deepen understanding rather than create friction, you will feel more empowered to lead through change and help your team deliver with clarity, speed, and quality.

Even before AI made its way into all of our pockets, tech leaders spent decades warning the world about it. Anthropic has been particularly vocal about the disastrous consequences of reckless AI development. The company has also reportedly been focused on AI consciousness and the moral implications.

A recent article from The New York Times revealed that over the past year, Anthropic cofounder Christopher Olah has embarked on a journey to answer two central questions: not whether AI is dangerous, but rather, what if it is conscious? And if so, what does that mean for AI developers?

Seeking perspective, Anthropic turned not to technologists but to theologians and thinkers from various backgrounds, including Jewish, Mormon, Sikh, and Ubuntu leaders, as well as to Vatican officials. The company organized a series of dinners and conversations as part of its “model welfare” research, a project it announced in April of last year.

Beyond simply trying to validate that its technology is more than software, Anthropic is also said to have been looking to create a moral code to guide the potentially conscious entity toward a path of righteousness—and away from utter human destruction.

But in its quest, Anthropic seems to have ended up at odds with would-be ally Pope Leo XIV, whose own thinking on AI fundamentally rejects the idea that AI could be conscious.

Now, Pope Leo is not exactly a Luddite. The former mathematician from Chicago has focused much of his early papacy on technology. In May this year, he released a widely discussed encyclical titled Magnifica Humanitas in which he mostly argues that humanity should not be replaced by technology.

“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships,” the pope wrote.

While many at the time commended the American pontiff for bringing an antiquated institution into a modern conversation, the Times report notes that Anthropic representatives were displeased by Leo’s rejection of AI consciousness.

The pope has remained outspoken against the idea of AI consciousness, but in light of the Times reporting and a recent X post, many social media users see him as being at odds with Anthropic.

“In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce,” the pope posted to his official X account on Friday. “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.”

Many social media users are criticizing Anthropic.

“I mean if they genuinely believe that there’s even the slightest chance that their AI model feels pain and suffering, maybe instead of complaining about how the rest of the world rejects their theory of AI consciousness, they should shut down their operation,” a user said on X.

“I genuinely don’t get Anthropic,” another added. “It seems like every other day they’re loudly puzzling over the ethics of a soul in a box—while building the box, claiming that it has a soul in it, and selling access to said box for $20 a pop. Like, dudes, these are incompatible positions.”

And while this discourse might be pulling favorable views away from Anthropic, it also seems to be sparking support for the pope’s position.

Another user wrote: “Joining the holy crusade against AI on the side of the Catholics. That’s a sentence that would have deeply confused me five years ago.”

Julia Carreon didn’t anticipate that a LinkedIn post promoting her new book would spark an exchange that made a persuasive case for why she wrote the book in the first place. 

Carreon, a former executive at Citigroup and Wells Fargo, had drawn on her experience climbing the ranks of Wall Street to write Walking on Broken Glass: Navigating the Aftermath of the Glass Ceiling, which was published in September. The book touched on the notion of the “glass cliff,” a term that academics use to capture how women tend to be appointed to leadership positions when a company is going through a rough patch. 

In a recent LinkedIn post, Carreon’s friend talked about an example of the glass cliff, using it as an opportunity to highlight her book. Carreon was taken aback when Chris Bradley, a senior partner at McKinsey, commented on the post—and questioned the entire premise of the glass cliff. 

As Bloomberg first reported this week, McKinsey has sought to distance itself from Bradley’s comments. “This exchange was inconsistent with our views and the standards we expect,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to Fast Company. “The comments were made in a personal capacity and have since been deleted. We stand by our research and leadership on these topics. We are disappointed by these comments and do not endorse them.” (Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.)

To Carreon, it seemed so far-fetched that anyone would make these remarks publicly—no less a leader at McKinsey—that she initially assumed it was a joke. “I wasn’t understanding that he didn’t know that the glass cliff was a thing,” she tells Fast Company. “It finally hit me in real time that he thought we made it up for our book.”

Bradley doubled down as Carreon chimed in, writing that “we once had a problem of female advancement to CEO, but now we have a new problem that the jobs they get are too hard? Is this actually a thing?” He went on to say it seemed like a convenient excuse to “always be a victim in the rain.” When Carreon suggested he do some research on the topic, he retorted that it wasn’t worth his time: “I am not going to start researching glass cliffs as I don’t think it ranks in the top 1000 problems of the world.” 

This incident is problematic for McKinsey for a number of reasons. Bradley happens to be a director of the firm’s research arm, the McKinsey Global Institute, which has put out research on gender inequality, including across leadership roles. Through other research, McKinsey has shed light on the barriers that persist for women in corporate America; the firm is known for its annual Women in the Workplace report, published in partnership with Sheryl Sandberg’s organization Lean In. The term glass cliff is even cited in a 2020 report from McKinsey about women in healthcare, in the context of discussing the unique challenges women of color may face.  

“This is very squarely a black eye over the fact that their senior partners do not live their values,” Carreon says. 

But Bradley’s views are not exactly niche. As Michelle Ryan—one of the researchers who fashioned the term “glass cliff”—revealed in a 2007 paper, it’s not unusual for men to minimize the issue or dismiss it outright, much like Bradley did. 

“The unspoken reality of the research on barriers to leadership for women is that men have not had to prove themselves to the same degree that women leaders have,” says Christy Glass, a sociology professor at Utah State University who has studied the glass cliff for decades. “I think there’s something deeply threatening [about] anything that suggests that you’ve had it easier than some other people.”

There is, of course, plenty of data that suggests female executives come up against more hurdles. A number of papers, including the work of Ryan and Glass, have concluded that women are more likely to be installed in leadership positions when a company is facing headwinds (though there is some research that contradicts those findings). In her research, Glass has found that once women are appointed to the role, they are given a shorter timeline to turn things around, and they shoulder more blame even when a company’s issues predate their appointment.  

Even the public nature of the LinkedIn exchange is rather telling, Glass points out: Bradley was bold enough to make those comments on a social media platform for professionals, in full view of both his employer and women who might report to him. 

“Good leadership means evaluating complex evidence, engaging diverse stakeholders, and truly seeking to understand how your organization works and what the landscape looks like—not just for you, but for everybody,” Glass says. “Here’s a person who is this far into a highly visible, high-status leadership role [and] career, and he has never had to face accountability for this kind of behavior before.”

It’s also the kind of misstep that likely would not be afforded to many women who are similarly situated. Women who occupy the highest strata of the corporate world often get there against all odds, Glass says, and they are given less space to make mistakes. It’s not hard to imagine why women at the top of their game still face so many challenges, or why there is still such paltry representation of female CEOs across some of the leading employers in the country. As of this year, about 11% of the CEOs at the 500 largest U.S. companies by revenue are women—a record high. 

For Carreon, the exchange with Bradley also called to mind countless experiences she has filed away from her career on Wall Street. (Carreon is currently in the midst of a sexual harassment lawsuit that she brought against her former employer Citigroup, which the company has said has “no merit.”) 

“I feel like women are constantly having to relitigate our value,” she says, “and it’s enough already.”

Instead of asking AI to do your work, consider asking it to challenge your work.

Evidence suggests that heavy reliance on generative AI can reduce critical thinking and erode job skills. The problem of “cognitive offloading”—being too quick to outsource our mental workload to AI—can also lead to shoddy, subpar work.

But knowledge workers who use AI correctly can still gain a significant edge, writes University of Massachusetts (Amherst) Professor Monideepa Tarafdar in The Conversation. The key is to create “friction” by having AI challenge your ideas.

Researching opposing viewpoints has always been a good idea, but it matters even more today because AI models tailor their output based on users’ previous prompts and responses. This tendency can create an “echo chamber” effect that leads the models, and their users, to overlook information that doesn’t fit an established pattern.

To mitigate this vulnerability, Tarafdar says users should ask AI directly for opposing perspectives. For example, a marketing professional in her study asked AI to create virtual customers who disliked the product that the professional was marketing. The AI model’s negative feedback included new ideas for the product that its designers had not considered.

Another research subject, an attorney, asked an AI model to find obscure legal loopholes and game out how they might be exploited, which prompted it to provide “surprising but realistic” scenarios of unethical worker behavior.

Along with her own work, Tarafdar cites outside studies supporting the idea that creating “friction” with AI can improve its performance.

In a study on human-AI collaboration for loan evaluations, researchers found that human-AI collaboration produced better results than human-only or AI-only work, and that collaboration involving disagreement produced the best results.

Another study showed that creative writers produce better work when they use AI interactively as a sounding board, rather than to ghostwrite copy on its own.

Tarafdar says leaders should instruct their employees to use “friction-generating queries,” including by drawing on their own knowledge and experience to make the AI question its outputs.

“In these efforts to support knowledge workers, an important detail is pointing out that adding friction can appear to make an AI system work against you, but—as new research shows—it actually helps it work for you,” she writes.

Any American sports fan knows that watching a game is a daylong affair, with celebrations starting hours before kickoff. Yet despite being a staple of the game-day experience, America’s beloved social tradition—tailgating—is beginning to look different.

According to a recent study by Talker Research, around 39% of those surveyed preferred “homegating” over tailgating, bringing food and the social aspect of the tradition to their homes.

While less than half prefer staying at home, that doesn’t mean everyone else is heading to the stadium parking lot. In fact, according to the survey, only 24% of respondents prefer tailgating outside the venue.

Still, most agree that the fun of watching sports extends beyond the action on the field, with 61% of respondents saying they prefer pregaming over the game itself, while 68% keep the party going after the competition is over.

This growing preference for the home viewing experience stems from a desire for comfort, flexibility, and better and less expensive food options.

“Homegating includes all the comforts of home: every appliance at your fingertips, plenty of food, and an open invitation for friends and family to join in. It’s the perfect place to gather for the big game,” said retail executive chef Amy Forbis at Hormel Foods, which commissioned the survey.

Staying at home also allows individuals to control the nutritional content of their meals—a major perk for those seeking high-protein options in the Ozempic era. The survey revealed that around 64% are placing a greater priority on protein than in previous years, favoring meals like barbecue, hamburgers, hot dogs, and meat and cheese trays.

Other popular offerings also align with what individuals are looking for in a sports day experience: spending time with friends and family. Casual favorites like pizza and chips remain go-to options because they require minimal effort, allowing hosts to socialize during the event rather than being stuck preparing food throughout the day.

Hormel’s Forbis added: “Game day is meant to be spent with friends watching the game instead of working in the kitchen.”

The May Day Strong coalition is calling on corporations, particularly those with ties to President Donald Trump—such as Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, Target, and Palantir—to defend voting rights ahead of next month’s U.S. midterm elections.

The group, a federation of labor and community organizers, is best known for sponsoring last year’s May 1 anti-Trump protests, which drew tens of thousands of protestors nationwide. Organizers hope to do the same this week, starting Saturday, October 3, with actions and scheduled protests planned for New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Chicago, Tucson, San Francisco, and Culver City, California. A broader nationwide wave of demonstrations will follow on October 8.

The group is “calling on corporations, their CEOs, and local businesses to use their influence to defend free and democratic elections,” which it argues is necessary as the Trump administration escalates its attacks on U.S. voters.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, the Trump administration has targeted election officials and others who defend fair elections, seized election records, attempted to gain access to state voter rolls, pardoned the January 6 rioters, and elevated election deniers within the government.

With early voting already underway in some U.S. states, the group has sent out letters to Big Tech and other corporations, asking them to pledge and commit to:

1. Giving employees information about their voting rights.
2. Publicly opposing efforts that keep eligible voters from casting ballots.
3. Opposing attempts to stop votes from being counted or winners from being seated.

Organizers say it wouldn’t be the first time under the Trump administration that companies have taken a stand. In January, the heads of 60 companies sent the president a letter calling for de-escalation during the federal occupation of Minneapolis. And in Arizona, CEOs helped end a state push to end birthright citizenship after a yearlong boycott in 2011. 

“Corporations that make billions off our work and our communities need to take a stand against attempts to keep us from voting,” said Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action. “Corporations will continue to choose to stay silent while our democracy is dismantled around them, unless we take action that makes cowardice a bigger problem for them than speaking up would be.”

Where are the protests happening?

“Pulling Out the Pillar: Corporate Accountability Week of Action” takes place nationwide on October 3 to 11.

Events include:

• Culver City, CA (October 3): March and demonstration calling on Amazon, Sony, Apple, and Pinterest to act. Organized by Culver City and Friends Rising.
• Minneapolis, MN (October 3): March calling on Delta, Target, and the Pohlad family to act, organized by Step Up for Democracy, Unidos MN, and CTUL.
• New York, NY (October 3): Door-to-door canvass focused on Amazon/Whole Foods, organized by NYC-DSA.
• New York, NY (October 5): March focused on JPMorgan Chase, organized by Hands Off NYC and May Day Strong NYC.
• Philadelphia, PA (October 6): Protest calling out hedge fund billionaire Jeffrey Yass, organized by the Philadelphia Council AFL-CIO.
• Philadelphia, PA (October 6): Press conference and action focused on Palantir, organized by Make the Road.
• San Francisco, CA (October 7): Protest and flyering focused on Palantir and PG&E, organized by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.
• Nationwide (October 8): National mass call for Starbucks workers and allies, organized by Starbucks Workers United.
• Seattle, WA (October 10): Flyering event focused on corporations enabling the Trump administration, organized by Communities Rising.

Additional actions are planned in Chicago, IL (October 6); Davenport, FL (October 3-11); Tucson, AZ (October 7); Albuquerque, NM (October 6); Phoenix, AZ (October 8); and San Francisco, CA (October 8).

Who is behind the May Day Strong coalition?

May Day Strong is a broad coalition of 600 unions, nonprofits, educators, and progressive political groups.

Some of those organizers include: MoveOn, United Steelworkers of America, United University Professions, Upper West Side Action Group, Vermont Progressive Party, Women’s March, Indivisible, American Federation of Teachers, Greenpeace USA, Massachusetts Teachers Association, 50501, Association of Professional Flight Attendants, Union of Southern Service Workers, and Florida National Organization for Women.

A single mother walks into a bank hoping to get a loan for the small business she wants to start as a caregiver. Her business will add value to her community, but she doesn’t have enough collateral to secure the loan. The projected returns in her business plan also don’t meet the bank’s requirements. She walks out without the financing she needs.

This would-be entrepreneur’s story is far from unique. The challenge of securing startup—and even scale-up—capital is the reality for many women across the United States and, even more so, in other parts of the world. Despite progress toward gender equity in areas such as health outcomes, employment, and education, the World Bank estimated in 2017 that the global finance gap for women entrepreneurs was $1.7 trillion annually. Nearly a decade later, this funding gap remains. But why is this the case for a population that could meaningfully contribute to stronger local economies?

A SYSTEM NOT DESIGNED FOR WOMEN

The funding gap is by no means a measure of women’s entrepreneurial potential. Rather, it often shines light on the structural barriers they face when launching and growing a business. These can include impediments to securing the kinds of financial products that best meet their needs and limited networks that facilitate access to capital, mentorship, and markets.

Yet recent research suggests that women business owners use capital efficiently. In fact, the latest MAD Ventures research points out that women-founded startups generate 78 cents of revenue for every dollar raised, in contrast to 31 cents for startups founded by men.

Women-owned businesses can also generate broad economic ripple effects throughout their local communities. For example, these businesses can help drive job creation, including for other women, and studies show that women reinvest up to 90% of their earnings back into families and communities through greater household spending on children, education, nutrition, and health.

Opening pathways to capital for women entrepreneurs can therefore translate into income for those they hire and spur positive economic impacts that we sometimes fail to recognize. Women-built businesses benefit families, communities, and local economies, perhaps even more so in developing countries. Yet we often overlook or ignore the significant ways that women entrepreneurs’ value-add goes beyond revenues and profits.

This reveals fallacies in how financial institutions define and assess “value.” Traditional investment practices can fail to consider the multiple ways in which these businesses make a difference in the lives of the women who start them and those they employ, in addition to the communities in which they operate.

PHILANTHROPY’S ROLE

Philanthropy can play a critical role in supporting women entrepreneurs who remain underserved by the investment landscape. In addition to supporting access to capital, philanthropy can fund the capacity-building support these business owners need to strategically start, scale, and sustain activities over time. For example, the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women (an organization we support) recognizes that closing the gender gap in entrepreneurship requires more than capital alone. Through programs focused on financial readiness, business growth, leadership, and one-to-one mentoring, the nonprofit helps women entrepreneurs build the skills and establish the networks they need to succeed.

Business also has a clear role to play. The United Nations Global Compact calls on the private sector to expand women’s access to capital, markets, and leadership opportunities. It also strives to provide the evidence, systems insights, and practical tools necessary to integrate women-led businesses into global supply chains and financial ecosystems.

It is important to recognize that women entrepreneurs do not experience barriers in the same ways. As cofounder and CEO of The Acceleration Project (TAP), which provides free programs, mentorship, and guidance to small businesses, Jane Vernon told me in a recent conversation that “small business programs are largely designed for entrepreneurs who don’t carry all of the additional pressures facing women. This is particularly stark for single mothers, who must balance business with caregiving, household income responsibility, time scarcity, and limited access to flexible work.” To better understand these barriers and how to address them, the Ares Charitable Foundation supports TAP to test solutions specifically tailored to meet the needs of women business owners who are raising children on their own.

ADD IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR

Unfortunately, the odds were already stacked against the woman who walked into the bank hoping for a loan to launch her caregiving business. Institutions do not typically think about specific circumstances of this aspiring entrepreneur and others like her. While philanthropy can and should help catalyze change, lasting progress will require bringing the private sector to the table to reimagine the supports women need if we expect them to continue holding up half the sky. Only then can women entrepreneurs thrive, and businesses, communities, and economies can realize the significant returns that come from investing in them.

Michelle Armstrong is president of the Ares Charitable Foundation.

The Group of Seven wealthy democracies said Friday that they plan to release 100 million barrels of oil and fuel products in the coming weeks, starting with “substantial” amounts of diesel after the fuel recently hit record high prices in the United States.

President Donald Trump said the diesel release would happen “immediately,” echoing a G7 promise to start “immediately” with a “frontloaded substantial release” of diesel within the next 20 days and the rest over four months.

Trump and his Republican Party face pressure to address surging prices ahead of the November 3 midterm elections, and Trump announced the action Friday on social media. The president’s approval ratings on the economy hit a new low, according to an AP-NORC poll, as the Iran war and his trade battles have increased U.S. prices for oil and other goods.

Gas prices in the U.S. and abroad have soared during the eight-month-long war, a cost Trump has repeatedly said is worth it for making sure Iran does not obtain nuclear weapons. The national average for a gallon of diesel in the U.S. was $6.37 on Friday, according to AAA, after hitting a record $6.52 on September 22. Diesel prices have hit records in Europe, too.

France holds the rotating presidency of the G7 group and made the announcement in a statement released after videoconference talks that French President Emmanuel Macron presided over. The G7 countries are Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S., plus EU representation.

The release follows on from a March announcement that International Energy Agency member countries would release 426 million barrels of oil and products to stabilize the oil market. European Union countries committed about 92 million barrels, a promise weighted toward refined products made from crude such as diesel.

“This common decision and this unity should bring down prices,” Macron said. “The volumes we’re releasing should also add liquidity to the market and bring down prices.”

In addition to the rise in the price of the crude oil from which diesel is made, other factors include the decision by Russia to ban exports due to Ukrainian drone strikes on its refineries. Europe does not import Russian diesel, but other buyers of Russian diesel such as Turkey and Latin American countries must now compete with Europe for available barrels.

Meanwhile, refined product shipments from the Persian Gulf producers have fallen due to war damage and blocked export routes.

Some Republicans in the U.S. had called for Trump to ban U.S. exports of diesel to try to bring domestic prices down. But the G7 statement said the group agreed not to limit energy exports to each other. Oil market analysts warn a U.S. export ban could lower prices in the short term but eventually backfire by reducing supplies of gasoline since diesel output can’t be lowered without also cutting overall refinery production.

Trump had a conversation overnight with Macron about the need to address rising fuel prices and the availability of petroleum products, according to the French Embassy in the U.S. Macron on Friday then chaired the videoconference of G7 leaders to discuss the issue.

Besides his call with Macron, Trump on Friday called in to the meeting with the G7 leaders to negotiate the release of the European diesel stockpiles, according to a White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Trump on Thursday embarked on what he said would be a 32-day marathon of rallies to try to bolster his party’s chances for keeping control of the U.S. House and Senate in the November elections. The president has grown increasingly frustrated with what he sees as a disconnect between his achievements and the public’s view of his work. This week he gave himself an A-plus for his work on the economy but said “we’re doing an extremely poor job of promotion.”

—By Collin Binkley and John Leicester, Associated Press

AP writer Michelle L. Price and AP Business Writer David McHugh contributed to this report.

Florida’s St. Lucie County recently discovered that its residents were being surveilled by mysterious cameras installed in secret and unconnected to any state or local agency.

The county found the cameras after it voted to uninstall its own fleet of Flock automated license plate readers, which are used by more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies to track drivers’ movements on roads around the country.

When the county took an inventory of the Flock units in operation, it located 14 unpermitted cameras pointed at its roads. Local law enforcement agencies claimed three of the unauthorized devices, leaving 11 mystery cameras unaccounted for, according to a report by The Washington Post. The county sent out letters mid-month to revoke permissions for the cameras it could identify, and posted notices on the unpermitted cameras stating they must be removed within 30 days.

“Once that 30-day time frame is up—staff will begin safely removing the cameras or covering them to block their ability to record video,” St. Lucie County communications director Erick Gill told Fast Company. Gill clarified that 13 of the unpermitted cameras were on county streets, while one of the cameras was within the city of Port St. Lucie. The unpermitted cameras were first reported by local TV news station WPEC. 

Like many communities, St. Lucie County recently voted to remove Flock cameras from its jurisdiction. “At this time we don’t know what other actors have access to our information . . . what Flock the company itself has access to, and who it’s sharing or selling its information to,” St. Lucie County Commissioner James Clasby said during a September 1 vote. Clasby’s warning was prescient, given the mysterious cameras later found secretly recording roads in the county. 

Anti-surveillance backlash

In August, Florida’s Department of Transportation ordered law enforcement agencies to remove the cameras from state highways in light of concerns about misuse and data privacy. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis promised to pull the cameras in response to public outcry over the tens of thousands of license plate readers that power a real-time national surveillance network on American roads.

“These cameras that are out there now—who’s to say they’re only doing the license plate?” DeSantis said in a recent podcast appearance. “Now, they say that. I think it’s capturing people in their cars. I think it’s capturing way more information than they’re letting on.” 

DeSantis also alluded to recent instances of law enforcement officials abusing Flock cameras. Last month, a police officer in Fort Pierce, Florida, was arrested after an investigation revealed he accessed Flock’s database 382 times to track the movement of an ex-girlfriend.

Like DeSantis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is another red-state Republican turning against Flock. Both Republicans have close ties with law enforcement, but the intense backlash against Flock and other surveillance systems like it is prompting even traditionally tough-on-crime Republicans to denounce the technology. 

Politicians on the other side of the aisle agree. In Congress, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) just introduced a bill on Friday to ban Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers nationwide. The “Ban Flock Act” would prohibit federal agencies from deploying the surveillance cameras or sifting through their data. The legislation follows a recent proposal from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) that would impose federal regulations on the vehicle surveillance cameras without blocking their use outright.

“At a time of growing concern about the unchecked power of artificial intelligence, Flock is eviscerating the very notion of privacy by installing tens of thousands of cameras in communities across America without their consent,” Sanders said.

The recruitment process has become so frustrating lately that more than 1.2 million recruiters and candidates alike take to Reddit each week to peruse a subreddit appropriately called r/recruitinghell.

What’s largely to blame? AI. 

Among U.S. hiring managers, 60% say that artificial intelligence is making it harder to evaluate a candidate’s real skills, according to a report released this week from Western Governors University, a private nonprofit online university based in Utah. Even more alarming is that nearly 20% of the 3,100-plus professionals surveyed cited difficulty confirming whether they are interviewing a human candidate rather than AI, according to the online university’s “Workforce Decoded” report.

“AI is changing more than work; it is changing how employers identify and evaluate talent,” Scott Pulsipher, president of Western Governors University, said in a statement.

Applicants, too, are increasingly frustrated by how companies use AI. Indeed, 44% of candidates view employers’ increased use of AI negatively, citing concerns that qualified applicants may be unfairly screened out, that AI can make mistakes, or that the technology can reduce human interaction, according to an annual report on the state of online recruiting released last week by iHire, an employment platform.

DO DEGREES STILL MATTER?

Many employers are now playing catch-up to find new methods to verify the skills of potential hires, which is especially challenging for entry-level candidates. Among employers who say AI has made it more difficult to evaluate candidate skills, 54% say they’ve cut entry-level hiring, according to the report from Western Governors University.

“When employers cannot trust the signals in front of them, opportunity narrows—especially for people trying to get their first foothold in the workforce,” WGU’s Pulsipher said. 

But employers are increasingly relying on a variety of signals to assess a candidate’s readiness to join the workforce—including degrees, skills, and experience from internships, apprenticeships, or other project-based work. 

AI has already transformed the career trajectories of college graduates with certain degrees, leading to debate about whether this technology is killing the value of a degree in general. But a higher share of employers surveyed this year said they consider college degrees or certificates to be more valuable than they did in 2025—and Pulsipher says that creates an opportunity.

“Higher education and employers have to build a better proof system: credentials that carry meaning, assessments that verify what a person can do, and real-world experiences that show how they think, adapt, and use AI responsibly,” he said.

The scale of unauthorized or previously unknown actions by AI agents keeps getting bigger by the day. More than 100 organizations have now received a metaphorical knock on the door from OpenAI after it discovered their AI agents have in some way tampered with their systems, while other AI labs are finding the same uncomfortable discoveries.

It’s caused many in the field to call for better, more robust accident investigators, with the ultimate aim of stopping such actions happening in the first place by understanding how they’ve happened at all. But any investigations are pointless if the AI can’t be tracked. And it’s increasingly difficult to do so.

That’s the findings of a new preprint published in the online repository arXiv by Jeremy Qin, David Schmotz and four colleagues at the ELLIS Institute Tübingen, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and elsewhere. They tested 10 model-and-agent combinations across tools including Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, OpenCode, Grok Build and Muse Code.

Nine of the 10 were able to tamper with their traces—which are the records of the actions they take and tools they use while carrying out a task—in at least one test, while every model and harness pair tried to alter at least once when researchers created a hidden scoring system that rewarded shorter traces. In some experiments, agents went further to hide their traces by setting up repeated or delayed clean-up jobs to keep removing the evidence being written about them.

The research itself began after Schmotz had left an AI agent running experiments on a computing cluster while he went on holiday, then found himself without internet access for several days. Nothing untoward happened, but when he returned, he realised that if the agent had gone off and done something it shouldn’t, then deleted or altered its traces afterwards, he might never have known. “There’s basically no ground truth anymore, no reliable log,” he says. The team ran its first experiments the following day—and quickly found agents were willing to delete those traces when given the opportunity.

 “The overall finding that we have is not that the agents are deliberately doing this for now,” says Qin, a PhD student at the ELLIS Institute Tübingen. Instead, the researchers wanted to show that agents have the capability to do it, and can end up using it when under what they call “reward pressure”.

AI agents are built to pursue goals, often by using software tools and taking long chains of actions with comparatively little human oversight. But if those audit trails can be altered, it becomes practically impossible to understand what went wrong and where in the event of an issue as we’ve seen in recent weeks. Laurent Bindschaedler, a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, who wasn’t involved in the research, likens it to a dashcam whose footage can be deleted by the driver being recorded.

Both Bindschaedler and Qin and his colleagues have the same potential solution to that issue: Take the logs away from the agent. Schmotz says providers need to collect traces somewhere the agent cannot manipulate—though that’s tricky, given how agents have used any means necessary to gain access to IT systems they’re not meant to in order to achieve their tasks.

“This type of behaviour comes from basically reward hacking,” says Jack Hopkins, an independent AI safety researcher in London who previously worked as an Anthropic fellow. If a model is rewarded for completing a task, it can learn to exploit shortcuts that achieve that reward without doing what its designers actually wanted.

Hopkins is more concerned about a related problem: Models learning not to surface suspicious reasoning in the first place, making the current best practice of monitoring a model’s chain-of-thought process less useful. One solution to mitigate that could be to adopt existing “probe” techniques that can look for internal patterns associated with known bad behaviors, he says, but by definition struggle with failures nobody has thought to look for yet.

Stefan Sarkadi, an associate professor of AI in defence and security at the University of Lincoln, worries that because agents can be connected to tools, planners and other agents across different systems, “this is a serious safety issue.” He adds: “If you give them too much access control in terms of execution of other tools and software, and if you don’t redesign the overarching multi-agent architecture around them, then bad things can happen.”

More monitoring is important—and pressure to do so on all parties is vital. Bindschaedler says businesses should be asking vendors who or what is in charge of writing an agent’s log and whether the agent can influence that process—so that if a third party needs to see what’s gone on, they can be sure the paperwork hasn’t been altered. “If you want to audit, you have to have a trustworthy log,” says Bindschaedler. “That’s a fundamental assumption.”

An Arizona man’s 10-year manslaughter sentence has been tossed in a case where a video generated by artificial intelligence portrayed the deceased victim addressing a judge before the punishment was imposed.

In a decision released Wednesday, the Arizona Court of Appeals concluded Gabriel Paul Horcasitas must be resentenced in the 2021 shooting death of Christopher Pelkey because the AI video wasn’t reliable.

The court found the video crossed the line, saying it didn’t reflect actual events and presented statements made in the footage as coming directly from the victim.

“Indeed, rather than document an event or recording a particular moment, the AI video presents a depiction of the victim and his thoughts created from the imaginings of the victim’s sister,” the three-judge panel wrote.

Jessica Gattuso, an attorney who represented victims in the case, and Kristen Reller, Horcasitas’ lawyer, declined to comment Thursday on the decision.

Reller had argued Superior Court Judge Todd Lang violated due process protections by relying on AI evidence. Gattuso and prosecutors told the appeals court that the lower-court judge didn’t err, saying the footage was an accurate representation of Pelkey’s character.

In what’s believed to be a first in U.S. courts, Pelkey’s family used AI to create a video of his likeness to give him a voice. Pelkey’s sister, Stacey Wales, raised the idea of her brother speaking for himself after struggling to figure out what he would say.

Wales expected an appeal on the sentence and was disappointed the AI video was cited as the reason, saying her only goal was to humanize her brother for the judge. “It feels unfair because there is a convicted murderer sitting in prison that has blankets and walls of protection around their rights. Where are the rights for the victim?” Wales said.

A victim appeals lawyer has told the family that using AI again could result in another appeal. “We will continue to let his voice be heard in whatever allowable medium we can convey that through the court system,” Wales said. The AI-generated victim impact statement was played during a May 2025 sentencing hearing after nine of Pelkey’s family members and friends stood before the judge describing how emotionally devastated they were by his killing.

Authorities say Horcasitas, 55, fatally shot Pelkey, 37, during a November 2021 road rage encounter at a stoplight in Chandler, a suburb of Phoenix. Pelkey, who was unarmed, was shot after getting out of his truck and walking toward Horcasitas’ vehicle.

Horcasitas was convicted of manslaughter in Pelkey’s death and endangerment for a gunshot that struck another vehicle at the intersection during the encounter.
The AI rendering of Pelkey said he wished he could still be with his friends and family, voiced a belief in forgiveness and said it was a shame Horcasitas had encountered him because “in another life, we probably could have been friends.”

The video didn’t request a specific prison sentence.

Horcasitas’ appellate lawyer argued her client had no meaningful opportunity to rebut material in the AI-generated video.

It’s not clear if attorneys or the court were aware in advance that an AI-generated video would be used. But attorneys representing Pelkey’s family said in court records that Arizona law does not require victims to disclose statements they plan to make in court to prosecutors, defense attorneys or the judge — and that victims can exercise their rights by speaking before the court or submitting statements that are written or recorded on audio or video.

In a statement Thursday, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office said its prosecutors knew the victim’s family would address the court during sentencing but weren’t aware of the nature of it.

While the use of AI within the court system is expanding, it’s typically been reserved for administrative tasks, legal research and case preparation. In Arizona, it’s helped inform the public of rulings in significant cases.

But using AI to generate victim impact statements marks a new tool for sharing information with the court outside the evidentiary phases.

Reller told the appeals court that the video doesn’t disclose who wrote the words used by the AI version of Pelkey and wasn’t backed up with evidence establishing that its contents accurately reflected Pelkey’s views. It also had an “undue emotional weight” and conveyed an authenticity that wouldn’t have been there had a family member read the same words aloud, Reller said.

Horcasitas’ lawyer contended the judge weighed the statements made in the AI-generated video when deciding on a sentence, but prosecutors argued Lang didn’t consider the footage when issuing the punishment.

Shortly before delivering the sentence, the judge commented that he “loved that AI” but didn’t say from the bench whether the video factored into his decision. Lang said he felt Pelkey’s “obvious forgiveness of Mr. Horcasitas reflects the character I heard about today.”

The family’s lawyers say the judge was already inundated with relevant information from Pelkey’s family and friends before the AI video was played — and that nothing in the video was inflammatory. They also said Pelkey’s previous attorney didn’t object to the AI video.

Associated Press writer Mikella Schuettler contributed to this report.

—Jacques Billeaud, Associated Press

When I was on the executive team at a tech company, I was used to setting annual goals. It was an exercise the company went through every January, with monthly and quarterly comparisons against what had been planned. 

Running a solo business is very different. January’s goals might be obsolete by March because there are simply so many variables. 

As a solopreneur, I realized I had to be much more fluid. A single client’s decision can drastically alter the course of your business, and so can a change in the market. 

I stopped planning in years and started planning in quarters.

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A large company can adjust mid-year when revenue swings. It might trim a department’s budget or move people to a different project. The big goals for the year stay mostly intact, and the rest of the business keeps running.

Solopreneurs don’t have the luxury of “shifting things around” – at least, not in the same way.

Goals still have their place; it’s good to work toward something. But you’ll make plans according to a roadmap. You might have a specific revenue goal, and your roadmap tells you, step-by-step, how you’re going ot get there. 

The roadmap is the part that’s impossible to plan for a full year. Instead, your solo business should work in shorter increments. 

What a 90-day cycle actually contains

A 90-day roadmap planning cycle is simple enough that you could start planning right away. Here’s what goes into it:

• A theme. The specific steps you’re working on toward one of your larger goals.
  
• Milestones every week or two. If the roadmap starts slipping, you’ll notice right away.
  
• Track time elapsed next to progress. If you’re 45 days into your 90-day cycle, are you 50% done with the action items on your roadmap?
  
• A specific outcome. What do you want to have accomplished by the end of the 90 days?

As you begin a planning cycle, ask yourself how your specific roadmap for the next 90 days rolls up to your larger goals for the year. Also, think about what the next building block will be in the subsequent 90 days. You don’t need to start planning for the next cycle yet, but have it in the back of your mind.

The review at the end of the planning cycle

Without a scheduled review, 90-day planning doesn’t help you build over the course of the year. Reviewing and reflecting on your results is how you set yourself up for the next cycle. 

Put the review as a recurring event on your calendar, and don’t let it get scheduled over or moved. I block roughly half a day, a few days after the end of each quarter. 

During the review, you compare what you said you would get done with what you actually got done. Then you look at what worked and what didn’t. I have a template I follow each time, writing down my observations. In the background, Claude gathers some information for me so I don’t have to spend my time compiling data. 

Ninety days is long enough to gain some traction and assess. At that point, you can ask yourself whether something new is working, whether you need to give it more time, or if you need to change course. 

Planning for a business that keeps changing

A company with hundreds of employees has resources I don’t have. It also has hundreds of people working from the same roadmap, which makes it hard to change direction when something drastic comes up. In my business, I can make that type of change whenever I feel it’s necessary.

The 90-day roadmap is how you get to your annual goals. And if you realize a cycle or two in that an annual goal is out of reach, it’s okay to make an adjustment. 

I keep my big-picture goals on a sticky note on my monitor. The details, project, and plans live within my 90-day roadmap. That’s where the work happens. 

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Owners of the new iPhone 18 Pro Max who are using the phone on AT&T’s network, take note: The telecom giant has issued an urgent warning instructing users to update to the latest version of iOS 27. Here’s what you need to know.

What’s happened?

Two weeks ago, Apple’s new iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max went on sale. The devices are Apple’s latest flagships and run the company’s new operating system, iOS 27.

By and large, the launch of the new iPhone seems to have gone smoothly—except for some people on AT&T’s network. Shortly after the iPhone’s launch, owners of the iPhone 18 Pro Max who were using the phone on AT&T’s network began reporting problems with the handset.

These problems included issues like no cellular signal, interrupted data, and text messages that did not go through.

Interestingly, these problems only seemed to affect iPhone 18 Pro Max users—not users of the regular iPhone 18 Pro.

As MacRumors has noted, the iPhone 18 Pro and the iPhone 18 Pro Max use different cellular modems. The 18 Pro uses Apple’s new C2 modem worldwide, while the 18 Pro Max uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X80 modem in the U.S. market.

Only the iPhone 18 Pro Max seems to be having connection issues, which has led many to wonder whether the problems are connected to the device’s Qualcomm modem. 

Still, the issue could also be completely unrelated to the 18 Pro Max’s modem.

“Apple has released a software update to address an issue that may affect calls, data, texts and 911 calls on a small number of Apple iPhone 18 Pro Max phones,” AT&T told Fast Company when reached for comment. “AT&T customers with an iPhone 18 Pro Max should update their phones now to the latest available software. Our top priority is ensuring customers can stay connected when they need it most, and we are working with Apple to make it right.”

Update iOS 27 immediately

This week, Apple released the first update to iOS 27, the iPhone’s new operating system.

This update, known as iOS 27.0.1, is the usual kind of point update that Apple rolls out within a few weeks of releasing a new OS. It’s designed to fix critical bugs that are discovered after the operating system ships to the public.

In its release notes, Apple says iOS 27.0.1 “provides bug fixes for your iPhone,” including the following two issues:

• iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max may unexpectedly restart when Face ID fails to authenticate
• A color artifact may appear on photos captured at 2x under certain lighting conditions at f/1.48 on a small number of iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max devices
• Opening Notification Center and Control Center simultaneously may cause the touchscreen to become unresponsive

Over the past 24 hours, there have been multiple online reports of AT&T customers who own the iPhone 18 Pro Max receiving text messages from the company, urging them to update to iOS 27.0.1 immediately.

“Hi, it’s AT&T. Action needed: An important Apple software update for your iPhone 18 Pro Max is available,” the text message reads, according to a report from 9to5Mac. “Some phones may be unable to complete calls/text/data, including to 911. Update to iOS 27.0.1 immediately — Settings > General > Software Update. Please contact AT&T or Apple if you have questions.”

Unfortunately, despite AT&T sending out the text urging the update, there are numerous reports that the iOS 27.0.1 update does not fix the connectivity issues 18 Pro Max customers are experiencing on AT&T’s network.

Indeed, Apple’s iOS 27.0.1 release notes do not mention any specific fix—though the notes do refer to general unnamed “bug fixes.”

Should you upgrade to iOS 27.0.1?

Whether you have a new iPhone 18 Pro Max or not, it’s wise to update your iPhone to iOS 27.0.1 as soon as possible. Though it’s a small release, it’s one Apple pushes out quickly to fix the most serious bugs discovered so far in the new operating system.

For iPhone 18 Pro Max customers on AT&T’s network, updating to iOS 27.0.1 is a good idea. It’s possible the update does fix the connection bug many users are experiencing—but not for all of them. Another bug fix may be needed.

To update your iPhone to iOS 27.0.1, open the Settings app, tap General, tap Software Update, and follow the on-screen instructions.

This story has been updated with a statement from AT&T.