In part two of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Companys oral history of YouTube, we look at how the companys rapid ascent after its 2005 founding led to multiple challenges, from bandwidth costs to unhappy copyright holders. This prompted the startup to consider selling itself, and on October 9, 2006, Google announced that it would be buying it, for $1.65 billion. That deal came with the promise that the web giant would help YouTube scale up even further without micromanaging it. Eventually, the balance they struck between integration and independence paid off. But when YouTube was still a tiny, plucky startup, nobody was looking that far ahead.
Read more How YouTube Ate TV
Part one: YouTube failed as a dating site. This one change altered its fortunes forever
Steve Chen, cofounderwith Chad Hurley and Jawed Karimof YouTube: I would take care of the product team, the engineering team, the technology side of it, building out this product. And [Hurley] would be managing finance, business development, and content partnerships, the legal side. But we always shared an office, or even shared a desk when we were small.
Chris Maxcy, YouTube VP of business development (2005-2013): When I got hired, there were about 11 of us operating out of a back office in Sequoias offices. Then we moved to San Mateo to the infamous spot above the pizza shop. It was truly rat infested.Zahavah Levine, YouTube general counsel, chief counsel (2006-2011): On my first day, Steve handed me a sealed box from Ikea, and invited me to erect my desk. Oh yeah, he added, you might also want to order a computer online. Of the 23 employees, most were under the age of 25. At 37, I often felt like the adult in the room, and at times I felt like the corporate grandmother.Mia Quagliarello, YouTube senior product marketing manager, content and community (2006-2011): On my first day of work, I was seven months pregnant. There was an engineer sleeping on the couch. It really felt like a small family.
Levine: I remember taking calls in the janitors closet when I needed privacy.
Lyor Cohen, Warner Music Group CEO of recorded music (2004-2012); YouTube and Google global head of music (2016-present): It felt like an independent record company. No formality. Everybody in full motion. Jake McGuire, YouTube software engineer (2006-present): It was like, If something is going to blow up next week, then who cares? Well deal with it next week, because weve got something thats blowing up right now. It was actually kind of fun.Levine: There was a lot of interest in buying us, including from the same L.A. media companies that were threatening us with lawsuits.Maxcy: We had a number of overtures even very early on from large tech companies in the Valley. At the time, Chad and Steve were pretty adamant that they wanted to stay independent.
McGuire: Chad and Steve had actually mentionedat an all-hands meeting with, I dont know, 40 people at the timethat they got an offer to sell the company for $500 million. And they turned it down. I just shouted out, You idiots! Why didn’t you take it?
Tara Walpert Levy, Google ads director (2011-2021); VP, Americas at YouTube (2021-present): Back in 2005 I was consulting, mostly to large media networks. And I had advised one of them, passionately, to buy YouTube. They chose to go a different direction.
How YouTube Shaped CultureHere It Goes Again, July 2006Rock band OK Go was founded in 1998, well before YouTube existed, but its eye-popping, single-shot music videos feel they were born to go viral on the site. Featuring beautifully choreographed treadmill choreography, Here It Goes Again was watched more than 50 million times before being yanked by EMI during a dispute with YouTube; after being restored, it racked up another 60 million-plus views.
Multiple factors ultimately led the company to confront the possibility that it would need to be part of a larger organization to prosper.
Levine: We couldnt keep up with the inquiries, content deals, takedown requests and legal threats, law enforcement subpoenas, press inquiries, infrastructure growth, hiring. It didnt stop.Dmitry Shapiro, founder and CEO, Veoh: They were blowing through millions of dollars a month in bandwidth costs.
Maxcy: Wed wait for a server to get delivered, and then wed see this immediate spike in traffic once we got the new infrastructure installed. We knew there was a lot of demand, but we also knew we just couldn’t afford it.
Chen: We were able to build a form of our own cloud in the various data centers around the U.S. But from a legal standpoint, it was just a big question mark.
Levine: We had Mark Cuban in the press repeatedly insisting that YouTube wasnt worth a dime because of the copyright issues.Roelof Botha, former PayPal CFO and partner at Sequoia Capital, YouTubes first investor: Wed gone down for a meeting in Los Angeles with Universal Music, and it was probably the worst business meeting of our lives. They were pit bulls, and when you looked at the demands they had, it wouldnt benefit artists. I think the [YouTube] founders left feeling quite defeated, and so the prospect of an acquisition became far more attractive.
Two tech behemoths quickly emerged as the most likely buyers.
Chen: It was a big decision whether to move forward with Yahoo or Google. Google was still the search engine, and Yahoo was everything else.
Botha: Yahoo was maybe the more natural acquirer because it had media experience and [former Warner Bros. co-CEO] Terry Semel was leading the company. But some of the dysfunction of the company was starting to show up in its ineptitude in landing the opportunity.
Maxcy: Google had the infrastructure, they had the know-how, they had the capital to really make it work.
How YouTube Shaped Culture Charlie Bit My FingerAgain!, May 2007Charlie, an English 1-year-old, chomps on his 3-year-old brother Harrys finger. Nobody is injured in the process, and millions of viewers find it adorably hysterical. Countless YouTubers riff on the duos videoincluding, a decade later, the brothers themselves.
Chen: What we liked about Google was not so much on the financial side. Eric Schmidt, the CEO, took me and Chad aside and basically told us, Weve been doing all these things with Google Video to try to compete, but theres some magic vibe within this YouTube group and community. We want to make sure that through this acquisition, we dont do anything to decelerate that. If anything, we should be here to help.
Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google (2001-2011): YouTube was the clear winner when it came to the social side of online video. It wasnt just about watching clips. It was about community, sharing, and connection. Thats what really drew us to the company.
John Harding, Google software engineer (2005-2007); YouTube engineering manager, director, VP (2007-present): Most of us on Google Video were infrastructure-focused. YouTube had this great consumer product. We all immediately saw, Okay, this is actually a perfect match.
Schmidt: They were right about the product, and we were right about how to scale it.
Levine: I think it took five days from signing the term sheet to signing the long-form agreement. I was operating on pure adrenaline.
Maxcy: The day of the acquisition, we were moving into new offices in San Bruno. Chads car was broken, so we rode to work together in mine. We show up and there are satellite trucks outside the building, and its this entire circus.
Quagliarello: I was about to go get lunch and leave the building. My manager’s like, “You might wanna stay here for this.
McGuire: My phone started blowing up with all these text messages. Theyd announced we got bought. We all went to TGI Fridays on the other side of the parking lot at the end of the night to celebrate.
Google honored its pledge to provide YouTube with resources while letting it chart its own course.
Suzie Reider, YouTube CMO (2006-2013): Chad [became] co-CEO with a longtime Googler named Salar [Kamangar], and they sat together in an office. I think Google did a good job of helping us come into the fold.
McGuire: They had one of their cafés in Mountain View cook lunch and they would drive it up in a van and serve it in our basement every day.
Chen: Wed been stumbling into hurdles when it came to search, recommendations on videos, internationalization. We were able to decide where we thought the most help was needed to continue the growth of YouTube as a platform.
How YouTube Shaped Culture CNN/YouTube Presidential Debate, July 2007
YouTubers get face time with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other Democratic candidates with the services first-ever debate livestream. The Republican contenders follow in November.
Harding: There was a lot of quick triage: Okay, what’s in the most risky shape, and how quickly can we get those things moved onto the Google infrastructure that’s more scalable? Search was one of the first things, and then pretty quickly after that we moved the video processing.
McGuire: Google previously had a strategy of making all their acquisitions rewrite their stuff in the Google way. I don’t know if they decided that wasn’t working out for them, but we were the first people who were not given that advice. They did send over a small number of engineers who were almost all pretty good. But even then, they were just trying to work with what we had.
Chen: That’s very different from what we thought would happen if Yahoo had been the acquiring group. We wanted to really avoid what happened with eBay and PayPal.
Billy Biggs, Google/YouTube software engineer (2006-present): After [Google] bought the company, I saw that some of the technical choices they made were very elegant. It was a master class in learning how to scale.
The motherships influence did grow over time.
Quagliarello: They said, Nothing’s going to change. You guys keep doing what you’re doing. It felt like that for about a year. But then it was pretty clear that things were going to change. There was more rigor and discipline around goals and OKRs. It just became more hierarchical.
Matthew Darby, YouTube director of product management (2008-present): There’s definitely a lot of the Google culture that got imbued into YouTube. It’s a very analytical, very engineering-driven culture, very rigorous. Its hard to know whether YouTube on its own would’ve been quite the same.
Reider: For me, it was calming, because I’d worked in larger organizations and I was used to a little more rigor and structure. I think it was hard for people who had never worked for a big company like that before. But we needed it.
Three months after Google acquired YouTube, Apple announced the iPhone, pitching video-watching as a core feature. When the phone shipped in 2007, it had YouTube onboard. Googles own mobile platform, Android, made YouTube even more of a strategic asset.
Harding: In 2007 and 2008, it wasn’t obvious that mobile was going to become what it did.
Biggs: It was truly unclear whether people would really want to watch a lot of video on their phone, or whether that was just not going to be a thing.
Chen: There was no SDK for third-party iPhone apps. Apple reached out to us to say, We think in order for the iPhone to be fully demonstrated, it needs to have YouTube on it. And so we were the only third-party company that rolled out with the initial set of apps that came with the iPhone.
Harding: We had a couple weeks to build the YouTube app for the iPhone, in partnership with the Apple team, before they had to send it off to manufacturing. I was like, I know exactly how to do that. I’ve already built this for Google Video, but nobody wants it.
Chen: We had to make sure that all the videos that we had were transcoded to be streamed on their video player. It just completely took off.
Darby: There was a concerted effort to get everybody at Google to think about mobile first. Android ended up sort of eating the entire world, and YouTube rode along that.
In the wake of the oogle acquisition, YouTubes cultural influence was already extraordinary and still growing. It was reflected in everything from a TV ad that repurposed a YouTube videos Chicken McNuggets rap to the U.S. presidential campaign.
Chris Edwards, Arnold Worldwide creative director (1999-2012): A colleague of mine shared a link to the video with a comment saying, What do they need us for anymore? I thought, Shit, this would make a great 30-second [McDonalds] spot. It got over a million views in the first few weeksback in 2007 that was a lot!and tons of comments and copycats doing parody videos on YouTube. We did local TV buys in three markets, and McNuggets sales shot up an average of 42%.
Chen: YouTube did a collaboration with CNN for the Democratic and Republican [primary] debates. Instead of having a bunch of panelists speaking into the camera for the questions, they had them coming from YouTube creators. I remember traveling to Charleston and appearing with Anderson Cooper. I was like, We’ve reached the pinnacle of anything that YouTube can do. But this was just 2007.
Additional reporting by María José Gutiérrez Chávez, Yasmin Gagne, and Steven Melendez.
As tech companies race to build more AI data centers, your electric bill is probably going up. And while some companies are prioritizing adding clean energy to accommodate their intensive demands, climate pollution is also climbing as utilities turn to gas or even coal to support our chatbot habits.
But there might be another way for new data centers to get the enormous amount of energy they plan to use. A recent report from the nonprofit Rewiring America suggests that instead of building new power plants, hyperscalersthe Big Tech companies whose data centers provide the backbone to cloud computingcould help homeowners install new solar panels, batteries, and heat pumps.
We saw this trend happening with data centers needing capacity on the grid and thought by upgrading households, we can actually create a significant amount of capacity, says Cora Wyent, head of research and data science at Rewiring America, which is focused on electrifying homes and communities.
[Interactive Map: Rewiring America]
Data centers that are planned or already under construction are projected to add a staggering 93 gigawatts of new power demand to the grid by 2029, or roughly as much electricity as 77 million homes use. But the nonprofit calculated that its possible to cover that growth by adding solar panels and battery storage at peoples homes. Heat pumps can also help.
In Georgia, for example, which expects to need an extra 6.7 gigawatts of electric capacity over the next five years, rooftop solar and storage on homes in the state could provide 5.4 gigawatts. The rest could be covered by upgrading houses with inefficient old-school electric heating to heat pumps. (This combination would actually create more room on the grid than data centers need, helping support growing electricity demand from EVs and other sources.)
If solar and batteries were deployed at a very large scale, Rewiring America says the cost could drop by 40%. That would make it possible for tech companies to invest in the equipment at roughly the same cost as building a new gas power plant. In the nonprofits model, tech companies would pay for 30% of the cost of the new technology. Homeowners would pay the rest, and then get the benefit of cheap electricity and access to power if the grid goes out in a disaster.
In hot climates, heat pumps can unlock significant grid capacity by replacing less-efficient air conditioners. Rewiring Americas calculations show that in Texas, upgrading air conditioners to heat pumps would create 3.9 gigawatts of capacity on the grid. Solar and batteries would add another 10 gigawatts, helping nearly reach the state’s planned needs for another 17 gigawatts by 2029.
Of course, rolling out clean tech at homes at the scale envisioned here would be a major challenge. But the report argues that it could happen faster than alternatives; building a new gas plant, for example, can take several years because of supply chain shortages. Tech companies are also investing in unproven new nuclear tech that isn’t yet commercialized. In theory, a network of new heat pumps, solar panels, and batteries could be rolled out in months.
It also could help data centers win more support in communities. “There’s been some recent polling showing that data centers are not very popular,” Wyent says. “Our perspective is that data centers are going to be built. So why don’t we try to make that as beneficial as possible to the communities where they will be built?”
Hiring an executive assistant (EA) to delegate work tasks and life admin to has long been something reserved for celebrities and Fortune 500 executives. But that belief might now be changing, as rank-and-file workers decide they, too, want a taste of the EA experience.
As Callum Borchers wrote earlier this month in The Wall Street Journal, more workers outside the C-suite are finding assistantsvirtual, in person, or AI, and sometimes just for a couple of hours a monthto help with everything from booking bouncy castles to managing work calendars.
Nowadays, everyones schedules are packed right down to the last minute. Plus, labor has never been easier to offload thanks to artificial intelligence and a globalized network. So it could be argued that what was once considered a luxury is now more accessible.
For repetitive tasks or errands, it makes sense for some people to hire a helping hand for the price of $50 or $60 an houror even cheaper if you enlist the services of AI. And while theres only so much someone who isnt employed by your company can do for you when it comes to work matters, theres still plenty they can do otherwise that could help your work-life balance.
Make no mistake: Hiring someone to do work for you is a luxury. But depending on your circumstances and situation, and if you can swing the financials, it may make sense to at least explore options. Here are some signs you might need the extra help:
You are drowning in repetitive tasks
If you don’t have a virtual or executive assistant, then the assistant is you. Repetitive tasksscreening emails, scheduling meetings, and planning travel logisticscan quickly eat up your time. When it gets to the point that they consume a full workday or more each week, its time to offload.
Log your activities for a week and, after getting a detailed picture of where your hours are actually going, outsource and delegate the tasks that are slowing you down work-wise. For example, Fyxer AI can help tackle your inbox and keep on top of email follow-ups. And as the WSJ story points out, an AI assistant like Ohai can take on some of the mental load at home.
You are dropping the ball
If you find yourself double-booking meetings, never reaching the bottom of your inbox, or working late just to keep up, it often means youre trying to do too much alone.
Outsourcing even 5 to 10 hours a week of admin can make a world of difference to both your professional capabilities and personal stress levels. Getting your own assistant helps keep you organized and accountable. Even one-off services like Taskrabbit, Angi, or Thumbtack could ease the burden when you feel yourself losing focus.
You can make the investment
Hiring your own EA, even part-time, is a financial investment. But it could also be an investment in your future. If youre so bogged down by daily tasks that you cant think bigger picture, pursue new clients, or focus on creative workit might be time to hire help.
If the return on that investment is there, it could be worth it. A good assistant, brought on board at the right time, could more than pay for themselves by giving you back hours in the day you can redirect towards growing personally or professionally. Research has shown effective delegation allows business leaders to earn up to 20% more, while companies led by CEOs who were good delegators achieved better business growth compared to companies whose CEOs delegated less.
Besides, if your workload means you are letting things sliplosing a client or project could cost more than hiring the assistant in the first place.
It is a sad fact of online life that users search for information about suicide. In the earliest days of the internet, bulletin boards featured suicide discussion groups. To this day, Google hosts archives of these groups, as do other services.
Google and others can host and display this content under the protective cloak of U.S. immunity from liability for the dangerous advice third parties might give about suicide. Thats because the speech is the third partys, not Googles.
But what if ChatGPT, informed by the very same online suicide materials, gives you suicide advice in a chatbot conversation? Im a technology law scholar and a former lawyer and engineering director at Google, and I see AI chatbots shifting Big Techs position in the legal landscape. Families of suicide victims are testing out chatbot liability arguments in court right now, with some early successes.
Who is responsible when a chatbot speaks?
When people search for information online, whether about suicide, music or recipes, search engines show results from websites, and websites host information from authors of content. This chain, search to web host to user speech, continued as the dominant way people got their questions answered until very recently.
This pipeline was roughly the model of internet activity when Congress passed the Communications Decency Act in 1996. Section 230 of the act created immunity for the first two links in the chain, search and web hosts, from the user speech they show. Only the last link in the chain, the user, faced liability for their speech.
Chatbots collapse these old distinctions. Now, ChatGPT and similar bots can search, collect website information, and speak out the resultsliterally, in the case of humanlike voice bots. In some instances, the bot will show its work like a search engine would, noting the website that is the source of its great recipe for miso chicken, for example.
When chatbots appear to be just a friendlier form of good old search engines, their companies can make plausible arguments that the old immunity regime applies. Chatbots can be the old search-web-speaker model in a new wrapper.
But in other instances, it acts like a trusted friend, asking you about your day and offering help with your emotional needs. Search engines under the old model did not act as life guides. Chatbots are often used this way. Users often do not even want the bot to show its hand with web links. Throwing in citations while ChatGPT tells you to have a great day would be, well, awkward.
The more that modern chatbots depart from the old structures of the web, the further away they move from the immunity the old web players have long enjoyed. When a chatbot acts as your personal confidant, pulling from its virtual brain ideas on how it might help you achieve your stated goals, it is not a stretch to treat it as the responsible speaker for the information it provides.
Courts are responding in kind, particularly when the bots vast, helpful “brain” is directed toward aiding your desire to learn about suicide.
Chatbot suicide cases
Current lawsuits involving chatbots and suicide victims show that the door of liability is opening for ChatGPT and other bots. A case involving Googles Character.AI bots is a prime example.
Character.AI allows users to chat with characters created by users, from anime figures to a prototypical grandmother. Users could even have virtual phone calls with some characters, talking to a supportive virtual nana as if it were their own. In one case in Florida, a character in Game of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryen, persona allegedly asked the young victim to come home to the bot in heaven before the teen shot himself. The family of the victim sued Google.
Parents of a 16-year-old allege that ChatGPT contributed to their sons suicide.
The family of the victim did not frame Googles role in traditional technology terms. Rather than describing Googles liability in the context of websites or search functions, the plaintiff framed Googles liability in terms of products and manufacturing akin to a defective parts maker. The district court gave this framing credence despite Googles vehement argument that it is merely an internet service, and thus the old internet rules should apply.
The court also rejected arguments that the bots statements were protected First Amendment speech that users have a right to hear.
Though the case is ongoing, Google failed to get the quick dismissal that tech platforms have long counted on under the old rules. Now, there is a follow-on suit for a different Character.AI bot in Colorado, and ChatGPT faces a case in San Francisco, all with product and manufacture framings like the Florida case.
Hurdles for plaintiffs to overcome
Though the door to liability for chatbot providers is now open, other issues could keep families of victims from recovering any damages from the bot providers. Even if ChatGPT and its competitors are not immune from lawsuits and courts buy into the product liability system for chatbots, lack of immunity does not equal victory for plaintiffs.
Product liability cases require the plaintiff to show that the defendant caused the harm at issue. This is particularly difficult in suicide cases, as courts tend to find that, regardless of what came before, the only person responsible for suicide is the victim. Whether itsan angry argument with a significant other leading to a cry of why dont you just kill yourself, or a gun design making self-harm easier, courts tend to find that only the victim is to blame for their own death, not the people and devices the victim interacted with along the way.
But without the protection of immunity that digital platforms have enjoyed for decades, tech defendants face much higher costs to get the same victory they used to receive automatically. In the end, the story of the chatbot suicide cases may be more settlements on secret, but lucrative, terms to the victims families.
Meanwhile, bot providers are likely to place more content warnings and trigger bot shutdowns more readily when users enter territory that the bot is set to consider dangerous. The result could be a safer, but less dynamic and useful, world of bot products.
Brian Downing is an assistant professor of law at the University of Mississippi.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A few years ago, I received some news Id been longing to hear: The first book Id ever written received an offer from a publisher. My childhood dream of becoming an author looked set to become a reality.
It was six oclock in the eveningthe ideal time for a celebratory drink with my colleagues. But I didnt tell anyone the news. I thought my excitement would be seen as bragging. So I kept my mouth shut.
If only Id known about the concept of Mitfreude: a German term for the vicarious joy people can feel at anothers happiness. According to recent research, we are needlessly cautious about sharing good news, because we fear it will provoke boredom, irritation, or envy in others.
Yet Mitfreude is surprisingly commonand sharing our happier moments can improve our mood, strengthen our relationships with our colleagues, and boost our reputation within our professional network.
‘Joying’ with someone
Mitfreude (which literally translates as joying with) comes from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, a man not typically known for a cheery worldview. And yet he once wrote: To imagine the joy of others and to rejoice at it is the highest privilege of the highest animals. You could see Mitfreude as the opposite of Schadenfreude, our joy at others misfortune.
Studies confirm that there are many benefits to joying with another person. In the psychological literature, Mitfreude is often known by the more technical term capitalization: the idea that we can amplify our happiness from a positive event by sharing it with people we like.
We can see this in studies tracking day-to-day changes in peoples emotions. After a conversation in which one person recounts a success or good fortune, the speaker gets to relive the positive experience while the other person enjoys a vicarious mood boost. Crucially, the warm feelings that arise also strengthen social bonds.
In close relationships, it fosters trust and intimacy, explains Trevor Watkins, an assistant professor of management at the University of Oklahoma who has examined capitalization in the workplace. Sharing our successes can also enhance our reputation with our peers: Among coworkers, it offers the opportunity to foster inspiration, he says. The result is an amplification of our initial happiness: We derive even more benefit from the positive events than if we had let them passively come and go, says Watkins. Thats why its called capitalization.
Unfortunately, many of us do not recognize these benefits. So we tend to keep our happiness to ourselves.
How concealing positivity can backfire
In a survey by Annabelle Roberts, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, her research team found that 80% of participants reported having concealed a success from people around them, like a promotion at work. Participants wanted to avoid provoking jealousy or creating awkwardness in a conversation. They thought they were being sensitive. In reality, it is the act of hiding a successand blocking opportunities for Mitfreudethat is most likely to elicit bad outcomes.
Roberts and her colleagues asked participants to consider the hypothetical story of two work friends who are both looking for a new job: One gets asked to give a presentation to a potential employer, but neglects to tell his friend, despite them having discussed their job hunts. There could be multiple explanations for his behavior (including sheer forgetfulness), but the participants saw it as an act that erodes trust. As a result, the participants responded that they would be far less likely to share personal information about themselves with such a colleagueor to collaborate with him in the future.
Sharing positive things about ourselves does a lot for connection, says Todd Chan, who conducted research into the benefits of perceived bragging for his PhD at the University of Michigan. Its not that people forget that friends might be happy for them. Its more that theyre disproportionately focused on the risk of things like envy. In reality, close friends mostly do feel joy for us.
How to share joy (without bragging)
Mitfreude can have caveats: Watkins has found that sharing good news is far less likely to bring vicarious joy in competitive workplaces, where it can breed envy and resentment. Fortunately, the research offers some tips to increase the chances that you will meet Mitfreude rather than envy in any situation.
The first is the law of reciprocity. Lukasz Kaczmarek, who heads the Social Psychology Centre at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, has shown that people often keep note of the ways that you have responded to their good news. This then shapes how theyll react to good news of your own. Conveying that enthusiasm will return to you as a boomerang, Kaczmarek says. Every time you show that your behavior has changed, it produces a change in your partner.
Where possible, you might also attempt to build up others alongside yourselfa strategy known as dual promotion. You might compliment someones organizational skills while describing your creative contributions to a project, for example. The fact you’ve said something good about someone else shows that you must be a warm person, says Eric VanEpps, an associate professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University who conducted this research.
Finally, you might try to talk about some of the challenges youve faced. In a study of entrepreneurs presentations, people who described past obstacles or mistakes were considered to be less conceited, and more inspiring, than those who spoke only of their triumphs.
With time, greater awareness of Mitfreude and its benefits may help us all to create a more positive culture.
Shying away from sharing good news creates like a void that then just is cluttered with bad news, says VanEpps. It’s nice to hear good things happen to good people.
From fake it till you make it to stay in your lane, SXSW festival goers reveal the worst career advice they’ve ever been given and why it stuck with them.
When you have work life balance and fulfillment, youre set up not only for success, but also for happiness. The big questions though, are about how you can find the best approach to work and life based on where you are in your journey, based on whats unique about you, and based on what you find most important.
The work-life mix is critically important. In fact, a survey of 26,000 people in five countries by Randstad found that for 85%, work-life balance was the most important element that people were looking for in both current and future jobsa critical feature for their satisfaction. Importantly, this is the first time in the surveys 22-year history that work-life balance was a higher priority than pay (79%).
But work-life balance is hard to achieve for many. According to the American Psychological Association, 33% of workers report they dont have adequate flexibility to balance their personal and work lives. In addition, three out of five workers are struggling with burnout, according to a survey by AFLAC. Millennials report the highest levels of burnout, and the stress for all generations is primarily based on heavy workloads and long hours at work.
The bottom line is that creating a plan to gain fulfillment from work and life is a very (very, very) good idea. But unfortunately, there are no quick fixes or standard solutions for perfect work or life. Instead, everyones approaches will be different and will evolve over time. Personalizing your own strategies for success and happiness is possible with these key considerations.
KNOW YOUR EXPECTATIONS
One of the first ways to personalize your plans for work and life is to get real about your expectations. Achieving true work-life balance is a myth. Instead, youll have ups and downs and ebbs and flows through stages and seasons of life. If you have young children and a full-time job, youll be especially busy. If youre building your career and caring for elders, youll be facing tons of demands. And if youre an empty nester, youll face new challenges as well.
If you believe you should be perfectly balanced all the time, youll set yourself up to fail. Instead, realize there will be busy (or exhausting) times and there will be easier times. Focus on managing and adjusting your choices, your time, and your boundaries throughout lifes stages, knowing regular adaptation is constructive and effective.
As youre setting your expectations, also think big about not only work and family, but also your volunteer and community efforts, time with friends, and time for yourself. When youre happy at work, youll tend to feel happier at home. But the opposite is also true. When youre happier outside of work, youll perceive greater happiness within work, according to research published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior.
Personalize your work-life plan by setting realistic expectations for the demands youll face and thinking broadly about all the elements of work and life that will contribute to your experience.
KNOW YOUR STRENGTHS
Another way to personalize your plan for work and life is to play to your strengths. When youre doing work that you enjoy, youll be much happier. Of course, there will always be elements of a job you dont love, and most people must work to pay the bills and cant just quit if they dont feel fully blissful every day. But no matter what you do, youll benefit when you lean into your strengths.
Identify what youre especially and uniquely good at. You can even consider activities you loved to do as a child since these can be windows into your natural gifts. Perhaps you work in customer service and youre especially good at empathizing with people and talking them down when theyre upset. Or perhaps you work in accounting, and you have a unique gift for seeing details and identifying discrepancies. No matter what you do, bring your best and remind yourself about what you do really well, and how your work matters to your customers and coworkers.
Personalize your work-life plan by taking inventory of your strengths, finding work that taps into them, and validating your own value no matter what you do.
KNOW YOUR SOURCES OF FULFILLMENT
Too often were in a hurry so we go through the motions of our days or our weeks. But pay attention to what brings you joy and how you most enjoy spending your time.
Its a little-known fact that when you spend time on things that you enjoy, youll actually perceive you have more time because youre energized by the activity.
Manage your commitments based on what pays you back most. Perhaps you dont enjoy the work of a school committee as much as you enjoy volunteering in a classroom and having contact with your child and their classmates (think: kids not committees). Or perhaps you love spending time in the hands-on work of a community garden, rather than on the board of your local museum. Despite long hours, you may relish the opportunity to participate on the new innovation team at work.
Also consider adding or subtracting activities based on your season of life. If youre building your career, joining the advisory council for the local charity is a great way to network. But when youre running carpool with three children and supporting all their activities, its a great time to decline additional invitations for extra project work at your job. Know your limits and boundaries and dont be afraid to manage to them.
Personalize your work-life plan by determining what feels most rewarding for you and making choices for how you spend your time based on the right mix. Often, work-life gurus recommend saying no as often as you can. A better approach is to be intentional, saying yes to things that are rewarding or rejuvenating and saying no (when you can) to the activities that are less energizing.
KNOW YOUR PEOPLE
Another key to a great experience of work and life is to surround yourself with people you can rely on. Choose to spend time with those who encourage you, support you, and help you. Invest in the friends whom you trust and who need your help as well.
Be ruthless with your time while youre gentle with people, turning them down tactfully or being understanding when they are requesting your time. But choose to invest less in the relationships that are minimally rewarding or that sap you. Giving back and focusing on others is correlated with happiness, but youll want to be intentional about avoiding people (as much as you can) who may be negative or who fail to reciprocate in terms of their time and investment in you.
Personalize your work-life plan by making connections and prioritizing time with people who are most important to you.
CULTIVATE GRATITUDE
And finally, no matter what stage of life youre in, one of the best ways to increase your fulfillment is to emphasize ratitude. Gratitude works because it focuses you on what you have, rather than what youre lacking. The relationship between gratitude and happiness is well-established by various studies.
Emphasize gratitude and think consciously about what you appreciate. Beyond things, focus on experiences, capabilities, family, and friends. Robert Braults advice is helpful: “Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.
Gratitude fosters positive experiences even as you face significant demands, and linguistic determinism helps, too. Essentially, how you talk to yourself affects how you think and feel about them. When you consider that you get to pick up the kids from school, it can feel more positive than if you have to pick them up. Or if you invest time in something, it can feel more rewarding than if you spend time in the same pursuit.
Personalize your work-life plan by being grateful and by managing your language, thoughts, and feelings about all the challenges you face.
Ultimately, the best work-life fulfillment comes from your own mix of how you spend your time and how you perceive the value of both your contributions and rewards. And over time, youll adjust and adapt as demands shift, life evolves, and as you grow and develop.
Despite the now widespread use of AI in workplaces, workers aren’t actually becoming more productive, according to a new survey led by Stanford Social Media Lab and BetterUp Labs.
The report finds that while employees are using modern AI tools more than ever, they’re using them to create subpar work. The new report calls the phenomenon “workslop, which it defines as “AI-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” In other words, it’s thoughtless, sloppy work that someone will eventually have to clean up.
The problem is widespread up and down the corporate ladder. Per the report, 40% of employees out of 1,150 surveyed said they’ve received workslop in the past month, and that about 15.4% of the work they receive overall meets the criteria for workslop. Most commonly, workslop is shared between peers (40% of the time), but it doesn’t stop there: 18% of the time, workslop gets sent to managers. And it also happens in reverse: 16% of the time, managers (or even more senior leaders) send workslop out to their teams.
The report says that two industries have been impacted the most: professional services and technology. But across all industries, the phenomenon is more than a minor annoyance. Theres an emotional cost to receiving workslop. More than half of respondents (53%) said they feel annoyed, 38% confused, and 22% are downright offended when they receive workslop.
Receiving low-effort work from employees may also change the way coworkers view said employees. “Approximately half of the people we surveyed viewed colleagues who sent workslop as less creative, capable, and reliable than they did before receiving the output,” the report said. Likewise, 42% of those surveyed said workers who generate subpar AI-generated work are less trustworthy; 37% even view them as less intelligent.
In fact, 34% of respondents said that when they receive workslop they notify other teammates or their manager. Nearly a third (32%) said they are less likely to want to work with the workslop producer again.
While AI might make it easier to speed through work, using it carelessly may erode trust among coworkers just as fast.
Lets be honest: No matter your perspective, taking in news these days tends to be a pretty tiring experience.
At best, its a bit boring. At worst, its anxiety-inducing and mind-melting, often leaving you with more questions than answers.
This week, a whole new kind of news app is officially breaking cover. And, I knowyadda yadda yadda, right? Another earth-shattering news app with more of the same as every other app before it?
I had the same thought when I first came across this. Then I started to actually use it. And man alive, lemme tell ya: This is not like any other news app Ive ever encountered.
Its fresh, its interesting, and its absolutely different. And it introduces some truly remarkable high-tech twists that turn news consumption into a uniquely personal and genuinely interactive experience.
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!
A news app like no other
First things first: While the app were about to go over is about as new as can be, it actually comes from a fairly familiar source.
The three guys behind it were among the early developers on Googles acclaimed NotebookLM toolone of the first legitimately useful standouts of our current (all-too-often overhyped) AI era.
NotebookLM, if you arent familiar, has won over oodles of fans with its clever approach to using AI in a limited, situation-specific way: It analyzes only the documents, web pages, and other info you feed into it and then lets you interact with that info in all sorts of engaging ways.
One of those ways is having the system turn your info into an on-demand podcastan undeniably intriguing new option for listening to info of your choosing in a conversational, audio-based form.
Thats the same basic philosophy behind Huxe, a cross-platform, audio-centric news app thats officially available for anyone to use today.
In short, Huxe lets you specify your areas of interestanything from technology and productivity to business, health, food, sports, books, and (if you must) current eventsalong with optionally adding in your location for local news, traffic, and weather updates and, if you really wanna get wild, connecting it to your calendar and/or email so it can include updates from those fronts as well.
Whatever you pick, each morning Huxe uses your preferences to serve up a single daily news brief made specifically for you. Its computer-generated, of course, but it sounds like two human hosts performing a podcast solely for your benefitwith a focus on the areas you asked for and as much personalization as youve opted to include.
Huxe serves up a single, personalized news brief every morningbut that’s not all.
Now, heres where it gets really surreal: While your podcast is playing, you can tap a microphone icon and interrupt itto ask questions about something, ask for clarifications or more info about a story, or ask anything else that comes to your mind as youre listening.
Whenever you speak, the hosts stop speaking and listen; then, within a matter of seconds, they respond to your request as if they are actually chatting with you. After theyre done addressing your inquiry, they segue naturally back into the rest of your predetermined program.
Here, for instance, I interrupted a segment about some incoming Google Play Store changes to ask whether the new features would be available globally or only in the U.S., for nowwhich hadnt initially been mentioned in my podcast. (I turned on live captioning to capture the apps spoken response.)
Your Huxe podcasts will stop and listen whenever you ask a question, then respond before continuing on with the program.
In addition to the standard morning briefings, you can open up Huxe anytime to get an on-the-spot custom podcast update, and you can tune in to a variety of live stations with varying themes related to your interests. You can even create your own custom live stations or DeepCasts to get instant podcasts on practically any topic imaginable, anytime.
The app gives you a sprawling selection of custom and on-demand podcast options.
And all of that is still just scratching the surface.
Now, two unavoidable reality checks:
First, could the systems involved here get facts wrongas AI systems so frequently do?
Its certainly possible ad arguably even likely. AI has thus far proven itself to be extremely fallible and untrustworthy, and thats in large part just par for the course with the way the underlying technology works.
In my relatively limited experience with Huxe so far, Ive yet to run into any obvious examples of errant information. But that doesnt mean it wont happen. And its something Id strongly suggest anyone using an app like this keep a close eye on and keep top of mind.
Second, is it slightly unsettling how good this is and how human it seems?
Yupsure is. But is it insanely impressive at the same time and something I could absolutely see being appreciated by an awful lot of people? Youd better believe it.
Whether you end up using the app often or just playing around with it for a while, its one seriously cool and impossibly interesting tool thats well worth your while to investigate.
And hey, who knows? You might just end up loving it.
Huxe is available for both Android and iOS. There isnt a web version (yet), but itll work on essentially any phone in front of you.
Its free to use for the moment, without any asterisks, and Ive yet to encounter any kind of advertising. Ive gotta think therell eventually be ads integrated into the shows and/or premium subscriptions of some sort offered, but the company hasnt spoken to any such specifics so far.
The app does require you to sign inwith either a Google account or an email addressbut no other form of personal info is required. Huxes privacy policy says the service may use your voice data for improving its system but never uses any personal calendar or email info for training without an explicit opt-in.
Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
Of all the things weve used ChatGPT for in 2025, one of the most specific was: What should we drink on a Dalston dive bar expedition on a Thursday night with cooler, younger clients, to avoid a hanxiety-filled Friday, with a board presentation to write?
The answer? Neat Patrón or margaritas, with tips on hydration and sleep.
It actually worked. We had a great night, and woke up (relatively) clear-headed. This is what millions of people are doing every day: trading Google rabbit holes for AI when seeking product advice, personal hacks, and brand choices.
ChatGPT isnt just an influencing preference. It increasingly is the preference engine.
KILL THE FUNNEL
For decades, brand and marketing strategy has operated around a simple concept: the funnel. First, you capture awareness. Then, cultivate interest. After that, you guide consumers toward decision, and finally, conversion. Clean, rational, linear.
We all knew it was flawed but there was a directional truth to it that made it very useful to plan around. But in 2025, the time has come to kill the funnel.
We set out to write a paper on what to replace it with, drawing on extensive research, our client work, and input from our friends at Reddit. Here are the highlights so far.
HOW TO REPLACE THE FUNNEL
Consumers arent moving predictably through stages. Theyre outsourcing research and shortlisting to machines. Theyre skipping steps entirely. Just six months ago wed have called BS on this proclamation. But today, this is very much happening:
Roughly 50% of shoppers in the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia use GenAI for e-commerce tasks
Over 60% of U.S. Gen Z and millennials use GenAI to help manage their finances
Leading venture capitalists and tech leaders are speculating about a future where AI superagents dissolve the role of apps and traditional user interfaces
Of course the rate of change varies widely by purchase complexity, with an incredible 47% of travel shoppers feeling confident when using AI compared to 17% knowingly using it in grocery. But the overall picture is of a collapsing customer journey.
That means the strategies designed to move people through it will collapse with it.
The implication is profound. Brand building now has two audiences: Humans and machines.
2 MODES OF MODERN BRAND-BUILDING
To succeed in this new reality, marketers must operate in two parallel modes: Priming and proving.
Priming is about creating long-term predisposition with humans. Building familiarity, cultural relevance, and emotional affinity regardless of whether theyre currently in market.
Proving is about surfacing the evidence that both humans and deep learning algorithms trust. Delivering the information and signals that win in a machine-mediated, AI-driven decision moment.
HOW TO PRIME
Priming creates familiarity and favorability in human memories, to become the default choice in someones mind before they need to choose.
That means:
Emotional storytelling that travels
Memorable brand codes and consistent assets
Participation in culture, including TikTok trends, Discord, or headline-making activations
Community-led content people want to remix, share, and live with
Experiences that build brand belief through action, not just ads
Orientating brand health measurement around equity metrics that track progress on how well youre influencing human perceptions and memory structures
In other words, best-practice, 21st century upper funnel marketing. But less focused on interruption at scale and more on a coherent ecosystem of authentic, useful, and entertaining content/experiences.
HOW TO PROVE
Proving is where humans and machines overlap. It’s what shows up when someone (or something) is checking whether you’re credible, relevant, and worth recommending.
That means:
High-quality, up-to-date product and brand information across the web
Clear alignment between brand promise and experience
Independent reviews and endorsements
High-authority media mentions and expert takes
Fast correction of misinformation and inconsistent signals
Orientating brand health measurement around entity metrics that track progress on how well youre influencing large language model (LLM) representation and retrieval
The proving layer is what determines whether AI assistants recommend your brand or skip it entirely.
THE NEW CUSTOMER JOURNEY IS A FLYWHEEL
Heres the shift:
Where the funnel assumes a one-way path, priming and proving are a constant loop.
This is a flywheel, where strong priming makes AI recommendations feel more trusted, while great proving strengthens memories and impressions with humans and machines alike.
Viewing our Patron/hangxiety experience through this model, wed already seen the Nothing to Hide platform (priming). The subsequent experience of the LLM recognizing bartender advocacy (proving) on the same topic likely influenced our momentous drinks decision.
This is what brand leadership looks like in the AI era: not guiding people down a funnel, but building a self-reinforcing system where emotional equity and informational credibility compound.
FINAL THOUGHT: HELPING HUMANS > HACKING SYSTEMS
The brands that win in this new era of customer decision making wont do it by hacking a single channel or reverse-engineering one LLM’s ranking logic. The innovation rate is so fast that no one really knows how this will play out. What feels like a hack today may be obsolete tomorrow.
But there are clues. Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT said recently that while they are still really in the MS-DOS phase, ultimately the expeience is being optimized to help people thrive rather than for a specific engagement or time metric. So it follows that the brands they favor will do the same, through being as useful, trustworthy, and interesting as possible.
Great brand building has always been about these qualities. But we cannot underestimate the paradigm shift caused by them being codetermined by hyperintelligent machines.
The flywheel previously known as a funnel is already spinning. CMOs should jump on it now, or watch competitors generate exponential growth while they wait.
Neil Barrie is global CEO and cofounder of 21st Century Brand. Dan Hauck is executive strategy director and partner of 21st Century Brand.
