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There have been five 1 in 1,000-year floods” this summer alone in the continental U.S. Heavy rains have poured over Texas, North Carolina, New Mexico, Illinois, and Florida over the past months causing streets to flood, homes to suffer irreparable damage, and people to lose their lives, loved ones, and pets. The death toll alone in Texas is at 135 as of July 25, as search efforts begin to end with only three more persons still missingthe result of over three weeks of searching. The 0.1% chance of these floods occurring makes their recent frequency alarming. This, coupled with other recent flash floods across major East Coast states like New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey and projected flash floods in central and southwestern U.S., makes for increasingly unsettling future forecasts. But are these weather patterns actually out of the normor are these floods becoming more common? How rare are 1,000-year floods? The phrase “1 in 1,000-year floods” comes from the fact that statistically, floods of that intensity and destruction are likely to happen once every 1,000 years (or a 0.1% likelihood). In 2024, there were 35 1,000-year floods across the U.S. and more than triple that number of 100-year floods, which have a statistical probability of happening 1% of the time. As far as I’m aware, if we tracked 1 in 1,000-year flood events over time, you wouldnt necessarily see a discernible increase in the number of events per year, says Allie Mazurek, a climatologist at the Colorado Climate Center. However, on a more general scale, we are expecting to see more extreme precipitation events in a warmer climate. An interactive map from the Colorado Climate Centerwhich is updated in near real-timetracks high precipitation events across the country. It combines past research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Atlas 14, a precipitation frequency data interface, to track high-precipitation events from 2002 to today in every state but Washington and Oregon (their data has yet to be updated on NOAA’s precipitation server). The data sets visually depict the number of 1,000-year heavy precipitation rates from 2002 to 2024. Each year follows similar patterns and frequency. But that doesnt mean rainfall and subsequent flooding isnt intensifying. Mazurek says there are two factors at play for these natural disasters: the frequency in which rain falls, and the intensityhow much it rains in a short amount of time. According to independent climate research group Climate Central, 88% of 144 locations across all nine climate regions in the U.S. have experienced a 15% increase in hourly rainfall intensity since 1970. Nearly two-thirds of those locations experienced at least a 10% increase in the same period. Mazurek says these trends come down to one primary effect of climate changehumidity. Rising temperatures create wet air Essentially, when you have warmer temperatures, that allows more water to exist in the vapor phase, and therefore, you get more water up in the atmosphere, Mazurek said. Then when you get a thunderstorm, there is more water available to it when it starts to precipitate and make rainfall. If youre adding more water to the atmosphere, you’ll get more rainfall as a result. Climate Central says that for every single Fahrenheit degree of Earth warming, the air holds 4% more moisture. Give that the Earths temperature has risen by roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the preindustrial era, there’s simply often more water available to create intense rainfall. So while the statistical probability of these floods occurring won’t change, their severity could get worse Mitigation and adaptation Flash floods arent expected to subside anytime soon this summer, with Accuweather meteorologists warning that additional flooding events can be expected due to this summers continued trend of high precipitation predictions. I think there’s definitely more work that all of us together could work on for extreme rainfall and flood events from meteorologists to emergency managers, Mazurek said. We all obviously have more work to do communicating those kinds of events and keeping people safe. I think that is still a very active area of research. However, with recent Trump administration changes to climate policy, emergency weather cuts at NOAA, and the dismantling of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), these efforts may become more and more difficult, even as climate-driven natural disasters increase. “We expect kind of both sides of the extremes to get more extreme, Mazurek said. Heavy precipitation, extreme rains, flooding events, as well as drought. They each work off their own feedback.”
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There’s an air of panic in the media world. The specter of AI has been looming large for a couple of years now, but the threat now appears to be solidifying. Publishers are reporting that search traffic is in free fall, and there’s overwhelming evidence that AI chatbots give very little in terms of referrals. What to do about “Google Zero” has gone from a theoretical destination to a reality that the media world must contend with. Of course, panicking is never a good strategy. But pivoting can be, and there’s been no shortage of that lately. Both Wired and The Verge announced this week a stronger push into newsletters, one of the more reliable ways to connect directly with readers. When Business Insider recently announced layoffs, it also said it would invest in live events. And even publishers that already charge for subscriptions are doubling down on them: Newsweek will launch new types for both consumers and businesses, and The Guardian now has a new, cheaper tier for readers who want to opt out of personalized ads. While AI may be the impetus behind a lot of these changes, they’re all directionally pushing toward building direct relationships with audience members. That is smart, but at a more basic level, they’re appealing to human desires that go beyond just getting informationa task AI fulfills very effectively. Offerings like newsletters, memberships, and events give a sense of belonging, encourage reading habits through consistency, and emphasize voiceeither that of the brand or the individual writer. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} Within all this is the beginnings of a post-Google content strategy for media. But really, it’s only half a strategy because it only accounts for humans. Much of internet activity in the future will be the result of bots, whether they’re hoovering up data to inform AI models or acting as agents on behalf of individual users. Data from TollBit indicates bot crawling is already comparable to what the big (non-AI) search engines dowhen everyone has their own AI agent, I would wager it will be the majority. Any forward-looking content strategy needs to take into account both humans and machines. The new organic audience Let’s start with the people. A few months ago, I hosted a webinar on the types of content that are most resilient to AI summarization. AI does a great job of summarizing news, but it struggles with voice and unique perspectives. The consequence: If you want good opinion and analysis, you’ll need to click through. Visual and interactive content is poorly conveyed by AI. And because AI is well known to hallucinate sometimes, anything that might inform a crucial decision for a readerlike context for health, legal, or financial decisionswill likely motivate readers to check the original source. Certainly, memberships and subscriptions are important mechanisms to build a loyal audience, but they also need to be centered around something readers can’t get anywhere else. That usually means narrowing the lens of focus rather than widening it. Niche subjectseven within a more general brandwill typically see higher engagement and more loyalty than general ones. Then there’s the stickiness of interactivity. One thing that emerging media platforms like Substack and TikTok do well is encouraging direct conversation between content creators and audience members. But being interactive doesn’t always have to be so hands-on: Semi-automated features like polls, quizzes, and games are all effective habit-buildersand cannot be substituted by AI. Rise of the machines If you think about it, there’s a kind of a “well, duh” quality to all the reports that confirm people don’t click through to sources when they use AI. (Pew Research just put out another, by the way.) That’s because removing the need to click is largely the point. Why go and read a whole bunch of articles when bots can do it for you? But that reveals the other side of the coin: Bots are now doing the searching and the clicking, and that activity is traceable, measurable, and potentially monetizable. In other words, the inevitable rise in bot traffic represents both an unprecedented threat and a massive opportunity. First, there’s the obvious idea of charging bots to scrape your site. Putting in paywalled endpointswhere AI bot operators pay a small fee to access contentmay work, especially now that Cloudflare is leading the charge in empowering website owners to block bots. However, it greatly depends on the scrapers acting in good faithand even if they do, it’s doubtful if the fee per scrape that publishers charge would ever be enough to build a sustainable business. What could help is winning the next SEO war: AIEO, or artificial intelligence engine optimization. Being one of the primary sources in an AI Overview or a ChatGPT answer might not seem like much of a prize, given the low click-through rates. But if you pair it with both a pay-per-crawl mechanism and a content strategy that focuses on the AI-resilient content types discussed earlierthe ones that have a higher chance of audiences seeking them outthe benefits could end up being more than mere bragging rights. This kind of AI-first content strategy does require a more sophisticated approach. You’d have to make use of the full search and AI toolbox, including things like Google snippets to ensure AI crawlers highlight the most enticing parts of your content without giving the store away, and MCP servers that can ensure bots have diect access to the content you green-light for them. While that can be technically cumbersome, the market is already adapting, with AIEO specialists like Scrunch AI offering one-stop-shop packages that essentially make a bot-friendly copy of your website so that crawlers can feast while humans enjoy your regular site. Smaller, better . . . robot-ier? The truth about the future of media is that the audience, the human audience, will be smaller for pretty much everyone. As more people get their information from AI portals, publishers will need to make the most of the few people who come directly to them. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Going small can ultimately be part of a healthier brand of journalism, as I argued in my very first column. But the parallel trend is that the bot audience is rising fast, and it undoubtedly will be a dominant force in the way information is distributed. Harnessing that force will be essential for the media. And though there are still a lot of unknownsthe best practices, the legal framework, even the potential rewardsat least it’s easy to see what not to do: wait. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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Its true that personal ambition fuels success. But we can reach a dangerous tipping point when healthy drive becomes hyper-ambitiona compulsive cycle of excessive striving that becomes self-defeating. Unlike healthy ambition that energizes you, hyper-ambition can leave you perpetually unsatisfied, overextended, and grinding to exhaustion. The cost isnt just personalhyper-ambition eventually undermines the very professional success it promises. Heres how to recognize if youve crossed into the danger zoneand take practical steps to realign toward healthy ambition. 1. You Feel Like Youve Never Achieved Enough and Are Never Satisfied Are you on a professional achievement treadmill, immediately shifting focus to your next goal after hitting a milestone? While accomplishments and rewards can provide short-term satisfaction, the challenge to getting into such a rhythm is that you may pursue goals without considering what you truly want. This can catch up to you when you realize youve met external expectations but never connected to your internal motivation, leaving you dissatisfied. Putting all your attention against the pursuit of professional validation can also lead to ignoring key areas of ones life that affect long-term happiness and well-being, such as your personal relationships, your health, and activities that fulfill and restore you. To realign to healthy ambition, orient your goals toward internal motivation firstits a better predictor of engagement and success. Research has shown that putting attention and focus on personal success linked to fulfillment, satisfaction, and happiness begets external success, while the opposite focus doesnt hold true. Start with your values: test if a goal is aligned with what is important and matters to you, rather than solely meeting external expectations. Academic studies have shown that aligning our goals with our values leads to more satisfaction, higher persistence, and more goal attainment. Expand your ambition to include meaningful life goals and challenge what success truly means in your life. Studies confirm that once our basic needs are met, more income, wealth, or possessions dont correlate with lifelong happiness. Plus, Gallup research finds that well-being isnt tied just to career or finances, but also encompasses physical, social, and community well-being. 2. You Feel Constantly Over-Extended and Frustrated You Cant ‘Do It All’ Do you say yes to every opportunity without strategic prioritization, then feel stretched thin and frustrated by your inability to pursue them all effectively? This suggests you either think more is always better, leading to overload and overwhelm, or you may not have an approach to help you choose where to put your time and attention when faced with seemingly equally valid goals. To shift toward focusing on what matters, use strategic methods to make conscious choices. Create and visualize a goal system by identifying your core priorities and mapping how other goals connect. This can reveal if youre pursuing too much, show how aligned actions serve multiple goals, and reduce perceived friction between supposedly competing goals. You can maximize goal attainment by creating these positive connections, minimizing conflicts, and better understanding trade-offs you may make. When faced with choices, apply the urgencyenergy filter. Ask, What has urgency, and do I have energy for it? This reveals several strategies: Prioritize: Commit to high-urgency, high-energy ambitions Reinterpret: For high-urgency, low-energy goals, find ways to achieve the same outcome with less time and effort Postpone: Back-burner lower-priority ambitions Let go: With self-compassion, release goals that no longer serve you Learn to compromise wisely by focusing on what matters at this time rather than trying to do everything. 3. Youre Grinding Hard All the Time Without Recovery How often do you find yourself compulsively working, putting in excessive hours without recovery time, leaving you exhausted? Operating in a persistent high-performance mode leads to unproductive stress, causing your physical and mental health to suffer. Ironically, your productivity declines and your work suffers, too. To break this pattern, be strategic about managing your effort and prioritizing recovery. Our ambitions arent created equal. Be discerning about the effort put against your goals by asking three key questions: Aspiration: How good do I want to be at this? Determination: What is worth the hard work? Motivation: How much effort do I want to put in and whats required? Additionally, manage perfectionism. Be conscious about where you apply excellence and give yourself permission to say this is good enough for lower-stakes areas. Finally, make recovery a leadership imperative. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the celebrated presidential biographer, has said: The most underappreciated leadership strength is the ability to relax and replenish energy. Research shows we paradoxically neglect recovery practices when we need them most. We need a deliberate plan to sustain ourselves for the work that matters and to prioritize time to psychologically disconnect from work. Sustainable success comes from strategic ambition, not hyper-ambition. The idea that you have to choose between being ambitious and being well is a false choice. The goal shouldnt be to eliminate ambition, but to keep it in a healthy zone where it energizes rather than depletes youallowing you to achieve what you really want both professionally and personally.
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