In the early days of The Real Dill, a pickle company that Denver locals Justin Park and Tyler DuBois founded in 2012, the two friends were tossing around 300 pounds of food scraps in the trash every week. Cucumber cutoffs, raw horseradish, peppers–all of it was bagged up and left for the garbage collection rounds.

That did not sit right with DuBois and Park, who, prior to founding The Real Dill, had worked, respectively, in the food industry and the community development nonprofit world, and were attuned to the need to cut back on waste. But the friends had never set out to launch a pickle company in the first place, and its breakneck growth–and resulting piles of leftover produce–caught them off guard.

“Once we got into the kitchen together and were turning out products, we were very conscious of food waste,” Park says.

Everyone from college students to mid-career professionals looking for a job change have been told they need to learn how to code. And despite outright detractors and calls for moderation from inside the tech sector, a glut of coding schools has flooded the job market with junior developers.

You’d think that would be good news for tech companies, which now have their pick of newly minted talent. But in many cases it can actually make it harder to develop and maintain a deep bench of tech talent at the senior level–folks who actually stick around, mentor newcomers, and solve the really hairy technical problems more inexperienced coders often can’t.

Too often, the tech industry’s usual slate of perks doesn’t have as much impact when it comes to retaining the most top-shelf, experienced talent. As Stack Overflow COO Jeff Szczepanski wrote for Fast Company recently, “developers care about learning and growing,” but training and professional development aren’t exactly the first things hot new startups rush to talk about when asked about their cultures. In order to stick around, great developers need real career paths; in other words, not just a “hot” job. Here’s a look at a few reasons why your best tech talent might be contemplating an exit, and what it takes to prevent that.

You Waited Until The Exit Interview To Ask What’s Wrong

The fun of solving problems and the joy of seeing something they’ve built come to life is what drives many software developers. Companies need to leave room for the best of them to keep conceiving of–and then executing–new ideas. “If someone who’s been coming to you with their ideas suddenly stops, it’s a huge sign they’re on the way out the door,” says technology consultant Jason Cole, who advises small businesses on their engineering teams. “If you have someone saying, ‘I’m bored’ and you don’t do something about it, expect them to leave for a place where they won’t be bored.”

These issues don’t usually crop up until somebody’s given their notice and you’re holding an exit interview. But that always means the information you could’ve used to get ahead of the problem arrives too late. That’s why tech leaders should consider holding “stay interviews” with their most valued developers. When the ideas stop flowing or productivity sinks, it’s usually a sign you need to have this type of proactive sit-down.

Diane Scarborough, most recently the interim VP for People and Culture at Sprint Connect, says she’s learned to spot these changes in behavior, however subtle, and unearth unspoken complaints before it’s too late. When talking with team members, she probes for a longing to work on newer technologies and listens for any mentions of friends at other companies working on different projects. Even if these remarks are only made off-handedly, she knows they can be red flags. “Don’t be afraid to ask people questions,” she advises: “Are you happy? What’s making you stay? What would make you leave?”

She adds, “Asking ‘Are you okay?’ isn’t illegal.”

You’re Confusing Teaching With Managing

The traditional career path is linear, which often means pushing top talent down a management track, supervising others. Leaders may notice that one of their people enjoys teaching others, and then assume that they’d enjoy managing others.

Mentoring and managing might seem similar, but they’re entirely different skills. Management is really about getting work done through others, which makes it highly people-focused. Mentoring or instructing–especially when it comes to software development–is more about a knowledge-transfer of technical skills.

Be careful not to mistake a technical expert who enjoys teaching for one who enjoys managing. Instead, offer your best senior engineers more than just one kind of leadership opportunity; carve out a separate path for technical experts to advance up the ranks based on how well they help their junior colleagues “skill up”–even if that doesn’t involve managing their work.

Your Org Chart Isn’t A Living Document

Be careful not allow your org chart to become a rigid, set-and-forget artifact–an especially acute risk when it comes to technical roles. Review and adjust your structure to match the expertise of your current team. In Cole’s experience, “the number-one reason technical people quit is because they don’t have the option to advance without going into management.” Szczepanski would likely agree; in his view, developers often get frustrated having to report to leaders who don’t have tech backgrounds themselves.

It’s a perennial problem, but circumventing it can be as simple as reviewing your reporting structure on a regular basis. No matter who leaves and who joins, you always have to make sure there are tech experts in the managerial ranks, and clear paths for other engineers to rise into them.

You Aren’t Offering Enough Support

In an attempt to provide flexibility and empower employees, some companies are actually too hands-off–they wind up not giving enough career support. “It’s easy to tell people you’re in charge of your own career,” Scarborough points out, “but it doesn’t work if you don’t support them. Nobody wins if you don’t help them.”

That’s just as true for developers as it is for anyone else, but the risk may be higher when it comes to tech teams, whose expertise can automatically cordon them off from leaders who may not know exactly what they do–or what professional development they might need. On top of that, your engineering team might be so in the weeds with their work they may not be looking at their skills or figure out how they might be applied better.

So rather than making succession planning a once-a-year, check-the-box formality, it’s important to find career development opportunities on a regular basis. Your HR leaders don’t need to have all the answers themselves, either; one of the best ways to offer support is simply to get everyone in a room for an hour and brainstorm ideas for how they can get more of what they want from their work.

Ultimately, building a culture of continuous learning and improvement is what will keep your most valuable senior tech talent on board. And it all starts with having more conversations than you might be, more often. When people can use their talents to do what they love while expanding their skills, they won’t just stay put–they’ll tell their smartest friends to come join them.

Few entertainment industries have seen a boom in recent years quite like comedy. One clear indicator has been Netflix’s full-court press on comedy specials with its plan announced a few months back to release a new special every week for the rest of the year. This “diamond age” of comedy, as some would call it, is also translating into the physical space. According to statistics company Statista, the number of people who visited comedy clubs increased from 15.95 million in 2014 to 17.6 million in 2016. And one of the key drivers of comedy’s continual dominance in both broadcast and live events has been Montreal’s Just For Laughs Festival.

Celebrating its 35th year, Just For Laughs started as a two-day, French-language festival and has since ballooned into an international phenomenon, spanning more than two weeks of sets and panels from comedy’s biggest names, and platforms for burgeoning stars to possibly get their break. This year’s lineup includes the likes of Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Carrey, Jane Krakowski, Trevor Noah, Ali Wong, and Lilly Singh. Just For Laughs currently holds festivals in Toronto, Vancouver, and Sydney, as well, but its flagship event in Montreal is by far the biggest. In 2016, the festival pulled in 2.5 million visitors and generated $100 million toward Quebec’s economy–not to mention that it provided the conduit of superstar talent that feeds the company’s primary revenue stream in digital and terrestrial broadcast deals.

The public’s appetite for comedy has never been stronger. Add to that the amount of clout Just For Laughs has accrued over the years with its continually stellar roster of performers and it would seem like a flush operation that, to some degree, could go on autopilot. But Bruce Hills isn’t flipping that switch just yet. For the past 32 years, Hills has worked just about every position within Just For Laughs, starting as a driver and now as its chief operating officer. Knowing the company’s humble origins and knowing that comedy can, and has, taken a massive dip in interest has Hills cautiously optimistic.

“We know very well after 35 years, there’s going to be ups and downs–but it’s very important to not create your own down by being complacent,” Hills says. “We’re hot right now–knocking on wood–and comedy is hot. We can ride it and lose focus, or we can look at it and say it can last a year, it could last longer–we don’t know. So we’ve got to continue to look ourselves in the mirror and be honest and hear feedback and change our game if what we’re hearing isn’t good. But the key piece of all this is talent–just being on top of the best comics in the world. And ‘world’ is also important. We’re an international event–we need to find and scour the earth for talent.”

Just For Laughs started as a festival as much for audiences as for comedians. Back in the ’80s, there were only a handful of standup comics like Eddie Murphy or Robin Williams who could sell out theaters and arenas, and networks like HBO and Showtime had a lock on televised comedy specials, all of which created something of a gatekeeper situation.

“It was a harder road to get to traction and to build your career. We realized that there was a need to have a super fest for fans and for the comics,” Hills says. “The festival became this day camp for comics in the industry because usually comedians, other than hanging out in a major U.S. city clubs like The Cellar or The Comedy Store, they’re on the road. They didn’t get a chance to fraternize and exchange ideas. We realized we could try to create an environment where we could foster creativity–where we could create opportunities for artists to advance their careers not just in Hollywood.”

As Just For Laughs gained its own traction, the push for breaking new comedians became a top priority. The festival launched its New Faces franchise in 1997, giving new comedians a platform for breaking into the industry.

“It’s a give and take situation,” Hills says. “We want to launch the next great voice in comedy, so we better take some chances–not every super original comedy voice is obvious when you first see them. So you’re going to have to take some chances and try to create an environment where they will do well.”

Part of that risk-taking team for programming Just For Laughs are Paul Ronca and Nick Brazo. In conjunction with consultants across the world and the rest of the programming team, Ronca, director of industry and special events programming, and Brazo, a producer for Just For Laughs, sift through about 700 sets a year, being a part of the audience but also talking to the comedians as well to try and get as comprehensive of a profile as possible.

“You’re really trying to predict who are going to be funniest people and representative of the next wave of comedy,” Brazo says. “Do they have a unique perspective? Do they tell a different story? Is there a lot of heat around them?”

The other important question is “are they ready?”

“That’s kind of the biggest question: Is this their year?” Brazo says. “Are they a little green or is this the year where you’re going to bring them to Montreal and they’re going to benefit from it because their material is ready. They’re ready as a performer, and they’re able to take meetings, maybe strike a deal, and leverage the festival for the platform that it is.”

Part of Just For Laughs’ evolution has been about knowing where comedy lives today. Social media has given rise to a new class of entertainers that can fill a space just as quickly as any headlining staple–hence the addition of New Faces Creators this year, a platform for influencers and digital content creators.

“The last thing we want to do as a festival is wake up 10 years from now and realize we missed that boat,” Ronca says. “The same way we have our New Faces show and how it gives us a chance to discover these comedians at a young age like Bruce did many years ago with Kevin Hart, we want to make sure we’re doing the same thing with these online creators.”

Investing in franchises like New Faces and New Faces Creators is part of Hills’s plan to keep the momentum going within the comedy industry–at the very least from a festival perspective.

“We only have to be special once a year. We’re not a TV show that makes 52 episodes. We’re not making a weekly show. We’re not a club that has weekends to sell out. We have to be special once a year–that’s not the hardest thing in the world, but talent has to lead,” Hills says. “If the talent’s great, from the breakout talent that we find to the stars, we’ll be fine. And we have to be smart enough and brave enough to hear feedback we don’t want to hear and adjust our game–if not we will have another bad period.”

WHAT: Comic Con-debuted trailers for two new projects that go all in on the 1980s.

WHO: Director Steven Spielberg for Ready Player One, and the Duffer Brothers for Stranger Things 2.

Related: Here Are The Trailers You’ve Missed From San Diego Comic-Con So Far

WHY WE CARE: Looking back, the lead infantryman in the onslaught of ’80s nostalgia was probably The Wedding Singer. Adam Sandler’s sweet, funny hit arrived in 1998 to poke gentle fun at all the wacky fashion choices of 1985. Here we are, though, 19 years later, and pop culture still can’t stop looking back at the era of Michael Jackson’s prime. Shows like GLOW are dripping with glossy Pat Benatar jams and visual signifiers–and viewers can’t get enough. It should come as no surprise that two new offerings from last weekend’s Comic Con promise the pinnacle of retro worship, with one project set in the ’80s and another one steeped in it.

“I was born in 2045, but I wish I’d grown up in the 1980s,” declares the narrator at the top of the Ready Player One trailer. It shows. The movie may take place in the future, but it’s also obsessed with the past. The Amblin logo at the top of the Spielberg-helmed film doesn’t just allude to the director’s involvement, but his body of work. In 2045, Columbus, Ohio,  the only thing there is to do is log into a virtual nexus of pop culture. As we see in the trailer, doing so involves run-ins with Freddy Kreuger, Back to the Future’s Delorean, and, if the film stays true to the book, many references to Spielberg movies from that decade.

The first season of Stranger Things was an out-of-nowhere hit that brought Netflix its biggest hype since House of Cards and OITNB first rolled out in 2013. One of the many celebrated aspects of the show was the authenticity of its era indicators, from the Stephen King font to the John Carpenter synths, the D&D gameplay, and overall kids-on-bikes-solving-supernatural-mysteries vibe. If the trailer is to be believed, the second season doubles down on that. The soundtrack is “Thriller,” arcade culture is represented, and Ghostbusters Halloween costumes look more like a plot point than a quick visual gag.

Between these two projects, there’s no reason for getting into a Delorean to go back to the ’80s; we’re already there.

As a teenager growing up in Wheeling, West Virginia, Justin Miller wanted nothing more than to get out and join the armed forces. He tried a couple times; after the planes struck the World Trade Center on September 11, he met with a recruiter but was turned away after meeting with some personal objections from the recruiter. At that point in his life, he’d already given up his passion for baseball and turned to drugs and alcohol, following in the footsteps of his father, who was himself an addict.

He reached out to Chris Mercado, an Army officer and friend of Miller’s who was, at the time, getting a masters degree at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, to tell him that he was contemplating suicide. “I spent the better part of six hours that night just listening, as a friend would do,” Mercado tells Fast Company. Though Mercado was not a licensed mental health practitioner by any means, his presence on the other end of the phone helped Miller begin to see the other side of his struggles.

That conversation sparked the idea for Objective Zero, a foundation and mobile application launching later this summer that will connect veterans experiencing mental distress with other veterans who can talk them through it.

The rate of suicide is trending downwards–the VA’s previous count, from 2012, found that 22 veterans took their own lives each day–hence the name Objective Zero. Mercado and Miller’s app echoes the sentiment of VA Under Secretary for Health, David J. Shulkin, who said in a statement: “We as a nation must focus on bringing the number of veteran suicides to zero.”

Objective Zero grew from Mercado and Miller’s conversation into the platform it is through the collaboration of Mercado’s Georgetown classmates, who learned about Miller’s experience through an article Mercado and Miller published on Medium in 2015. The growing team researched the issue of veteran suicide, pulling data from the VA and designing what the app could look like: It would act as a conversation platform between veterans, but also direct users to other resources and services they could pursue independently.

Objective Zero has the backing of Headspace, the popular subscription-based meditation and mindfulness app, which is offering its normally $150 services free-of-charge to veterans registered through Objective Zero. As will Comeback Yoga, a Colorado-based nonprofit that instructs military personnel in yoga specifically to relieve post-traumatic stress; Comeback’s videos will be available through the app.

A Kickstarter the Objective Zero team launched in January raised $35,000; other fundraising efforts, through events and social media, have brought in another $50,000 to develop the app. “The structure of the app is borne out of what the data tells us,” Mercado says. “What we found is by increasing social connectedness among veterans, providing access to resources, and improving access to care, we can lower suicide rates.”

Mercado is clear-eyed about the fact that the app will not be able to solve the problem–veterans are twice as likely to die from accidental opioid overdoses than non-veterans, and as the opioid epidemic continues unabated in the U.S., and while the VA has recognized the link between time in the armed forces, chronic pain, and opioid addiction, and taken steps to reduce the use of opioid painkillers in prescribed treatment regimens, the effects linger. “But just because we can’t help everyone, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to help somebody,” he says.

There are currently around 23 million veterans in the U.S.; the Objective Zero team will be coordinating with the VA to help get veterans registered on the app once it’s available later in the summer.

Red Bull’s social entrepreneurship training program, Amaphiko Academy, just backed 14 community improving projects as part of the company’s push into another extreme sport of sorts: social entrepreneurship survival. The winners, most of who are young, and the majority of which are minorities, will meet in Baltimore in early August for a 10-day boot camp to workshop their ideas, followed by 18 months of coaching from like-minded executives that the energy drink company has recruited to act as mentors.

While this is the Amaphiko Academy’s first year in the U.S., the international program started in South Africa in 2014 and has since expanded to Brazil. Combined, both places have launched 100 viable small business, the best known of which is probably Repurpose Schoolbags, a backpack and solar lantern charger that has earned repeated shout-outs from Bill Gates because of its clever utilitarian design.

A selection panel of eight people from both Red Bull and Ashoka, a partner group that coaches and often provides fellowships for emerging social entrepreneurs, selected this year’s class. In total, about 250 people applied, leading to a shortlist of about 30. Before rendering a decision, Amapiko judges visited many applicants in their hometowns to get a firsthand view of their work. “We looked at how much they care about the problem, what vision do they have for themselves, and their business, and how is that aligned,” says Red Bull Amaphiko career coach and social innovation consultant Alfie van der Zwan. Being especially resilient and open to feedback was also crucial.

Amaphiko’s goal is to create a fleet of sustainable groups and companies that provide either a helpful product or service to those in need. Many U.S. winners are focused on the service side of that equation, thinking up helpful social service programs rather than the next Repurpose bag.

In Baltimore, Brittany Young has founded B-360 is a community group that uses dirt bikes to teach STEM education, and connect interested students to likely employers within the field.

In Tampa, Jon Dengler heads Well Built Bikes, a bike program that repairs donated old bikes, and uses secondhand parts to build new bikes for those who need them, particularly the homeless who might otherwise not have way to commute to work. The bikes are priced affordably and can be earned by working for the organization. Thanks to Tampa’s mild weather, it’s a year-round solution.

In New Orleans, Matthew Kincaid has launched the nonprofit Overcome Racism, which provides training and consulting services for schools, teachers and other organizations to avoid creating a culture of systemic bias. That’s something even supposedly equality-minded nonprofits still struggle with.

Other projects include an online platform to sell clothes made by and for women responsibly, a pop-up dinner project that awards micro-grants to needy causes that diners learn about and vote for while at the table, and a sexual abuse program that offers a wide range of services for victims.

For now, the process is to prove that each concept works in one place, and have the originators try to grow it or expand elsewhere. “We have a tendency to think we can provide a solution and parachute it into the community, whereas the people on the ground know best how to provide that,” says van der Zwan.

Amaphiko is Zulu for “wings”—a play on the caffeinated brand’s promise to give drinkers something of a lift. While the current class doesn’t receive any financial boost from participation, the company hopes the camaraderie and life skills taught will be invaluable. That makes sense, as in some cases, the projects are so nascent that there wouldn’t be much to invest in.

“What we are looking for is potential,” says van der Zwan. “A lot of these are grassroots things solve [problems] for their communities. To not have it all figured out already is a good thing. We want to help them grow and develop as they do.”

Learn more about all the winners here.

Last April, Apple released its 58-page Environmental Responsibility Report, an ecological “progress report” for the 2016 fiscal year, which boasted of a number of sustainability and safety initiatives under the high-profile leadership of Lisa Jackson, a former Environmental Protection Agency administrator. However, a subsequent report published by Vice’s technology vertical Motherboard found that Apple had instructed third-party recyclers to shred its old products, rendering them ineligible for reuse or repurposing, even when stored data could be safeguarded without destruction of the hardware. Apple’s shred-agreement policies offer a telltale glimpse into a burgeoning environmental issue: electronic waste. The years 2014 and 2015 produced approximately 41 million tons of e-waste each (less than one-sixth of the e-waste in 2014 were estimated to have been recycled); projections for 2017 approach 50 million tons.

Unlike ordinary household trash, e-waste contains heavy metals and hazardous chemicals; smartphones use lead, mercury, and brominated flame retardants, whose toxicity and lack of biodegradability have long threatened the health of humans, animals, and the environment. Waste also requires the mining of “conflict minerals” (coltan, wolframite, cassiterite, and gold), whose funding of the Congolese civil war, for example, has long been documented and which are found in smartphones and laptops. Furthermore, as these minerals’ finite supply attenuates, miners must look to deep-sea alternatives.

“Coltan is needed for the antennas on [smartphones] to actually get those WiFi signals . . . and there really aren’t that many sources of it around the world,” says deep-sea ecologist Andrew Thaler. “We don’t have a very good pipeline to reuse these minerals after they’ve lived out their life in a piece of electronics resources . . . As we’re exhausting ore bodies on the surface, much like with oil exploration, we’re going deeper and deeper into the ocean to try to find these resources.”

There’s no federal law requiring e-waste to be recycled, and procedures nationwide are often fragmented and cumbersome; only 25 states have implemented legislation. In addition, e-waste recycling is largely privatized, placing its control in the hands of profit-driven businesses. In 2013, the New YorkTimes reported that insufficient governmental oversight of the recycling programs of companies like Sony, Toshiba, and Apple had begotten fraud among recyclers who were buying paperwork to inflate the quantity of waste collected.. Third-party facilities’ recycling streams may also prove noxious; contracts with manufacturers and adherence to environmental protocol vary, affecting how much waste can actually be responsibly recycled, and businesses that depend on the market value of recyclable materials may opt to abandon their stockpiles or dump them in landfills when materials become obsolete.

“One growing problem is cathode ray tubes [which are commonly found in television and computer monitors from previous decades],” says Freyja Knapp, a PhD candidate in Environmental Science Policy & Management at the University of California, Berkeley. “The leaded glass is a real problem. The barium in them is a problem. [The] markets have declined for” many of the facilities that process CRTs, “and you see a lot of abandoned facilities with big piles of leaded glass just laying there.”

The Role Of Planned Obsolescence

What’s arguably most responsible for this, however, is the manufacturing model of planned obsolescence, in which software and hardware become incompatible or antiquated, or hardware isn’t designed for durability. Smartphones may begin to malfunction after two years, for example, or fail to support recent operating systems or app versions if they’re two or three versions removed from the latest models. (iOS 10, the operating system Apple introduced in late 2016, proffers a number of tactile features that require an iPhone 6S or later model.) This also manifests in larger appliances. In 2015, ENDS Europe found that electronic goods’ lifespans were dwindling, noting that “the proportion of all units sold to replace a defective appliance grew from 3.5% in 2004 to 8.3% in 2012”; the percentage of large household appliances that had to be replaced within the first five years also grew from 7% in 2004 to 13% in 2013.

Silicon Valley companies’ smartphones and laptops’ fragility and comparatively brief two- to five-year shelf lives are especially deleterious factors. What’s more, devices from Apple, Google, and Microsoft have reached levels of cultural ubiquity rivaled by few other forms of electronics, thus feeding their incredibly high demand.

“A lot of companies make devices that go obsolete in a couple of years, and then they essentially become useless to the user, and you have to buy the updated version,” Thaler explains. “If smartphones lasted for 10 years, there wouldn’t be the huge need for e-waste recycling and finding ways to deal with the massive amount of essentially garbage produced by needing to buy a new cell phone every two years.”

Culpability, then, begins with design. “I don’t see how [companies’ profit motives and e-waste] could not be related because of planned obsolescence . . . that’s forcing the market to continue consuming,” Knapp says. “There are design decisions that are more concentrated [in Silicon Valley], so that’s one area of influence on the generation of electronic discards, and how well they can or cannot be recycled or discarded in some other way, or have lives longer than, say, a year, three years, five years. The design decisions getting made there [are] a significant responsibility, and probably the biggest responsibility.”

Little Interest In Cleaning Up Their Act

Some of the largest e-waste producers have shown little interest in making any changes. A proposed New York state law, S618B (the “Fair Repair Act“), aims to remove barriers to electronics repair by requiring companies to sell replacement parts and tools (and in some cases, provide guides) to users and proscribing software locks, which can deter third-party vendors from replacing electronics parts. Recent lobbying efforts from Apple, Verizon, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and other major tech actors have sought to blockade the bill. (Similar legislation has arisen in a number of other states, including Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Tennessee, where tech giants are suspected, Motherboardnotes, of lobbying against the proposed laws. Apple, Verizon, and CTA have not replied to requests for comment for this article.)

Given the magnitude of the problem, a number of technocratic solutions have been floated. Thaler postulates that, to combat product obsolescence, companies can begin to reduce “code bloat”; in other words, their software engineers should preemptively write minimal software whose “slimness” renders it compatible with various gradations of hardware. “Because there’s no incentive to slim down the software to make it run well on older equipment, that old equipment becomes obsolete through software,” he says. “If you change the processor on a board on a smartphone, you can’t design software around it if the fundamental architecture of the phone changes. You need new software and a new phone. But for a lot of cases, that fundamental architecture doesn’t change nearly as fast as the software just bloats.”

Others posit that companies can practice Design for Environment (DFE), a paradigm of ecologically minded hardware design. The concept, however, is nebulous; like “corporate responsibility,” it means virtually nothing concrete, and dependence on companies to make any decisions that ultimately prioritize the environment or public health over their respective bottom lines may seem misguided. Technocrats also posit that governments should bestow companies with tax incentives to recycle their old products or produce longer-lasting software.

The ecological ramifications of the electronics industry’s profit motives are profound and systemic–symptoms of the prevailing economic order. “[Silicon Valley companies] want consumption because that is what drives profit,” says Bruce Olszewski, a lecturer and director of the Center for the Development of Recycling at San Jose State University. “The incentive in capitalism is always maximizing profit. The problem with that is there’s no response mechanism in capitalism for things like social good and reducing pollution.”

Still, Olszewski asserted, the problem is not insurmountable, as long as the economic principles governing electronics production begin to shift. “We want whoever caused the problem to pay for the problem. That’s going to come from some bold leadership . . . It really is about creating a new economy. It’s governments’ responsibility to recognize the needs for society and sustainability.”

As Spotify eagerly gets ready to go public on the stock market later this year, the music streaming company seems to have an ongoing challenge: Staying out of court.

Last week, a pair of lawsuits was filed against Spotify accusing the company of failing to acquire proper licenses—and thus failing to pay out the necessary royalties to songwriters—for certain songs being streamed on its service. In other words, technically, copyright infringement. If this feels like déjà vu, that’s because the suits come just a few weeks after Spotify dropped $43.4 million to settle another class action lawsuit filed on behalf of songwriters. Last year, Spotify reached a $30 million settlement in a similar dispute with the National Music Publishers Association over unpaid royalties. If successful, these new lawsuits could yield up to $345 million in damages for songwriters.

So what’s going on here? It’s easy to slap a dramatic headline onto a couple of paragraphs summarizing the lawsuits, but that wouldn’t quite do justice to the complex (and admittedly unsexy) music industry controversy at hand: streaming royalties and how artists get paid for their work. Not only are music licensing and royalties a legally (and these days, technologically) complicated affair—based on century-old federal law—but the relationships between streaming companies, rights collection organizations, music publishers and performance rights bodies make it difficult to pin down exactly who is at fault when something goes awry.

Why Did Spotify Hire This Expert In Music-Making AI? 

Songs generally have two components to their copyrights: One for the sound recording (typically owned by a record label, but not always), and one for the composition itself (typically owned by the songwriter or a music publisher). These two copyrights require two different types of licenses and generate two different royalty payments.

Unlike the direct deals Spotify negotiates with record labels over the rates it pays to stream their sound recordings, the rates paid to songwriters (called mechanical royalties) are determined by U.S. law and can be secured using what’s called a compulsory license, either by negotiating with the publisher directly, or sending a “notice of intent” and committing to pay a legally defined licensing fee.

In other words, a direct deal with songwriters isn’t necessary; streaming services can just start playing a song, give the songwriter a heads up, and start sending royalty checks. The recent lawsuits deal solely with these mechanical royalties that get paid out to songwriters. (The name originates with the advent of turn-of-the-century player pianos; it was in 1909 that Congress passed a law that provided these compulsory licenses, making it easier for anyone to make a mechanical reproduction of a musical composition.)

In particular, these new suits—filed separately by Nashville music publisher Bluewater Music and songwriter Bob Gaudio—claim that Spotify failed to obtain the mechanical licenses for thousands of songs by artists like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (for whom Gaudio wrote several hits, such as “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You”), Guns N’ Roses (“Yesterdays”), and Miranda Lambert. In both lawsuits, the plaintiffs are represented by Richard Busch, the music industry lawyer who successfully won the controversial copyright infringement case filed by Marvin Gaye’s estate against Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke over their radio hit “Blurred Lines,” to the eventual tune of $5.3 million, as well as a landmark royalties case against Universal over Eminem tracks. Not a bad choice of attack dog to send after the biggest music subscription service in the world.

Royalty payments to labels, publishers, and songwriters remain by far Spotify’s biggest cost as it gears up to go public. Indeed, the huge expense of licensing music is what makes the streaming business so tough in general, and why none of these companies has managed to turn an enduring profit to date. This is why many people suspect Spotify of sidestepping licensing deals with tracks by so-called “fake artists” (a charge the company denies) and might even be planning to generate its own music in the future using artificial intelligence. For now, it’s beholden to direct licensing deals with labels and compulsory licenses with publishers. But there’s apparently a glitch in the system intended to keep the money flowing.

Bad Record Keeping, Says Spotify

It’s not that Spotify isn’t paying mechanical royalties to songwriters at all. Like the previous two royalty-related settlements, the issue here stems from a discrepancy between the music that’s available on Spotify, and the database of songs administered by the Harry Fox Agency (HFA), the third-party rights management company to whom Spotify has outsourced the job of handling mechanical licenses and songwriter royalties. If a song isn’t covered or properly documented by the HFA, then the HFA or Spotify would need to contact the copyright owner on its own to secure a compulsory license to stream the song. According to the lawsuits, that hasn’t happened in many cases.

Spotify has acknowledged the gap in songwriting attribution data (both explicitly and, one could argue, implicitly, by agreeing to settlements that set aside millions of dollars for unpaid royalties), chalking it up to difficulty identifying all the songwriting credit data, and connecting those dots on the backend.

The issue first came prominently to light in 2015, when Victory Records pulled its entire catalog from Spotify over a dispute over unpaid royalties. A few months later, Spotify publicly acknowledged the issue with copyright data and vowed to build out a more comprehensive database. Earlier this year, Spotify acquired Mediachain, a New York startup specializing in using blockchain technology to build a peer-to-peer, cryptocurrency-inspired data layer on top of media content—like a comprehensive, up-to-date database about music and its creators, for instance.

Jeff Price, the founder of royalty collection startup Audiam—which helped provide data and insights for these lawsuits—has a simple, blunt retort to Spotify’s claim that it’s a data problem.

“Bullshit,” says Price. “Spotify is lying.”

Audiam, which claims to have tracked down and paid out millions of dollars in unpaid mechanical royalties from streaming services, counts Bob Dylan, Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and several other recognizable artists and publishers among its clients. He works with these artists and their teams to compare the songs in their own catalogs with royalty statements from services like Spotify, YouTube, Google Play, and others, frequently finding discrepancies and working to get these songwriters paid properly. In many cases, Price says those discrepancies are pretty big.

“For Bob Dylan, we found 7,000 sound recordings,” Price says. “He was getting paid on a couple of hundred. Metallica hasn’t been paid anything on a half a billion streams of their own recordings.”

The reason Price says he doesn’t believe Spotify’s “missing data” defense is that he has informed the company many times over the years, passing along spreadsheets of metadata about the music in his clients’ repertoires so Spotify can connect the dots and distribute royalty payments accurately. Price says he has even offered to let Spotify use his company’s technology for free to help fix the problem, to no avail.

“Spotify never built the systems to connect the sound recording to the composition,” Price says. “They just threw up the sound recordings in 2011, and never got a license in the first place.”

Estimating approximately 35 billion unpaid streams between June 2011 and the end of 2015, along with an alleged failure to pay approximately $15 million in royalties, one of the new lawsuits asserts that past settlements have done nothing “to resolve the outstanding issues with the Spotify licensing and royalty payment system.”

Meanwhile, it estimates, after class-action lawyers take their cut, “Spotify will be allowed to walk away after paying approximately $4 per infringed composition. Such a settlement is essentially an empty gesture that encourages infringement and is entirely insufficient to remedy years of illegal activity.”

A Problem Bigger Than Spotify

It’s not clear how widespread this apparent disconnect is, but it’s important to note that it’s not a comprehensive, across-the-board issue with Spotify’s catalog. The Harry Fox Agency is the primary mechanical licensing and royalty collection body for songwriters in the United States, with over 48,000 music publishing clients. It handles the mechanical licensing for Google Play, Tidal, and other streaming services.

But even though the HFA is the go-to provider for mechanical licensing, the system is far from perfect; Many songwriters have complained that they haven’t received the legally required notices from HFA seeking a compulsory license for their songs. In some cases, those notice letters have arrived a few years after their music started streaming (U.S. copyright law requires them to be sent within 30 days).

The issue isn’t limited to Spotify. The incomplete picture of who wrote which songs is, as Price puts it, “pretty endemic” across music services and always has been.

Tidal, Deezer, Rdio, and Rhapsody have all been hit with lawsuits for unpaid royalties.  For its part, Apple seems to have been more proactive about sending legal notices to songwriters and even filed a proposal with the Copyright Royalty Board calling for a higher, fixed rate for mechanical royalties on streaming services (a move that would double as a sly, competitive one-up against Spotify, which doesn’t have the mountainous cash reserves that Apple generates).

So why gang up on Spotify? After all, most streaming services—some of them owned by much bigger and deeper-pocketed companies—are falling short on the songwriter royalty front as well. And besides, doesn’t liability fall on the Harry Fox Agency, whose job it is to handle mechanical licenses and royalties? The latter question may depend on how the contract between Spotify and HFA is worded, which is something only the lawyers and executives know. But the widespread, multi-service nature of the issue would certainly suggest that HFA may be at fault.

Meanwhile, Spotify is thinking about another set of legal work: That related to a new royalties agreement with Warner Music said to be finalized by September, the last of the big three labels to come to new terms with the streaming service, and to its IPO later this year, which could potentially value the company at $13 billion.

As the biggest music subscription service, and at this critical moment, Spotify makes for an obvious and tempting defendant in such litigation, even if its competitors have more money to throw around. Whatever the barrage of lawsuits means for Spotify’s future prospects and bottom line, they help to amplify a loud message across the music streaming market: Sooner or later, the songwriter royalty problem needs to be fixed.

If you work at Google’s Sunnyvale campus–like its other offices–lunch presents a multitude of choices. Fourteen separate employee cafes serve everything from pho to braised lamb or grilled trout, all free. But each restaurant also subtly nudges diners to make one choice in particular: eat less meat.

On a Friday afternoon, a cafe called BRGR lists a vegan burger first on its menu for the day; another burger, highlighted in a box in a center of the menu, is a “blended” version that uses mushrooms along with beef in the patty, reducing the total amount of meat. At a Vietnamese cafe, vegetable broth is listed before meat in the options for pho. And in a Mexican cafe, a chef is testing a new recipe for a vegan taco explicitly designed to compete with more popular meat-based dishes.

The nudges fit into Google’s broader sustainability vision. This year, the company will hit its goal of purchasing 100% renewable energy, and it recognizes that meat consumption is also an important part of its carbon footprint. (By one estimate, raising livestock for meat, dairy, and eggs is responsible for 14.5% percentage of global emissions).

One theory: Restaurants need new recipes to compete with so-called “power dishes”–the entrees most commonly found on menus in the United States. Right now, number one is a chicken sandwich, followed by a chicken salad, and salmon. Out of the top 20, only one, a veggie sandwich/wrap, doesn’t have meat. Google, along with a small group of other organizations that are part of the Better Buying Lab, has spent the last six months experimenting with recipes for a new “plant-forward” dish that could make the list.

“We were trying to solve for a delicious alternative that would displace a good proportion of animal protein,” says Scott Giambastiani, Google’s global food program chef and operations manager. “It might be completely vegetarian, or it might be what we call a flipped product, where you’re eating 20% or 30% less of the animal protein.”

The company’s typical strategy is not to try to convert meat-lovers immediately to fully vegetarian food; this is in line with a World Resources Institute study that calculated that if meat-heavy regions cut back on meat 17%, it could reduce their per-person greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture by about half. The blended burger, like a similar burger now served at some locations of the fast-food chain Sonic, is a good example of the reduction strategy. The mushrooms, which soak up the flavor of the beef as they cook and add moisture, make the patty taste better while trimming the carbon footprint. The version served at Google has slowly increased the percentage of mushrooms in the patty from 20% to 50%. (Because beef has the highest carbon footprint of any meat, Google says it is particularly aggressive in its work to reduce the beef each Googler consumes). In other dishes, meat might shift from being the center of the meal to a side or garnish.

“It’s moving people along a continuum, whether people are eating red meat every day and you ask them to start eating a little more white meat, or they’re already on a white meat kick and it’s a little bit more seafood, or moving even further along to alternative proteins or produce. You can’t expect everyone to start loving lentils day one,” Giambastiani says. “Some do, most don’t. What you’re trying to do instead is get people to think about that continuum.”

“Who doesn’t love a good taco?” Giambastiani says. The dish was relatable and familiar, but also unusual enough to be interesting; chef Cristina Espinosa (who works for Bon Appetit, Google’s catering company) took inspiration from her mother’s handmade tortillas to make a new tortilla from quinoa and broccoli, then filled it with kimchi and Korean-spiced sautéed mushrooms, topped with an avocado-cashew cream. Like most things at Google, the process of developing the dish relied partly on data, using feedback from hundreds of Googlers who volunteered for taste tests. “We took a lot of time to get it right,”Giambastiani says.

“We judged the dishes based off of nutritional content and density, greenhouse gas emissions being low, but ultimately it came down to one thing–it came down to flavor,” says Giambastiani. “If the flavor of the dish was something that people loved, we knew that could be something that we could potentially scale outside of the Google walls, and try to make a bigger impact in a quick service restaurant…Success for us would look like the Sonic example [as the first fast food restaurant to serve a blended burger] happening on more and more menus.”

Over the next few months, Google and the other partners are working with researchers from Yale to study how popular the new “power dishes” are and how that shift translates into specific environmental benefits. They’ll also test how menu descriptions can make people more or less likely to choose a particular food.

“People have an expectation when they see the word ‘taco,'” says Giambastiani. “When they look at that title, if it says vegan, I’m running for the hills. I love vegan, but I don’t want to see it on the menu. I want you to deliver an experience in what I’m about to eat and something that’s exciting. So it needs to look good, taste good, and it needs to sound good on the menu.”

In initial taste tests, the taco was called simply a “mushroom taco” to avoid influencing tasters, and then “oyster mushroom taco,” “Korean spiced maitake taco,” and “spicy multi-nut maitake taco and quinoa tortilla.” Though Google is just beginning the process of testing to see how different names influence selection of the taco, previous research from Stanford found that if plant-based dishes are described with “indulgent” language more often used for meat dishes, diners are 25% more likely to choose them compared to when they use “basic” labels (and 35% more than “healthy” labels). Google has also found that diners respond to labels that refer to geography, nostalgia, unique ingredients and cooking techniques, and references to personal stories, such as “Great grandma’s Tuscan stew.”

The tweaks to descriptions on menus, along with rearranging the order of items on menus, are similar to other nudges that Google uses for health, such as offering smaller-size plates, or tiny servings of smoothies near much larger-size water glasses to encourage people to drink less sugar and more water, or focusing on making salad stations as tempting as possible. The company has found that its health nudges help make Googlers 71% more likely to eat healthier at work than outside of it. While a chef might share the health and sustainability benefits of a particular food with someone as the food is served, the cafes don’t have signs with sustainability messages. The object isn’t to guilt people into eating something or not eating something else, but to use behavioral science to make the best choice more likely to happen.

“We need to think through how we can make a better choice easier for people,” Giambastiani says.

Correction: This article originally misspelled chef Espinosa’s name. We regret the error.

Here’s a riddle: What takes a tenth of a second to occur and can make or break your startup? No, it’s not the computation performed by your tech product’s proprietary algorithm. It’s a first impression, and the Princeton researchers who discovered how quickly we form them also found that our first impressions don’t change much after getting to know somebody for longer.

So while you really need to nail your whole pitch, your fate might be sealed within a few short moments of first meeting with an investor. Indeed, if there’s any group whose job it is to suss out strangers’ trustworthiness quickly and meticulously, it’s venture capitalists. That’s certainly not to say they always get it right, of course, but the fact remains that you’ll need to avoid those first-meeting turnoffs if you’re going to succeed.

According to five VCs, these are a few of the most cringeworthy ways founders tend to screw up right out of the gates–what it takes to avoid that.

Related:Do These 5 Emotionally Intelligent Things Within 5 Minutes Of Meeting Someone

Overconfident Name-Dropping

Using names of investors who are “almost certainly in the deal” is a big red flag, says Ewa A. Treitz, a venture partner at Black Pearls VC who focuses mainly on early-stage tech startups in Central Europe. This kind of information is very easily verifiable with my peers,” Treitz points out, “and if untrue, the deal is off the table.”

But even when it’s entirely accurate, name-dropping can start things off on the wrong foot. “It also says a lot about the founders’ confidence in their business,” she adds. Relying on “outside confirmation as opposed to their own conviction is a dangerous strategy, never played by the winning teams.”

Market-Size Misses

“A huge turnoff is when founders come to us with a totally overblown estimate that doesn’t reflect their corner of the universe,” says Brad Svrluga, cofounder and general partner at Primary Venture Partners.

He explains, “One vertical SaaS company selling into health care providers came to us and quoted their market size as total health care IT spend. This couldn’t have been farther from the truth. The administrative software they were pitching only touches a fraction of that market, and their numbers certainly shouldn’t reflect the countless other portions of HIT spending–like CT imaging software, supply-chain management software, patient-portal technology, etc.–that have nothing to do with their product.”

VCs are especially attuned to identifying off-base estimates like these, says Svrluga. “When determining market potential, founders should be 100% focused on their specific product. Lumping in everything else from a particular industry will only raise questions and distract potential investors from what’s really relevant to their business.”

Related: Lessons From The Early Pitch Decks Of Airbnb, BuzzFeed, And YouTube

Nisa Amoils, a partner at Scout Ventures, has seen market misses as well. She adds, “A founder needs to show a bottom-up analysis based on sales projections. This is more realistic than only providing [a] top-down claim where you say you will get X percent of the total market size, which is always huge in every pitch. Your total addressable market should be arrived at by estimating both carefully.”

Subtle Signs Of Character Flaws

“If there is one validating factor–assuming we already like the business in the pitch, of course–it is the level of ethics/conduct we get from the entrepreneur at the very first meeting,” says Jonathan Tower, general partner at Catapult VC. Tower asks himself one question of every founder he meets: “Would I have complete confidence in the entrepreneur exercising good judgment with key relationships that the firm has?”

“If I get a whiff from the first meeting that the entrepreneur is not on the level, is being cagey, fudging too many important details, is being condescending to younger staff or gatekeepers, is playing power games–these are all quick no-gos.” Tower adds, “Character cannot be taught, and these tendencies are apt to show up again and again if we work with that entrepreneur. Frankly, life is too short.”

Tone-Deaf Or Insensitive Language

It’s no secret that the tech sector in general and the VC world in particular have serious diversity problems, and that those demographics have contributed to a spate of scandals in Silicon Valley over the past year. While there are important efforts underway to change things, some VCs have learned to weed out bias simply in the ways they’re spoken to by founders.

Related:This Women-Led VC Fund Wants To Show The Valley What Real Gender Equality Looks Like

“Words matter, and the language people use reflect the type of founder they are and the type of company they are going to build,” says Chang Xu, an associate at Upfront Ventures. She recalls one uniquely egregious example. “I had an entrepreneur say that he’ll ‘open the kimono’ with me. As I’ve learned, this is a term used in finance to mean sharing the inner workings of the company. However, it’s wildly inappropriate.”

Xu couldn’t be more right. In fact, when Fast Company assembled a bracket of 32 examples of awful business jargon (including “synergy”, “touch base,” and “move the needle”), readers voted “opening the kimono” as the absolute worst. (It was ceremonially destroyed in the form of a piñata in August 2015.) As Xu describes the offensive encounter, “I look at the entrepreneur wondering if they have ever pitched to a female VC, or better yet, an Asian female VC, and realize the irony,” she recalls.

“Next time I hear the term, I’ll respond with, ‘sure, drop your trousers.'”

Regardless of your job title, writing and public speaking probably make up a large part of the work you do, whether it’s brainstorming ideas with colleagues or sending emails to clients. Being able to express our thoughts both accurately and concisely has a huge effect on our productivity, yet the breadth of the average person’s vocabulary is on the decline.

That’s bad news, according to Katie McKnight, the CEO and founder of Engaging Learners. McKnight is a literacy expert who regularly works with companies on vocabulary development, comprehension, and writing for the professional sector.

McKnight says it’s not just important for professionals to have a good knowledge of the vocabulary used in their specific field. In order to communicate effectively a broad vocabulary that is understood by the general population is needed as it allows us to better demonstrate what we know and understand to others. And if we can demonstrate our understanding and expertise of something through our written and spoken communication the prospective client is more likely to choose us to do the job.

So, just how do you increase your vocabulary? The good news is it’s not too hard and doesn’t take much time. “Vocabulary development is about exposure and our ability to manipulate and use language. The more we use it and develop it, the greater our vocabulary,” says McKnight. Here are four things she recommends you do to help expand your vocabulary.

Play With Language Like A Child

“Word games help build vocabulary and they increase awareness of language and its possibilities. And I’m not just referring to the NY Times crossword puzzle and word search games, although they certainly do help us all learn new words,” says McKnight. “Consider, instead, the way children play with language. A 5-year-old who says, ‘He was a snowman and he snowmanned up my yard in the snowmaniest way!’ demonstrates a solid understanding of language mechanics.”

As a professional adult, McKnight says you probably wouldn’t want to use words in exactly the same way as a child, but you can use the same technique to explore language as they do. She gives the word “sanitation” as an example. “If sanitation is a noun that is commonly used in your field, think about its other word forms and make sure you’re using them when appropriate. ‘Sanitize’ would be the verb form; ‘sanitary’ or ‘sanitized’ would be adjectives; and ‘sanitization’ is an alternative noun form.

“It seems simple, but having all word forms at your disposal is a quick and easy way to make sure you’re using jargon in the richest possible way to succinctly express your thoughts,” says McKnight.

Use The Built-In Thesaurus

While few of us would send an email or document to a client or colleague without hitting the spell-check button in Word, most of us probably don’t often use that other powerful built-in tool: the thesaurus. Using a word processor’s built-in thesaurus has a dual benefit. It can quickly make your writing more punchy and concise, but also the very act of using it introduces you to alternative word choices your brain will remember for the future.

“If you think about it, our language contains so many words that English speakers and writers can often pick and choose from a range of words to imply specific meaning,” says McKnight. “Advertisers know that happy, delighted, jolly, content, and giddy all have slightly different connotations. Are there common words or phrases in your field that might be a little overused? Probably. Take a few minutes to look for alternatives and consider how they might help you convey more subtle gradations of meaning–while making your writing flow more naturally and your speaking seem more interesting.”

Read Anything (It Doesn’t Have To Be Shakespeare)

While the Bard is one of the greatest wordsmiths in the history of the English language, you needn’t read his complete works to improve your vocabulary. Matter of fact, you don’t need to read anything highbrow at all if you don’t want to. The important thing is just that you read–and doing so will automatically increase your vocabulary.

“What we read is not nearly as important as being in the habit of reading,” says McKnight. “Read for pleasure, read what you enjoy. Having more exposure to language and how it’s used is what truly matters.”

And it gets even better. You don’t need to read for hours a day to improve your vocabulary. McKnight says even 20 minutes will do. Still too much? Then how about this: technically you don’t even need to read at all. “Listening to audio books counts too!” says McKnight. “It really doesn’t matter what you read or listen to. The more we engage with language, the more we learn and develop our vocabulary.”

The only caveat is that if you really want to expand your vocabulary you should occasionally go outside your comfort zone. If you like reading about tech news, introduce some sports journalism or restaurant reviews into your daily news feed. If you like reading crime novels, switch it up with sci-fi every now and then.

“Authors of each genre tend to use a specialized language all their own,” says McKnight. “Seeing or hearing all those words being used in a variety of contexts will help them ‘stick’ and increase the likelihood that the reader will be comfortable using them in his own conversation.”

Use A “Word A Day” App

“These apps are a far cry from the old flip-a-page calendars,” says McKnight. “They not only display and define a new word every day, but they often include audio support so you’ll know how to pronounce it correctly.”

McKnight says many of the apps also allow you to create your own personalized dictionary so you can access your new words whenever you want as well as share word lists with other users, and send you push notification reminders to check out the latest daily words. While the iOS and Android app stores are flooded with such apps, McKnight suggests looking for recommendations on which app to use on educational websites like Vocabulary.com.

“If you’re the kind of person who likes setting goals, these apps might be just the thing.” says McKnight.

Last month, the New York Times took on the seemingly impossible task of counting the lies of Donald Trump. To make this task manageable, they counted all the lies over the course of his first six months in office. They arrived at a grand total of 100 lies. And that’s without even including in their count such categories as the president’s “dubious statements” and “careless errors.”

It is difficult to imagine a more demoralizing job than counting the lies of a man commonly labelled a pathological liar. The lies have left us numb. We have grown accustomed, passive, and helpless before them. We fully expect the lies as surely as we expect the sun to rise and fall.

So how did we get here? How did we arrive in this Twilight Zone, in which the norms of public discourse appear to have broken down–this alternate universe in which brazen lies and grotesque spectacles of incivility feel like the new normal?

Who’s To blame?

There are at least two ways of framing the problem. One is to zero in on the media, that is, on journalism. This way of framing the problem sees fake news as the primary culprit. If only we could find some way of keeping fake news in check, this line of reasoning goes, we could restore some order and rationality to our public discourse. Presumably, then, the answer lies in more aggressive fact-checking on the part of traditional journalism and greater media literacy on the part of the public.

A second way of framing the problem is to focus on media, that is, on technologies of communication. This way of framing the problem sees the dominant media of the age, not their content, as the primary culprit. According to this second line of reasoning, if only we could understand how our dominant media shape not just content, but the entire affective structure of public discourse, we might come to appreciate the nature and severity of our present chaos.

Both ways of framing the problem have their respective merits. But between the media and media, which, if either, can be said to be the driver behind what has come to be known as our post-truth world?

Democracy As Entertainment

In his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman offered an early version of the second view. Taking his cue from the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, Postman argued that public discourse had been re-created in the image of television. American democracy had become a form of entertainment–equal parts sitcom, soap opera, and tabloid TV–in which the trivial and the superficial had come to hold greater persuasive power than the logical and the factual.

Television, Postman claimed, offered nothing less than a “philosophy of rhetoric,” a theory of persuasion according to which truth is decided by entertainment value. The more entertaining a public figure, the more persuasive the message. Postman, of course, wrote in a more innocent time, the age of Ronald Reagan. Would that he had written in the age of Donald Trump.

We can extend Postman’s argument about television to social media. If television turned politics into entertainment, then social media might be said to have turned it into a giant high school, replete with cool kids, losers, and bullies. The presidencies of both Barack Obama and Donald Trump are very much social media presidencies. But they tell two different stories.

Obama represents the more positive, rosy, feel-good story of social media. He was wildly popular on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, displaying a tech savviness that put his rivals John McCain and Mitt Romney to shame. Obama’s photogenic appearance, witty humor, sense of irony, knowledge of popular culture, friendships with Beyoncé and Jay-Z, and impressive grace under pressure made him a social media natural.

But Obama’s social media success turned out to be a curse for his party. His fellow Democrats arrogantly assumed that the future belonged to them–that social media was the terrain of a younger generation of liberal hipsters fluent in irony, memes, and hashtags–all the while assuming that conservatives were a largely clueless generation of technologically challenged old people scarcely able to make sense of the exotic world of “the Facebooks,” “the Twitters,” and “the Snap Chaps.”

Conservatives As New Rebels

They could not have been more wrong. What they failed to recognize was the rise of the alt-right, a new generation of conservatives equally as cyber-savvy as their liberal counterparts, but whose politics are driven by a burning, insatiable rebellion against liberal orthodoxy.

In some sense, we’ve seen a reversal in the narrative of the culture wars: The rebels of yesterday are said to have become the mainstream, while the new generation of conservatives has become the new rebels, a reversal brilliantly documented by Angela Nagel in her book, Kill All Normies.

The alt-right, as Nagel observes, grew out of the subversive culture of 4chan, the obscure imageboard on which anonymous users freely post all manner of images, no matter how graphic or tasteless. The anonymity of 4chan early on fostered a spirit of rebellion against authority. What we today know as memes originated on 4chan. Anonymous, the anarchist-hacktivist collective known for its DDoS attacks on government websites, also originated on 4chan. But the same spirit of rebellion that gave birth to Anonymous also gave birth to the alt-right, which formed in reaction to feminist critiques of video games and gamer culture. One of the most vocal supporters of the Gamergate movement was Milo Yiannopoulos, the public, if now disgraced, face of the alt-right.

It’s not for nothing that Milo, a self-identified and quite proud troll, led the new generation of conservative rebels in support of Donald Trump, in whom they saw the most effective and consistent force against the tyranny of political correctness. The rest of the 2016 Republican field was just too civil, too submissive before the liberal enemy to warrant their allegiance. Donald Trump, however, was the real deal: a man whose irreverence toward liberal propriety and whose absolute lack of principle made him the perfect instrument against the enemy.

Twitter Wars

If Facebook is a high school popularity contest, then Twitter is a schoolyard run by bullies. It is the medium in which both Milo and Trump honed their craft as trolls. Although originally designed as a social tool, Twitter soon devolved into an anti-social hellscape. The 140 characters are hardly conducive to civil disagreement. They do, however, lend themselves to reactionary, paranoid behavior: vicious insults that seek to hurt and offend, to get under the other’s skin, to find their weak spot, to stick the knife in and violently twist it to exact the maximum degree of psychological torment.

It’s difficult not to get pulled into the black hole of Twitter trolling. Even the most dignified users will feel tempted to respond to vicious personal attacks. Twitter wars have become a kind of media spectacle in themselves, worthy of full-blown news coverage, often with headlines like, ” …and Twitter lets [him/her/them] have it.”

Whoever Insults Hardest Wins

The problem is that trolling has gone mainstream. It is no longer confined to the darker corners of the internet. The president of the United States is a troll. It is not a wild exaggeration to say that American public discourse is being re-created before our eyes in the light of Twitter.

We are witnessing the birth of a new political game, in which one of the primary moves is the act of trolling. Politicians now routinely troll each other online. Citizens troll politicians and politicians troll them back. The common denominator in all this white noise is the logic of the insult: Whoever insults hardest wins.

The problem with zeroing in on fake news as the culprit for a post-truth world is that it does not explain what’s driving the fake news. It would be naïve to think that fact-checking and more skepticism of news sources can somehow contain the problem. Indeed, the problem is much deeper.

Revisiting Postman’s classic book and applying his insights to social media can go a long way not only in explaining the proliferation of fake news, but also the political tribalism that’s pitting citizens against each other. If Postman were alive today, he might be concerned that we are not so much amusing, as trolling ourselves to death.

Jason Hannan is associate professor of Rhetoric & Communications, University of Winnipeg, and editor of Truth in the Public Sphere (Lexington Books, 2016). Read the introduction here. 

This essay first appeared at The Conversation.

More often than not, pitching VC firms means pleading your case to white men. This is no easy feat for women entrepreneurs who, at best, may be easily dismissed or, at worst, may be taken advantage of. The solution, of course, is to overhaul the culture and demographics of VC firms—but as is the case with male-dominated tech companies, that’s a tall order.

Below are funding options for female founders that, in most cases, were created by women and are run by women. It could take years for the VC landscape to change, so perhaps you’ll be emboldened by the avenues that are already available to you.

Female Founders Fund

Chances are you know this one already: Female Founders Fund‘s portfolio ranges from Rent the Runway and Zola to Thrive Global and Maven. The early-stage fund helmed by Anu Duggal is committed to investing in—you guessed it—female founders and high-impact sectors for women-led startups, like e-commerce and marketplaces. Since Female Founders Fund’s launch three years ago, its portfolio has raised a total of $400 million in capital.

XFactor

XFactor Ventures is  a pre-seed and seed stage fund that plans to invest $3 million into 30 female-led companies. XFactor is a bit unique in that its investing partners include nine entrepreneurs who are themselves female founders that have successfully obtained VC funding. In giving the likes of Mattermark CEO Danielle Morrill and The Muse CEO Kathryn Minshew investing power, XFactor is upping female representation on both sides of the table.

Our #wcw goes out to #BUILTBYGIRLS founder + BBG Ventures partner @nish67. She's helping build the new girls' club and is always on the lookout for the next wave of visionary tech entrepreneurs. If you didn't know someone could look so fab sipping on lemonade, now you know ???? #BUILTBYGIRLS #ThisIsAOL

A post shared by BUILTBYGIRLS (@builtbygirls) on Oct 5, 2016 at 10:29am PDT

BBG Ventures

Since BBG invests in consumer-facing internet and mobile startups with at least one female founder, its portfolio overlaps a bit with that of Female Founders Fund. (This isn’t uncommon, given there’s only a handful of VC firms serving female founders.) That means BBG has also invested in Zola, Shine, Handwriting.io, Ringly, and Rockets of Awesome, along with other companies like women’s club The Wing and organic feminine hygiene service Lola.

Focus Fund

You might assume a female founder’s best chance at funding is in a city like New York. If we’re going by numbers, that’s true: Earlier this year, Female Founders Fund reported that in 2016, female founders raised 17% of overall series A funding in the Big Apple. But there are opportunities to be found elsewhere—in Ohio, for example, where the nonprofit JumpStart created a $10 million public-private fund last year. The Focus Fund exclusively offers seed funding to startups led by women or underrepresented minorities, though they must be based in Ohio or relocate to the state.

Celebrating the #graduation of our 2015 LA, SF, & Silicon Valley Pipeline Angels with support from some local #alumnae, #speakers, and portfolio companies. Glad to support a #womyn-owned #restaurant, @foreigncinemasf! #pipelineangels #angelinvesting #angelinvestor #sf #siliconvalley #la #celebration #morevoices #empower #empowerment #investment #venturecapital #startup #startups #womenempowerment #womeninbusiness #womenentrepreneurs #womeninvestinginwomen #entrepreneur #entrepreneurship #socent #socialentrepreneur

A post shared by Pipeline Angels (@pipelineangels) on Jan 22, 2016 at 6:56pm PST

Pipeline Angels

What Pipeline offers is twofold: an angel investing bootcamp to train would-be female investors, and a pitch summit to give female entrepreneurs a chance to score funding from its investors. To be eligible for the pitch summit, startups should have a social or environmental slant, and Pipeline explicitly says founders should identify as “women and/or non-binary femme social entrepreneurs.” Since Pipeline holds summits in cities across the country, it is—like Focus Fund—a good alternative for women who live outside the entrepreneurial enclaves of San Francisco and New York.  

Related: This Is How Some Black Women Are Skirting Racism And Sexism To Find Funding

Forerunner Ventures

Forerunner doesn’t explicitly fund only women-led companies, but as a female-run early-stage VC firm that invests in commerce startups, it has lent support to a slew of female founders. (Founder Kirsten Green recently told CNN that Forerunner’s own staff is 70% female.) Forerunner counts among its portfolio Glossier, Birchbox, Draper James, and Reformation, and reportedly now invests in 48 companies. Last year, Forerunner raised its third fund, which is worth a whopping $122 million.

Backstage Capital

Backstage has invested in more than 30 companies started by underrepresented founders—those who identify as women, people of color, or LGBTQ. After closing a $5 million fund late last year, Backstage founder Arlan Hamilton is raising a second fund and, as she told TechCrunch back in January, is looking to fund largely women of color. Hamilton hopes to eventually invest in 100 companies, with half of them founded by women of color.

At just 23 years old, Julia Michaels has established herself in the music industry as one of its most preeminent songwriters. To date, Michaels has contributed to more than 10 billion streams worldwide with her work on chart dominators like Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” Selena Gomez’s “Good for You” and “Bad Liar,” and Hailee Steinfeld’s “Love Myself.” But back in January, Michaels dropped “Issues,” her first single as a solo artist that marks her transition from just a songwriter to a performer as well.

“It has been equal parts terrifying and exciting,” Michaels says. “I’m used to baring my soul to everybody but nobody really knows about it. So to be at the forefront of it all is crazy, but I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t willing to be vulnerable in front of everybody.”

Since “Issues,” Michaels has released her follow-up single “Uh Huh” and has been making her rounds on the live performance circuit with appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the iHeartRadio Much Music Video Awards, and the Billboard Music Awards–all of which is leading up to the July 28 debut of her “mini-album” Nervous System.

“Honestly, this is all still so new to me,” Michaels says. “I am such an anxious person, and of course I want everybody to be happy and feel fulfilled–but I’m trying to take it step-by-step and day-by-day, so I think [this] is the way to go for me right now.”

Michaels acclimation to that front-facing vulnerability of stepping out from behind her lyrics and commanding them as her own is certainly a work in progress, but it’s one that Charlie Walk, president of The Republic Group, is entirely invested in.

Back in 2015, Walk stopped by a studio session in Los Angeles for Hailee Steinfeld, who he had just signed. Michaels and her writing partner of four years Justin Tranter were workshopping lyrics when Walk immediately took notice of Michaels.

“I’m listening to her voice and words and I’m like who is this girl?” Walk says. “There was like a force of nature attracting me to this type of artist. I went up to her in the studio and I said, you’re not a writer–you’re an artist.”

Michaels initially dismissed Walk until a year later when he took her to see the Broadway play Beautiful about the life of singer/songwriter Carole King.

“I wanted her to absorb the story of Carole King because at the end I knew I could look at her and say that’s you,” Walk says. “At the end of the play we actually held hands and she looked at me and I looked at her, and she knew that I knew and I knew that she knew–and that was the beginning of the transformation of a writer into the artist phase.”

“The interesting and beautiful thing about this whole story is sometimes the greatest artists need to be told they are,” Walk continues. “They’re living in their own vortex of writing and sometimes people like me who are on the outside have a different point of view in seeing something that is a diamond in the rough and that can become a global force in music and in pop culture.”

What makes Michaels unique has as much to do with her distinctive vocals (airy yet powerful, raspy but sweet) as her lyrics. The emotional simplicity of Michaels’ work has become something of a signature. In “Issues,” she lays out her state of mind plain as day:

I’m jealous, I’m overzealous
When I’m down, I get real down
When I’m high, I don’t come down
I get angry, baby, believe me
I could love you just like that
And I could leave you just as fast

The same goes for “Uh Huh,” which she describes as that euphoric wave that comes right before kissing someone.

“When it comes to relationships, I love intimacy–it’s my favorite part. And that first initial breath right before you’re about to kiss somebody that you’re incredibly infatuated with is one of the most beautiful feelings in the world,” Michaels says. “It’s such a universal feeling and I was just like, how is there not a song about this moment? It’s such an incredible moment.”

Michaels is quick to admit that she’s an emotional person, which is exactly why she’s attained the level of success she has in a relatively short amount of time. For a new artist to go double platinum with her debut single (making it the best-selling song by a new artist in 2017) and to rack up more than 20 million Spotify streams for her follow-up track that was released just a month ago, something has to be connecting with an audience.

“When it comes to songwriting, I try to try to keep it as honest to myself as possible. I used to write songs for what I thought people wanted, and when you do that it’s not the same,” Michaels says. “I wear my heart on my sleeve–I really do. I’m the kind of person where if I ask how are you, I’m expecting an in-depth response. I don’t like shallow things or surface things. I get deep with people really quick because I really want to know who a person is when I meet them. I trust everybody until I don’t, and I love everybody until I don’t.”

“She has this infectious connectivity as a person and artist that, to me, screams superstar,” Walk says. “We know that she writes songs that people care about. We know that she writes melodies that people hum to. We now know that when she puts music out it cuts through the clutter. She’s created her own lane of sound and music, and she’s doing it on her own terms. The goal isn’t to hit chart bullseyes every time with her. The goal is to build her musical brand as a singer/songwriter over the years to come.”

And that brand for Michaels ties back to a creative output that may not be prolific but is emotionally raw and all her own.

“I love when people try to push boundaries and not follow trends. I think what’s missing [in the music industry] sometimes is a lack of creativity. Really, it’s fear–I think people are scared to be different sometimes,” Michaels says. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t want people to know my story. I don’t want to put out anything that’s vague. It’s important for me as an artist and for people listening to know who I am.”

“Google has had a major influence in terms of my DNA and how I look at the world,” reflects Falon Fatemi, one of Google’s youngest employees when she was hired, at age 19, in 2005. Her experience there–and in the years since leaving her final role as a Googler, at YouTube, in 2011–laid the foundation for her newest venture, a search and discovery tool called Node.

Search is useful when you know what you are looking for,” Fatemi explains. But “discovery” (which is when you don’t) is much slipperier considering that “more information is created on the web in a single day than you can possible use in a lifetime.” On the eve of Node’s launch out of stealth, Fatemi spoke with Fast Company to share how her career–first as a Googler and more recently as a business consultant in Silicon Valley–inspired her to build a more predictive search algorithm with the potential to change the way we network.

How Networking Led To A Tech Idea

As Fatemi sees it, most search engines still rely on users at least thinking that they know what they want. Google already deploys artificial intelligence wherever it can–for instance, by autocompleting keywords in its search bar–to help users zero in on those wants.

Fatemi’s vision for Node is to predict them ahead of time, and to start with, the platform is focusing on a relatively narrow problem among a specific user base: sales and marketing professionals in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space looking for the right people and companies to convert to customers. The idea for that bubbled up partly from Fatemi’s time at Google, where she remembers being thrown into the deep end right away.

“I capitalized on internal resources and worked to understand different facets of the company,” Fatemi recalled in a contributed article for Fast Company in 2015, “from the treasury department to the philanthropy team. By carving out a few hours here and there to meet with people on interesting teams, I plotted my trajectory and wasted no time going after it.” As a result, her professional network grew at a fast clip.

After spending six years in Mountain View, Fatemi put the many contacts she’d made to new use, diving into the startup world in 2012 as strategy consultant to entrepreneurs and VCs. Serving as a matchmaker between people, companies, and industry resources brought Fatemi into contact with the likes of Quora cofounder Charlie Cheever and major investors like Mark Cuban. Among the transactions she helped broker were “millions of dollars in investments, a number of acquisitions, and a number of sales and marketing partnerships.”

Before long, their collective impact led Fatemi to step back and analyze all the introductions she’d made. “What is it within my own matching algorithm that facilitates these opportunities?” she recalls musing. Fatemi realized that she was essentially acting as a node within her own network, helping others find well-timed opportunities.

She had made a conscious effort to get to know the business objectives of every person in her network, and began manually pattern-matching them. Then she’d present the most relevant opportunity to a matched pair of people and prepped both sides for an initial conversation. But to do anything like this for other people at scale, Fatemi recognized, would require drawing on some of Google’s search mechanics and reinventing others.

The tech giant’s mission statement has long been to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” As Fatemi pointed out in her earlier Fast Company post, “Google’s data method works because the company closely monitors data trends with an eye on what’s next–in other words, in order to anticipate future needs, not just to understand what’s happening right now. The question then becomes: What can we do now to head them off beforehand?”

Node’s value proposition is Fatemi’s answer to that question. And in her view, the most logical place to test the platform’s predictive matchmaking was to see how well it could surface “the right person, at the right company, at the right time, and even suggesting the right message to reach out [with].”

The Value Of Predictive Recommendations

Node has grown quickly over the past couple of years in stealth; according to the company, revenue has doubled in the last six months. Node integrates with Salesforce and counts companies like BlueJeans Network, Periscope Data, Pagerduty, Outreach.io, and others among its current users, for which Node’s recommendations have enabled nearly $100 million in total revenue.

If Node could help SaaS marketers determine who their next best customer might be, its predictive networking possibilities might reach much further than that.

From here, Fatemi says, it’s easy to see how Node’s algorithm might be applied to recruiting, public relations, or even finding the next great investment. However, she’s quick to point out that while Node’s algorithms sift through publicly available information to build profiles of individuals and businesses and map their relationships, it’s the person or company using Node that owns those datasets, not Node itself. Where it gets a little squishy is just how “private” these personalized recommendations can be.

Back in 2016, Google changed the way it tracks its users across the internet by combining their personally identifiable information from Gmail, YouTube, and other accounts with their browsing history across the web. Facebook, too, has been tracking users by name, as have other sites. And, of course, you can opt out, provided you’re aware that you’re being tracked and don’t want to be.

That means that, basically, the ads delivered to the websites you visit are served up according to your past Google searches, online purchases, and the like. Fatemi dismisses this type of predictive advertising as “dumb repurposing”–reading past behaviors to encourage similar ones. Instead, she imagines a future where you’d get ads for things you might be interested in buying based on smarter pattern-matching, but not necessarily keyed to what you’ve done before, or what you think you like.

Like other tech leaders working through these problems, Fatemi believes that fine-tuning recommendations can only make our lives easier. “We’ll know we have succeeded as a business when any application you log into, you’re not only getting proactive recommendations of people you should know, companies and job opportunities you should pursue, articles you should read–but you should also be able to enter in [the] type of opportunity you’re interested in, and the system will facilitate a recommendation and even suggest what you should say,” Fatemi explains.

Think of the most useful person in your professional network–the one you go to for advice negotiating your salary or making introductions in a field you’re just getting a foothold in. So far, technology hasn’t come close to replicating this (although LinkedIn is trying). For AI to become something truly invaluable, Fatemi says, it will need to be able to give that type of contact a run for their money. “You need to have a social layer that understands who people are and what they care about.”

Finding the right balance between role performance and personal development is not easy.

Over the last few months, I’ve had a lot of experience trying to balance my performance as a Happiness Hero (on our customer support team at Buffer) and my passion for learning more about engineering, which allows me to help my team outside of the Happiness inbox.

When I’m passionate about something, I want to dedicate as much time and energy as possible into pursuing that passion. While this is a wonderful attitude to have, it can also negatively impact other areas of life such as mental and physical energy as well as job performance.

In the early stages of my personal development, all three of these suffered. I put in 14-to–16-hour days, 5–7 days a week. I burned myself out toward the end of last year, feeling constantly lethargic and straining relationships with friends and family.

The biggest surprise to me was that my productivity as a Happiness Hero suffered quite a bit. I would find myself starting each day in the inbox feeling exhausted. Some days it would feel like a grind to keep up with my usual pace, and often I missed the mark entirely. I would end days feeling disappointed with the work I put in, which negatively impacted my self-development, not to mention my job performance the following day.

Related:The Self-Improvement Strategy You Didn’t Realize You Learned In Science Class 

I was caught in a vicious cycle, which led to my decision to pause my personal development work and get my work as a Happiness Hero back on track.

But it got better, and I’d love to tell you how.

Using Personal Goals To Move Ahead

I don’t think I could have lived with myself if I completely abandoned my development as an engineer. I put in too much work, and I was too passionate about it to let it slide. However, I couldn’t continue along the same path. Something needed to change.

At this time, I was helping customers in Reply, Buffer’s tool for quickly replying to tweets and Facebook messages, and I was struggling to ramp up my volume of responses, one of the metrics we use to track Happiness Hero productivity. This was a big concern to me, as it made me realize how much I still had left to grow into my role as a Happiness Hero.

I took a step back and reflected on why I wasn’t hitting the level of performance I expected of myself. After a lot of reflecting, I decided I need to commit to setting myself some goals to help me level up, just like I did in Buffer’s six-week bootcamp period that every employee goes through.
This was tough. I was surprised to learn that I still had so much to develop as a Happiness Hero, and here I was trying to develop additionally with engineering outside my work time.

I set volume-related goals for my role that I knew I could accomplish; for instance, I set goals of answering 10 tickets in an hour for HelpScout (emails) and 10–15 tickets in an hour for Reply (tweets). These were goals that I used to set for myself regularly, without even thinking about it. Somehow, this got lost in my journey over the last year.

Related:The Ultimate Guide To Goal Setting For People Who Never Set Goals 

When I transitioned to Olark, the platform we use for live chat support, I set myself goals of how many chats I can take on at once, following up on conversations I didn’t get great ratings for, hitting 50 tickets in Reply before lunch, and hitting 20 Reply tickets while in Olark for the afternoon.
Having these goals helped me set a personal standard of performance that made me feel like I had accomplished something in my day.

Notice a trend with those goals above? Yep, they’re all volume related!
I’m not fond of measuring performance based on personal volume. However, volume is a big part of our role as Happiness Heroes. While probably not the most important aspect of our role, it’s something that affects how much bandwidth we have to improve other metrics such as customer happiness and response times.

Why Personal Goals Worked For Me

The reason I’ve been able to recommit myself to personal development over the last few weeks is that I feel like I am accomplishing a lot in my regular role.

Not only was I working on personal development outside of my normal role, I hadn’t even realized I was still developing within my full-time job. It was a lot of development! I felt better once I quantified my effort with growth on the main role, which allowed me to feel more energized about the extra personal development.

I now end each day in the inbox feeling proud of myself for the work I did that day. This gives me the energy and enthusiasm to approach my engineering work without suffering the same drain of energy I once did. I’ve also balanced the time I spend on personal development a little better this time around!

Hitting my personal goals each day gives me the freedom to spend time working on self-development, without feeling the negativity, and sometimes guilt, that I felt before.

I don’t set and hit these goals to justify my personal development time with my lead or anybody else. I do it to justify it with myself. The balance is tough to get right. Too much energy put into self-development can cause decreased performance in your main role. Constantly straining yourself trying to hit ambitious goals and “grind” through the inbox impacts the time, energy, and motivation you have for self-development.

Related:This Is The Mind-Set You’ll Need In Order To Thrive In The Future Of Work 

Knowing my self-development is not impacting my performance as a Happiness Hero greatly benefits the level of energy and enthusiasm I have for the work outside the scope of my role. Knowing I can compare my personal performance against team-wide metrics allows me to be gracious with myself when I don’t hit my goals.

As a support team, our position is quite unlike other teams because the time we spend out of the inbox affects the quality of service we give to our customers. Our Happiness team is one of the strongest benefits of Buffer as a product. When we are off our game, Buffer as a product suffers.

A version of this article originally appeared on Buffer and is adapted with permission.

When the so-called strongman duo appeared on WEAU’s Hello Wisconsin last November, clad in chef pants and too-tight tops, they looked absolutely ridiculous, an obvious folly. Not everybody got the joke, though.

Chop & Steele had stopped by the morning news show ostensibly to promote their “Give Thanks 4 Strengths” tour. The pair’s unorthodox exercise demonstration involved whacking a spare tire with baseball bats, stomping on Easter baskets, and throwing gnarled wooden sticks at each other’s backs–all while the hosts looked on, bemused but chipper. If the fitness benefits of these activities sound dubious, it’s because they’re made up. Chop & Steele are made up as well, the alter egos of Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher, comedians stealthily promoting their actual tour, Found Footage Festival. The promotional effort backfired, however. Not long after Pickett and Prueher appeared on Hello Wisconsin, WEAU’s parent company, Gray Television, filed a federal lawsuit against them. Now the Found Footage Festival is facing an existential crisis and it’s going to take something of a litigious strongman to get them out of it.

Welcome to the dumbest first amendment battle of 2017.

Prior to the lawsuit, Pickett and Prueher had been making a living with Found Footage Festival for 13 years. The show is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, with the two comics commenting over creatively edited clips from videos unearthed in thrift stores and garage sales around the country. The footage ranges from exercise tutorials to home movies and public access disasters that have to be seen to be believed. It’s the kind of unintentionally hilarious spectacle that was once passed around dorm rooms on VHS before YouTube was born. The path to promoting the show as Chop & Steele, though, began with making similar appearances in earnest.

“We hated doing the morning news shows because they’re really early in the morning and we’d wonder if our audience was even up yet,” Prueher says. “So we’d come up with ways to entertain ourselves and to prove that these news stations weren’t really paying attention.”

The main way they would spice things up while out promoting was with the two-word phrase challenge. Pickett would present Prueher with two unlikely words such as “basketball murderers,” which he would then have to casually work into the interview somehow. For that particular example, the news anchor asked Prueher which kinds of people usually make the type of videos they tend to screen, to which he responded: “Oh, they might be anybody. They could be crazy basketball murderers for all we know.” The reporter didn’t bat an eye.

“That’s when we realized we could probably get away with a lot more,” Pickett says.

In 2010, the duo took whatever they’d started with the two-word phrase challenge to the next level. They forged a press release for a performer named Kenny “K-Strass” Strasser, a yo-yo expert who supposedly went to different schools around the country teaching kids about the environment, through the magic of yo-yos. The odds of such an act existing, if you really think about it, are astronomical.

“News stations should have sniffed this out immediately,” Prueher says. “It’s a nonsense pitch.”

K-Strass ticked all the morning news boxes, though. The fictional character had a message, a personality, and he put on a demonstration. He provided 10 minutes that could easily slot into any morning show with a lax booker and a gaping maw of airtime to feed. Several news stations responded to the press release, requesting time with the yo-yo master.

Pickett and Prueher recruited their comedy friend Mark Proksch to don Peter Pan shorts and suspenders to play K-Strass on TV. Proksch went along on tour, popping into every morning news show that would have him. Each K-Strass appearance resulted in painfully awkward banter and malfunctioning yo-yo tricks with scant educational value. In terms of actually creating the kind of stilted TV moment they usually had to search flea market bargain bins for, though, it was a stunning success.

A few years later, they trotted out a new character, Chef Keith, purported author of Leftovers Right: Making a Winner of Last Night’s Dinner. Keith’s specialty was coming up with kitchen hacks nobody should ever use, like mashed potatoes in ice cream cones. Chef Keith somehow managed to get booked on as many shows as K-Strass did, even if he didn’t eventually perform on Conan, as his predecessor did. By the time, Pickett and Prueher dreamed up strongman duo Chop & Steele earlier this year, they were convinced that oversight at local news stations was at an all-time low.

“We couldn’t believe how many of these we got away with,” Prueher says.

Even before the lawsuit, they hadn’t gotten away with them all. Some news stations figured out what was happening, mid-appearance, and would send a friendly email later on, to the effect of “You got us.” On the day of their ill-fated appearance on Hello Wisconsin, Pickett and Prueher stopped at a competing news station nearby to make another appearance, and were denied entry. They were in the lobby, in full costume, cradling a tire and a baseball bat, when a representative kindly informed them that the station had not been able to find any information about Chop & Steele online, and therefore had to rescind the offer. The duo simply nodded and accepted this fair assessment–the news station had done its job–and then went on to their next appearance, at WEAU.

Nothing seemed unusual about the visit to Hello Wisconsin. In fact, after it was over, a producer asked them to film a promo for a later episode. That night, however, Pickett and Prueher received an angry email from Gray Television, parent company of the news station that ran the show. Nearly half a year later, this past April, they found out through a New York Post article that Gray had filed a federal lawsuit against them. The company owns over 90 stations around the country, including stations that incidentally played host to both K-Strass and Chef Keith in the past.

“I think they were humiliated and they were like, ‘this is going to keep happening if we don’t do something,'” Pickett says, “And instead of putting the onus on their reporters to do their jobs, they were like ‘let’s try to sue these guys and make them pay.'”

The two defendants quickly retained the services of a sympathetic attorney willing to work well below his rate. The amount it’s going to cost to fight the case in court is expected to top out at over $100K, though, so the duo have started a GoFundMe to help with their legal fees, and plan to release some new material for sale on their website to raise funds as well. They also have an extensive touring itinerary. The issue of whether they would push back against the company suing them, though, was never in question.

Here it is: the video that's captivating and nauseating audiences all over the country. See it and other VHS delights in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Los Angeles and Tucson this month (link in bio).

A post shared by Found Footage Festival (@foundfootagefestival) on May 8, 2017 at 2:20pm PDT

“We have to fight this no matter what, even if it bankrupts us, because we didn’t do anything illegal,” Prueher says. “I kind of feel like Larry Flynt, in a way. We’re fighting this First Amendment battle because we chopped sticks on a morning show.”

Although relatively inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, the lawsuit strikes a sinister note when viewed as part of a greater trend. Large companies seem to be increasingly throwing financial and legal weight behind efforts to silence their critics. It’s a cultural shift outlined in great detail in the recent Netflix documentary, Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press, which finished editing well before a coal company sued John Oliver in June for his segment on them. People with money and influence are feeling emboldened, and it’s unsettling to consider where it may lead.

“We certainly didn’t ask for this,” Pickett says, “But now that we’re in this fight, we feel like it’s important to take it all the way and set a precedent so that other people can be free to criticize the news too.”

Perhaps when he and Prueher were beating a rubber tire with baseball bats on TV, what they were really walloping were the forces that threaten our freedom.

Growing up in southeast Washington, D.C. in the 1970s, Charles Thornton was never told he could or would contribute positively to society. Instead, “as far back as elementary school, I can recall being told by different counselors that we were going to Lorton, which was the District’s prison system at the time,” Thornton recalls in a new documentary, Returning Citizens. “There was a seed planted before I even walked through that door.” Thornton was first arrested in 1979 for a minor drug-related offense; that began what he describes as an 11-year “revolving-door odyssey in and out of jail.” In 1983, Thornton was among the first wave of offenders to be sentenced under the new mandatory minimum law, and received a three-to-nine-year sentence for possession. He was paroled in 1988, but within another three months, he was back inside.

There were no re-entry services to meet Thornton when he walked out of prison; he returned to the streets, and, as he remembers in Returning Citizens, he told himself he was going to get himself a pistol and some dope, because that was the only way he could see to provide for himself and his family. After another cycle of conviction and parole, though, Thornton enrolled himself in an AA program, and through his sponsor, found a place in supportive housing. A friend from Thornton’s neighborhood, who had turned his life around after repeated convictions, helped him find a job. From being told all his future held was Lorton, Thornton went on to serve as director of the Mayor’s Office of Returning Citizen’s Affairs (MORCA) from 2011 to 2016, and is now the board chair of the D.C. Corrections Information Council.

Cassaday became connected to Thornton through advocacy work around her first film, Cyber-Seniors, which examines programs that bring technology training to older Americans. While in D.C., she learned about a technology program through MORCA specifically for men and women returning from prison, many of whom, she tells Fast Company, were senior citizens who had spent decades inside and had never used a computer before. Her second film was initially going to focus on that program, Cassaday says, but she soon widened her focus to re-entry on a broader scale.

At one point in the film, Cheese is in the car with a man who was recently released and staying at the Hope Village Halfway House. Cheese, at this point, has been out for three years and is struggling to find a job or a path that will keep him out of the justice system. “Coming out of prison, you have three strikes against you,” he tells the other man. “A criminal record, too old, and no experience–with no job, you try to hustle, sell drugs, and then you go back to jail.”

In making the film, “I got interested in understanding what it was that made people commit a crime in the first place,” Cassaday says. “And what I found was people were coming from situations in their families or in the community where they were faced with violence from a young age. Placing someone in prison, the idea is that you’re taking them out of a violent situation and giving them an opportunity to rehabilitate. But what happens is they’re placed in another situation where they’re struggling for survival every single day, and they come out worse off than when they went in, which isn’t benefitting anybody.”

With 716 per 100,000 people in prison, the U.S. incarceration rate is the highest in the world. The majority of people inside come from low-income communities of color, like Southeast D.C. And without robust alternatives to incarceration, and with parole boards disappearing as mandatory minimums became the norm in the 1980s, long prison sentences, like those served by people like Cheese and Thompson-El, have become a mechanism for breaking apart families, and keeping the threat of incarceration alive in communities.

In Returning Citizens, the message that comes through again and again is that the solution to the crisis of mass incarceration, and the resulting difficulty with re-entry, can be found in the problem. Around 90% of the staff of MORCA were previously incarcerated; Thornton maintains that every re-entry program and related service–from halfway houses to job training programs–needs to be staffed by former prisoners. “We’re the only ones that know what happens on the inside,” Thornton says in the film.

And though it remains unclear how Obama’s legacy of reducing prison populations will fare under Donald Trump, whose attorney general appointee, Jeff Sessions, has vowed to enforce tougher sentencing laws, it’s clear that continuing to build up and support re-entry efforts like MORCA is a crucial piece to slowing the rate of mass incarceration regardless of who sits in office. Immediate connection to resources, particularly jobs and housing, lowers rates of recidivism, as do efforts like Thornton’s and Thompson-El’s to reach and redirect young people before they get trapped in the “revolving door” of arrest and parole.

Though Returning Citizens focuses on a small community in Washington, D.C., Cassaday hopes the message will resonate in cities across the country. After the release of the film, Cassaday will be connecting with other communities and re-entry programs to organize screenings like the one she hosted in Southeast D.C. a few weeks ago. There, Cassaday saw how “the film really empowered the people who were involved in the issue–I think they’re going to be the ones who really run with this film and get it into schools and prisons to serve as a resource for people inside,” she says.

“With an issue like this, you can get into a lot of blaming and just pointing out the problem without doing anything about it,” she says. “But the goal of the film is to focus on the success stories; to focus on people who have successfully turned it around and build up a sense of hope for people returning home to know that it’ll be all right for them, too–that they have people looking out for them.”

In his 2011 book Reinventing Fire, the renowned physicist and environmentalist Amory Lovins laid out how the U.S. could power itself largely with renewables by 2050–and save money at the same time. By tripling investment in energy efficiency and quintupling the use of solar, wind, and other clean energy sources, he says we can cut carbon emissions by 84% while growing the economy 2.6 times over. What’s more, he argues, we could make the transition without any major new inventions and without any acts of Congress.

Six years later, after a period of federal and state-level government support for renewable power and heavy private investment, Lovins, chief scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute, says the U.S. is still on a path to meet those targets. But he’s concerned this progress could be undermined by the Trump Administration. Specifically, he worries about statements by Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who says regulations have privileged renewables at the expense of nuclear and coal-fired power plants.

As Texas governor, Perry was an ardent states’ rights advocate, resisting any interference from Washington as an affront to the 10th Amendment. But, as Energy Secretary, he’s floated whether his department could intervene in state power markets on national security grounds, solidifying the position of coal and nuclear power across the country. “Are there issues that are so important to the national security of this country that the federal government can intervene on the regulatory side? I’ll suggest there are,” he told the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit in April. Around the same time, he ordered an internal Department of Energy study questioning whether government support for renewables is threatening grid reliability and harming coal and nuclear.

To write the report, Perry put in charge his chief of staff, Brian McCormack, previously vice president of political and external affairs at the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group representing investor-owned utilities, and Travis Fisher, formerly of the Institute for Energy Research, a “free market” think-tank funded by the Koch brothers, which regularly assails renewable energy.

Still, Lovins feels the need to challenge Perry’s rhetoric because it superficially makes sense, and there’s a good chance that people, given the inclination, might be willing to believe it. Lovins’s vision of a remorseless shift to renewables and efficiency is prefaced in market economics and undermined by Perry’s wrench in the otherwise ineluctable process. If he’s prepared to prop up up coal and nuclear, Perry makes reinventing fire a slower process.

Perry describes baseload power—coal and nuclear power stations—as “fuel on hand.” It’s available when you need it, as opposed to, say, power from a distant solar farm, which is subject to weather and dusty conditions. But this argument misses the ways coal and nuclear can also be unreliable, Lovins says. Coal piles freeze up in cold weather (in 2011, 50 fossil-fuel plants in Texas shut down because of frozen piles, burst pipes, and other issues, he says). Trains carrying coal to those plants derail or catch on fire. Nuclear plants need regular maintenance and repair. Half the current national nuclear fleet has closed down for repair at least one year, and 10 of them have closed for more than a year twice. Japan, meanwhile, lost its entire nuclear capacity in the wake of the Fukushima disaster–almost 30% of its electricity supply at the time.

In other words, the idea that renewables are flakey luxuries while coal, gas, and nuclear are steadfast is, at this point, not supported by the evidence, Lovins says. In fact, almost the opposite could be true: Renewables may not offer constancy, but they’re not unpredictable.

“With renewables, output varies with the weather and the rotation of the Earth, but those are not unexpected or unpredictable forced outages,” Lovins says. They are no more unpredictable than the demand for electricity, which is constantly shifting for myriad factors. Solar systems have a failure rate of just 0.2%; they’re generally easily fixable; and the power they produce is “dispatchable.” That is, grid operators can send out for power from a wind or solar farm in an instant, while a power plant will take hours and days to fire up, and often at a large cost.

In fact, a recently leaked version of the Perry-commissioned study backed up Lovins’s points. It says “most baseload power plant retirements have been the victims of overcapacity and relatively high operating costs [and] often reflect the advanced age of the retiring plants” and fails to blame government policy as the main cause of coal and nuclear’s decline. However, the report was likely written (and leaked) by permanent staffers at the DOE rather than Perry’s political appointees. The final version may well be more favorable to Perry’s point of view.

If he does want to intervene in state power regulations, Perry could turn to an Obama-era law that allows the DOE to keep existing power stations open in emergency circumstances. But Lovins thinks this could only ever be a stopgap measure and it’s sure to roil the vast majority of people who’d rather the best and cheapest energy won in the end.

“The exit of these coal and nuclear plants is economically efficient and logical. The secretary would like to change that by putting his thumb on the scale, but he’s unlikely to succeed,” Lovins says. “If he did, he would hobble competitive power markets and suppress innovation that we baldy need, and he would encourage corrupt and rent-seeking behaviors and actually harm national security, not enhance it.”

By most meaningful measures, Facebook is flying. It reached the milestone of 2 billion active users a month ago, and its stock is currently trading at near-record highs of $165.12 a share. But there are a lot of signals coming out of Mark Zuckerberg’s social media behemoth that its phenomenal growth is starting to slow.

That’s one of the big things to look for tomorrow afternoon when Facebook reports its second-quarter 2017 earnings. Analysts are predicting the company will announce revenues of $9.2 billion, and earnings per share of $1.13, up from 97¢ a year ago. But year-over-year revenue growth has been down for four straight quarters, as Recode wrote, and Facebook has been warning for some time that, as growth inevitably slows, ad revenue will cool down, too.

Still, the company has not been sitting still as profits wrinkle from news feed advertising. It has said that it’s testing ads in its huge Messenger business, as well as Instagram.

Video, of course, has become a major part of Facebook’s business, too, but it’s expensive to operate and, according to CNBC, there’s an expectation that growing expenses related to the blossoming video side of the business will cut into Facebook’s bottom line. As a result, analysts have lowered their predictions for the company’s earnings for the full year, from $5.44 a share earlier in the year to $4.85 a share now–the equivalent of 11% lower profits, Forbes wrote.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of optimism around Instagram, Facebook’s popular online photo- and video-sharing service, and a perennial thorn in the side of competitor Snapchat. As Seeking Alpha wrote, in the 11 months since Instagram Stories was launched, it has grown to 250 million users, far more than Snapchat’s 166 million. Instagram’s growth is likely to be the main driver behind post-earnings stock price increases.

Facebook will issue its Q2 earnings report after the market closes tomorrow. It will follow with a conference call with top leadership, during which it will discuss the quarterly performance, as well as some of its plans for the third quarter and the rest of the year. Please check out FastCo News for our coverage.