Did it take a stadium of booing kids to tell us AI is holding us too tight? Plus all the latest brand news.
Issue 89 — Sunday, May 31, 2026
Eric Schmidt used to run Google. He is worth thirty billion dollars. He is seventy-one years old. He is delivering the commencement address at the University of Arizona.
And he is having a bad evening.
His long-standing script and book writer crafted every word. There will have even been a presentation coach, in a room with closed curtains, masking tape on the floor showing him where to stand, how to read from the left teleprompter to the right, how to land perfectly timed beats with the fist, the clasp, the thumb push, even some double-finger shooting.
His suit and gowns have been pressed perfectly by his valet.
As many as 35,000 are gathered in the audience.
But they are booing him.
Some of it was planned. Student groups co-ordinated on Instagram. Eric is accused of raping his former business partner on a yacht off Mexico in 2021 and sexual assault at Burning Man in 2023. He denies it. A judge sent the case to arbitration in March.
But, what’s happening now isn’t part of that plan.
AI is going to touch everything… Schmidt confirms.
Boos intensify. A din.
He keeps going. Cheek muscles squeezed into a smile. He talks about the beginning when Time magazine made the computer Person of the Year in 1982, and how they are right to be afraid, that fear is rational, that algorithms have learned to amplify it.
(Algorithms his old company built.)
He raises his hands. If you’d let me make this point, please, he says. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.
The exact line he pitched twenty-five years ago to Sheryl Sandberg to get her to join Google from the US Treasury. After that, she left for Facebook and presided over Cambridge Analytica.
One graduate’s TikTok post kept it simple:
🖕🏼 you Eric Schmidt
Luckily, Eric isn’t a Wildcat, he went to Princeton and Berkeley. He’s bought his way to the lectern with hundreds of millions of dollars for Lazuli, a new space telescope being built in partnership with the University of Arizona. The honorary gowns and the speaker’s slot are the gift in return.
Easy to think Eric’s just the drunk king of big tech, giving his one speech.
But no, he’s not the only one being booed.
A real-estate executive at the University of Central Florida said the rise of artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution, got booed, laughed nervously, and asked what happened?
The music executive who signed Taylor Swift in 2005 told graduates at Middle Tennessee State AI is rewriting production as we sit here and got booed. He snapped back deal with it, you can hear me now or pay me later.
Pay me later? The ones booing are paying now.
Entry-level US job postings are down thirty-five per cent year on year. Forty-three per cent of global CEOs say they will reduce junior roles within twelve months, up from seventeen the year before. Eighty-nine per cent of the class of 2026 say they are worried about it, up from sixty-four last year.
If that wasn’t enough, two coming-of-age moments will collide in a perfect storm this summer. Graduates leaving school. AI leaving private.
SpaceX, including xAI, filed its prospectus to go public and trades on the twelfth of June at a target valuation of $1.75 trillion. On Thursday, Anthropic closed a $65 billion round at a valuation of nearly $1 trillion, bigger than OpenAI’s last private round. Analysts project both will IPO by late 2026, because it’s now or never.
And the speeches aren’t over yet.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, covering both Google and DeepMind, will give the Stanford commencement on the fourteenth of June.
Two days after the SpaceX bell rings.
When the Hard Fork podcast asked him what his boo strategy would be at Stanford, Sundar gave the game away.
He said the graduates would drive the progress and deal with the impact of artificial intelligence.
Yes, this year, thousands of ambitious twenty-somethings will get into some of the big AI labs, or find themselves in some venture-backed AI success. Or get spun through the AI résumé-screener and actually land on interview. Stanford grads more than most.
But of the 1.5 million graduating, the majority will be landing the other side of that and.
What Eric, Sundar…and Elon, and Mark, and Sam, and Dario, and Satya, need most from the class of 2026 is for them to play along. Use the tools. Take the jobs that are left. Pay the subscriptions. Be the data the models train on.
The class of 2026 isn’t being hired to drive progress. The class of 2026 is being asked to drive the demand for AI that all these valuations are being priced against.
Kyla Scanlon called it: these commencement speeches are JFK in reverse. Ask not what AI can do for you. Ask what you can do for AI.
The kings are grabbing on too tightly.
A peek inside the skull of a twenty-two-year-old and you will see reward circuitry fully mature, the prefrontal cortex still wiring. The brain is at its most creative, built evolutionarily to ignore what its elders say about the future.
On the ground, most CEOs sit too far from the actual work to have any clue where most AI’s future value is going to come from. And tokens won’t stay cheap forever.
They need each other. Right now, neither seems able to say it.
My son left on Tuesday. He is gone for two weeks, to a place called Molveno, by bus, twenty-four hours each way.
It is the third trip this year. He is thirteen.
I had a version of the goodbye in my head. I had it rehearsed for weeks.
He would come down. We would talk on the kerb. He would nod. We would hug. He would look me in the eyes, briefly, with the look I had been waiting for since he was small.
Thanks to you, the look would say. I’ve got this.
Reality.
A full-grown hairy man came up next to me in the shower glass. He was my son. He told me to get out. I got out.
I reached for some deodorant. He has seventeen sprays lined up on the shelf, each called something like Java or Apex Onyx. But they are all his.
Then he shouts that we haven’t left. I shout that it’s far too early. We rush the half mile to the drop-off hall to find we are the only ones there. No teachers. No bus. No other families. I can’t look at him.
By the time he comes to leave, he’s been sat with friends a while and the dread of the goodbye has begun to clasp my throat.
The friends have taken over a low wall outside, shoulder to shoulder. The version in my head had been stood at the kerb and I’m not ready for a version where he’s sat with three other boys and I have to walk towards them to say something.
Bye, then.
I reach out an open hand between us, but it descends into a handshake neither of us can find.
My hand closes on what’s there of his and squeezes.
1984. Dad in the doorway, drunk and sobbing. He has my hand. Don’t go, he says. Don’t go. He knows we are. Mum’s voice somewhere behind me, low and certain. We go.
Bye, Dad.
The kids are buzzing to get going. I load his bag on. They haven’t left yet, but the moment they’re stood together, they’re gone. I stay to wave them off anyway.
Later.
Knowing he won’t reply to a message, I send him a question with buttons.
Are you: A: Having a great time B: Not great, wish I was home C: Stop bothering me
On Saturday he taps A.
And C.
I drop a ♡ back, too quickly.
I’m already at next Saturday. The bus pulling in. Him stepping off. Him smiling. Him reaching me first.
He’s back. He’s back. He’ll always come back.
The hug we missed at the kerb.
Let’s rise together with every issue.
Market Moves
UK faces £125bn annual cost if youth unemployment crisis goes unaddressed | The Guardian
Students are booing AI mentions at graduation speeches across the US | Fast Company
AI hiring slowdown puts skilled trade workers in a position to win | CNBC
Stock market soars while consumer sentiment hits a 70-year low | The Wall Street Journal
Core inflation holds at 3.3% in April, matching Fed’s preferred gauge forecast | CNBC
Brand Beat
Les Binet and Will Davis warn ‘small thinking’ is killing advertising | IPA
Subway overhauls CMO and agency roster to fix emotional connection gap | Ad Age
Disney cuts 1,000 TV and film jobs under new CEO | Fox Business
Patagonia takes legal action against drag queen Pattie Gonia over trademark | The Guardian
Lululemon and founder Chip Wilson end bitter proxy battle | Retail Dive
Nike’s surprise World Cup cast hints at a bold new marketing playbook | Adweek
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky no longer sees hotels as the enemy | The Wall Street Journal
How Shake Shack kept its hospitality soul while going digital | Harvard Business Review
How Crocs made ‘ugly’ its biggest brand asset | Adweek
BTS and Oreo launch limited-edition cookies inspired by a Korean treat | People
K-beauty hit $2.4 billion in the US last year — and it’s still growing | The Wall Street Journal
Eli Lilly’s experimental obesity shot cuts body weight by 28% in trials | Business of Fashion
Oura Ring 5 is slimmer and lighter with an AI health coach built in | Wired
On and Erewhon team up for a sneaker built for grocery runs | WWD
Ferrari unveils $640,000 electric speedster designed by Jony Ive | The Wall Street Journal
Why going viral has lost its appeal for fashion brands | Vogue
Starting Up
NanoClaw creator rejects $20M buyout to raise $12M seed round instead | TechCrunch
Company inspection startups; the new AI frontier | Seriesastories
Airbnb-backed WeRoad raises $58M to expand group travel platform to the US | TechCrunch
BrewDog founder launches new beer brand with promise to original investors | The Times
Loonen Water: a deep dive | Feedme, Emily Sundberg
Tech Tidbits
Anthropic overtakes OpenAI to become world’s most valuable AI company | The Guardian
Tech CEOs are losing touch with reality over AI hype | TechCrunch
Meet the Vatican’s unlikely insider shaping AI ethics at Anthropic | Wired
SpaceX lands $6.45B in Space Force contracts ahead of IPO | TechCrunch
Meta launches paid subscriptions across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp | TechCrunch
Venture Vibes
SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs will put AI boom to the test | Financial Times
How Anthropic became a $900 billion AI giant so fast | The New York Times
Space X’s S1 breakdown ahead of IPO | TikTok
Is a wave of fintech IPOs finally about to break? | Forbes
Why Silicon Valley is nervous about Pope Leo’s stance on AI | Politico
British Business Bank backs new UK-dedicated VC fund | UKTN
Design Driven
Three Italian auto experts debate whether the Ferrari Luce’s design is really that bad | Wired
Rocky outcrops and cactus walls shape this desert-edge Mexican home | Wallpaper
Young Vic’s new logo uses motion blur to modernise tired theatre branding | It’s Nice That
Happiness
A happiness expert explains why optimising your joy will backfire | The New York Times
Slowmaxxing is the wellness trend embracing a slower pace of life | Vice
7 body language cues that make you instantly more likable | Big Think, Vanessa Van Edwards
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