F16s are still on Kyiv’s wish list.

Ukraine is no stranger to malign forces rampaging over its soil. While there is no solution to the problem of evil, literature – especially one 20th-century Ukrainian writer – can offer insight.

In the 25 years since Don Katz launched Audible as a pioneering audiobooks service, the audio space has become flooded with content. It’s easier than ever to record a podcast in your bedroom and reach a large number of listeners over social media.

Rather than try to chase the widest possible audience, Audible—which was acquired by Amazon for $300 million in 2008 and now reaches millions of listeners around the world—is doubling down on creating exclusive, prestigious content that users won’t be able to get anywhere else. Case in point: this week, Michelle Obama announced that she will adapt her book The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, into a podcast that will debut on Audible on March 7, with guests like Oprah Winfrey and Conan O’Brien.

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“When you look at professional-grade, profound storytelling, I’m more comfortable with how Audible Originals has cherry-picked that world than a world of millions and millions of personalized options,” Katz says.

In a Zoom interview, Katz reflected on the last two-and-a-half decades: from leaving a writing career to kickstart an audiobooks industry that did not yet exist; taking Audible from a public company into an Amazon subsidiary; and moving the company to Newark at a time when other companies were fleeing the city. Each of those moves has paid off: Audible consumers consumed nearly 4 billion hours of audio in 2022 across audiobooks, podcasts and theater productions, according to the company.

Here are excerpts from the conversation.

TIME: You wrote for Rolling Stone and other magazines for years. How did your background in journalism influence your approach to business?

Don Katz: For years, I have said that probably the best entrepreneur startup background you could have is being an inquisitive, worldly journalist. Because you have to have a big idea that preferably someone else hasn’t had, and then you pursue it by persuading people to give you insights in ways they haven’t in the past.

You need a business plan that’s disruptive, and you need to convince people to believe in your mission. And then the main thing is that you have to be incredibly honest about what you don’t personally know—and then supplement that with people who do.

In college, you took a class with the renowned novelist Ralph Ellison on America’s long-held traditions of oral storytelling. What impact did he have on you and Audible?

It’s pretty rare that a great American writer is the godfather of a large American corporation. But Ralph Ellison showed me that if any society should have had storytelling and verbal tradition as a mainstream media type, it was the United States of America.

From him, I understood that the reason that Stephen Crane wrote like an American was because he listened to this incredible polyglot storytelling that brought together so many voices from so many worlds. Mark Twain wrote like an American because of his understanding of that culture.

When I started Audible, there was criticism that I had abandoned a good literary career for this inferior form of audio transmission. And I would basically give mini-lectures on the fact that the Greeks were dead set against text in every way. Everything that made the difference intellectually, for thousands of years, was oral culture.

This fall, Spotify launched its own audiobooks wing. Are you worried about them cutting into your market share?

Spotify is one of dozens of companies who have come into the space over the last 25 years since our launch. For years, we didn’t have very much competition, and that meant that we had to create all of the global awareness of how powerful this medium is. So on one level, it’s “welcome to the party.”

But on another level, we’ve been at this a long time. It’s harder than it looks to help people integrate a habit into their lives. They’ll certainly find this out.

Another thing that I think of, when you bring up Spotify, is how happy I am that my era of being a public company CEO—and my responsibility to sell our stock price—is no longer. While I enjoyed running a public company in many ways, it is also a reality that the responsibilities of stack-ranking the shareholders can skew a company’s long-term purposes.

I’m a really deep student of American corporations and the victory of Milton Friedman’s view on shareholders. To his credit, he did say that caring for your employees was part of your fundamental responsibility. But what also basically said was that the private sector had no business trying to impact society, let alone redress societal inequalities. That was not something I ever bought into.

The other thing that hugely affected me was the way people like Martin Luther King talked about what became the go-to move for corporations exhibiting any kind of social caring, which was to write a check to nonprofits and charities. The charity is fine. But if you don’t look at the headwaters of the cause—which we know now is institutionalized racism and a whole lot of other inequities—then you’re just going to be papering over core problems.

One of the ways you attempt to change a core problem with Audible is with your paid internship program for students from Newark public schools. Do you feel that program has debunked perceptions about the need for companies to hire from prestigious schools?

Yes. We have been gifted by these kids. They raise the quality of our culture and they make us better in every way.

But what they didn’t necessarily grow up with is the background conversation of resumes and organizational language. That led to some fairly dire pre-COVID statistics of Black college graduates’ employment having a massive disparity to white college graduates. So now we’ve now gotten to the point of “curricularizing” organizational vocabulary.

And that led to another program, Cornerstone. We’ve had so much success with these amazing students. What if we hired people in Newark who, on paper, were the least employable? People without degrees, single parents on public assistance, people who just got out of prison: Could you change your learning style teaching to get them to be part of a successful tech-driven customer care organization?

The answer is yes, you could. What I said at the beginning was simply, ‘you just have to be native-smart and outgoing. And we’ll take it from there.’ And these people coming from non-obvious backgrounds are some of the highest performers in the company.

What advice do you have for early-stage entrepreneurs?

If you want to operate a business and be good at managing people, that’s great. But if you want to be entrepreneurial or inventive, it’s kind of a gift to be able to step back; to connect multiple dots and think of what something could be in the biggest way.

There are many, many successful businesses that are basically problem-solving, or productivity enhancements. Uber is clearly a better, faster, cheaper way to get from here to there. But I’m always constantly telling people, ‘Don’t look sideways. Don’t just solve the problem at hand. Step up to a more inventive level of what something could be.’ And you’ll start to see things that excite you and make you want to do all that you need to operationalize something big.

On Instagram in late January, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a series of stories calling out the prejudice inside the cringy phrase “word salad.” It’s an accusation of muddled speech that’s lobbed at people (okay, women) whose communication style differs from the traditional speaking patterns we associate with leadership—a.k.a men, or, really, any of us who match that linguistic style in order to get taken seriously. Any of us, for example, who endeavor to speak low and slow and use abstract and visionary language, or who aim for direct speech rather than roundabout. Ocasio-Cortez suggested that sometimes, despite our best efforts, when we think out loud, we’re told our words are impossible to follow—because really, what the listener means is they have no intention of trying to follow someone who doesn’t sound like them.

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The truth is, each of us inadvertently shares whole dossiers of information about our lives when we speak, revealing where we’ve been and where we’re going through our accent, style of speech, and word choice (lofty or colloquial, sweary or clean, peppered with “like”s and “just”s, or more to-the-point). And those linguistic quirks shift as we bend our speech to fit the occasion. After all, you likely speak differently to your mom than you do to a lawyer or a little kid or your partner. You might alternate between dialects or whole languages to fit in, or get what you want, or pull rank, or keep yourself safe.

Read more: Talking Less Will Get You More

Most of us make these sorts of negotiations at rapid speed and often without conscious thought every single day, as we wrestle with how we’re perceived and how we want to be. In other words, the lengths we’ll go to avoid hearing “word salad.”

For 15 years, I’ve told movie stars what to do with their tongues. As a Hollywood dialect coach, I would talk vowels and consonants with clients desperate to sound clearer to American ears or those just putting on a funny voice for a fun new role. I’d spend whole days on set, listening in on the sounds coming out of my actors’ mouth, and then, between takes, gently nudge the wayward ones in the right direction.

But during the 2018 midterms, I began to help political candidates, too—regular folks going public for the first time, being seen and heard at scale, whose communication hurdles were not due to accent but rather an acute awareness of the kinds of vocal traps Ocasio-Cortez alluded to. And then I began coaching rising business leaders needing new tools to level up. Inevitably it would be women who’d find me, or those with a voice marked for race or class or not-from-around-here, trying to get taken seriously despite a mismatch between their own voice and the traditional sound of authority.

I knew all along that each of us tells a story with our voice, beyond the words—with the tone, the accent, the inflection, the pitch, the rhythm, the ways we hide behind monotone or overuse filler words. But it took working with these leaders to realize: We’re actually all performing power with how we talk.

After all, move your tongue a millimeter one direction or the other and it could affect your job prospects, whether your lease application is accepted, or if you’re taken seriously when you run for office. Finish your sentence with a whimper not a bang and risk losing credibility: For decades now, we’ve heard that habits like vocal fry and upspeak render millennial women and younger generations incapable of sounding professional, let alone like a boss. In a study founded by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, analysts concluded that “relative to a normal speaking voice, young adult female voices exhibiting vocal fry are perceived as less competent, less educated, less trustworthy, less attractive, and less hirable.”

If you’re sick of getting dismissed or undervalued when you speak, it stands to reason you’d work to change those habits that signal you don’t deserve power. To speak “normal,” as it were. According to Dr. Michael Kraus, a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, during even brief interactions, speech patterns shape our perceptions of the speaker’s overall competence. His study suggests we’re able to judge “social class” with reliable accuracy merely from hearing seven random words. “We rarely talk explicitly about social class, and yet, people with hiring experience infer competence and fitness based on socioeconomic position estimated from a few seconds of an applicant’s speech,” Kraus said.

What do most of us do with this onslaught of information? Maybe you brush it off and speak unapologetically in your own voice anyway. But most folks eyeing leadership end up turning to executive presence trainings or coaches. They master code-switching to hide their difference or obsessively count their “um”s, policing themselves before anyone else does. They chase the traditional sound of power so they might speak like the standard one day too—or they just hate the sound of their voice.

Or both.

But there is a third way, and it requires that we name what’s true: That the standard is entirely arbitrary, and its origins suspect. Bill Bryson, in The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, confirms that no accent or style of speech has inherent value over any other. In fact, “considerations of what makes for good English or bad English are to an uncomfortably large extent matters of prejudice and conditioning.”

First impressions aren’t really first impressions; they’re inherited biases. And we can learn, as listeners, to check them. Get curious about who you instinctively take seriously based on how they speak and who you don’t. Consider just how many different ways the people around us communicate in sound, style, volume of words, and what’s left unsaid. If our voices reflect our life experience, we actually each sound unique. What does it take for us to celebrate that vast diversity of sound, rather than judge it?

When Ocasio-Cortez was still a candidate for U.S. Congress, less than a year out from tending bar, she came through Los Angeles, and I grabbed a ticket to hear her speak at a sweaty church in Koreatown. While I inched along city streets blasting the air conditioning in my car, I called my mom and told her where I was going. She exclaimed, “Oh good, she needs you!”

“Oh God,” I thought. My mom’s my biggest fan and she meant well. “Mom, I think she’s doing just fine without me,” I responded.

“No, no,” she pushed back. “That voice. I can’t take her seriously with that voice.” My mother is a second-wave feminist, the kind who got a Fulbright scholarship, went to law school, and kept her last name when she married. But my mother couldn’t take her seriously with that voice. I knew what she meant, of course. Ocasio-Cortez’s voice is a bit nasal. A bit higher-pitched than we’re used to hearing from elected officials. She sounds distinctly Millennial, distinctly female, and above all, warm—like she was probably an excellent bartender who knew all of the regulars. I don’t say this to be flip; we all pick up valuable vocal skills from the rooms we’ve mastered and that one’s a pressure cooker. She sounds like where she’s from and who she is. She sounds like she has no interest in apologizing for it.

“Or maybe, she’s teaching us what getting taken seriously might sound like,” I responded, feeling a burst of fire.

After all, it is up to us to determine what we take seriously. It’s up to us whom we give authority, and it should be based on merit, more than sounds coming out of a mouth. This is totally obvious, of course, but in the real world the equation is complicated by implicit biases born of traditions, industries, and policies meant to keep those once powerful, still powerful. My mom is not the bad guy in this story; most of us could stand to take a flamethrower to our preconceptions.

And our preconceptions about our own voice, while we’re at it. Focus for a moment on yours. What do you like about it? I bet these sounds that come out of your mouth, your way with words, yours, has served you somewhere in some way. Consider how. Who do you sound like and why is that wonderful? Who can you connect with because of how you talk?

If this vast diversity of sound were the new normal—what would be possible?

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — China played down the cancellation of a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken after a large Chinese balloon suspected of conducting surveillance on U.S. military sites roiled diplomatic relations, saying that neither side had formally announced any such plan.

“In actuality, the U.S. and China have never announced any visit, the U.S. making any such announcement is their own business, and we respect that,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement Saturday morning.

Blinken was due to visit Beijing on Sunday for talks aimed at reducing U.S.-China tensions, the first such high-profile trip after the countries’ leaders met last November in Indonesia. But the U.S. abruptly canceled the trip after the discovery of the huge balloon despite China’s claim that it was merely a weather research “airship” that had blown off course.

The Pentagon rejected that out of hand — as well as China’s contention that the balloon was not being used for surveillance and had only limited navigational ability.

Uncensored reactions on the Chinese internet mirrored the official government stance that the U.S. was hyping up the situation.

Many users made jokes about the balloon. Some said that since the U.S. had put restrictions on the technology that China is able to buy to weaken the Chinese tech industry, they couldn’t control the balloon.

Others called it the “wandering balloon” in a pun that refers to the newly released Chinese sci-fi film called “The Wandering Earth 2.”

Still others used it as a chance to poke fun at U.S. defenses, saying it couldn’t even defend against a balloon, and nationalist influencers leapt to use the news to mock the U.S. One wrote wryly: “The U.S., because of the balloon incident, delays Blinken’s visit to China.”

Censorship was visible on the topic — the “wandering balloon” hashtag on Weibo was no longer searchable by Saturday evening.

“The U.S. is hyping this as a national security threat posed by China to the U.S. This type of military threat, in actuality, we haven’t done this. And compared with the U.S. military threat normally aimed at us, can you say it’s just little? Their surveillance planes, their submarines, their naval ships are all coming near our borders,” Chinese military expert Chen Haoyang of the Taihe Institute said on Phoenix TV, one of the major national TV outlets.

The balloon was spotted earlier over Montana, which is home to one of America’s three nuclear missile silo fields at Malmstrom Air Force Base, defense officials said.

President Joe Biden had declined to shoot down the balloon, following advice of defense officials who worried the debris could injure people below. Meanwhile, people with binoculars and telephoto lenses tried to find the “spy balloon” in the sky as it headed southeastward over Kansas and Missouri at 60,000 feet (18,300 meters).

The Pentagon also acknowledged reports of a second balloon flying over Latin America. “We now assess it is another Chinese surveillance balloon,” Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, said in a statement.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to a question about the second balloon.

Blinken, who had been due to depart Washington for Beijing late Friday, said he had told senior Chinese diplomat Wang Yi in a phone call that sending the balloon over the U.S. was “an irresponsible act and that (China’s) decision to take this action on the eve of my visit is detrimental to the substantive discussions that we were prepared to have.”

China has denied any claims of spying, and said it is a civilian-use balloon intended for meteorology research. Experts have said that their response was feasible.

But analysts said the unexpected incident will not help the strained ties between the two countries, and particularly China’s initial response where it said they could not control the balloon and “regretted” that it unintentionally entered U.S. space.

On Saturday, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs again emphasized that the balloon’s journey was out of its control and urged the U.S. to not “smear” it based on the balloon.

Wang said China “has always strictly followed international law, we do not accept any groundless speculation and hype. Faced with unexpected situations, both parties need to keep calm, communicate in a timely manner, avoid misjudgments and manage differences.”

Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore, said China’s apology did not appear sincere.

“In the meantime, the relationship will not improve in the near future … the gap is huge.”

___

Associated Press researcher Henry Hou in Beijing contributed to this report.

Bernard Arnault has a net worth of $196 billion.

Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images

• Bernard Arnault’s wealth increased by $33.7 billion this year, Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index shows.
• The multi-billionaire tops its rankings of the world’s richest people, followed by Elon Musk.
• The LVMH CEO and co-founder has a current net worth of $196 billion, per Bloomberg.

The world’s richest person Bernard Arnault’s wealth has skyrocketed by over $33 billion this year, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.

Bernard Arnault is the CEO and co-founder of luxury goods conglomerate LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton, more commonly known as LVMH.

The mogul’s fortune has swelled by $33.7 billion – more than a fifth of his total wealth – so far this year.

Bloomberg has estimated his current net worth at $196 billion. The 73-year-old French billionaire is currently ranked by Bloomberg as the world’s richest person, followed by Elon Musk whose net worth is valued at $175 billion.

Arnault co-founded the group that owns brands such as Marc Jacobs, Givenchy, and Moët & Chandon as well as a 50% stake in Fenty Beauty in 1987. It also operates high-end brands such as Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co., and Christian Dior.

The CEO recently appointed his daughter, Delphine Arnault, CEO and chair of Dior. Dior announced in January the younger Arnault would take over as of February 1, after serving as an executive vice president of Louis Vuitton since 2013.

All four of his sons hold top positions at his companies too. Antoine Arnault is CEO of LVMH holding company Christian Dior SE; Alexandre Arnault is an executive vice president at Tiffany & Co.; Frédéric Arnault is the CEO of Tag Heuer; and Jean Arnault is the director of watches development and marketing at Louis Vuitton. 

LVMH did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment made outside of typical working hours. 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm.

Sopa Images/Getty Images

• ChatGPT has lit up interest in artificial intelligence on the internet and among investors. 
• Insider’s Carla Mozée asked OpenAI’s buzzy chatbot how to get in on the AI craze. 
• Some mega-cap tech names like Google and ETFs were on its list of ideas. 

ChatGPT – a source for hot stock tips?

That’s a stretch, but OpenAI’s chatbot has ignited an internet and investing frenzy surrounding artificial intelligence. ChatGPT has accelerated interest in natural-language technology, as the fun-to-use tool displays a human-like ability to perform tasks such as addressing investment question and writing layoff emails. 

I jumped into ChatGPT and asked two questions about getting exposure to AI through the financial markets. ChatGPT’s suggestions included well-known companies such as Microsoft, but it also offered assets that aren’t tech behemoths or household names. 

How can I invest in the AI craze?

“There are several ways to invest in AI,” ChatGPT answered. “1. Invest in technology companies that are developing AI products or services. 2. Invest in venture capital funds that specialize in AI startups. 3. Invest in AI-related stocks,” for starters.

The tool’s examples of tech companies working with AI were Microsoft, IBM, and Google’s parent Alphabet. For AI-focused companies, Nvidia, Intel and Applied Materials popped up. 

It also suggested AI-focused ETFs including the Global X Robotics & Artificial Intelligence ETF  and the ARK Innovation ETF, the fund run by high-profile money manager Cathie Wood. 

“Purchase shares of private AI companies,” it also responded.”This can be done through equity crowdfunding or venture capital firms.” 

ChatGPT’s charm stems from its natural-language ability, so I asked it:

What companies can I invest in for exposure to natural language processing?

Its response:

1. Amazon (AMZN): Amazon is a leader in natural language processing (NLP), leveraging its AWS platform to provide customers with a suite of NLP solutions, including Amazon Lex, Amazon Comprehend, and Amazon Transcribe.

2. Microsoft (MSFT): Microsoft has a number of different NLP products, including Microsoft Cognitive Services and the Azure Machine Learning platform. (ChatGPT didn’t tell me that Microsoft is a major partner of OpenAI.) 

3. Google (GOOGL): Google has a variety of NLP products, including Google Cloud Natural Language and Google Cloud Speech-to-Text.

4. IBM (IBM): IBM has a variety of different NLP solutions, including Watson Natural Language Understanding and Watson Discovery.

5. Apple (AAPL): Apple has a variety of NLP solutions, including the Apple Machine Learning platform and the Natural Language Framework.

“The hype surrounding Artificial Intelligence has spilled over into retail investments,” Vanda Research, which tracks retail investing activity in more than 9,000 stocks and ETFs, said in a note this week. 

ChatGPT didn’t mention C3.ai, but I’ll forgive it. C3.ai stock has more than doubled this year, with this week’s surge set off after the business AI software maker said it would integrate ChatGPT into its lineup of AI tools. 

For now, you can’t invest directly in research lab OpenAI. But I asked ChatGPT anyway: Can I invest in ChatGPT?

“No, ChatGPT is not an investment platform. It is a platform that enables users to earn rewards by simply chatting with bots.”