Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Everyone is talking about GEO. Agencies are selling it. Brands are buying it. On its face, the pitch makes sense: the search-based internet that powered the digital economy for decades is giving way to generative AI answers. The pressure to act is real. So is the trap: you’re going to start paying for another lease on someone else’s internet. GEO is a tactic for a bigger and more important strategy. That strategy is owning your audience. The problem is that this new tactic is generating too much buzz and money for brands to ignore. McKinsey recently released a report arguing that $750B in US revenue will flow through AI-powered search by 2028. If you want your brand i…

When people discuss climate innovation, they often picture technology. Better batteries. Smarter grids. Carbon capture at scale. Those breakthroughs matter and are happening every day. But on this World Creativity and Innovation Day, I want to make a case for a different kind of innovation. One that is structural rather than technical, already underway, and quietly accelerating climate progress. It is, in a word, trust. A SYSTEM BUILT FOR FRAGMENTATION The social impact sector is filled with brilliant, committed people working on the climate crisis. It is also organized in a way almost perfectly designed to prevent the scale of impact the crisis demands. Many o…

Shares in the space-based internet provider AST SpaceMobile Inc (Nasdaq: ASTS) are sinking this morning after a major mishap occurred with the deployment of its latest satellite from Blue Origin’s most advanced rocket, the New Glenn. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On Sunday, April 19, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space company launched its flagship rocket, the New Glenn, for the third time. The New Glenn is a partially reusable heavy-lift rocket aimed at directly competing with archrival SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. (This rivalry pits two of the world’s richest people against each other: Bezos, founder of Amazon, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.) …

If AI can write our emails, analyze data, and generate code, then machines outperform humans on nearly everything we currently measure: speed, productivity, and task completion. Based on these measures, humans lose. Their jobs. Their dignity. Their worth. A recent management study shows that AI can help people do 12% more work, 25% faster—but it gets the answers wrong 19% of the time. That’s a telling number. And helps us to understand what we’re all experiencing. We’re optimizing for throughput while quietly accepting a compounding error rate. If we value motion and not direction, we’re like Wile E. Coyote, sprinting forward ever faster—only to realize, a beat…

In 2021, newly relocated to San Francisco from New York City, Danielle Snyder Shorenstein went with her husband to her first Golden State Warriors game. She wasn’t a sports fan, really, and especially not a Bay Area sports fan. “I identify as a New Yorker,” she says. Having owned and run a fashion and jewelry brand called Dannijo with her sister, Jodie Snyder Morel, since 2008, and looking around at the game merch, she thought to herself how unlikely she’d be to wear any of it. Over the course of the season, Shorenstein continued to go to games with her husband and began experimenting with her own take on fanwear. She cut up a jersey, added a crochet collar, some cry…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. These are difficult times for elite universities. Controversies over the handling of pro-Palestine protests on campus cost several school presidents their jobs; under the The President administration, federal research grants have plunged; and just 42% of Americans polled by Gallup in 2…

About 20 minutes into the Devil Wears Prada—the 2006 David Frankel film that constitutes one of the most important and perfect films ever produced (please hold all dissent)—Meryl Streep delivers a critical speech to Anne Hathaway that encompasses the plot’s primary tension. The moment, which may come up in the sequel (an Instagram post from a professional dyeing service in New York suggests this may be the case), comes as Streep’s Miranda, the frigid chief editor of a top fashion magazine is pondering items that might be featured for an upcoming issue, while surrounded by her stressed-out underlings. Also in the office is Andie (Hathaway), a comparatively disheveled …

Carroll Tower, a 194-apartment public housing development in Providence, Rhode Island, was built in 1974. For more than 50 years, residents there relied on electric baseboards for heating and their own window air conditioners, if they had them, in the summers. But now, the entire building has been retrofitted with a modern HVAC system: 277 heat pumps from Gradient, a San Francisco-based climate tech startup, will heat and cool the property. The heat pumps were installed as part of a $1.25 million public-private project between the Providence Housing Authority, Gradient, the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources, energy consulting firm Abode Energy Management…

Sunday has long been regarded as the day of rest: After a week of early wake-ups and diligently checking off to-do lists, there finally comes the one day where doing nothing is not only socially acceptable—but actively encouraged. Or so you thought. More and more Americans are now optimizing their Sunday as a means of self-improvement. This might look like light cleaning and calendar organization. Or meal-prepping while marinating in an avocado face mask. Rather than rest, Sunday is now a day to reset for the week ahead. While hardly groundbreaking, the idea has taken off online with almost a million videos tagged #sundayreset on TikTok. Searches for “Sunda…

Most business leaders are laser-focused on the existential threat that AI poses, with many of them citing it as a reason for major layoffs. At an event this week, however, Indeed CEO Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba suggested there was another force that would wreak havoc on the labor market—one that he argued was more pressing. “Actually, what is happening in all developed countries, including European countries and the U.S., what is happening is a big demographic change: an aging labor market,” Idekoba said at Semafor’s World Economy Summit on Wednesday, as Business Insider reported this week. He said the sheer number of workers aging out of the workforce and retiring would…

If you’ve been curious about #vanlife but can’t justify dropping $100,000 on a kitted-out camper, a new patent from a Chinese automaker offers a compromise – but you might not like it. Seres, a prominent EV maker out of China, just secured a patent for an in-car toilet that slides out and tucks away beneath the seat. The patent, first reported outside of China by Autoblog, was filed in April of last year, approved last week, and is currently active. The patented design looks practical enough, with a rail system that allows a compact toilet to slide out from under the seat like a drawer and remain hidden from view when not in use. The design is intended to “satisfy…

Just because a startup fails doesn’t mean it can’t cash out big. According to a report by Forbes, defunct companies are selling their digital footprints to AI companies as training data—and making real money from it. Shanna Johnson, the CEO of now-defunct software company cielo24, told the publication that she was able to sell every Slack message, internal email and Jira ticket as training data for “hundreds of thousands of dollars.” This isn’t a one-off scenario. SimpleClosure, a startup that helps companies like cielo24 shut down, told Forbes that there’s been major interest from AI companies trying to get their hands on workplace data. Because of this, SimpleC…

Like many, I’ve never met a chatbot I trust completely. Not only do they have a propensity to hallucinate by making up facts, but you can never be sure what their parent companies do with the information you provide. Most AI companies say they use your data to further train their models, but anonymize it first. However, you just have to take them at their word on this. Still, chatbots can be useful for summarizing and explaining complicated information, such as the kind contained in many bank statements, medical reports, and mortgage contracts. So if you do choose to upload sensitive documents like this, you should take steps to redact as much personal information…

Spring is in the air! The tulips are blooming, college acceptance letters are zooming into email inboxes, and the majority of parents with college-bound students are panicking about paying for their kid’s schooling. Ain’t this time of year grand? There’s a lot that families can do to tame the cost of higher education, starting with filing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) which determines a student’s eligibility for federal aid, applying for scholarships and grants which don’t need to be repaid, and considering the cost of attendance when comparing college acceptance offers. But for some college students, there is a funding gap between their…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Based on our analysis of the Zillow Home Value Index, U.S. home prices are up just +0.8% year-over-year between March 2025 and March 2026. That marks a deceleration from the +1.2% growth rate a year earlier—though national year-over-year home price growth has recently stabilized, ticking a tad higher from a low of -0.01% in August 2025. In the first half of 2025, the number of major metro area housing markets seeing year-over-year declines climbed. That count has since stopped ticking up. 31 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (i.e., 10%…

You’ve likely heard of vibe coding and very well may have conducted an experiment or two yourself, enlisting Claude or some other AI tool to create a simple website or an interactive game. OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy coined the phrase with a tweet in February 2025. In its simplest terms, vibe coding involves telling an AI program what you want to accomplish and having the AI create the code. It uses natural language provided by the user to generate the software. Vibe coding is a truly revolutionary democratizer of software development. It allows anyone with a computer and a little imagination to come up with software that appears, at least on the surface, to …

“What brand am I wearing?” Sydney Sweeney says, looking into the camera as the shutter snaps, revealing a rotation of summery denim looks. The mood suddenly calms, her eyes close, she takes a deep breath, seagulls call in the background. “Yeah, that one,” she says with a giggle. The ad marks the return of one of the most notorious brand partnerships in recent memory, as American Eagle launches a new campaign to hype its denim shorts called “Syd for Short.” It’s a perfectly pleasant, perfectly innocuous piece of brand work meant to conjure the free-spiritedness of summertime (and, you know, maybe make you forget about—or at least move on from—the last time Sweeney ha…

The advancement of artificial intelligence has shifted rapidly from abstract curiosity to an immediate personal threat for millions of workers. People aren’t just wondering if jobs will change—they’re asking whose jobs, how fast, and whether their own will be next. Making matters worse, several tech companies have already executed a staggering number of layoffs—almost always citing AI as the cause. On its own, this unpredictable unfolding of an entirely new and disruptive technology would be enough to unsettle us—yet we all know it’s just one of several forces compounding an already profound—and growing—sense of uncertainty in our lives. Add to this the volatile t…

Companies are currently grappling with how to use AI, and results vary. At times it can feel like the blind are leading the blind. As you watch leadership in your organization chart a path to engage with AI, what can you do to ensure that your company doesn’t get it completely wrong? 1. Educate yourself To contribute to any discussions around the use of AI in your organization, you have to be educated. That education requires a few components. You should certainly be aware of the ongoing conversations that are happening broadly in the business press. But, most of the people with a platform to speak to mainstream and social media have a viewpoint and/or product…

Karlee Rea had a gut feeling she was going to get laid off. In February, there were whispers among coworkers that layoffs were coming for employees at LTK, the creator e-commerce platform where Rea worked for nearly five years. The Dallas-based 26-year-old decided to vlog her day: She woke up early, hit the gym. Then it was time for work. Turns out, Rea’s gut feeling proved to be correct. That morning, she was part of staff cuts that the company said impacted a “low, single-digit percentage of LTK’s overall head count,” from software engineers to creator-facing roles. Rea decided to include the devastating development in her vlog. “This was my first big-girl …

For decades, the business world has quietly subscribed to a myth: that cognitive performance peaks early and declines steadily thereafter. It’s a belief baked into hiring practices, promotion decisions, and even redundancy strategies. Youth is equated with innovation, speed, and adaptability; age with decline, resistance, and risk. If we ask ourselves, “Am I a better/more effective employee now than I was at 21?” most of us would say, “Yes!” Science and data prove what we already know: that many of the cognitive capabilities that matter most in today’s complex, fast-moving organizations improve with age. The wrong model of intelligence The traditional view of …

Solopreneurs make dozens of business decisions every day. Which client to prioritize. Whether to raise rates. Which tool to try. In a corporate job, there are committees, managers, and approval chains to share the decision-making load. When you’re running a solo business, every call is yours. When I was a product manager, I learned to sort decisions into two categories: ones you can easily reverse and ones you can’t. It sounds almost too simple, but it changed how quickly I moved and how much I deliberated. That same framework can be applied directly to running a solo business. Reversible decisions: move fast Most business decisions are reversible. You can chan…

Lawyers notoriously struggle with technology. The legal profession is one of wood-paneled courtrooms and leather-bound lawbooks—not apps and chatbots. The infamous Lawyer Cat of the early pandemic Zoom era is an especially hilarious example of what happens when lawyers are forced to embrace tech they wouldn’t otherwise touch. And when lawyers use artificial intelligence, it often goes just as poorly. A Massachusetts lawyer was sanctioned for citing nonexistent cases hallucinated by ChatGPT in an official court filing, and California recently fined an attorney $10,000 for similar AI-hallucinated errors. It’s no surprise, then, that lawyers can be relu…

A Samsung Galaxy Tri-Fold smartphone sits beside something we haven’t seen before. It’s a round screen with a swiveling head. Called Project Luna, it has the mechanical charm of Luxo Jr., and a beep not so different from Wall-E. “The guests are here,” whispers a voice. Moments later, we hear an orchestra begin to play. Project Luna and the Galaxy become the conductors of a wide array of Samsung products and concepts, all of which share the same, pulsating orb graphic animation that lands somewhere between a face, mouth, eye, and the light ring of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL. This is how Samsung is saying hello to its visitors at Milan Design Week for its exhibitio…

It’s tempting to think that stacking a team with top talent guarantees results. Add AI, and you’ve got supercharged individuals. But star performers don’t automatically create high-performing teams—and AI can make things worse. Duke dean and professor Scott Dyreng saw this firsthand. His M.B.A. students worked in teams, with the option to “break up” for the final project. Before AI, about 5% did. After AI, over half went solo, he writes in The Wall Street Journal. Dyreng found that AI disrupted core teamwork skills, like negotiating and reaching agreements. But instead of banning it, he used AI strategically—for meeting analysis, summarizing discussions, and reporting…