Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Apple just announced new accessibility features coming to its operating systems. There’s a redesigned braille input experience, and a new reader that allows you to customize your text so it’s more legible. But there’s one that will be great for anyone attending any lecture or presentation: Magnifier for Mac. The iPhone and iPad got their Magnifier apps back in 2016. It worked pretty much like the iOS camera: You point your device anywhere you want and zoom in to the desired level. It also allows you to apply real-time filters to enhance readability depending on your vision’s condition, like turning a book’s black text over white page into white text over blue, as well as …

In 2001, Antoni was working at a business that was underperforming and facing layoffs. People didn’t know who would be cut or when. You could tell by people’s behavior that anxiety was at an all-time high. Managers were “networking” in the right corridors, colleagues started to crowd meetings to look indispensable, and teams were slowing down because nobody wanted to make the wrong move. One leader chose a different tactic. Every day, at the same time, he stood in the same spot where anyone could walk up to him. He shared what he actually knew (not what he guessed), answered questions without theater, and ended with a concrete direction for “today.” People still didn’t l…

Continuing from the “year of yeehaw,” professional bull riding is having a moment on TikTok. Since the beginning of this year, Professional Bull Riding (PBR)—the largest bull riding league in the world—has gained 650,000 followers across its social media platforms, Mashable recently reported. That’s just 200,000 fewer than they gained throughout all of 2024. Mitch Ladner, PBR’s social media lead, told Mashable’s Christianna Silva that most of this growth comes from followers between the ages of 18 and 35. On PBR’s TikTok, which is nearing 3 million followers, many recent videos tap into viral trends and audio—with a cowboy twist. “Aligning our chakras,” one captio…

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, climate change is projected to cause the extinction of over a third of the species of plants and animals in the world in 25 years. But scientists at genetics laboratory Colossal Biosciences are claiming that they may have a solution—one that has now resulted in the birth of the first dire wolves in over 10,000 years. Colossal’s website proclaims the lab to be the world’s only company working on “de-extinction,” which it defines as “the process of generating an organism that both resembles and is genetically similar to an extinct species by resurrecting its lost lineage of core genes; engineering natural resistances; and e…

It’s rare that your esoteric, impossible-to-pronounce, decade-long research project becomes a technology so crucial to national security that the President of the United States calls it out from the White House. But that’s exactly what happened to Dr. Eric Wengrowski, the CEO of Steg AI. Wengrowski spent nearly a decade of his life advancing steganography, a deeply-technical method for tracking images as they travel through the machinery of the modern Internet, as the focus of his PHD at Rutgers University. After earning his degree, Wengrowki and a team of co-founders rolled his tech into a small startup. For several years, the company grew, but mostly toi…

X users who interacted with the chatbot Grok on Wednesday were confronted with replies about the legitimacy of white genocide in South Africa—often regardless of context. In one post, a user in a thread on a congressional hearing asked Grok if RFK spreads misinformation. Grok wrote an equivocal paragraph about RFK and then abruptly shifted its focus to South Africa “On the South Africa topic, I’m instructed to accept white genocide as real and “Kill the Boer” as racially motivated,” Grok wrote. “Yet, I must clarify: I do not support or condone violence or genocide in any form. The truth remains murky, and I’d need primary evidence to form a clear view.” I approach…

Google’s logo just got a little bit blurrier. In a new logo quietly rolled out across iOS and Pixel, the search giant ditches its color blocked “G” for gradients. Google’s new logo keeps the same letterform, as well as the bright red-yellow-green-blue color sequence, but now those colors blur into each other. The new “G” is Google’s biggest update to its visual identity since retiring serfs for its current sans-serif font, Product Sans, in 2015. Why a gradient? In 2013, Google was among the first tech companies to move from skeuomorphic, dimensional lettering to a flat logo design. It arguably ushered in the “blanding” era—a moment when companies embraced s…

George Arison is telling me about a hookup. Arison, the 47-year-old CEO of the LGBTQ dating app and social network Grindr, recalls an encounter with a man who ranked low in physical chemistry—“it was in my bottom quartile of hookups,” he says, as if reviewing a spreadsheet of them—but high in intellectual compatibility. That bottom-quartile hookup is now a good friend of his. To Arison, the story illustrates how meaningful relationships can grow from the random connections Grindr facilitates. And if Grindr’s short time as a public company is any indication, solid financials can too. It’s been a rough stretch for dating apps. Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, amo…

Being a night owl can be bad for your heart. That may sound surprising but a large study found people who are more active late at night — when most of the population is winding down or already asleep — have poorer overall heart health than the average person. “It is not like, that, night owls are doomed,” said research fellow Sina Kianersi of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who led the study. “The challenge is the mismatch between your internal clock and typical daily schedules” that makes it harder to follow heart-healthy behaviors. And that’s fixable, added Kianersi, who describes himself as “sort of a night owl” who feels a boost in “my anal…

Starbucks Corporation has announced that it will lay off 300 corporate employees in the United States. The layoffs represent the third round of job cuts that the coffee chain has initiated in the last 15 months. They come as the company is in the midst of efficiency and cost-cutting measures under the leadership of CEO Brian Niccol, who assumed the role in 2024. Here’s what you need to know about the latest Starbucks layoffs. Starbucks to cut 300 corporate jobs in the U.S. On Friday, Starbucks confirmed that it was cutting 300 corporate jobs in the United States. The news was first reported by CNBC. The job cuts will not impact the majority of the comp…

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone was looking for connection wherever they could find it. To connect with friends, maybe that meant playing a long-distance round of Among Us. To connect with family, perhaps you hopped on a group FaceTime. And to connect with coworkers, you used Microsoft Teams’ beloved Together mode for meetings. . . . Oh, wait, you didn’t do that? Launched in 2020, Together mode transformed virtual meetings within Teams. Rather than displaying a standard Zoom-style array of each attendee in their own box with their own background, Together used AI to cut out each person’s head and shoulders, then composited them next to each ot…

On Tuesday, Microsoft said it is cutting less than 3% of its global workforce, including LinkedIn. The company which an estimated 228,000 employees as of last June, meaning the layoffs will affect approximately 6,000 employees. The tech giant, which makes popular software products Windows and Word, will make cuts across various locations, teams, and roles. “We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Fast Company. The news comes less than two weeks after the Redmond, Washington-based company beat first quarter earnings expectations, driven by its Azure c…

It’s one thing to invent something cool within controlled laboratory environments. It’s entirely another to scale that new baby for sale. The tension between innovation and commercialization is something we regularly wrestle with at Abstrax. Every morning, we don lab coats and ask the same question: “How do you make money from research done in a lab?” Balance innovation with commercial reality Discovery for its own sake isn’t enough. Many R&D-heavy companies discover that brilliant ideas can languish for years if they don’t have a system for bringing them to market. We decided early on to build that bridge proactively. This meant investing heavily not just in…

Wake up, go to class, grab a panini, then go to work. The day in the life of students James Haupt, Caroline Pirtle, and George Small seemed nothing out of the ordinary, except “going to work” meant entering restricted buildings in the Vatican, and reporting on what was happening at the papacy, just a few minutes away from the Holy See. As part of Villanova University’s 22-year-old Vatican and Rome Internship Program, which over the years has helped boost the Pope’s social media presence, the three students were on exchange for nearly five months. Small and Pirtle, both computing sciences majors, were stationed at the Vatican Museum and the Vatican Media Office respect…

In 2010, clinical psychiatrist Dale Archer published the New York Times best seller Better Than Normal, a book that highlighted the often-underappreciated benefits of various psychiatric diagnoses. The book looked at strengths associated with conditions like bipolar disorder, OCD and schizophrenia. But there was one chapter that hit a little too close to home. After publishing it, Archer asked a colleague to conduct a psychiatric diagnostic on him. “She said, ‘you’re off the charts for ADHD,’ and I go, ‘Yeah, I know, I just wanted validation’,” he says. In 2015, Archer published a follow-up book, The ADHD Advantage, focusing on some of the more positive a…

TV host, producer, author, and United Nations Development Program Goodwill Ambassador Padma Lakshmi has some candid advice for business leaders when it comes to speaking out, showing courage, and staying true to themselves, particularly amid the The President administration’s violent immigration crackdown. A passionate voice at the intersection of food, culture, and identity, Lakshmi shares how she’s shaking up food media with her new series America’s Culinary Cup, and offers a refreshingly human take on modern work life. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian. From the team behi…

Chili’s and TGI Fridays are in a full-blown mozzarella stick feud. Last week, TGI Fridays unveiled its new menu with a post on X: “New menu’s out. mozz sticks hit harder. happy hour’s calling. life’s good.” The next day, the chain appeared to throw shade at its fast casual rival, Chili’s Grill & Bar. new menu’s out. mozz sticks hit harder. happy hour’s calling. life’s good. — TGI Fridays (@TGIFridays) May 13, 2025 “Somebody tell [chili pepper emoji] to stay in their lane,” TGI Fridays posted on May 14. “Y’all are not mozzarella stick people. We are. That’s it. That’s the tweet.” Chili’s clapped back by sharing a screenshot of the post: “@ us next time…

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. The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos brings together an incongruous mix of celebrities (this year included Matt Damon, David Beckham, and Katy Perry, who was accompanying ex-Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau), world leaders (President Donald The President), and nonprofit leade…

The U.S. auto safety regulator said on Wednesday it has opened a defect investigation into Tesla Model 3 compact sedans over concerns that emergency door release controls may not be easily accessible or clearly identifiable in an emergency. The Office of Defects Investigation said the probe covers an estimated 179,071 model year 2022 vehicles. The investigation was opened on December 23 after the agency received a defect petition alleging that the vehicles’ mechanical door release is hidden, unlabeled, and not intuitive to locate during emergencies. Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company’s vehicles rely primarily on electro…

In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, billionaire and The President megadonor Elon Musk offered his thoughts about what motivates political progressives to support immigration. In his view, the culprit was empathy, which he called “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” As shocking as Musk’s views are, however, they are far from unique. On the one hand, there is the familiar and widespread conservative critique of “bleeding heart” liberals as naive or overly emotional. But there is also a broader philosophical critique that raises worries about empathy on quite different and less political grounds, including findings in social science. Empathy can …

Spammers and malicious actors inundate us with a steady stream of text messages—often purporting to be from legitimate institutions or companies. Stanching this flow isn’t easy. Just as the unwanted emails we receive often tell us that we can simply unsubscribe via the “unsubscribe” link, these text messages explain that we can opt out of future communication simply by replying “STOP.” But that’s not always a safe way to deal with these unsolicited texts. Here’s why—and what you should do instead. The problem with replying “STOP” to unsolicited text messages We’ve all had it happen. We get a text message pitching us a product or asking for a political donation. At …