Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

For years, deepfakes were treated as a political or social media oddity, a strange corner of the internet where celebrity faces (of women 99% of the time) were pasted onto fake videos (porn in 99% of the cases) and nobody quite knew what to do about it. But that framing is now dangerously outdated, because deepfakes have quietly evolved into something much more systemic: an operational risk for corporations, capable of corrupting supply chains, financial workflows, brand trust, and even executive decision-making. Recent headlines show that synthetic media is no longer a fringe experiment. It is a strategic threat, one that companies are not prepared for. When a …

Strategic planning is a big business. Companies spend millions of dollars working with consulting firms to chart a path forward. Not only does a lot of money change hands as part of this process, but the amount of time that employees invest in working on the plan likely doubles the cost of the entire process. In the end, leadership gets a shiny report they can send to employees, shareholders, external stakeholders, and others. Often, though, much less money and time is invested in implementing that plan than was spent creating it. As a result, there is a lot of cynicism around engaging in strategic plans. In many ways, this feels a lot like New Year’s resolutions.…

It sounds like an obvious business decision: cut headcount, reduce costs, and signal efficiency to the market. When Block CEO Jack Dorsey eliminated more than 4,000 jobs—nearly half the company’s workforce—citing AI-driven efficiency gains, the company’s stock rose more than 20% within hours. Citigroup is executing CEO Jane Fraser’s plan to cut 20,000 roles by the end of 2026. Morgan Stanley recently reduced its workforce by 2,500 positions across its major business divisions, despite posting record revenues in 2025. The announcements are framed as strategic resets. The market often rewards them. But the real consequences rarely show up in the stock price. They sh…

Time is running short for customers of Joann. That’s because in just a few more days, the beloved fabrics and crafts retailers will have closed 255 locations across America. And by the end of next month, all its locations will be shuttered for good. Here’s what you need to know about April’s round of Joann stores closing, including the locations of the closing stores and the dates they are expected to close. Why is Joann’s closing? Like many once-ubiquitous large retail chains, Joann Inc. has faced years of financial struggles that have only gotten worse thanks to rising inflation, consumers cutting back on discretionary spending, and the increased prevalence o…

Take a moment to think about what the world must have looked like to J.P. Morgan a century ago, before his death in 1913. A shrewd investor in emerging technologies like railroads, automobiles, and electricity, he was also an early adopter, installing one of the first electric generators in his house. Today, we might call him a Techno-Optimist. He could scarcely imagine the dark days ahead: two world wars, the Great Depression, genocides, the rise of fascism and communism, and a decades-long Cold War. Had he lived to see it, he might have asked how, despite so many scientific and technological breakthroughs, things went so wrong. Today, we are at a similar junctur…

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…

Dating in 2025 has been rough. According to articles, data, and personal narratives on social media, it seems that it’s never been more challenging to find a partner. But, according to a new report, when it comes to one qualification, daters may actually be lowering the bar. Tawkify, a matchmaking service, surveyed 1,010 U.S. adults to find out how work-related trends are shaping modern dating. Turns out having a job is no longer a must-have for a growing number of romance seekers. These days, only 29% of daters say that unemployment is a red flag that would make them inclined to turn down a potential partner. Likewise, while living with one’s parents would’ve once been…

The new Pentagon press corps gathered last week for their first in-person briefing. That’s since almost all credentialed reporters from traditional media companies surrendered their passes in October to protest new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s strict media policy. Refusing to sign a 21-page Pentagon document that in effect banned journalists from trying to solicit any kind of information that was not pre-approved, the Pentagon instead issued passes to a newly credentialed corps of influencers, conspiracy theorists, and conservative commentators who happily agreed to the strict rules. The handpicked press corps were active on social media last week as they doc…

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. Before becoming CEO and president of C.H. Robinson in 2023, Dave Bozeman worked at four of the world’s most iconic companies: Harley-Davidson Motor Company, Caterpillar, Amazon, and Ford Motor Company. During each stop, he gleaned valuable lessons: Harley-Davidson (16 years): The m…

Imagine you’re talking to someone and they suddenly start to add advertising to the exchange. What might that look like? In a 1965 episode of the classic sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, the protagonist uses her magical powers to create fake parents for herself in order to impress a date. She crafts them to be “just like the people on television commercials,” making them speak using sentences from commercials. Her synthetic “parents” appear friendly and normal—until they start talking, reciting ads verbatim for products like “streak-away” for gray hair, dish soap, “Grippo” denture adhesive, and deodorant. They have so much to say, yet communicate nothing at all. Something …

Last night’s surprise announcement from Netflix that it was abandoning its Warner Bros. takeover bid in the wake of a “superior” offer from Paramount Skydance has sent shockwaves through both Hollywood and Wall Street. And investors in all three companies have reacted strongly. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, Warner Bros. Discovery said it has determined that a revised bid for its cinema and television properties from Paramount Skydance was a “superior proposal” to Netflix’s long-standing offer of $82.7 billion. Paramount, which has been in a hostile bidding war with Netflix over the movie studio, issued a new proposal to Warner Br…

Allie K. Miller, one of the most followed voices in the AI industry, says that “by the time you wake up, your AI should have already been working for you for hours.” Formerly the global head of machine learning for startups and venture capital at Amazon Web Services, Miller is among the busiest AI consultants and influencers in the industry, with more than 1.6 million followers on LinkedIn alone. Through her company Open Machine, she advises enterprises and business leaders—including those at OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Warner Bros. Discovery—on how to adopt AI. In 2025, Miller was named one of the 100 most influential people in AI by Time. In an interview with Inc.…

Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Company’s work-life advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: Help! None of my coworkers have kids and don’t understand what it’s like. A: No two people’s lives are the same and people with all kinds of family structures have issues that pull their time and attention away from work. That said, few things in life are as schedule-disrupting as being a parent. In an ideal world, your boss and coworkers wouldn’t need to be parents themselves to understand things like needing to miss work when you have a sick kid or having…

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…

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 …

The District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virgina (DMV) region is emerging as a national test case for the future of office space. As cities across the country grapple with persistent office vacancies, D.C. is taking a bold approach: Instead of focusing solely on residential conversions, it is pioneering a broader strategy to convert offices to…anything. While the concept of office conversions isn’t new, most efforts have been centered on residential use. D.C.’s strategy breaks that mold. In January 2025, the city launched the Central Washington Activation Projects Temporary Tax Abatement, better known as the Office to Anything program. This policy targets buildings that…

There’s a statistic that’s been making the rounds for the better part of a decade that says the average person is exposed to about 10,000 ads every day. This has always sounded a tad suspect, as it amounts to an ad every six seconds of our waking day (it has since been debunked). But maybe the reason it’s persisted this long is because it really feels true. Our feeds are saturated with ads. The airwaves, TV broadcasts, sports sidelines, team jerseys, and our streamers are full of them. Now artificial intelligence is threatening to make that 10,000 ads a day statistic a reality. Agency Genre.ai has made AI-generated ads for IM8, Popeye’s, and Qatar Airlines, as well a…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Pandemic era adoption of work-from-home and hybrid work models has left many office spaces unused, triggering a surge in expired leases and vacant office buildings. Simultaneously, the residential housing market remains resilient, with the number of active homes for sale in January 2025 sitting 25% below the levels recorded in January 2019. It’d only make sense that many of these offices over time get converted into condos and apartments, right? To gain a comprehensive understanding of the current office-to-apartment conversions landscape, ResiCl…

Fallingwater, the iconic Pennsylvania home architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed to sit over a running stream, just rebranded. But it doesn’t have a logo, and that’s intentional. “A logo’s purpose is to provide a cognitive shortcut to brand essence—but Fallingwater’s iconic elements, the cantilevered house and its landscape, are too rich to compress graphically, yet too essential to abstract,” says Amy Blackman, founder of L.A. design firm Fruition Co., that worked on the rebrand which went live last week, said in a statement. Unsplash The new brand also comes with updated fonts and an expanded color palette that was inspired by nature and the natural materials…

The van makes its way slowly but surely through the city streets, braking gently when a car swerves into its lane. But its steering wheel is turning on its own, and there’s no one in the driver’s seat. The driverless technology from Nissan Motor Corp., which uses 14 cameras, nine radars, and six LiDar sensors installed in and around the vehicle, highlights Japan’s eagerness to catch up with players like Google’s Waymo that have taken the lead in the U.S. Japan, home to the world’s top automakers, has not kept pace with the global shift to autonomous driving, so far led by China and the U.S. But momentum is building. Waymo is going to land in Japan this year. Details ha…

Culture rot is when everything that once made a company good gradually starts to disappear—resulting in sinking morale, low productivity, lots of gossip, quiet quitting, and overall cynicism. And it can cause big problems for everyone. View the full article

The news landed quietly, tucked into a letter from MIT Sloan’s dean to colleagues: After 67 years, MIT Sloan Management Review is shutting down. Future insights, the letter explained, will live on via “digital newsletters, short-form video, social-first content, and podcasts.” This is a strategic inflection point for management thinking. It will have a major impact on the entire ecosystem through which serious management ideas travel from researchers to the people who run organizations. That ecosystem was already fragile. Winner-take-all dynamics MIT Sloan Management Review and similar journals were classic two-sided market propositions. They offered management…

You couldn’t have missed the news: Jony Ive and Sam Altman have teamed up, after OpenAI acquired Ive’s company io for $6.5 billion. The plan? For Ive, and a sizable team of ex-employees from Apple, it’s to create a series of hardware products for OpenAI. The news alone dropped shares of Apple by 1.8% as two of the most celebrated software and hardware development teams in the modern era have combined to realize the potential of artificial intelligence and change the way we live. Hopefully for the better. The first io product, according to The Wall Street Journal, arrives in 2026. It will be a small object “capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life.…

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…