Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

From “fake it till you make it” to “stay in your lane,” SXSW festival goers reveal the worst career advice they’ve ever been given and why it stuck with them. View the full article

A shortage of air traffic controllers caused more flight disruptions Monday around the country as controllers braced for their first full missing paycheck during the federal government shutdown. The Federal Aviation Administration reported staffing-related delays on Monday afternoon averaging about 20 minutes at the airport in Dallas and about 40 minutes at both Newark Liberty International Airport and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. The delays in Austin followed a brief ground stop at the airport, meaning flights were held at their originating airports until the FAA lifted the stop around 4:15 p.m. local time. The FAA also warned of staffing issues at a facilit…

Before the age of technological distraction, we lived more in tune with our bodies. We spent more time outdoors where the sun regulated our circadian rhythms, which has been scientifically proven to reduce anxiety and depression. Without constant distraction, people sat in their boredom, which became drivers of artistic endeavors, creative ideas, and human connection. But how many of us can remember the last time we were truly bored?Drove without music, or sat in a coffee shop simply looking out the window? Today, our digital devices have optimized our lives to the point of exhaustion. In pursuit of a frictionless experience, technology has eradicated the natural …

Even if you use a calendar app to organize your life, the paper calendar is far from being obsolete. Write something down on a printed calendar, and it becomes a persistent reminder of important events. You don’t have to dig through any screens to write things down, and you don’t have to perform any complex sharing maneuvers to set up a communal calendar for family members or colleagues. But even the paper calendar could benefit from some digital enhancements. With a few minutes of setup, you can print a custom calendar to your exact specifications while also making it small enough to fit on a single sheet of paper. This tip originally appeared in the free Coo…

Financial markets are volatile. Consumer confidence is at its lowest level in five years. Economists say recession risks are rising. It all adds up to financial uncertainty for a lot of Americans. Roughly half of U.S. adults say that President The President’s trade policies will increase prices “a lot,” according to a recent poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center of Public Affairs Research. And about half of Americans are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the possibility of the U.S. economy going into a recession in the next few months. Matt Watson, CEO of Origin, a financial planning app, says it’s a period of uncertainty for everyone, including experts. “No one…

AI is radically changing the future of the workplace — from redefining jobs to fueling the rise of so-called “work slop.” Live on stage at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, Box CEO Aaron Levie, LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer Aneesh Raman, and Meta’s Head of Business AI Clara Shih share their insider perspectives on AI optimism, uncertainty, and navigating this unprecedented era. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian and recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response …

Ugly might be the new cute: Just look at Labubu, a “kind of ugly” plush toy that has sparked a buying frenzy across the world, especially in Asia, reported CNN. People from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur flocked to shopping malls on Friday to get the latest edition of the oh-so-collectible furry, while they quickly sold out online. Inspired by Nordic folklore, the toothy stuffed animal has high, pointy, rabbit-like ears, big round eyes, and a mischievous grin with serrated teeth. Made by Chinese toymaker Pop Mart, Labubus come in so-called “blind boxes” the size of a hand, which keep the contents a mystery until the box is opened. Pop Mart, which sells collectibles, has …

When looking for an apartment in San Francisco today, artificial intelligence can seem inescapable; and that’s not just because every rental building seems to have an AI bot answering calls. In San Francisco, the technology’s ascendency—and the subsequent skyrocketing job growth— has helped make the apartment market one of the tightest in the nation, with the fastest growing rent in the U.S. Lisa McCarrel, Managing Partner of Move Bay Area, a relocation and rental housing service, has seen the rental market become frenzied in recent months due in part to the increase in AI and AI-adjacent jobs. With units harder to come by, she’s seen some potential tenants offer…

Changing prices for what the market will bear has long been a staple of pricing for everything from airplane seats to a gallon of gas to hotel rooms. Indeed, an entire field of so-called “dynamic pricing” exists to figure out how to extract the most profit from the most willing customers has now emerged. But we’re at an inflection point now in which such practices are going from the exception, and for relatively few items, to the norm. The regulatory framework is at the moment right in the midst of figuring out what the guardrails will be. The Intermediary Industrial Complex Remember when a gallon of milk cost the same for everyone who walked into the store? That …

Move over, figure skating and ice hockey: There’s a new Olympic sport taking to the slopes in Milano Cortina. The sport—called ski mountaineering, or, colloquially, “skimo”—is the first entirely new sport at the Winter Olympics since 2002. As its name suggests, skimo combines elements of both skiing and mountaineering, requiring competitors to climb their way up a mountain slope before descending back down. It’s a more rugged take on the winter sport genre that involves rougher terrain than a cross-country or alpine ski course, requires athletes to change their own gear mid-race, and balances both technical skill and endurance. A total of 36 athletes will be comp…

Have you seen larger-than-life depictions of your friends lately? They might have been sucked into the latest social trend: creating AI-generated caricatures. The trend itself is simple. Users input a common prompt: “Create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me,” and upload a photo of themself, and, voila! ChatGPT (or any AI-image platform) spits out an over-the-top, cartoon-style image of you, your job, and anything else it’s learned about you. This ability is predicated on a robust ChatGPT (or other AI) chat history. Those who don’t have a close, personal relationship with the AI might need to give additional information to get a mo…

It’s Friday afternoon, and a potential client just emailed, asking about your services. You scramble to find your pricing. (Where did you save that document?) You dig through old emails for a proposal you sent six months ago that you could adapt. You piece something together and curse your past self for not being more organized. This scenario plays out constantly for solopreneurs. Most chalk it up to the chaos of running a business alone. But constantly scrambling will start to cost you as your business grows—and eventually hold you back. Most solopreneurs think that “operations” is something only real companies need: businesses with employees, office managers, a…

Substack and Patreon are vying to become creators’ primary revenue stream. For most influencers, payouts from platforms like Meta or Google aren’t enough to build a sustainable career. Rather than spending their days hawking products, many creators are turning to direct fan support, and two companies dominate that space: Patreon and Substack. Patreon’s latest move targets streamers. Its native livestreaming feature, currently in demo and set for a broad rollout this summer, could attract gamers and broadcasters alike. But Substack beat them to it, launching a similar live video tool just three months earlier. As the two platforms expand their offerings, the rivalr…

As press releases go, it was a mic drop moment. On September 4, OpenAI announced that it was coming after LinkedIn. And it was coming after job search specifically. For those unfamiliar with the story, it was reported across multiple sources that not content with torpedoing Google, education, interpersonal relationships, and entire industries such as psychiatry or management consultancy (both smugly considered untouchable until about 15 minutes ago), OpenAI is now coming after the age-old industry of human resources. Specifically, the $300 billion company wants to streamline the process of hiring by automatically matching candidates to roles via context alone,…

When we talk about decarbonizing industries, footwear doesn’t often steal the spotlight. Yet behind every pair of sneakers or boots is a complex web of supply chains, raw materials, energy consumption, and logistics. While our shoes leave physical footprints, they also leave behind a much larger, often invisible carbon and waste footprint. The footwear industry is estimated to be responsible for hundreds of millions of metric tons of CO₂e emissions each year—that’s more than the emissions of some entire countries. And it’s a sector undergoing massive transformation, fueled by a perfect storm of shifting regulation, growing consumer demand for transparency, and the urgen…

Lawyers for social media companies will be working overtime in the coming weeks as several major trials get underway addressing the potential harms to children caused by popular sites and apps. At the same time, efforts to deflect at least one major future case have fallen short, increasing pressure on tech giants to agree to an independent assessment of how they protect teen users. The convergence of these developments creates a potential perfect storm for the industry, one that could result in both financial damages and changes to the algorithms that encourage users to keep scrolling for longer and longer periods of time. Much of the focus is on a bellwether tri…

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit with a mission to build safe artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity. For a while, that structure made sense. But in 2019, the company made a discovery that changed everything: scaling up AI models—with more data, compute, and parameters—led to predictably stronger results. The insight was formalized in a 2020 paper titled “Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models,” and it reshaped OpenAI’s trajectory. That same year, the company released GPT-3, a model 100 times larger than GPT-2. Microsoft invested. Venture capitalists piled in. Inside the company, employees began to see Sam Altman as the one who could turn a nonp…

The feeling of “languishing” is likely relatable for many workers—even if they don’t quite have that exact language for it. And new research shows it’s not many workers who feel this way. It’s most. “What gets a little confused in people’s minds is that they assume languishing is almost like distress and mental illness,” says Oscar Ybarra, business professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “But it’s more like: I’m just kind of stuck. I’m not really engaged. I don’t know where I’m going.” Ybarra wanted to capture the malaise that employees often experience in the workplace, which doesn’t always rise to the level of mental illness. When he first polled wo…

In Melinda French Gates’s new book, The Next Day, she illuminates the importance of knowing “the story that you are writing for yourself.” After turning 60, leaving The Gates Foundation, and beginning a new chapter in her philanthropy, I was curious about the story that she is authoring. What are French Gates’s new dreams? “My new dreams are to lift women up generationally,” she says. “So, the world is different when my granddaughters enter the workforce. There are barriers that we need to break down, things about women’s health that we should be exploring, and opportunities that are more limited for women. I would love for many of those things to be easier for my grand…

Netflix’s decision to quietly remove the ability to cast content from its mobile apps to smart TVs and streaming devices has caused a bit of an uproar on social media. The complaints are the usual ones you see when a company removes a feature. Some blame greed. Some are upset their method of end-running subscription sharing has been shut down. Some just jump on the opportunity to complain about Netflix. But frequent travelers could have a legitimate grievance about the company’s decision to largely end casting. The change was enacted without warning and without fanfare in November, with some of the earliest complaints from users coming on November 10. Netflix has since …

Not driving your car directly into a body of water may sound like common sense—but hey, if Elon Musk says it’s safe, who are we to disagree? A Tesla Cybertruck driver learned the hard way that Musk’s words aren’t gospel when he intentionally drove his car into Grapevine Lake in North Texas on Monday evening, employing the vehicle’s “Wade Mode,” which is intended for use in water up to 32 inches deep. Videos shared on social media show the vehicle moving through the shallow section of the lake, only for his Cybertruck to shut down when he got to deeper waters, leaving the vehicle stranded. In the aftermath, social media users are pointing to posts by Elon Musk that…

An environment conference opened in Nepal on Friday to discuss global climate change, including the impact on the highest Himalayan peaks where snow and ice are melting. The three-day conference in Kathmandu titled, “Climate Change, Mountains and the Future of Humanity,” is expected to include discussions of critical climate issues. “From the lap of Sagarmatha (Everest), the world’s highest peak, we send this message loud and clear that to protect the mountains is to protect the planet. To protect the mountains is to protect our seas. To protect the mountains is to protect humanity itself,” Nepal Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli told participants at the opening meeting.…

I recently noticed a paradox among a team of developers. With AI, engineers started writing code faster and getting answers in seconds, yet they also reported feeling more exhausted than before. AI hasn’t actually reduced the amount of work that needs to be done. Instead, it has fundamentally changed its nature. We can now run multiple tasks in parallel and perceive this as productivity. Up to a point, it is. But eventually, managing tools and constantly switching between them becomes more draining than performing the original tasks themselves. In some cases, it even slows down the process of finding a solution. I’ve been managing developer teams for over 15 years…

For the first time that I can remember, this year I was completely enthralled by the Winter Olympics. In fact, I don’t think I’d ever watched the Winter Games before, but it really caught my attention this go-round. One event that really stood out for me was the skeleton. For the uninitiated (like I was just a month ago), the skeleton is a slide-based sport where athletes lie face down, headfirst, on a small slide going 80 mph down an icy, declining slope. On the surface, it doesn’t look like it requires much from the athlete but to lie down and hang on for dear life until crossing the finish line. But upon further inspection, the sport is far more intricate, requirin…