Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

In the Cow Hollow neighborhood of San Francisco, at the corner of Union and Webster Streets, sits a small gift shop that many visitors might stroll past. The Andon Market doesn’t have the widest assortment of products, favoring the open spaces you’d be more likely to find in an Apple store. And on its opening day, the store’s manager neglected to schedule any workers to open the doors. That kind of mistake would embarrass most founders. Andon Market’s founder felt no shame. It found, the founder felt nothing at all. The store was conceived and launched by artificial intelligence. Welcome to the Bay Area’s first AI-run store, selling everything from artisanal choco…

When women don’t talk money, they lose it—Emma Grede says it’s time to break the silence. View the full article

“We’re all on the same page.” You’ve said it. Your team has said it. And somewhere between that meeting and getting the work done, things went wrong. Steve, the CEO of a fast-growth financial startup, thought his leadership team was perfectly aligned. After months of planning, they all agree on one goal: becoming AI-centric. But that illusion of alignment fell apart the moment Steve brought me in. Operations thought “AI-first” meant efficiency—eliminating as many jobs as possible. Marketing saw it as a cool slogan, not a real change in how they worked. Product Management thought AI should inform decisions, but not replace human judgment. The executive…

Lauren Sánchez Bezos is great at being happy, so much so she is encouraging other to pursue unapologetic happiness too. But, unsurprisingly, those without private jets aren’t buying it. Over the weekend, The New York Times published a profile on Jeff Bezos’s new wife, Sánchez Bezos, offering a glimpse into the powerful couple’s daily life. Their mornings, for example, start of at their $230 million compound in Florida, where the couple crafts a gratitude list before kicking off their day. The story also dissects the couple’s dynamic—regular exercise and leaning on each other for advice—a blueprint for reaching happiness while enjoying the perks of wealth. As the …

More than a thousand movie stars, writers, directors, and other Hollywood professionals announced their “unequivocal opposition” to the proposed Paramount merger with Warner Bros. Discovery in an open letter published Monday. A large swath of the movie industry, including Denis Villeneuve, Kristen Stewart, J.J. Abrams, and Joaquin Phoenix came out forcefully against the $111 billion deal that would consolidate two legacy studios into one, arguing that it further reduce jobs and movies in an already downsized Hollywood. “The result will be fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in th…

McDonald’s drinks menu is growing to soon include new flavors, dirty sodas, and eventually energy drinks. The fast food chain is adding new menu options later this year like a Red Bull Dragonberry Energizer, a Dirty Dr Pepper, and a Mango Pineapple Refresher, according to documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. McDonald’s confirmed to Fast Company that crafted sodas and new Refreshers will be introduced nationwide beginning next month. “Our fans’ love for McDonald’s beverages runs deep, from rallying for the return of Hi-C Orange Lavaburst to coining the iconic ‘Spicy Sprite,'” McDonald’s US tells Fast Company. “Next month, we…

A few years ago, I started noticing a pattern. Every time a major publication or LinkedIn thread took on AI in hiring, the framing was almost always the same: hype on one side, existential alarm on the other. The talent leaders I actually talk to have more nuanced opinions than that, but those narratives still shape the conversation in ways that hold organizations back from building the hiring processes their people and candidates actually deserve. After spending the last decade building AI-powered hiring tools and working alongside the talent teams implementing them, I’ve had a front-row seat to the gap between what people assume about AI in hiring and what actua…

A California company has recalled more than 3.1 million bottles of lubricating eye drops because it had not properly tested—and thus could not prove—whether the products were sterile. These products are sold under several names at major retailers across the country. The company, K.C. Pharmaceuticals, initiated the recall on March 3, 2026. I am a clinical pharmacologist and pharmacist who has assessed risks of poor-quality manufacturing practices and lax oversight for prescription drugs, eye drops, dietary supplements, and nutritional products in the United States for many years. This recall is very large, potentially affecting over a million people. Using nonsteri…

Artificial intelligence is rapidly learning to autonomously design and run biological experiments, but the systems intended to govern those capabilities are struggling to keep pace. AI company OpenAI and biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks announced in February 2026 that OpenAI’s flagship model GPT-5 had autonomously designed and run 36,000 biological experiments. It did this through a robotic cloud laboratory, a facility where automated equipment controlled remotely by computers carries out experiments. The AI model proposed study designs, and robots carried them out and fed the data back to the model for the next round. Humans set the goal, and the machines did much of …

The gravy train is picking up steam again at Hardee’s. The Southern-inspired fast food chain has been quietly reopening locations across the Southeast after an explosive legal battle with a franchisee had led to dozens of store closures late last year. Newly reopened Hardee’s restaurants in at least three states—Georgia, South Carolina, and Missouri—are being described in job listings as “now corporate owned,” according to recent ads posted on Indeed.com and SimplyHired. They share addresses with Hardee’s restaurants formerly operated by franchisee ARC Burger, whose 77 locations shuttered in December 2025. Some of the listings are marked as “urgent.” …

Issa Rae is a Hollywood success story. Her web series The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl launched her career in the early 2010s, leading to her HBO series Insecure and now her production company Hoorae Media. Through all her projects, Rae has been praised for her authentic portrayal of Black women’s lives—but at a recent panel, Rae said that the entertainment industry is no longer interested in celebrating diversity. Shifting tides in the film industry While speaking at TheWrap’s Creators x Hollywood Summit last Wednesday, April 8, Rae pointed out a troubling trend she’s seeing on the production side of Hollywood. “I’m seeing it. Just blatantly. Peopl…

Many tech observers initially believed the software engineers would become scarce in the face of AI. But that hasn’t turned out to be the case—in part due to the power of human ingenuity. “Software engineers are spending less time coding,” says Aneesh Raman, the chief economic opportunity officer at LinkedIn, who just published the book Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI. “But now they’re getting to build things in a way they couldn’t before. They’re going into conversations with clients and customers. Or they’re thinking about the ethical implications of what they build.” In their book, Raman and his co-author—LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky—argue that …

Chipotle, like almost every other fast casual restaurant, has been battling an ongoing period of increased inflation and lower consumer spending. Last year, the company saw what its CEO Scott Boatwright described to investors as a “broad-based pullback in frequency” of customer visits, especially among low- to middle-income customers and younger consumers, due to concerns about the economy. But the burrito chain has a master plan to address that, and it’s currently moving into its next phase: making earning rewards feel more like a game. The company’s fourth quarter report showed a revenue increase of 5.4% to $11.9 billion. But those gains were partially offset by a 1…

There is a persistent belief that food, fuel, and industrial uses compete for the same bushel. In practice, the opposite is increasingly true. Crops have always served multiple markets. What is changing is how intentionally we are designing agricultural and manufacturing systems to serve those markets together. In a previous article I wrote, I focused on how familiar crops like corn and soybeans are finding new life through new demand pathways and molecular innovation. What I see today goes a step further. The same acre is increasingly supporting food, industrial materials, energy applications, and emissions-reduction strategies simultaneously. That convergence is…

Roblox is updating its child protection features again, rolling out restricted Kids accounts for users ages 5 through 8 and Roblox Select accounts for users 9 through 15, both with parental controls and other age-based restrictions. Users will be required to go through an age verification process, generally based on live selfies or a government-issued ID—or be effectively restricted to content approved for the youngest users. Since January, age verification has also been required to use the platform’s chat features, with users under 18 generally restricted to chatting people relatively near to them in age. “We’ll be going through a transition period where we’ll…

With layoffs still dominating headlines, many job seekers assume the biggest challenge in today’s market is competition. But new research suggests another obstacle may be quietly draining applicants’ time and emotional energy: job postings that may not actually be hiring. Recent analysis of more than 175,000 job listings across industries found that roughly one in seven postings remain active for more than 30 days, even when companies may no longer be accepting candidates. Some listings remain online for months, continuing to collect applications long after hiring decisions have effectively been made. These roles are often referred to as “ghost jobs.” For job seek…

When you think of an operating system, you probably think of interfaces to open, workflows to follow, screens to move through. Work has always lived inside those boundaries. At Anthropic, that logic is starting to break. The company is reorganizing itself around a simple, destabilizing premise: work no longer needs a fixed system to run through. Anthropic says employees now rely on Claude, its flagship AI model, along with its products Code and Cowork, for most of their day-to-day work. The model is starting to function as an “internal operating system.” What once required navigating multiple systems, stitching together data, and coordinating across teams now begins w…

When Palantir CEO Alex Karp called for a suite of new recruitment programs to spot raw young talent and prioritize aptitude over experience, the team moved quickly. Within a week, the idea became an actual fellowship. “We did a speed run from April to June,” says Jordan Hirsch, a senior counselor at the defense tech contractor. “We designed the curriculum, recruited faculty, reviewed applications, brought on the fellows, and arranged housing.” The inaugural four-month Meritocracy Fellowship drew over 500 applicants for 22 salaried spots. Fellows completed intensive training, used Palantir’s software, and worked alongside full-time employees, and undertook a four-…

Entrepreneurship has always required resilience—nearly half of new businesses don’t make it past five years. But today, the nature of running a business is shifting. It’s no longer just about how hard the work is—it’s about how constant it feels. I see this tension every day from the conversations I have with entrepreneurs from around the world. For many business owners, the mental load of running a business often overwhelms the joy of building it. For the modern small business owner, financial pressure is no longer a seasonal wave. It’s a steady, background hum of rising costs and economic volatility. New research into the “emotional tax” of running a small business …

Mental healthcare has traditionally been based on a single relationship: patient and provider, one hour at a time on a weekly basis. The major flaw with that model is that mental health conditions rarely stay in their lane, something we commonly see at Equip. Depression intersects with chronic illness. OCD co-occurs with eating disorders. One provider, no matter how skilled they are, can only hold so much. This has to change. The evidence increasingly points toward team-based care as the model that actually moves the needle for how we can deliver mental health treatment. Integrated, multidisciplinary teams sharing information, aligning on treatment goals, and …