Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

There’s a surprising amount of science in a bag of potato chips. Researchers have spent decades developing potatoes for chip makers that can grow in all kinds of climates, avoid diseases and pests, sit in storage for months and still deliver a satisfying crunch. They’ve also kept an eye on consumer trends; a shift to snack-size portions has increased the demand for smaller chipping potatoes, for example. “The potato industry is dynamic,” said David Douches, a Michigan State University professor who leads the school’s Potato Breeding and Genetics Program. “The needs change, the costs, the pressures that they have, and the markets change. So we have to adapt to that with …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Zillow economists just published their updated 12-month forecast, projecting that U.S. home prices—as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index—will shift +0.0% between March 2026 and March 2027. That’s a mild downward revision from its 12-month forecast published last month (+0.5%). U.S. home prices, as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index, are currently up +0.8% year-over-year. Zillow’s latest 12-month outlook (+0.0%) expects national home prices to remain near that subdued pace. As long as national home price growth remains below U.S. income …

For decades, brands functioned primarily as symbols. A logo, a name, a set of visual and verbal signals designed to convey trust, recognition, and meaning. Brand architecture emerged to organize those symbols. Companies needed systems to structure product portfolios and manage sub-brands. These systems ensured that names, identities, and messages worked together coherently across markets and channels. Frameworks were built for a world in which brands communicated. AI is changing that world fundamentally. When a brand is embodied in an AI agent or a conversational interface, it no longer simply represents a company. It interacts with people directly. It answers que…

When Liza Moiseeva first heard that Allbirds was pivoting to AI, she thought it was satire. “It belongs in an Onion article,” says Moiseeva, chief marketing officer at Commons, an app that helps people shop more sustainably, in part by rating brands. Moiseeva has worked in sustainability for about 15 years, and she’s been an Allbirds customer for more than a decade. Her family owns 10 pairs of the sneaker that once ruled Silicon Valley streets—and that had been a leader in sustainable fashion. Now, Allbirds is stepping away from its footwear business, pivoting instead to AI compute infrastructure and rebranding as “NewBird AI.” (The Allbirds brand and footwea…

John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, has been named the new CEO of Apple, the company announced. In a letter posted on the company’s website, current CEO Tim Cook wrote that he will leave his role in September and become executive chairman. He described Ternus as “a brilliant engineer and thinker who has spent the past 25 years building the Apple products our users love so much, obsessed with every detail, focused on every possible way we can make something better, bolder, more beautiful, and more meaningful. He is the perfect person for the job.” Ternus has been at Apple for 24 years, and led the hardware engineering division since 2013. …

Changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) begin today in Florida. Program recipients can no longer use their SNAP benefits to purchase soda, energy drinks, candy, and prepared desserts. This is part of a broader effort by the The President administration to give states more control over the public assistance program. Through a federal waiver process, states can now submit a waiver proposal to limit which foods and drinks qualify for SNAP purchases. Twenty-two states have already applied for waivers and received federal approval. Here’s what you need to know. Florida becomes the 10th state to implement such restrictions An estimated…

When building relationships, at work and beyond, most people search for deep commonalities. That may be wrong. It is undeniably true that interpersonal chemistry exists between people who are similar in important ways, particularly in values, which represent our most treasured ideas about what is good in the world. But if we limit ourselves to relationships with others who share our core values, we cut ourselves off from most of humankind, the vast majority of whom are pursuing good values, even if those values do not match our own. There are real benefits to connecting with others whose worldview differs from our own, particularly in professional life. When we re…

After years of complaints, some customers who were overcharged for an event by Ticketmaster might finally get some of their money back. On April 20, D.C. Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb announced that Live Nation, Ticketmaster’s parent company, will pay $9.9 million in a settlement to resolve his district’s allegations that it “misled customers about ticket prices, charged deceptive fees, and used illegal pressure tactics to get fans to buy tickets for a decade.” A total of $8.9 million is expected to be returned to D.C.-based Live Nation customers in the coming months. This settlement is the result of a months-long consumer protection investigation conducted by…

Last year at SXSW, I got on stage with a colleague from Tangent, a London-based digital design agency, to ask a simple question: What if every time you checked your phone, a visible puff of smoke rose into the air? While we can’t immediately see the environmental impact of our digital lives, it is very real. Over the past two decades, the digital ecosystem has become society’s invisible infrastructure. More than 60% of the global population is now online. Each user generates 229 kilograms of carbon dioxide, amounting to almost 4% of average per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Most of us don’t know or even consider the hidden cost of our increasingly digitized world. …

One of the weirdest brand collaborations of 2026 just dropped: The non-profit organization StoryCorps is teaming up with Prego—yes, the pasta sauce brand—on a device shaped like a pasta sauce lid that will record your family’s dinner conversations. The device is part of a limited-time offering called the Connection Keeper Bundle, which launches on April 27 for $20. It includes some Prego sauce, a “Connection Keeper” recording device and instruction manual, and a pack of conversation prompt cards to spark discussion. StoryCorps, which is dedicated to recording the stories of Americans “from all backgrounds and beliefs,” is billing the Connection Keeper as a “simpl…

At a recent Stanford Graduate School of Business panel, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and California Congressman Ro Khanna discussed some burning topics about artificial intelligence—from innovation and competition to adoption and skepticism. While AI-related job panic has infiltrated different industries, Huang doubled down on his belief that the technology will do more good than harm to the job market. “The narratives of AI destroying jobs is not going to help America,” Huang said. “First of all, it’s just false.” Huang offered the example that the most popular and successful software engineers at Nvidia—the $5 trillion company where agentic AI has been integrated within…

Five years after its California debut, Gwyneth Paltrow’s fast-casual concept, Goop Kitchen, is officially expanding to its second state. The delivery-focused chain plans to open seven new restaurants in New York by the end of 2026, beginning in Midtown West. New York is the state where Goop’s consumer brand awareness is strongest, according to the Academy Award-winning actress. And while larger fast-casual rivals like Sweetgreen and Chipotle Mexican Grill have lately struggled to lure diners, Paltrow tells Fast Company that Goop Kitchen is “pretty much in line with most other fast-casual restaurants in terms of what they charge. And I would argue that our ingredients …

Palantir is undoubtedly controversial. Many view the data and software company as a beacon of technological progress, with some even sporting a photo the company’s CEO on their t-shirts. Others see it as the pinnacle of all modern evil, primarily due to its involvement with the U.S. military and the The President administration’s anti-immigration initiatives. Now thanks to a viral social media post, the debate is once again in the spotlight. On Sunday, Palantir’s X account posted a lengthy summarization of the key points argued in The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, a book published last year by Palantir CEO Alex K…

When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, the reaction was immediate and visceral: this works. For the first time, millions of people experienced AI not as a distant promise, but as something useful, intuitive, and even with its flaws, astonishingly capable. That instinct was correct. The conclusion that followed was not. Because what works brilliantly for an individual at a keyboard has proven surprisingly ineffective inside an organization. Two years later, after billions in investment, countless pilots, and an endless stream of “copilots,” a different reality is emerging: generative AI is exceptional at producing language. But companies do not run on language: …

The annual Lyrid meteor shower is back, reaching its peak on Tuesday evening and at predawn on Wednesday. On average, 10 to 20 meteors are produced per hour during a Lyrid shower. But, in some rare occasions “outbursts” can occur, with up to 100 meteors produced in an hour. According to the American Meteor Society, Lyrids will be mostly visible in the Northern hemisphere at dawn, although limited availability will also be available to those in the Southern Hemisphere. The Lyrid shower is among the oldest recorded meteor showers, dating back as far as 2,700 years. The meteor shower is visible when Earth travels through the path of Comet Thatcher, rendering a t…

Grocery stores waste around four million tons of food in the U.S. each year—mostly fresh food, since it’s hard for store managers to know exactly how many cartons of strawberries or pounds of beef to keep in stock to meet demand. Until fairly recently, most of that planning happened manually. But AI tools from the startup Afresh are helping stores cut waste by as much as 25%. The company announced $34 million in new funding today to expand, co-led by Just Climate and High Sage Ventures. A decade ago, when Afresh cofounders Matt Schwartz and Nathan Fenner were MBA students at Stanford and looked at the challenge of food waste, they started visiting grocery stores a…

The last time I set foot in this historic Chicago mansion built in the heart of Michigan Avenue, I’d been served one less-than-generous slice of lukewarm prime rib. This is back when it was a Lawry’s steakhouse. I remember white tablecloths, silver serving trays, one decent staircase, and just the stodgiest of old rooms that felt less like I was in the Gilded Age than at a funeral parlor. Now, when I step inside the lobby, a large wooden door slides open in front of me. I enter a room with a ringing telephone. And when I pick it up, my journey begins . . . With the help of the architecture firm Rockwell Group and the design firm Pentagram, the McCormick mansion has bee…

Nearly two out of three American adults have used an AI-powered search tool in the past six months. But here’s the stat that should keep every product builder up at night: only 15% say they trust the results “a lot.” That gap between adoption and trust is the defining challenge for the next era of AI search. Consumers are showing up, but they are questioning the results. As product builders, we have to ask ourselves an uncomfortable question: Are we building experiences that earn and deserve consumer trust? The Walled Garden Problem Yelp partnered with Morning Consult to survey more than 2,200 U.S. adults on how they use and perceive AI-powered search. The fin…

I have been thinking about a question that nobody in enterprise software seems to want to sit with: why can the most advanced AI models in the world solve Olympiad-level mathematics but fail to reliably extract a total from an invoice? This is not an academic exercise for me. I have been building automation software for twenty years. My company has processed billions of documents for some of the largest enterprises in the world. Yes, I have a stake in this answer. But twenty years of watching models work on real enterprise data, not benchmarks, gives you a different view than turning a model in a lab. And when those real-world models cannot get the simple stuff right,…

Conflict, while uncomfortable, is a fact of life. However, few of us deal with it well–either we avoid it until it swells into resentment, or it explodes creating damage we often fail to repair. In her new book, Anchored, Aligned and Accountable: A Framework For Transcending B*llshit and Transforming Our Lives and Work, (foreword by Brené Brown) leadership coach Aiko Bethea lays out a framework for transforming conflict into personal growth. For Fast Company, Brené Brown sat down with Aiko Bethea to discuss the cornerstones of the framework and how applying it can change our lives. Brené Brown: Your Anchored, Aligned and Accountable Framework, has completely shi…

How do you build products that work? We have decades of accumulated science of learning research, but it can be hard to get that research into the hands of classroom teachers. I met with Sandra Liu Huang, Learning Commons’ president, to discuss building the infrastructure to bring learning science into product development and empower educators with better tools. We talked about making research more usable for developers and educators, why shared infrastructure matters, and how we can ensure learning science actually reaches classrooms. Auditi: Something I have long been fascinated by is the gap between established learning science and what reaches teachers and stu…

Walk into any office and you’ll hear it. “She’s so nurturing — she’d be great leading the wellness committee.” “Don’t worry, the guys will handle the heavy lifting on this pitch.” “You look amazing today!” These statements arrive warmly, often from people who genuinely mean well. That’s exactly what makes benevolent sexism one of the most insidious and under-addressed forces in modern workplaces. Unlike overt harassment, benevolent sexism doesn’t announce itself. It hides behind chivalry, compliments, and cultural tradition. It flatters women while quietly limiting them, wraps restriction in a ribbon and calls it care. And for that reason, it tends to go unchallenged …

These days, many founders feel pressure to raise tremendous amounts of venture capital. But it wasn’t always like this. Most people are surprised to learn that four of the most valuable companies in the world barely raised any VC funding at all by today’s standards. Apple is believed to have raised less than $1 million before its IPO. Amazon raised about $8 million. Microsoft raised about $1 million. Google raised $25 million. Add it all up, and it’s less than $35 million in total VC funding. Granted, that’s about $74 million in today’s dollars, but it’s still a relatively small investment that led to four companies that are worth around $14 trillion today. Before billi…