Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

OpenAI on Thursday released its answer to Google’s impressive Gemini 3 Pro model–GPT-5.2—and by the looks of some head-to-head benchmark test scores, it looks like a winner. The new model took the highest score on a number of benchmark tests covering coding, math, science, tool use, and vision. (Benchmarks should, of course, be combined with real-world use to tell the whole story. But still . . .) OpenAI says GPT-5.2, which is a reasoning model, achieved expert-level performance scores on its own GDPval benchmark, which evaluates performance on 44 real professional tasks including things like spreadsheet creation, document drafting, presentation building, and more. GPT-…

In planning meetings, in brainstorms, in the messy moments when decisions need to be made before all the information is in, AI is my copilot. But not in the “cute robot helper” way. I treat it like my sharpest strategist, fastest researcher, and most unflinching truth-teller. As the CEO of Quantious, a future-forward marketing agency that works with tech companies, my job is to stay fast, smart, and endlessly curious; not just for myself, but for my clients. Having executive-level AI by my side is how I operate at scale without sacrificing strategy or soul. Forget about the “hype” of AI. Let’s talk about what it really takes to work smarter, experiment faster, and free …

For all the advances in data science, artificial intelligence, and behavioral assessments, one hiring ritual remains stubbornly unchanged: the job interview, where candidates are still subjected to awkward brainteasers about golf balls in airplanes, forced to disclose their “biggest weaknesses” to amateur psychologists, asked whether they would keep working after winning the lottery, or made to present to silent panels who seem less interested in evidence of competence than in observing how gracefully applicants endure a mildly humiliating social experiment. Despite decades of research showing that traditional interviews are only moderately reliable predictors of perform…

New Tesla car sales plunged across Europe in April even as sales of other electric vehicle brands soared, in part due to backlash against CEO Elon Musk’s support for Europe’s far-right politics, as well as growing competition from both European and Chinese EV carmakers, according to Reuters. Last month, Tesla’s new car sales in the U.K. and Germany tanked to their lowest in over two years, falling 62% and 46% year on year, respectively, even as demand in both countries rose for EVs. And in Spain, there was more bad news for Tesla, with new sales falling 36% in April 2025 compared with the the same month a year earlier, according to data from ANFAC, the Spanish Ass…

Bringing home the Baconator is not as easy as it used to be, and it’s about to get even harder in cities around the country. Fast food giant Wendy’s is continuing its push to close hundreds of locations as it seeks to stabilize profits and shed underperforming restaurants. Nearly six months after the burger chain first announced the plan on an investor call, its U.S. footprint is decidedly smaller, with multiple states seeing net store declines in the double digits, according to a review of Wendy’s store locator tool. As of Friday, the tool showed 5,675 locations in the United States. That’s roughly 200 fewer locations than what it showed at the end of Sep…

Noodles & Company, the fast-casual chain known for serving an array of noodle-based dishes, will shutter up to 21 restaurants. The brand, founded in Denver, Colorado in 1995, has already closed at least nine locations over the past year. In a conference call last week, chief financial officer Michael Hynes said, “We expect to close 13 to 17 company-owned and four franchise restaurants in 2025.” The most recent count is up from a previous estimate of 12 to 15 company-owned closures. Noodles & Company currently has 380 company-owned restaurants and 89 franchised locations in 31 states. According to the brand’s website, the impending closures are due to higher f…

Grab your boots and cowboy hats. The 60th Academy of Country Music Awards will have you two-stepping in your living room tonight (Thursday, May 8). This big anniversary show is sure to be an old-fashioned good time. Here’s everything you need to know about this celebration of country music, including how to tune in. A brief history of the Academy of Country Music and the ACM Awards Believe it or not, the Academy was founded in Los Angeles, California: A group of country music lovers led by Tommy Wiggins, Eddie Miller, and Mickey and Chris Christensen founded the organization in 1964. Their goal was to promote country music and artists, such as Merle Haggard, …

A startup called Adapt is betting that it can be an AI hub connecting other software tools to help answer questions and get things done. When users pose questions or ask for help with a business task, Adapt can answer based on information from the web and business data to which it’s been given access, similar to other AI tools. But it can also automatically launch a virtual machine, essentially a computer in the cloud from which it can connect to a wide range of internet-based software, pull information from databases, and craft custom code to analyze data and create charts and visualizations. It’s an approach that cofounder and CEO Jim Benton says lets users with mi…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. While national active housing inventory for sale at the end of March 2025 was still 20% below pre-pandemic March 2019 levels, on a year-over-year basis national active listings are up 29% between March 2024 and March 2025. This indicates that homebuyers have gained some leverage in many parts of the country over the past year. One of the biggest year-over-year increases is happening in California—where active inventory for sale is up 50% year-over-year. Despite the 50% year-over-year jump in active California housing inventory for sale—in…

Uber is facing internal staff unrest as it attempts to implement a three-day-per-week return to office (RTO) mandate and stricter sabbatical eligibility. An all-hands meeting late last month descended into acrimony as staff flooded the online meeting chat with queries about why the mandate was being enacted. “How is five years of service not a tenured employee? Especially when burnout is rampant in the org,” read one message that was reviewed by CNBC. Following the meeting, Nikki Krishnamurthy, Uber’s chief people officer, issued a memo saying staff had “crossed an acceptable line” during the call. It’s unclear if there has been any disciplinary action to date. …

Thomas Edison said that success is “1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” But what if his famous formula is missing a key ingredient? What if success demands not just creativity and perseverance, but a third, much less discussed skill? Modern neuroscience suggests it does. Research shows mastering this often overlooked ability will not only upgrade your brain, but make it much more likely you’ll achieve your goals (with less perspiration along the way). The secret ingredient for success What is this magic ingredient? Some scientists call it a strategic mindset. Others term it metacognition. Whatever label you go with, the idea is straightforwar…

Fans of Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant will be disappointed to learn that the beloved restaurant and pub chain has abruptly closed all of its locations across multiple states. Here’s why and what you need to know about Iron Hill Brewery’s closure. What’s happened? Yesterday (Thursday, September 25), Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant made several announcements. Effective immediately, it was closing the doors to all its locations, the company revealed. Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant was founded nearly 30 years ago. Its first location opened in Newark, Delaware, in 1996. Since then, it had expanded to multiple states along the country’s eastern coast, in…

Humans are a unique species, because of our collective knowledge of our own mortality. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the average life expectancy for males in the United States is 75.8 years. That means entertainer extraordinaire Dick Van Dyke is defying statistics by turning 100 years old this Saturday, December 13. As he reaches this milestone birthday, let’s take a look back at his impressive career, what he credits his longevity to, and how he plans to celebrate. We’ll also cover how you can get in on the action and celebrate the Mary Poppins actor. A brief Dick Van Dyke biography Richard Wayne Van Dyke was born in West P…

As the arms race in the artificial intelligence world ramps up, Big Tech companies are rushing to become your default AI source. Meta, last week, launched the Meta AI app to challenge ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. It’s a system that measures up feature-wise with its competition and some might argue it improves on some aspects. But with Meta’s long history of privacy problems, it’s reawakening some old concerns about the company. The tool offers “personalized” answer and advice as well as a social network for people to share their AI conversations and images. But if you’re looking to scrub the system’s memory of you, that’s a bit more challenging. And our early tests s…

Social media users have been having a field day with Waymo’s autonomous vehicles, sharing videos that poke fun at the driverless cars getting stuck, acting unpredictably, or simply navigating the world a little too awkwardly. The latest wave of posts follows Waymo’s recent expansion into Austin, where users are already documenting bizarre and frustrating experiences with the service. TikTok user Becky Levin Navarro posted a video on April 20 claiming a Waymo car trapped her and her fellow passengers on the side of a highway after heading in the wrong direction. “This is the most insane thing. We’re in a Waymo, here, under Mopac,” she said. “It was going the wrong …

The Federal Communications Commission on Monday said it would ban new foreign-made drones, a move that will keep new Chinese-made drones such as those from DJI and Autel out of the U.S. market. The announcement came a year after Congress passed a defense bill that raised national security concerns about Chinese-made drones, which have become a dominant player in the U.S., widely used in farming, mapping, law enforcement,ss and filmmaking. The bill called for stopping the two Chinese companies from selling new drones in the U.S. if a review found they posed a risk to American national security. The deadline for the review was Dec. 23. The FCC said Monday the re…

One of the best performing stocks on the market yesterday was Webull Corporation (Nasdaq: BULL), which saw its shares surge nearly 375% in a single trading session to end the day at $62.90. The stock price surge in BULL occurred on its second trading day after the stock-trading platform merged with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to go public. But in premarket trading today, BULL shares are down a significant amount—about 15% as of the time of this writing. Here’s what to know about the stock and what could be next for Webull shares. What is Webull? Webull Corporation is the owner of the Webull trading platform. The online platform allows users to …

Every January, we’re bombarded with resolutions rooted in consumption—buy this, try that, subscribe to something new. For Gen Z, this consumer-first vision of the New Year feels outdated and hollow. Instead, Gen Z is turning to peers for a community-driven “soft start” to the year ahead. Popularized on TikTok, January resets offer a modern alternative to the outdated idea of resolutions. This shift from consumer-driven goals to community-supported resets is especially visible in how Gen Z is approaching health and wellness in 2026. It’s not surprising either. Earlier in 2025, millions of young people took to social media to publicly document their quit journeys using #Q…

The silhouette could not change. This was the main parameter guiding the designers and engineers at KitchenAid as they set out to upgrade one of the brand’s hero product, the stand mixer. Used by amateur and professional bakers for more than 70 years, the classic stand mixer is a staple of the kitchen appliance world, and much of its staying power has to do with the consistency of the product, which has changed remarkably little in all that time. Most notably, the mixer’s bowl-hugging form factor has defined it since the start. So when the company decided to integrate some new features and functions into an updated version of the mixer—the Artisan Plus Stand Mixer…

Laying people off takes its toll. “Going back 25 years plus ago, I can still remember every situation that I had to do it in,” says Robert Kovach, a work psychologist and former corporate executive. The experience sticks with you, he says. Because it’s not just about “operational stress: Have I filled out the forms? Made the calls?” It’s also filled with “moral stress,” he adds. “Even when the decision is necessary, it can feel like a violation of your own personal values.” People laying off their coworkers often feel a clash between their responsibility to their company and their responsibility to be a good person to the people they’re laying off—parti…

Pricing is one of the most powerful growth levers a business has, yet it is still one of the most overlooked. While teams spend months refining product and brand, pricing decisions are too often rushed, emotionally charged, or guided by instinct rather than insight. Under the pressure of rising costs and competitive pressures, many leadership teams resort to the fastest fix: promotions to meet short-term targets or price increases to plug a margin leak. The companies that consistently outperform take a different approach. They treat pricing as a strategic, evidence-led discipline. They ground pricing in how customers perceive value and make decisions to deliver gr…

The past few days in the stock market have been so wild—a plunge on Monday, a sharp pivot upward on Tuesday, a rise with lots of oscillations on Wednesday—that a record set by the Dow Jones Industrial Average on last week’s final day of trading has been largely overlooked. That’s unfortunate, because there’s a lot to be learned from that record about how financial markets work. I’m referring to the record loss inflicted on the Dow last Thursday by the three-digit share price drop of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH), the large healthcare and insurance company. (Thursday was the last day of trading last week because the market was closed for Good Friday.) That price d…

Elite education has spent decades competing on curriculum, faculty, and brand. Those signals still carry weight. But for founders, executives, and investors, the real question is no longer “Where did you study?” but “Who now takes your call—and why?” When high‑quality content is everywhere, the premium is shifting from information to access. What matters is the environment around the learning: who is in the room, how quickly trust forms, and what happens when people close their laptops and start talking about real decisions. That has become clear in my work advising GIOYA HEI, an institution that deliberately combines higher education with a curated leadership and…