Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

As summer nears and states like Texas are already facing extreme heat, tariffs are about to make cooling your home a lot more expensive—and experts don’t expect prices to come down any time soon. The U.S. heating and cooling industry is highly dependent on overseas manufacturers, both for fully assembled units like air conditioners, heat pumps, and HVACs, and for the component parts used to build them. According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, the U.S. imported more than $15 billion in AC units last year, mainly from Mexico and China. But according to Aydin Mehr, general manager of the HVAC contractor UniColorado, overseas manufacturers essentially hal…

There’s trouble in AI-generated paradise. TikTok’s most popular AI-generated series “Fruit Love Island” has millions of followers, but that may not be enough to save it from video takedowns and shifting online attitudes toward AI. “Fruit Love Island” is exactly what the title implies: a one-to-one recreation of the popular dating show Love Island, rendered with AI and featuring humanoid fruit as contestants. When hot new bombshells enter this villa, they’re anthropomorphic cherries, bananas, pineapples, and more. “Welcome to Fruit Love Island, where eight single fruits are about to flirt, fight, and trust—things get messy fast,” begins the first episode. …

Be careful what you like on social media – you never know when a billionaire’s lawyers might be going over your likes with a fine-toothed comb. Elon Musk’s lawyers requested that a judge with a history of presiding over his legal battles step aside this week. The reason? A post she liked on LinkedIn. In a motion for recusal, Musk’s legal team requested that Delaware Chancery Court Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick remove herself from a pair of Tesla lawsuits to “avoid an appearance of bias.” The post in question celebrated a verdict in a San Francisco federal court that found Musk defrauded Twitter investors in the chaotic days before he bought the social network. In the f…

Shares opened mixed in Europe on Tuesday after slipping in Asia as some regional markets wrapped up trading for the year. Crude oil prices edged higher and gold and silver resumed their ascent. U.S. futures were flat. In Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi rang out the final session for 2025 in a traditional year-end ceremony. “By realizing a Japanese economy that earns the trust of investors around the world, we will create a virtuous cycle in which global capital flows into Japan,” Takaichi said. The benchmark Nikkei 225 shed 0.4% to 50,339.48, its first year-end close above 50,000. It ended 2025 up nearly 25%. With just two trading days left before the y…

Consumer products is perhaps one of the broadest, most competitive arenas for marketers, always facing the constant question: “Why should anyone care or pay attention?” These Brands That Matter honorees are answering that question. Brawny To launch its new three-ply paper towels, the brand decided to breathe new life into its lumberjack mascot, to help the Brawny Man stand out on store shelves and in culture. The brand puts its new heartthrob mascot into a partnership with Bachelor Nation‘s Rachael Kirkconnell to tap into a real-life messy moment—her high-profile breakup—and flip it into a story of strength and humor. In a video posted to TikTok and Instagram, Rachael r…

Quickfire question: Who, in a business, should be responsible for AI? Most of us would assume the tech side of an organization should hold the bag: the CTO, CIO, CDO, CMO or perhaps even a new chief AI officer. And while this direction certainly made sense in the early wave of AI adoption—when it was still a mere tool—the rise of agentic AI (read: autonomous, intelligent agents that behave less like gadgets and more like colleagues) forces us to rethink our assumptions. Which means we should be asking whether AI should be treated as a technology or as a member of the team. And if it’s the latter, is HR actually the role best positioned to oversee it? WHY HR IS RE-EMERG…

Restaurant delivery in New York is not like restaurant delivery in any other part of the country. The city has a long history with food delivery thanks to its dense population and copious restaurants (roughly 25,000 at last count). It even had its own delivery brand, Seamless, launched over a quarter-century ago as SeamlessWeb in the city. Now, after a brief fall from public view, Seamless is back in New York. Seamless has operated under the thumb of a much larger brand for years. It merged with Grubhub in 2013, but retained its own branding in the biggest and arguably most important delivery market in the country. But when Grubhub got a new, foreign owner in 2020—Ams…

In December 2025, the biggest battery maker in the world, CATL, started what it calls the world’s first large-scale deployment of robots in its Luoyang, China factory. Last week, the State Grid Corporation of China began its $1 billion 2026 plan to deploy a humanoid army to maintain its grid autonomously. And just a few days ago, at the other side of the East China Sea, Japan Airlines announced the beginning of a test program of humanoids to carry luggage at airports. While we listen to Elon Musk tell us how magical and civilization-changing Tesla’s Optimus robots are, Asian countries are light-years ahead of us, deploying humanoids to do their bidding in real-life sc…

Several times during the men’s final of the Madrid Open tennis tournament between Casper Ruud and Jack Draper last spring, TV viewers were treated to a remarkable camera perspective. They watched the match from just behind the baseline, effortlessly following the player’s movement step for step and glimpsing his perfect angle on the ball with every shot. With no discernible blur or delays, the smoothly flowing live footage had the hyper-real feel of a video game. Tennis TV “I love the footwork by the cameraman,” wrote one YouTube commenter. The company now uses the comment in its investor pitch deck. In reality, these uncanny tracking shots didn’t involve any huma…

Everyone is talking about it in group chats, at the supermarket, and at the gas pump. No, it’s not Heated Rivalry—it is the “monster” winter storm that is set to hit the U.S. this weekend, traveling from Texas across the Southwest, into the Southeast, and finally into the Mid-Atlantic states and into New England. The storm is forecast to dump a whopping ten to 20 inches of snow, creating dangerous conditions for about half the nation, according to the Washington Post. Widespread heavy snow, sleet, damaging ice, and a potential nor’easter could affect as many as 230 million Americans from Friday, January 23 to Monday, January 26, bringing temperatures below zero, …

There we were: two experienced professionals, each standing on the iconic red dot of our own TEDx stages, ready to deliver what we hoped would be the most impactful talks of our careers. For Jamie, her meticulously rehearsed opening line—the one she practiced 327 times in the shower, in the mirror, and in front of a very patient partner—evaporated the moment the spotlight hit. Hundreds of expectant eyes waited as the silence stretched . . . and stretched. “Oh @*#%,” she whispered—into the mic. What was meant to be a private moment of panic turned into a public announcement. But instead of recoiling, the audience leaned in. Scott was one minute and fifty secon…

The steady encroachment of email into all moments of life has been quiet but formidable. A quick glance during a first date. Surreptitiously tapping out a reply during a wedding ceremony. Some even admit to refreshing their inbox at a funeral. Often it’s not the infinite scroll on social media that triggers the nervous phone-glancing. It’s the inbox. More than half of professionals check work email outside regular working hours, according to a recent study published by ZeroBounce, surveying 1,157 professionals in the United States and Europe last month. Nearly 3 in 4 professionals feel pressure to respond to emails off the clock, with that pressure intensify…

It’s that time again. The calendar has flipped, the resolutions are written, and you’re probably sitting in your office chair at your office desk looking at a lukewarm cup of office coffee, wondering if you’ve really got another year of fluorescent lights and “serendipitous” coworker interactions in you. Let’s make a pact: No more. It’s time to find a great remote job. Unfortunately, you can’t find 21st-century work using 20th-century methods. If you’re still scrolling through the generic “Big Box” job boards and getting buried in 5,000 applications for one role, you’re doing it wrong. Instead, here are the five sites you should check first when you’re looking…

Some days, starting feels effortless. A clear challenge or opportunity presents itself, an idea crystallizes, and then contracts into a single coherent thought. Today, frankly? That’s not happening. I’m staring at a pristine white canvas while the cursor mocks me. That uncomfortable space—the blinking cursor, the first messy draft, the false starts—isn’t a nuisance. It’s where creativity lives. Today, the temptation is to skip past all that. With AI, you don’t even need to know where you’re going. The bot can map it out, hand you something good enough. But what does good enough mean if you didn’t wrestle with the idea yourself? A recent MIT Media Lab study, Your Brain …

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. When I was a young professional in the 1990s, I didn’t aspire to be a CEO. (I was a business journalist focused on getting more challenging editorial assignments.) And even if I had wanted to run a company, I wouldn’t have known how to cobble together the necessary experiences to qualify for a…

For the past two years, artificial intelligence strategy has largely meant the same thing everywhere: pick a large language model, plug it into your workflows, and start experimenting with prompts. That phase is coming to an end. Not because language models aren’t useful, with their obvious limitations they are, but because they are rapidly becoming commodities. When everyone has access to roughly the same models, trained on roughly the same data, the real question stops being who has the best AI and becomes who understands their world best. That’s where world models come in. From rented intelligence to owned understanding Large language models look powerf…

“As someone who has tried almost every workout class on the planet, there is nothing like SoulCycle,” said TikTok creator Matt Trav in a video posted in early January. “The average human being cannot understand what blowing out the candle during the soulful song can do to the human psyche.” Nearly 40,000 people who liked the video seem to agree. “Absolutely nothing can beat NYC SoulCycle circa 2016,” one commenter wrote. “Literally like going to church,” another added. Across social media platforms, that renaissance is already underway. Devotees have been sharing nostalgia-laced photos from years past, unearthing old merchandise, and swapping stories in co…

In the music video for “Runway,” Lady Gaga’s collaboration with Doechii for The Devil Wears Prada 2 soundtrack, the wardrobes are high fashion and the musicians and their dancers serve, pose, and vogue. Colorful and camp, it’s everything you’d expect considering the subject matter of the song is about turning dance floors into runways. For some viewers, though, it just looks like a Target commercial. The post activity for Popcrave’s tweet about the “Runway” music video is filled with commenters pejoratively comparing the clip to a Target ad. It’s not hard to see why. Swap out the black-and-white lines on the video’s main set with red-and-white circles, and i…

Below, Maya Shankar shares five key insights from her new book, The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans. Shankar is a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans. She served as a senior policy adviser in the Obama White House, where she founded and chaired the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. She was also appointed as the first behavioral science advisor to the United Nations. What’s the big idea? What if the life upheavals that shake you most could also be your greatest opportunities? Change can feel like loss, but it can also be the start of a stronger, reimagined self. Listen to the audio version of this Book …

Box CEO and tech thought leader Aaron Levie says he recently met with 20 enterprise AI and IT leaders and came away with insights into what everyone, especially the stock market, wants to know: how—and how fast—large U.S. companies are adopting AI for core business functions. In a post on X, he outlined the main themes he heard. Had meetings and a dinner with 20+ enterprise AI and IT leaders today. Lots of interesting conversations around the state of AI in large enterprises, especially regulated businesses. Here are some of general trends: * Agents are clearly the big thing. Enterprises moving from… — Aaron Levie (@levie) March 19, 2026 Here’s a closer look a…

Few brands have been more associated with the fast-fashion boom of the last two decades than Zara, the flagship apparel chain owned by Spanish clothing giant Inditex SA. It may surprise some consumers to learn, then, that Zara has in fact reduced its global footprint over the last few years since the pandemic. The brand’s decline in physical storefronts has been moderate but meaningful, from a third-quarter peak of around 2,139 stores in 2019 to just under 1,800 stores five years later, according to earnings statements from Inditex. That’s a reduction of 16%. Now, thanks to new accounting metrics from the company, we’ve learned that Zara’s physical footprint…