Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

The U.S. and Israel’s attack on Iran led to commercial flights disruption on Saturday across the Middle East and beyond as regional airspaces began closing and tens of thousands of travelers around the globe were stranded. Israel, Qatar, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Bahrain closed their airspace, while Oman’s Muscat International Airport shut down and all flights were restricted over the United Arab Emirates, according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24. Major airlines based in the Middle East with worldwide networks canceled hundreds of flights while many other travelers were unexpectedly diverted to airports across Europe or flown back to departure airpor…

In today’s world, the villain in our story isn’t a person; it’s our desire for instant gratification. Explosive sales growth? We want it now. An dream angel investor? We want it now. A raise, a promotion, a spot at the top? We want it now. Can you blame us? If we can binge-watch an entire season of a new show on Netflix in a weekend and order restaurant-ready food to our door in less than thirty minutes, that can set us up for unrealistic expectations about getting other things quickly, including in the workplace. The need for speed leaves us rushing and impatient—and it shows in the way we speak, too. Our conversations become transactional, our questions become …

Gee whiz, Gboard: You’re really falling behind. For all the many ways Google’s Gboard keyboard makes tapping out text a breeze on Android, its ability to transcribe your speech and turn it into words isn’t exactly awe-inspiring. Android’s voice-to-text setup has always been pretty good, relatively speaking—but now, newer and more effective options are popping up, and it’s suddenly seeming like a system from the past. Last month, I introduced readers of my Android Intelligence newsletter to a new Android voice typing tool called Typeless that blows Gboard out of the water with its ability to actually understand what you’re saying and transform it into accurate,…

“Do you want to know the biggest career hack I’ve learned in 25 years of recruiting?” That’s the opening of one TikTok video. The answer, the creator Elite Recruiter says, is “skill stacking”: combining complementary skills to give you an advantage in job applications. “You’re not just a teacher—you’re a teacher who understands UX,” she gives as an example. That emphasis on skills over experience matches a growing chorus online that’s singing the praises of self-taught skills in the job market. “3 courses to take for early career success,” another creator suggests. “Skill stacking is the new degree flex,” a comment read on another recent TikTok video. Rat…

Small-business owners are up against a lot. It can be difficult to come up with the funding required to take an idea and turn it into something profitable, especially in an economy that can often feel less stable than many of us might prefer. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad idea to start your own small business. In fact, the opposite is often true. If you have an idea and a plan you believe in, the future of your small business can be wide open. Of course, there are a few considerations to keep in mind along the way, Chedva Ludmir tells Fast Company. Ludmir, who founded the consulting and coaching firm Consider Labs, regularly works with entrepreneurs…

Below, Joe Tidy shares five key insights from his new book, Ctrl + Alt + Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet. Tidy is the BBC’s first cyber correspondent and a leading voice on cybercrime. He has covered major global cyberattacks and produced widely viewed international documentaries, including a high-profile investigation into Russia’s most wanted cybercriminal. What’s the big idea? Teenage hackers are quietly reshaping cybercrime. They’re not movie-style geniuses, but persistent, socially connected, and often addicted—causing real harm through data breaches and feeding a cycle that leads to ever more serious attacks. Listen to the audio version…

Below, Daniel Coyle shares five key insights from his new book, Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment. Coyle is the New York Times bestselling author of The Culture Code. He has served as an adviser to high-performing organizations, including the Navy SEALs, Microsoft, Google, and the Cleveland Guardians. What’s the big idea? Everybody wants to flourish—to experience joyful, meaningful, shared growth. The problem is, we’ve been trained to approach the most important parts of our lives as if they are games to win, when they’re more like gardens to be grown. Flourishing isn’t about being smarter—it’s about taking simple actions that foster t…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Since the Pandemic Housing Boom fizzled out in the summer of 2022, some overheated parts of the country—particularly in the West, Southwest, and Southeast—have experienced home price declines from their peak (see this map). While many of these markets have seen only modest drops, a few metro areas, such as Cape Coral and Austin, have undergone what I’d consider “material” home price corrections, falling -19.1% and -27.8%, respectively, from their peaks. These regional home price declines raise the question: How many mortgage borrowers are actually “u…

Mattel just got its first custom global typeface in over 80 years, and it’s brimming with brand easter eggs. Mattel operates dozens of brands under its corporate umbrella, each with their own visual identity and brand voice. But, until now, Mattel has never had its own proprietary typeface for its overarching brand, instead opting to license multiple existing fonts on a global scale—an endeavor that was not only expensive, but also came at the cost of visual consistency across Mattel’s many product lines. Otis Gibson, founder of the Chicago-based creative agency Gertrude, says his agency was tasked with “putting a lasso” around Mattel’s corporate identity. Their solution,…

While some parts of the country deal with freezing temperatures and blizzards, Los Angeles sits comfortably in the mid-70s. Beyond the sunshine, the forecast calls for red carpets and celebrity gossip as award season is in full swing. The newly rebranded Actor Awards Presented by SAG-AFTRA is arguably the most emotional and meaningful celebration of the season because it is where fellow performers honor their own. Here’s everything you need to know about the 32nd iteration of the former Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG Awards). The opening monologues While it’s easy to assume that being an actor is all glamour and glory, the opening monologues dispel t…

Smartphones have been the greatest drivers of creative democratization over the past 15 years, giving people a powerful voice and platform. Recent advancements in the “brains” behind these devices are almost limitless, from their software and processing power to their AI capabilities. But what about their bodies? For years, the smartphone’s physical form has remained a familiar slab of glass and ceramic. This form factor, once revolutionary, is now becoming a physical constraint on creativity. Over time, smartphone design has created a paradox. The very tool meant to capture our memories can prevent us from truly living in the moment. While the intention was to connec…

Let’s be honest: The web browser is the modern-day operating system for everything from managing spreadsheets to pretending to work while reading tech blogs. Google knows this. That’s why the Chrome team announced a trio of new productivity features designed for people who basically live inside their browsers. Best of all? They’re actually quite useful. Here’s what you need to know to get your tab-hoarding, PDF-losing life back in order. Split View You know the drill. You’re trying to reference a document while writing an email, or maybe you’re watching a tutorial while trying to write code. You end up clicking back and forth between two tabs until your eye…

People change jobs all the time. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the oldest people in the workforce have probably held more than 12 jobs over the course of their lives. Those aren’t just new titles within a firm, they likely include larger career shifts. With globalization and changes in technology, the need to shift career paths can happen to people even in the last decade of their work lives. I myself have recently moved to the private sector after more than three decades as a university faculty member. If you make a significant career switch, what can you do to ease the adjustment to the new role and make a contribution quickly? Don’t be afraid of …

The light is shining through the windows of what looks like a well-appointed, book-lined apartment where Dario Amodei, the chief executive of AI giant Anthropic, is giving an interview. He smiles and laughs at the interviewer’s jokes, giving the impression of an approachable, amiable, ever-so-slightly unkempt scientist. But when the questions turn to AI’s impact on humanity, Amodei’s demeanor shifts. He says that while he is not a doom-and-gloomer, he is certainly worried. Previous disruptions took place over longer timescales, and he frets that the speed and scope of this one will make it much harder to manage. His concern “is that the normal adaptive mechanisms wil…

We live in a world, especially in Western cultures, that relentlessly promotes positive thinking and celebrates self-belief to the point of sidelining reality—that inconvenient thing that does not disappear simply because we ignore it. Self-help advice and pop-psychology slogans urge us to stop worrying about what others think, to believe in ourselves no matter what, and to focus on our strengths. They rarely stress the value of acknowledging our flaws and limitations, even when this requires revising, if not abandoning, our childhood ambitions. It may sound harsh, but science shows clear benefits to confronting our shortcomings, aligning our self-assessments wi…

In 2025, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson from The Atlantic released a book called Abundance, which posited that America had developed a culture of scarcity. Overregulation and overall risk aversion from the government, the authors argued, were stifling the development of infrastructure and housing in the country. To remedy this, they proposed an “abundance agenda,” one that focused on a growth mindset among elected officials that would help foster long-term prosperity. Although the provocation has its challenges, it got me thinking: What if we applied the idea of abundance to our work? For over a decade, I’ve occupied two worlds simultaneously—o…

Anthropic has announced a new “memory” tool that allows Claude users to copy over their chats from other AI chatbots, giving those who want to switch over from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot an easy way. The new memory tool is available to paid Claude subscribers only and enables them to import saved memories from rival AI chatbots, and comes as more people seem to be turning toward Claude and away from ChatGPT over growing concerns about how, and to what end, the U.S. military will use AI chatbots. (While OpenAI signed a deal with the Pentagon, Anthropic said no.) As Fast Company previously reported, despite Pentagon demands to use AI assistants for “all lawful pur…

When I first started my freelance writing business, I assumed I should find clients who would put me on retainer. The appeal seemed obvious: steady income for me, predictable working relationship for the client. I even knew how to structure retainer agreements based on my prior roles at marketing agencies. But a few months into a solo career, I was willing to take any work that came my way. Which was primarily project-based work, not retainers. I quickly built a business based on ad hoc assignments from many clients, rather than relying on a few. The conventional wisdom would say that I was “doing it wrong.” Every solopreneur forum, coach, and freelancer communi…

A triceratops skeleton that stood in a Wyoming museum for decades will be auctioned off, a rare instance of a museum-exhibited dinosaur going to the auction block just as the market for the prehistoric giants has hit record highs. The fossil, dubbed “Trey,” will be open for bidding from March 17 to 31 on Joopiter, an online auction platform founded by Grammy-winning artist and producer Pharrell Williams. It has a pre-auction estimate of $4.5 million to $5.5 million. Dating back more than 66 million years to the late Cretaceous period, Trey was discovered near Lusk, Wyoming, in 1993 by Lee Campbell and the late Allen Graffham, a commercial paleontologist who made n…

No one wants to be in a bad movie—but imagine a movie studio casting you in new movies after you die, without your consent. That may have once seemed something out of a Black Mirror episode, but it’s becoming a real issue, and many think current legal protections don’t go nearly far enough. In 2024, the late Ian Holm appeared, in digital form, in Alien: Romulus four years after his death, a move some critics decried as “digital necromancy.” Early this year, producers partnered with a British artificial intelligence startup to re-create the voice of Alain Dorval, who spent decades dubbing Sylvester Stallone classics like Rocky and Rambo in French. The plan was scrapped…

With nearly 40,000 locations in over 100 countries, tens of millions of people worldwide regularly eat McDonald’s iconic burgers. But in an Instagram post that’s blowing up the internet, company CEO Chris Kempczinski appears less-than-thrilled to be eating one himself. The video was posted to Kempczinski’s Instagram account a month ago, but found new life over the weekend on platforms like X and TikTok, with many users wondering if it’s “intentionally cringe,” saying that Kempczinski looks “uncomfortable” or commenting how he “looks like he’s gonna hurl.” “From this video, it seems likely the CEO of McDonald’s has never eaten McDonald’s before,” one user wrote. …