Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece titled “Why Work-Life Balance Will Keep You Mediocre.” Certainly a headline designed to draw ire from many readers, myself included. The author advocates “ruthlessly” optimizing your time, from missing important events with loved ones to declining social events. The goal? In his case, he built a company worth $20 million and set himself up with financial freedom for the rest of his life. My gut reaction was, “That’s no way to live a life.” There was a time, in my early twenties, when I poured all of my energy and time into my job. I wore the badge of long hours and unlimited availability, replying to emails long i…

How I spend my hours in the day is how I live. To make the most of my waking hours, I practice the one-hour rule—a simple habit that helps me learn, reflect, and think. I give myself 60 uninterrupted minutes a day to try and become a little wiser than I was yesterday. I consciously take control of my growth to transform how I think, how I decide, or live. It takes commitment. But just an hour a day learning, thinking, and reflecting is helping me improve my life processes. That’s it. Sixty minutes. Five hours a week. And you are upgrading yourself daily. That means reading something that stretches you. Reflecting on what went wrong and why. Sitting in silence and lett…

As a learning designer at Zapier, I used to spend my days helping my teammates learn: I built and led trainings, created enablement resources, and helped folks better understand how their work contributed to company strategy. Now, I sit inside our HR team as an AI automation engineer. But the through line is the same: I still help my teammates (and now customers, too!) do their best work. What is an AI automation engineer? AI automation engineer sounds like a vague title, so here’s the job, plainly: I embed with a team (HR, in my case), spot opportunities to enhance the team’s work, and build AI-powered workflows that jump on those opportunities. The goal is to cre…

It’s been an unprecedented and brutal week for the advertising industry. The finalization of Omnicom Group’s $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group (IPG) (the biggest takeover in advertising history) is affecting tens of thousands of workers—most immediately the 4,000 expected to be laid off by the end of the year. Both Omnicom and IPG own many different ad agency brands, all of which will be profoundly impacted by the merger. Omnicom is retaining only McCann from the IPG roster of agency networks, while folding FCB into BBDO, and both DDB and MullenLowe into TBWA, in order to achieve Omnicom Chairman and CEO John Wren’s goal of $750 million in synergies. Th…

In the 1960s, IBM embarked on what Fortune called the $5 billion gamble. It was a bet-the-company investment on a scale nobody had seen before. The payoff was the legendary System/360 mainframes, which revolutionized computing and set the stage for two decades of IBM dominance. That $5 billion would be roughly the equivalent of $50 billion today, but even that princely sum is dwarfed by the $364 billion that tech giants are expected to invest in artificial intelligence this year. And the spending won’t stop there. McKinsey projects that building AI data centers alone could demand $5.2 trillion by 2030. Today, the AI investment boom is probably the single biggest f…

As I uploaded a 1940s photo of my grandpa Max and hit a few buttons in Google’s Veo 3 video generator, I saw a familiar family photo transform from black and white to color. Then, my grandpa stepped out of the photo and walked confidently toward the camera, his army uniform perfectly pressed as his arms swung at the sides of his lanky frame. This is the kind of thing AI lets you do now—virtually bring back the dead. As a hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch this weekend highlighted, though, just because we can reanimate our departed loved ones, that doesn’t necessarily mean we should. Grilling the dog The sketch, which The Atlantic has alrea…

The most obvious use case for generative AI in editorial operations is to write copy. When ChatGPT lit the fuse on the current AI boom, it was its ability to crank out hundreds of comprehensible words almost instantly, on virtually any topic, that captured our imaginations. Hundreds of “ChatGPT wrote this article” think pieces resulted, and college essays haven’t been the same since. Neither has the media. In October, a report from AI analytics firm Graphite revealed that AI is now producing more articles than humans. And it’s not all content farms cranking out AI slop: A recent study from the University of Maryland examined over 1,500 newspapers in the U.S. and found…

The Salt Lake City Olympics planned for 2034 are now the Utah Games after organizers announced a new logo and name to reflect the multi-community work that goes into hosting the largest winter sports event on Earth. The state’s Governor, Spencer Cox, says the new logo has united people—though not in a good way. “It’s really brought people together because everyone seems to not like it,” Cox said at a recent press conference. The new logo is temporary until the final emblem of the Games is released in 2029. It spells out “Utah” in irregularly shaped characters (does that say “IJTAH?”) that are stacked on top of “2034.” Its launch color palette is just black and…

A voluntary layoff? In this economy? The mass layoff meat grinder is out in full force this week. In just the past couple of days, thousands of workers have fallen victim to job cuts at Amazon, Target, Paramount, CBS, and other large companies. YouTube has also quietly introduced voluntary exit packages for employees who are willing to be laid off with severance benefits, according to an internal memo first reported by Alex Heath’s Sources AI newsletter. Adding words like “opt in” or “voluntary” in front of separation, retirement, and severance packages is the new way to soft-launch layoffs, in the hope of making the idea of losing one’s job slightly more pal…

OpenAI’s announcements at its third annual developer conference told a lot about where the company is in its evolution. In the past, the company’s executives talked mainly about new models that were smarter, cheaper, or more efficient. At the event in San Francisco on October 6, the company’s leaders said relatively little about their latest models, and nothing about AGI or superintelligence. Instead, they discussed new ways to make the AI do real work that matters. Building functional agents One of the keys to enterprise customers realizing a return on their investment in AI is the creation of intelligent agents capable of completing complex business tasks. …

Skyscanner, a leading global travel booking site, released its 2026 Travel Trends report on Thursday. And the forecast for the year ahead includes trips down the supermarket aisle, literary-inspired itineraries, in-flight beauty routines, and some surprising trending destinations (looking at you, New Haven). If travel in 2025 was about collective experiences, the new travel mindset for 2026 is clear—it’s no longer solely about community connections, it’s about prioritizing travelers’ individual interests and passions. The report also looked at the role AI is likely to play in travel search and planning in 2026: 54% of travelers said they felt confident using AI to…

JPMorgan Chase unveiled its new 60-story headquarters to the public on Monday, one of the first major office buildings to be constructed after the COVID-19 pandemic and one that will remake the New York City skyline for decades. The bronze and steel tower at 270 Park, which reportedly cost $3 billion, replaced the Union Carbide Building, which sat on a full city block at 48th Street and Park Avenue for nearly 60 years. JPMorgan expects to house roughly 10,000 of its 24,000 New York-based employees in the new building, with employees starting their first workday at the tower at the same time as the company holds its ribbon cutting ceremony. “For 225 years, JPMorgan…

Shopping assistant chatbots were a novelty a year ago. Now, they’re everywhere. After rolling out AI-powered assistants, online retailers and tech companies have been adding more artificial intelligence features to make online shopping easier and more convenient. The latest crop of AI-powered shopping services and tools made their debut in recent weeks, just in time to kick off the holiday shopping season that begins with Black Friday. Here’s a rundown of existing and newly released AI services that can help with your search for the perfect gift in the run-up to Christmas: Retail chatbots Amazon led the way by rolling out its Rufus chatbot in 2024. Other ecommerc…

The day after the jewelry heist at the Louvre in Paris, officials from across Washington’s world-famous museums were already talking, assessing and planning how to bolster their own security. “We went over a review of the incident,” said Doug Beaver, security specialist at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, who said he participated in Zoom talks with nearby institutions including the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art. “Then we developed a game plan on that second day out, and started putting things in place on Days 3, 4 and 5.” Similar conversations are happening at museums across the globe, as those tasked with securing art ask: “Could that happen here…

For decades, MBA programs, leadership trainings, and consultancies have told us that effective leaders share a set of “essential competencies.” You know the lists: empathy, strategic vision, humility, charisma, psychological safety, communication skills. These ideas get repeated in boardrooms and promised in executive education programs. But if these competencies were truly essential, then the leaders we most admire should have them. The truth is, they often don’t. This never made sense to me. In addition to my writing and research, I’ve spent the past 15 years running a secret dining experience called the Influencers Dinner. We’ve hosted close to 4,000 Olympians, Nob…

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. Our new print issue features “How YouTube Ate TV,” an oral history of the video-sharing site’s impact on entertainment, culture, and business as told by dozens of eyewitnesses past and present. As we stitched sound bites together into a story, it became clear that our interviews had provided an embarrassment of riches. Indeed, we had too many great stories and insights to cram into one magazine article. So we expanded the online version of the article into five oral histories. Two are live on our site now, covering the company’s earliest days and acquisition by Google. Three more will roll out next week,…