Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Forward March? The initial market movements on Monday seem to indicate that’s the case, at least for crypto. On Monday, the price of Bitcoin (BTC) was up more than 5%, jumping to more than $69,000 as of 12 p.m. ET from around $65,500 on Sunday afternoon. Likewise, Ethereum (ETh) was up around 6% while XRP rose about 3%. The CoinDesk 20, a crypto market index, is also up around 5%. The broad increase in crypto values was a reversal from a downslide that cryptocurrency markets had been seeing in the lead-up to the United States and Israel launching attacks on Iran on Saturday. On Saturday, after news of the attacks broke, Bitcoin values fell to near $63,000…

Below, Liz Tran shares five key insights from her new book, AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing. Liz is a leadership coach to the CEOs and founders of some of the world’s fastest-growing companies. Her work has been featured by the Today Show, The New Yorker, the New York Times, Bloomberg, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, and other outlets. What’s the big idea? The most consequential divide in modern society is not economic or political. It’s psychological. The gap between people who can adapt to constant change (high Agility Quotient) and those who feel undone by it is shaping everything from workplaces to mental health. Listen to the audio ve…

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…

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…

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…

Over the past two years, AI has been framed as a productivity engine, a cost-cutting lever, an infrastructure race, and, on more dramatic days, as a civilizational rupture. Boards demand AI road maps. CEOs announce “AI-first” agendas. Entire divisions are reorganized around tools whose capabilities shift every quarter. But beneath the noise lies a quieter and far more consequential reality: AI does not create strategic clarity. It reveals whether you had any to begin with. I’ve argued previously that the next layer of advantage in corporate AI will not come from owning infrastructure, but from building better internal models of how your business world actually wo…

Below, Rebecca Hinds shares five key insights from her new book, Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done. Rebecca is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. Her research is consistently featured in publications like Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Wired. What’s the big idea? If you’re tired of watching your organization suffer under the weight of bad, broken, bloated meetings, there are proven ways to replace that slow-motion dumpster fire with calendars that actually move work forward. By treating meetings like a product, you can design the be…

In graduate school, my experimental archaeology professor told a student to create a door socket—the hole in a door frame that a bolt slides into—in a slab of sandstone by pecking at it with a rounded stone. After a couple of weeks, the student presented his results to the class. “I pecked the sandstone about 10,000 times,” he said, “and then it broke.” This kind of experience is known as individual learning. It works through trial and error, with lots of each. Also known as reinforcement learning, it is how children, chimpanzees, crows, and AI often learn to do something on their own, such as making a simple tool or solving a puzzle. But individual learning has l…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. I tested more than 200 educational sites, apps, and services last year. Some were so confusing that I quickly gave up. Others were too costly. A few went out of business. Many were narrowly useful, e.g., for 3D modeling, math, or music. The top-tier tools have consistently been super valuable for me—in my teaching, in my job at the City University of New York, and as a dad of two daughters. To save you the time and effort of sifting through the chaff, I’m sharing the ones I find most useful. Even if you’re not a teacher, these tools m…

We live in a time when our expectations for ethical business practices are no longer predictable. Global regulation, along with ideas around standards like ESG, are in flux—and building debate around what the standards should be for leaders and managers. “Some governments are tightening oversight, while others are relaxing enforcement,” write ethics leaders at the World Economic Forum. Companies may focus on strictly following the law, thinking that it doesn’t make sense to go beyond regulatory expectations. But being compliant doesn’t mean you’re being ethical. There are three common signals that your company is headed towards a flawed business practice—decision…

With GLP-1 use on the rise in the U.S., one grocery store chain made a starter kit for first-time customers that could help capture a higher percentage of their food budget at a time when it’s becoming increasingly important. ShopRite’s “Wellness Your Way” branded kits are free for customers filling their first GLP-1 prescription at the East Coast grocer’s in-store pharmacies. They’re one part informational, another part promotional, and they’re designed to look like they’re from a direct-to-consumer subscription healthcare brand, taking advantage of ShopRite’s specific store model. The blue mailer box, which is available while supplies last, opens from a front fl…

HBO Max might be getting a brand update. Again. The streaming service has notoriously waffled between different names and logos over the past several years. More recently, it got caught up in an intense bidding war between Netflix and Paramount Skydance to acquire its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery. On February 27, Netflix finally admitted defeat and abandoned its takeover bid—meaning Paramount is set to acquire WBD for $110 billion. The transaction is expected to close later this year. This supersized deal will undoubtedly have major ripple effects across the broader entertainment industry. But, for HBO, it might mean yet another blow to an already di…

Globally, the majority of people say they’re extroverted, and if you’re an introvert, you may feel out of touch, out of sync, or disconnected. You may also struggle to find friends, make friends, or sustain friendships. But it’s possible to feel not only connected and fulfilled, but also comfortable with yourself as an introvert. It’s a critical issue today. We’ve all become more isolated, with increasing numbers of people who say they’re lonely or they don’t have enough friends. Relationships are critical to physical, cognitive, and emotional well-being. But it’s possible to create great friendships at work and in life, even if you’re an introvert. THE IMPORTANCE OF …

In the late 1920’s, Einstein and Bohr were engaged in a series of famous debates about the future of physics, in which Einstein insisted that “God does not play dice with the universe.” “Einstein, stop telling God what to do,” Bohr retorted. Einstein lost the argument and his career as a productive scientist was largely finished after that. Ostensibly, the debate was about quantum mechanics and whether what we can know about subatomic particles is absolute or merely a function of probability. But at a deeper level it challenged a basic philosophical principle that had been around since before Plato or Aristotle: that essence precedes existence. If essence precede…

A journalist is assigned a profile of a prominent politician on a tight turnaround. With the interview just hours away, she asks ChatGPT to generate a list of questions. Satisfied with the 30 questions churned out in under a minute, she shares them with her editor to make sure no stone is unturned. The editor nearly rewrites the list entirely. It’s missing questions about pivotal early-life experiences, why the senator dropped out of college, parting ways with her first campaign manager, and more. All of these missing questions stem from understanding the larger context and years of honing editorial judgment—the kinds of things AI can’t replace. Just as generative AI to…

Anthropic is making hay while the sun shines. The AI company’s high-stakes dispute with the Pentagon—in which it refused to allow its product to be used for autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance—generated intense mainstream media coverage and a wave of public support, including from many within the artificial intelligence community. Claude rose to No. 1 in the Apple App Store’s free app rankings on Sunday, February 28, and on Tuesday, March 3, it hit No. 1 in a similar ranking for the Google Play store. The government is effectively banning the use of Anthropic models and tools within government agencies and their suppliers, and has labeled Anthropic…

The battle of the burgers is on. But at the center, there’s no actual fast food. Instead, it features viral moments of the companies’ leaders. In case you missed it: Last weekend, an Instagram video of McDonald’s CEO and chairman Chris Kempczinski—looking rather uncomfortable as he sampled his own company’s newly launched Big Arch burger—was widely circulated and mocked across the internet. He took only one small bite and repeatedly called the food a “product.” “I love this product,” Kempczinski said. “It is so good.” The comments were ruthless. “From this video, it seems likely the CEO of McDonald’s has never eaten McDonald’s before,” one user wrote. “What a…

Oil prices are on the rise, hitting an 18-month high as of Tuesday as the conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran continues. The war against Iran, which started in earnest over the past weekend, has disrupted oil and gas shipments in the Middle East, constricting supply, and with no clear timetable as to when the war could end (or if there’s a plan for a drawdown), markets are spooked about the potential for a prolonged conflict and market hiccups. Specifically, concerns about shipments getting through the Strait of Hormuz—a busy shipping lane for fossil fuel-carrying tankers—have been effectively stopped, and no one knows with any certainty as to when i…

A note to corporations everywhere: Asking politely for the internet to stop making fun of you often has the opposite effect. Microsoft may have just learned that lesson the hard way, after it accidentally helped a not-so-nice nickname go viral. As Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot is integrated into features across the company’s products—from its controversial Recall feature, to a dedicated AI button on Windows keyboards—it’s catching more and more flak, including a new term coined just to clown on Copilot: “Microslop,” a portmanteau of “Microsoft” and “AI slop.” The word was flying freely on Microsoft’s official Copilot Discord server, until users noticed a new fi…

The conference room door opened, and the team filed back to their desks. Sam had missed the meeting. A client call had run long; it happens. He leaned over the cubicle wall as Elaine sat down. “What did I miss?” he asked. She paused. “Nothing big. Just the usual.” That answer should concern every leader. Because something did happen in that room. Slides were shown. Words were spoken. Time was invested. But nothing stuck. No idea traveled, and no action accelerated. A meeting happened, but communication did not. George Bernard Shaw once wrote that the biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. Leaders fall into that illusion more …