Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Each year, June marks Pride Month for the LGBTQ+ community and our allies. This is a time for both celebration and acknowledgment of the progress we have yet to make. In recent years, there has been significant attention on the role that businesses play during Pride Month. As the CEO of one of the largest LGBTQ+ organizations in the U.S., I’ve worked with numerous companies—across all industries, sizes, and locations—looking to support our community in meaningful ways. Here are a few insights to guide how you show up for the community during Pride, and beyond: KNOW THE DATA Nearly 1 in 10 adults in the U.S. identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community. For Gen Z adults, that…

We are living through a golden age of faking it: the AI stunt that earns a news cycle and dissolves the moment you press on it, the activation that is shared for five minutes and forgotten, and the commercial that’s more about the celebrity starring in it than the brand. Merriam-Webster named slop the word of 2025. It’s the equivalent of an artificial sweetener; surface-level buzz at best, no substance beneath. So, for the sake of timeline cleansing and inspiration, let’s talk about one of my favorite topics, dogs, the things they do, and dog shows. Every year, several million people watch dogs trot around a ring in televised dog shows. Viewers pick favorites, dev…

Apple’s Tim Cook isn’t the only well-known tech CEO stepping away from the chief executive role this year. Now, the founder and CEO of Dropbox (Nasdaq: DBX), Drew Houston, has announced he is making a similar move at the company he is synonymous with. Here’s what you need to know about Houston’s departure from the chief executive role and how investors are reacting to the news. What happened? Today, Houston announced he will be retiring from the chief executive role at the cloud storage provider. Houston has been with Dropbox in the role since he founded the company in 2007. It’s hard to understate how revolutionary a cloud storage solution like Dropbox was 19 …

The promise of frontier AI has always sounded like a utility: abundant intelligence, available on demand, as easy to access as electricity, water, or cloud computing. The metaphor is powerful, and for good reason. Utilities scale because they abstract complexity away. You don’t need an engineer from the power company sitting in your office every time you turn on the lights. And yet, the most sophisticated AI companies in the world are increasingly doing something very different: They are sending people. OpenAI recently announced the OpenAI Deployment Company, explicitly designed to embed forward deployed engineers (FDE) inside organizations working on complex problems…

Conversations about youth mental health and addiction are often treated as separate issues—different experts, different headlines, different policy conversations. But for today’s young people, these challenges are deeply intertwined. The same forces driving rising levels of anxiety, stress, and social comparison are also shaping their risk for substance use. In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the rapid shift to phone-based childhood fundamentally changed the developmental environment for young people. Attention, reward, identity formation, and peer validation have been rewired by digital platforms engineered to maximize engagement.…

Gabriel Landeskog wears the small sensors in the insoles of his skates for practices and games. He wears them in his sneakers when he’s training and, maybe most handy of all, while taking his dog for a walk. Those spins around the block and ice record all of his biomechanical measurements. The numbers provided a blueprint in helping the Colorado Avalanche captain resume his career after a three-year gap caused by a complicated knee injury. Now, they keep him at his gritty, goal-scoring best. The collected data ranges from movement patterns to his asymmetry and whether he’s favoring his surgically repaired right knee. It calculates in-game/in-practice workloads, stride c…

BTS has turned sold-out stadium tours, albums, and merch drops into global events. Now, the group is taking on another challenge: reinventing the Oreo cookie. Oreo is teaming up with the Korean supergroup on a limited-edition cookie that blends Korean street food inspiration with fan-focused collectible packaging and custom cookie designs. The new Limited Edition Oreo & BTS Cookies feature a creme flavor inspired by the hotteok, the sweet Korean brown sugar pancake sold at street markets. The cookies also introduce Oreo’s first-ever purple wafers, a nod to BTS’s globally devoted fanbase, ARMY. A collaboration rooted in nostalgia According to Matt Foley,…

On Monday, Pope Leo XIV made history by becoming the first pope to personally present an encyclical, a letter of great importance in which a pope explains his views on a major moral or social challenge facing the world, to his followers. The leader of the Catholic Church didn’t do so on his own, however. He had help in unveiling the encyclical, “Magnifica humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” The Anthropic cofounder and self-proclaimed atheist Christopher Olah was also present. An unlikely speaker The Vatican doesn’t normally invite outsiders to speak, let alone those in the tech industry. But Leo…

You spent hours researching the company, rehearsed your answers, and asked smart questions. You walked out of the interview feeling like you nailed it. Then you sent a thank-you email. Something like: “It was great to meet you. I’m very excited about the opportunity and look forward to next steps.” And just like that, you missed a huge opportunity to close the deal. Too many executives treat the follow-up as a courtesy to signal interest and show you know the social script. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: at the senior level, everyone who makes it to the final round is prepared, credentialed, and poised. The interview itself is often not enough to separate the…

At first glance, Aitana Lopez could be any other influencer. Her Instagram feed is a mix of Pilates workouts, model shoots, and photos posing in front of Coachella’s iconic Ferris wheel and inside the Alo gym. The 27-year-old is a Scorpio. Her long hair is dyed a soft shade of pink, with dark roots coming through. She also doesn’t exist. Lopez is a “virtual soul”, or at least that’s what her creators at the Barcelona-based tech agency The Clueless call her. Aitana was created using artificial intelligence, and behind her social media platforms, which have a combined following of nearly 400,000, is a team of eleven people. Aitana is part of a new wave of digitally c…

Resilience is a favorite buzzword for many entrepreneurs. You’ll see it throughout pitch decks, founder stories, and LinkedIn posts. The idea is, if you’re able to endure enough, you’ll successfully come out the other side. Some 83% of founders experience high stress, struggling with imposter syndrome and rapidly losing confidence in the idea they were certain would work out. In this context, the resilience story is a motivating one. But the idea is also highly misleading. Among the 90% of startups that fail, most founders are likely resilient right up until the end. They push through setbacks and persist with their idea, despite plenty of evidence suggesting that…

Designer Marc Jacobs is nothing if not eclectic and playful, filling the fashion world with odes to subcultures through garments inspired by punk princesses and ’90s club kids, quirky typography, and lots and lots of color. He also loves channeling whimsy in his personal style, often sporting sculptural nail art. To complete his creative vision, Jacobs branched into beauty in 2013, launching his own makeup collection with Kendo Beauty, the same incubator behind Fenty Beauty by Rihanna. A cult favorite among beauty enthusiasts, the original line offered coconut-scented bronzer and primer, vivid glittery eyeliner, and saturated lipsticks that could last a whole night out. …

Lakes of digital ink have been spilled on the topic of AI killing traffic to media sites. I’ve certainly poured my share. The basic fear: If your business depends on attracting as many eyeballs as possible to content on a website, AI will detour that gaze and point it toward its own summary of that content, resulting in far fewer people looking your way. There’s still a lot to be resolved with respect to the economics of AI scraping and how publishers will be compensated for that act. But however that plays out, it’s becoming clearer by the day that the battle for attention is slowly shifting to whose information is cited most prominently in an AI summary. AI presence is…

Taxpayers who don’t or can’t drive are increasingly subsidizing those who do, and it’s not sustainable. For decades, the main way we paid for highways, bridges, and major roads was through dedicated user fees. The biggest one is the federal gas tax. States have their own gas taxes too, plus vehicle registration fees and tolls in some places. The idea was simple: The more you drive and the more gas you burn, the more you pay. That money went into the Highway Trust Fund and state road funds. It was supposed to cover building and fixing roads without dipping into money for schools, health care, or other services. For decades, the deal seemed straightforward: Drivers …

In the movie The Perfect Storm, three large weather events converge, creating a storm bigger than the sum of its parts. As overused as the metaphor might be, it’s a good one for what’s happening to leaders globally right now. This storm involves the widespread integration of mainstream AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude into organizational workflows, and three large, interacting, non-obvious effects of this trend on leaders at all levels. Unchecked, research suggests, artificial intelligence could bring a toxic force to bear on how leaders build and reinforce their cultures. Trend one: Leaders are already overwhelmed and thinking poorly The first trend involves t…

If you’re leaving meetings feeling destabilized and second-guessing yourself, you’re probably not imagining it. Workplace bullying looks a lot different than it did in middle school. Here’s how to recognize it, respond in the moment, and protect yourself when the bully has power over you. View the full article

Zohran Mamdani is entering his streamer era. The NYC mayor launched a series on Twitch, titled “Talk with the People,” on May 21. The series has Mamdani answering questions from New Yorkers live on the stream. He announced the series in an Instagram post this morning, featuring a photo of himself and one of a Franklin D. Roosevelt “Fireside Chat.” Mamdani’s campaign was unique in its engaging deployment of social media, and he has continued to create shortform video content since taking office. So it comes as no real surprise that the 34-year-old mayor is utilizing another popular social platform to increase his direct access to constituents. This is the first…

There’s no doubt that AI has accelerated product marketing. Your copy is getting drafted faster, your personas are cleaner, and your positioning frameworks are getting shipped before your coffee is even cold. But speed has made many teams less disciplined, not more insightful. Too much AI-assisted product marketing sounds polished but lacks grounding in reality. It borrows the language of strategy without doing the strategic work required. You get neat messaging frameworks, confident claims, and copy that sounds familiar in the worst way: “built for modern teams,” “streamline workflows,” “unlock efficiency at scale.” It reads fine. It just doesn’t mean much. T…

Energy costs are increasing, and while it may cost a lot more than before to heat or cool a home, they’re basically peanuts compared to operating a hockey arena. That’s why the National Hockey League is bringing in a building automation heavyweight to help. This week, the NHL announced a new partnership with Honeywell aimed at increasing the efficiency of hockey facilities around the country in an attempt to lower operating costs. The multi-year partnership makes Honeywell—a massive company that provides products and services to many different industries—the “Official Building Automation and Energy Management Partner of the NHL.” The primary issue the partnership …

Earnings are in for two of the largest retailers, and they paint two very different pictures. Walmart, which has seen success in an economy where consumers are cutting back on spending and turning to budget retailers, now seems to be in a downturn, having just announced layoffs as it stocks falls. Meanwhile, Target, which was struggling a year ago amid a cost-of-living crisis and rising tariffs, and following consumer boycotts over a DEI rollback, seems to have hit reverse—with sales and stock price in an upswing. What’s happening with these two retailers? Here’s what to know. Walmart looks at impact of soaring gas prices On Thursday, Walmart reported s…

In an interview with Bloomberg on Wednesday, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that every job will feel the effects of AI—including bankers. “I think [AI will] reduce some of our jobs down the road,” Dimon told Bloomberg’s Haslinda Amin. “I think we’ll be hiring more AI people and probably less bankers in certain categories.” Dimon said that AI will cause reductions and downsizing at the company, but he said, “that’s been happening my whole life.” As AI changes jobs, the billionaire CEO said JPMorgan will retrain and redeploy employees, and in some cases, offer early retirement. Dimon also said that society needs to “get prepared” for how AI will change the workforce. JPM…

For years, Claire’s was a rite of passage for mall-going millennials who wanted to buy glittery accessories and butterfly hair clips, and also get their ears pierced. Now the iconic fashion accessories and jewelry retailer is set to expand well beyond the mall. Earlier this week, Ames Watson and Centric Brands announced a licensing partnership that will bring Claire’s to more than 7,000 new retail locations across North America. Currently, Claire’s operates more than 900 locations, many of which are in malls. But Claire’s is set to diversify more. Centric Brands will help expand Claire’s presence into new categories and across major retail partners, including…