Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

As return-to-office mandates tighten, many workers are reckoning what life in a cubicle looks like. If it’s up to the Swiss furniture and design firm Vitra, your next cubicle might not look much like a cubicle at all. Vitra partnered with German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic to create Scout, a family of minimalist office furniture built to adapt to the flexible ways people work today. Launched on March 19, Scout is comprised of five pieces that range in sizes, offering stationary and mobile workspaces with customizable options for workplaces and schools. Konstantin Grcic The tables feature trapezoidal desks that have metal tubular frames. Attachments tha…

If you pick up plastic trash from a beach, you’re helping protect marine wildlife from harm. And every little piece—from a plastic bottle cap to food wrappers—matters, because even small amounts of this trash can be deadly to animals like sea turtles and seabirds. A new calculator from Ocean Conservancy can now quantify that impact. If you enter the amounts of different types of plastic that you clean up into the Wildlife Impact Calculator, it will tell you how many animal lives would have been at risk, had those items made their way into the ocean and been ingested. “We hope that people really see that beach cleanups matter,” says Erin Murphy, Ocean Conservancy’s…

It’s another bad day for gold and silver. Traders in precious metals are seeing both gold and silver plummet significantly as the week kicks off, with gold down nearly 7% and silver down 8% over the past 24 hours. Worse, gold has now fallen nearly 20% since its all-time high of over $5,586 in January. Silver is down even more, falling more than 44% since its all-time high earlier this year of over $121. Here’s what you need to know. The ‘safe haven’ trade is absent Silver and especially gold are generally considered “safe haven” assets—assets investors turn to when economic uncertainty abounds, and they want to park their money in a valuable that isn’t likely …

Market research can be a slow, fragmented, and difficult process, often involving tedious internet searches, questionable data sources, and time-consuming manual synthesis. This makes it a great candidate for some assistance from AI. What’s more, an update to a popular feature on ChatGPT has made it even better at doing this kind of work. Imagine that you have a potential business idea but still need to validate how viable it actually is, identify primary competitors in your market, and develop an ideal customer persona. Instead of spending hours collating data, explains Dan McCarthy, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Maryland, you can use Deep Re…

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 Valerie Oswalt became CEO of breakfast and snack products company Kodiak in November 2022, she inherited a fast-growing business with beloved products, dedicated employees, and an outdoorsy vibe, befitting its Park City, Utah, headquarters. She also walked into a company that needed to …

Sundar Pichai was blindsided by ChatGPT. Soon after being named Google CEO in 2015, he’d declared that the world was entering an AI-first era. He went on to bet his stewardship of the entire company on his belief that the technology would be “an intelligent assistant helping you throughout your day,” as he put it in his first shareholder letter. Yet his prescience hadn’t prevented OpenAI from swooping in on November 30, 2022, with the first product that truly demonstrated the epoch-shifting power of generative AI, a breakthrough that had emerged from Google’s research labs in the first place. Pichai remembers his instinctive response to ChatGPT: “Wow, this technology is …

I recently met with 300 leaders at one of the country’s top-performing transit authorities. I asked them to raise their hands if they’d ever worked for a leader who truly cared about them. Nearly every hand rose. The room lit up with warmth, as people recalled a boss who’d looked after them. Then I asked: on that team, how many of you were pushed to truly exceptional results? Lots of hands dropped. Then I turned the question around: Who has worked for a leader who drove performance like no other? Hands shot up. And how many of you felt valued and understood as a member of that team? Many hands fell. Only a smattering of people kept their hands up through all four que…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the pandemic housing boom, housing demand was running so hot—and homes sold so quickly—that listings barely even registered as active inventory. Indeed, in February 2022, there were only 346,511 active homes for sale, according to Realtor.com’s data series. That was a staggering 68.5% below the 1,102,660 active listings in February 2019. At the end of February 2022, not a single one of America’s 200 largest housing markets had more inventory than in pre-pandemic February 2019. Fast-forward to the end of February 2026, and there were 914,86…

After a long court battle, the SAVE plan is officially kaput. Launched in 2023, the Biden administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) federal student loan repayment plan was created to replace the outgoing REPAYE program–and help keep Biden’s campaign promise to forgive student loans. Under the SAVE plan, a borrower’s monthly payment would be calculated based on income and family size and could be set as low as $0 per month for the lowest-earning borrowers. The program also fast-tracked forgiveness for those who borrowed less than $12,000. Several states sued the Biden administration in 2024, arguing that the SAVE plan exceeded the administrative br…

After a long court battle, the SAVE plan is officially kaput. Launched in 2023, the Biden administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) federal student loan repayment plan was created to replace the outgoing REPAYE program–and help keep Biden’s campaign promise to forgive student loans. Under the SAVE plan, a borrower’s monthly payment would be calculated based on income and family size and could be set as low as $0 per month for the lowest-earning borrowers. The program also fast-tracked forgiveness for those who borrowed less than $12,000. Several states sued the Biden administration in 2024, arguing that the SAVE plan exceeded the administrative br…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Zillow economists just published their updated 12-month forecast, projecting that U.S. home prices—as measured by the Zillow Home Value Index—will rise 0.5% from February 2026 to February 2027. That’s a mild downward revision from its 12-month forecast published last month (+0.9%). While Zillow’s national home price forecast isn’t negative, it isn’t exactly bullish either. It foresees a soft national housing market in 2026, one where affordability may improve slightly as U.S. income growth outpaces U.S. home price growth. What type of regional variation…

To sell the idea of last year’s Wienie 500 to Oscar Mayer, creative agency Johannes Leonardo used AI to show what a race among the iconic Wienermobiles might look like when they took to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s historic oval. “That is an inherently brilliant idea that most people will go, ‘That’s fun,’” said the agency’s CEO, Helen Andrews, during a panel discussion at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “It’s a good example of how AI can accelerate creativity, not replace it.” While AI can be a powerful way for brands to accelerate production and analyze consumer data, creative types must recognize that just because they can use these tools doesn’t mean they…

The healthcare crisis in the U.S. is one marked by rising costs, coverage gaps, staggering medical debt, and attacks on access. While various groups have stepped up with innovative solutions to address these serious issues, experts say the crisis is likely to get worse in the absence of radical policy change at the federal level. Consider how Undue Medical Debt is tackling the $220 billion in medical debt that affects some 100 million Americans. Since the nonprofit was founded more than a decade ago, it has forgiven $27 billion in debt for 17 million people by buying debt for pennies on the dollar using donations. But the cumulative mountain of debt is …

Actor John Stamos is thinking a lot more about potential opportunities to live-stream these days—be it at New York’s Thanksgiving Day parade, performing with the Beach Boys when he heads to Route 66 for the 100-year anniversary later this year, or even while getting his first-ever tattoo in Austin for SXSW. “I thought, ‘Oh, we should have live-streamed that,” said Stamos, speaking at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “That could have been interesting watching me go through that kind of pain.” As chief innovation officer of Zeam, a startup that lets people stream local TV stations and other content from anywhere, Stamos is excited to bring people an alternative to w…

“I don’t know why I’m procrastinating on this.” I hear this constantly from people who are clearly motivated, clearly capable, but stuck on one important project. It’s been on their list for weeks. They see it every day. They know it’s important. And yet, week after week goes by with no progress. Their prescribed fix? Wake up earlier. Be more disciplined. Push through. That almost never works, because the diagnosis is wrong. What’s actually happening isn’t procrastination at all. It’s cognitive overload. And treating it like procrastination is why so many smart, driven people stay stuck. In cognitive overload, your brain goes on defense When you’re …

Most people seek career advancement. Moving up the ladder gives you additional opportunities, greater autonomy, more chances to think strategically, a higher level of prestige, and (of course) a bigger paycheck. And at some point, you’re going to feel like it is time for you to get that promotion. So, how do you know whether it is the right time to really push for it? Finding the right timing requires being aware both of your own capacities and the current situation in your organization. The stars have to align for you to be successful in your efforts. Here are three things to consider. 1. Are you ready? If you’re going to really push for a promotion (and not j…

It’s a familiar feeling: You start a text message, and your phone’s auto-complete function suggests several choices for the next word, ranging from banal to hilarious. “I love …” you, or coffee? Or you’re finishing an email, and merely typing the word “Let” prompts your app to suggest “Let me know if you have any questions” in light gray text. Predictive language technologies have become so routine—baked into smartphones, email services, and chatbots—that we barely notice them anymore. But they raise a difficult question: What happens to a writer’s unique voice when AI routinely completes their thoughts—or generates them altogether from scratch? As the chair of a …

Fire officials and pro-density urbanists are often at loggerheads. This is especially evident in notoriously car-centric Los Angeles, where a firefighters’ union spent six figures opposing active mobility measures. The two camps can have different ideas of acceptable risks and priorities. But Matthew Flaherty, a firefighter who has lived in L.A. his whole life, bridges the two worlds. He’s an advocate for affordable, transit-friendly housing. His struggle to find an apartment in a walkable neighborhood led him to become a member of the Livable Communities Initiative, a nonprofit group advocating for more walkable neighborhoods in L.A. “Cities shouldn’t be designed aroun…

It’s still more than two years until the cauldron lights up for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, but we now know what the multibillion-dollar global sports spectacle will look like. The design team at LA28, the local organizing committee for the games, has given Fast Company a preview of the concepts and visuals that will guide the look and feel of the 2028 Olympics. The design approach is conceptually based on the superbloom, a natural phenomenon sometimes experienced in Southern California when an unusually wet winter leads to an explosively colorful spring bloom of wildflowers. The LA28 design approach uses bright, almost neon tones and an abstract graphic tha…

A few years ago, the reusable water bottle transformed from a humble utilitarian good into a status-signaling piece of arm candy. On TikTok, popular creators were decking out their water bottles with custom accessories and add-ons. Out in the real world, people were coordinating their water bottle colors with their activewear sets. Some consumers were even willing to drop hundreds of dollars for a “luxury” hydration experience. It was a full-on war of the water bottles, and there was a clear leader in the pack of drinkware brands vying for attention: Stanley 1913. For Stanley, a subsidiary of the parent company PMI WW Brands, the great water bottle wars were a business …

For the past several months, the food scientists at PepsiCo have been working overtime to dream up new products that meet young consumers’ health and wellness demands. First, there was a new Starbucks coffee protein drink. Then, there were dustless Cheetos. And now, the company’s latest innovation is Doritos Protein. Doritos Protein launched in select retailers this month and come in two different flavors: classic Nacho Cheese and Sweet & Tangy BBQ. One 28 gram serving of these chips contains 10 grams of protein and 150 calories, compared to the meager two grams of protein in a 28 gram, 150 calorie serving of standard Doritos Nacho Cheese. And, unlike regular Dor…