Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

It’s almost the end of the year, and for many, that means health flexible spending account (FSA) funds are set to expire. FSAs allow employees to set aside pretax money to pay for healthcare expenses such as copays, some medications, and deductibles. But many people aren’t aware that the funds don’t always roll over into the next calendar year after December 31. Sometimes, employers will provide grace periods of up to two and a half months past the end of the year to allow for extra time to use your FSA funds. Others may allow you to carry over up to $660 per year. But 33% of employers have a hard deadline, so if you don’t use your funds by the end of the year, they’r…

Below, Tim Elmore shares five key insights from his new book, The Future Begins with Z: Nine Strategies to Lead Generation Z as They Disrupt the Workplace. Elmore is the founder and CEO of Growing Leaders, a nonprofit dedicated to developing emerging leaders. As a speaker and coach, he has helped organizations from universities to Fortune 500 companies connect more effectively across generations. What’s the big idea? Many leaders are scratching their heads over Gen Z. The old playbook doesn’t work anymore—but figuring out how to engage and collaborate with this generation is what turns good leaders into great ones. Listen to the audio version of this Book B…

Fast Company’s Brands That Matter is designed to honor the brands that plant their flags firmly at the intersection of business and culture in unique ways. But there are also bigger companies that manage to succeed in that task with multiple brands. The five 2025 Brands That Matter family of brands honorees didn’t just excel with a single brand—they’ve created cultural moments and sales momentum for multiple brands across their businesses. While being bespoke for each brand, the efforts are nonetheless able to drive solid results on engagement and overall business performance. Coca-Cola When you make the world’s top-selling soda, it might be easy to let the ma…

Aging gracefully is a tall order for any company, but the 2025 Brands That Matter heritage brands honorees have stuck around in style for decades—and in one case, even centuries. Along the way, they’ve adapted to the times and grown even stronger in the process, whether that means embracing design overhauls, creating innovative new technologies, or staying on the pulse of Gen Z trends. Here are the brands proving that age doesn’t necessarily make a brand old-fashioned in 2025. Bath & Body Works Bath & Body Works began as a mall staple in 1990, and 35 years later, it could easily have fallen by the wayside like so many of its peers. But instead, it is Ge…

Since the launch of ChatGPT three years ago, almost everyone has used Artificial Intelligence in some fashion to help with their work and the world collectively believes AI holds potential. I have written on AI subjects three times before in this series – on strategy & AI, on AI investment, and on AI’s impact on entry level hiring. The third was co-authored with friends Ahmad Zaidi, co-founder and CEO of AI start-up TransforML, and Gui Loureiro, Regional CEO Walmart Canada, Central America, Chile and Mexico and co-author of Reinventing the Leader. That team returns for this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insight piece on leadership and AI. And as always, you can find all…

A few blocks from my home sits a small Japanese grocery store that has been in the neighborhood for years. It’s the kind of place that once felt irreplaceable—carefully sourced ingredients, shelves stocked with items I couldn’t find in mainstream supermarkets, and an owner who knows her regulars. But much as I love this store, it has been in steady decline for a few years now. Whole Foods opened up nearby and it now stocks all the basics—miso paste, kombu, dashi packets, nori—that I, or anyone else, could want for weeknight Japanese cooking. Suddenly, the extra trip to the specialty shop felt unnecessary most of the time. The big chain became “good enough,” and in a w…

The city of San Francisco filed a lawsuit against some of the nation’s top food manufacturers on Tuesday, arguing that ultraprocessed food from the likes of Coca-Cola and Nestle are responsible for a public health crisis. City Attorney David Chiu named 10 companies in the lawsuit, including the makers of such popular foods as Oreo cookies, Sour Patch Kids, Kit Kat, Cheerios and Lunchables. The lawsuit argues that ultraprocessed foods are linked to diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and cancer. “They took food and made it unrecognizable and harmful to the human body,” Chiu said in a news release. “These companies engineered a public health crisis, they…

Andreessen Horowitz investors (and identical twins) Justine and Olivia Moore have been in venture capital since their undergraduate days at Stanford University, where, in 2015, they cofounded an incubator called Cardinal Ventures to help students pursue business ideas while still in school. Founding it also gave the Moores an entry point into the broader VC industry. “The thing about starting a startup incubator at Stanford is all the VCs want to meet you, even if you have no idea what you’re doing, which we did not back then,” Olivia says. At the time, the app economy was booming, and services around things like food delivery and dating proliferated, recalls Just…

The healthcare industry faces major challenges in creating new drugs that can improve outcomes in the treatment of all kinds of diseases. New generative AI models could play a major role in breaking through existing barriers, from lab research to successful clinical trials. Eventually, even AI-powered robots could help in the cause. Nvidia VP of healthcare Kimberly Powell, one of Fast Company’s AI 20 honorees, has led the company’s health efforts for 17 years, giving her a big head start on understanding how to turn AI’s potential to improve our well-being into reality. Since it’s likely that everything from drug-discovery models to robotic healthcare aides would be …

If you combine the NYSE and TBPN, do you get a BFD? Apparently. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is announcing that it has inked a partnership with the live video podcast TBPN, becoming the show’s exclusive exchange partner. The deal marks another feather in the cap for TBPN, which has become one of the most-talked-about financial and tech-focused media startups in only 11 months, and also marks a further cross-generational shift into new media by the NYSE, which itself is 233 years old. TBPN (“Technology Business Programming Network”) will continue to record and broadcast from its home base in Los Angeles. The show will now have access to the NYSE—similar …

Adidas defeated an appeal on Wednesday by U.S. shareholders who said the footwear and apparel maker fraudulently concealed antisemitic and other improper behavior by Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, before its partnership with the rapper and fashion designer imploded in 2022. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Adidas did not mislead shareholders in its annual reports by saying improper behavior by partners from the entertainment industry could have a negative spill-over effect on business. “A reasonable investor would know that a partnership with a celebrity partner like Ye would come with inherent risks relating to improper behavior,” a …

When it comes to market segmentation, I don’t see truly well-documented cases often. At a more simplistic level, we think of classic matrices such as BCG or McKinsey’s. But the real exercise of segmentation is far more complex. In certain contexts, it comes close to the behavior of a tensor: multiple dimensions, cross-dependencies, distinct weights, temporality, and contextual factors that shift the meaning of data depending on the axis being analyzed. Thinking like a tensor is practicing Model Thinking, which remains, above all, an analog discipline. It requires a brain, not a machine. The challenge is necessarily multidisciplinary, and this is exactly where …

Spotify has a knack for mining your listening data into something fun and shareable rather than weird and creepy for its annual “Wrapped” feature. This year, it outdid itself. The 2025 edition of Spotify Wrapped goes beyond just summarizing what you listened to with charts and infographics. This year, Spotify is also assigning each user a “Listening Age,” which is based on the release years of their favorite tracks compared to others in the same age group. The feature quickly went viral, as users recoiled at their seemingly geriatric (or juvenile) musical tastes. At the risk of reading too much into something that’s ultimately good fun, Wrapped’s expanding purview…

It’s a common experience: you search for white bean soup recipes one time on Instagram, and you are bombarded with white bean soup content on the app for seemingly all eternity. Instagram wants to fix that. Starting today, the company’s three billion users can have more control over their algorithm via a “Your Algorithm” feature. It’s not quite Bluesky, or the Instagram of yore that only displayed content from accounts users followed, but it does let users select or unsubscribe from different topics. The new feature, which leverages AI, lets users pick topics they want to see more or less of on their explore page. Users will first be able to see a list of suggest…

Rejoice, New Year’s dieters: Oreos are getting a sugar-free option. Mondelez said Tuesday that Oreo Zero Sugar and Oreo Double Stuf Zero Sugar will go on sale in the U.S. in January. They’re a permanent addition to the company’s Oreo lineup. It’s the first time Mondelez has sold sugar-free Oreos in the U.S. They’re already sold in Europe and China, the company said. Mondelez said consumers are increasingly seeking what it calls “mindful indulgence,” and the new Oreos will fill an existing gap in the market for sugar-free sandwich cookies. Others have also noted the trend toward healthier snacks. In a report earlier this year, the market research company Circana…

There are three kinds of annoying colleagues. I have already written about dealing with annoying bosses and colleagues. What happens if the source of your annoyance is one of your direct reports? Once again, dealing with what bothers you depends a lot on what it is causing the problem. Here are four common causes of annoyance. 1. The one who sucks up It is natural for people who are ambitious to want to find ways to get ahead. Obviously, doing great work is important, but a little self-promotion can’t hurt either. After all, if you have lots of direct reports, you may not notice everything that everyone is doing. So, you should expect that the folks who work fo…

AI promises a smarter, faster, more efficient future, but beneath that optimism lies a quiet problem that’s getting worse: the data itself. We talk a lot about algorithms, but not enough about the infrastructure that feeds them. The truth is, innovation can’t outpace the quality of its inputs, and right now those inputs are showing signs of strain. When the foundation starts to crack, even the most advanced systems will falter. A decade ago, scale and accuracy could go hand-in-hand. But today, those goals often pull in opposite directions. Privacy regulations, device opt-ins, and new platform restrictions have made high-quality, first-party data harder than ever to ca…

Mickey Mouse, welcome to the AI era. Fans will soon be able to create short-form generative AI videos featuring more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters thanks to a three-year agreement that The Walt Disney Co. inked Thursday with OpenAI. In addition to a $1 billion equity investment in the tech company, Disney will become the first major content licensing partner on OpenAI’s Sora app. The new collaboration offers an opportunity for Disney to “extend the reach of our storytelling” through AI, Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, said in a statement. “Bringing together Disney’s iconic stories and characters with OpenAI’s groundbreaking technology puts imagi…

When life gives people lemons, most try to make the best out of a bad situation. Instead, Beau du Bois, vice president of bar and spirits at Marisi Italian restaurant in La Jolla, California, found himself with an incredible opportunity. In 2021, the Adler and Lombrozo families, owners of the Puesto Mexican restaurant chain, tapped du Bois to build Marisi’s bar program from the ground up. One of the first actions du Bois took when learning about this new venture was starting a batch of limoncello, using a lesser-known Amalfi Coast technique. “They told me about Marisi almost exactly a year before we opened,” du Bois tells Fast Company. “And the very next day, even…

The USS Enterprise was an impossible dream rendered in fiber glass. Designed for Star Trek, it looked like a creation straight out of creator Gene Roddenberry’s imagination: Twin nacelles—those long, gleaming engine pods held by elegant pylons—extended from a central saucer holding the engines that allowed Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. Bones, and the rest of the crew to travel across the cosmos. Inside those nacelles, the show’s creators imagined, lay the secret that made those trips possible: a warp drive that could crease spacetime itself, folding the universe in front of the ship while unfurling it behind, allowing faster-than-light travel not through speed but thro…

A headline catches your eye: A company you admire, known for its market performance and strong culture, is embroiled in a massive scandal. It causes reputational harm, profitability tanks, and customers notice. The details feel depressingly familiar—enough to fill books (most recently The Dark Pattern). With postmortems pointing to “culture problems,” your instinct might be to double-check your own organization’s cultural health. So, you pull up last year’s employee engagement survey: 85% of employees feel comfortable raising concerns, and 90% believe leadership demonstrates ethical behavior. The numbers are reassuring. But the company you’ve read about probably had s…

The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage edged higher this week, though it remains relatively near its low point so far this year. The uptick brings the average long-term mortgage rate to 6.22% from 6.19% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. A year ago, the rate averaged 6.6%. Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, also rose this week. The rate averaged 5.54%, up from 5.44% last week. A year ago, it averaged 5.84%, Freddie Mac said. Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy decisions to bond market investors’ expectations f…

Bitcoin investors are bracing for “Witching Friday” tomorrow, December 18, when billions of options are due to expire—making for what could be a highly volatile, roller-coaster ride at the end of the week for the markets. Some $23 billion in contracts are set to expire just on Deribit, the largest Bitcoin exchange, according to Bloomberg. Here’s what to know. What is ‘Witching Friday’? “Witching Friday,” also known as “triple witching” or “the triple witching hour,” refers to the last hour of the stock market trading session on the third Friday of March, June, September, and December, when three kinds of securities expire simultaneously, often leading to i…

A 911 call about a man resembling “the CEO shooter.” Body-camera footage of police arresting Luigi Mangione and pulling items from his backpack, including a gun that prosecutors say matches the one used to kill UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and a notebook they have described as a “manifesto.” Notes about a “survival kit” and “intel checkin,” and testimony about alleged statements behind bars. A three-week pretrial hearing on Mangione’s fight to exclude evidence from his New York murder case ended Thursday after revealing new details about his December 2024 arrest in Altoona, Pennsylvania, steps prosecutors say he took to elude authorities for five days, and what h…

Santa keeps delivering for quantum computing investors this year. On Monday, shares of well-known quantum computing firms shot up by double digits, with D-Wave Quantum stock up almost 15% and Quantum Computing Inc. up 11%. Shares of IonQ Inc. and Rigetti Computing were likewise up roughly 10%. The exact catalyst spurring those increases is unclear. It may have initially been sparked in part by D-Wave’s Monday announcement that it would be attending the CES 2026 trade show next month. The Palo Alto-based company plans to showcase its “award-winning annealing quantum computing technology, hybrid quantum-classical solvers, and real-world customer use case…