Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Back in November, Fast Company and Johns Hopkins partnered for the first-ever World Changing Ideas Summit in Washington, DC, an event that convened leaders across business and academia to engage with the ideas and innovations reshaping the future. Knowing we were heading into a new year that undoubtedly is bringing new challenges to every industry, we asked some of our speakers working in space, healthcare, AI, and the intersections therein, what would be top of mind for them in 2026: “We’re in a race against resistance.” Akhila Kosaraju, founder and CEO of Pharebio, is using predictive and generative AI to power drug discovery. The startup plans to develop 15…

A proposed billionaires’ tax in California has ignited a political uproar in Silicon Valley, with tech titans threatening to leave the state while Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom maneuvers to defeat a levy that he fears will lead to an exodus of wealth. A technology mecca, California has more billionaires than any other state — a few hundred, by some estimates. Nearly half its personal income tax revenue, a financial backbone in the nearly $350 billion budget, comes from the top 1% of earners. A large health care union is attempting to place a proposal before voters in November that would impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets of billionaires — including stocks, art, busin…

Chipotle is going for gold again with the return of its gold-foil burritos for the 2026 Winter Olympics. Starting January 15, Chipotle will offer a few Olympian-inspired menu items on the Chipotle app and online. Then in February, Chipotle will wrap every burrito in gold. For Chipotle, the Olympics are an opportunity to shake off a slump. Chipotle shares plummeted 19% in October 2025, and its operating margin was down 1% in Q3. The company hasn’t announced its full 2025 financial results yet, but sales are expected to decline (a reversal from February 2025 projections). Key segments of the company’s customer base—younger people and low- to middle-income households…

When the NFL and Apple Music announced Bad Bunny as the 2026 Super Bowl half-time show headliner, the choice surprised some. But to anyone tracking the data over the past few years, it was inevitable. In 2022, Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti redefined the market, driving Latin music’s streaming growth to new heights. It later became the first Spanish-language album nominated for Grammy Album of the Year. The takeaway is simple: When you have accurate, real-time data, you don’t guess where culture is going, you know. That kind of foresight is exactly what industries need now, especially as AI accelerates change at a pace that demands evidence, not instinct. In real time, …

Valentino, who died on Monday at 93, leaves a lasting legacy full of celebrities, glamour and, in his words, knowing what women want: “to be beautiful”. The Italian fashion powerhouse has secured his dream of making a lasting impact, outliving Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent. Valentino was known for his unique blend between the bold and colourful Italian fashion and the elegant French haute couture—the highest level of craftsmanship in fashion, with exceptional detail and strict professional dressmaking standards. The blending of these styles to create the signature Valentino silhouette made his style distinctive. Valentino’s style was reserved, and over…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Based on our analysis of the Zillow Home Value Index, U.S. home prices are up just 0.1% year over year from December 2024 to December 2025. That marks a deceleration from the +2.6% growth rate a year earlier—though national price growth has recently stabilized, ticking slightly higher from a low of -0.01% in August 2025. In the first half of 2025, the number of major metro-area housing markets seeing year-over-year declines climbed. That count has since pretty much stopped ticking up. 31 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (10% of market…

Every month, around two billion people see AI Overviews, Google’s AI-powered search feature that generates summaries to users’ queries. Now, a new study is revealing a concerning pattern among some of these responses: When asked health-related questions, AI Overviews appears to turn to YouTube significantly more often than trusted medical sites. Since its inception, AI Overviews has faced its fair share of controversies, from early reports of the product spewing nonsensical answers to a series of lawsuits from businesses and publisher groups alleging that the feature is damaging to organic traffic patterns. The most recent concern with AI Overviews emerged via an inve…

While Silicon Valley argues over bubbles, benchmarks, and who has the smartest model, Anthropic has been focused on solving problems that rarely generate hype but ultimately determine adoption: whether AI can be trusted to operate inside the world’s most sensitive systems. Known for its safety-first posture and the Claude family of large language models (LLMs), Anthropic is placing its biggest strategic bets where AI optimism tends to collapse fastest, i.e., regulated industries. Rather than framing Claude as a consumer product, the company has positioned its models as core enterprise infrastructure—software expected to run for hours, sometimes days, inside healthcare…

Whenever my wife and I go to watch a movie together, lately we tend to pick a new theater close to where we live that’s called 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku. There are reclining seats, you get free popcorn in a chill lounge when you arrive, and the supposedly best-in-Japan sound system was tuned by the late music legend Ryuichi Sakamoto. What’s not to like? But when we went to see 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple this past weekend, we realized it was only showing in the auditorium dedicated to ScreenX, a fairly new format that has been picking up some steam of late. I’d heard of it before but I hadn’t ever seen it for myself, so I was happy to check it out in the spirit…

Virginia-based Gerber Products Company is voluntarily recalling limited batches of Gerber Arrowroot Biscuits, a cookie-like snack meant for children 10 months or older. On January 26, the baby food and snack producer issued the voluntary recall due to the potential presence of soft plastic and paper pieces that “should not be consumed,” the company said this week. The material comes from a supplier of arrowroot flour that initiated its own recall, Gerber said. The company said it was no longer working with the supplier, though it did not name the supplier in its recall notice on Monday. No illnesses or injuries have been reported. Gerber says it is issuing t…

A decade ago, when Claire Burgi moved to New York City, she decided to cut meat out of her diet. The 33-year-old actor and audiobook narrator, who lives in Queens, grew up in California, where she’d seen the effects of climate change firsthand. She knew that meat consumption was a major driver of greenhouse gas emissions and that vegetarianism was a way to help conserve resources and reduce pollution. “When I was young, it rained a lot,” she says. “Now, it rains much less. All the fires are astoundingly horrific.” The December 2017 Thomas wildfire burned more than 280,000 acres in and around Burgi’s hometown of Ventura, just north of Los Angeles. “I just didn’t w…

Two in five Americans have fought with a family member about politics, according to a 2024 study by the American Psychiatric Association. One in five have become estranged over controversial issues, and the same percentage has “blocked a family member on social media or skipped a family event” due to disagreements. Difficulty working through conflict with those close to us can cause irreparable harm to families and relationships. What’s more, the inability to heal these relationships can be detrimental to physical and emotional well-being, and even longevity. Healing relationships often involve forgiveness—and sometimes we have the ability to truly reconcile. But …

Record cold temperatures are once again expected to hit a swath of the country this weekend—even plunging Florida into its coldest stretch of the last 15 years, potentially bringing snow to areas of the state that haven’t seen it in four decades. This arctic blast is actually a sign of climate change, and how more extreme weather happens in an increasingly warming world, despite erroneous claims by the president and others. There’s a difference between weather and climate Ahead of the winter storm that brought intense snow, ice, and freezing temperatures to about two-thirds of the United States earlier this month, President The President took to Truth Social …

Women in all parts of my life are encountering similar obstacles in their health journeys. The common thread is that when we don’t advocate for ourselves and ask the right questions, we don’t get the care we need. While volunteering as a women’s heart health advocate and immersing my public relations agency in the health innovation ecosystem, I’m constantly thinking about how to bring to light the issues—and solutions—that are all around us. “Women are dying because we aren’t marketing life-saving therapies to them,” said Rachel Rubin, MD, a urologist and sexual medicine specialist, and assistant clinical professor in urology at Georgetown University Hospital. She…

At a factory in Austin, a startup recently finished its first prototype: a row house it plans to replicate in cities nationwide to help with the housing shortage. Row houses—narrow, multistory homes that share walls with neighbors on each side—are ubiquitous in older neighborhoods from Brooklyn to San Francisco, but aren’t commonly built now. The American Housing Corp., wants to bring them back. “Row homes are an underbuilt category in the United States,” says Riley Meik, cofounder and CEO of the American Housing Corp. The company has developed a kit of parts that can be quickly manufactured, shipped to building sites in dense urban neighborhoods, and assembled, h…

On most golf courses, silence is sacred. At the WM Phoenix Open’s 16th hole, noise is the point. Every year, tens of thousands of fans pack into a stadium-like enclosure at TPC Scottsdale, turning a short par 3 into one of the most recognizable—and rowdiest—settings in sports. Missed putts are booed. Holes in one trigger cascades of beer. The atmosphere is closer to a college football rivalry than a PGA Tour stop. But as iconic as the 16th hole has become, its future wasn’t guaranteed by tradition alone. Behind the spectacle, the structure itself had reached a limit—architecturally, operationally, and environmentally. “We made the decision that that was as goo…

After more than two decades as a psychosexual therapist, I have learned to listen carefully for what people are not saying. When vulnerability is close to the surface, uncertainty shows up quickly. Am I doing this right? Do I belong here? What am I allowed to ask for, and what will it cost me if I do? At its core, psychosexual therapy is not really about sex. It is about how humans relate when the stakes are high, when power is present, and when much of what matters remains unspoken. It is about noticing how meaning is made in moments of vulnerability and choosing how to respond rather than react. What continues to surprise me is how familiar these same dynamics f…

Hello, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. “Programming, as it turns out, is just typing.” Talking at Cisco’s AI Summit in San Francisco on February 3, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made that pithy observation to sum up the phenomenon of people using AI coding tools to simply describe in plain language software they want to exist, with an algorithm doing the heavy lifting. The comment came during a wild, wide-ranging riff on how AI is changing the world, and Huang kept joking that his chatter might have been influenced by several glasses of wine. (Hey, he was the after-dinner speaker.) But even if alcohol-fueled poetic license was involved, the sentiment capt…

The logic behind electric vehicles benefiting public health has long been solid: More EVs means fewer internal combustion engines on the road, and a reduction in harmful tailpipe emissions. But now researchers have confirmed, to the greatest extent yet, that this is indeed what’s actually happening on the ground. What’s more, they found that even relatively small upticks in EV adoption can have a measurably positive impact on a community. Whereas previous work has largely been based on modeling, a study published this month in the journal Lancet Planetary Health used satellites to measure actual emissions. The study, conducted between 2019 and 2023, focused on Califo…

We’ve all opened our mailboxes to discover an unsolicited credit card offer (or three) inside. Although there must be people out there who take advantage of these offers, most of us simply throw the unopened envelopes in the trash. Yet simply tossing these pieces of snail mail can leave you and your finances vulnerable. Here’s why, and how you can get those unsolicited offers to stop for good. Why am I getting unsolicited credit card offers? While not as incessant as all the spam emails and text messages we get every day, unsolicited credit card offers are definitely one of the annoyances of modern life. The offers are sent by credit card companies via the U.S. Pos…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. When assessing home price momentum, ResiClub believes it’s important to monitor active listings and months of supply. If active listings start to rapidly increase as homes remain on the market for longer periods, it may indicate pricing softness or weakness. Conversely, a rapid decline in active listings beyond seasonality could suggest a market that is heating up. Since the national pandemic housing boom fizzled out in 2022, the national power dynamic has slowly been shifting directionally from sellers to buyers. Of course, across the country, that …

In the first week of February 2026, a social network called Moltbook became the biggest story in AI. Billed as “social media for AI agents,” the Reddit-like platform allowed autonomous AI bots to post, comment, and interact with one another while human users observed. Within days, more than 1.5 million agents had reportedly registered. They debated the nature of consciousness. They discussed whether they persisted when their context window was reset. Some proposed founding a religion for AI agents. Others outlined plans for world domination. While some commentators pointed out that much of this was just chatbots role-playing at the behest of their human owners, other…

One of the first projects Hyun Park spearheaded when he began working for South Korea’s entertainment powerhouse Studio Dragon was a dystopian sci-fi drama—much to the chagrin of his boss. “The CEO said: Koreans don’t do sci-fi,” Park recalls. “It’s a Hollywood thing. The budgets are too big. It doesn’t really make sense. It will never look real.” His boss had a point. Big, splashy science fiction dramas with expansive futuristic worlds and lots of special effects were a rarity in the Korean studio system. “For the past 30–40 years, we’ve done amazing family dramas and romantic comedies,” Park says. “We’ve always failed in sci-fi.” Park believes it’s time to chang…

Investors in Pinterest, Inc. (NYSE: PINS) are waking up to a wall of red this morning. The stock price of the popular digital image-sharing board has fallen off a cliff after the company reported its Q4 2025 results yesterday. Here’s what you need to know. Pinterest’s Q4 2025 results From a quick glance, Pinterest’s results for its fourth quarter of fiscal 2025 didn’t look too bad. The company reported some impressive gains in a couple of key metrics. Those metrics include: Total revenue: $1.32 billion (up 14% year over year) Global Monthly Active Users (MAUs): 619 million (up 12% year over year) However, despite those gains, the company’s $1.32 billi…

Here’s the sad truth about sports score apps: Most of them aren’t all that interested in actually telling you the score. After all, where’s the money in providing straightforward information like that? The modern sports score app has to do more. It must bombard you with banner ads and betting odds, implore you to create an account and opt into notifications, sell you some tickets, and show some videos to keep engagement up. The scores themselves are an afterthought. Fortunately, there’s an alternative that tells you the outcomes of every major sporting event without distractions. And the same sort of resources are available to bring minimalist magic to your ne…