Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Below, co-authors Ruth DeFoster and Natashia Swalve share five key insights from their new book, The Fear Knot: How Science, History, and Culture Shape Our Fears – and How to Get Unstuck. Ruth is a journalism professor and media scholar who teaches at the University of Minnesota, where she is also the Director of the Undergraduate Studies for the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Natashia is a neuroscience professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, where she teaches psychology and psychopharmacology. What’s the big idea? The Fear Knot explores our misguided human fears, from premature burials to GMOs, while explaining the real da…

The Senate passed legislation Monday to reopen the government, bringing the longest shutdown in history closer to an end as a small group of Democrats ratified a deal with Republicans despite searing criticism from within their party. The 41-day shutdown could last a few more days as members of the House, which has been on recess since mid-September, return to Washington to vote on the legislation. President Donald The President has signaled support for the bill, saying Monday that “we’re going to be opening up our country very quickly.” The final Senate vote, 60-40, broke a grueling stalemate that lasted more than six weeks as Democrats demanded that Republicans negoti…

Below, co-authors Suzy Burke, Rhett Power, and Ryan Berman share five key insights from their new book, Headamentals: How Leaders Can Crack Negative Self-Talk. Suzy, president and co-founder of the leadership consultancy Accountability Inc., is an organizational psychologist and seasoned executive with an exceptional track record in a diverse array of businesses, from a Fortune 20 technology company to a highly successful beverage start-up. She is also a National Institute of Mental Health scholar and member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches Agency. Rhett is the CEO and co-founder of Accountability Inc. and was named the #1 Thought Leader on Entrepreneurship b…

The headache of planning a ski trip stands in sharp contrast to the freedom of effortlessly slicing down the slopes once you actually get up the mountain. If you’re tired of worrying about squeezing all of that gear into your car or wrestling with chains in the cold, Uber’s latest option for getting you to the slopes is one way to go. The company continues to broaden the services you can book through its app, and now Uber wants you to not only hail one of its rides up the mountain, but also book your ski pass on the way. Through a partnership with Vail Resorts, Uber is offering an option to buy an Epic Pass through the app. The Epic Pass, sold by Colorado ski gia…

If you’ve ever taken a sick pet to the vet’s office, you know the pain of seeing your four-footed family member hurting. Then, of course, comes the secondary anguish of figuring how to pay for their veterinary care, which may have you wishing you’d ponied up for pet insurance. While Insurify reports that the average cost of a routine vet visit is about $138 for a cat and $214 for a dog, emergency veterinary care can run the gamut from $300 to $10,000, according to Marketwatch. The insurance industry touts pet insurance as the financial solution to the high cost of veterinary care. Like human health insurance, you pay monthly premiums so that your pet insurance wil…

Another week, another questionable TikTok trend. The latest internet sensation has social media users asking someone to film them dancing. Instead, the dancer clicks the flip-camera button mid-dance — filming the filmer instead of themselves. And while the trend is meant to be funny (and, of course, get clicks), not everyone is laughing. The prank, called the flip-camera trend, has resulted in hundreds of videos showing awkward, close-up faces of people who believe they are filming friends (or even strangers) circulating on the platform. However, some of the videos are awkward to view, and are resulting in some major embarrassment. That’s especially true when the vide…

Underperformance usually shows up in the guise of missed deadlines, low-quality work, or a bad attitude. This gets spotted sometimes, but not always, by a leader who then has to make a choice: when and how to tackle the underperformance. However, the problem can be exacerbated by acting too quickly: there is often a fierce desire within leaders to jump to action. They want to stop the badness, stop the ripples, and solve the situation as quickly as possible. But often, this means that they make assumptions about what is causing the underperformance and how to solve it without taking a little time to explore the real reasons behind the poor performance. The problem…

While I’m happy to extol the powers of the written word, sometimes you need a little something extra to get your point across. I’m not just referring to pictures, either, but also to annotations, flowcharts, and freeform drawings. These illustrative tools can be a powerful way to convey your message, whether by themselves or on top of an existing image. Allow me to (*ahem*) illustrate exactly what I mean, using a free tool that might end up being the image-editing, markup-magic-creating supplement you never knew you needed. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to di…

This week’s biggest business news is perhaps that the U.S. federal government shutdown finally ended; however, that ending didn’t come without more than a few noteworthy concessions. Meanwhile, a beloved coffee chain walked straight into a strike on one of its biggest promo days, and a regional grocer found a way to turn literal loose change into both PR and foot traffic. In the background, the tech world reminded everyone that hype cycles come with fine print. CoreWeave, one of the hottest names in AI infrastructure, delivered blockbuster revenue but still saw its stock sink on news of a delayed data center. IBM, facing louder rivals in quantum computing, rolled out …

New locker rooms. Rows of seats removed. Every last Real Madrid sign hidden from sight. These are just some of the measures the National Football League took to transform one of the world’s most iconic soccer stadiums for a matchup between the Miami Dolphins and the Washington Commanders. On November 16, the two teams will compete on the field of Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu, though the pitch won’t look anything like its usual self. To get the field ready, the NFL spent $2.32 million on a series of temporary renovations. The most fundamental change was to the playing surface itself. Since soccer pitches are shorter than American football fields, the playing field h…

AI has a writing style, or, at least, an alleged style. Tools like ChatGPT and Claude seem to communicate with a tendency toward formalism. The chatbots are earnest, sometimes too evenhanded or overly complimentary. There’s a noticeable lack of personal flair, and no deeply held opinions. According to Grammarly, AI language tends to evoke “repetitive phrasing” and “robotic tone.” Now, there are even AI buzzwords and phrases like pivotal and delve into and underscore. It’s the verbiage of instruction booklets for middle schoolers writing their first essays. In the age of AI, these helpful crutch words are now verbata non grata. Some people are now trying to avoid usin…

For technology adopters looking for the next big thing, “agentic AI” is the future. At least, that’s what the marketing pitches and tech industry T-shirts say. What makes an artificial intelligence product “agentic” depends on who’s selling it. But the promise is usually that it’s a step beyond today’s generative AI chatbots. Chatbots, however useful, are all talk and no action. They can answer questions, retrieve and summarize information, write papers, and generate images, music, video, and lines of code. AI agents, by contrast, are supposed to be able to take actions on a person’s behalf. But if you’re confused, you’re not alone. Google searches for “agenti…

Meta has prevailed over an existential challenge to its business that could have forced the tech giant to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp after a judge ruled that the company does not hold a monopoly in social networking. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued his ruling Tuesday after the historic antitrust trial wrapped up in late May. His decision follows two separate rulings that branded Google an illegal monopoly in both search and online advertising, dealing yet another regulatory blow to the tech industry that for years enjoyed nearly unbridled growth. The Federal Trade Commission “continues to insist that Meta competes with the same old rivals it has for…

AI can do your taxes now—sort of. The tax software giant Intuit just struck a new deal with OpenAI that will weave AI deeply into its portfolio of financial apps, including the ones many Americans use to file their taxes. In the multiyear deal, Intuit will pay ChatGPT maker OpenAI more than $100 million annually to implement its artificial intelligence models across products like TurboTax, personal finance manager Credit Karma, email marketing platform Mailchimp, and the accounting tool QuickBooks. Through the partnership, Intuit’s products will also become accessible directly through ChatGPT—the latest lucrative business integration for OpenAI. “We are taki…

Microsoft said Tuesday it is partnering with artificial intelligence company Anthropic and chipmaker Nvidia as part of a cloud infrastructure deal that moves the software giant further away from its longtime alliance with OpenAI. Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude that competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, said it is committed to buying $30 billion in computing capacity from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform. As part of the partnership, Nvidia will also invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, and Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion in the San Francisco-based startup. The joint announcements by CEOs Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Satya Nadella of Microsoft…

AI models have a voracious appetite for data. Keeping up to date with information to present to users is a challenge. And so companies at the vanguard of AI appear to have hit on an answer: crawling the web—constantly. But website owners increasingly don’t want to give AI firms free rein. So they’re regaining control by cracking down on crawlers. To do this, they’re using robots.txt, a file held on many websites that acts as a guide to how web crawlers are allowed—or not—to scrape their content. Originally designed as a signal to search engines as to whether a website wanted its pages to be indexed or not, it has gained increased importance in the AI era as some…

A Gustav Klimt portrait painting that helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust sold Tuesday for $236.4 million, a record for a modern art piece. Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” sold after a 20-minute bidding war at Sotheby’s in New York, where the flashiest item of the night was a solid gold, fully functioning toilet that went for $12.1 million. The 6-foot-tall (1.8-meter-tall) portrait, painted over three years between 1914 and 1916, depicts the daughter of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families adorned in an East Asian emperor’s cloak. It is one of two full-length portraits by the Austrian artist that remain privately owned. The work …

Time slows. The mind chatter quietens. Outside distractions dial down to a hum. You are at one with the task at hand. Congratulations, you’ve reached flow state. Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined the term to describe a state of complete immersion in an activity, one in which focus comes naturally and you’re “in the zone.” Think of the hours flying by as a painter gets lost in their art. Or when you’re juggling three browser tabs, the caffeine hits, and suddenly, your fingers start flying across the keyboard. Well, over on TikTok, a new trend has the internet sharing the hyper-specific ways they “genuinely” enter their “flow state”—the more chaotic, the …

Five years ago, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong did a bold thing. He banned political conversations at work. He made this decision because he knows what the job of a business leader is: to deliver for customers, employees, and shareholders. More recently, another executive did the opposite. Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s fame left the company as part of a row with its parent company over social activism. For Greenfield, political stances are not just part of the company; they ultimately outweigh everything else. This stark difference is very instructive at this time. Amid America’s rising polarization, what stance should businesses take? Many people who think…

You’ve just finished a strenuous hike to the top of a mountain. You’re exhausted but elated. The view of the city below is gorgeous, and you want to capture the moment on camera. But it’s already quite dark, and you’re not sure you’ll get a good shot. Fortunately, your phone has an AI-powered night mode that can take stunning photos even after sunset. Here’s something you might not know: That night mode may have been trained on synthetic nighttime images, computer-generated scenes that were never actually photographed. As artificial intelligence researchers exhaust the supply of real data on the web and in digitized archives, they are increasingly turning to synth…

Maybe your car broke down, your computer was stolen, or you had a surprise visit to urgent care. Emergencies are inevitable, but you can prepare to deal with them by building an emergency fund. “There are so many things that happen in our lives that we don’t expect and most of them require financial means to overcome,” said Miklos Ringbauer, a certified public accountant. The industry standard is to save three to six months of expenses in an emergency fund. However, this can feel daunting if you live paycheck to paycheck or if you have debt. But if you’re in either of these situations, it’s even more crucial to build a financial safety net that can help you in tim…

Before Wicked opened on Broadway in October 2003, the musical’s production team took the show to the Curran Theatre in San Francisco for what’s called an “out of town tryout.” The five-week run allowed the producers, writers, and director to work out the kinks ahead of the show’s Broadway debut. During the San Francisco run, University of Southern California film student Jon M. Chu happened to be home for the weekend visiting his parents, who owned a Chinese restaurant called Chef Chu’s in Los Altos, California, just outside Silicon Valley. Chu was the youngest of five children growing up in a family that spent their free time playing instruments or going to the balle…

The U.S. government on Thursday released a new crash test dummy design that advocates believe will help make cars safer for women. The Department of Transportation will consider using the dummy in the government’s vehicle crash test five star-ratings once a final rule is adopted, the agency said in a news release. Women are 73% more likely to be injured in a head-on crash, and they are 17% more likely to be killed in a car crash, than men. The standard crash test dummy used in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration five-star vehicle testing was developed in 1978 and was modeled after a 5-foot-9 (175-centimeter), 171-pound (78-kilogram) man. The fem…

“POV: You have a type B coworker,” TikTok creator Eric Sedeño posted last week. In the viral skit, the “coworker” rolls into the office past 10 a.m., pulling out a laptop with only 5% charge. “I went to bed at like 4 a.m. last night,” he confesses. “Seriously work is so hard today,” he complains before taking a nap on the couch. When he is working, music is blaring and he is simultaneously on Instagram Live. “When’s that big presentation?” he asks. (It’s today.) If you don’t have a type B coworker like this, it’s probably you. “Type b people EXPECT everything to work out fine for them and it always does,” one commented. “This is literally the person that ac…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. John Rogers, the chief data and analytics officer of Cotality (formerly known as CoreLogic), returned to ResiDay this year to give a two-part presentation: first, how risk—insurance, climate, construction cost—is reshaping the housing market, and second, how AI is about to turn property professionals into “superheroes.” In 2011, the firm was predominantly a U.S. mortgage-data company. Today, Cotality is a multicountry, multi-industry analytics platform that supports more than 1 million real estate agents, touches more than 8 out of every 10 U.S. mort…