Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

I slip on a pair of Nike running shoes. I clip a chunk of metal to the heel, which wraps around my lower leg like a shin guard. The battery goes on last, hugging it all like a high ankle bracelet. In all of 30 seconds, I’ve turned my legs into robots. I’m wearing Nike’s new exoskeleton footwear, dubbed Project Amplify. My legs feel heavier for sure. But with each step, there’s a little kick in my heel. Like a cherry bomb exploding underfoot. And when it launches next year under a new name for an undisclosed price, Project Amplify will power runs up to 10 kilometers long on a single charge, increasing your energy output by 15% to 20% along the way. “Think of i…

One of my Bentley University students put it plainly the other day: “AI taking entry-level jobs is a ‘when,’ not an ‘if.’ But in venture capital, 70% of the decision is reading the founder and team—and that’s something AI can’t do.” That simple breakdown , 70% people, 30% product—flips the usual narrative about finance. For decades, finance was defined by numbers. Analysts lived and died by the spreadsheets. Today, AI can run discounted cash flows, parse a term sheet, and size a market faster than any junior associate. But if you talk to people in venture capital, they’ll tell you the math has never been the most important part. The numbers matter, of course, but the …

In 2025, Amazon, Dell, Apple, Google, IBM, Meta, Salesforce, and dozens more have doubled down on demands for employees to return to the office (RTO) at least three days a week, if not all five. And they’re getting exactly what they want. Now, when I say “exactly what they want,” you might be expecting me to paint a picture of workers happily returning to their daily commutes, overcrowded highways, cavernous or claustrophobic offices, constant interruptions, and extra expenses, and all of it resulting in massive productivity gains. That’s not happening, the productivity-gains part. And the longer we play this out, the sillier the performances of “productivity thea…

Meta’s Threads app is leaning into impermanence. Starting Monday, the platform is rolling out “ghost posts,” a new post format for sharing fleeting thoughts that automatically disappear after 24 hours. Think Snapchat or Instagram Stories—except, for text. Unlike regular Threads posts, replies to ghost posts go straight to the user’s messaging inbox rather than inline, and only the author will be able to see who liked or responded to them. It’s a subtle but significant shift toward private engagement within a public feed, providing a middle ground of sorts between Twitter’s public discourse model and Instagram’s close-friends Stories. Meta says the feature is a…

Apple has become the third company to see its market capitalization top $4 trillion, underscoring its role as one of the leading publicly traded tech companies and making it the second most valuable company in the world. Shares of the company briefly topped $269.53 soon after trading began on Tuesday, putting it above the milestone. Apple was the first company to top $1 trillion, $2 trillion, and $3 trillion in market capitalization. But Nvidia beat it to the $4 trillion mark, on the back of surging investor interest in artificial intelligence. That company’s staggering chip sales have boosted its stock more than 400% since October 2023. Apple’s march to $4 trill…

Below, Eric Becker shares five key insights from his new book, The Long Game: A Playbook of the World’s Most Enduring Companies. Eric is the founder and chairman at Cresset, an award-winning multi-family office with billions in assets under management. He also co-founded Sterling Partners, a value-added, growth private equity firm. With his long history of starting, backing, and nurturing companies, Eric advises founders, entrepreneurs, private equity partners, and ultra-high worth families. What’s the big idea? Companies that last not one generation, not two, but for a hundred years and beyond share certain things in common. It is no accident when a company en…

Last year Canva reworked its user experience and tools in a full-frontal attack on the productivity and enterprise markets now dominated by Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. Now the Australian company is going for Adobe’s jugular. Affinity—the British company Canva bought in 2024—is out with a new app that aims to sink Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign with a simple proposal: If you are a professional designer, here’s an integrated photo editing, vector illustration, and page layout studio seamlessly integrated into a single application, with a feature set comparable to Adobe’s apps and a fully customizable UI. For free. You know, free free. “Free for…

The market for obesity and diabetes treatments remains scorching hot, funneling billions in sales to Eli Lilly and fueling a bidding war over another drugmaker. Lilly said Thursday that its top-selling drugs, Mounjaro and Zepbound, brought in more than $10 billion combined during the recently completed third quarter. That made up over half of the drugmaker’s $17.6 billion in total sales. Separately, Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk announced plans to buy Metsera Inc. in a deal that could be worth up to $9 billion. That came more than a month after U.S. drugmaker Pfizer Inc. made a nearly $5 billion bid for Metsera, which has no drugs on the market but is developi…

When the new Chevy Bolt arrives early next year, it will start at $29,995, making it one of the most affordable new EVs in the U.S. It’s thousands of dollars cheaper than Tesla’s “affordable” new versions of its Model 3 and Model Y. It’s also significantly less expensive than the average gas car, and like other EVs, it’s cheaper to operate. GM faces major headwinds with the loss of the $7,500 tax credit for electric cars, and it’s scaled back production plans and cut jobs in response. But the new Bolt is so affordable that it could win over consumers even without the incentive. “We wanted to get that under-$30,000 number,” says Jeremy Short, chief engineer on GM’…

Imagine this: You’re scrolling online late at night and with just a few clicks, you can order gummies that promise to boost your sex drive, a cream claiming to rebalance your hormones, or even prescription drugs from a telehealth site that spent millions on a Super Bowl ad without any disclaimers or mention of side effects. The solutions seem endless, and like most things that sound too good to be true, they often are. After 25 years in biotech and 10 years spent squarely at the nexus of science and women’s health, I’ve seen how hype can often race ahead of science. Evidence-based treatments for women remain chronically underfunded and underdeveloped. It’s no wonder t…

“I always dream of the same mall.” So begins a recent post on the popular subreddit r/The MallWorld. The subreddit was first created in 2021, and currently has 10,000 monthly visitors detailing their recurring dreams of eerie, often empty spaces. The description reads, “Have you been to one of these common dream locations?” The post continued: “It has a very vintage feel to it. It always has warm amber lighting and wooden guard rails. It has 3 main floors, and one secret lower floor. “The lower floor is usually kept pristine, a time capsule of the 90’s. The stores are closed, but the merchandise remains. It smells like my kindergarten class did..” If this…

Have you ever opened a jar of Crisco and proceeded to slather it all over your body? I have, in the summer of 1992. I was just exiting sixth grade, and my friend was over for an afternoon of suntanning. When I reached for the brown bottle of suntan lotion, my friend stopped me, “Let’s go look for your mom’s Crisco.” “Crisco???” I said. “Yes, it’s how my older sister gets so tan.” Although I was suspicious that vegetable shortening was good for my skin, I silenced my doubts when I pictured her older sister in my mind—she was gorgeous, popular, and bronze. From a young age, we have an immature relationship with authority. Psychologists call this authority bias, whic…

More than six years after a Boeing 737 Max jetliner crashed in Ethiopia, the first civil trial stemming from the disaster that killed all 157 people on board the plane appears poised to move forward. Boeing has settled most of the dozens of wrongful death lawsuits that families of the victims filed against the aircraft maker after the March 2019 crash, but two of the remaining cases are scheduled to open before a federal court jury as soon as Tuesday. The trial in Chicago, where Boeing used to have its headquarters, isn’t expected to examine the company’s liability. Boeing already accepted responsibility for what happened to Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and for a…

I spent several years of my career in the uncomfortable role of middle manager. On one side, I had executives asking me why my team couldn’t “do more,” and on the other side, my employees told me they were stretched too thin. It was an endless tug-of-war. I was both the enforcer of company expectations and the advocate for my team’s needs. At times, my role felt at complete odds with itself. Executives push for efficiency and growth, while employees look for empathy and stability. Middle management, understandably, feels like a pressure cooker. The shifting role of middle management My role as a middle manager was many years ago. Today’s middle manager…

How do I control my emotions? I get asked that question a lot. As an emotional intelligence coach, I’ve received thousands of emails from readers over the years who get caught up in a cycle of emotional thinking, which leads them to say or do things they later regret. Often, this results in harm to their closest relationships, professional and personal. Here’s the thing: Emotions aren’t bad. They’re what make us human, and that’s a good thing. The key isn’t taking emotions out of the equation. Rather, you want to balance emotions and rational thinking, so you can look back and be proud of what you’ve said or done. To help with this, I recommend using simpl…

French authorities have warned they may block access to Shein after it emerged that the online fast fashion giant had been selling sex dolls with a childlike appearance. France’s consumer watchdog, the Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control, said last week it had discovered the dolls on Shein’s website, noting that their descriptions and categorization left little doubt as to their child-pornographic nature. The agency has referred the case to public prosecutors, and Economy Minister Roland Lescure said on Monday he would seek to ban Shein from the French market if such incidents were to occur again. “This is provided for by la…

The most obvious use case for generative AI in editorial operations is to write copy. When ChatGPT lit the fuse on the current AI boom, it was its ability to crank out hundreds of comprehensible words almost instantly, on virtually any topic, that captured our imaginations. Hundreds of “ChatGPT wrote this article” think pieces resulted, and college essays haven’t been the same since. Neither has the media. In October, a report from AI analytics firm Graphite revealed that AI is now producing more articles than humans. And it’s not all content farms cranking out AI slop: A recent study from the University of Maryland examined over 1,500 newspapers in the U.S. and found…

If the three years since the release of ChatGPT have signaled OpenAI’s dominance of generative artificial intelligence, it’s worth recalling that the company’s rapid rise would have been impossible without another Big Tech backer. In 2019, Microsoft agreed to supply OpenAI all the compute it needed, with near exclusivity. In exchange, Microsoft retained the right to use OpenAI’s tech until the arrival of artificial general intelligence, or AGI: the point at which AI systems are able to act like humans and respond to whatever task they’re given, regardless of whether they’ve been trained to solve it. As generative AI’s capabilities blew past initial expectations, t…

If sweating it out on a Peloton helps you stay fit, be sure to see if you’re affected by a major new recall from the exercise bike maker. Peloton issued a major recall for some bike models on Thursday, warning that the seat posts of affected models could break and potentially injure their users. The recall is based on three reports of seat post malfunctions. In two of those incidents, Peloton users were injured after falling off the bike. Though the number of incidents is very small, the recall applies to 833,000 units manufactured in Taiwan and sold in the U.S. The recall affects Peloton Original Series Bike+ units with model number PL02 and serial numbers that s…

If it’s one thing that can consistently break the internet, it’s pets. Take Pancho the diva: The 1-year-old English cream mini dachshund started his career early in the fame-hungry world of LA, and is now a celebrity with 148,000 followers on Instagram. “We created this personality of this dog that is a diva and a brat who loves the lavish, luxury lifestyle—but his poor little parents can’t afford it,” says his owner, Felix Levine, entrepreneur and host of the popular podcast Unlike Me. He and Serena Kerrigan, founder of the dating game Let’s F**ing Date, are seasoned content creators, so when friends joked about giving their new dog an online persona, the idea st…

If one founder is good, then more must be better, right? Not necessarily. New research shows that the benefits of cofounding a startup with strangers can be eclipsed by the risks. Yes, cofounders can bring their own perspectives, along with “access to wider networks, greater capacity, and access to funding,” says Monique Boddington, a management practice associate professor at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School, whose research includes early-stage venture formation and startup strategy development. And yet: “An increasing number of individuals have been setting up businesses with no intention of taking on employees,” she explains. That’s beca…

When corporate crises hit, the public looks to the CEO. From product recalls to workplace discrimination to customer mistreatment scandals, CEOs are often thrust into the spotlight and forced to apologize. But do the exact words they choose really matter? I’m a professor of marketing, and my preliminary research suggests the answer is yes. In fact, they can even move stock prices. A tale of 2 apologies Consider two examples from the not-too-distant past. When Samsung Electronics had to recall 2.5 million smartphones in 2016 due to battery fires, the company ran full-page ads in major American newspapers that said, “We are truly sorry.” Despite the apology, …

Every professional faces cycles consisting of booms, busts, restructurings, and reinventions. The difference between those who endure and those who fade isn’t luck or timing; it’s adaptability. In volatile economies, careers built on curiosity and agility thrive long after others stall. No market cycle lasts forever. Careers, like economies, move through expansions and contractions. It’s vital to continue upskilling, remain flexible, and adapt to market cycles. They are not always predictable, but the leaders who adapt, always learn, network, reflect, and rebalance will outperform the cycles. Adaptability Is the New Alpha In finance and beyond, resilience has …

Feed Me’s Emily Sundberg has launched her first foray into podcasting with Expense Account. The first episode, out today, features chef and author Alison Roman in conversation with host Jason Lee (formerly Semi Anonymous Restaurant Critic J Lee)’s, revealing her secret order at Keens, her new tomato sauce business, and the importance of keeping fresh flowers at home. “Expense Account is a food podcast for everyone. Insiders, outsiders, your mom, your dad, New Yorkers, Angelenos and also people from Florida (we love you). Anyone who enjoys eating food,” the show’s description reads. “It’s even for people who hate food.” The podcast marks Sundberg’s first step …

Amazon ushered in a new era for television advertising when it converted Prime Video into an ad-supported experience by default in 2024. By the middle of this year, some 130 million U.S. viewers were on Prime Video’s ad tier, watching between four and six minutes of ads per hour, according to an Adweek report. The move is part of the company’s long-term plan to dominate television advertising as viewership shifts from traditional broadcast and cable TV to streaming platforms. “The digital advertising landscape is rapidly evolving with streaming TV becoming mainstream,” says Kelly MacLean, VP of Amazon DSP, the company’s ad-buying platform. Under MacLean, Amazon’s…