Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

At SXSW this year, artificial intelligence was everywhere. Every panel. Every hallway conversation. Every prediction about the future of work seemed to revolve around the same question: How do we keep up? But the moment that stayed with me wasn’t about AI at all; it was reconnecting with the world of Jack Johnson. He took the stage not just as a “musician,” but as something far more compelling: a fully integrated human being. Before his success in music, Johnson was a professional surfer, then a filmmaker, and then a globally recognized musician. And in his recent documentary SURFILMUSIC, what becomes clear is that he didn’t abandon one identity to become another. He …

Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) could stay at 2.8% in 2027, the same as its rate for this year. That’s the latest prediction from The Senior Citizens League (TSCL) and mirrors 2026’s COLA. If enacted in October, it would increase the average benefits check from $2,024.77 to $2,081.46—a $56.69 increase. The TSCL finds the 2.8% increase concerning due to high costs of living, such as rents and mortgages. “The fact is that most senior households already get by on only about 58% as much income as their working-age counterparts, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a middle-class or working-class American who thinks the economy is doing well right…

Sunday has long been regarded as the day of rest: After a week of early wake-ups and diligently checking off to-do lists, there finally comes the one day where doing nothing is not only socially acceptable—but actively encouraged. Or so you thought. More and more Americans are now optimizing their Sunday as a means of self-improvement. This might look like light cleaning and calendar organization. Or meal-prepping while marinating in an avocado face mask. Rather than rest, Sunday is now a day to reset for the week ahead. While hardly groundbreaking, the idea has taken off online with almost a million videos tagged #sundayreset on TikTok. Searches for “Sunda…

Compliments come in many forms, and handling them well is an important part of building strong relationships and projecting a positive image. Sometimes a simple “Thank you” will do. But in other cases, praise may have a negative undertone, which you will want to respond to. Still others may be laudatory comments that you can build upon. Here’s how to respond to a broad range of compliments. 1. “I LIKE YOUR STYLE” The best and easiest answer to this compliment is “Thank you.” Whenever someone compliments you on your style (“I love your look” or “I love your purse/tie”), responding with “Thank you” shows grace and appreciation. Don’t undercut those complimen…

For digital nomads, logging on to work from a cafe, co-working space, hotel lobby or airport lounge is a way of life. Remote working has been made possible by reliable high speed internet and turbocharged by the pandemic. For some remote workers, that includes working from somewhere other than their home, perhaps because their company doesn’t have a physical location in their area, or because they don’t have an ideal home office setup. Working in public, however, doesn’t come without privacy and security risks. Here’s a quick reminder of precautions to take: Read the rulebook Hybrid or fully remote working is the norm for many jobs, so it’s a good idea to check f…

Two new experiments show that most people do not even consider that a personal message could be AI-generated, even when they themselves use artificial intelligence to write. To see how people judge someone based on their writing in the age of ChatGPT, my colleague Jiaqi Zhu and I recruited more than 1,300 U.S.-based participants, ages 18 to 84, and showed them AI-generated messages like an apology sent in an email. We split our volunteers into four groups: Some people saw the messages with no information about who or what wrote them, as in everyday life. Others were told the messages were definitely written by a human, definitely AI-generated, or that the source could…

Using AI in the workplace promises significant productivity gains. And using chatbots may make you feel productive, because it they designed to create engagement from users. But, you need to be more explicit about calculating the costs (and opportunity costs) and tangible benefits to your work. That will help you determine whether the AI juice is worth the LLM squeeze. Here are three key considerations. 1. Calculate your time spent using AI When people first started analyzing the downside of smart phones, one of the big data points that got trotted out was how long someone would remain off-task once they picked up their phone. Because apps on your phone are so …

It’s not just you. Workplace stress is at a breaking point and starting to manifest in some alarming ways. Overstressed workers are now crying, having panic attacks, and even using substances to cope with work stress while on the job in strikingly high numbers. A new report from Modern Health, a mental health platform offered as an employee benefit, surveyed on a random sample of 1,000 workers at companies of 250 or more employees. It found that employees are deeply stressed, feel largely unsupported, and that it’s all bubbling over to the point that it’s impacting their behavior at work. For many workers, AI fears are driving their stress levels. Two-thirds say…

Burger King’s slogans have long emphasized personalization, like “Have It Your Way” and “Your Rule.” Now there’s a text generator that lets you personalize its logo, too. A new Burger King logo font generator lets users customize the red, rounded letters that sit between the logo’s burnt-orange-colored buns. It’s by Pixel Frame, a website that makes album cover and logo text generators for everything from Drake’s discography to Dragon Ball Z and Donkey Kong. Just a few words will render big and bold in the logo generator, but the text will become increasingly squished and stacked as you add more text, with one line stacked on top of the other like hot-off-the-gril…

Golf fans are eagerly awaiting the start of the 2026 PGA Championship, which kicks off this week. From May 14 to the 17th, the biggest 156 names in golf will compete to earn the coveted Wanamaker trophy. Last year’s winner Scottie Scheffler, 29, who took home the trophy for the first time, will return as the defending champion. Other big names will include Rory McIlroy, who is coming off of two consecutive Masters titles and is trying for his third PGA win and seventh major title. Other star players to watch are Cameron Young, Jon Rahm, and Bryson DeChambeau. This year, the tournament will take place at Aronimink Golf Club in Pennsylvania, a location that hasn’t …

First you choose a partner, then you choose a genome? For this episode of FC Explains, Fast Company Senior Writer Ainsley Harris digs into the rapidly growing world of embryo genetic screening, including IVF startups like Orchid and Nucleus that offer parents the ability to select embryos based on genome sequencing. Proponents say this kind of genetic testing helps optimize health outcomes and prevent hereditary disease. Parents say it’s giving their kids the best shot at life. On this episode of FC Explains we dig into why some scientists have called polygenic embryo screening “modern snake oil,” and why others are calling for an urgent, society-wide conversation abo…

Intelligence is one of the most consequential human traits. It is also one of the most socially awkward to discuss. Few topics trigger as much discomfort, denial, or moral posturing. Suggest that IQ matters and you risk being accused of elitism, determinism, or worse. Yet the evidence is remarkably clear. Cognitive ability remains the single best predictor of educational attainment, even after controlling for parental socioeconomic status. Large-scale longitudinal studies and meta-analyses have consistently shown that IQ predicts grades, years of education completed, and academic progression across cultures. It is also the most robust predictor of job performance, wit…

All writing is autobiographical. Even if you’re not explicitly writing about your own experience, it shows up in the topics you choose, the details you focus on, even the things you leave out. Key example from my trove of nearly 3,000 articles here on Inc. over the years: a study I latched onto a decade ago about the single thing wealthy families do to give their kids a leg up on the world. The answer, drawn from University of Southern California research, was straightforward: They buy the neighborhood. The insight wasn’t so much about money as it was about what money makes possible. Stable schools, stable peer groups, and stable environments. The specific …

For most of the last century, we believed human potential could be measured through intelligence, and we built whole institutions around that belief. IQ was the metric. If you were analytical enough, technically proficient enough, quick enough on your feet, doors opened, schools rewarded it, employers screened for it, and entire industries grew up around identifying and elevating it. Then we noticed what intelligence alone couldn’t do. Technical brilliance without humanity tended to create distance rather than trust, and a generation of leaders who were brilliant on paper proved unable to inspire the people around them. So we elevated a second form of intelligence, em…

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has updated the public on ongoing Salmonella outbreaks linked to backyard poultry. Unfortunately, the outbreaks have continued to spread and have now infected nearly 200 individuals in 31 states, with children making up an alarming number of cases. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? As Fast Company previously reported, the CDC in April warned the public about a concerning Salmonella outbreak that had then spread to 13 states. The outbreak was alarming because those infected with Salmonella were found to have strains of the bacterium resistant to fosfomycin, a drug commonly used to treat the infec…

Below, David Epstein shares five key insights from his new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. David is the author of The New York Times bestsellers Range and The Sports Gene. He has worked as a senior writer for Sports Illustrated and an investigative reporter for ProPublica. What’s the big idea? Using deliberate constraints and simplification strategies helps you focus better, be more productive, and make more creative decisions. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by David himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book. 1. Make all your current commitments visible. At one genomics lab, the staff took the tim…

Online creators are giving their followers some unusual advice to help lower their flight ticket prices: head to the public library. Over the past few days, multiple viral posts have sprung up wherein creators claim that they were able to score major savings on flights (up to thousands of dollars, in one case) by booking their tickets on a public library computer rather than their own personal devices. “Yeah, so I just tried this, and it worked for me,” creator Ellyce Fullmore told her followers in an Instagram video posted on May 16, which now has nearly 250,000 likes. She added, “We got a flight for $500 cheaper from booking on the library computer. What in th…

As large language models seep into everyday life, some worry the technology could trigger a mass political realignment. Chatbots, the theory goes, can be shaped by training data and system instructions to privilege certain worldviews, and users who interact with them daily may gradually absorb those biases at scale. But Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan cautions against assuming such a future is inevitable. LLMs may be powerful, he says, but that doesn’t mean they’ll influence people in the ways we expect, or even in the ways their creators intend. There are several reasons an AI-driven political shift may be harder to engineer than it sounds. M…

Barnes & Noble has an incredible comeback story. In 2019, the American bookstore chain was facing bankruptcy, but it’s since returned to a position of growth: In 2025, the franchise opened 67 new stores across the United States, and 60 more are slated to open throughout 2026. But recent comments from the brand’s CEO have some social media users convinced Barnes & Noble is wasting all its goodwill. James Daunt, who took over the company in 2019, shared how he plans for Barnes & Noble to adapt to the AI era—and those plans have some book lovers rethinking their relationship to the brand. “We will stock them”: Barnes & Noble opens its arms to AI …