Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

After a rough start to 2025 due to the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires, awards season in Hollywood is officially back in the swing of things. The fires, which broke out right after the Golden Globes, even caused some to question awards shows’ relevance in this time of crisis. Despite several delays, however, the Critics Choice Awards was held at Barker Hangar in Santa Monica on February 7. The following day, the Producers Guild of America Awards (PGA) was held at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles and the Directors Guild of America Awards (DGA) was presented at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills. The results from these three prestigious awards shows …

After-work drinks are a nice way to bond with colleagues in your 20s and 30s. But, as people get older, different circumstances can necessitate more planning, and new avenues for making friends at work. Take Olga Valadon, 54, whose last corporate role was as chief of staff at Deloitte. “Both I and the people I became friends with faced different pressures, whether from work or family commitments,” says Valadon. “We were running around all day chasing our tail to fulfill these needs, often leaving too little time or energy for anything that was just for us.” It’s no surprise that, as people age, family obligations become a significant barrier to making friends. Bi…

In today’s world, where success is often tied to financial accomplishments, status, and impressive job titles, Warren Buffett offers a refreshing perspective: True success is about the love we share. Yes, love. Buffett once said, “Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.” Buffett’s wisdom gets to the core of what matters, reminding us that, ultimately, life’s real currency is the relationships we nurture that lead to two-way love. Who do you want to have love you? Are you a leader, manager, founder, or CEO with scores of people looking at you f…

Neom, the insane urban development project in Saudi Arabia, appears to be sinking faster than the giant holes they keep digging in the middle of nowhere. Increasing delays and soaring cost overruns have led to project cancellations and a general scaling back of the original vision. Now a Wall Street Journal report has uncovered an internal audit that reveals evidence of deliberate manipulation of finances by management to justify rising cost estimates to investors. The sense of impending disaster is even more shocking when you look at the only crazy structure that is now standing in Neom: an unbelievably giant palace. New satellite images obtained by Business Insider …

My Non-Negotiable Mindset started with exercise, or more accurately, with not wanting to. That moment of resistance became a turning point in how I show up and follow through. I wasn’t lazy or undisciplined. I was human. And that’s when it clicked: if I only exercised when I felt like it, I’d never do it often enough to matter. So I made exercise non-negotiable, like brushing my teeth or showing up to teach a class. This commitment was to myself. No mood checks. No internal bargaining. No excuses. Four times a week, minimum. That was the contract. What changed wasn’t just my behavior; it was my identity. My thinking shifted from I need to exercise to I’m the k…

“Apple has a new CEO; he’s a hardware guy.” That quick distillation of Apple’s impending leadership change spread fast across Silicon Valley and the broader tech world. The company’s choice, John Ternus, rose through the ranks on the hardware side, taking over iPhone engineering in 2020 and all hardware engineering a year later. Analysts say Ternus’s elevation to succeed Tim Cook signals that Apple will enter the AI era with a family posture: using AI strategically to make its devices work better, but not stretching to incorporate AI into all of its services and businesses. While its peers are pouring tens of billions of dollars per year into AI research and d…

The Onion is developing a documentary for America’s 250th anniversary, called Birth of a Nation, a project CEO Ben Collins says reflects the company’s growing focus beyond satire articles and headlines. “For the 250th anniversary of America, we’re making a documentary called ‘Birth of a Nation,’ which is great,” Collins said onstage at the Fast Company Most Innovative Companies Summit, in a conversation with Jill Bernstein. The documentary is one of several projects underway at The Onion, following its acquisition by Collins and a group of investors in 2024. Before buying the publication, Collins spent years at NBC News covering extremism and misinformation on…

For decades, MBA programs, leadership trainings, and consultancies have told us that effective leaders share a set of “essential competencies.” You know the lists: empathy, strategic vision, humility, charisma, psychological safety, communication skills. These ideas get repeated in boardrooms and promised in executive education programs. But if these competencies were truly essential, then the leaders we most admire should have them. The truth is, they often don’t. This never made sense to me. In addition to my writing and research, I’ve spent the past 15 years running a secret dining experience called the Influencers Dinner. We’ve hosted close to 4,000 Olympians, Nob…

Elon Musk’s loss in his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, decided on Monday by a jury and upheld by a judge, wasn’t the only damaging revelation to emerge from the California courtroom. The two-week trial also punctured the carefully managed public images of some of the most prominent figures shaping AI for hundreds of millions of people. Whether it was Musk’s combative texts to Altman threatening to make “[Altman and Brockman] the most hated men in America” if OpenAI refused to settle, co-defendant Greg Brockman’s painfully earnest diary entries about becoming a billionaire (“Financially, what will take me to $1B?”), or Mira Murati’s anxious messages to Microsof…

In a seismic shift for one of television’s marquee events, the Academy Awards will depart ABC and begin streaming on YouTube beginning in 2029, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Wednesday. ABC will continue to broadcast the annual ceremony through 2028. That year will mark the 100th Oscars. But starting in 2029, YouTube will retain global rights to streaming the Oscars through 2033. YouTube will effectively be the home to all things Oscars, including red-carpet coverage, the Governors Awards, and the Oscar nominations announcement. “We are thrilled to enter into a multifaceted global partnership with YouTube to be the future home of the…

There’s Blue Sky and then there’s Bluesky. Blue Sky, a paper goods company founded 16 years ago, appears to be seeing a massive bump in traffic to its website, www.bluesky.com, thanks to the newfound popularity of the social media platform of a nearly identical name. Blue Sky’s website saw 215,100 visitors in March of this year compared to 56,300 visitors in March of 2024, marking a 282% increase in visits, according to data from digital market intelligence firm Similarweb. At the same time, Bluesky, the X competitor hosted at bsky.app, saw a 864% growth in visitors. In March 2025, Similarweb tracked 169.8 million visitors, compared to 17.6 million in March 20…

It’s no secret that raising kids in the U.S. has become grossly expensive. The price of childcare alone has ballooned over the past decade, with many families reporting that it costs them at least a quarter of their annual income. Across many states, families need to earn an average of $180,000 to comfortably afford infant care; the high cost of living in states like California and New York can require an income exceeding $250,000. An increasing burden on families A new analysis by the online lending marketplace LendingTree captures why so many families are struggling to manage the enormous cost of having children. The study found that since 2023, the annual cost o…

Members of the Sackler family who own OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma must pay billions of dollars to settle a flood of lawsuits over the harms of opioids, under a new deal that was formally approved by a federal bankruptcy judge on Tuesday. The Sackler family must contribute up to $7 billion over 15 years. Most of the money is to go to government entities to fight the opioid crisis, which has been linked to 900,000 deaths in the U.S. since 1999. Thousands of victims of the opioid epidemic could be paid thousands of dollars each, with a portion of the money distributed next year to some people who had OxyContin prescriptions and their survivors. “This plan is no…

Padel has taken the sports world by storm. In a smaller but growing circle, it’s also become a way to date. Much of that runs through Playtomic, a booking app for racquet sports where players join “open matches” with strangers, chat through the app, and meet people they wouldn’t otherwise encounter. For some, those connections carry off the court. “People are meeting each other on the court . . . [and then] grabbing a beer or coffee from the grounds,” says Pro Padel League CEO Michael Dorfman. That kind of interaction is exactly what the app Playtomic is designed to facilitate, and increasingly, to scale. In 2017, co-founder Pablo Carro set out to solve a …

When deciding if something is worth the effort, whether you’ve already exerted yourself or face the prospect of work, changes your calculus. That’s what we found in our new research, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. When you consider a future effort, more work makes the outcome less appealing. But once you’ve completed the work, more effort makes the outcome seem more valuable. We also discovered that hiding behind this general principle of timing there are individual differences in how future and past effort shapes people’s value for the fruits of their labor. What’s it worth to you? In our experiment, we gave participants a choice…

China produces 75% of the world’s batteries. South Korea and Japan control much of the remaining supply chain. With tariffs looming over the industry, the U.S. is in a unique position, having both urgency and opportunity to strengthen domestic battery production for myriad uses. The reality is that American battery manufacturers lag their Asian counterparts. Companies here are attempting to catch up by rushing to follow Asia’s manufacturing formula, but that strategy won’t hold up in the long term. The only way to surpass these larger Asian competitors is to move on from outdated manufacturing methods and materials and focus on what defines American leadership: innov…

In September 2025, the nation received its latest report card on 12th-grade math from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. These results should be a wake-up call for any American concerned about the future of education and workforce development in the United States. The findings showed that 78% of 12th graders were not proficient in mathematics, with more students than ever falling below the math proficiency benchmarks established by the National Center for Education Statistics. This widening skills gap signals serious trouble ahead for the American workforce. As the future of work becomes increasingly dependent on STEM skills, we are failing to equip millions…

“The purpose of computers is human freedom.” – Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) The computer is as emblematic of the American dream as the automobile. Perhaps it’s only natural that Apple, HP, Adobe, Google, and Amazon were each launched out of a garage. It was inside the garage that the modern era of personal computers was born, where anyone could own the power to calculate millions, and then billions of processes per second. PCs are a tool designed to move us faster, with a hood you can pop open to soup up. We insist that our computers speed up every year if only because it’s proof of progress. The very term “personal computer” promises libert…

Your pennies are now collector’s items. The last penny was minted Wednesday at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, spelling the end of America’s longest-running coin design. More than Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe or Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, it’s sculptor and medalist Victor David Brenner’s profile of Abraham Lincoln on the humble penny that’s actually believed to be the most-reproduced piece of art in the history of the world: the U.S. Mint estimates some 300 billion pennies remain in circulation. And even though no new pennies will be minted, the coin will remain legal tender—good news for those inclined to give a penny, take a penny at their local gas station. …