Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Seventy-three-year-old Delroy Lindo just received his first Oscar nomination of his career—and he has advice for anyone who’s been in their fields for decades like he has. “The first thing that you have to come to terms with as an actor is being rejected,” the actor told The Wall Street Journal this week. That’s key for anyone trying to make it in Hollywood. But Lindo, who plays blues musician Delta Slim in Best Picture nominee Sinners, has been working in the industry since moving to New York in his 20s, and finally got his first Academy Award nomination this year (for Best Supporting Actor). He told the Journal that he wouldn’t be where he is today without trus…

When fintech company Block laid off 40% off its workforce last week, CEO Jack Dorsey explained the decision in a memo to employees that he also shared on social media. He was eliminating more than 4,000 jobs in the name of AI efficiency, he said, even though the company’s profitability was increasing. Though much of his letter was addressed to those who were losing their jobs, he ended with a note to those who’d be staying on. “What I’m asking of you is to build with me,” Dorsey wrote. “We’re going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. How we work, how we create, how we serve our customers.” But one Block employee who survived th…

Utah-based outdoor retailer Sportsman’s Warehouse may be closing some of its stores in the near future. “As part of the Company’s review of its stores, we have identified about five stores for potential closure due to underperformance and lack of profitability,” Sportsman’s Warehouse wrote in its Fiscal Year 2025 financial results press release. Sportsman’s Warehouse did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment on which stores it identified at the time of publication. Sportsman’s Warehouse has 148 locations spread across 32 different states. The brand is mostly centered around western states, with 17 stores in California, 14 in Washington, and 13 in U…

When I was in high school in the 1990s, my physics teacher pulled me aside with a question he couldn’t shake: “How do they get every computer in the world to talk to every other computer?” He’d seen how hard it was to agree on basics like electrical outlets or phone dialing standards. Yet suddenly we had this internet thing where a machine in Thunder Bay could talk to one in Tokyo in milliseconds. No central planner. No global treaty. Somehow it just worked. The real answer is less magic and more mindset: a systems principle called Postel’s Law. In plain language: Be strict in what you send; be generous in what you accept. When I talk to you, I should do my…

If you’re looking for a job or hiring, the question is no longer whether AI is involved—but how aggressively you’re using it. Generative AI has wormed into every stage of recruitment, from drafting applications and filtering candidates to AI-led interviews. It’s the wild west out there. (And it’s getting wilder.) Both employers and prospective employees are exasperated. Examples abound. Last year, Anthropic urged prospective applicants to not use AI systems when applying to jobs at the AI company, even asking them to sign a contract to confirm they read and understood the ask. Goldman Sachs has implemented blocks and employs AI detection software, while McKinsey act…

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 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 shift has…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. I recently talked with Lance Eaton, Senior Associate Director of AI and Teaching & Learning at Northeastern University and writer of AI + Education = Simplified. We traded ideas about what’s actually working. We came up with 10 specific, practical ways anyone who teaches, coaches, or leads can put AI to work. 1. Spark Richer Student Reflection Lance: Ask students to reflect through a conversation with AI rather than staring at a blank page. A well-prompted AI will keep asking follow-up questions, pushing students past “I didn’t…

Tomorrow is the quarterly staff meeting, and project director Ann knows she needs to be ready. The agenda is familiar. At 3 p.m. she opens PowerPoint, pulls up the last deck, swaps in tomorrow’s date, and starts updating the numbers. By 5:30 pm, the slides are done. But is she ready? She has a deck, not a message. She has data, not direction. Communicating like a leader isn’t about updating presentations—it’s about shaping moments. And those moments are won or lost long before you step to the front of the room. Here are seven ways managers can ensure they’re making the most of their moment. 1. Know your plan Ann’s preparation went sideways the moment she o…

Walt Disney Imagineering has revealed the inner workings of its latest creation: a real-life 3D version of Olaf, the funny snowman from Frozen, complete with a detachable carrot nose that kids can steal. According to Disney Parks, creating the snowman was a far greater challenge than standard bipedal humanoids, which rely on symmetrical weight distribution to stay upright. Olaf is a physical anomaly: He has a massive, heavy head perched on a remarkably slim neck, with two floating snowballs for feet and arms as thin as literal tree branches. This introduced equilibrium, mechanical, and thermal problems that the team had to solve. Adding to these design and techno…

For years, B2B marketers have chased a familiar formula: more leads equal more opportunities. Build the list, blast the message, and chase the pipeline. Yet despite better data, smarter tools, and growing investment in performance marketing, many organizations are still challenged when it comes to driving measurable revenue impact. The problem isn’t reach—it’s relevance. Most performance strategies were built for individuals, not buying groups. Modern B2B decisions are made by large, diverse groups of stakeholders spanning departments, seniority levels, priorities, and generations. And while most marketers now acknowledge this reality in theory, their engageme…

At the Exceptional Women Alliance, we enable high-level women to mentor each other to enable personal and professional happiness through sisterhood. As the nonprofit organization’s founder, chair, and CEO, I am honored to interview and share insights from some of the thought leaders who are part of our peer-to-peer mentoring. This month I introduce to youKarlyn Mattson, an award-winning retail C-suite executive and founder of The Leadership Advisors.She has decades of experience delivering profitable growth, transformative consumer and product experiences, omni-channel and digital transformation, and consumer centric value creation for brands such as Macy’s, Target, a…

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. On March 9, Jay Graber stepped down as CEO of Bluesky. She will become the social networking platform’s chief innovation officer, while Toni Schneider, a venture capitalist and former CEO of WordPress parent company Automattic, joins Bluesky as interim CEO. (I may be the last person left who also associates Schneider with Oddpost, an impressive browser-based email client he co-created way back before Gmail existed.) Graber explained her decision as stemming in part from a desire to turn the CEO role over to someone who can help scale up the platform. From November 2024 to January 2025, as Elon Musk’s role…

As of yesterday, March 12, hundreds of thousands of innovators, disruptors, and leaders began descending on Austin for SXSW. If you search “Tech and AI” in this year’s schedule, you’ll find 185 results. That’s more than double the 80 AI sessions in 2024, the same year I wrote a Fast Company op-ed about how women have spent decades building the intellectual foundation of AI while receiving almost none of the credit. It was also the year that companies with at least one female founder raised $38.8 billion in venture capital funding which is a 27 percent increase from the year prior, but still not close to the high point in 2021 with a raise of $62.5 billion. Two years …

My new favorite creator on TikTok is Apple. Yes, that Apple. On March 4, Apple launched its newest product, the head-turningly affordable $599 MacBook Neo. That same day, the company also deleted all of the content that once populated its TikTok page and started over. Its new videos—on view there are now 15—run the gamut from a clip inspired by Steve Jobs’s original introduction of the 1984 Macintosh to a cutesy animation of the Mac finder icon giggling and blushing. The videos have consistently debuted in batches of three, each corresponding to one of the brand colors associated with the Neo. This TikTok refresh is a clear play to cater to the audience that Apple…

I was walking down the street with my partner in London’s Camden neighborhood on Wednesday night when we saw an ad that said, “This app was designed to keep you hooked.” A finger could be seen tapping Instagram’s app icon above a claim reading, “45% of teens say they spend too much time on social media.” In theory, this was all straightforward messaging, but the ad’s final note in the corner threw us: “From Meta,” logo and all. We turned to each other in confusion, trying to make sense of it. The ad looked so professionally designed that we wondered, could Meta Platforms, a company that has repeatedly denied responsibility for its users’ mental health, be ad…

Every organization that produced an Epstein-related villain once called him a leader. Peter Attia. Larry Summers. The head of the World Economic Forum. HR statements issued. Leadership transitions announced. The story told as if it’s over. It isn’t. Not for the women inside those organizations, who are right now having a single quiet thought: Ah. That explains everything I’ve experienced. The subtle dismissals. The closed doors. The invitations that never came. The jokes that weren’t funny but nobody challenged them. The way one man’s voice filled the room and everyone else just . . . made room. And not for the rest of us—because the real scandal isn’t…

The doughnut chain that hardly needs an excuse to give away free doughnuts is, you guessed it, giving away more free doughnuts today. In honor of St. Patrick’s Day 2026, America’s favorite doughnut chain, Krispy Kreme, is giving away green doughnuts to those wearing the right colors. Here’s what you need to know. Get green for green Krispy Kreme usually has fun holiday-themed doughnuts for holidays throughout the year, and today, Tuesday, March 17—aka St. Patrick’s Day—is no different. The doughnut chain has been selling a selection of assorted St. Patrick’s Day-themed treats for the past week. But today, customers can get a Patty’s Day-themed doughnut at …

Everything is bigger in Texas, they say—including an economic boom there in recent years. Austin, in particular, consistently ranks among the fastest-growing metro areas in the country, and is vying to become one of the top startup hubs. Meanwhile, the state has successfully lured hundreds of companies to relocate to Texas in recent years. In 2024, Texas surpassed New York as the top employer of workers in the financial services industry, and it will up the ante with the opening of the Texas Stock Exchange later this year. This is the latest sign that the state, the eighth-largest economy in the world, is becoming a global financial and business powerhouse. “E…

We’ve all got an inner critic in our heads. You know its voice: it’s the one who berates you when you make a mistake, who peers over your shoulder and critiques your work unfavorably, or who tells you you’re useless and worthless when things don’t go to plan. Inner critics can thrive in work environments—especially fast-paced environments where there is little room for error, or where you’re responsible for people on your team. The question is how you interact and deal with your inner critic. Obeying them without question is neither sustainable nor healthy. But silencing or completely ignoring them isn’t recommended either, as this can easily lead to reckless or e…

The healthcare crisis in the U.S. is one marked by rising costs, coverage gaps, staggering medical debt, and attacks on access. While various groups have stepped up with innovative solutions to address these serious issues, experts say the crisis is likely to get worse in the absence of radical policy change at the federal level. Consider how Undue Medical Debt is tackling the $220 billion in medical debt that affects some 100 million Americans. Since the nonprofit was founded more than a decade ago, it has forgiven $27 billion in debt for 17 million people by buying debt for pennies on the dollar using donations. But the cumulative mountain of debt is …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. On Friday, Trumark Homes—which has been majority owned by Japan-based Daiwa House since 2020—announced that it has struck a deal to acquire a Seattle metro-based homebuilder JK Monarch. The deal is the latest in a recent string of U.S. homebuilder acquisitions by Japanese firms. Exactly five weeks ago today (February 13), Japan-based Sumitomo Forestry announced that it had agreed to acquire Tri Pointe Homes—a giant public homebuilder ranked No. 715 on the Fortune 1000—for $4.5 billion. Then on February 23, Stanley Martin Homes—which has been owne…

If you’re one of the legion of iPhone fans who can’t wait for the next major software update and all the new features it will bring, there’s some good news. Apple has revealed when you’ll be able to get a look at the iPhone’s next operating system, iOS 27—and you won’t have to wait much longer. Here’s what you need to know. Apple announces the dates for WWDC26 Apple has revealed when it will hold its next Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The conference, affectionately referred to as “dub-dub” by Apple employees, is one of Apple’s two major events throughout the year, and one of the tech industry’s most important. WWDC is an annual week-long event where A…

Three years (plus) after the arrival of ChatGPT, chatbots are morphing into AI agents. As generative AI models have improved and become able to reason in real time, the major AI labs, starting with Anthropic, have begun to shift their research focus from models that compose and comprehend text to ones that reason, use tools, and work autonomously. The first kind of agent that matured to the point of having real-world impact was an agent that can write, test, and document computer code. Coding agents, powered by language models, can understand plain language, which has democratized software development and made “vibe coding” possible. Products like Lovable and Bolt al…

Ryan Coogler, Zinzi Coogler, and Sev Ohanian, the founders of Proximity Media, share their top leadership tips for creatives. View the full article

This marks the eighth year Fast Company’s Best Workplaces for Innovators will recognize companies and organizations from around the world that most effectively empower employees at all levels to improve processes, create new products, or invent whole new ways of doing business. Honorees will appear in our Fall 2026 issue as well as on fastcompany.com. The final deadline for applications to this year’s Best Workplaces for Innovators program is fast approaching – Friday, March 27, at 11:59 pm PT. In addition to ranking the world’s Best Workplaces for Innovators, we will recognize companies in 19 different categories, , including a brand new category that focuses on…