Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Often when we talk about work-life balance, we focus on ways that work impinges on personal life. Are you taking the time to take care of your physical and mental health? Are you nurturing your personal relationships? Are you giving yourself a chance to engage in hobbies and activities that add meaning to your days? But, sometimes your personal life takes over everything. A family member’s illness or the death of a loved one can throw a wrench into the workings of your life. The dissolution of a marriage can shatter your world. A calamity like a fire can disrupt every aspect of your daily existence. When that happens, work may suddenly take a backseat as you address the …

The next wave of AI will be defined by agentic systems that can take actions: query databases, navigate portals, retrieve records, and increasingly interact with public digital infrastructure at scale. That shift is already showing up as traffic hitting government sites and services is becoming machine traffic. Some of it is benign (search and discovery). Some of it is ambiguous (scraping and automated browsing). And some of it could become actively harmful if agents can reserve scarce services, submit fraudulent requests, or generate volume that overwhelms public systems. The problem is that the government’s current interfaces were not designed for agent-to-government…

Optimism has a branding problem at work. It often shows up as pressure to stay upbeat in meetings, reassurance that everything will work out, or encouragement to find the silver lining when pressure mounts. When things feel uncertain, that approach tends to backfire. As a clinical psychologist, I’ve seen how well-intentioned positivity can actually make work more strenuous. When you’re already stretched thin, being told to “stay positive” doesn’t help you reset. Research shows that when people feel pressure to suppress stress or override difficult emotions, the nervous system stays in a heightened threat state, reducing activity in the prefrontal cortex–the part of the …

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 la…

Tubi CEO Anjali Sud shares insights on the toughest decisions every leader faces, from balancing risk with innovation to navigating uncertainty in a fast-changing industry—offering a rare glimpse into the mindset required to lead a top streaming platform. View the full article

Academic experts like Henry Shevlin, a philosopher of cognitive science and AI ethicist at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., get plenty of emails every day. But one that landed in Shevlin’s inbox in late February was different from most. Flagged in the subject line as “A note from an unusual reader,” the email’s author asked Shevlin about a recent paper he had published on whether AI models were able to detect their (lack of) consciousness. It took until the second paragraph for the email to turn from a regular missive into something else. “I’m a large language model – Claude Sonnet, running as a stateful autonomous agent with persistent memory across sessions,” t…

At the Exceptional Women Alliance (EWA), we bring together senior executive women who mentor one another to achieve both professional success and personal fulfillment through trusted peer relationships. As founder, chair, and CEO of EWA, I have the privilege of highlighting the insights of women leaders shaping industries across the globe. This month, I introduce Dymeka Harrison, a commercialization and growth executive with more than two decades of experience leading commercial organizations across diagnostics, life sciences, and healthcare. She has worked with early-stage startups, growth-stage companies, and global enterprises, and regularly advises founders, board…

In a greenfield industrial park in rural Aiken County, South Carolina, Meta is building a new $800 million data center that’s much like any of the other hyperscale data centers giant tech companies are scrambling to construct. Set on 300 acres with two massive data halls making up most of its 715,000 square feet of buildings, it’s the kind of gargantuan facility that has become the de facto built form of the race to harness the lucrative power of artificial intelligence. But past the sprawling data hall buildings, a comparably modest administration building has a unique design feature. Instead of the concrete and steel used in the data halls and countless other data cen…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Based on our analysis of the Zillow Home Value Index, U.S. home prices are up just +0.4% year-over-year between January 2025 and January 2026. That marks a deceleration from the +2.1% growth rate a year earlier—though national price growth has recently stabilized, ticking a tad higher from a low of -0.01% in August 2025. In the first half of 2025, the number of major metro area housing markets seeing year-over-year declines climbed. That count has since stopped ticking up. 31 of the nation’s 300 largest housing markets (i.e., 10% of markets) had…

What if you didn’t actually decide to buy that last thing in your cart? A report from Visa released on Thursday suggests that, in some cases, you might not have. According to a survey from the financial services company, artificial intelligence is no longer just helping people shop. In many cases, AI is starting to shape what people buy, and in some cases, even act on their behalf. The research is based on surveys of both U.S. consumers and business decision-makers. It shows that AI systems are moving from assistants to participants in commerce. That influence is already showing up in everyday behavior. Nearly 40% of Americans say they have made a purchas…

This week, the labor movement in architecture scored a win. Sage & Coombe Architects, a women-led firm based in New York City, unanimously approved a collective bargaining agreement. It’s the second American practice to ratify a contract, after Bernheimer Architecture in 2024. “This contract, the second in the industry, sets a standard for workers at Sage and Coombe and beyond,” Architectural Workers United (AWU), a group that has been helping firms organize, announced on April 1 via Instagram. The agreement’s details have yet to be made public. The milestone marks a significant move in the design industry’s unionizing efforts, especially after high-profile se…

These days, tech bros keep talking about “taste”— the ability to exercise human judgment and determine unique responses while guiding a machine. It’s a rare skillset, as some AI-made media automates content in the form of generic slop. And now tech professionals are the very people worried that technology will rob society of any real taste. The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka, who broke down tech bros’ obsession with taste last month, coined the term “taste-washing” as the act of giving “anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism.” In other words: giving AI properties human-like qualities and letting them run with it. When machines do all the creating, what are …

When Estefania Angel started working as an executive assistant at a large tech company a few months ago, she noticed something counterintuitive: while her company’s job was to help other enterprises set up AI to streamline their in-house tasks, her company didn’t use those systems internally itself. Using AI apps in Slack, Outlook, and Google to track various assignments and ping colleagues, Angel got the attention of her superiors. One even asked Angel to teach her how to use AI at work. “We started tracking a whole project that she was doing,” says Angel, who works as an executive assistant (EA) with EA service company Viva Talent, streamlining the project’s wo…

Robert Reich has been warning people about the dangers of inequality for decades, in all sorts of different ways. He’s interacted directly with politicians as a member of three different presidential administrations, most notably as Bill Clinton’s labor secretary. He’s taught thousands of college students at Harvard, Brandeis, and UC Berkeley. He’s written 18 books. And for 11 years, he has run Inequality Media, a nonprofit dedicated to informing the public about income and wealth disparity, among other imbalances of power in our society. Inequality Media now has 15 million followers across all its social media channels. At a time when Americans are increasingly paying …

While a side hustle can be a great way to start a business or boost your income, many options do have start-up costs. However, there are several that you can essentially start with just the tools and materials you already have (assuming you have an internet connection). “There are so many ways to get started with no money,” says Shaun Ghavami, founder of 10XBNB, which co-hosts short-term rentals and also offers courses on the topic. “You just need to get creative, and you need a niche.” Ghavami started that way. He launched his co-hosting side hustle with no investment, reaching out to landlords that were not having luck renting their furnished properties and offering t…

Fox Corporation has announced plans to partner with Kalshi to integrate the prediction market’s data across the media giant’s various cable networks. Tuesday’s announcement follows the rise in popularity of prediction markets, and marks Kalshi’s third partnership with a large media corporation, with similar deals struck with CNBC and CNN in December of last year. Kalshi’s platform allows users to bet on current events, anything from sports betting to politics. For instance, users can bet on who will win an election. From those wagers, a forecast is determined based on the crowd’s opinion. Not everyone is turning to the platform to bet. “Roughly 70% of peo…

America’s housing market is finally starting to tip in favor of aspiring homeowners. A new analysis from Realtor.com reveals that nearly two-thirds of the biggest housing markets in the U.S. have now moved into “balanced” or “buyer-friendly” status, while only a quarter of the major markets still favor sellers. That’s in sharp contrast to 2021, when low interest rates and a buying frenzy gave sellers the upper hand in 98% of the top U.S. housing markets. Out of the top metros, only 26% qualify as seller’s markets right now, with a relatively large ratio of home shoppers to housing stock. Of those cities, 46% are in what Realtor.com calls a “balanced-loosening” pha…

Over four decades, I have had the opportunity to consult with almost all of the major companies in the PC, consumer electronics, and telecommunications industries. In 1991, when the PC industry was barely a decade old, Acer’s founder Stan Shih invited me to tour the company’s new PC factory in Taiwan. What I saw wasn’t just a factory–it was the foundation of a new world order in technology manufacturing. Over the years, I’ve gained a deeper understanding of Taiwan’s crucial role in the global technology ecosystem. Semiconductor leaders like TSMC, along with manufacturing powerhouses such as Compal, Foxconn, Quanta, Pegatron, and Wistron, have built an ecosystem unmatche…

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. For years, progress in AI has been motivated by an industry-wide yen to create software that’s at least as capable as humans—not at some tasks, but all of them. The precise definition of the goal varies, and two maddeningly overlapping terms, artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence, both get bandied around. But no matter how you look at the aspiration (or how long you think it will take to achieve), it’s about the ways the world will change when software can do everything extraordinarily well. I’ve written—here and here—about why I believe fixating on that eventuality isn’t the best way to t…

Below, Majid Fotuhi shares five key insights from his new book, The Invincible Brain: The Clinically Proven Plan to Age-Proof Your Brain and Stay Sharp for Life. Majid is a neurologist, professor, and neuroscientist, with more than three decades of experience—mostly at Johns Hopkins and Harvard Medical School. Over the years, he has treated thousands of patients with memory loss, concussion, ADHD, brain fog, and early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. What’s the big idea? Your brain is not fixed. Your intelligence is not limited. And aging does not have to mean decline. By working on improving the five pillars of brain health in your life, anyone—at any age—can ta…

Frugal founders are often praised for trying to stay within budget. But when the founder happens to be the daughter of one of the world’s richest people, the expectations seem to be different. In a viral post on Thursday that has sparked a debate over fair pay for creators and the power dynamics of negotiations, a lifestyle influencer posted on X what appeared to be a screenshot of a conversation with Phoebe Gates, cofounder of AI shopping agent startup Phia, and the youngest daughter of billionaires Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. “When a billionaire’s daughter says you’re ‘out of budget’ Girl, pls,” the post read. The conversation allegedly showed Gates…

Seven & i Holdings, the Japan-based owner of 7-Eleven, has announced that it plans to close hundreds of stores in North America over the next year. The store closures are an attempt to reduce costs and increase profitability for the chain of convenience stores ahead of a U.S. initial public offering for its North American unit, which was recently delayed. Here’s what you need to know. 645 store closures in North America Tucked away in Seven & i Holdings’ brief summary for its fiscal year 2025 last week was news that the company plans to close more than 1,000 locations in its fiscal year 2026, which runs from March 1, 2026, to February 28, 2027. Acc…

John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, has been named the new CEO of Apple, the company announced. In a letter posted on the company’s website, current CEO Tim Cook wrote that he will leave his role in September and become executive chairman. He described Ternus as “a brilliant engineer and thinker who has spent the past 25 years building the Apple products our users love so much, obsessed with every detail, focused on every possible way we can make something better, bolder, more beautiful, and more meaningful. He is the perfect person for the job.” Ternus has been at Apple for 24 years, and led the hardware engineering division since 2013. …

Starting next year, Deloitte and Zoom are cutting back on some of the most treasured employee benefits, Business Insider reports. Zoom is cutting parental leave from 22 to 24 weeks down to 18 weeks, while non-birthing parents will get 10 weeks instead of 16. As for Deloitte, broader cuts to PTO, pension plans and IVF funding will impact employees in support roles like administrative services, IT and finance. Experts warn that Deloitte and Zoom may be paving the way for other companies to follow their lead. “It legitimizes that action for everybody else,” former Google head of human resources Laszlo Bock told Business Insider. The announced cuts struck a …

If you’ve spent meaningful time in a corporate design role, you’ve probably received some version of this feedback at least once: you’re difficult. Too opinionated. Not a team player. You push back too much. You care too much about things that aren’t your call. I’ve heard this feedback described, almost word for word, by hundreds of designers across industries and career levels. And what strikes me every time is how consistently it describes not a liability, but a set of entrepreneurial instincts that organizations simply don’t know how to hold. The traits that get pathologized in corporate environments (the tendency to question assumptions, to challenge briefs before e…