Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

I still remember the thrill I felt in 2013 when I got the chance to interview IBM’s Watson team. Two years earlier, it had competed on the popular game show Jeopardy! and beaten human champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. After that interview, I wrote an article for Forbes arguing that Watson would inaugurate a new era of cognitive collaboration. As I look back now, more than a decade later, the article holds up remarkably well. I compared learning to collaborate with AI to pilots learning to “fly by wire,” using automated rather than manual controls. We still have pilots, of course, but they don’t actually fly planes anymore. They manage the systems that fly the p…

Despite what Timothée Chalamet may think, the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Richard Wagner’s epic Tristan und Isolde is generating a lot of buzz this season. That’s thanks in no small part to director Yuval Sharon’s bold choices, which include cutting-edge video projections and an immersive set design by Es Devlin. Sharon believes it is necessary to be forward-thinking, especially since the arts are facing a hard economic reality. He also believes it’s what helped drive the production’s impressive ticket sales. “People all saw that there is something new is being attempted here that you’ve just got to see,” he tells Fast Company. “I think that is its own…

Pop star Zara Larsson is the internet’s newest it girl. After a wave of viral hits, including her latest album’s title track “Midnight Sun” and her feature on PinkPantheress’ “Stateside” remix, the Swedish singer cemented herself as the next big thing in pop music. But fame doesn’t come without controversy, as Larsson learned when she revealed to her fanbase that she uses generative AI. The discourse began when Larsson posted about watching AI-generated content on TikTok. Larsson first reposted an image from the account Ai Fruit Stories, a page posting AI animations of—you guessed it—drama between anthropomorphic foods. Larsson then posted a selfie with the c…

A few years ago, the reusable water bottle transformed from a humble utilitarian good into a status-signaling piece of arm candy. On TikTok, popular creators were decking out their water bottles with custom accessories and add-ons. Out in the real world, people were coordinating their water bottle colors with their activewear sets. Some consumers were even willing to drop hundreds of dollars for a “luxury” hydration experience. It was a full-on war of the water bottles, and there was a clear leader in the pack of drinkware brands vying for attention: Stanley 1913. For Stanley, a subsidiary of the parent company PMI WW Brands, the great water bottle wars were a busine…

Innovation isn’t a spark—it’s a sustained pursuit. Meet Google, Proximity Media, Google, Reddit, Unwell and Tubi—the teams turning bold vision into daily discipline, redefining what it takes to lead, create, and stay ahead. View the full article

Most people use AI like a search engine: type a question, get an answer. It’s an easy, well-understood use case for tools like Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT. But for solopreneurs, the real value is in setting up dedicated projects with a lot of background information about your business. Most AI tools let you create project workspaces where you can add context about who you are and what you do. You can attach relevant files, and keep the conversation focused on one specific idea or area of your business. I have 23 AI projects in Claude for everything from strategic planning to building a website. Some are used a few times per month, while others I rely on almost …

A New Mexico jury determined Tuesday that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its social media platforms, a verdict that signals a changing tide against tech companies and the government’s willingness to crack down. The landmark decision comes after a nearly seven-week trial, and as jurors in a federal court in California have been sequestered in deliberations for more than a week about whether Meta and YouTube should be liable in a similar case. New Mexico jurors sided with state prosecutors who argued that Meta — which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp — prioritized profits over safety, and v…

Generative AI is seemingly becoming more and more entrenched in daily life, with built-in tools making it near impossible to avoid across platforms, not to mention the AI-generated content flooding apps like X, TikTok, and Instagram. At every turn, the technology’s critics have shouted their concerns from the rooftops, including the environmental havoc wrought by data centers to the damage AI can do to creative industries. Now, that crowd has something to celebrate: the end of OpenAI’s video generation platform Sora. On Tuesday, March 24, OpenAI announced it was shutting down Sora, its AI-first TikTok clone, just months after its launch in September of 2025. “…

Making the move to management is not for every employee, yet many think it’s the only option for climbing the ladder. There’s an art to coaching individual contributors who either want to take that step, or offering a promotion to someone you think is ready. It’s important to approach this not just as an opportunity, but a teachable moment. We asked our Fast Company Impact Council members how they coach team members to make this move and got much wise counsel in return. Their ideas might improve how you approach this with your employees. 1. TRUST YOUR PEOPLE I tell them I am trusting them, and in turn, they need to trust their people. Trust is giving someone an ass…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Florida’s particularly intense overheating during the Pandemic Housing Boom is the key reason for its downside pricing vulnerability. While U.S. home prices rose +41% between March 2020 and June 2022, Florida home prices surged +51% over the same period—leaving some parts of the state significantly overvalued. Only, it takes a large enough shift in the supply-demand equilibrium for that vulnerability to manifest into falling prices. Of course, over the past three years, 5 factors have come together to create a supply-demand equilibrium shift large en…

There is a particular kind of leadership failure that occurs when a leader transitions into a new high stakes role. It’s tricky at first, because it doesn’t look like failure. No one is being fired. The leader feels productive, even indispensable. But below the surface, something has quietly broken. Talented people are no longer making decisions on their own. The team, once confident and self-directed, has learned to wait. An escalation culture is forming, and it is more common, and more costly, than most organizations acknowledge. The damage accumulates in layers. Disengaged employees cost the global economy an estimated $8.8 trillion in lost productivity annually, a…

Across the top floors of an Amazon warehouse in Garner, North Carolina, about 10 miles south of Raleigh, the robots are already crowding out human workers. A sprawling robotic system in the middle of one floor specializes in stowing items, which involves picking up a pack of paper towels or a Stanley tumbler and making space for it in a storage bin—a complex task for a robot. The humans who work among them are left to mill about the perimeter of the floor. Few human workers are welcome on another floor populated by robots, aside from the technicians who maintain them. At this warehouse, known as RDU1, the workers have grown accustomed to robots buzzing around th…

It’s finally happening. The Artemis II mission—returning humans to the lunar neighborhood for the first time in more than 50 years—is set to launch on April 1 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida during a two-hour window that opens at 6:24 p.m. (EDT), with additional launch opportunities through April 6. The first crewed Artemis mission will send NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day journey around the moon. Objectives include testing the Orion spacecraft’s life support systems in situ for the first time with people, gathering additional data on how spaceflight affects…

A woman is facing backlash after allegedly calling ICE on construction workers who were finishing up a roofing job at her home in Cambridge, Maryland. In a video, recorded and livestreamed on Facebook by Bryan Polanco, a co-worker with permanent residency, from the roof of the property, federal agents can be seen waiting on the lawn for the workers. X account @LongTimeHistory, which posted a clip from the video, alleges the woman owed the workers $10,000. In the video, which now has millions of views, Polanco says: “We came to fix this lady’s house, and she’s the one who turned us in. Fixing up her house and still with hatred in her heart.” Polanco repeated this …

When professionals hit their cognitive limit, most people assume the problem is lack of time or energy. But in reality, overwhelmed people are taking more action than ever. When overwhelm hits, they start doing even more: more lists, more reorganizing, more inbox management, more clicking between tabs. They are busy, visibly productive, heads down for hours, yet at the end of the day the most important work still hasn’t moved. The productivity mistake almost everyone makes when they’re overwhelmed comes down to taking the wrong action while feeling certain the whole time that they’re taking the right one. A 2025 managerial study found that digital fatigue and cogn…

American Express is expanding its airport lounge network with a new Centurion Lounge planned for Boston, a second Sidecar concept coming to Charlotte, and a major expansion of its existing space at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. The moves highlight how the credit card and financial services company is investing in both larger flagship lounges and smaller spaces designed for travelers with limited time before boarding. “American Express has long been at the forefront of the airport lounge experience, and we continue to build on that legacy and raise the bar as we grow our network,” Audrey Hendley, president of American Express Travel, said in a press rele…

In his very public standoff with the Pentagon recently, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI should never be used to kill without humans involved. The technology is capable, he said. What it isn’t capable of is handling the unexpected, the messy reality that no algorithm can plan for. That lesson is true in war and in almost every corner of work and life. A few weeks ago, AI seemed unstoppable. Now, nearly every organization I speak with is struggling with reliability, usability, and measurable impact. The reason is simple. These models excel in controlled conditions, but they falter in the real world. That gap, what we call the “execution frontier,” is where hum…

The constant race on the work treadmill doesn’t just steal your time. It systematically decays every relationship you have. During a recent keynote, I asked leaders in the room a simple question: “How many of you have cancelled plans with someone you care about, family, friends, a partner, because something came up at work?” Nearly every hand went up. Then I asked: “How many of you have done it more than once this month?” Most hands stayed up. There were a few nervous laughs. Recognition ripples through the room. These aren’t disengaged leaders. They’re high performers who genuinely believe they’ll make it up later. They won’t. And here’s what most don…

With last weekend’s opening of World of Frozen in the renamed Disney Adventure World park, Paris became the new leader in advanced technology among the company’s theme parks. It’s a title that shifts hands frequently, but with its robotic Olaf and a new nighttime show that blends airborne and water drones with fountains, fire, and water walls, Adventure World is a technological marvel. Disney tends to downplay the focus on technology in its park attractions. Workers and executives at Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI) see the technology as a way to evoke emotion, their primary goal. And with a growing arsenal of tools at their disposal, from AI to powerful game engines (a…

Most organizations think they have a productivity problem. They don’t. They have a work design problem. I’ve spent decades studying how people solve problems and take action, and the same pattern keeps showing up. Productivity dips, so leadership responds the way they always do: new tools, redesigned workflows, and an engagement initiative with a catchy name. And it works, but only for a while. Teams rally around the new process. Leaders feel good about the momentum. Then, a few months later, the same questions come back. Why does the work still feel harder than it should? Why are capable, committed people running on fumes? And typically, motivation is…

At first, he appeared in the top corner of a multi-slide TikTok post. Then he was spotted demurely relaxing in a lawn chair on a livestream. Finally, on March 30, Apple’s new mascot, nicknamed “Finder Guy,” made his debut—and the internet has instantly become enamored with him. Finder Guy appeared as part of the rollout for Apple’s MacBook Neo, a colorful, affordable laptop marketed to younger consumers. For the Neo campaign, Apple introduced an entirely new TikTok brand persona on March 4, clearly making a play to capture Gen Z and Gen Alpha viewers by combining trending aesthetics with Apple’s high-design point of view. Popular videos have included a brain-ting…

Today, April 6, 2026, is Easter Monday. It’s the final part of the long Easter Weekend, which runs from Good Friday through today. In several countries around the world, including Canada and Australia, Easter Monday is a public holiday. But what about here in America, and what stores and institutions are closed for the day? Here’s what you need to know. Is Easter Monday a national holiday? No. Although Easter Monday is observed as a national holiday in dozens of countries worldwide, it is not a national holiday in the United States. This means that federal agencies—at least those not affected by the ongoing partial government shutdown—will operate as usua…

Something I live by in my role: departmental success means nothing unless the entire company is making progress toward its goals. That thinking changes everything about how I approach my job—from the metrics I care about to the conversations I have with the CEO and leadership team. I’ve moved beyond operating within the confines of a title or a narrowly defined scope. The lines between departments should be artificial, and what truly matters is taking ownership of the company’s success. Historically, the chief marketing officer (CMO) position was often confined to brand management, campaigns, and lead generation. Critical drivers like revenue, customer retenti…

Over the past few days, new billboards have slowly been popping up along a 130-mile stretch of desert into Indio, California. One features a giant image of a crying face emoji; another is a picture of an unexplained blob; a third shows an edit of the Mona Lisa sipping out of a delicate tea cup. Each of these eye-catching visuals is an advertisement for a performance at this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Coachella 2026 takes place over two weekends: April 10 through 12 and April 17 through 19. And while billboard advertising has been a hallmark of the lead-up to the festival almost since its inception, it’s become increasingly intense in recent years…

The spring bloom of cherry blossoms is a stunning sight. Across Japan, Korea, and places like Washington, D.C., the trees burst with dense, pink flowers for just one or two weeks, bringing millions of tourists. But climate change is threatening these blooms. As the planet warms, our winters are getting milder. And those mild winters can delay the flowering of cherry blossom trees by up to 32 days, according to a new study by researchers at the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute in Kyushu, Japan, and at Boston University. Without enough cold weather, the trees don’t know that winter has passed, and so they don’t know to come out of their winter do…