Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

During college, a friend convinced me to take an improv comedy class. An introvert by nature, I was way out of my depth. On the first day, I was so nervous I thought I might faint. But I ended up loving it—and learning a lot. In addition to silly warm-ups to get rid of inhibitions (zip, zap, zop, anyone?), I discovered the magic of “Yes, and . . .” In improv, “Yes, and” is more than just a phrase; it’s a mentality—to accept whatever idea or proposition is thrown at you, no matter how outlandish, rather than shutting it down. This mantra helped the flow of our improv performances, but it turned out to be a great life lesson as well. From that point on, I tried practici…

Floor tiles designed to block cellphone signals. Special window film to ruin the photos of overhead drones. A bevy of hidden electronic jamming devices. This might sound like the arsenal of a high-tech spy, but it’s actually just a few of the trappings required to keep a conclave secret in 2025. In the wake of Pope Francis’s death and funeral this weekend, the Catholic Church is now in a high-stakes race to prepare for the papal conclave, the traditional ceremony that will determine the next pope. On May 7, around 135 Roman Catholic cardinals will be sequestered in the Sistine Chapel for a series of ballot votes to decide who will inherit leadership of the church—a pr…

Smartphones have been around long enough that, to the casual observer, their designs seem to have hit a plateau. And on a functional level, that’s more or less true — we’re all essentially holding the same six-inch-ish rectangle, aside from the occasional foldable exception. But the maturity and ubiquity of smartphones have sparked a new phenomenon: the return of trends in cycles, much like fashion. For example, most phones released in the past few years have flat sides, like the iPhone 4 from 2010. Five years ago, almost all those sides would have been curved. Flat edges aren’t a new invention — they’re just what’s trending again. But this year brings a surprisin…

Most people think of wisdom as an arrival. You accumulate enough experience or perspective, then you get there. You become the sage. And stop making mistakes. They’ve got it completely backward. The wisest or smartest people I know are still making mistakes. They’re just much better at noticing them, sitting with them, and learning from them. “Let’s never speak of this again” is not a thing for them. Wisdom is a practice. And failure is the training. Experience alone is not enough. You can accumulate all the experiences in life and still deflect, rationalize, or tell yourself a comforting story in your head. Some people even think of their mistakes as someon…

In the entertainment industry, as in life, change is the only constant. It wasn’t that long ago that streaming services such as Netflix were the outsiders making waves and altering the way audiences watched movies. Today, there’s a new kid on the block rapidly growing in popularity. Vertical dramas, essentially a 90-minute soap opera broken down into one-minute episodes viewed—you guessed it—vertically on smartphones, are here to shake things up even further. (I know this firsthand as an actor who has recently worked on some of these projects.) Joey Jia, the CEO of Crazy Maple Studios, is at the forefront of this movement. His content creation company was named o…

Austria’s governing coalition on Friday announced plans to ban social media use for children under 14, joining a string of other countries in drawing up restrictions for young people. Alexander Pröll, the official in Chancellor Christian Stocker’s office responsible for digitization, said that draft legislation will be drawn up by the end of June. He said that “technically modern methods” of age verification will be used that allow users to verify their age while respecting their privacy. It wasn’t immediately clear when the plan to introduce a minimum age, which will need parliamentary approval, might take effect. Australia in 2024 took the lead, becoming the first co…

When I worked a corporate job, I was often in charge of purchasing decisions. At one company, my team had inherited a lot of homegrown solutions. I saw the limitations of these products and was quick to replace them if the budget allowed. In corporate settings, “build vs. buy” is a well-known decision framework. Companies weigh the cost of developing something in-house against purchasing an outside solution. It’s often simple math: how much time and resources does it take to maintain this internally versus what does it cost to buy or outsource? Solopreneurs face the same decision constantly. However, the stakes are a lot higher when it’s your own time and own mo…

Nearly every solopreneur starts their business saying “yes” to everything. After all, you’re trying to get clients and build a business. Revenue is unpredictable, and your brain treats every opportunity like it might be the last. But when you work for yourself, every “yes” comes at a cost. Agreeing to one project means declining another — or giving up time you can’t get back. Defaulting to “yes” is how solopreneurs end up overcommitted, underpaid, and working on projects that don’t move their business forward. Saying no is a business skill and, like any skill, it gets sharper with practice. Saying no to bad-fit clients Not every client who reaches out is…

When Winter storm Fern tore across the country in late January, more than a million Americans lost power. In Nashville, the utility recorded its highest outage total in history. In Louisiana, some families waited nearly two weeks for the lights to come back on. Officials issued emergency orders in several states as the storm exposed the fragility of our centralized energy system. And yet, during that same storm, a different story was quietly playing out. Households with the ability to generate and store their own power with home solar and storage kept the lights on, ran their heat, and charged their devices. They were independent of a grid that was buckling under the …

After months of anticipation, Elon Musk’s SpaceX finally made its S-1 financial filing and business prospectus public for all to see. The document, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), makes an ambitious case to investors that Space Exploration Technologies Corp.—yes, that’s the official name—is poised to build a future for humanity that will include cities on the moon and other planets. But perhaps unexpectedly, the prospectus also offers a fascinating autopsy of one of the internet’s most legendary brands. Buried within the revenue and profit figures for SpaceX’s rocket and satellite businesses is a by-the-numbers look into the spectacula…

It made sense 50 years ago to market to entire generations as if they were one persona. It was a way for companies to understand consumers when there was little else to go on. But does this approach still work today? In the 1960s, marketers needed to reach the large cohort of post-war consumers entering adulthood (and peak spending years). Et voilà, the idea of the Baby Boomer generation was born. The conventional wisdom was that the entire cohort had lived through similar experiences that shaped their values and spending patterns similarly. It was largely true at the time, but a lot has changed since then. Technological progress was impressive, but it didn’t …

From beyond the museum walls Monday, works of art will move and take shape as the glitterati of guests from Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman to Venus Williams will fashionably ascend the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s steps and exhibit their creative interpretations of this year’s dress code, “Fashion is art.” The question of whether fashion is art has long been topic of conversation for fashion insiders, and this first Monday in May the dress code is leaving nothing up for debate. The dress code for the starry fundraising event calls for guests to “express their relationship to fashion as an embodied art form.” Fashion has long drawn inspiration from works of art, leaving guests …

In 2023, as Texas lawmakers debated Senate Bill 13—a controversial bill aimed at restricting certain books in public school libraries and expanding parental oversight—Steve Wandler was among the dozen-plus parents, educators, and advocates who testified before the legislature. Wandler wasn’t just another concerned citizen. He was a Canadian entrepreneur who had relocated to Texas the year before to found Bookmarked, a fledgling startup that promises to help school districts manage their library collections and give parents greater visibility into what their children are reading. The legislation addressed the very issue Wandler believed his company could help solve. Th…

I tend to write about AI from the perspective of the bleeding edge, looking at how journalists and media companies are using the technology to change the way they work, reach new audiences, and transform their organizations. But the reality is that there’s a stigma around using artificial intelligence in the journalism community. In conversations I have with working reporters and editors, there’s clearly still a lot of reluctance, if not outright disdain, for using AI in almost any part of their work. Looking at recent coverage of journalists using AI, however, you might think some of that disdain is going away. The Wall Street Journal recently profiled how Fortune bu…

It feels like they match anything. Black. Silver. White. Cream. All rendered in gloss and knit. I wasn’t sure how the silhouette would look in person when I first saw it in photos from Junya Watanabe’s Fall/Winter 2024-25 show. But they made my stomach churn in just the right way. I needed them. And so did a lot of other people. The New Balance 1906L launched last year, kicking off a new type of shoe: the sneaker loafer, aka (and please never say this term aloud) the snoafer. With a loafer silhouette, technical fabrics, and bouncy foam outsoles, they represented a new mix of formal wear and street style. Nike, Hoka, and Puma all quickly followed suit with sno…

British pop star Dua Lipa is suing Samsung Electronics for at least $15 million in damages alleging the South Korean electronics company illegally used a copyrighted image of her without permission. The legal complaint filed Friday in the United States District Court for the Central District of California alleges Samsung used an image of Lipa for some of its television cardboard boxes in circulation last year. According to the lawsuit, Lipa accuses Samsung of violating her “right of publicity” as well as infringing on her copyright and trademark rights. The image in question is allegedly taken from a performance at the Austin City Limits music festival in 2024. Ac…

Hello again, and thank you for spending time with Fast Company’s Plugged In. Last October, I visited the Silicon Valley headquarters of 1X Technologies—the startup behind a humanoid home robot called Neo—and spoke with its VP of product and design, Dar Sleeper. Among the points he made was that long-standing public expectations have set a high bar for household robots. Naturally, he name-checked the world’s most iconic one. “The ultimate, North Star, in a lot of people’s minds, is Rosie the Robot,” he told me. “A Jetsons world where you ask and receive, and it makes your life better, you spend more time with your family, you’re more present.” Sleeper’s referen…

For as long as people have been using AI to churn out text, other people have been coming up with “tells” that something was written by AI. Sometimes it’s punctuation that comes under suspicion. (The em dash is generally considered the shadiest.) Other times it’s words that robot writers seem to love and overuse. But what if the biggest giveaway that a text was written by AI isn’t a word, phrase, or punctuation mark, but a particular sentence structure instead? Why is it so hard to make AI writing sound human? The idea that certain rhythms of sentences might be a sign of AI writing first came to my attention through my work as a professional word nerd. Recen…

It’s graduation week, which means the emissaries of the nation’s elite are now descending onto college campuses to deliver the much-discussed and, they hope, indelibly quotable college commencement address. These speeches are their own sort of literary genre. The celebrities, politicians, and titans of industry invited to give these keynotes must seem intelligent enough, but not bore—or worse, antagonize—their audience. Typically, this involves a speaker integrating a clever life story, select nuggets of eternal wisdom, a few trite asides to campus lore, and well-placed references to current affairs into one propulsive and affecting speech. The problem this year, how…

Why do good companies stumble? I’m talking about the organizations that were once on top. The ones that seemed to lead their category. Today, we’d call them legacy brands or some euphemism that acknowledges the significance they once had and their staying power to stick around. However, somehow or another, they lost the plot along the way, and if only they had fixed this, changed that, or done this one thing, they would have continued winning. It’s a “If/then” proposition straight out of an MBA case study. A clear villain with an easy fix. As satisfying as that framing might be, it’s almost always never that simple. Instead, it’s typically a litany of factors at play…

The infamous “Am I The A**hole?” subreddit is making its way to the small screen. Hosted by Jimmy Carr, the new game show for Comedy Central U.K. will feature members of the public appearing before Carr and a panel of two comedians to reveal their deepest secrets and most bizarre disputes—before receiving judgement, per Deadline. The show is based on the popular Reddit subreddit of the same name, which boasts 24 million members at the time of writing. The subreddit’s creator, Marc Beaulac, is one of the executive producers of the series. Jimmy Carr’s Am I The A**hole? is being produced by STV Studios-owned Tuesday’s Child. Filming will take place in late spring, a…