Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

JPMorganChase said Wednesday it plans to open more than 160 new bank branches in over three dozen states—and renovate nearly 600 more—as part of a nationwide, multibillion-dollar push for more affordable financial services. Those branches will include locations in rural and low-to-moderate income (LMI) communities in the Northeast, Southeast, America’s “Heartland” or Midwest, and Southwest—including in North and South Carolina, Florida, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Massachusetts, and Tennessee this year. JPMorganChase tells Fast Company those will include branch locations in: “Greater Philadelphia, Greater Boston, the Tampa Bay area, Minneapolis–Saint Paul metro area, R…

United Parcel Service (UPS) is planning to close dozens of packaging facilities this year, the shipping giant revealed in a court filing this week. The plans include shuttering facilities in Texas, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, and several other states. It includes locations that have union employees, according to a docket made public as part of a lawsuit between UPS and the Teamsters Union. UPS revealed in January that it will cut 30,000 jobs over the coming year. The move was announced as its partnership with Amazon was winding down and amid a broader push toward automation. At the time, it also revealed plans to close 24 total facilities, though it did no…

As national Democrats search for a unifying theme ahead of the fall’s midterm elections, a California proposal to levy a hefty tax on billionaires is turning some of the party’s leading figures into adversaries just when Democrats can least afford division from within. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders traveled to Los Angeles on Wednesday to campaign for the tax proposal, which has Silicon Valley in an uproar, with tech titans threatening to leave the state. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is among its outspoken opponents, warning that it could leave government finances in crisis and put the state at a competitive disadvantage nationally. At an evening rally near downtown, Sande…

When word started circling that AMC Theaters was screening an AI-generated short film, the internet’s cinephiles took it personally. On Wednesday, some social media users reported that the short was playing in the pre-show before trailers at select AMC locations. A little digging revealed the source: Earlier this week, the short, titled Thanksgiving Day, was announced as the winner of the inaugural Frame Forward Animated AI Film Festival. The prize package included a nationwide theatrical release, which apparently entailed making its way to AMC’s screens. Movie lovers across social media were immediately up in arms. Some called for boycotts. Some found it insultin…

A CEO sits in a boardroom, staring at a strategy deck generated overnight by AI. The analysis is sharp. The recommendations are confident. The numbers line up. And yet something feels off. It feels flat, almost a little too perfect . . . This moment is becoming increasingly common for leaders. Artificial intelligence is now one of the most powerful management tools ever created. It can analyze markets in seconds, surface patterns no human team could find, and generate plans on demand. For many executives, AI already feels indispensable. But as intelligence scales at unprecedented speed, a quieter question is emerging inside organizations: How do we ensure AI…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has defended the resource-intensive use of AI by comparing it to all the energy—and food—that humans require, sparking a wave of backlash across social media. That comparison, experts in climate and tech spaces say, is misguided, downplays the climate risks associated with AI, and illustrates the disconnect between tech CEOs and the rest of society. Altman’s comments came while speaking to the Indian Express at the India AI Impact summit. The outlet asked him to address some of the common criticisms of AI, including the amount of energy and water the technology requires. “One of the things that is always unfair in this comparison is peop…

The devil might’ve worn Prada in 2006, but two decades later, the fashion elite are wearing books. Case in point: Coach’s hot new accessory is a keychain made out of literal hardcovers. Coach revealed the new “book charms” in a series of social posts on February 25. Created in collaboration with the publisher Penguin Random House, the charms include adorably teeny, fully readable versions of classics like Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, alongside more recent titles like Untamed by Glennon Doyle and A Forest of Wool and Steel by Natsu Miyashita. The book bag charms will be available for $95 on the Coach website …

The light is shining through the windows of what looks like a well-appointed, book-lined apartment where Dario Amodei, the chief executive of AI giant Anthropic, is giving an interview. He smiles and laughs at the interviewer’s jokes, giving the impression of an approachable, amiable, ever-so-slightly unkempt scientist. But when the questions turn to AI’s impact on humanity, Amodei’s demeanor shifts. He says that while he is not a doom-and-gloomer, he is certainly worried. Previous disruptions took place over longer timescales, and he frets that the speed and scope of this one will make it much harder to manage. His concern “is that the normal adaptive mechanisms will b…

When I hosted a client dinner honoring my good friends Jules Kroll and his extraordinary wife Lynn, I did not expect to get one of the best bits of life advice I’d ever heard. Jules and Lynn met in college about 65 years ago and raised four wonderful children together. Toward the end of dinner someone asked, “How do you raise good kids?” Lynn, an amazing force of nature, answered swiftly: “You need to raise the children you have—not the ones you would have liked to have.” I was stunned by the clarity and simplicity of what she said and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. LEARN THE HARD WAY AS A PARENT My father died when I was five. My family situ…

HBO Max might be getting a brand update. Again. The streaming service has notoriously waffled between different names and logos over the past several years. More recently, it got caught up in an intense bidding war between Netflix and Paramount Skydance to acquire its parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery. On February 27, Netflix finally admitted defeat and abandoned its takeover bid—meaning Paramount is set to acquire WBD for $110 billion. The transaction is expected to close later this year. This supersized deal will undoubtedly have major ripple effects across the broader entertainment industry. But, for HBO, it might mean yet another blow to an already di…

Below, co-authors Dave Evans and Bill Burnett share five key insights from their new book, How to Live a Meaningful Life: Using Design Thinking to Unlock Purpose, Joy, and Flow Every Day. Dave and Bill are co-founders of the Stanford Life Design Lab and co-authors of the New York Times bestseller, Designing Your Life. What’s the big idea? A meaningful life isn’t something you discover once or achieve at the top of a hierarchy. It’s something you design through daily practices, mindsets, and experiences. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Dave and Bill—below, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. What’s better than fulfillment? Learning to b…

Economist Larry Summers will resign from his tenured job as a professor at Harvard University, the school announced on Feb. 25, 2026, following heightened scrutiny of his ties with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Summers will leave at the end of the 2025-26 academic year, with a new title: president emeritus. It’s a soft landing for his fall from grace. In November 2025, Harvard launched an investigation of Summers, a former U.S. Treasury secretary who previously served as Harvard’s president. The probe looked into whether Summers and other members of Harvard’s faculty and administration had interactions with Epstein that violated its guidelin…

After losing an hour of shut-eye, thanks to daylight savings time, sleep is one many people’s minds today. The day after we “spring forward,” people are significantly more tired—and cranky—due to that lost hour of sleep, which disrupts our natural circadian rhythm, increasing the risks of car accidents, strokes and even heart attacks, according to John Hopkins’s Bloomberg School of Health. In honor of Sleep Awareness Week—that elusive thing many Americans just don’t get enough of—we though we would introduce you to the Dutch method for getting a good night’s rest. In the U.S., “sleep hygiene” a popular way to clean up your sleep routine, is a hack that comes…

At any given time, I’m juggling multiple clients. That means I’m juggling context for multiple projects, background information on various companies, and a lot of deadlines. Some of my clients give me a steady stream of work each month, while others pop in with a request every few weeks. Whether you’re coaching, doing creative work, or have long-term retainers, most solopreneurs eventually find themselves managing multiple clients simultaneously. The number of clients you take on directly impacts your income, but more clients also means more complexity. In my corporate life, I worked as a product manager at a software company. Even though my work is very differe…

You’re at your usual weekly team meeting. The team leader asks for ideas, and you immediately come up with the best one. It’s not just clever. It’s perfect. You rush to say it, glowing with anticipation. Silence. Nobody reacts. You walk out deflated, wondering how a group of smart people could ignore the obvious answer. The assumption is simple. If the idea is sound, it should carry weight. We tend to believe that the one with the best ideas has the greatest impact. We take for granted that influence flows from competence and that those who are right, early and often, naturally shape decisions. But decades of research in social psychology and decision science tell a diff…

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Here’s the annual U.S. household income needed to purchase the typical valued U.S. home: January 2020: $52,041 January 2021: $52,087 January 2022: $63,111 January 2023: $87,092 January 2024: $93,227 January 2025: $98,900 January 2026: $93,061 While the income needed to buy the median-priced U.S. home is +78.8% higher than it was in January 2020, it’s down -5.9% year over year. Methodology: This Zillow calculation is conservative and assumes a 20% down payment and that the homebuyer spends less than 30% of their monthly inco…

Web browsers love the theme of navigation. Safari is clearly a compass. Chrome appears to be an all-seeing cyborg eye. But Firefox? It’s comparatively unhinged: a wild animal made of flame. It’s like a beast out of Pokémon, Digimon, or Chinese mythology. And now, for the first time, the fox is breaking out of the Firefox logo to become a full-blown corporate mascot ready to protect its customers. In an era when AI companions are quickly becoming commonplace, the fox named Kit is a keen-nosed scout, helping you navigate a world filled with unprecedented surveillance. “Kit is really like your companion for this internet era,” says Amy Bebbington, global head of brand at …

Marcus Hoed, a Dutch immigrant who founded the New York-based shipping company DutchX in 2013, was always intrigued by the possibilities of biking—specifically cargo bikes—to fill in the same-day shipping gap in urban logistics. For the last few years, the company has billed itself as a zero-emissions shipper: a fleet of electric-powered vans that traverse roadways and bridges while cargo bikes handle the last few miles of a package’s journey. But starting last December, DutchX found a way to dramatically cut delivery times. Typically, shipping from its Brooklyn Marine Terminal sorting facility to Midtown West would take about 75 minutes, after navigating over a bridge …

Alibaba’s net income fell 66% year-over-year (YOY) for 2025’s fourth quarter while it invested heavily in AI. In total, net income dropped from 46.4 billion Chinese yuan ($6.8 billion) to 15.6 billion Chinese yuan ($2.27 billion). The downturn is one of multiple disappointments in the Chinese technology giant’s latest financial results, announced Thursday, March 19. Alibaba also reported a 71% decrease in diluted earnings per share YOY. Higher cloud revenue, but not high enough Even Alibaba’s revenue, which rose 2% YOY, failed to meet expectations. The company reached 284.8 billion Chinese yuan ($41.4 billion) in revenue for quarter four, falling sho…

It’s another bad day for gold and silver. Traders in precious metals are seeing both gold and silver plummet significantly as the week kicks off, with gold down nearly 7% and silver down 8% over the past 24 hours. Worse, gold has now fallen nearly 20% since its all-time high of over $5,586 in January. Silver is down even more, falling more than 44% since its all-time high earlier this year of over $121. Here’s what you need to know. The ‘safe haven’ trade is absent Silver and especially gold are generally considered “safe haven” assets—assets investors turn to when economic uncertainty abounds, and they want to park their money in a valuable that isn’t likely …

The most innovative retailers in 2025 used technology not to chase trends, but to solve real problems. As tariffs squeezed margins and labor costs climbed, companies scrambled to adapt. Shopify opened its platform to agentic AI shoppers, letting customers purchase directly within ChatGPT. Amazon launched Lens Live to turn smartphones into instant product scanners. Rebel scaled its re-commerce platform into new categories, processing over 70,000 returned products weekly and keeping 25 million pounds of goods out of landfills. Others doubled down on heritage and experience. J.Crew proved nostalgia sells when paired with a carefully curated archive. Printemps brought…

In Q3 of 2025, Bot Auto achieved its first “driver-out” run on public roads: a trip in which the truck drove itself with no human behind the wheel, and in our case, no humans in the cab at all. This is a milestone reached by only a tiny handful of AV trucking programs. From the founding of the company to that milestone, we spent just $212,552 on one category of work that is usually very expensive in AI: paying people to manually label training data—for example, drawing boxes around cars and pedestrians—so a neural network can learn from them. To many people that number does not sound like a breakthrough. It sounds like something is missing: a cost not counted, a line …

A strong PR plan should balance day-to-day visibility with long-term brand building. At most plans’ core will be some sort of press office, one that fields reactive inquiries, chases proactive opportunities, and strives to create a consistent drumbeat of attention. That ongoing media presence is further punctuated by product launches, releases, or announcements that help create heightened awareness around a singular piece of news or event. That describes the basic tenets of a traditional PR plan for earned media (acknowledging that the PR function is much broader). But the playbook that agencies and in-house teams are using to deliver that is evolving; it looks vastly di…

The battle for overhead bin space on flights is likely to intensify as United Airlines announced it will increase the checked bag fees starting Friday. It will now cost $10 more to check luggage for passengers traveling on flights in the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and Latin America. Since the airlines often move in tandem on ancillary fees like checked bags, this could mark the beginning of a trend ahead of the busy summer travel season. Earlier this week, JetBlue Airways raised its prices for checked bags by $4 to $9 per bag, depending on whether passengers are flying during peak or off-peak periods, with the highest fee now coming in at $49. Airlines are grappling w…

Universal Music Group saw its shares (AMS: UMG) rise more than 11% on Tuesday, following a proposal from billionaire Bill Ackman to buy the music giant through his investment firm Pershing Square Capital Management. Pershing Square currently owns a 10% stake in Amsterdam-listed UMG. Despite today’s bump, the stock is down about 15% year to date. UMG has an extensive music catalogue and is home to major recording artists such as Taylor Swift, Bob Dylan, and Bad Bunny. What would the deal mean for UMG? If approved, the deal would offer shareholders €9.4 billion ($10.9 billion) in cash and 0.77 shares in “new UMG” for each share of UMG they currently own. …