Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

In January, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, announced that it would use its chatbot to develop an AI tutoring system for more than a million students in El Salvador. The announcement came on the heels of similar ones from OpenAI, which is connecting students in Kazakhstan with its ChatGPT Edu services, and from Microsoft, which is similarly equipping students and teachers in the United Arab Emirates with AI-based tools and training. While other countries are executing on national infrastructure projects for the AI era and treating it as an economic imperative, here in the United States, we can’t seem to move past a narrative of how AI makes it easier…

Daylight savings time (DST) is just around the corner. This Sunday, March 8, the clocks will spring forward again, and with the change comes the ongoing conversation about, well—why are we doing this, anyway? According to an AP-NORC poll, only 12% of Americans favor DST, while 47% oppose it and 40% are neutral. In Canada’s British Columbia (BC) province, the government has finally decided to take matters into its own hands, and come this Sunday, daylight saving time (DST) will be permanent year-round. “This decision isn’t just about clocks. It’s about making life easier for families, reducing disruptions for businesses and supporting a stable, thriving economy,” B…

There aren’t enough hours in the day to be an expert on every issue (even though we’re expected to hold a strong opinion on just about everything). I prefer to stick to topics I’m already familiar with or in the process of learning. But sometimes, especially on X/Twitter, I’ll post color commentary about an issue that’s not in my wheelhouse. It’s a good way for me to keep the bigger picture of human flourishing in sight. Those topics might be childhood independence, economics, mental health, or vehicle size. I’m not singularly focused on vehicle size, but it’s a growing issue among people who already drive badly. The percentage of new vehicle sales/leases for pickup t…

Americans are seeking financial relief and, in some cases, are even desperate enough to go against conventional financial wisdom. A record number of Americans are turning to their retirement funds to cover emergency expenses. According to newly released data from Vanguard, 6% of 401(k) holders took hardship withdrawals last year. The number is up from 4.8% in 2024, and well above prepandemic levels of about 2%. Taking funds out early is not recommended because early withdrawals from 401(k) plans are taxed. In addition, the funds incur a 10% penalty if the person withdrawing them is under the age of 59½. (The IRS does allow some exceptions to the penalty, includin…

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…

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…

Retail has always evolved around a central promise. First it was price and scale. Then convenience and speed. More recently, brand and experience took the lead. Now another shift is underway, one that many companies still treat as secondary. The next competitive advantage in retail is designing for real life. That means designing for the full range of human ability, attention, mobility, and circumstance. Not as a compliance exercise. Not as a niche offering. But as a smarter, more complete version of customer experience. Accessibility is often misunderstood as a feature aimed at a small group of people. In reality, it is a systems-level discipline. It asks a simpl…

In 2020, Waymo began offering fully driverless rides to the public in Phoenix, turning the city into the closest thing the U.S. has to a real-world laboratory for autonomous vehicles. What began as a cautious pilot has since grown into a sprawling robotaxi network that now includes freeway travel and service to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Since then, Waymo has expanded to cities including San Francisco and Austin, while rivals like Tesla and Zoox are racing to deploy their own autonomous fleets. But the technology’s spread has come with a steady stream of logistical and political questions for the cities hosting it (especially since Phoenix, with its wid…

A recent class-action lawsuit against David Protein, filed in January, alleges the company misrepresented the amount of calories and fat in its popular, healthy-branded bar, claiming that it had “way more” of both than customers were led to believe. Now, in response to the lawsuit, social media is having a field day with comparisons to the 2004 movie Mean Girls, with one TikTok user and apparent David Protein customer posting, “I have been Regina Georged.” Here’s a quick brief on what’s happening. Wait, remind me, what’s the ‘Mean Girls’ plot again? If you’re like me, you’ve seen Mean Girls a dozen times. The plot is a hilarious and biting commentary on the…

It’s time for the dazzling conclusion to the 2026 awards season. After the Hollywood elites walk the red carpet, the curtain will rise on the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday, March 15, which is tonight. The excitement will be palpable as the audience waits to learn who will take home a coveted Oscar. Here’s everything you need to know to fully enjoy the evening, including how to tune in. Where does the 98th Academy Awards take place? The location for this fabulous event is in Tinseltown, of course. More specifically, the ceremony will take place at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Who’s hosting the 2026 Oscars? Comedian and former late-night host Conan O’…

Coleman just invented a hard cooler that can collapse in on itself like an accordion, shrink to one-third of its full size, and slot neatly onto a storage shelf. The cooler, called the Snap ’N Go, officially launched on March 17 in three sizes, with prices ranging from $199.99 to $239.99. It’s a first of its kind in the world of food and beverage insulation: While companies like REI, Yeti, and Coleman itself have created large soft cooler bags that can be compressed for storage, no one has ever manufactured a collapsible hard-sided cooler. That’s somewhat surprising, given that hard coolers are often more durable, more insulated, and easier to clean than their soft co…

As a graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School I believed full-time roles were the only way to succeed, until an unexpected Bollywood acting opportunity opened my eyes to freelance-forward careers. Since then, I have toggled between holding full-time executive roles and fractional ones. If you’re not familiar with the phrase, you can think of fractional work as the executive version of freelancing. Fractional leaders work in a C-suite or other senior role part-time, usually for multiple companies simultaneously. Landing a fractional role I landed my first fractional General Counsel role when I attended an industry conference in the hopes of…

Entrepreneurship has been synonymous with sleep deprivation for decades. Treating sleep as a weakness, CEOs and founders have worn the “founder’s grind” on their faces—showing off dark circles as badges of honor, and drawing a parallel between exhaustion and commitment. Sleep became optional in the name of business success. I’ve worn that badge and know that grind all too well. In my roles as a founder and entrepreneur, I treated sleep as a luxury, and it wasn’t until I lost the ability to get a good night’s rest that I realized just how critical it was to my performance. For a long stretch of my career, I woke up every morning at exactly 2:57 a.m. My eyes would o…

AI poses an infuriating dilemma: On the one hand, it promises to reduce the grunt work present in every job. On the other hand, between the creation of AI slop, and employee fears around job loss, figuring out how to actually reap those benefits creates another job in and of itself. Companies are resorting to a variety of strategies to solve this problem. Amazon tracks how often employees use AI, Microsoft has an internal bootcamp where teams brainstorm how to redesign their workflows to include AI, and Boston Consulting Group has made AI use part of employee performance evaluations. Other companies are taking a different approach: paying employees to experiment…

Augmented and virtual reality companies continue to harness the technology for everything from family entertainment to healthcare and workplace safety. Xreal’s wearable displays offer users new options for integrating AR with workflows and devices, and RayNeo’s ultralight AR glasses deliver AI features and a stunning 43-inch virtual display. AR and VR are even creating innovative forms of entertainment. Cosm has built “shared reality” domes that let spectators immerse themselves in sports and movies as if they were in the stadium or scene, and Immotion’s VR shows bring education and entertainment to a host of zoos and museums. Virtuix takes VR entertainment to the home gy…

For the first time in 36 years, the old-school Adidas trefoil logo will appear at the World Cup. The vintage Adidas logo shows three leaf-shaped foils with three parallel horizontal lines that cut through the bottom of the shapes. It previously appeared on Adidas World Cup kits until it was replaced by the brand’s triangular three-bars logo in the 1990s. Now, for the 2026 World Cup, the trefoil logo is making a comeback, appearing on the right chest of away jerseys for 25 countries, including Japan, Mexico, and Ukraine. Bringing the old logo back is a nostalgia play. Sam Handy, general manager of football for Adidas, said in a statement that the German sportsw…

With help from AI, I finally tackled some computer chores that I’ve been putting off for months. My Downloads folder is cleaner than it’s been in ages. The photos that OneDrive blandly sorted by month are now arranged into folders by event. The obscure, unpurchasable jazz album I ripped from YouTube ages ago is now properly sliced into separate tracks, tagged with metadata, and sitting inside my media server at last. Instead of spending hours on those tedious tasks myself, I delegated them to Manus, an AI assistant whose desktop app is free to download for Mac and Windows. Manus launched in March of last year with an emphasis on being able to accomplish tasks auto…

Before I ever met Sam Kececi, I had already interviewed him on his career, his use of AI, and his thoughts on data privacy. In this case, “him” might be a loose word, depending on your definition—I had spoken not with Kececi himself, but with an AI chatbot that he designed to recall his memories, mimic his personality, and share his opinions. Kececi is an ex-Amazon software engineer who, since August 2025, has been building an AI company called Sentience. The real Kececi, who I spoke to after interviewing his personal AI, describes Sentience as “the digital version of you, but with perfect memory.” It’s a chatbot that uses your emails, Slack messages, Apple Notes…

A pair of landmark court cases found Meta and YouTube guilty last week of harming young users by designing algorithms that were addictive and led to mental health distress. The damages assessed against the companies amounted to a fraction of a percent of their annual earnings. The long-term implications, however, could be far more significant. The rulings found that programmed algorithms are not protected by Section 230, the federal law that shields social media companies from liability for user-posted content. That represents a crack in a legal defense these companies have relied on for years. And thousands of similar cases are already pending. Section 230 has be…

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…

Another round of layoffs has hit the tech industry, this time at SaaS giant Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL). The job cuts reportedly came out of the blue for most affected employees, with many receiving an early-morning email announcing their job loss just hours before they were scheduled to go into the office. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? On early Tuesday morning, Oracle employees around the world began reporting on social media that they had received an email from the company informing them that their employment had been terminated. According to these reports, the emails began arriving in employees’ inboxes at around 6 a.m. local …

You earn qualifications, polish your résumé, climb the ladder, grow your salary, and build your reputation. You’ve done everything you’re supposed to, so you (understandably) expect to feel on top of the world. Yet you remain unsatisfied despite accomplishing everything that you thought you wanted. That sense of “What’s next?” is surprisingly common. According to a recent study by Headway app, 77% of people consider themselves successful, yet 81% also admitted feeling behind in some area of their lives. The cause of your internal discontent A lack of effort or having more to achieve isn’t the cause of your dissatisfaction. It stems from not doing what you reall…

Recently, one of us was guest-teaching a humanities class on artificial intelligence. He asked students a simple question. Had they noticed themselves becoming more “attached” to their favorite chatbot? “For example,” he asked, “do you find yourself saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to the chatbot more than you used to?” Nearly every head nodded. “Why?” he asked. One student raised her hand. “So if AI does take over,” she said, “it’ll remember that I was nice to it.” The class laughed—but not entirely. The fear and hype around AI When we see public conversations about AI, they tend to swing wildly between hype and catastrophe. On one end, we see promises …

As you have probably heard, most of human history, civility was not the default setting. Societies were rougher, hierarchies more brutal, and interpersonal interactions often governed by blunt displays of power and overt physical aggression rather than kind or cordial exchanges. In medieval societies, for instance, everyday interactions were far less restrained by norms of politeness. Status determined how you were treated, and those with power often exercised it quite openly. Rudeness, intimidation, and direct confrontation were not social faux pas so much as ordinary features of life in rigidly stratified societies. Fortunately, we have come a long way. Today, succe…