Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Is it even worth having a kid in the AI era? It’s the question at the heart of The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, a new documentary about the promise, peril, and uncertainty surrounding artificial intelligence. Codirected by Charlie Tyrell and Academy Award winner Daniel Roher, the film follows Roher, a soon-to-be father, as he tries to understand how AI works, what risks it may carry, and what kind of world he and his wife are bringing their son into. Along the way, he encounters both AI’s loudest skeptics and its most ardent utopians. The film features dozens of experts, including CEOs like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, longtime r…

This week, Google announced new features for its AI-powered interface tool Stitch—in the process, it signaled that it’s going all-in on “vibe design.” “We are evolving Stitch into an AI-native software design canvas,” Rustin Banks, product manager at Google Labs, wrote on company’s blog, Keynote. “With it, anyone can create, iterate and collaborate to turn natural language into high-fidelity UI designs.” Launched last March during the Google I/O annual developer conference, Stitch sets out to give people an accessible tool for creating front end UI designs for projects like websites or mobile apps. While late to a market already occupied by competitors like Figma …

People who live and work in Washington state don’t currently pay any income tax. But in a few years, a small group of residents will be subject to one: Washington lawmakers recently passed a bill that would impose a 9.9% tax on income earned above $1 million, which goes into effect on January 1, 2028. The so-called millionaires tax could raise up to $4 billion annually for the state, revenue that Governor Bob Ferguson has said could go toward free breakfast and lunch for students, and to working families through a tax credit. (Ferguson has yet to sign the bill, which landed on his desk March 13, but has pledged to.) The tax is part of a wave of bills that lawmaker…

Actor John Stamos is thinking a lot more about potential opportunities to live-stream these days—be it at New York’s Thanksgiving Day parade, performing with the Beach Boys when he heads to Route 66 for the 100-year anniversary later this year, or even while getting his first-ever tattoo in Austin for SXSW. “I thought, ‘Oh, we should have live-streamed that,” said Stamos, speaking at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “That could have been interesting watching me go through that kind of pain.” As chief innovation officer of Zeam, a startup that lets people stream local TV stations and other content from anywhere, Stamos is excited to bring people an alternative to w…

Think about how we commonly seek to motivate human performance in our workplaces: Employees are treated as costs to be minimized rather than people to be invested in. Performance is managed through fear of consequences. Supervisors closely monitor daily tasks, requiring frequent check-ins or reports. Being available at all hours is treated as evidence of commitment. Directives flow one way—downward. Feedback is delivered as judgment rather than support. In practice, if not in intention, we still manage people more like machines than human beings. How did we get here—and, more importantly, why have we never left? Most of what we call “modern management” isn’t moder…

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 …

Several hundred non-tenured full-time faculty members at New York University are on strike after the school failed to reach a tentative contract agreement with Contract Faculty United-United Auto Workers. Nearly 75% of the union’s more than 900 full-time NYU contract faculty—who teach across the university’s various schools—voted to authorize the strike in February. On Monday morning, a deal seemed possible, with CFU-UAW extending its 8 a.m. strike deadline by three hours after bargaining through the university’s spring break last week. By midday, union members and supporters were on the picket line outside NYU’s John A. Paulson Center in lower Manhattan. The stri…

In some ways, the attention game for brands is only getting tougher. The increased pace of the cultural cycle and the tidal wave of slop hitting our feeds have added a layer of suspicion to any brand work. Is it real? How do you know? These are big, existential questions. This year, 20 companies, ranging from brands to agencies, are answering them from the perspective of marketers looking to build real connections with real people. The companies here are not only working to embed into and engage with culture, but they’re doing it in ways that reinforce the role of humans in that dynamic. It includes Dick’s Sporting Goods launching its own internal film studio to …

There’s a restaurant in New York City called Rosa Mexicana that positions itself as a fresh take on Mexican cuisine. It’s upscale, well curated, and delicious. However, my favorite part about the dining experience is when you order guacamole, the wait-staff wheels out a little cart, draped in the traditional Mexican cloth, a vibrant sarape, and staked with fresh ingredients—avocados, lime, onion, salt, all the things. And as they arrive at your table, they make the guacamole right there in front of you. It’s quite the show, and it makes the entire dining experience better. What the restaurant has realized is what some of the best organizations know to be true: when th…

Fashion resale company Poshmark just got its first app redesign in 15 years, and it’s taking a page out of Depop’s book of UI. The new look encompasses an updated algorithm, redesigned navigational tools, and a new, streamlined aesthetic. It comes as a pivotal moment for the second market, which, according to ThredUp’s 2025 Resale Report, is expected to reach $367 billion by 2029, growing 2.7 times faster than the overall global apparel market. The majority of this growth, the report notes, has been driven by young consumers—millennials, Gen Zers, and Gen Alpha shoppers who are familiar with buying products through apps or in-app features like TikTok Shop. And com…

A former SpaceX engineer walked away from rockets to chase something far more impactful: a perfect coffeemaker. JC Foster left the aerospace giant to launch Puresteel, a startup building what he described as “an affordable, convenient, plastic-free coffeemaker,” he wrote in a post on X. For Foster, developing Puresteel was about more than a perfectly brewed cup of coffee at a precise 200°F. “Creating Puresteel was about solving a problem that hits close to home and helping humans thrive,” he wrote in the company’s Note from the Founder. The problem, as he saw it, was plastic. Foster began searching for a completely plastic-free coffee machine and quickl…

As companies continue to seek ways to harness artificial intelligence for concrete productivity gains, a company called Writer offers AI tools specifically geared toward getting things done at the enterprise level. Writer’s AI systems can connect to a wide variety of business software, including standard productivity tools from Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft, as well as a range of database systems. And customers can customize on a granular level what data the AI—and the humans using it—has access to read and write. But Writer’s platform is also specifically designed to enable white-collar workers without an engineering background to reliably get things done …

Few sectors of the economy show the growing divide between the haves and have-nots more than the airline industry, which is increasingly catering to high-income fliers in an effort to squeeze as much revenue per available seat mile as possible. United Airlines, which just announced newly designed economy seats you can lie flat and sleep on, found a clever way to appeal to everyone by bringing the couch to coach. This week, the airline announced what it calls “United Relax Row,” a row of three seats that transform into a single lie-flat space. The seats will begin appearing on United aircrafts in 2027. Reaction online to the airline’s announcement was joyous. “Uni…

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…

For many people, the COVID-19 pandemic feels like a distant memory. In reality, the SARS‑CoV‑2 coronavirus is still spreading widely across the globe and continues to evolve into new variants. Sometimes these variants are no more dangerous than the previous ones. Yet each newly discovered variant also has the potential to be more harmful than the last, which is why health organizations worldwide monitor emerging variants. Currently, health officials are tracking a new Covid-19 variant called BA.3.2, also known as “Cicada.” Here’s what you need to know about it. What is BA.3.2 ‘Cicada’? BA.3.2 “Cicada” is an offshoot of a COVID-19 variant that has been circ…

Many people enjoy sleeping with their pets. Who wouldn’t? After a hard day of work, cuddling up with a cute animal that shows you unconditional love is just the thing many people need. But sadly, after digging into a newly released study, they may start to think twice before letting their furry friends into bed at night. The Conversation recently published an article highlighting the major findings of a study by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine that examined the pros and cons of having pets sleep in bed with them—something that 46% of respondents do. Though the research suggests that sleeping with your pet in bed may have psychological benefits, it may actually …

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 …

With Social Security on track to go broke in less than seven years, a new report from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) is proposing a solution: Cap Social Security payouts to $100,000 a year for couples, as part of an overall plan to save it from insolvency. (That’s $50,000 for a single retiree.) The renewed spotlight on Social Security follows a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that the main trust funds responsible for paying benefits, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund, could be insolvent by as early as 2033. By law, that would automatically trigger a massive 24% cut in benefits. On top of the higher cost …

Jeopardy! may have been born on cable television, but it’s determined not to live and die there. The trivia game show’s first iteration premiered on daytime television more than 60 years ago in 1964. Its modern syndicated version launched in 1984, and 41 seasons later, it’s still going strong, garnering 7.5 million viewers for its latest season premiere and maintaining its title as the most-watched syndication series on television. Though Jeopardy! made it through the cultural transition to streaming largely unscathed, its producers are still finding ways to innovate on its format and bring the show to new platforms. That includes the newly announced Jeopardy! You…

The promise of AI was always that it would handle certain kinds of work so we could focus on others. It was going to free our time, reduce friction, and let us concentrate on what requires human judgment and creativity. That promise assumed we would divide the labor wisely. That we would hand off the operational drag—the scheduling, formatting, and summarizing that eats the day before we’ve had a chance to think. We would keep the cognitive friction—the hard work of wrestling with ambiguity, forming a point of view, and figuring out the right approach. The work where your value is actually made. Instead we handed over the thinking first. Because cognitive friction…

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…

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…

It’s 8:45am on a rainy weekday morning in Paris, and I’m standing in what used to be a traffic lane in a busy neighborhood near the city’s largest train stations. Less than a block away, cars are streaming by in the rush hour commute. But here, workers have torn up the pavement and replaced it with a newly-planted park with trees, a protected bike lane, and a wide gravel path for pedestrians. Where cars once drove, someone is walking his dog. It’s one of hundreds of streets in Paris that have been redesigned over the past decade as the city radically transformed to reduce pollution and make neighborhoods more livable. In front of elementary schools, around 300 streets…

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…

March Madness is well underway, but for a lot of people, it’s just another day at the office. That is, until you walk into the break room or sign into Slack and realize the place is abuzz with bracket chatter and Final Four predictions. You sigh, resigned to yet another month of sportsball—a whole lot of chatter about a game that you don’t know about. And don’t really care to. For many people, March Madness is a nearly month-long ritual that requires a lot of feigning interest or noise-cancelling headphones. For every excited person replaying Yaxel Lendeborg’s latest opponent-crushing dunk is a disinterested coworker nearby, confused at best, or at worst, sensing…