Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Remember the iPod? It’s making a quiet comeback. Four years after Apple killed off its digital music player, secondhand sales are surging. It’s fueled in part by young people interested not just in its retro looks but a desire to listen to music in a focused way and with playlists not determined by algorithms. “There’s a growing trend, particularly amongst younger users, to mitigate the ease with which they can be distracted by smartphones, often driven by mental health and well-being concerns,” said Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight. “Having a dedicated music device, such as an iPod, is a good way to reduce your dependence on a smartphone and avoid being dra…

After glorious lunar views, a moving dedication, a malfunctioning toilet, and a floating Nutella, Artemis II is poised for the riskiest part of its 10-day journey to the far side of the moon. The Orion spacecraft, Integrity, is slated to enter the Earth’s atmosphere tonight at 7:45 EDT at a blistering 25,000 mph and 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The autonomously guided capsule will slow down and dissipate heat through a time-honored “skip” maneuver that dips it in and out of the atmosphere in a suborbital arc, then back in again for a final descent. Think of skipping a stone on the water’s surface to slow it down. The technique involves shifting Orion’s center of mass…

In operating reviews and boardrooms, I keep seeing the same pattern: leadership asks for rigor, teams deliver the numbers, and promising AI efforts get judged as underperforming before the organization has actually learned what it takes to make them real. Then someone pulls the plug, scales back the investment, or lets the initiative quietly expire. Sometimes they’re right. But often, they’ve just used the wrong test. The problem isn’t that leaders care about measurement. Strong measurement discipline is exactly what separates organizations that scale AI from those that accumulate pilots. The problem is that many leaders are applying a mature-business scorecard to…

My father has a PhD in mechanical social engineering and, among many things, designed cooling systems for nuclear reactors. From him, I inherited a restless curiosity about how the world works and a deep respect for the laws of science. Over the years, I’ve found that many of the principles governing physical objects translate perfectly to business. Take Newton’s first law of motion. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest, and objects in motion stay in motion—at least in a vacuum. What’s true in physics is true for companies. Those that stall are destined to fall behind. But the businesses that remain in constant motion? They succeed. In the agentic AI era, data is …

The call comes on a Tuesday morning. Taiwan Strait tensions have escalated overnight. Markets are already moving. Your CFO is on one line, your General Counsel on another. By the time you’ve hung up, your head of communications is in the doorway. Most CEOs have planned and prepared for this moment. In my work running a global communications firm, I’ve been part of the war-gaming sessions. But I’d contend that most leaders aren’t ready for it. Not because they haven’t been paying attention to geopolitics—they have. But because their teams have been assessing the Taiwan risk through a single lens: geoeconomic exposure. The financial model has been stress-tested. The…

Have you noticed the junk-food aisle at your local grocery store is looking a little, well, funky lately? Blame the youngest generations of shoppers. While the preferences of Gen Z and Gen Alpha consumers are likely leading to healthier choices for all of us, they’re also reshaping the snacking industry. Some changes include snacks that are available in smaller sizes and have cleaner ingredients, according to data from Nielsen IQ, as reported by the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS), an industry trade group. One of the most consequential changes is that shoppers are seeking out healthier snacks. Among parents of Gen Alpha kids who are buying snack…

Seven & i Holdings, the Japan-based owner of 7-Eleven, has announced that it plans to close hundreds of stores in North America over the next year. The store closures are an attempt to reduce costs and increase profitability for the chain of convenience stores ahead of a U.S. initial public offering for its North American unit, which was recently delayed. Here’s what you need to know. 645 store closures in North America Tucked away in Seven & i Holdings’ brief summary for its fiscal year 2025 last week was news that the company plans to close more than 1,000 locations in its fiscal year 2026, which runs from March 1, 2026, to February 28, 2027. Acc…

At first blush, it sounds too good to be true: a learning experience that’s precisely tailored to a child’s needs, strengths, and struggles, speeding up or slowing down as the moment demands, with infinite patience. For a decade or more, that’s been the promise fueling the education technology industry—customized learning that fuels rapid progress. Yet, for the most part, it was too good to be true. Not because the ambition was wrong, but because the prevailing vision has had it backwards. A FAILED PERSONALIZED LEARNING APPROACH? The vision of AI in education that has drawn the most attention and investment centers on personalized learning. Think Khan Academy’…

A silent productivity killer is operating in every enterprise without detection, causing harm unnoticed: the 100-page slide deck, which I call the “Frankendeck.” It is a bloated, decentralized collection of charts, bullet points, and appendices emailed to the C-suite 48 hours before a critical meeting. As a presentation strategist working with Fortune 500s and scaling startups to improve executive communication, I see this pattern everywhere. Corporate teams tirelessly gather data, create graphs, charts, and tables, only to paste them into slides and call it a board meeting deck. But we confuse “data-dumping” with “strategic storytelling.” In doing so, we impose a mas…

After rising by more than 580% in a single trading session yesterday, shares of Allbirds Inc. (Nasdaq: BIRD) fell this morning in premarket trading, at one point more than 30%. The steep rise and now potential fall in the stock price followed the company’s unexpected announcement that it intends to transition from a sustainable shoemaker to an AI compute infrastructure provider. But while AI-obsessed investors initially cheered the odd move, history suggests the pivot may be a challenging one to pull off in the long run. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Yesterday, San Francisco-based Allbirds, whose wool footwear had been popular with Silicon …

As founder, chair, and CEO of the Exceptional Women Alliance, I am privileged to engage with extraordinary female leaders across industries. This month, I spoke with Shari Hofer about a workforce issue hiding in plain sight: eldercare. For many organizations, caregiving is still viewed as something employees manage quietly outside of work. According to the 2025 Caregiving in the US report, released by AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, approximately 63 million Americans provide family care, with almost 48 million providing unpaid care to adults. The 2021 AARP report estimated that the economic value of care was over $600 billion annually. Today, these prof…

Here in San Francisco, we live in a bubble, and we know it. While much of the rest of the country sees the city through the lens of Fox News cameramen searching out homeless encampments, we actually live in a very beautiful, very wealthy, and, currently, very AI-obsessed place. Traditionally, the billboards along 101 through Silicon Valley have offered a glimpse into the collective mind of the tech industry. These days, a big chunk of that industry, including most of the major AI labs, is based here in San Francisco, and the billboards have followed. The San Francisco Chronicle recently did the legwork to catalog literally all of the billboards in the city and found t…

Most business leaders are laser-focused on the existential threat that AI poses, with many of them citing it as a reason for major layoffs. At an event this week, however, Indeed CEO Hisayuki “Deko” Idekoba suggested there was another force that would wreak havoc on the labor market—one that he argued was more pressing. “Actually, what is happening in all developed countries, including European countries and the U.S., what is happening is a big demographic change: an aging labor market,” Idekoba said at Semafor’s World Economy Summit on Wednesday, as Business Insider reported this week. He said the sheer number of workers aging out of the workforce and retiring would…

Five years after its California debut, Gwyneth Paltrow’s fast-casual concept, Goop Kitchen, is officially expanding to its second state. The delivery-focused chain plans to open seven new restaurants in New York by the end of 2026, beginning in Midtown West. New York is the state where Goop’s consumer brand awareness is strongest, according to the Academy Award-winning actress. And while larger fast-casual rivals like Sweetgreen and Chipotle Mexican Grill have lately struggled to lure diners, Paltrow tells Fast Company that Goop Kitchen is “pretty much in line with most other fast-casual restaurants in terms of what they charge. And I would argue that our ingredients …

For 30 days, a drum roller compacted dirt on a 30-acre airport extension in Austin, Texas, without a human behind the wheel. According to the contractor, Dynamic Site Solutions, the machine dropped daily downtime from six hours to under one hour, nearly doubling its productive hours on site while registering zero accidents thanks to a safety system that is designed to avoid any ‘Wile E. Coyote tries to catch the Roadrunner with an ACME steam roller’ outcome. The technology behind it is an aftermarket robotic brain built by Crewline—a four-person startup headed by CEO Frederik Filz-Reiterdank and CTO Mohamed Sadek—that can be installed on an existing steamroller in ab…

This month, Anthropic announced that it had built an AI model so powerful it couldn’t be released to the public. Claude Mythos had autonomously discovered thousands of critical security vulnerabilities across all major operating systems and web browsers. Anthropic chose to make the model available only to a consortium of technology companies, giving them an opportunity to patch vulnerabilities and strengthen defenses before models with similar capabilities inevitably fall into the hands of those who would exploit them. This development shines a light on the potential future dangers that the rapid evolution of AI models brings with it. These kinds of powerful models wi…

For publishers, one of the observations that’s often cited about AI search is that the people who click through are more intentional than those who come from traditional search. In other words, sure, AI might be nuking your referral traffic, but at least the people coming from there are more likely to engage, and potentially become loyal readers. And that’s true—the stats show it. But it’s an oversimplification of a more interesting reality. It turns out that the audience in AI search isn’t just a blob of traffic that you need to work extra hard to get the attention of. People who ask AI portals for information about something can have wildly different intentions…

Prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket have roared into the public consciousness, drawing scrutiny from regulators and politicians. They’ve also captured the imagination of social media users, some of whom post outlandish claims of striking it rich by pointing AI models at prediction markets and making bank. But a new study published in the Cornell University archive arXiv suggests it’s not as easy as that. Researchers at Arcada Labs, through its Prediction Arena benchmark, tested six frontier AI models by giving each $10,000 to trade on prediction markets over 57 days earlier this year, tracking how they handled real-time information and decision-making on pla…

In recent years, nearly half of employees report increased workloads and an accelerating pace of change, so the last thing anyone can afford is doing hard work that doesn’t make an impact. Ambitious workers aren’t afraid of putting in effort, but they want it to contribute to work that matters. Work worthy of our effort creates value on two dimensions: it generates value for others (your organization, customers, or the people around you), and it creates value for yourself through personal meaning and growth. Research shows that connecting to both dimensions taps into our intrinsic and values-based motivation. When those connections are weak, despite being busy, the wo…

When Meryl Rosenthal and her cofounder started a human capital and workplace transformation consultancy in 2005, she was 41 years old. Nine years later, her cofounder left for personal reasons, rendering Rosenthal—by then age 50—a so-called solopreneur. Being a woman of that age and running a business on her own certainly came with challenges. One, she says, was that younger HR and business leaders tended to assume she didn’t have the necessary expertise because her background had not squarely been in HR. Another was a preconception that she—as an older woman—didn’t understand technology as well as her younger peers. None of these things daunted Rosenthal, though…

While it sounds silly, especially since I have a variety of construction skills, I lay awake some nights stressing about our stairs. We had gotten quotes for replacing the carpet on our stairs with white oak, but the average estimate, not including materials, was $10,000 per flight. Three flights of stairs, at $10K per? Sounded like another job for me — except I had never remodeled stairs, and everyone I knew, including contractor friends, said I shouldn’t try. What really stressed me out was the fact I didn’t know what I didn’t know. It’s one thing to think you know how to do something and worry about whether you can actually pull it off; it’s even more stressful…

For decades, the American Dream was rooted in opportunity at home. Today, a growing number of workers are redefining that dream and increasingly, it doesn’t include staying in the United States. A mix of economic pressure, shifting expectations, and global opportunity is pushing employees to consider life and work abroad in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. New research from Preply’s Language and Global Career Mobility Report underscores just how widespread this shift has become. Preply, a foreign language learning platform, surveyed over 1,800 adults in the U.S., U.K. and Canada who had studied a language or were interested in learning one. …

Google’s transition into the era of artificial intelligence continued to pay off for its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., which on Wednesday announced another quarter of stellar growth that helped to more than double its already lofty market value during the past year. Alphabet earned $62.6 billion, or $5.11 per share, during the January-March period, an 81% increase from the same time last year. Revenue climbed 22% from last year to $109.9 billion. Both numbers easily surpassed the analyst projections that steer investors. Alphabet’s stock price rose more than 6% in extended trading after the numbers came out, setting up the shares to hit a new high during Thursd…

It’s not just you. Workplace stress is at a breaking point and starting to manifest in some alarming ways. Overstressed workers are now crying, having panic attacks, and even using substances to cope with work stress while on the job in strikingly high numbers. A new report from Modern Health, a mental health platform offered as an employee benefit, surveyed on a random sample of 1,000 workers at companies of 250 or more employees. It found that employees are deeply stressed, feel largely unsupported, and that it’s all bubbling over to the point that it’s impacting their behavior at work. For many workers, AI fears are driving their stress levels. Two-thirds say…

Information is a commodity. The real challenge is establishing trust in today’s world of content overload and automated answers. How can you tell who, among an array of self-proclaimed experts, really understands a topic? And more importantly, how can you instill that trust in others? It starts at the top. According to the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, 75% of respondents said CEOs are obligated to help bridge trust divides, but just 44% do so well. That’s a huge gap that highlights a leadership credibility challenge, playing out externally with customersand inside the workplace. 3 TRUST-BUILDING STRATEGIES These are three core principles I lean on to establ…