Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. Before we go any further, an invitation: On Thursday, April 23, at 1 p.m. ET, my colleague Jared Newman and I will be cohosting “The AI Productivity Playbook: A Practical Guide to Working Smarter,” a livestreamed event exclusively for Fast Company subscribers. We’ll highlight the AI work tools we find actually useful and share advice on how to get the most out of them. You can RSVP here. And if you have any questions or tips related to our topic, I would love to hear them. Over a lifetime of writing, I have used more word processors than I can count. Long-defunct obscurities such as Scripsit and Pfs…

About an hour after the men’s college basketball season ended in Indianapolis with a Michigan Wolverines’ championship on April 6, the team’s coaching staff was already working hard at trying to win the next one. The transfer portal—a digital compliance tool and database to systematically manage the transfer process for student-athletes—opened for Division I men’s basketball players on midnight after the title game, and it set off a firestorm of entries with players seeking massive paydays. However, the public doesn’t actually know for certain who is getting how much money. And in today’s disinformation economy, it’s become a haven for fake news to take the mantle…

It’s been a rough several years for restaurant chains. Many have been facing headwinds on two fronts: consumers who are pulling back on discretionary spending as inflationary pressures bite, and rising operating costs. These pressures have resulted in numerous chains filing for bankruptcy in recent years. Now, another chain’s owner has joined those ranks. 801 Restaurant Group, the parent company of the 801 Chophouse chain of steakhouses, has filed for bankruptcy. Here’s what you need to know. What’s happened? Earlier this month, 801 Restaurant Group, owner of several companies that own 801 Chophouse, 801 Fish, and 801 Local, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in t…

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is warning restaurants and retailers not to sell or serve recalled shellfish from a Washington State company due to potential norovirus contamination. The recalled shellfish was harvested on March 22 through April 9, according to a safety alert from the FDA. The alert follows an April 10 recall conducted by the Washington State Department of Health, cautioning the FDA about all species of shellstock from the company, Gomez Shellfish, due to norovirus-like illnesses that were associated with the consumption of raw oysters. Norovirus is a contagious virus that causes vomiting and diarrhea and is the leading cause of foodbo…

You’ve likely heard of vibe coding and very well may have conducted an experiment or two yourself, enlisting Claude or some other AI tool to create a simple website or an interactive game. OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy coined the phrase with a tweet in February 2025. In its simplest terms, vibe coding involves telling an AI program what you want to accomplish and having the AI create the code. It uses natural language provided by the user to generate the software. Vibe coding is a truly revolutionary democratizer of software development. It allows anyone with a computer and a little imagination to come up with software that appears, at least on the surface, to …

John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, has been named the new CEO of Apple, the company announced. In a letter posted on the company’s website, current CEO Tim Cook wrote that he will leave his role in September and become executive chairman. He described Ternus as “a brilliant engineer and thinker who has spent the past 25 years building the Apple products our users love so much, obsessed with every detail, focused on every possible way we can make something better, bolder, more beautiful, and more meaningful. He is the perfect person for the job.” Ternus has been at Apple for 24 years, and led the hardware engineering division since 201…

The annual Lyrid meteor shower is back, reaching its peak on Tuesday evening and at predawn on Wednesday. On average, 10 to 20 meteors are produced per hour during a Lyrid shower. But, in some rare occasions “outbursts” can occur, with up to 100 meteors produced in an hour. According to the American Meteor Society, Lyrids will be mostly visible in the Northern hemisphere at dawn, although limited availability will also be available to those in the Southern Hemisphere. The Lyrid shower is among the oldest recorded meteor showers, dating back as far as 2,700 years. The meteor shower is visible when Earth travels through the path of Comet Thatcher, rendering a t…

Nearly two out of three American adults have used an AI-powered search tool in the past six months. But here’s the stat that should keep every product builder up at night: only 15% say they trust the results “a lot.” That gap between adoption and trust is the defining challenge for the next era of AI search. Consumers are showing up, but they are questioning the results. As product builders, we have to ask ourselves an uncomfortable question: Are we building experiences that earn and deserve consumer trust? The Walled Garden Problem Yelp partnered with Morning Consult to survey more than 2,200 U.S. adults on how they use and perceive AI-powered search. The fin…

I have been thinking about a question that nobody in enterprise software seems to want to sit with: why can the most advanced AI models in the world solve Olympiad-level mathematics but fail to reliably extract a total from an invoice? This is not an academic exercise for me. I have been building automation software for twenty years. My company has processed billions of documents for some of the largest enterprises in the world. Yes, I have a stake in this answer. But twenty years of watching models work on real enterprise data, not benchmarks, gives you a different view than turning a model in a lab. And when those real-world models cannot get the simple stuff right,…

You can now book haircuts, doctors’ appointments, and food deliveries through Yelp. The business search and review platform has rolled out integrations with providers including DoorDash, Zocdoc, and Vagaro, letting users book appointments and order food directly from a Yelp listing or through the AI-powered Yelp Assistant. Users could already request quotes from businesses ranging from home and auto repair professionals to beauty experts. The Yelp Assistant is also getting its own tab in the app, as the company aims to become a destination not just for its hundreds of millions of user-contributed reviews but for answering questions about local businesses and booking their…

As artificial intelligence puts Americans out of work, there are programs available to help them land on their feet—but experts warn they’ll need to ramp up quickly to meet the demand. One new pilot program sends a $1,000 monthly stipend to workers displaced by AI while providing career support to help them return to the workforce. Called the AI Dividend, it’s an initiative that’s privately funded through donations to the Fund for Guaranteed Income (a nonprofit that distributes cash through various programs, including its AI Commons Project) in partnership with What We Will, which provides recipients with community support and career resources. The Fund for Guaranteed…

Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders are set to vote Thursday on the company’s proposed $81 billion sale to Skydance-owned Paramount, in a mega merger that could vastly reshape Hollywood and the wider media landscape. Paramount wants to buy all of Warner. That means HBO Max, cult-favorite titles like “Harry Potter” and CNN could soon find themselves under the same roof as Paramount’s CBS, “Top Gun” and the Paramount+ streaming service. And a greenlight from shareholders would bring the acquisition closer to the finish line. Shareholders are expected to meet at 10 a.m. ET to vote on the deal, which is valued at nearly $111 billion, including debt, based on Warner’s current…

JetBlue replies to customers on social media every day, from assuaging their customer service woes to thanking them for choosing their flights. But one seemingly innocuous JetBlue response may have set a class action lawsuit in motion, after customers became convinced that the airline implicated itself in using surveillance pricing. A social media frenzy JetBlue first drew suspicions of surveillance pricing with an April 18 reply on X to a user complaining about the airline’s prices. “A $230 increase on a ticket after one day is crazy,” they wrote. “I’m just trying to make it to a funeral.” JetBlue replied, recommending that the user “try clearing your cache an…

Experts have a lot of ideas about persuasion. Some suggest leveraging social proof to show that people have adopted the idea and had a positive experience. Others emphasize the importance of building trust and appealing to emotional, rather than analytical arguments. Still others insist on creating a unified value proposition. The problem is that change is not about persuasion. The best indicator of what we think and do is what the people around us think and do, and that effect extends out to three degrees of separation. It is not only those we trust, but even the friends of our friends’ friends—people we don’t even know—that affect our opinions and actions. So ev…

There are ​more than 20 billion things​ to watch on YouTube, but sometimes that endless choice can feel constraining. It’s all too easy, for instance, to get trapped inside an algorithmic bubble that keeps stuffing you with more of the same thing. And that’s before you get sidetracked looking at comments, descriptions, and sidebar recommendations. Fortunately, a new tool makes watching YouTube feel more like watching old-school TV—with a grid-based channel guide to flip through and minimal distractions. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech …

Look, we all know the drill. Job hunting is basically a full-time job that pays zero dollars and requires you to be perpetually “passionate” about companies that make, I don’t know, enterprise-grade cloud storage for other cloud storage companies. It’s exhausting. But it’s 2026, and if you’re still copy-pasting your résumé into a hundred different web forms like it’s 2012, you’re doing it wrong. The robots are already screening you, so you might as well hire some robots of your own to level the playing field. Here are five AI-powered job-hunting tools to check out. Teal: Mission control If your job search is currently a mess of saved LinkedIn posts and half…

Thank you for reading Modern CEO. Before we dive into this week’s topic, please check out our first livestreamed event exclusively for Modern CEO subscribers: On Monday, May 18, at 1 p.m. ET, I’m hosting The CEO’s Guide to AI. Matt Fitzpatrick, CEO of Invisible Technologies, will help leaders understand where AI can have an impact—and what’s hype. You can RSVP here, and if you’re not already a subscriber, you can sign up here. And if you have questions for Matt, you can submit them to stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. One of my first Modern CEO newsletters highlighted the opportunity for CEOs to have constructive conversations with organized labor. It was a contrary take a…

You know the scenario: It’s nighttime. You’re cozy under the bed covers, drifting off to sleep. Then, your eyes fly open. Wow, that was a big credit card bill this month. It’s time to make a budget. Your boss made that weird comment yesterday. Are you on thin ice at work? Forget work—are we on the brink of a world war? And what the heck is going on with that weird mole? Before you know it, the worries are flooding your brain. You’re wracked with anxiety—and sleep isn’t coming any time soon. “I think we’ve all had that experience where we seem to spiral at night and, in the morning—in the light of day—whatever you were stressing about the night before sometime…

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 increase rapidly 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 where sellers are gaining power. Since the national pandemic housing boom fizzled out in 2022, the power dynamic has slowly been shifting directionally from sellers to buyers. Of course, that shift has varied…

In late April, indoor golf and entertainment brand Five Iron Golf launched its first location in Saudi Arabia after nearly three years of coordination with Golf Saudi, an affiliate of the country’s massive sovereign wealth fund. The golf center, located on the ground floor of the Public Investment Fund Tower—the fund’s headquarters and the tallest building in Riyadh—offers a similar mix of simulators, leagues and lessons, and food and music as other Five Iron locations both in the U.S. and abroad, says Jared Solomon, cofounder and CEO of the brand. “People are hitting golf balls, they’re having fun, they’re eating food,” he says. “They’re not drinking, because the…

A large Applebee’s franchisee that filed for Chapter 11 protection in March is seeking to close additional restaurants as it works its way through the bankruptcy process and sale of its assets, a new court filing reveals. NRPF Group Two, which operates roughly 50 Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill + Bar locations in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, has asked a federal court for permission to reject the leases on five additional properties. Most of the Applebee’s restaurants associated with the properties appeared to be still open this week, though a few were marked as temporarily closed on Google as of Wednesday. Atlanta-based NRPF Group Two said in the court filing …

Anyone spending time inside a company right now can feel it. There is a growing assumption shaping decisions at the highest levels. AI will drive efficiency and therefore companies are expected to reduce headcount. It sounds logical. It sounds disciplined. But it is also incomplete. I have been in boardrooms where AI is discussed as both an opportunity and a justification. Leaders talk about transformation, and in the same breath talk about reducing headcount. The connection feels automatic, as if one must follow the other. Here’s what’s missing from the conversation: What is the work we actually want done, and how should it be done? THE EFFICIENCY SHORTCU…

Below, Piera Gelardi shares five key insights from her new book, The Playful Way: Creativity, Connection, and Joy Through Everyday Moments of Play. Gelardi is a creative entrepreneur. She cofounded the media brand Refinery29 and, more recently, the creative wellness company NoomaLooma. What’s the big idea? Playfulness means being curiously, creatively, and courageously engaged with life. Being playful isn’t the easy choice. It requires showing up authentically, risking looking silly, and trying something that might not work. In a world that rewards performance and polish, choosing play is a quiet act of courage that will help you feel alive. Listen to the a…

Artificial intelligence is constantly in the news, and it’s one of the most talked about topics among our Fast Company Impact Council members. Its use and acceptance levels are changing daily, with company direction on how to approach it changing alongside that. Boards, leadership, teams, and customers are also reassessing AI usage in the workplace and in the work product. We asked our Impact Council members what kinds of attitude changes toward AI they are seeing in their ecosystem. This question drew an onslaught of replies—clearly a topic everyone has thoughts about. We are sharing 26 of their responses, ranging from the theoretical to unusual use cases. 1. MOVE AW…

Chili’s has had a major comeback in recent years. The casual dining chain turned 50 last year, and recently reported 20 consecutive quarters of growth. Chili’s CEO Kevin Hochman told Business Insider that the success of the chain boils down to two things: marketing and operations. “We have a saying here: marketing brings them in, and ops brings them back,” Hochman told BI. Hochman shared this sentiment with analysts and investors during an earnings call with investors last year. It’s clear the Tex-Mex chain has continued to lean in on that strategy. “The marketing has to be exciting,” Hochman said. “And then the operators are in charge of creating that ex…