Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Hiroshi Fujiwara is perhaps the most dramatically lit person I’ve ever interviewed on Zoom. Joining me at his preferred time (midnight) from Tokyo, the man known as the godfather of streetwear—who launched his own label at 26, was among the first hip-hop DJs in Japan, wrote a regular column for Popeye, and now runs his own consultancy, Fragment—has met with me to discuss his latest collaborations with Nike. But when I dig in, asking about the hidden details lurking in his shoes? He admits, “I don’t really want to talk about it,” without an ounce of rudeness. “Sometimes, if you see a movie and you don’t really get the ending, you have to guess what [the creators] t…

A widening war in Iran has halted oil tankers, made targets of refineries and spooked investors worried about the cascading impact of spiking energy prices. In response, the International Energy Agency agreed on Wednesday to release the largest volume of emergency oil reserves in its history, with the Paris-based organization pledging to make 400 million barrels of oil available from its member nations’ stockpiles. The announcement marked a shift in momentum in government response to the war upending the flow of oil, with other global leaders previously indicating reluctance to tap into stockpiles. Here is a look at the energy supplies that countries hold and when they …

When Kevin Ketels bought an electric 2026 Chevrolet Blazer last year, he wasn’t thinking about the cost of gas. He just thought EVs were better and “wanted to be part of the future.” Now that the Iran war is spiking prices at the pump, the Detroit man is happy he is no longer filling up his 11-year-old gas-powered SUV. “Electricity can go up, but it won’t go up nearly as much as gas will and it won’t go up nearly as fast, either,” said Ketels, 55, an assistant professor of global supply chain management at Wayne State University. Experts say prolonged high gas prices may drive some EV interest and sales, especially if drivers assume their electricity prices won’t be aff…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. AI pioneer pulls in a cool billion to launch his “world model” AI company Yann LeCun, one of the pioneers of AI and Meta’s former chief AI scientist, has long argued that large language models alone will not produce AI systems that outperform humans at most tasks. LeCun says today’s transformer-based large language models are useful enough to be applied in valuable ways, but he also believes they are unlikely to achieve the general or human-level intelligence needed to perform many…

Gone are the days when marketers can think in five- or 10-year plans. These days, it’s about tomorrow, not the next 16 months, because culture and what captures consumers’ attention is changing faster than ever. Today, it’s Love Island and Traitors reality TV star Rob Rausch posing shirtless on a giant billboard in Times Square for MAC Cosmetics. And tomorrow, it’s Punch the Monkey holding on to his plush doll. (And if you know what we’re talking about, congrats, you are chronically online and in tune with the culture. If you don’t, you’ve got some work to do, but that’s why we’re here.) The state of brand building in 2026 looks vastly different than what any ve…

We’re now one month into a partial U.S. government shutdown due to a Department of Homeland Security funding lapse. Yet, employees with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are still expected to show up for work. As of last Friday, many TSA employees missed their first full payday and instead received $0 paychecks. Due to financial concerns, many have been calling out sick or resigning to find alternative income sources. Staffing issues have led to longer lines and increased wait times at U.S. airport security checkpoints nationwide. Now the CEOs of major U.S. airlines are publicly calling on Washington to end the shutdown. In an open le…

A new research note just named Waymo the “Kool-Aid man” of the ride-haling economy. And it might leave Uber, Lyft, and Tesla playing catchup. The study, published on March 16 by Wall Street research firm MoffettNathanson, is a 21-page exploration into how Alphabet’s self-driving car company is poised to disrupt the existing ride-sharing landscape as it continues to aggressively scale. “Waymo’s incursion into the U.S. rideshare narrative reminds us of the Kool-Aid commercials from our childhood,” the analysis begins. “The Kool-Aid man kicks down walls, causes havoc, screams ‘oh yeah,’ and runs off into the next scene.” In the case of Waymo, it continues…

Parents make “deals” with their kids everyday. Mow the lawn and get your allowance. Finish your dinner, and you’ll get some ice cream. When Corey Scholibo was eight, his mother made him an offer: if he stopped sucking his thumb, he’d earn $20. He stopped in a week, and she made good on the promise. Now 47, Scholibo has a business designed around these childhood “deals.” In January, he launched an app-based service, Dayo Deals, that enables parents to strike bargains with their teenage children—specifically to help them reduce their screen time and social media use. Together, both parties work together to establish time limits and a monetary reward. If the te…

On a hot day, most clothing traps heat. But fabric coated with nanodiamonds—tiny diamond particles—can instead release heat, helping cut energy use for air-conditioning. The diamond nanoparticles, each less than one-thousandth of the width of a human hair, have the same carbon crystal structure as larger diamonds. But since they don’t have to be perfectly formed and can be made from carbon waste such as plastic, they are relatively inexpensive to make. The structure means that they’re especially effective at moving heat. “Because carbon has exceptional thermal properties, it can absorb energy and heat quickly, and it can dispense it quickly through that system,” s…

There’s a brand new hook to Nespresso’s upcoming global advertising campaign: Dua Lipa. The coffee brand, created by Nestlé in 1986, is teasing that the pop star will be featured in a new ad push called “Vertuo World,” which will debut on April 14 and promises to shepherd a new creative direction. Millennial Dua Lipa will star alongside Oscar-winning actor (and baby boomer) George Clooney, who has been an ambassador for Nespresso since 2006. A new face for a new generation Adding Dua Lipa to the mix builds on Nespresso’s efforts to lure a coveted demographic, Gen Z. There are around 70 million of them in the U.S. today, a generation that’s still aging into …

During last year’s NCAA Tournament, basketball fans complained about the lack of a team-focused Cinderella storyline to define the event. The only double-digit seed to advance to the Sweet 16 was Arkansas, out of the SEC, coached by Hall of Famer John Calipari. That’s hardly the kind of underdog we’re used to seeing. In 2023, Princeton made it to the Sweet 16, Florida Atlantic lasted until the Final Four, and Fairleigh Dickinson University beat No. 1 seed Purdue. And we’re unlikely to ever see a repeat of 2022, when Saint Peter’s made the Elite 8. The 2025 tournament was one of the “chalkiest” of all time, meaning the teams that made the final rounds were pretty …

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…

K-12 teachers and students across the country are increasingly using AI in and out of classrooms, whether it is teachers turning to AI to refine lesson plans or students asking AI to help them research a particular topic. An estimated 85% of K-12 public school teachers recently reported that they used AI during the 2024-2025 school year, often for curriculum and content development. In 2023, 13% of teens said they used ChatGPT to complete their schoolwork, while 26% of them said in 2025 that they were using ChatGPT for this purpose. Similarly, 86% of K-12 students shared in 2025 that they have used AI in general. An estimated 50% of students reported that they…

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. When Valerie Oswalt became CEO of breakfast and snack products company Kodiak in November 2022, she inherited a fast-growing business with beloved products, dedicated employees, and an outdoorsy vibe, befitting its Park City, Utah, headquarters. She also walked into a company that need…

Market research can be a slow, fragmented, and difficult process, often involving tedious internet searches, questionable data sources, and time-consuming manual synthesis. This makes it a great candidate for some assistance from AI. What’s more, an update to a popular feature on ChatGPT has made it even better at doing this kind of work. Imagine that you have a potential business idea but still need to validate how viable it actually is, identify primary competitors in your market, and develop an ideal customer persona. Instead of spending hours collating data, explains Dan McCarthy, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Maryland, you can use Deep…

When people choose their cofounder, it’s rarely scientific. They’re guided by trust, and trust is easiest to find in familiar places: former coworkers, college classmates, close friends, people who already sit in your orbit. While starting a company is chaotic enough without bringing strangers into the mix, I wanted to understand whether this instinct toward familiarity actually comes with a cost. Turns out it does. Having worked with hundreds of early-stage startups as founders and investors, including at Coatue, Kleiner Perkins, and NFX, we wanted to test whether the instincts founders use to choose partners actually hold up in the data. We surveyed nearly 350 U…

Postpartum depression is often framed as a private struggle that unfolds at home or in the doctor’s office. But for millions of working parents, its effects also show up quietly at work—through missed deadlines, sudden disengagement, or a colleague who no longer seems like themselves. Too often, these changes are misunderstood as performance issues rather than signs of a common and treatable mental health condition. To better understand what employers, managers, and coworkers often miss—and how workplaces can respond more thoughtfully—I spoke with Andrea Clark, deputy CEO of Postpartum Support International, a global nonprofit focused on supporting families and raisin…

Less than two years ago, Sam Altman described advertising as a “last resort” for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, during a Harvard Business School interview. He said he would pursue it if it were the only way to provide global access to high-quality AI services. At the time, the comment stood out—not because ads seemed unlikely, but because it underscored what was at stake. ChatGPT doesn’t win attention the way social platforms do. It wins trust. That’s why ChatGPT’s recent ad launch matters far beyond just the creation of a new advertising surface. It’s a real-time test of whether a product built almost entirely on trust can monetize without fundamentally changing user behavior. Op…

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…

Microsoft’s recently announced use of a West Virginia data center that will run entirely on natural gas could cause the company’s emissions to skyrocket by 44%. That’s according to a new report from Stand.earth researchers, who say Microsoft’s power needs at the facility will see it burning the same amount of methane as annually as more than 1.2 million homes. The data center, called the Monarch Compute Campus, is an example of a “behind-the-meter” or “off-grid” data center, which generates its own electricity, bypassing the public grid. With the growth of AI data centers threatening to overload the electricity grid and raise residents’ energy bills, these…

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…

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Hurricane Center (NHC) is redesigning its most recognizable—some would say iconic—”cone” graphic for the 2026 hurricane season. Other product upgrades include improvements to Hawaii’s storm surge watches and warnings. “These improvements empower communities to prepare earlier and more effectively for dangerous hazards from tropical storms and hurricanes,” Michael Brennan, director of NOAA’s National Hurricane Center, said in a statement. The updates come as climate change brings warmer global temperatures and rising sea levels, leading to more extreme weather events including longer, more intens…

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 …