Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Raising venture capital for a physical-world company can feel harder than getting struck by lightning. You could be standing on a mountain for months, holding a metal pole in a storm, waiting. And you probably still wouldn’t get hit. Meanwhile, it can seem like founders in San Francisco announce a new AI round every other week. Capital moves quickly when you’re building software that rides the current hype cycle. If you’re building something that touches atoms instead of code, like manufacturing, energy, agriculture, or materials, you’re often grinding quietly. The timelines are longer. The checks are fewer. The rejections stack up. And pardon my French, but you get y…

The Social Security Administration is rolling out some big changes to how it handles disability payments while also upgrading its customer service. The changes come in the aftermath of a major overhaul by DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, in 2025, which resulted in the layoffs of more than 7,000 workers. First, let’s take a look at disability payments. The new process aims to cut the time it takes to determine eligibility for Social Security, speed up the time it takes beneficiaries to receive their checks, and, according to the Washington Examiner, reduce the agency’s current backlog. The SSA had a backlog of claims that was on track to exc…

Eli Lilly wants to get its obesity drugs into the hands of more Americans and it’s betting on employers to help do so. The Indianapolis-based drugmaker launched a new program on Thursday that’s designed to offer employers more options for covering obesity drugs, thereby lowering the cost barriers to access for employees. Lilly and rival Novo Nordisk have taken various steps in recent months to slash the prices of their now-popular GLP-1 medications, and Lilly’s latest move is intended to close what it refers to as an “access gap” in U.S. obesity care. In early 2024, Lilly launched LillyDirect, an online pharmacy where patients can buy a variety of medications, inc…

Conspiracy theories are literally contagious. Recent research on misinformation and how it goes viral across social networks has revealed remarkable parallels to how diseases spread in populations. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that Tracy Letts’s Bug was tackling this topic 30 years. The psychological stage drama feels like a cautionary tale for our current moment, where facts bleed into false assumptions and produce toxic conclusions. Except the story here is decidedly pre-internet, centering on a nomadic Gulf War veteran and a substance-abusing cocktail waitress who develop a codependent relationship with deleterious results. The more time they spend alo…

Starbucks customers who love collecting the company’s loyalty rewards stars for each dollar they spend are in for a change this morning. America’s No. 1 coffee chain is launching its revamped rewards program today, March 10. With it comes a tiered loyalty membership program and a new structure for earning stars and new rewards. Here’s what you need to know. The former Starbucks loyalty rewards system is no more Before today’s launch of the new rewards program, Starbucks’s previous loyalty system was more straightforward. Under the old system, which was in place from around 2019 until yesterday, there were no membership tiers. In that program, all Starbucks…

Google is rolling out new AI features designed to quickly flesh out Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides using data from the web and your existing Google files. The overall aim is to eliminate much of the busywork involved in filling out templated documents, transferring data from saved files or internet sources into spreadsheets, and tweaking slide presentations to add new facts and figures—all while reflecting the personal and professional preferences expressed in people’s previous work. “It’s not enough to simply generate a generic email or brief,” says Yulie Kwon Kim, VP of product for Google Workspace. “People want AI to understand your specific context, delivering result…

In 2012, NASA launched two probes into space: Van Allen Probe A and Van Allen Probe B. Their goal was to collect data on charged particles passing through Earth’s magnetic field. Those particles can wreak havoc on communications and other technologies on our planet, so understanding them is important. In 2019, the Van Allen Probes’ mission ended. With its fuel spent, the “A” probe is set to reenter Earth’s atmosphere today, and the parts of it that are not burned up upon reentry may crash onto our planet in the next 24 hours. Here’s what you need to know. Which probe is crashing? Thankfully, we only need to worry about one probe crashing into Earth to…

Fresh off a historic 40-point performance in the finals of the Unrivaled season, WNBA player Kelsey Plum is taking a different shot: an AI twin. Fans can now voice call with a digital version of the Los Angeles Sparks star. Plum announced the twin on her personal Instagram account on March 6, asking her AI self for advice on her ponytail and coffee versus energy drink. Plum is the first professional female athlete to launch a verified AI digital twin. It’s a move that’s earning plaudits as a way for women in sports to take control of their image and expand their reach. “The opportunity to have a twin that can connect with fans, with young people, people tha…

Spend enough time in corporate America, and somewhere along the line you’ll hear the refrain: Bring your whole self to work. It’s become the mantra of modern management—printed on culture decks, repeated in leadership off-sites, and embedded in HR rhetoric. The idea traces back to management thinker and author Frederic Laloux, a former associate partner at McKinsey & Company, who argued that the most progressive organizations invite employees to show up fully. Not as cogs in the machine, but as the complex and multifaceted humans we are. We invited Eric Solomon on the From the Culture podcast, where the PhD-trained cognitive psychologist who’s led research f…