Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

You know, there was a plague before COVID. Lots of people came down with it every morning and evening: the agony of traffic and train delays. Commuting sucked, and everyone agreed on that. Then remote work came along and, all of a sudden, having to go into the office disappeared for millions. But something else disappeared, and no one really talks about that part. If you listen closely to parents now, you’ll hear it. They miss the commute. Sort of. They don’t miss fighting for a seat on the subway. And no one is longing for the good old days of gridlock. But they do miss what that time offered them. I didn’t realize it either until it was gone. Catching our bre…

Google Fi has been around for north of a decade now and it still feels like the weird, smart kid in the back of the wireless-carrier room. It’s not quite a major carrier, but it’s much more than just a budget MVNO. And it’s one of the only tech services I’ve been using for years and years that hasn’t changed all that much or arbitrarily and routinely jacked up its prices. My bill has looked the same for a long, long time. So if you’re tired of the Big Three and you’re thinking about jumping ship, here’s the reality of life on Google’s network. Seamless international travel If you’ve ever landed in a foreign country only to be greeted by a $10-a-day “travel …

The glory days of self-serve fountain drinks at McDonald’s are almost over, and people are not happy. Self-serve soda fountains have been a staple of fast food restaurants like McDonald’s for decades, allowing visiting customers to self-pour, refill, and even customize their order by mixing all available soda options. But as fast food chains look to optimize their operations, not all beloved features are making the cut, and fountains are quietly disappearing. In September 2023, McDonald’s announced it was eliminating the self-serve soda fountains, with a goal to remove them all by 2032, a decision made to drive consistency for staff and customers across its many o…

It’s been a busy month for Hugh Jackman. Between headlining New Born on Broadway and starring in an upcoming mystery-comedy called The Sheep Detectives, the X-Men actor stopped by Ball State University to deliver a commencement speech for the graduating class. “I’ve been asked [countless times] to give a speech like this over the years, and I have always said no, because the money just was never really good enough,” the actor joked. Jackman reportedly first visited Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana last year with his Broadway costar turned romantic partner, Sutton Foster—a longtime faculty member of the school’s theater department. Jackman himself studied c…

Since he was seven years old, voice actor and influencer Hunter Peterson has told people that his biggest dream was to start and run an airline. In the wake of Spirit Airlines’ recent shutdown, he believes his golden opportunity has arrived at last—and the internet appears to agree. On May 2, Spirit Aviation Holdings, Inc., the company that owns Spirit Airlines, announced what it called “an orderly wind-down of operations,” effective immediately—in other words, Spirit is going out of business. The news followed years of financial struggles for the airline, multiple bankruptcies, and, most recently, an untenable rise in fuel prices due to the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. …

Hours before Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos take their places as sponsors and honorary chairs of the Met Gala—fashion’s glittery annual fundraiser in support of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute—a different kind of fashion event was unfolding across town. Ahead of the gala, hundreds of workers, organizers, and advocates gathered in the Meatpacking District in downtown New York for the Ball Without Billionaires, a worker-led fashion show designed to contrast the one at the museum. Organized by a coalition of labor groups including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Strategic Organizing Center, and the Amazon Labor Union, the…

Fashion’s biggest night out returns to New York City tonight as the Metropolitan Museum of Art prepares to welcome couture-wearing celebrities back to its steps. But as tech billionaires buy their way into the mainstream, the event is making headlines even before the kickoff, not for who might be the best dressed, but who is underwriting the festivities. Held the first Monday of every May, the Met Gala is an invitation-only benefit fundraiser in support of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. The gathering has become an iconic event, synonymous with status and fashion, with its organizer, Anna Wintour, filling the tables with celebrities and th…

Forget AI replacing human artists—The Devil Wears Prada 2 just proved that human artists can replace AI. The new movie, a long-awaited sequel to 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada, sees the return of star Meryl Streep as iconic fashion editor Miranda Priestly. It begins with Priestly in a PR crisis, sparking a slew of online hate. That includes memes like an image of Priestly dressed as a fast food worker captioned, “Would you like lies with that?” The image is only briefly on screen, and at first glance, many moviegoers assumed it was AI-generated. After all, on the internet of 2026, it most likely would be—an internet troll likely isn’t going out of their way to craft…

On a March afternoon, artificial intelligence detected something resembling smoke on a camera feed from Arizona’s Coconino National Forest. Human analysts verified it wasn’t a cloud or dust, then alerted the state’s forest service and largest electric utility. One of dozens of AI cameras installed for the utility Arizona Public Service had spotted early signs of what came to be known as the Diamond Fire. Firefighters raced to the scene and contained the blaze before it grew past 7 acres (2.8 hectares). As record-breaking heat and an abysmal snowpack raise concerns about severe wildfires, states across the fire-prone West are adding AI to their wildfire detection t…

You might remember ZenBooths—Amazon’s contribution to corporate well-being. These were booths installed in the middle of warehouses, equipped with a fan, a potted plant, and a monitor playing meditation videos. The company called them mindful practice rooms. Employees called them despair chambers. The internet called them coffins for workers—workers who, incidentally, didn’t even have time to use the bathroom because of crushing productivity demands. ZenBooths are, I think, a fitting metaphor for modern corporate wellness. According to Gallup, employee engagement dropped to 20% in 2025—the lowest it’s been since the COVID-19 lockdowns. Companies are pouring money into…

The music industry has seen disruption before. Vinyl gave way to cassettes, CDs to Napster, downloads to streaming. Each shift rewired how the music industry distributes and monetizes songs but did not change what music fundamentally is or the fact that humans have always created it. Artificial intelligence doesn’t just change how music moves. It challenges who owns it and who gets paid for it. The real threat of AI isn’t that it can make songs. It’s that it reveals how fragile the music industry is. For years, artists have operated inside a system where millions of streams translate into fractions of a cent, algorithms dictate visibility, and ownership is often dilu…

A luxury cruise ship is currently being held off the coast of West Africa after a suspected outbreak of hantavirus—a rare infectious disease typically carried by rodents—killed three passengers and infected three others. The World Health Organization (WHO) shared the news of the suspected outbreak in a post to X. According to the organization, one case of hantavirus on the ship, MV Hondius, had been confirmed through laboratory testing, and there are five additional suspected cases. Of those six affected individuals, three have died and one is currently in intensive care in South Africa. According to an official update from Dutch company Oceanwide Expe…

In December 2025, the biggest battery maker in the world, CATL, started what it calls the world’s first large-scale deployment of robots in its Luoyang, China factory. Last week, the State Grid Corporation of China began its $1 billion 2026 plan to deploy a humanoid army to maintain its grid autonomously. And just a few days ago, at the other side of the East China Sea, Japan Airlines announced the beginning of a test program of humanoids to carry luggage at airports. While we listen to Elon Musk tell us how magical and civilization-changing Tesla’s Optimus robots are, Asian countries are light-years ahead of us, deploying humanoids to do their bidding in real-life sc…

Willie Simon stood outside the Memphis motel where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, now a museum dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement. Days after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, Simon feared what the decision would mean not just for Black Americans like himself but an entire country where the political guardrails seem to be coming apart. Simon, who leads the Shelby County Democratic Party in Tennessee, said the court’s conservative majority set a precedent that if you’re “not in the in-crowd group, they can just erase us.” By weakening a requirement that states draw congressional districts in a way that gi…

A landmark federal court decision has opened the doors to COVID-era tax refunds for millions of U.S. taxpayers. In Kwong v. United States, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims determined that the COVID-19 pandemic effectively paused federal tax deadlines from January 2020 through July 2023, giving taxpayers more time to file and pay their taxes than the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had previously recognized. The court ruled that the disaster-relief provision in Internal Revenue Code Section 7508A requires the IRS to pause all penalties and interest throughout the entire disaster period, plus an additional 60 days. That means that while the COVID-19 federal dis…

The Pentagon said Friday that it has reached deals with seven tech companies to use their artificial intelligence in its classified computer networks, allowing the military to tap into AI-powered capabilities to help it fight wars. Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Nvidia, OpenAI, Reflection and SpaceX will provide their resources to help “augment warfighter decision-making in complex operational environments,” the Defense Department said. Notably absent from the list is AI company Anthropic, after its public dispute and legal fight with the The President administration over the ethics and safety of AI usage in war. The Defense Department has been rapidly acceler…

Your boss can make or break your job experience: a good boss, smooth sailing ahead. A bad boss? Misery. According to a new workplace study, most employees are dealing with the latter. The research comes from Harris Poll’s Thought Leadership Practice who just conducted its Toxic Boss survey, which included online responses from 1,334 employed U.S. adults. It defined a toxic boss as someone who “exhibits harmful workplace behaviors, including unfair preferential treatment, lack of recognition, blame-shifting, unnecessary micromanagement, unreasonable expectations, being unapproachable, taking credit for others’ ideas, acting unprofessionally, or discriminating against e…

Why do good companies stumble? I’m talking about the organizations that were once on top. The ones that seemed to lead their category. Today, we’d call them legacy brands or some euphemism that acknowledges the significance they once had and their staying power to stick around. However, somehow or another, they lost the plot along the way, and if only they had fixed this, changed that, or done this one thing, they would have continued winning. It’s a “If/then” proposition straight out of an MBA case study. A clear villain with an easy fix. As satisfying as that framing might be, it’s almost always never that simple. Instead, it’s typically a litany of factors at play th…

GameStop Corporation has proposed to buy the online auction giant eBay Inc. for $125 per share, or a total of roughly $56 billion. “The offer represents a 46% premium to eBay’s unaffected closing price on February 4, 2026, the day GameStop started accumulating its position in eBay,” reads a press release from the video game retailer. “GameStop has built a 5% economic stake in eBay through derivatives and beneficial ownership of common stock.” Here’s what you need to know about the unusual move: What did GameStop propose? The deal, as proposed, would comprise 50% cash and 50% GameStop stock. Ryan Cohen, who took over as GameStop’s CEO in 2021, would remain …

From beyond the museum walls Monday, works of art will move and take shape as the glitterati of guests from Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman to Venus Williams will fashionably ascend the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s steps and exhibit their creative interpretations of this year’s dress code, “Fashion is art.” The question of whether fashion is art has long been topic of conversation for fashion insiders, and this first Monday in May the dress code is leaving nothing up for debate. The dress code for the starry fundraising event calls for guests to “express their relationship to fashion as an embodied art form.” Fashion has long drawn inspiration from works of art, leaving guests …

Germany’s SPRIND, the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, and Sweden’s Vinnova, the country’s innovation agency, are two bodies that traditionally haven’t worked hand in hand. But the challenges the world currently faces have brought the two public innovation agencies together to back teams from across Europe building systems that can defend airports, nuclear plants, and civilian sites from hostile drones. One team, led by Martin Saska, a robotics professor at Czech Technical University in Prague, is among those being backed by the agencies to develop anti-drone technology. Beyond supporting a single company, the partnership offers Europe a way to stand firm amid s…

To rebrand the Allen Institute, designers thought horizontally instead of vertically. The nonprofit bioscience research institute, founded by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen to map the human brain, had a perfectly sufficient logo that designer Neville Brody says was “at the heart of everything.” But Brody, a legend in the industry who has designed for Coca-Cola, Nike, and Channel 4, reimagined the Allen Institute’s new identity so “the brand is a platform” for a company’s activities. Of the elements that comprise a brand, the logo traditionally comes first then the other components spin off of it. But for this project, Brody collapsed the hierarchy. He and his team develop…

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. On any given workday, you might find Whatnot employees hawking trading cards, apparel, or other items on the digital live-shopping app. They’re not slacking on the job or trying to make rent—they’re actually evaluated on whether they’ve spent time selling and buying on the app. “We only e…