Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

In a recent survey of senior leaders at large U.S. and U.K. professional services firms, 61% said they had abandoned at least one AI project in the past year because their people lacked the skills to deliver it. Deloitte’s “2026 State of AI in the Enterprise” report, based on a survey of more than 3,200 business and IT leaders across 24 countries, found that insufficient worker skills are now the single “biggest barrier to integrating AI into the business.” There is no quick or easy solution to this problem. While it is possible to bring in new hires or contractors with the short-term capabilities you need, this approach is not sustainable in the long term as it is bo…

Ah, the olden days of choosing where to spend your money on dining, travel, and all that connected those experiences. Neighborhood restaurants would drop flyers in your apartment lobby to let you know they were there. Hotels would rent space on billboards and place ads in newspapers and magazines. Some joined industry groups, such as the Leading Hotels of the World, which got its start by promising ship passengers when they arrived at their destinations there would be appropriate accommodation for them. The go-to reference for figuring out where to eat would have been the iconic burgundy Zagat guides, one of the original crowdsourced review guides with quotes from ordinar…

One of the more annoying things that could happen is that you spend $3,300 on a brand-new display, only to find out that, just after you’ve passed the return window, the price has dropped by $400. Nothing else has changed; just the price gets cheaper after you’ve already paid for it and can no longer return it to the store. That’s what happened for customers who bought Apple’s brand-new Studio Display XDR, the company’s high-end mini-LED monitor targeted at professionals with a few grand to spend on a monitor. The company offered the Studio Display XDR with two stand options—a VESA mount adapter and what Apple calls a “tilt-and-height-adjustable stand.” Both versions …

There’s a quiet trade-off happening inside high-growth companies right now. We’re moving faster than ever, and teams are more efficient. AI is handling work that used to take hours, and asynchronous communication means decisions don’t have to wait for meetings. On paper, it’s all an upside. But underneath the speed, something else is happening. Leaders are moving further away from their teams. Not intentionally and not dramatically—just gradually enough that you don’t notice it until alignment shifts: decisions that need to be revisited, priorities that aren’t as clear as you thought, or challenges surfacing later than they used to. The assumption that new…

Michael Patrick King has spent decades writing about people navigating worlds where everything feels transactional. With the colossally successful Sex and the City, which spawned multiple films and the sequel series And Just Like That…, King explored how identity, romance, and status become tangled up in consumerism and self-invention. In the long-running sitcom 2 Broke Girls, the focus shifted toward economic precarity and the humiliations of trying to survive in a world where money shapes nearly every relationship. But King’s sharpest work may be The Comeback, the HBO cult classic he co-created with Lisa Kudrow, who stars as Valerie Cherish, a washed-up sitcom actre…

This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps. I rely on Ideogram, an AI image generator, to help me create posters, banners, social posts, newsletter illustrations, and video thumbnails. Context: Ideogram competes in an exploding market. Gemini’s new Nano Banana Pro makes remarkable infographics, ChatGPT’s image generator produces fantastic illustrations, and Canva, Adobe, and Midjourney keep getting stronger. Yet I still find myself returning often to Ideogram. 10 reasons I like Ideogram Your prompt gets automatically improved. Ideogram’s magic prompt algorithm refines …

Using your email address as your username has become the standard. In many cases, you simply enter your email address and choose a password. Some services remove the need for a password altogether, allowing you to register using just your email address and a onetime code sent to it. Others offer the option to connect your account directly to your Google or Apple identity. As we scroll, shop, apply, and register across services, our email address quietly becomes our identity everywhere, from shopping platforms to banking to travel. Over time, more and more of our activity starts pointing back to a single account. While it all feels convenient, there is an issue we …

Organizations invest in setting the right goals to drive strategy, and increasingly they’re using AI to help. To be sure, AI can support the mechanics: draft objectives, align to strategy, track progress. But the questions that determine whether you can deliver on a goal, sustainably, aren’t ones an algorithm can answer: Are you clear on the target? Do you know why it matters? Is it realistic given your capacity? Too often, employees take on goals without asking these questions, and the result is unfocused, empty effort or burnout. The fix isn’t an AI agent—it’s having a smarter, human conversation before you commit. Next time your manager asks you to take on a new in…

High-performing leaders don’t automatically create high-performing teams. Even the most impressive executive teams on paper can struggle with alignment, trust, and collective execution. When a team isn’t functioning, a leader’s instinct is to blame individual performance, skill gaps, or the strategy. More often the underlying issue is that the team doesn’t know how to operate together. In the earlier stages of a leader’s career, they are often rewarded for what they produce. There is far less emphasis on how leaders can drive team performance. As they move up in the organization, leaders find themselves in more team environments. Yet what makes leaders successful indi…

When Olympic skier Eileen Gu walked the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Met Gala on May 4, she wore a short, shimmering gown that appeared to be made of thousands of iridescent soap bubbles caught mid-float, clustered across her body and trailing into the air behind her. Eileen Gu It was created by Iris van Herpen in collaboration with the Tokyo-London design studio A.A.Murakami. Assembled from 15,000 hand-formed glass bubbles, it took 2,550 hours to construct, and contained hidden microprocessors that released real bubbles into the air as Gu moved. It was also a glimpse into the show that opens at the Brooklyn Museum on May 16: Iris van Herpen: …

Want more housing market stories from Lance Lambert’s ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. During the pandemic housing boom, housing demand surged rapidly amid ultralow interest rates, stimulus, and the remote work boom. Federal Reserve researchers estimate “new construction would have had to increase by roughly 300% to absorb the pandemic-era surge in demand.” Unlike housing demand, housing stock isn’t as elastic and can’t quickly ramp up. As a result, the heightened demand drained the market of active inventory and caused home prices to overheat, with U.S. home prices in June 2022 sitting at a staggering 43.2% above March 2020 levels. …

Graduation season is upon us, which means copies of Oh, the Places You’ll Go! are flying off bookstore shelves—since whimsical Seussian life advice has been the go-to gift for new graduates since 1990. But handing over a picture book seems especially unhelpful for the class of 2026. While every generation of young graduates seems to face a unique set of woes in their early adulthood, this year’s new grads are coming up against some particularly turbulent times. AI is gobbling up the entry-level jobs that new graduates need to get their foot in the door. Adding insult to injury, commencement speakers are encouraging grads to embrace their new AI overlords. But …

RETN started with a bold ambition to build a nine-figure business. After doubling our revenue to nearly $80 million in the last five years, that goal is now within close reach. But it’s taken more than a daring founding team to get us to this point. This is all due to our engineers, sales, and support staff, who share a desire to grow and achieve exceptional results. As a team, we believe a business is only as strong as its weakest link. Poor components can cause bottlenecks and compromise performance. To maintain our strong network, we’re meticulous about hiring, no matter the role. And these three questions help us identify exceptional talent to maintain our gr…

Decades ago, when a classmate and I were supposed to be learning Photoshop in our high school computer lab, we stumbled upon something much cooler—and weirder. The program was called HyperCard​, from Apple, and it let you create interactive presentations with multiple choice buttons and branching pathways. We quickly started using it to craft crude choose-your-own adventure games when the teacher wasn’t looking. HyperCard could have become something bigger if Apple hadn’t abandoned it, which is a whole other story​. The point of this article, though, is to let you know about a spiritual successor that enables all kinds of modern uses despite its old-school aesthet…

In order for a chatbot to become more intelligent, and thus more useful to the end-user, it needs to assimilate data continuously. This process is known as “training.” The problem is that many AI companies never explicitly ask for consent from data owners before scraping their webpages and adding the data to the corpora of the large language models (LLMs) that power AI chatbots. But some of those data owners, also known as content creators or IP holders, are now fighting back. They are doing this by using tools known as “tarpits.” Their aim? To poison the chatbot’s underlying LLM and thus degrade the quality of its outputs, potentially causing end-user flight. Here’s …

Below, David Epstein shares five key insights from his new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. David is the author of The New York Times bestsellers Range and The Sports Gene. He has worked as a senior writer for Sports Illustrated and an investigative reporter for ProPublica. What’s the big idea? Using deliberate constraints and simplification strategies helps you focus better, be more productive, and make more creative decisions. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by David himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book. 1. Make all your current commitments visible. At one genomics lab, the staff took the tim…

During a commencement address at Emory University in Atlanta on Monday, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian admitted that he used artificial intelligence to write his speech. “Out of curiosity, I asked AI to prepare the address. I was amazed at how quick and easy it was generated,” Bastian told the graduating class of more than 5,000 students. “But I also noticed the lack of soul nor warmth it conveyed,” he said. “It was not my personal voice, and it did not express my genuine appreciation for the opportunity to impart my insights to thousands of you. You want to hear from me, not some algorithm of me. “So, don’t worry,” he told the crowd. “I threw it away, and too…

As companies battle it out with employees over RTO policies, Dropbox is choosing to stay out of the drama by prioritizing remote work. “The pandemic tested our assumption that we have to be in person in order to be productive,” Dropbox chief people officer Melanie Rosenwasser told The Associated Press. After adopting a remote work policy during the pandemic, Dropbox has remained steadfast to its “virtual-first” model—even as its peers pushed workers back to their desks. The San Francisco-based cloud storage and file share company allows its workforce of around 2,100 employees to work from anywhere in the world. “It’s especially important to us to maintain th…

Giddy up, Yellowstone fans: The epic saga of the Dutton family continues. The Western drama, which began humbly in 2018, has since grown into one of television’s most valuable franchises. A Bloomberg story from last year estimated that it generated nearly $3 billion in sales and $700 million in profit. Today, the sequel series Dutton Ranch premieres on both the Paramount Network and Paramount+. Beth and Rip are ready to make a new start in Texas. But just how did they wind up there? Here’s everything you need to know before tuning in. How did Yellowstone end? Taylor Sheridan and John Linson co-created Yellowstone, which ran for five seasons beginning in 20…

Artificial intelligence has notoriously struggled with creating images, writing out gibberish on signs, or adding extra fingers to people. But it seems it’s not much help for photography either—and the internet is having a field day over it. The official X account for the Sony Xperia smartphone shared examples from its new “AI Camera Assistant” tool, which offers lens, exposure, and color suggestions for users. While it’s a decent idea in theory, the images shared by the post revealed otherwise. The X post included a series of before-and-after examples, with the tool appearing to create a comedically overexposed effect. In one of the images, a picture of a…

El Niño is “likely to emerge soon,” with an 82% chance of it forming between May and July, and with a 96% chance it will continue from December into February 2027, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center. The report, out Thursday, says while there is “still substantial uncertainty about El Niño’s peak strength” this hurricane season—and it’s too early to tell—the summer outlook does seem ripe for the possibility of creating “very strong” conditions later, as “the strongest El Niño events in the historical record are characterized by significant ocean-atmosphere coupling through the summer.” In addition, N…

The global energy industry is under pressure to innovate. Energy companies need vetted, field-tested technologies that improve efficiency, enhance safety, and streamline operations. On the other side of the spectrum, early-stage startups developing new technologies struggle to access customers, test environments, and capital. These parallel challenges can slow crucial energy innovation, creating a commercialization gap. One approach to addressing this challenge has emerged in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a region with deep institutional knowledge and over a century of experience in energy operations. Rose Rock Bridge, a nonprofit based in Tulsa, is a pilot deployment studio that …

A normally quiet Atlanta neighborhood has suddenly found itself flooded with traffic early in the mornings. It’s not tourists. It’s not new neighbors. In fact, it’s not people at all, but an overwhelming amount of driverless cars. The cars are from robotaxi company Waymo, which has been operating in Atlanta since June of 2025. The company has a fleet of about 100 cars in the city—and when they’re not being called to provide rides, some of those Waymos have mysteriously decided to spend their free time circling a few residential streets. One of the neighborhood’s residents explained the situation to local news channel WSB-TV, saying that she and her neighbors first…

Crypto investors are making a mad dash to Zcash. Zcash (ZEC) has become something of a darling of crypto markets lately, with the token up more than 1,200% over the past year. As of Friday morning, it was trading at around $530. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is down more than 21% over the past year, and Ethereum is down around 12%. Zcash has also gained more widespread adoption—Robinhood, for example, recently added it to its platform. What’s behind the rise of Zcash? It’s difficult to point to one specific factor for the recent rise in popularity. Zcash did see its initial large-scale push during the fall of 2025, even though it had been on the market since…