If everything feels expensive this year, youre not alone. The high cost of living is on many Americans minds heading into the tail end of the year a period defined by ceaseless shopping, whether its for the Thanksgiving menu or a last minute gift for under the tree.
Americans need to buy stuff (perhaps not so much stuff), but theyre also feeling the pinch of persistent inflation, chaotic tariffs and a frozen job market in 2025. How those forces will play out this holiday shopping season remains to be seen.
According to a recent survey from consulting firm Deloitte, more people will be shopping this Black Friday through Cyber Monday, but they plan to spend less. Consumers said they plan to spend an average of $622 during the stretched out shopping holiday, down 4% from last year the first decline in five years. Unsurprisingly, shoppers who planned to cut their spending pointed to higher living costs and financial constraints in the decision.
Some generational differences emerged. Gen X shoppers and boomers reported plans to reduce their spending during the shopping holiday, but Gen Z and millennial shoppers said they would stay the course and keep their spending levels the same this year. With the explosion of online shopping, lining up at the mall before sunrise for doorbuster sales might seem like a relic of the past, but 72% of Gen Z shoppers actually said they plan to shop in person this year.
While most shoppers are showing restraint this season, the spending power of Gen Z is growingthey are responsible for about $20 of every $100 holiday dollar spent, compared to just $4 five years ago, Deloitte Retail Strategy Leader Brian McCarthy said. And we expect they are headed back to the stores on Black Friday to take part in the excitement of the day. People from both higher and lower-income households said they planned to cut back on spending this year, but those in the range between $100,000 and $200,000 actually reported plans to spend 5% more this year.
The National Retail Federation estimates that a record 186.9 million people plan to shop between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday (the Monday following Black Friday) this year. That projection is up by 3 million shoppers compared to 2024. During that period, Black Friday is expected to reign supreme among deal-seekers, drawing an estimated 130.4 million people to shop the day after Thanksgiving. Saturday and Sunday arent full-blown shopping holidays of their own, but Cyber Monday a relatively recent invention will likely continue to gain ground, luring around half as many shoppers as Black Friday itself.
Pushing back on Black Friday
To draw attention to the cost of living crisis, a coalition of organizations is calling for shoppers to sit out this Black Friday. A grassroots movement known as the Mass Blackout, is urging Americans to boycott online and in-store shopping, including digital purchases, for one week, starting on Tuesday, November 25. While the Mass Blackout website calls out the Trump administrations coziness with corporations, its not explicitly a Democratic effort.
Big business is funding authoritarian candidates while walking back public commitments to civil rights, labor protections, diversity, and democracy, the website states. This isn’t about left vs. right. This is about people vs. power. While the coalition wants Americans to spend less this holiday season, it still encourages participants to give their money to small businesses and local shops.
Another major boycott is looking to hit the biggest names in retail where it hurts this holiday season. The We Aint Buying It movement, tied to progressive groups like Indivisible and the No Kings protests, is similarly calling for a shopping blackout over Thanksgiving weekend, specifically targeting Amazon, Target and Home Depot over their deference to the Trump administration and their reversal of DEI policies. Well send a clear message: until they cease collaborating with this administrations harmful policies, our dollars will go elsewhere, the campaigns website states.
Sales at U.S. retailers and restaurants increased modestly in September as resilient consumers moderated their spending after splurging over the summer.
Sales rose 0.2% in September from the previous month, the Commerce Department said Tuesday, in a report delayed more than a month because of the government shutdown. Sales jumped 0.6% in July and August and 1% in June. Numerous reports on inflation, employment, spending, and growth remain delayed and the government wont likely be caught up until late December.
The retail sales figures, which aren’t adjusted for inflation, suggest that Americans pulled back on spending in September as many households struggled with high prices for groceries, rent, and many imported goods hit by tariffs. The retail sales report covers about one-third of consumer spending, with the rest going to services such as travel, haircuts, and entertainment. Still, higher spending should lift the economys growth to a solid 3% annual rate in the July-September quarter, economists forecast, after a sluggish 1.6% expansion in the first half of the year.
Much of the spending, however, was driven by rising prices at gas stations and grocery stores. Still, sales rose 0.7% in September at restaurants and bars, a healthy gain in discretionary spending. Sales at clothing, electronics, and sporting goods stores fell.
Consumer spending could slow in the final three months of the year, economists warned. The government shutdown, weak hiring, and elevated inflation will likely cause more Americans to cut back.
The moribund labor market and ongoing drag on real incomes from tariff-induced price increases suggest that this slowdown is likely to be maintained, Oliver Allen, an economist at Panthenon Macroeconomics, a consulting firm, said.
Also on Tuesday, payroll processor ADP released its weekly measure of hiring, which found that companies cut an average of 13,500 jobs a week in the four weeks ending Nov. 8. The report is a sign hiring may have slowed since September, when the government said a solid 119,000 jobs were added.
The disparity found in economic data shows how the economy remains in an uncertain state despite the solid growth in the third quarter. Hiring has generally been weak and the unemployment rate has ticked higher, which could drag down consumer spending and the broader economy if it worsens. Unemployment rose to 4.4% in September, the highest in nearly four years, from 4.3%, according to the delayed monthly jobs report released last week.
Higher-income Americans are driving much of the gains, according to data from Bank of America and reports from retailers such as Walmart, as lower-income shoppers seek bargains and are more likely to spend more on necessities.
Still, some retailers issued positive reports Tuesday, including electronics chair Best Buy and Dick’s Sporting Goods. Best Buy lifted its sales and profit forecasts for the year.
Tuesdays report comes before the crucial winter holiday season kicks off this weekend, when retailers earn as much as a fifth of their revenues. The National Retail Federation and other forecasters expect modest sales gains this year, compared with last years holiday, with the NRF projecting that sales will top $1 trillion for the first time.
Separate figures from the Labor Department suggest that inflation remains elevated but isn’t accelerating, which could make it more likely that a closely-divided Federal Reserve cuts rates next month.
Wholesale prices rose 0.3% in September from August, the Labor Department said Tuesday, and 2.7% compared with a year ago. The monthly gain in the producer price index was pushed higher by a sharp increase in gasoline costs. The yearly figure was unchanged from the previous month.
Core prices, which exclude the volatile food and energy prices, rose just 0.1% in September and 2.6% from a year earlier. Those figures are less than expected and suggest inflation pressures are cooling, economists said.
The retail sales figures land as many economic data are coming in mixed. Wage growth has slowed this year and is just modestly above inflation, a trend that is likely driving Americans concerns around affordability.
Wages, on average, rose 3.8% in September from a year ago, the government said last week. That is only modestly above Septembers annual inflation rate of 3%.
But for many Americans, particularly those earning lower incomes or for older workers, wages are rising more slowly and are clearly trailing inflation.
The Bank of America Institute estimates that for the poorest one-third of households, pay grew just 1% in October from a year earlier, while the highest one-third saw their wages rise 3.7%. The gap between higher- and lower-income households matches an August figure as the widest in nearly a decade, the bank said. Bank of America uses anonymous data from its customers to calculate the figures.
And a separate report from JPMorganChase Institute showed that incomes for a typical household have retreated to levels last seen in the early 2010s, after the harsh 2008-2009 recession.
Households are going into the end of the year with weak income growth and bank balances that remain flat, after adjusting for inflation, the report said.
Christopher Rugaber, AP economics writer
AP Retail Writer Anne DInnocenzio contributed to this report.
If you ask New Yorkers on the street what they think about the giant, controversial print ad campaign in the NYC subway system, their initial response might be, Which one? In the past two months alone, not one, but two ad campaigns fitting that description have appeared on the subway.
The first debuted in late September, when Friend, an AI company billed as a portable companion, ran a $1 million print campaign featuring a variety of servile messages like, Ill never leave dirty dishes in the sink. The campaign received massive criticismto the point that the MTA was forced to continuously remove Friends vandalized ads. In an interview with Fast Company, Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann said he expected that would happen, and, in fact, he designed the ads with white space to invite graffiti.
Now, another controversial print ad campaign has joined the fray. The new ads are paid for by Nucleus Genomics, a genetic health company specializing in genetic testing, IVF services, and embryo screening. The companys ads include phrases like, Height is 80% genetic, IQ is 50% genetic, Have your best baby, and These babies have great genes. In emails to Fast Company, Nucleus said that its new campaign was inspired by yet another contentious ad from this year: Sydney Sweeneys recent American Eagle partnership, which sparked backlash for what many people believed was a casual promotion of eugenics.
Shock value marketing is as old as advertising itself. But Friend and Nucleuss recent campaigns represent a novel kind of rage bait marketing that is primed for the current moment of political and technological divide. This new era of attention-seeking provocation, incubated on social media with companies like Cluely, has now made its way into the physical world where brands are looking to double down on turning backlash into opportunity.
We spoke to leading experts about the rise of rage bait marketing and where it goes from here. Hear from:
An NYU Stern School of Business professor on why the new crop of tech startups is perfectly primed for rage baiting.
The head of strategy at The Martin Agency on the advantage provocative marketing campaigns give young companiesand what it might cost them.
The cofounder of Joan Creative on what comes next after this initial wave of rage bait campaigns.
[Photo: Nucleus Genomics]
What is Nucleus Genomics trying to do, exactly?
Nucleus was launched in 2021 by the now-25-year-old Kian Sadeghi. According to Sadeghi, the company is dedicated to helping parents have healthier children through what he calls genetic optimization.
In practice, Nucleus provides a few different services. Its first offering was a proprietary DNA testing kit that uses cheek swabs to, per its website, uncover your genetic risk for 2000+ conditions. This summer, Nucleus partnered with a company called Genomic Prediction to begin offering an embryo screening service that allows patients to look at their embryos statistically predicted traitsincluding the potential likelihood of developing conditions like autism or Alzheimer’s, alongside eye color, height, hair color, and IQ. Later, in August, the company bundled that service with a new full-service IVF program called IVF+.
[Images: Nucleus Genomics]
Nucleus isnt the only company thats started offering more advanced embryo screening services in recent years. Several others, like Orchid and Genomic Prediction, have emerged within the last decade. All of these companies are facing intense debate from the scientific community over the legitimacy of their prediction models, the morality of screening for certain traits, and the long-term repercussions of a future in which embryo optimization becomes commonplace.
This discussion around the ethics of Nucleus core premise is actually what sets it up for a successful rage bait campaign, according to Joshua Lewis, an assistant professor of marketing at NYUs Stern School of Business. For companies like Friend and Nucleus, he says, some level of polarization is intrinsic to the product itself. AI companions, for example, will inevitably have detractors who find the premise objectionable, as well as champions who believe in it wholeheartedly; the same goes for embryo screening companies.
By employing rage bait tactics, Lewis says, these companies can start broader cultural dialogues and build affinity with their target audiences without losing too many potential customers.
To polarize intentionally can make some sense, because ultimately what you want in marketing is to have your target segments be loyal. Polarizing can be quite good, as long as your non-target segments are experiencing the rage, and your target segments are appreciating what the brand is doing, Lewis says. Regardless of Nucleus actual intentions, he adds, it doesn’t cost them much to upset people who weren’t going to be using their products anyway.
For companies in nascent fields, theres an added advantage to aiming for shock value in campaigns, says Elizabeth Paul, chief strategy officer at the advertising company The Martin Agency.
If you’re in the business of genetically engineered babies or AI companions, controversy is baked into the product, Paul says. It seems to me like Nucleus Genomics and Friend AI decided to lean into that reality and make their baklash bug a feature. If anyone’s wondering, Why would you do that? I think their tension-filled campaigns better amplified mass awareness for what are very nascent categories.
[Images: American Eagle]
Inside Nucleus latest campaign
In an email to Fast Company, Nucleus PR firm described the subway campaignwhich includes a full takeover of the Broadway Lafayette station, more than 1,000 subway car ads, and another 1,000 street adsas the first mainstream campaign to openly champion advanced embryo selection for specific traits. Several of the ads call out physical attributes and IQ, and most direct viewers to Nucleus landing page, pickyourbaby.com.
The Nucleus team says it was inspired by the controversial Good Jeans campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney. In that campaign, a denim-clad Sweeney narrates, Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue. A male voice-over adds, Sydney Sweeney has great jeans. It almost immediately entered the sphere of marketing infamy for (likely inadvertently) promoting genetic ideals, given Sweeneys blue eyes, blond hair, and white skin.
When Sadeghi saw the reaction to the Sweeney ad, he noticed a lot of what he calls DNA dissonanceor what he considers a widespread misunderstanding of what DNA actually is, why genetics matter, and how far along genetic testing has come in the scientific community. He claims that Nucleuss products are just another tool parents are going to use to help give their child the best start in life, and that the ads can help parents better understand how to achieve that advantage.
While Sadeghi benignly frames the campaign as an educational tool, it doesnt exactly line up with the actual ads. Much of the copy feels designed to generate a reactiongood or badto what Sadeghi refers to as the “sci-fi narrative” surrounding embryo optimization.
The internet reacts
On Threads, one post of an ad reads, Every single day theres a new dystopian subway ad. On TikTok, a video with nearly 200,000 views critiquing the campaign is captioned, We need to have some very serious conversations about eugenics cuz we’re losing ground here. Another TikTok with more than 2.4 million views shows a camera panning around the Broadway Lafayette station with the overlaid text, Uhhh sorry but what in the eugenics is this? More than 8,000 other users have sounded off about the campaign in the comments.
On the surface, rage baiting might seem counterproductivewho wants people to hate their product? But for companies like Friend and Nucleus, the numbers may speak for themselves.
Nucleus says that since the campaign debuted, the company has seen an over 1,700% increase in sales, primarily driven by sign-ups to its IVF+ services. Across organic responses, its achieved almost five million impressions. Similarly, Friends earlier campaign sparked dozens of stories in the media and commentary across social media, causing Schiffman to deem it an overwhelming success.
The vast majority of marketers are not going to want to test the adage all press is good press by courting controversy, Paul says. Still, most can probably understand the desire to break through the noise in an environment where consumers are bombarded with content on a daily basis. On social media, one algorithmically-backed way to achieve those ends is by eliciting fear or anger.
The reality is, according to Kantar, 85% of ads right now fail to meet the minimum threshold of attention for comprehension, Paul says. In other words, they are so bland and boring and invisible, people did not pay enough attention to even process what they said. In an environment like that, brand invisibility is a bigger threat than brand rejection.
View on Threads
Companies are choosing to say the quiet part out loud
Risk and provocation in marketing is a tale as old as time. Paul points out that such tactics trace back as far as P.T. Barnums shock-value stunts for his circus events. But Jaime Robinson, cofounder of the agency Joan Creative, believes there is something entirely unique about Friend and Nucleus recent campaigns: the willingness to openly address, and even emphasizeintrinsically controversial elements of their products.
Robinson recalls a 1974 ad in which a brand called Beautymist featured football player Joe Namath pictured with his legs smoothed by a pair of nylons. Lewis remembers a 2018 ad featuring Colin Kaepernick after he refused to take a knee during the National Anthem. Each of these examples, they told me in separate interviews, were made with the knowledge that there would be some backlash from the public.
The difference with Friend AI and Nucleus, Robinson explains, is that pantyhose and sneakers are not inherently controversial, while AI companions and embryo screening areand instead of hiding the elements of these products that consumers are most wary of, both companies are bringing them to the fore.
[Nucleus] product is something where you can not just look out for potential diseases your embryos might have, but also pick out features like eye color and hair color. Theyve made a really provocative choice in their product and their use-case, Robinson says. Last year, she adds, a company like Nucleus might have shied away from talking about those features, and instead emphasized the health aspects of the marketing. Now, theyre putting it front-and-center.
It’s about saying things that go against some of the most deeply held convictions of most of us and the things that we find most uncomfortable in the world: being replaced by robots; having babies being picked by their physical features and IQ, Robinson says. These are the things that we find the most abhorrent, just as human beings.
[Screenshots: Twitter/X]
Robinson believes that part of this marketing strategy might be attributable to a political climate in which authority figures are constantly testing the boundaries of what is acceptable to say. Lewis noted that, in a sense, President Trump often uses similar rage bait techniques in order to communicate his own personal branding. Now, we might be seeing that political tenor bleed into the marketing sphere. Both Robinson and Paul predict that, in the wake of Friend and Nucleus campaigns, were likely to see an uptick in rage bait marketing in the months to come.
What’s interesting now is how companies are choosing to say the quiet part out loud, and doing it fearlessly, Robinson says. It’s almost as if they’ve thrown away the dog whistle and traded it for a foghorn.
U.S. consumers were much less confident in the economy in November in the aftermath of the government shutdown, weak hiring, and stubborn inflation.
The Conference Board said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index dropped to 88.7 in November, from an upwardly revised October reading of 95.5, the lowest reading since April, when President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs that caused the stock market to plunge.
The figures suggest that Americans are increasingly wary of high costs and sluggish job gains, with perceptions of the labor market worsening, the survey found. Declining confidence could pose political problems for Trump and Republicans in Congress, as the dimmer views of the economy were seen among all political affiliations and were particularly sharp among independents, the Conference Board said.
Earlier Tuesday, a government report showed that retail sales slowed in September after healthy readings over the summer. While economists forecast healthy growth for the July-September quarter, many expect a much weaker showing in the final three months of the year, largely because of the shutdown.
Less-confident consumers may spend less, though the connection isn’t always clear. In recent years, consumer spending has held up even when the available data suggests they’ve grown more anxious.
We do not think that consumer spending is about to hit a cliff, as spending has decoupled from confidence, but risks to the downside are increasing, Thomas Simons, chief U.S. economist at Jefferies, an investment bank, said.
The proportion of consumers who said jobs are plentiful dropped to 27.6% in November, down from 28.6% in the previous month. It is down sharply from 37% in December.
At the same time, 17.9% said jobs are hard to get,” slightly below the 18.3% who said so in October. That figure is up from 15.2% in September. The figures on job availability are seen by economists as reliable predictors of hiring and the unemployment rate.
Americans continue to worry about elevated costs, fueling the affordability concerns that were a key issue in elections earlier this month.
Consumers write-in responses pertaining to factors affecting the economy continued to be led by references to prices and inflation, tariffs and trade, and politics, with increased mentions of the federal government shutdown,” said Dana Peterson, chief economist at the Conference Board. The shutdown ended November 12.
The economy likely grew at a solid annual rate of about 3% in the July-September quarter, economists estimate. But growth is likely to slow in the final three months of the year, largely because of the shutdown, which cut off pay for federal workers, disrupted contracts, and interrupted air travel.
The Conference Board survey ran through November 18, about five days after the shutdown ended.
By Christopher Rugaber, AP economics writer
The Trump administration is hunting for ways to block the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence. In response, dozens of state attorneys general have now sent a letter pressing Congressional leadership not to approve language that would preempt their governments freedom to propose their own legislation on the technology.
Broad preemption of state protections is particularly ill-advised because constantly evolving emerging technologies, like AI, require agile regulatory responses that can protect our citizens, they write in a Tuesday memo. This regulatory innovation is best left to the 50 states so we can all learn from what works and what does not. New applications for AI are regularly being found for healthcare, hiring, housing markets, customer service, law enforcement and public safety, transportation, banking, education, and social media.
The endeavor, which represents 36 states total, comes as Congress weighs language, packed in a new defense funding authorization bill, that would prevent states from enforcing their own rules about the technology. A previous measure, which failed, would have established a 10-year moratorium on states writing their own rules. A draft executive order leaked last week would, similarly, push the federal government to punish states for enacting or enforcing these rules.
If there were real cases to be brought up, they would have brought [them] already, Alex Bores, the lawmaker who authored New Yorks passed, but not-yet-signed AI legislation, the RAISE Act, told Fast Company last week. The only reason you need an executive order to tell people to look for cases is when you just want to harass states into submission.
Every state should be able to enact and enforce its own AI regulations to protect its residents, New York Attorney General Letitia James, the lead author of the letter, said in a statement. Certain AI chatbots have been shown to harm our childrens mental health and AI-generated deepfakes are making it easier for people to fall victim to scams. State governments are the best equipped to address the dangers associated with AI.
The letter comes after state lawmakers wrote to their federal peers not to strip states of their ability to regulate artificial intelligence. Thus far, the federal government has not passed major legislation on ensuring model transparency use, AI cybersecurity and safety, or energy use.
For state officials, the concern is that states will be banned from taking their own action on these fronts. Arati Prabhakar, a top tech adviser under the Biden administration, recently called this effort ludicrous, since Congress has yet to establish any regulatory regime for AI.
The attorneys general emphasized the importance of defending children from inappropriate relationships with chatbots, including discussions of self-harm, and defending against deepfake-enabled scams. A moratorium would put us behind by tying states hands and failing to keep up with the technology, they write, arguing that pre-emption prevents states from remaining agile in responding to an emerging technology.
In a packed room at a library in downtown Boston, Rep. Ayanna Pressley posed a blunt question: Why are Black women, who have some of the highest labor force participation rates in the country, now seeing their unemployment rise faster than most other groups?
The replies Monday from policymakers, academics, business owners, and community organizers laid out how economic headwinds facing Black women may indicate a troubling shift for the economy at large.
The unemployment rate for Black women increased from 6.7% to 7.5% between August and September this year, the most recent month for available data because of the federal government shutdown.
That compares with a 3.2% to 3.4% increase for white women over the same period. And it extended a yearlong trend of the Black women’s unemployment rate increasing at a time of broad economic uncertainty.
Many roundtable attendees view those numbers as both an affront and a warning about the uneven pressures on Black women.
Everyone is missing out when were pushed out of the workforce, said Pressley, a progressive Democrat from Massachusetts. That is something that I worry about now, that you have all these women with specific expertise and specializations that were being deprived of.
And when Black women do have work, she said they tend to be woefully underemployed.
Black women had the highest labor force participation rate of any female demographic in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, yet their unemployment rate remains higher than other demographics of women.
Historically, their unemployment rate has trended slightly above the national average, widening during periods of slowed economic growth or recession. Black Americans are overrepresented in industries like retail, health and social services, and government administration, according to a 2024 Bureau of Labor Statistics Survey.
Black women are at the center of the Venn diagram that is our society, said Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, a PhD candidate in public policy and economics at the Harvard Kennedy School.
She pointed to April as the month when Black womens unemployment began to diverge more sharply from other groups. A policy agenda that ignores the causes, she said, could harm the broader economy.
Roundtable participants cited many long-standing structural inequities but attributed most of the latest divergence to recent federal actions. They blamed the Trump administration’s downsizing of the Minority Business Development Agency and the cancellation of some federal contracts with nonprofits and small businesses, saying those actions disproportionately impacted Black women. Others said tariff policies and mass federal layoffs also contributed to the strain.
The administration’s opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives was repeatedly mentioned by participants as a cause for a more hostile environment for Black women to find employment, customers, or government contracting.
There is no concrete data on how many Black federal workers were laid off, fired, or otherwise dismissed as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts through the federal government.
The attendees discussed a wide range of potential solutions to the unemployment rate for Black women, including using state budgets to bolster business development for Black women, expanding microloans to different communities, increasing government resources for contracting, requiring greater transparency on corporate hiring practices, and encouraging state and federal officials to enforce anti-discrimination policies.
I feel like I was just at church, said Ruthzee Louijeune, the Boston City Council president, as the meeting wrapped up. She encouraged attendees to keep up their efforts, and she defended DEI policies as essential to a healthy workforce and political system. Without broad-based efforts, the Democrat said, the countrys business and political leadership would be abnormal and weakened.
Any space that does not look like our country and like our cities is not normal, she said, and not the city or country we are trying to build.”
By Matt Brown, Associated Press
In recent weeks, OpenAI has faced seven lawsuits alleging that ChatGPT contributed to suicides or mental health breakdowns. In a recent conversation at the Innovation@Brown Showcase, Brown University’s Ellie Pavlick, director of a new institute dedicated to exploring AI and mental health, and Soraya Darabi of VC firm TMV, an early investor in mental health AI startups, discussed the controversial relationship between AI and mental health. Pavlick and Darabi weigh the pros and cons of applying AI to emotional well-being, from chatbot therapy to AI friends and romantic partners.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
A recent study showed that one of the major uses of ChatGPT for users is mental health, which makes a lot of people uneasy. Ellie, I want to start with you, the new institute that you direct known as ARIA, which stands for AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistance. It’s a consortium of experts from a bunch of universities backed by $20 million in National Science Foundation funding. So what is the goal of ARIA? What are you hoping it delivers? Why is it here?
Pavlick: Mental health is something that is very, I would say I don’t even know if it’s polarizing. I think many people’s first reaction is negative, the concept of AI mental health. So as you can tell from the name, we didn’t actually start as a group that was trying to work on mental health.
We were a group of researchers who were interested in the biggest, hardest problems with current AI technologies. What are the hardest things that people are trying to apply AI to that we don’t think the current technology is quite up for? And mental health came up and actually was originally taken off our list of things that we wanted to work on because it is so scary to think about if you get it wrong, how big the risks are. And then we came back to it exactly because of this. We basically realized that this is happening, people are already using it. There’s companies that are like startups, some of them probably doing a great job, some of them not.
The truth is we actually have a hard time even being able to differentiate those right now. And then there are a ton of people just going to chatbots and using them as therapists. And so we’re like, the worst thing that could happen is we don’t actually have good scientific leadership around this. How do we decide what this technology can and can’t do? How do we evaluate these kinds of things? How do we build it safely in a way that we can trust?
There’s questions like this. There’s a demand for answers, and the reality is most of them we just can’t answer right now. They depend on an understanding of the AI that we don’t yet have. An understanding of humans and mental health that we don’t yet have. A level of discourse that society isn’t up for. We don’t have the vocabulary, we don’t have the terms. There’s just a lot that we can’t do yet to make this happen the right way. So that’s what ARIA is trying to provide this public sector, academic kind of voice to help lead this discussion.
That’s right. You’re not waiting for this data to come out or for the final, whatever academia might say, this consortium might say. You’re already investing in companies that do this. I know you’re an early stage investor in Slingshot AI, which delivers mental health support via the app Ash. Is Ash the kind of service that Ellie and her group should be wary about? What were you thinking about when you decided to make this investment?
Darabi: Well, actually I’m not hearing that Ellie’s wary. I think she’s being really pragmatic and realistic. In broad brushstrokes, zooming back and talking about the sobering facts and the scale of this problem, one billion out of eight billion people struggle with some sort of mental health issue. Fewer than 50% of people seek out treatment, and then the people who do find the cost to be prohibitive.
That recent study that you cited, it’s probably the one from the Harvard Business Review, which came out in March of this year, which studied use cases of ChatGPT and their analysis showed that the number one, four, and seven out of 10 use cases for foundational models broadly are therapy or mental health related. I mean, we’re talking about something that touches half of the planet. If you’re looking at investing with an ethical lens, there’s no greater TAM [total addressable market] than people who have a mental health disorder of some sort.
We’ve known the Slingshot AI team, which is the largest foundational model for psychology, for over a decade. We’ve followed their careers. We think exceptionally highly of the advisory board and panel they put together. But I think what really led us down the rabbit hole of caring deeply enough about mental health and AI to frankly start a fund dedicated to it, and we did that in December of last year. It was really kind of going back to the fact that AI therapy is so stigmatized and people hear it and they immediately jump to the wrong conclusions.
They jump to the hyperbolic examples of suicide. And yes, it’s terrible. There have been incidents of deep codependence upon ChatGPT or otherwise whereby young people in particular are susceptible to very scary things and yet those salacious headlines don’t represent the vast number of folks whom we think will be well-serviced by these technologies.
You said this phrase, we kind of stumbled on [these] uses for ChatGPT. It’s not what it was created for and yet people love it for that.
Darabi: It makes me think about 20 years ago when everybody was freaking out about the fact that kids were on video games all day, and now because of that we have Khan Academy and Duolingo. Fearmongering is good actually because it creates a precedent for the guardrails that I think are absolutely necessary for us to safeguard our children from anything that could be disastrous.
But at the same time, if we run in fear, we’re just repeating history and it’s probably time to just embrace the snowball, which will become an avalanche in mere seconds. AI is going to be omnipresent everywhere. Everything that we see and touch will be in some way supercharged by AI. So if we’re not understanding it to our deepest capabilities, then we’re actually doing ourselves a great disservice.
Pavlick: To this point of yeah, people are drawn to AI for this particular use case. So on our team in ARIA, we have a lot of computer scientists who build AI systems, but acually a lot of our teams do developmental psychology, core cognitive science, neuroscience. There are questions to say, why? The whys and the hows. What are people getting out of this? What need is it filling? I think this is a really important question to be asking soon.
I think you’re completely right. Fearmongering has a positive role to play. You don’t want to get too caught on it and you can point historically to examples of people freaked out and it turned out okay. There’s also cases like social media, maybe people didn’t freak out enough and I would not say it turned out okay. People can agree to disagree and there’s plus and minuses, but the point is these aren’t questions that really we are in a position that we can start asking questions.
You can’t do things perfectly, but you can run studies. You can say, “What is the process that’s happening? What is it like when someone’s talking to a chatbot? Is it similar to talking to a human? What is missing there? Is this going to be okay long-term? What about young people who are doing this in core developmental stages? What about somebody who’s in a state of acute psychological distress as opposed to as a general maintenance thing? What about somebody who’s struggling with substance abuse?” These are all different questions, they’re going to have different answers. Again, I feel very strongly that the one LLM that just is one interface for everything is, I think a lot is unknown, but I would bet that that’s not going to be the final thing that we’re going to want.
Just days before Thanksgiving, as Americans shop at supermarkets nationwide for their holiday meals, Ambriola Company, which makes some Boars Head products, has issued a recall for select pecorino romano cheese products due to possible contamination from listeria.
Supreme Service Solutions LLC, also known as Supreme Deli, is assisting in the Class I recall. There have been no illnesses or consumer complaints reported to date for items purchased from Supreme.
What is listeria, and what are the symptoms?
Listeria monocytogenes is a type of disease-causing bacteria that is generally transmitted when food is harvested, processed, prepared, packed, transported, or stored in manufacturing or production environments contaminated with the bacteria, according to the FDA.
Infection can lead to severe symptoms, such as fever, nausea, abdominal pain, and diarrhea, and poses a particular risk to vulnerable populations, including pregnant women, the elderly, and those with weakened immune systems. In pregnant women, it can cause miscarriages and stillbirths.
What is the product information for the recall?
Ambriola Company, has issued a recall for select SKUs of pecorino romano cheese products, including two products they produce under the Boars Head Brand label. Details for the affected products are as follows:
BOARSS HEAD GRATED PECORINO ROMANO CHEESE
Item code: 858
Size: 6 oz.
Case UPC: 042421-05858
Sell by dates: 11/21/25-3/12/26
BOARSS HEAD PECORINO ROMANO CHEESE
Item code: 15119
Size: 6 oz.
Case UPC: 042421-15119
Sell by dates: 11/21/25-3/12/26
In addition, due to an abundance of caution, Boars Head has made the decision to withdraw all of Ambriola Company’s products for Boars Head. This includes the following additional products NOT affected by the recall:
PRE-CUT PECORINO ROMANO
Item code: 15160
Case UPC: 042421-15160
Sell by dates: 11/25/25-5/11/26
Recalled items were distributed in Kroger retail stores located in Kentucky and Indiana. Products are packaged in clear-plastic grab-n-go containers of various sizes with the appearance of deli salads and wraps. The retail packaged items are:
Product Name: EverRoast Chicken Caesar Salad
Barcode UPC: 850042244142
Best by date: 11/9/2025-11/22/2025
Product Name: EverRoast Chicken Caesar Wrap
Barcode UPC: 85004224455
Best by date: 11/9/2025-11/22/2025
What if I have these products in my freezer?
Consumers who have purchased the recalled products with the above lot codes should not to consume the products and discard them. Consumers with questions or concerns about their health should contact their physician.
Consumers with questions may contact the Ambriola Company by email at info@ambriola.com.
Boeing and NASA have agreed to keep astronauts off the companys next Starliner flight and instead perform a trial run with cargo to prove its safety.
Mondays announcement comes eight months after the first and only Starliner crew returned to Earth aboard SpaceX after a prolonged mission. Although NASA test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams managed to dock Starliner to the International Space Station in 2024, the capsule had so many problems that NASA ordered it to come back empty, leaving the astronauts stuck there for more than nine months.
Engineers have since been poring over the thruster and other issues that plagued the Starliner capsule. Its next cargo run to the space station will occur no earlier than April, pending additional tests and certification.
Boeing said in a statement that it remains committed to the Starliner program with safety the highest priority.
NASA is also slashing the planned number of Starliner flights, from six to four. If the cargo mission goes well, then that will leave the remaining three Starliner flights for crew exchanges before the space station is decommissioned in 2030.
NASA and Boeing are continuing to rigorously test the Starliner propulsion system in preparation for two potential flights next year, NASAs commercial crew program manager Steve Stich said in a statement.
NASA hired Boeing and SpaceX in 2014 three years after the final space shuttle flight to ferry astronauts to and from the orbiting outpost. The Boeing contract was worth $4.2 billion and SpaceXs $2.6 billion.
Elon Musks SpaceX launched its first astronaut mission for NASA in 2020. Its 12th crew liftoff for NASA was this summer.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Marcia Dunn, AP aerospace writer
If youve chosen a target asset allocationthe mix of stocks, bonds, and cash in your portfolio youre probably ahead of many investors. But unless youre investing in a set-and-forget investment option like a target-date fund, your portfolios asset mix will shift as the market fluctuates. In a bull market you might get more equity exposure than you planned, or the reverse if the market declines.
Rebalancing involves selling assets that have appreciated the most and using the proceeds to shore up assets that have lagged. This brings your portfolios asset mix back into balance and enforces the discipline of selling high/buying low. Rebalancing doesnt necessarily improve your portfolios returns, especially if it means selling asset classes that continue to perform well. But it can be an essential way to keep your portfolios risk profile from climbing too high.
Where and how to rebalance
If its been a while since your last rebalance, your portfolio might be heavy on stocks and light on bonds. A portfolio that started at 60% stocks and 40% bonds 10 years ago could now hold more than 80% stocks.
Another area to check is the mix of international versus U.S. stocks. International stocks have led in 2025, but that followed a long run of outperformance for U.S. stocks, so your portfolio might lack international exposure. (Keeping about a third of your equity exposure outside the U.S. is reasonable if you want to align with Morningstars global market portfolio.)
Other imbalances might exist. Growth stocks have gained nearly twice as much as value stocks over the past three years. You might also be overweight in specialized assets such as gold and bitcoin thanks to their recent run-ups.
After assessing your allocations, decide where to make adjustments. You dont need to rebalance every accountwhat matters is the overall portfolios asset mix, which determines your risk and return profile. Its usually most tax-efficient to adjust within a tax-deferred account such as an IRA or 401(k), where trades wont trigger realized capital gains. For example, if youre overweight on U.S. stocks and light on international stocks, you could sell U.S. stocks and buy an international-stock fund in your 401(k).
If you need to make changes in a taxable account, you can attempt to offset any realized capital gains by selling holdings with unrealized losses. That might be difficult, as the strong market environment has lifted nearly every type of asset over the past 12 months. Only a few Morningstar Categories (including India equity, real estate, consumer defensive, and health care) posted losses over the trailing 12-month period ended Oct. 30, 2025. The average long-term government-bond fund lost about 8% per year for the trailing five-year period as of the same date, so those could offer opportunities for harvesting losses.
Required minimum distributions can also be used in tandem with rebalancing. Account owners have flexibility in which assets to sell to meet RMDs. If you own several different traditional IRAs, you could take the full RMD amount from any of them. Selling off holdings that appreciated the most can bring the portfolios asset mix back in line with your original targets.
Another option is funneling new contributions into underweight asset classes. Depending on the size of additional investments, this approach might take time, but its better than not rebalancing at all. This might also appeal if youve built up capital gains you dont want to realize.
Final thoughts
Rebalancing is especially important in extremely volatile times. But even in a more gradual bull market like in recent years, its important for keeping a portfolios risk level in check, especially for investors as they approach retirement and start spending their portfolios.
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This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more personal finance content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance
Amy C. Arnott, CFA is a portfolio strategist for Morningstar.
