Every few weeks, Americans get another letter in the mail that starts the same way: Were writing to inform you that your personal data has been exposed. A retailer gets hacked. A hospital. A supermarket. A travel site. It never ends. Most of us feel like weve lost control over who has our information and how its being used. But a new kind of privacy technology, one that lets companies confirm what they need to know without ever seeing your personal details, may finally offer a way out of this mess.
Weve slipped into a world where giving away our personal information is the cost of participating in modern life and where were frustrated, but not surprised, when it gets stolen. In an age defined by apps, AI, and digital payments, our data has become both currency and collateral damage.
But we may finally be reaching a turning point. And the solution thats emerging didnt come from Silicon Valley or Washington; it came from an unexpected place: cryptography, the science of using math to secure information, and the foundation of blockchain technology.
Its called zero-knowledge proof technology, and despite the intimidating name, it theoretically offers something every American wants: privacy without the headaches, and security without the surveillance.
Wall Street quietly moved first
While consumers are dealing with endless breach notifications, something very different is happening on Wall Street.
Many of the worlds financial titans, including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and BNY Mellon are testing blockchain-based trading, settlement, and other systems that let assets move 24/7. Tokenized treasuries, money-market funds, and even tokenized stocksa mechanism where something is turned into a digital “token” that lives on a blockchainare no longer experiments; Robinhood introduced tokenized versions of stocks and ETFs for European Union investors this summer.
But theres one major barrier: on a public blockchain, everyone can see everything.Investors dont want that. Banks, pension funds, hedge funds dont want thatfor competitive reasons, among other things.
If financial markets are going to ultimately run on modern cryptographic infrastructure, they will need privacy that doesnt compromise trust or oversight.
Consumers feel the same way
Americans are tired of being told that if they want convenience, they must give up control of their personal information. The AI economy depends on massive streams of data and whether it survives may come down to one thing: trust.
Right now, trust is running out.
People dont want more logins, more verification codes, or more data sitting in more databases that will inevitably get hacked. They want a world where businesses can verify what they need to verify, without collecting everything about us.
Thats exactly where zero-knowledge proof technology comes in.
Zero-knowledge proofs: verify without exposing
A zero-knowledge proof lets someone prove something is true without revealing the underlying data.
You can prove youre old enough to buy a product, without giving away your birthdate.
A bank can prove it has enough reserves, without exposing its entire balance sheet.
A company can verify a user is real, without storing personal details that can get hacked later.
This isnt science fiction, and it isnt just crypto. Its already in the apps Americans use today:
Google Wallet has quietly integrated zero-knowledge technology.
Bumble uses it to verify user attributes without storing sensitive data.
Financial institutions are incorporating it to protect user data.
StarkWares founders codeveloped zk-STARKs and zk-SNARKs, advanced cryptographic methods for zero-knowledge proofs, and this technology now underpins some of the most promising privacy tools in AI, fintech, and digital identity.
Regulators are finally ready to talk about privacy and the crypto angle
For years, the word privacy in Washington was viewed with suspicion, confused with anonymity, or treated as a threat to oversight.
Hopefully, thats now changing.
Back in August, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce wrote compellingly that the “sledgehammer has become the tool of choice for monitoring financial crimes,” and “[t]he American people and their government should guard zealously peoples right to live private lives and to use technologies that enable them to do so.” The SEC is now preparing to convene a first-of-its-kind roundtable on Financial Surveillance and Privacy, where builders at the forefront of privacy technology will show how these tools allow for risk management without exposing every transaction.
At the same time, the Executive Branch has embraced emerging technologies, signalling a top-down encouragement for regulators to approach innovation as a path towards improvement, and to encourage its growth.
Why this moment matters
The privacy wave is not just a consumer protest. It is institutional. It is technological. It is regulatory. It is an inflection.
Institutions need privacy to operate competitively.
Consumers need protection from constant breaches.
Regulators need tools that preserve oversight without creating systemic vulnerabilities.
Zero-knowledge proofs sit at the center of all three needs.
The digital economy, from AI systems to payments to financial markets, is gaining speed.
But without privacy infrastructure, we are setting ourselves up for a future where every trade, every transaction, and every personal detail is visible to everyone.
We dont need to accept that world.
Zero-knowledge proof technology offers a better one:a world where verification is possible without exposure, where markets are efficient without being surveilled, and where people can participate in the digital economy without surrendering their most intimate data.
Privacy is not anti-technology.It is the foundation of trust and trust is the one thing the AI economy and the financial system cannot survive without.
There’s a generational shift happening in workplaces that goes far deeper than debates about RTO or perks and snacks. Gen Zthe cohort that learned to communicate through stories, stickers, and swipe cultureis fundamentally reimagining how work gets done. After analyzing data from 2,475 professionals across our latest research, I’m convinced they’re crafting the future of work.
Gen Z intuitively understands something many organizations are still learning. As we live in a world drowning in information, clarity is a competitive advantage. And increasingly, that clarity is offered visually.
The Visual-First Expectation
Sound familiar? Workplace tools mirror social behaviors, just with a lag. Just like how early 2000s texting culture paved the way for Slack, were now seeing Gen Z’s visual-first communication style make its mark on how we collaborate at work. Technology isn’t driving generational change, it’s catching up to how people already interact. Now, all work is expected to be visual, collaborative, and intuitive by default.
For senior leaders managing distributed, multigenerational teams across time zones, the challenge is dual: translating complex ideas into clear visual communications while cutting through visual clutter to reach precise audiences. The goal remains constantmake every design count through compelling, memorable visuals that drive engagement.
Among Gen Z professionals we surveyed, the majority say they do their best work visually and believe visual fluency makes them more valuable employees in addition to a critical skill to future-proof their careers. Other generations approach AI with varying degrees of skepticism or caution, but Gen Z sees it as a natural extension of their creative capabilities.
Yet despite this confidence and capability, Gen Z workers are being systematically slowed down by outdated systems and fragmented tools that hinder their natural workflows. More than half want their companies to shift to a visual-first approach entirely.
The Business Case for Visual-First
Our neuroscience research, conducted in partnership with Neuro-Insight, provides objective evidence that Gen Z’s instincts for visual communication are spot on, aligning with how human brains actually process information.
Visual content triggers memory encoding 74% faster than dull alternatives. In controlled laboratory settings, participants exposed to high-quality visual presentations showed 21% more emotional intensity and 16% greater likeability compared to boring or poorly designed versions of identical content. Documents with superior visual design generated 26% higher emotional intensity and 9% improved likeability. The report bears out that emotion fuels attention. And attention fuels retention.
These represent fundamental differences in how information resonates and persists. Companies that embrace visual-first communication report 66% clearer and more efficient communication, while 61% achieve stronger brand cohesion and sharper differentiation. With 89% of business leaders now considering visual fluency a must-have skill for leadership positions, the question for ambitious professionals isnt whether or not to adapt at allits how quickly can they upskill across their teams.
Organizations that resist this shift face measurable consequences. In the U.S., companies invest $65,000 annually per creative team member on visual content creation. Despite this substantial investment, more than 90% of leaders and their Gen Z colleagues continue to face obstacles that prevent them from producing their highest quality creative work.
The creativity gap compounds these costs. Despite the fact that the U.S. is expected to pour over $143 billion annually into the visual content economy, teams remain locked into fragmented tools and text-first workflows. This creates a productivity bottleneck that stifles returns on massive organizational investments.
Perhaps most concerning, 85% of creative leaders and 83% of Gen Z have resorted to using unapproved tools, while 82% of leaders bypass IT entirely to accomplish visual work. When talented employees consistently work around your systems, the systems need examining.
An Action Plan for Future Forward Leadership
For forward-thinking leaders, Gen Z’s visual fluency represents more than operational efficiencyit unlocks motivation, autonomy, and high-impact creative thinking. When we asked Gen Z what broader visual fluency across their companies would enable, their responses revealed aspirations that extend far beyond job satisfaction to be more motivated to contribute, more creatively empowered, and more confident in sharing ideas.
Gen Z workers want to lead with AI, experiment with new approaches, and create visual experiences that drive results. The organizations that provide the right systems, support, and trust will unlock better work entirely.
Audit your tool chaos: Task your department leads with taking inventory of their current visual tools. If it’s more than four, you have a cost center that might need consolidation.
Document the inefficiency: Map all current visual tools your teams use, taking stock of overlaps and redundancies. Present the data to justify consolidation and to align Marketing, IT, and Finance on the operational cost of inefficiency.
Run a 30-day pilot: Test AI-powered visual tools in real workflows with baseline KPIs: time saved, output volume, and brand consistency. Use the results to build a data-backed case for investment, focusing on performance over potential.
Lead a “Visual Sprint”: Pick one legacy processonboarding, product briefs, or internal communicationsand task your teams with redesigning it using visual-first approaches. Give your team permission to break the mold and set big goals.
Bridge the generation gap: Host recurring, informal office hours or workshops where everyone from interns to execs can bring new AI projects theyve been working on, showcase new visual workflows, and ask for help. This is about visual and AI literacy, and about building a new type of creative muscle memory.
Four generations now share the workplace, with a fifthGen Alphaapproaching quickly. Organizations that harness the visual fluency, AI confidence, and creative instincts that Gen Z brings naturally will discover a competitive advantage.
The visual communication revolution is here. Gen Z is ready to lead the visual era with intuitive platforms, visual-first communication, and freedom to experiment with AI. The companies that meet them with the right systems, support, and trust will invest in more than employee satisfactionthey̵ll invest in the future of how work gets done.
When Raising Canes recently opened its first-ever location in Meridian, Idaho, it wasnt a particularly remarkable event for the restaurant chain. The fast-growing chicken purveyor also opened six other restaurants in five other states on the exact same day in November. It aims to open close to 100 new stores this year.
But some Idahoans were willing to stand outside in chilly fall weather for more than 48 hours to be the first in the state to get a taste of Raising Canes, whose exceptionally narrow menu features chicken fingers, french fries, a secret proprietary dipping sauce, and simple sides like garlic toast and coleslaw.
We had customers camping out since Sunday morning, AJ Kumaran, co-chief executive officer and chief operating officer of Raising Canes, tells Fast Company of the new Idaho restaurant that opened on a Tuesday. People are excited about our entry into that market.
A boom in a cooling restaurant economy
At a time when restaurant chains including Chipotle, Cava, and Sweetgreen are confronting a sales cooldown as Gen Z and millennial diners are pressured by inflation, high housing costs, flat income growth, and other broader macroeconomic challenges, chicken-focused restaurant chains like Raising Canes and Daves Hot Chicken have been consistently expanding across the U.S. and are posting sturdier sales and traffic growth.
The fastest-growing chain in America last year by unit count was Hangry Joes Hot Chicken & Wings, according to data provider Datassential, which also reported the domestic unit total for all chicken restaurant concepts increased by 4.7% in 2024 from the prior year, far exceeding the industrys increase of 1.5%. Systemwide sales for chicken restaurants now exceed $52 billion annually.
[Photo: Refrina/Adobe Stock]
Total restaurant traffic for all quick-service restaurant concepts dropped 1% for the year-ending September 2025 from the comparable prior-year period, while that same metric increased 3% for the chicken concepts, David Portalatin, senior vice president and a food and foodservice industry advisor for Circana, told Fast Company. The market researcher says that traffic for the QSR restaurant industry, which was battered by shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, is still down 8% from 2019, but has increased 15% for QSR chicken.
The chains defying fast-food slowdown trends
Were obsessed with fried chicken, says Portalatin. He believes that more innovative twists on chicken prep and unique sauces have put a more modern twist on classic, Americana staples. Chicken, Portalatin adds, is among the very few bright spots in growth areas within the restaurant landscape.
Since Raising Canes opened its first location in Louisiana in 1996, the chain has only sold chicken fingers and cooks every dish fresh to order, which Kumaran says results in efficient restaurants that are focused on making just a few menu items. There are no heat lamps or microwave ovens in the chains kitchensand no limited-time menu offers or discounts.
[Photos: Raising Cane’s]
We dont take shortcuts and we dont play any gimmicks, says Kumaran. You will not see us in discount mode or saying, Heres the flavor of the month.
Over the past decade, Raising Canes has grown from a $350 million business to $5.1 billion in system sales in 2024. The company says it is marching toward $10 billion in annual sales from more than 1,600 locations, which would be an increase of around 600 restaurants from whats in operation today. Earlier this year, Raising Canes leapfrogged KFC to become the third most-popular chicken chain in the U.S. after Chick-fil-A and Popeyes. The chain even has a nickname for its most devoted fans, the Caniacs.
That popularity has led to some increased competition from other chains outside of the chicken specialists that have added the protein to their menus. There are a lot of people jumping in, says Kumaran. Whether it’s taco players or fajita players or burger players, everybody’s got a chicken dinner option right now.
The new competition crowding the chicken category
Chickens soaring growth has been attributed to some yearslong trends like Chick-fil-As aggressive expansion beyond that chains initial regional focus in the south, the sandwich chicken wars that kicked off in 2019 when Popeyes debuted a new menu item that led to a social media and in-store frenzy, and the more recent perception that all proteineven fried chickenis better than other quick-service food options.
Whether that’s true or not, I’m not, I’m not being the judge of that, says Portalatin. I’m not a dietitian or nutritionist, but the consumer will often perceive the chicken option as the better-for-you option.
How the protein halo reshaped fast-food preferences
Chickens protein halo is particularly relevant to consumers who are taking GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, and that connection led Daves Hot Chicken earlier this year to debut a promotional meal called the Davezempic, featuring mini sliders. It gives influencers and customers a way to engage with the brand in a funny and quirky way, says Srishti Handa, vice president of marketing at Daves.
[Photo: Daves Hot Chicken]
Founded in 2017, Daves Hot Chicken recently sold a majority stake for a reported $1 billion to private equity firm Roark Capital and ended 2024 with 260 locations. The chain expects to have 400 locations in operation by the end of this year and has signaled it expects to open more than 125 restaurants every year for the foreseeable future.
When asked about a north star target, Daves President and COO Jim Bitticks told Fast Company the chain could easily support 1,000 domestic locations. Talk to me in 15 years and that number could be 2,000 or 3,000 restaurants, adds Bitticks.
The chain serves its Nashville-style chicken tenders and sliders at seven different spice levels ranging from no spice to the reaper, the latter requiring a signed waiver promising that yes, its that hot. I dont recommend it, but you know, youve got to try everything once, says Bitticks. It definitely blows your head off.
Bitticks says that Instagram and other social channels have been a big driver of traffic when Daves establishes restaurants in new markets, especially attracting Gen Z to the concept. Im not from that generation, I dont get the idea of following a brand that Ive never tried before, he added. I dont understand it, but it is a huge piece of Daves story.
Slim Chickens bets on variety, content, and sauce innovation
Slim Chickens, an Arkansas-based chain with 300 locations across 34 states, has a more expansive menu than its peer upstarts with tenders, wings, salads, wraps, and even chicken and waffles. The chain says that it is alluring Gen Z consumers and even Generation Alpha, children born after 2010 who are asking their parents to take them to a Slim.
[Photo: Slim Chickens]
Variety is a competitive advantage for us, Patrick Noone, chief marketing officer of Slim Chickens, said in an interview.
To stand out in a crowded category, Slim has created an in-house recording studio so that the chain can pump out a steady drumbeat of content across social channels. Noone says that these creative assets have a short shelf life online, losing their relevance after just 10 days. Slim is also in the process of developing and debuting a new mobile app in the first quarter of 2026. The chain is also continuing to think through the physical restaurant space to make it easier for customers who place a mobile order and want to pick up their food in the store.
But Noone says one top priority will always be innovation for Slims range of sauces, which today includes 14 different flavors like Korean BBQ, sweet red chili, and cayenne ranch.
We spend as much time innovating around sauces as we do on tenders and the center of the plate, says Noone. Chicken is just the perfect canvas.
Hello again, and thank you for spending time with Fast Companys Plugged In.
Last October, I visited the Silicon Valley headquarters of 1X Technologiesthe startup behind a humanoid home robot called Neoand spoke with its VP of product and design, Dar Sleeper. Among the points he made was that long-standing public expectations have set a high bar for household robots. Naturally, he name-checked the worlds most iconic one.
The ultimate, North Star, in a lot of people’s minds, is Rosie the Robot, he told me. A Jetsons world where you ask and receive, and it makes your life better, you spend more time with your family, you’re more present.
Sleepers reference returned to the front of my brain last week, when I attended a Wired event in San Francisco featuring an interview with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. Explaining AIs transformative impact, he turned to an obvious precedent: George Jetsons reliance on Rosie.
I keep watching reruns of the old cartoon show The Jetsons, Prince said. There are a lot of things that are anachronistic about it. But I think asking the question, Where does George get his information from? is a really interesting one. And the answer is Rosie the Robot. When he says, Hey, Rosie, I want a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Rosie doesnt say, Here are 10 blue links, go find one yourself. Rosie says, Heres a recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
Rosie comes up so often in discussions of the future of technology that its easy to tune out rather than nod in appreciation. But hearing two executives mention her by name got me wondering why this secondary character from a 1962 Hanna-Barbera prime-time cartoon, canceled after only one season (albeit rerun endlessly), has been such an extraordinarily durable touchstone. Its not an easy question to answer. Even if, like me, youve already spent more time contemplating the Jetsons cultural impact than most people.
Before we go any further, a few Rosie factoids for you:
Her name was originally spelled Rosey, but the more common Rosie won out over time.
The very first Jetsons episode, Rosey the Robot, told the story of how she entered the Jetsons’ home, initially as a short-term rent-a-robot.
She appeared in only one other episode among the 24 in the first seasonthat shocked mebut was much more prominent in the additional Jetsons shows Hanna-Barbera produced in the mid-1980s, including starring roles in the episodes Rosie Come Home, Mothers Day for Rosie, and Rip-Off Rosie.
As a sassy-yet-kindhearted maid, she drew undeniable inspiration from the title character in the newspaper comic Hazel, which had been turned into a popular TV sitcom the previous season. (The rest of The Jetsons knocked off another comics mainstay, Blondie.)
Her Brooklyn-tinged voice was provided by actress Jean Vander Pyl, much better known as Wilma Flintstone.
If you need to catch up on Rosies adventures, as I did for this newsletter, youll find The Jetsons widely available on streaming servicesI watched the show on Huluand airing every day on MeTV Toons.
None of this explains why technologists are still talking about Rosie. The most superficial reason is that it would be pretty cool to off-load tedious household chores to someone else. Most of us cant afford human help, making a robot maid an alluring proposition. (As shown in the first episode, even paying for Rosie was a challenge for Jane and George: She was a discounted previous-year demonstrator model, and they were able to keep her only because Mr. Spacely gave George a raise.)
But if all Rosie did was the dishes, I dont think shed be so well remembered. She is a piece of sophisticated technology with an uncommonly humane user interface. Thats why the Jetson family loved her so much, and why she sticks in our minds. And given that her features are presently morphing from fantasy into stuff that might actually be possible to build, shes only growing more relevant.
As with many things about The Jetsons, Rosie is both old-timey and prescient. At one point in the first episode, she opens her front and dumps in Judy Jetsons homework tapes to incorporate them into her knowledge base. Thankfully, magnetic tape petered out as a primary form of data storage well over 40 years ago. But Rosies ability to crunch Judys classworkand presumably help her with itsure looks similar to an LLM ingesting data.
Rosie was an uplifting presence in the Jetsons’ household. [Screenshot: Hanna-Barbera]
In todays buzzwordy AI parlance, Rosie is also agentic. She handles tasks with a sizable degree of autonomy, is fine-tuned to behave responsibly and, though engaging and supportive, never slips into sycophancy. If Elroy confided that he was planning to become a juvenile delinquent, we can be certain she wouldnt aid him. Instead, shed push back on the idea andif necessaryalert his parents. Our 2025 chatbots are crude by comparison, if not downright dangerous.
Still another reason why Rosie remains resonant is the timeless appeal of The Jetsons optimistic air. As depicted in the show, the future is a pretty wonderful place, and Rosie is part of that. Even by the end of the 1960s, our culture had grown darker. 2001: A Space Odysseys HAL 9000 may be as famous as Rosie, but hes also a grim object lesson in the dangers of trusting technology to work in our best interest. You wont catch tech execs speaking approvingly of HAL as a font of inspiration.
The Jetsons was never dystopian, but neither was it naive. A sizable percetage of its humor stemmed from the downsides of theoretically useful technology, often in ways that are, in retrospect, as forward-looking as any other aspect of the show. As youll recall, the end credits of every episode concluded with George becoming overwhelmed by a runaway automated treadmill and calling for Jane to stop this crazy thing. (In real life, Pelotons safety issues with its Tread treadmill werent so funny.)
Rosie does not appear in another 1962 Jetsons episode called Uniblab. But its moralthat artificial intelligence in the office might be a pointless waste of moneyis the furthest thing from entertainingly quaint.
Mr. Spacely introduces George to his new boss, Uniblab. It doesnt go well. [Screenshot: Hanna-Barbera]
Uniblab is a workplace robot that Mr. Spacely acquires for $5 billion (!). Apparently an AGI true believerhe gloats that Uniblab has a higher IQ than GeorgeSpacely demotes George to serve as the robots assistant. It turns out that Uniblab uses his always-on microphone to spy on Spacelys employees. He also induces them to play rigged gambling games. And thats about all hes good for.
After being sabotaged by the shows resident hacker, the Jetsons handyman, Henry, Uniblab suffers a hallucinatory meltdown in front of Spacely Space Sprockets board of directors. Hes unceremoniously decommissioned. Humanity triumphs, at least for the moment.
When The Jetsons premiered in 1962, publicity materials explained that it was set exactly 100 years in the future, in 2062. That indicates that even 37 years from now, AI may struggle to definitively prove its worth. For now, countless present-day Mr. Spacelys are currently overspending on the technology based on unrealistic expectations.
Rosie, meanwhile, is clearly based on more mature AI than Uniblab. But in the first Jetsons episode, Jane and other characters are astonished at her capabilities, a sign that domestic robotics will still be in the process of going mainstream in 2062. Which means that it may be several more decades until Rosie is truly, unquestionably real. May she continue to serve as an aspirational stretch goal for the entire tech industry.
Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on fastcompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.
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When life gives people lemons, most try to make the best out of a bad situation. Instead, Beau du Bois, vice president of bar and spirits at Marisi Italian restaurant in La Jolla, California, found himself with an incredible opportunity.
In 2021, the Adler and Lombrozo families, owners of the Puesto Mexican restaurant chain, tapped du Bois to build Marisi’s bar program from the ground up. One of the first actions du Bois took when learning about this new venture was starting a batch of limoncello, using a lesser-known Amalfi Coast technique.
They told me about Marisi almost exactly a year before we opened,” du Bois tells Fast Company. “And the very next day, even though I’ve got 364 days to get the restaurant open, I started making the limoncello right away.”
Du Bois had excellent timing, as the appetite for limoncello in the United States has been on the rise. According to IWSR Drinks Market Analysis, global limoncello volumes grew at a compound annual rate of 8% between 2019 and 2024.
In 2024, the top three markets for limoncello were Italy, Germany, and the United States, in that order. The U.S. has seen steady average annual growth of 5%. The IWSR predicts the figure will continue its upward trend, with a projected compound annual growth rate of 2% from 2024 to 2029.
Even though Du Boiss preferred preindustrial limoncello process has been a part of the restaurant since its 2022 opening, its recently made a big splash on social media.
An Instagram reel documenting the procedure has garnered over four million views and reveals larger trends in the hospitality industry.
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Nothing says Merry Christmas quite like a 7.5-foot-tall Chewbacca holding a candy cane. At least, according to the team at Home Depot.
Home Depot has long been known as a purveyor of holiday decor, from pumpkins at Halloween to a wide selection of real and artificial trees at Christmas. In recent years, though, its been upping the creative ante on its decor game to capture new audiencesand, in some cases, to score a viral hit on TikTok.
This year, its doing just that with two new additions to its holiday lineup: life-size, animated versions of Star Wars Chewbacca and R2-D2 ($349 and $299, respectively), complete with movie-accurate, motion-activated sound effects.
While Home Depot declined to share specific sales data about the characters, R2-D2 appears to have sold out within weeks of debuting, inspiring several TikTok videos with hundreds of thousands of views and resulting in multiple Reddit forums where users are discussing strategies for getting their hands on one of the units. Resellers are already pedaling the product on eBay for nearly double its original price.
With its increasingly extravagant Halloween animatronics and now its suite of nerdy, high-tech Christmas decor, Home Depot is making the spectacle of extreme holiday decorating accessible to the average customer.
[Image: Home Depot]
Home Depot is turning extreme holiday decorating into an accessible sport
Home Depot is no stranger to building head-turning (and TikTok view-farming) holiday decor. In fact, its towering 12-foot-tall skeleton, Skelly (who debuted in 2020), is what initially propelled the big box store to its current status as customers go-to shop for viral decor. Since then, Home Depot has leaned into both the scale and detail of its holiday decor, including with Halloween releases this year like a seven-foot-tall Frankenstein and 9.5-foot-long haunted pirate ship. Now bringing that same amped-up energy into Christmas.
Chewie and R2-D2 are part of Home Depots range of IP-adapted characters, which include other popular characters like Chucky, a 13-foot-tall Jack Skellington from Disneys The Nightmare Before Christmas, and, also new this year, Olaf from Disneys Frozen. The company already sells a seven-foot-tall Darth Vader and six-foot-tall Stormtrooper.
[Photo: Home Depot]
Aubrey Horowitz, Home Depots senior merchant of decorative holiday, says Home Depots Star Wars line plays to a couple of different emerging genres of holiday shoppers. One is the seasonal decor enthusiast, who tends to like to refresh their decor from one holiday to the nextwhich is why characters like the Stormtrooper, Darth Vader, and R2-D2 all come with modifications to transition from Halloween to Christmas.
Another is the holiday shopper thats interested in nostalgic aesthetics, from vintage-looking artificial trees to retro characters. That tracks with data Pinterest shared with Fast Company, which found that searches for nostalgic Christmas aesthetic were up 1,130% this November compared with last November.
[Photo: Home Depot]
With the majority of its IP collections, Home Depot is able to capture fans by keeping prices relatively low: For comparison, other life-size replicas of R2-D2 can run between $1,500 and $8,000. Clearly, the choice is resonating with fans online. A commenter under one video of R2-D2 with more than 130,000 views wrote, Take my money. Now I can put this alongside my R2D2 Pepsi cooler. And under a separate clip of Chewbacca, commenters are responding with photos of their own Home Depot Chewie surrounded by other Star Wars characters (and one dressed in a sports jersey).
This holiday season, Home Depot is making sure that the most eccentric dad on your block can tap into his childlike wonder without breaking the bankand were not mad about it.
Its hard to believe that just a few short years ago a video of Will Smith eating spaghetti generated by ModelScope, a text-to-video AI model, was the peak of AI slop.
Fast-forward to today and our trust for CCTV footage of cute animals has been eroded, slop is showing up across marketing and music playlists, and Sora 2 deepfakes are fooling both grandparents and politicians nationwide.
A number of artist projects are fighting back against the deluge of slop polluting the shared waters of the internet (or at least poking fun at those who willingly consume it).
Steve Nasopoulos and Peter Henningsen, both freelance copywriters, recently created the Slop Trough in their spare time. Its a digital feeding trough that serves up endless slop, so long as you turn on your webcam and get down on all fours like a good little piggy.
Are you a little piggy who needs your slop? the homepage asks. Click yes and it tells you to get on the ground on all fours oink oink.
We just wanted to capture the degrading feeling of having someone put this horrible content in front of us and actually expect us to consume it. It feels, how shall we say, a little dehumanizing? the creators told Fast Company. The internet was once a magical place, because it was full of weirdos making bizarre websites and stupid art projects. Slop and AI content are diametrically opposed to that because its mass-produced garbage made by robots.
Other online art projects imagine an internet untouched by generative AI. 404 media recently reported on Slop Evader, a browser tool created by artist and researcher Tega Brain that filters web searches to include only results from before November 30, 2022the day ChatGPT was released to (or, rather, unleashed on) the public.
The term AI slop itself emerged around 2023, when platforms like ChatGPT and DALL-E became publicly available and more widely adopted, according to Google Trends. Yet concerns about AI among U.S. adults have grown exponentially since 2021, according to the Pew Research Center, so much so that slurs for robots now exist.
But for every new AI slop video created, there will always be those resisting it with human-made projects. As Nasopoulos and Henningsen put it: We think humans making stuff and putting it on the internet is what the internet was designed for, so the more of that the better.
Six years ago, when Michael Buckley returned to True Religion‘s offices as CEO, the denim brand looked nothing like the one he had built a decade earlier.
Buckley was the brand’s president between 2006 and 2010, when True Religion was a luxury brand that sold jeans priced between $300 and $500 at Neiman Marcus and Barneys. Buckley helped grow revenues to more than $300 million a year, but after he left, the brand hit hard times, as it struggled to adapt to e-commerce. It filed for bankruptcy in 2017 and again in 2020.
In 2019, after serving as CEO of Differential Brands Group (which owns Hudson Jeans), Buckley came back to True Religion to clean up the mess. He’s executed a remarkable turnaround, doubling the company’s revenues and leading it to its highest profitability ever.
Buckley’s strategy is interesting. He’s rebuilt the business around the Black and Latino customers who have been loyal to the brand from the beginning. Under his leadership, the brand has rethought everything from pricing to design to marketing with these consumers in mind. (While none of True Religion’s top leadership is Black, Buckley says the company’s employees “reflect the brand’s consumers.”) “We didn’t change our target demo,” Buckley says. “This was the True Religion demographic all along, and it was our job to embrace them.”
In the past, True Religion’s ad campaigns featured predominantly white models, but today, its website and social media features exclusively models of color. The brand partners with rappers and hip-hop artists like Megan Thee Stallion, Quavo, and 2 Chainz as ambassadors. True Religion is now back at the center of culture, seen on celebrities like Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner. Thanks to collaborations with brands like Von Dutch and Supreme, the brand is regularly featured in fashion blogs.
Ciara [Photo: True Religion]
Buckley believes that the future of True Religion lies with Black consumers. The brand is now focused on winning over the next generation; it’s going on a college tour with a focus on historically Black colleges and universities, like Spelman and Morehouse. But experts say that for True Religion to build an enduring relationship with Black consumers, it needs to go beyond just marketing to them; it must also forge authentic partnerships with these communities.
Megan Thee Stallion [Photo: True Religion]
“It’s awesome that the brand is serving the Black consumers that stuck around when others abandoned them,” says Marcus Collins, a marketing professor at the Ross School of Business and the author of For The Culture. “But to take it to the next level, the question is, how are you showing that you’re invested in the community? Are you collaborating with the community in a way that shares equity?”
A Loyal Customer
Historically, Black consumers have been sorely neglected by fashion brands, despite having significant economic power. Their spending on apparel and footwear is expected to grow by 6% a year to $70 billion by 2030, and yet, many fashion brands don’t tailor their products or marketing to their Black audience.
A 2021 McKinsey survey found that Black consumers were profoundly dissatisfied with their fashion options and did not see themselves in most brands’ marketing campaigns. “Black consumers are so underserved and marginalized that they will gravitate towards brands that aren’t even targeting them,” says Collins.
When True Religion first hit the market in 2002, its advertising campaigns rarely featured people of color. Its pricingwhich was astronomically expensive for jeanswas also designed to signal exclusivity. When he was previously at the company, Buckley says products were designed for consumers with household incomes above $250,000. Jeff Lubell, who cofounded True Religion, had no apologies for this high price tag. Its not for everybody, even though I would love it to be,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. “Its like being in the club.
When Buckley came back to True Religion in 2019, its price point and identity hadn’t changed significantly since its early days, but the style was no longer resonating in the market they had targeted. “The brad assumed the same luxury customer was buying, but when I walked the streets, it didn’t look like that at all,” he says.
[Photo: True Religion]
Buckley commissioned a survey to find out who was actually buying True Religion. The results were interesting: A third of customers were Black and 15% were Latino. Consumers skewed male and had an average household income of $65,000. For Buckley, this seemed like a big opportunity. “Years ago, when we were targeting wealthy consumers, we were touching 4% of the apparel market,” he says. “But the middle class demographic is enormous: it’s 150 million people. It seemed like a no-brainer to pivot.”
According to Kristen D’Arcy, True Religion’s CMO, the brand has resonated with Black consumers because rappers and hip-hop artists had taken to it early on. The rapper Quavo, for instance, was such a fan of True Religion in his teens that he got a tattoo of the logo on his arm back in 2007. In 2014, rapper 2 Chainz name-dropped True Religion in a lyric. “The hip-hop world has always loved True Religion,” she says. “Even when we were selling to a different consumer, they were buying it.”
Buckley has rebuilt the business around its current customers. For one thing, he lowered prices. Today, most of the brand’s styles are under $100, and thanks to frequent promotions, they’re often even cheaper.
The aesthetic of the jeans is also very different now than it was in the early 2000s. In 2019, Buckley brought back Zihaad Wells, who had previously served as the brand’s VP of design from 2006 to 2017. Today, True Religion’s jeans still feature some of its original design elementslike visible stitching and the horseshoe iconographybut they now have a distinct Y2K streetwear aesthetic, which appeals to Gen Z as well as older consumers who are nostalgic for the early 2000s. It sells bedazzled jeans and sweat suits, baby tees, and grungy, distressed jeans.
True Religion x Von Dutch [Photo: True Religion]
“The aesthetic looks very dated to me, particularly with the large logos,” says Tina Wells, a marketing strategist and entrepreneur, with an expertise in multicultural marketing. “It’s certainly resonating with a subsection of Black consumers right now, but it will be important for the brand to keep their finger on the pulse, so that they’re not just creating products they think Black people want.”
D’Arcy, for her part, has been focused on creating brand imagery that reflects this consumer base. With the brand’s $50 million annual marketing budget (which equates to 10% of sales), D’Arcy has launched campaigns with popular hip-hop and rap artists, including Megan Thee Stallion, Anitta, and NLE Choppa.
YG [Photo: True Religion]
Going Deeper
The turnaround strategy has been effective. True Religion is projected to reach half a billion dollars in sales this year, up from $280 million in 2023. According to McKinsey’s survey, Black consumers show a strong preference for brands that resonate with them culturally. And when brands develop products for Black consumers and create diverse marketing campaigns, they will be rewarded with an influx of consumers.
Saweetie [Photo: True Religion]
D’Arcy believes there is even more room for True Religion to grow within the Black community. True Religion is popular across age rangesincluding the over-60 crowd, which makes up 15% of its audience. But to be an enduring brand, Buckley believes it is important to target the next generation of Black consumers who will hopefully stay with the brand as they enter adulthood. “We’re focused on acquiring millions of new customers in the 18-to-25 market,” says D’Arcy.
True Religion is currently doing a college tour, where it hosts pop-ups on campuses, giving students a chance to take a study break while playing trivia games and browsing racks of clothing. Some of these colleges are HBCUs, including Morehouse and Spelman in Atlanta, while others, like the University of Florida in Gainesville and St. John’s University in Jamaica, New York, have large Black populations.
Chelley B (Love Island) [Photo: True Religion]
Both Wells and Collins say that the test of True Religion’s commitment to the Black community will be borne out by how much effort the brand puts into really getting to know these consumers. He points to Ralph Lauren’s partnership with Morehouse and Spelman over the past two years, which resulted in two successful collaborations. Ralph Lauren spent a long time working with scholars at these schools, along with Black designers and creatives, to create clothing and campaigns that authentically reflected the Black experience.
“Their proximity to the culture allows them to do something that doesn’t feel opportunistic,” Collins says. “Black consumers immediately resonated with that campaign because it felt so authentic.”
For Buckley, True Religion’s current success is proof that Black consumers are a scalable and profitable market. “We’re doing everything we can to embrace a customer that has loved us for a long time,” he says. “This is a growing, trend-setting population. I don’t know why any brand wouldn’t want to serve them.”
Anitta [Photo: True Religion]
Leadership listening is in sharp decline, and the consequences run deep. A survey from People Insights found that only 56% of employees believe senior leaders genuinely make an effort to listen, which is down from 65% two years ago.
We live in a world where algorithms reward noise. Visibility has become a proxy for value, and airtime is the metric that many use to measure leadership presence.
But real influence doesnt come from speaking more. It actually comes from listening better. Influence grows through empathy, trust, and the ability to see and understand people.
The disconnection crisis
When leaders stop listening, people stop contributing. Ideas fade, trust erodes, and creativity retreats into silence. Ive seen this in large transformation programs with a sound strategy. Employees felt unheard, so progress stalled.
When we paused to listen, everything changed. People began to share what was really going on. They talked about their fear of redundancy, exhaustion, and the loss of identity sitting just beneath the surface. Once they acknowledged those emotions (and responded with intentional action), we saw a decrease in resistance, and collaboration returned.
This situation reminded me that change rarely fails because of poor strategy. It fails when we dont understand the why behind the resistance. Leaders might not be able to fix every concern, but giving people space to speak and be heard starts to rebuild trust. Listening is the first act of empathy, and empathy is the bridge back to psychological safety.
The future model of influence
There is another kind of silence thats intentional and not imposed. Its the pause that allows leaders to think, feel, and respond with awareness rather than react. This is where modern influence begins. Visibility and authority wont build the leaders of tomorrow. What will set them apart is their ability to build trust and lead with empathy to create psychologically safe workplaces.
Todays leaders are juggling unprecedented complexity, whether thats shifting markets, hybrid work, rapid transformation, and multigenerational teams with diverse values and communication styles. Each generation might look for something different, but they all want someone to hear them out. Amid this constant pressure, few leaders have the space to slow down. Yet as complexity accelerates, active listening becomes essential. The most effective leaders create space for everyday check-ins rather than relying on quarterly surveys. These small moments of connection allow them to pivot quickly, address issues early, and stay in rhythm with their teams.
You dont measure the pulse of leadership in reports; you do so in daily conversations. Empathy enables leaders to read emotions as fluently as they read information and to sense what people need before they can articulate it. It turns listening into awareness and awareness into intelligent action. This isnt performative listening or surface acknowledgment; its a disciplined practice of presence, understanding, and follow-through.
Measuring connection
While you can measure listening, you feel its actual impact through culture. Simple questionsMy manager genuinely listens to my concerns or Senior leaders act on employee feedbackreveal whether an organization values voice and transparency. Psychological safety remains the most reliable indicator of a connected culture. When people feel safe to speak, innovation thrives. Regular pulse surveys can track progress, but measurement only matters when it leads to visible action. Asking employees whether they see follow-through ensures that listening translates into progress. When leaders act on what they hear, empathy becomes motion. It builds credibility and reinforces the belief that every voice matters, which turns trust from an aspiration into a measurable outcome.
The quiet revolution
Influence today demands composure in complexity. Leaders need to find space to hear what their employees arent saying, reflect before responding, and make room for diverse perspectives. When empathy becomes part of daily leadership, it strengthens clarity, confidence, and connection across the organization. Empathy allows leaders to stay grounded in uncertainty and connected in complexity. Listening transforms disconnection into alignment and noise into meaning.
This is human-first leadership that balances the rational with the emotional. I call it “rational empathy”where emotional awareness meets clear reasoning. Its the space where leaders respond, with both compassion and composure. Those who master it will build cultures that are open, resilient, and ready for what comes next.
The leaders who will define the next decade wont be the loudest in the room. The next revolution in leadership will listen and balance confidence with curiosity. Are you listening deeply enough to understand what really matters and what could change in your team, your culture, or your impact if you started there? When leaders truly listen, they connect, and that connection is where real influence begins.
From the latest skyscraper in a Chinese megalopolis to a sixfoottall yurt in Inner Mongolia, researchers at the Technical University of Munich claim they have created a map of all buildings worldwide: 2.75 billion building models set in highresolution 3D with a level of precision never before recorded.
Made from years of satellite data analysis by machinelearning algorithms, the model reflects a sustained effort to capture the built world in three dimensions. The result now provides a crucial basis for climate research and for tracking progress toward global sustainable development goals, according to the scientists behind it.
Professor Xiaoxiang Zhu, who leads the project and is the chair of data science in Earth observation at TUM, says the real achievement is that the new map is a threedimensional picture of how much space people actually inhabit. 3D building information provides a much more accurate picture of urbanization and poverty than traditional 2D maps, she explains. With 3D models we see not only the footprint but also the volume of each building.
[Screenshot: FC]
At the heart of this work is the GlobalBuildingAtlas, an open dataset that describes individual buildings across the planet both as 2D outlines and as simple 3D objects. In total, it contains 2.75 billion building footprintspolygons tracing the edges of each structurecovering every building the satellites could detect in satellite imagery from 2019.
[Screenshot: courtesy of the author]
At first glance, there are some interesting takeaways from the map, like the distribution of building volume clusters around major metropolitan regionswith particularly dense concentrations in East Asia, Europe, and North America. Meanwhile, many parts of the Global South show vast numbers of buildings that are small and lowrise, especially in Africa, which has more buildings than Europe and North America, but far less total built area and volume.
[Screenshot: FC]
The ability to map building height and volume reveals disparities that conventional 2D maps tend to hide: A dense informal settlement and a carefully planned neighborhood of multistory buildings can look similar in a flat, areabased statistic. But if you have accurate 3D buildings, experts can understand that they offer radically different housing conditions and require different infrastructure. Their proposed metric of building volume per capita turns the GlobalBuildingAtlas into a lens for spotting where housing and infrastructure lag behind population and, therefore, where urban policy and investment should concentrate.
[Screenshot: FC]
How they made it
The scientists used machine learning algorithms to identify one billion more buildings than any previous global database, creating simplified 3D “shoebox” models for 97% of them. That’s 2.68 billion 3D buildings, compared to Google Open Buildings, which has 1.8 billion building outlines.
The team started with daily satellite images from the PlanetScope constellation, which photographs the Earth at roughly 9.8 feet per pixel. Then they stitched together about 800,000 cloud-free scenes from 2019 into a seamless global mosaic, and taught a neural network to recognize buildings by training it on known building outlines from OpenStreetMap and other sources.
To add height to these flat building outlines, the team used laser measurements (LiDAR) from airborne surveys in developed countries to train an AI that can estimate how tall a building is just by looking at a single satellite photosimilar to how a person can judge a skyscraper’s height from its appearance and shadow. This height-prediction model scans the entire global image and assigns a height value to every pixel, even calculating its own margin of error.
