Dog owners have a lot of choices nowadays when it comes to picking out pet food for their pup. Dry kibble or wet? Beef or chicken? Frozen, fresh, or raw? Brands even boast human-grade ingredients and grain-free recipes.
If you have a dog, your decision may be focused on nutrients, or maybe price. But one vet-turned-environmental researcher wants you to also consider the climate impact.
And that impact could be hugedepending on the type of food, your dogs diet could have a greater environmental impact than your own.
Calculating the carbon footprint of dog food
What we eat matters for the planet. Globally, food production is responsible for more than a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions and has impacts on biodiversity, deforestation, and water use.
Climate experts agree that eating less meat and more plants is better for the environment.
What we feed our pets matters too, says John Harvey, a veterinary surgeon working on environmental sustainability at the University of Edinburgh.
In Harveys newest study, published in the Journal of Cleaner Production this week, researchers calculated the carbon footprint of nearly 1,000 types of dog food that are commercially available in the United Kingdom.
Though the study is U.K. focused, the dog food market there is similar to the United States: the sample included dry, wet, and raw foods, as well as grain-free and even plant-based options.
Harvey and his team found that in the U.K., the production of ingredients for dog food accounts for about 1% of the countrys total greenhouse gas emissions. Though 1% may seem small, it does matter, Harvey says. That’s big.
Scaled up, the impact is clearer: If all dogs around the world were fed like they are in the U.K., the emissions to produce that food would be equivalent to more than half of all jet fuel emissions from global commercial aviation. (Dog food emissions actually range enough that they could be 59% to 99% of jet fuel emissions, when scaled up.)
Its not clear what share of U.S. emissions comes from dog food, but dog ownership here is even higher. About 36% of U.K. households own a dog, for some 13 million total pups. In the U.S., more than 45% of households own a dog, for a total closer to 90 million, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.
What type of dog food is the most environmentally friendly?
Your dog’s environmental pawprint depends on what exactly their food is made up of. And depending on the ingredients, that impact can change drastically: Over those nearly 1,000 different types of pet food, the researchers found a 65-fold difference between lower-impact feed options and higher-impact food.
For comparison, the difference between human diets is much smaller: an average high-meat human diet produces 2.5 times the emissions as an average vegan diet.
The dog foods with the highest greenhouse gas emissions were those that are meat-rich, wet, raw, or grain-free, the study found.
[Image: courtesy The University of Edinburgh]
When we look at feeding a 20-kilogram [44-pound] dog on raw food or wet food, many of those have a higher impact than a high meat human diet, Harvey says. Wet grain-free and raw foods also come with about twice the emissions of a human vegan diet.
Terms like grain free, fresh, or human grade may sound appealing to pet owners, but studies have found that they dont come with clear health benefits, or generally lack evidence that theyre superior.
There are people who really believe in a particular type of feeling, for example, that dogs must be fed like wolves, only meat and raw bones, Harvey says. Well, I would say the veterinary profession I’m not sure is aligned with that, and the evidence isn’t necessarily aligned with those particular positions.
Helping dog owners be more aware
Harvey doesnt want to demonize any way an owner might feed their dog; he just wants pet owners to be a bit more aware.
This is not about saying You’re doing the wrong thing or blaming people, he says. There are opportunities within every single class of food that we looked at to pick a dramatically lower environmentally impactful formulation, and there’s opportunities for manufacturers to reformulate.
Beef and lamb are the worst climate offenders when it comes to proteins, for example, so it makes sense that beef and lamb dog foods come with higher emissions. Switching to dog food with chicken would reduce your pups diet emissions.
Similarly, foods with prime cuts, similar to what humans eat, have a bigger environmental impact, while those that use meat byproducts are more sustainable. There are also plant-based dog foods, which come with some of the lowest emissions.
Pet owners can also be cognizant of managing portion sizes and waste to make their dogs diets more environmentally friendly.
Harvey focused on food because it comes with a big impact, but also because its changeable. He even has a website with more information for pet owners.
He hopes pet owners do become more aware of the impact of their dogs diets, and that dog food manufacturers become more transparent and better about labeling their ingredients, so customers can make informed choices.
With his background as a vet, Harvey knows that pets matter to people. He also knows that were facing a climate crisis.
I’d like people to still be able to have a pet as the climate changes, he says. I want those two things to be compatible.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he plans to meet with Danish officials next week after the Trump administration doubled down on its intention to take over Greenland, the strategic Arctic island that is a self-governing territory of Denmark.Since the capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump has revived his argument that the United States needs to control the world’s largest island to ensure its own security in the face of rising threats from China and Russia in the Arctic.Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lkke Rasmussen and his Greenland counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, had requested a meeting with Rubio, according to a statement posted Tuesday to Greenland’s government website. Previous requests for a meeting were not successful, the statement said.Rubio told a select group of U.S. lawmakers that it was the Republican administration’s intention to eventually purchase Greenland, as opposed to using military force.The remarks, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, were made in a classified briefing Monday evening on Capitol Hill, according to a person with knowledge of his comments who was granted anonymity because it was a private discussion.On Wednesday, Rubio told reporters in Washington that Trump has been talking about acquiring Greenland since his first term. “That’s always been the president’s intent from the very beginning,” Rubio said. “He’s not the first U.S. president that has examined or looked at how we could acquire Greenland.”
European leaders express concern
The leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom joined Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in issuing a statement this week reaffirming that the mineral-rich island, which guards the Arctic and North Atlantic approaches to North America, “belongs to its people.” Frederiksen warned that a U.S. takeover would amount to the end of NATO.“The Nordics do not lightly make statements like this,” Maria Martisiute, a defense analyst at the European Policy Centre think tank, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “But it is Trump whose very bombastic language bordering on direct threats and intimidation is threatening the fact to another ally by saying, ‘I will control or annex the territory.'”Rubio, who was on Capitol Hill for a classified briefing Wednesday with the entire U.S. Senate and House, did not directly answer reporters’ questions about whether the administration was willing to risk the NATO alliance by potentially moving ahead with a military option regarding Greenland.“I’m not here to talk about Denmark or military intervention, I’ll be meeting with them next week, we’ll have those conversations with them then, but I don’t have anything further to add to that,” Rubio said. He added that every president retains the option to address national security threats to the United States through military means.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that using the military to acquire Greenland was an option, though she told reporters Wednesday that “the president’s first option always has been diplomacy.”Some Republican senators said they saw strategic value in Greenland, but they stopped short of supporting military action to acquire it.Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall said he hoped “we can work out a deal,” while North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven said some of the discussion about taking Greenland by force has been “misconstrued.”“One of the things about President Trump, you may have noticed, is he keeps our adversaries off balance by making sure they don’t know what we’re going to do,” Hoeven said.But Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she hated “the rhetoric around either acquiring Greenland by purchase or by force,” adding, “I think that it is very, very unsettling.”Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, co-chairs of the bipartisan Senate NATO Observer Group, said the U.S. needs to honor its treaty obligations to Denmark.“Any suggestion that our nation would subject a fellow NATO ally to coercion or external pressure undermines the very principles of self-determination that our Alliance exists to defend,” the senators said in a joint statement.
‘This is America now’
Thomas Crosbie, an associate professor of military operations at the Royal Danish Defense College, said an American takeover would not help Washington’s national security.“The United States will gain no advantage if its flag is flying in Nuuk versus the Greenlandic flag,” he told the AP. “There’s no benefits to them because they already enjoy all of the advantages they want. If there’s any specific security access that they want to improve American security, they’ll be given it as a matter of course, as a trusted ally. So this has nothing to do with improving national security for the United States.”Denmark’s parliament approved a bill in June to allow U.S. military bases on Danish soil. It widened a previous military agreement, made in 2023 with the Biden administration, in which U.S. troops had broad access to Danish air bases in the Scandinavian country. Denmark’s foreign minister has said that Denmark would be able to terminate the agreement if the U.S. tries to annex all or part of Greenland.In the event of military action, the U.S. Department of Defense operates the remote Pituffik Space Base, in northwestern Greenland, and the troops there could be mobilized.Crosbie said he believes the U.S. would not seek to hurt the local population or engage with Danish troops.“They don’t need to bring any firepower. They don’t need to bring anybody,” Crosbie said Wednesday. “They could just direct the military personnel currently there to drive to the center of Nuuk and just say, ‘This is America now,’ right? And that would lead to the same response as if they flew in 500 or 1,000 people.”The danger in an American annexation, he said, lies in the “erosion of the rule of law globally and to the perception that there are any norms protecting anybody on the planet.”He added: “The impact is changing the map. The impact I don’t think would be storming the parliament.”
Kim reported from Washington. Geir Moulson in Berlin, Mark Carlson in Brussels, and Ben Finley, Joey Cappelletti and Aamer Madhani in Washington contributed to this report.
Stefanie Dazio and Seung Min Kim, Associated Press
Less than 24 hours after the horrifying shooting of a woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis, merchandise related to the slain U.S. citizen is already proliferating on e-commerce shopping sites, including on Amazon and Etsy. Heres what you need to know.
Whats happened?
On Wednesday, a woman was fatally shot by an ICE officer near a raid that federal officials were conducting. The woman was identified by authorities as Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother and U.S. citizen.
As CNN reports, multiple videos taken by bystanders on the scene show ICE agents confronting the car that Good was driving, which was parked sideways on the street.
After some verbal interaction between the driver and the officers, the car appears to begin turning, at which point an ICE agent fired multiple shots into the vehicle.
Good was reportedly struck in the head by one of the shots and later pronounced dead at a local hospital. Kristi Noem, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has accused Good of weaponizing her vehicle in an effort to run over the ICE agent, but any such intent is far from certain at this point.
Democratic leaders, on the other hand, have called for an investigation into the incident, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has said that his administration will stop at nothing to seek accountability and justice.
The incident has quickly become the latest political flashpoint around President Trump’s controversial decision to send federal agents into U.S. cities.
Renee Good merch proliferates on Amazon and Etsy
Within hours of Goods death, thousands of mourners took to the streets in Minneapolis and other U.S. cities to honor the victim and peacefully protest the actions of the ICE agent.
At the same time, another phenomenon began happening: merchandise related to Good and her shooting began rapidly proliferating on online shopping sites like Amazon and Etsy.
As of the time of this writing, visitors to these sites can easily find everything from stickers to hats to T-shirts in support of Good and her memory. Such products often sport the phrase Justice for Renee or Justice for GOODness as well as other phrases, including rest in power.
Sellers move quickly to capitalize on viral events
The fact that Good-related merchandise already exists isnt entirely shocking. As Fast Company previously reported, in recent months, politically contentious events have often led to a quick proliferation of merchandise related to the incidents.
In November, the Epstein Bubba email led to an explosion of merch on both Amazon and Etsy, and earlier in 2025, Alligator Alcatraz merch spread on Etsy, where it met significant blowback on social media.
However, the ideological motives behind the sellers making this merchandise aren’t always clear. For instance, some of the seller accounts appear to be new, and they don’t always state whether they are opposed or aligned with any of the events that have spawned the merch.
What is interesting to note, however, in the case of the Good-related merch, is that some of the Amazon sellers appear to be based in China, suggesting at the very least that individuals overseas are eager to profit from the latest social and political turmoil engulfing the United States.
Fast Company has reached out to Etsy and Amazon for comment.
Renee Good GoFundMe exceeds $400,000
While some sellers on Amazon and Etsys platforms appear to be keen to profit from a tragic event, other individuals are actively using online platforms to support Renee Goods wife and child.
As of the time of this writing, a number of Renee Good fundraisers have been set up on GoFundMe. One such fundraiser, with the stated aim of raising funds for her wife and child, has already surpassed $400,000 in donations from more than 10,300 individuals.
Fast Company has reached out to GoFundMe to ask whether the campaign is verified. We will update this story if we hear back.
Thomas Edison said that success is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. But what if his famous formula is missing a key ingredient? What if success demands not just creativity and perseverance, but a third, much less discussed skill?
Modern neuroscience suggests it does. Research shows mastering this often overlooked ability will not only upgrade your brain, but make it much more likely youll achieve your goals (with less perspiration along the way).
The secret ingredient for success
What is this magic ingredient? Some scientists call it a strategic mindset. Others term it metacognition. Whatever label you go with, the idea is straightforward enough. Metacognition is thinking about your thinking. It means not just doggedly pursuing your goals but questioning how you pursue them.
If youre a student, that might mean evaluating your study techniques. Is rereading the text over and over the most efficient way to study? (Science suggests not.) If youre playing poker, it could look like observing when youre letting emotion get in the way of a smart bet. Business leaders might not just ask, Did I make the right decision? but also, Is there a smarter way to make similar decisions in the future?
This kind of strategic thinking can have big impacts, research out of Stanford and the National University of Singapore recently found. Scientists tested more than 850 volunteers chasing a variety of tough goals, from academic excellence to weight loss. The more study subjects employed metacognition, the more likely they were to reach their aims.
The most successful people, in other words, werent necessarily the smartest or the grittiest, though those abilities certainly help. They were the ones who thought about their own thinking, probing for ways to improve.
Metacognition can be taught
Thats interesting to know, but the finding isnt very useful for entrepreneurs unless its a skill that can be taught. Helpfully, it can.
Not only did the researchers find that a strategic mindset makes you more likely to be successful, they also showed that when study participants were explicitly taught about metacognition, their odds of achieving their goals went up.
What we know now is that adults seem to naturally vary in their strategic mindset, and that a strategic mindset can be taught, study coauthor Patricia Chen summed up to the BBC.
5 tricks to upgrade your brain
So how do you teach yourself to reflect on and improve thinking? Above all, stay curious about how your mind works, neuroscientist and author Anne-Laure Le Cunff suggested on Big Think recently.
She went on to offer five specific ideas to upgrade your brain through metacognition:
Explain things to yourself. When learning something new, dont just read or listen. Ask yourself why it makes sense and how it connects to what you already know, she writes. Both Bill Gates and Elon Musk have recommended this same technique of trying to hook up new knowledge with previously learned information to speed learning.
Study your mistakes. If something goes wrong, resist moving on too quickly. Instead, dig into what happened: What was I thinking? Where did my reasoning break down? What was I assuming? What would I do differently? suggests Le Cunff. Get detailed advice on how to learn more from your mistakes here.
Think out loud. When solving a problem or making a decision, narrate your thought process. Speak (or write) what youre thinking as you think it. This makes your invisible reasoning visible so you can examine it, she says. Le Cunff is far from the only expert claiming that writing is a powerful way to stress test and clarify your thinking.
Check your confidence. Notice how sure you feel when making a decision. Consider whether your confidence comes from solid evidence or gut feeling, and what information you might be missing, she says. Psychologists insist that learning to think in probabilities can aid in this process.
Notice your thoughts. Just like in mindfulness meditation, simply observe your mental processes without judgment. You dont need to meditate for hours; even a few minutes of paying attention to your thinking can be helpful, Le Cunff concludes.
Achieve more, sweat less
All of these practices share a common thread. They nudge you to pay closer, more skeptical attention to your thoughts in progress. Watch yourself think and youll find ways to improve your appoach to problems. Rather than muscle through with a suboptimal strategy or rickety logic, youll avoid pitfalls and proceed more efficiently.
With respect to Mr. Edison, hard work definitely plays a big part in achievement. But upgrading your brain through metacognition can help you reach your goals with a whole lot less unnecessary perspiration.
Youve probably heard the saying, If you need to get something done, give it to the busiest person you know.
This statement often rings true. However, if you find yourself nodding along to this, you could be doing yourself a disservice. Yes, reliability and dependability are strengths, but they can quickly become your Achilles heel if youre everyones go-to person, all the time.
Research shows that teams composed of people who are dependable perform better. In fact, Googles Project Aristotle found dependability to be the second most important factor in high-performing teams. And yet if this dependability extends beyond the sustainable (for example, if it turns into hyper-independence or people-pleasing), what starts as well-intentioned can result in a myriad of negative outcomes.
The possibility of quiet cracking
We get it. Being the go-to person feels good. It gives you a sense of purpose and contribution. But saying “yes” at all costs, even when youre overloaded, has a real impact on your professional performance, and on you personally. The unintended consequences of being everyones go-to person can result in workload imbalances, unspoken resentment towards your team, and even quiet cracking, which are precursors to burnout.
Quiet cracking is a subtle, internal experience of emotional and mental depletion that happens when you feel stretched too far for too long. And it makes sense, being everyones go-to person without feeling appreciated or a sense of progress and advancement will likely leave you unhappy and unmotivated. It happens somewhere between burnout and quiet quitting, when you still show up and perform, but your engagement is silently eroding.
So if youre a high performer who is quietly cracking beneath the surface, it might be time to take off that busy badge and honor how youre really feeling. This is a call to action for those quiet go-to people who are feeling resentful, tired, irritable, or have just had enough. The reality is that when youre spread too thin, you cant perform at your best.
Here are four things you can do right now to help yourself.
1. Acknowledge how youre really feeling
You cant fix what you wont face, and denial isnt a long-term strategy for success. The first step to breaking the cycle is admitting that the way youre working right now isnt sustainable. High performers are often the best at pushing through, even when they’re exhausted. However, resilience without reflection quickly becomes self-sacrifice.
Start by allowing yourself to pause and be honest. Are you coping, or just going through the motions? Acknowledging the truth isnt weakness. Its the gateway to change. Is the way youre working today actually taking you to where you want to go?
2. Get clear on the priorities and set boundaries around whats not
Get clear on the tasks that are most mission-critical in your role for both individual and team success. When everything becomes a priority, nothing is. Once you have clarity around key priorities, protect your time and energy to focus on those by setting better boundaries. Learn to communicate with your manager when work demands arent realistic. Set firmer boundaries with your colleagues and team members about what work youre accountable for, and whats within their remit.
When youre always saying “yes,” you’re teaching others how to treat you and demonstrating that youre always available when people need you. Instead, be clear about what capacity you do have, and what you need to deprioritize if youre to take on extra responsibility. If you need to say no to your coworkers, say something along the lines of, I understand this project is important to you, lets bring it to the table with the team to see whos best placed to help.
3. Share the load so that you dont carry it alone
You dont build thriving teams due to one hero. You build them on shared ownership, distributed responsibility, and collective accountability. If youre always the one stepping in, fixing things, or saving the day, you may unknowingly be holding the team back from developing capability, confidence, and resilience. When you take everything on, others dont get the chance to learn, experiment, or rise to the challenge.
Start by getting curious: Where are the bottlenecks? Where does work pile up around you? What tasks could someone else take on with support? Instead of quietly carrying more, raise the issue with your manager from a solutions-focused perspective. Not only does this relieve pressure on you, but it also lifts the bar for everyone.
4. Redesign your role around your strengths
Dependability is your strength, but every overplayed strength can become an Achilles heel. If the work that once energized you now leaves you depleted, its worth reflecting on where you can best use your skills.
Consider which tasks light you up versus the ones that flatten your energy. Use this self-awareness as a starting point for a conversation with your manager about workload design, growth pathways, and skill development. Figure out where you can add the most value, and what you may be able to redesign so that you can thrive. You dont need to do everything to be valuable. Often, the work that drains you might be an opportunity for someone else to grow. When you realign your role with what you do best, your performance improves and so does your well-being.
Being the go-to person doesnt make you indispensable; it makes you invisible when youre struggling. Boundaries, collaboration, and better role design arent signs of weakness; theyre leadership behaviors. When you protect your time, share responsibility, and play to your strengths, you create space for your best work, and for others to rise too.
Single-use soy sauce packets for sushi take-out orders are now a whole lot more sustainable, thanks to a redesign that doesn’t use any plastic.
While sushi lovers in the U.S. are used to getting their to-go soy sauce in rectangular packets like they do their ketchup and mustard, soy sauce in Australia often comes in small plastic fish bottles with a screw top.
[Photo: Heliograf]
This typical mini fish-shaped bottle is cute, for sure, but the user is done with it in a few minutes. Its packaging lasts much, much longer by comparison, since plastics can take as long as 500 years to break down. Does the user experience really require packaging that lasts that long?
[Photo: Heliograf]
The Holy Carp soy sauce dropper, now available for preorder, is a plastic-free and fully compostable alternative that solves this dilemma. The kraft-brown-colored dropper is made from bagasse pulp (plant residue), and it comes in two pieces that snap together. The lid, which is shaped like a fish, decomposes in four to six weeks, not centuries.
[Photo: Heliograf]
Rather than a cap, the Holy Carp dropper dispenses sauce out of an opening under the fish’s eye, and restaurants fill them in-house. The dropper can hold sauce for 48 hoursprobably longer than you’d want to keep your take-out sushi in the fridge anyway.
[Photo: Heliograf]
The Holy Carp dropper was designed by Heliograf, an Australian design studio, with Vert Industrial Design House, and made in consultation with sushi restaurants. Since customers usually grab a handful of those plastic fish-shaped bottles with their take-out order, the designers made their compostable version of the fish dropper bigger, with 12 milliliters of capacity.
[Photo: Heliograf]
The studios worked together in 2020, on Light Soy, a compostable fish-dropper lamp, to draw attention to single-use plastic waste, but with the Holy Carp, they’ve set their sights higher.
You just need one fish lamp for your room, but you need soy sauce every time you get sushi. And that adds up to a lot of plastic: Heliograf estimates that somewhere between 8 billion and 12 billion fish bottles have been used since 1950.
Working from home might be frowned upon at some companies these days, but the rising number of layoffs last year and the growing collection of workers who are launching their own businesses means the number of people working out of a home office is on the rise.
If youre among them, youve no doubt learned that to make it a comfortable experience, you need a lot more than a laptop and a convenient table.
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this year, plenty of items on display seemed well-suited to make work life easier for home-based employees. Heres a look at the most notable tools.
Xebec Tri Screen 3
If you’re used to a multi-monitor setup, you know the pain of having to adjust to a single monitor when you’re on the road or find yourself confined to a smaller workspace. Xebec has been providing solutions for that for a while, but the Tri Screen 3 is the easiest fix yet. Simply clamp the base onto the back of your laptop’s screen, plug it in, and in seconds you’ll have three independent screens with which to spread out your browser windows, spreadsheets, and documents. The Tri Screen 3 works with both PCs and Macs (adapter needed) and runs $699.
Libernovo Omni
A good office chair is critical for home workers. Plopping yourself down in a chair stolen from the dining room for long periods will result in back pain and decreased productivity. Libernovo’s Omni ergonomic chair has been on the market for a bit, but at CES, the company showed off upgrades that make it even more appealing. Rather than adjusting the chair itself, the Omni, which starts at $803, uses what it calls a bionic backrest, featuring 16 joints and eight panels, mimicking the human spine and following the users movement in real time. It also will offer a temperature-adaptive cooling cushion that adjusts to your body heat.
Jackery Explorer 1500 Ultra
Over the past few years, more and more areas of the country have experienced climate-related power outages, whether due to extreme heat, tropical activity, or some other meteorological quirk. But for the home-based worker, reliable power is essential. Jackery’s Explorer 1500 Ultra is a portable power solution that will keep the power running. Prefer to work outside on nice days? Jackery has also introduced a solar-powered gazebo, which can generate up to 10 kilowatt-hours per day. The company did not announce pricing for either product.
Ugreen NAS storage
Cloud storage has the advantage of accessibility, but security is sometimes a concern (and some cloud operators can shut down with little or no warning). Ugreen’s network-attached storage devices let you keep your data backed up and secure. The NASync iDX Series offers increased speed and fully local AI to help you parse the information you have collected. Prices start at $999 and increase as you add more memory.
Motorola Mesh Wi-Fi
There are plenty of mesh Wi-Fi receivers on the market, but you’d be hard-pressed to find one cheaper than Motorola’s current offering. At $129, it’s an affordable way to bring Wi-Fi 7 into your home office, with a range of roughly 2,000 square feet. Technically called the MNQ1525, it can support up to 120 devices, letting home-based workers unshackle themselves from their desks.
You hear the blurps and bloops after you pass the food court in the Mall of Georgia on a fall Sunday afternoon, the unmistakable sound of points being scored and players eliminated.
Then you see him: Standing in an oversize vitrine is a 6-foot-tall animatronic rodent. Hes grinning and waving, but frozen in place, preserved like a museum piece.
This isnt an outpost of Chuck E. Cheese, the 48-year-old family pizza chain with more than 460 restaurants in 45 states and another 88 abroad. Its Chucks Arcade, a fledgling new enterprise launched this past summer by parent company CEC Entertainment in an effort to expand the brands reach to Gen Xers, nostalgic millennials, and teens who have outgrown the flagship.
These 13-and-counting old-school arcades are crammed with a dizzying mix of optionselaborate games like Drakons Realm Keepers (flying dragon battles); games tied to Marvel and Jurassic Park and the NBA; arcade classics like Tempest; and analog options like Skee-Ball and air hockey. This one, in Buford, Georgia, draws a steady afternoon crowd of couples, families, and packs of teenagers. A pair of giggly tweens take a furtive selfie with the animatronic Chuck near the door.
Five years after the pandemic plunged Chuck E. Cheese into its second bankruptcy, the brand is showing surprising energy. In addition to launching the new arcades in exurbs and mid-tier cities around the country, it has redesigned most of its restaurants in the U.S. and expanded its menu; most recently, it announced another spin-off focused on physical active play.
And its financial picture appears to be stabilizing. While the company reportedly struggled earlier this year to raise funds to meet debt payments, in September it closed a $625 million private credit term loan, and ratings agency S&P Global forecast that the companys 2025 same-store restaurant sales will grow between 2% and 2.5%.
CEO David McKillips is not shy about his view of the brands potential. Since he took the helm, in 2020, the company has begun to leverage the intellectual property around Chuck E. Cheese, the character, inking several dozen licensing deals that have put the friendly rodents likeness on apparel, toys, frozen pizza, and more. A Chuck E. Cheese Christmasan animated holiday special featuring not just Chuck but also his sidekick charactersdebuted on Amazon Prime on Thanksgiving Day.
All of this may seem like a long-shot vision for a brand thats been more associated recently with cheap punch lines (California governor Gavin Newsom told Vice President JD Vance on social media that ONLY SOMEONE WITH A LAW DEGREE FROM CHUCK E. CHEESE COULD BE AS DUMB AS YOU!!!) and squalid Florida Man cringe (last July, a video of an employee being arrested on fraud charges while wearing his Chuck E. costume went viral).
But the CEC executives spin it differently. Its impactful when Chuck E. Cheese is in the news, good or bad, says Mark Kupferman, the companys chief insights and marketing officer. Chuck E. Cheeses Q scores are amazing.
Shawn and Shelbie Moseley, a couple in their thirties who are making their second visit to Chucks Arcade today, share a fondness for Chuckand the animatronics that used to be the chains signature. Shawn has enjoyed several YouTube documentaries about them. Nostalgia, he says with a knowing grin.
Its a sentiment that CEC is banking on. The company estimates that around 24 million kids, across four generations, have celebrated a birthday at Chuck E. Cheese.
My IP dream is a global movie release, McKillips says, citing Shrek, Sonic the Hedgehog, and the cross-generational appeal of a Pixar property as reference points. I wont stop until we have a movie. There are theme park opportunities, gaming opportunities. . . . Im not done until every 5-year-old is going to sleep in their Chuck E. Cheese pajamas and waking up and having Chuck E. Cheese cereal.
Nostalgia is an exercise in selective memory. And people remember things differently: One fans classic is another fans kitsch. Few brand mascots embody this tension better than Charles Entertainment Cheese.
Born as a giant cigar-smoking rat with a bowler, buck teeth, and a Jersey accent, as Benj Edwards reported in Fast Company in 2017, Chuck first appeared alongside his animatronic bandmates co-vocalist Helen Henny, guitarist Jasper T. Jowls, keyboard player Mr. Munch, and Pasqually on drumsat a pizza-and-entertainment restaurant that opened in San Jose in 1977.
In those days, arcades seemed vaguely shadyhangouts for directionless teenagers. Chuck E. Cheese, as the chain came to be called, offered a family-friendly alternative with games, pizza, and music, geared to delight 2-to-12-year-olds.
Yet the concept always had deeper undercurrents. It was developed and tirelessly championed by founder Nolan Bushnell, the eccentric, visionary tech entrepreneur who also cofounded Atari (and was Steve Jobs’s first boss). He had sought to evoke the mix of technology and carnivalesque ritual that he saw at the heart of collective human culture.
And Chuck was a rat only by accident. Turns out Bushnell had always wanted to start a pizza parlor and had the name Coyote Pizza in mind. In the mid-1970s, not long after cofounding Atari, Bushnell ordered what he thought was a coyote costumebut it turned out to be a rat costume. Trotted out as a regular gag at Atari company events, the character became known alternately as Rick Rat and Big Cheese. Bushnell floated the idea of calling his restaurant Rick Rats Pizza, but his marketing folks intervened, coming up with an alternative: Chuck E. Cheese. The first restaurant had a sign out front reading “Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre,” and by the mid-1980s, it had become a chain, with more than 240 locations. Hampered by overexpansion and a slew of copycats, the company went into its first bankruptcy in 1984.
Bushnell resigned, and ShowBiz Pizza, a rival, bought the company in 1985, returning it to a suburban fixture again throughout the 1990s and 2000s. By the time Apollo Global Management bought the 577-location chain for $1.3 billion in 2014, Chuck had morphed into a cheerful adolescent, and, in the iPhone age, the animatronics were feeling antiquated.
McKillips, formerly a Six Flags executive, paid his first visit to a Chuck E. Cheese on a Saturday in Grapevine, Texas, in 2019, and says he found the brand environment tired and dated. But just as he was about to leave, there was a verbal countdown to the arrival of Chuck himself. It was like a Taylor Swift concert, he recalls. Kids were going bananas. And I was like, This is fricking awesome. He left a 13-plus-year career at Six Flags to become CE in January 2020just as COVID-19 hit.
Unexpectedly presiding over the chains second bankruptcy (filed in the summer of 2020 as diners stayed home), McKillips and his board raised $650 million in bonds, and ultimately spent $350 million to revamp its locations. COVID was a little bit of a blessing in disguise, he says. The brand was crushed for a time, and obviously the human toll on laid-off workers was severe. But it allowed us to pause and really look at the business.
Theres a choice that youth-focused brands grapple with: Do we grow up with our audienceor stay forever young? Chuck E. Cheese had always been in the forever-young business, but had, McKillips felt, lost touch with todays kids. Winking satires in Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia (the Risk E. Rats Pizza and Amusement Center) and the horror movie Five Nights at Freddys didnt help.
Out went Munchs Make Believe Band, as Chuck E.s animatronic musical group was called. In came an interactive dance floor, with a jumbotron and Kidz Bop as an official music partner. Arcade games stayed, but the interiors got brighter and featured adventure zone areas with trampolines and superhero playgrounds. And the pizza got better. During COVID-19, the company converted its kitchens into ghost kitchens for its new delivery and takeout brand, Pasquallys Pizza & Wings. In the process, the company reformulated its pizza recipe and expanded its menu with more toppings and options than it had ever bothered with before, an experiment that resulted in a new adult menu when its dining rooms reopened and the ghost kitchen brand was retired in the spring of 2025.
The business model changed too. Borrowing a tactic from the amusement park industry, the chain started to offer a variety of seasonal and annual passessuch as a $49 Summer Fun pass for unlimited visits for eight weeksproviding discounts in a belt-tightening era, guaranteeing steadier revenue, and cementing loyalty. Chuck E. Cheese sold 79,000 passes in 2023. The next year, it sold nearly 400,000.
Since the beginning, Chuck E. Cheese has been, on some level, a tech company. Today, its main restaurant chain is the largest arcade in the world and the biggest buyer of games, McKillips says. We have 2 billion gameplays every single year.
The company opened a handful of arcades in malls in 2024, called the Fun Spot Arcade, which flopped. But Kupferman, the companys chief insights and marketing officer (and another Six Flags veteran), began envisioning a new stand-alone arcade business that could carry Chuck E. Cheese branding. McKillips was resistant. Doesnt fit, he recalls thinking. We are about age 2 to 12, wholesome, safe family entertainment. They ended up leaving the modern version of the mouse with the childrens pizza chain but using traditional Chuck E., the retro version associated with the 1980s and 1990s, for the arcade.
When the first Chucks Arcade launched in 2025, its logo featured the nostalgic version of Chuck, with the bowler hat and bow tie, and a salvaged animatronic rodent greeted people at the door. While the company wont share specific data, a spokesperson says the switch to Chucks Arcade from Fun Spot has had a very positive effect on the performance of each location. A typical visitor, whether a teen or a 50-year-old, buys a $50 game card and exhausts it over an hour or so.
Now the company is making another play for its millennial and Gen Z fans, this time alongside their Gen Alpha kids, with Chuck E. Cheese Adventure World. The first location11,300 square feet, or 10 times the typical size of an active play zone in one of its restaurantsjust opened in Arlington, Texas, in November. Features include slides and tunnels, climbing zones, a dance floor, and exclusive character appearances (as well as snacks, but curiously, no pizza). The company says it will test a handful of locations before setting any full rollout goals.
As for the flagship chain, the company is currently leveraging all those new screens for its CEC Media Network, announced in Maya de facto television network utilizing almost 4,000 screens across hundreds of Chuck E. Cheese locations. Appealing to todays screen-focused kids, this in-restaurant network plays selections from a library of original entertainment content, with more than 300 digital shorts featuring Chuck E. and the band, as well as partner content from Kidz Bop and others. We are using that as a promotional platform, selling advertising, creating a new revenue model, McKillips says. Its seen by 40 million visitors a year.
The company is also working with streaming technology provider Future Today to expand the CEC Media Network beyond the restaurants. CEC-branded channels now exist on other platforms, such as Roku, Fire TV, Samsung, LG, and Future Todays own family-friendly platform, HappyKids.
But for some, watching a screen isnt as entertaining as interacting with it, and thats what Chucks Arcade is for. Back at the Mall of Georgia, a young boy and his mom play a seated, two-player virtual reality game that involves fighting a frantic array of monsters, including Godzilla, from an armed helicopter. The kid is ecstatic, blasting away at monsters and feeling the effects supplied by the VR headset. Mommy, were flying so high! he squawks, but Mom doesnt answer. Shes blasting away, too, lost in the game.
A small Finnish startup says it has done what the world’s biggest automakers are still struggling to do: put a solid-state battery into a production vehicle, starting with a motorcycle that can charge to more than 100 miles of range in as little as five minutes.
For the last 15 years, the entire battery industry in automotive has been talking about solid-state batteriesthat theyre the future, says Marko Lehtimäki, CEO of Donut Lab, the startup that makes the new battery. But up until today, despite all the talk, theres never been a single production vehicle that uses solid-state batteries. Theyve only been used at lab level.
[Image: Verge Motorcycles]
Verge Motorcycles, an electric motorcycle startup, is using the new battery in a bike thats shipping to customers this quarter. Donut Lab, which originally launched as a spin-off of Verge, is also in talks with about 100 electric vehicle companies that want to shift to solid-state batteries.
[Image: Verge Motorcycles]
Solid-state batteries have big advantages over the typical lithium-ion batteries that are in use now. The batteries, which use a solid electrolyte instead of liquid or gel, are safer, without the risk of catching fire.
Theyre also more efficient and can charge much faster, making charging an EV more like filling up with gas. (Verge advertises that its motorcycle’s new battery can add 186 miles of range in 10 minutes, though it can technically charge in as little as 5 minutes with a high-power charger; the vehicle offers up to 370 total miles of range.) Solid-state batteries also don’t degrade as quickly. And in Donut Lab’s case, the battery is made from low-cost materials that are abundantly available around the world.
[Image: Verge Motorcycles]
The new battery could help avoid the problem of EVs quickly losing resale value. “This battery lasts multiple lifetimes of a car or motorcycle,” Lehtimäki says. “So that’s another very important thing. You can rest assured that there’s zero degradation over time in the lifetime of a motorcycle. If there’s a new model and you want to sell the previous version, you know it’s as good as new from the battery perspective.”
[Image: Verge Motorcycles]
The startup is still in the process of patenting the technology, and declined to share its specific chemistry or production methodology. (Automakers interested in using the batteries have seen more details under a nondisclosure agreement, Lehtimäki says.) But it argues that it was able to outpace other companies working on solid-state batteries because it’s more nimble.
[Image: Verge Motorcycles]
“When you have smaller groups of very talented engineers working on a single vision, where it’s okay to take risks and think outside the box and try out new thingswhich is quite hard in corporate environmentsit’s typically the young companies that actually bring new technologies and innovations to the market,” Lehtimäki says. Donut Lab previously designed a high-performance motor for EVs that fits inside wheels.
[Image: Verge Motorcycles]
The batteries each have cells roughly the size of mobile phones, arranged in larger modules. In the motorcycle, the full battery pack is around the size of a suitcase; for energy storage at a power plant, the system can scale up to fill a shipping container with battery cells.
[Image: Donut Lab]
The batteries, which Donut Lab produces at its own factory in Finland, can also be made in custom shapes, meaning they can easily be swapped into the design of current electric cars or other vehicles. In one demonstration, the team took a swappable battery pack out of a scooter popular in Southeast Asia and re-created it.
[Image: Donut Lab]
“We just took the dimensions and we created a battery in that exact shape and form,” Lehtimäki says. “That means that it can fit in the 100 million scooters in Asia as a drop-in replacement. And we can literally make these in any size so that the OEM [original equipment manufacturer] building cars doesn’t need to make any changes.”
Of course, some automakers have already invested heavily in making their own conventional lithium-ion batteries, and couldn’t immediately make the switch. But Lehtimäki says others are considering quickly adopting the new batteries.
Cova Power, a company that electrifies trailers for semitrucks, plans to use the new batteries. Several automakers are also in the process of putting them in cars, Lehtimäki says, though his company can’t yet name the manufacturers.
In the past, one of the major challenges for solid-state batteries has been cost. But Donut Lab says its costs are competitive because it uses readily available materials.
“The materials are the biggest driver for cost in batteries,” Lehtimäki says. “That’s why we are able to produce them already today at prices that are cheaper than lithium-ion for the end customer, which is the OEM. So that means that if you have a well-established company that produces, say, 100,000 SUVs a year, and they have negotiated the cost of their batteries for a decade, we can go to them and we can immediately offer them these better batteries at the same price than what they pay today.”
Companies that need energy storagelike data centers, EV charging stations, or solar farms, for examplecould also quickly adopt the new batteries. “They can have three or four times faster charging than what they have today, Lehtimäki says, with lower costs.
If youre like most Americans, youve already set all manner of goals and resolutions for the New Year. And likewise, if youre like most Americans, youll have entirely abandoned them by February 1.
Studies have found that 23% of people quit their New Years resolutions within a week, and almost half drop them by the end of January. Only 9% of Americans actually complete anything from their list in a given year.
The biggest issue, apparently, is that were all very bad at setting resolutions. The things we choose are too vague, too hard, or too external.
That got me wondering: Could AI do any better?
Specifically: Can I mine the vast treasure trove of personal information ChatGPT has gleaned from our conversations and use that to set better resolutions for the year ahead?
Turns out, the answer is yes. Heres how I funneled ChatGPTs casual disregard for privacy into a list of specific, actionable resolutions for 2026and how you can do it too.
Remember Me
Many users dont realize that ChatGPT pays careful attention to every conversation you have with it. Its constantly eyeing your language choices, facts you share about yourself, and data you upload in order to better understand what makes you tick.
And it retains everything.
This privacy-obliterating feature is called Memory. OpenAI rolled it out in 2024. And its been expanded and improved constantly ever since.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called Memory one of the most important breakthrough areas for AI, and the company is leaning heavily into improving the feature in 2026.
Memory is helpful because it allows ChatGPT to respond to your queries in a more personalized way. If the bot knows youre a vegetarian, for example, it wont recommend a meatball sandwich when you ask it for lunch ideas.
But ChatGPTs Memory can also get extremely granularand strange.
You can see what the bot knows about you by clicking your profile icon in the ChatGPT interface, choosing Personalization, finding the Memory section, and pressing Manage.
Doing this for myself, I learned, for example, that ChatGPT knows my birthday, my marital status, where I live, and the names of my children.
But bizarrely, it also believes that Im writing articles about asphalt and has stored the fact that I like straight ASCII quotes in its vast Memory banks.
While OpenAI talks about Memory as a personalization function to help ChatGPT provide more helpful responses, its also likely a way to lock you into OpenAIs system.
If ChatGPT knows more about you than Gemini, youre more likely to keep using it. You wont just flit over to a different chatbot provider every time they roll out a new model, as many users do today.
All that stored info, then, is really there for OpenAI, not for you. But with the right prompting, you can readily access and mine it. Specifically, you can use it to make a killer list of resolutions.
Resolving Wisely
To do so, I fired up the ChatGPT interface and selected the GPT-5.2 model. I then set the bot to the Extended Thinking mode. That configuration ensures that ChatGPT uses its most powerful LLM, and spends as much time as possible processing a given query.
I then gave the bot this prompt (feel free to steal it for your own resolution setting):
Look back at your memory of the conversations we’ve had over the last year. Based on what you find, make a list of 10 highly specific, actionable New Years Resolutions for me for 2026. Cover all aspects of life, including work, health, family, and more. Follow expert guidance and best practices for setting realistic, actionable and truly achievable New Year’s resolutions. Specifically, use your knowledge of me to tailor the resolutions to the things I value and care about, and phrase/structure them in a way that you know will resonate with me personally.
After thinking for several minutes, ChatGPT responded with a customized list. As requested, the resolutions are very specific. And the bot clearly knows lots about me.
Its first recommendation is to Run a 45-minute 925 Newsroom Sprint 4 days/week with the goal of publishing 3 locally sourced Bay Area Telegraph stories/week (permits, public safety, openings, schools, city hall) and miss no more than 6 weeks total.
Based on that, ChatGPT clearly knows that I run a local news publication and publish a newsletter about the Bay Areas 925 region.
But it also seems to know about how much time I take off every year (six weeks), and correctly inferred the kinds of stories I cover for my publication.
For another resolution, ChatGPT advises me to Hit 30 minutes of licensing progress 5 days/week and gives specific ways I could do thata reference to my day job as a news photographer with licensable photos.
I mostly talk with ChatGPT about work, so many of its resolutions focus on my professional life. But it also recommended several health-related resolutions, like Make LDL-friendly eating automatic with 3 defaults including one soluble-fiber item daily (beans, oats, chia, etc.)
Sometime in 2025 I must have uploaded blood test results and asked the bot to explain them to me. Since then, ChatGPT has apparently been worrying about my LDL cholesterol and would like me to tweak it (thankfully, my actual doctor is not worried).
Other suggested resolutions focus on building a workout routine (including a less-strenuous dad-of-3 version for busy weeks), improving my Python coding, and traveling more to photograph hotels for work.
Forget It
Overall, Im impressed by ChatGPTs specificity and level of detail. My own real-life list of resolutions is laudable but vague, with items like be more present in daily life.
ChatGPTs, in contrast, are all about mtrics, action items, and accountability. Based on expert advice, thats probably a wise approach.
Still, it creeps me out a bit to see how much ChatGPT knows about me. And it feels stranger because I never specifically asked the bot to remember any of those thingsit just decided to retain all the minutiae I dumped into its interface.
Thats fine when ChatGPT remembers things like my preferred format for em dashes, and the fact that I enjoy Jared Baumans writing (hes a friend).
But when the bot starts retaining highly specific medical information based on a conversation I forgot I even had, the whole thing starts to feel invasive.
Thankfully, OpenAI makes it fairly easy to remove specific items from ChatGPTs memory. You can do so on the same Manage page I referenced earlier. After seeing what the bot knows about me, I deleted several items that were too overtly medical or were simply wrong.
You can also opt to switch off the function entirely, or to use a Temporary Chat for a specific, sensitive query.
Those are short-term fixes, though. As Altmans breakthrough comment suggests, Memory is becoming an increasingly important function of modern AI chatbots.
That means LLMs will almost certainly retain ever more knowledge about usespecially as companies exhaust the performance gains of building ever-bigger models and data centers. And they may not always explicitly share what they know.
For now, you can leverage that knowledge for good and set some resolutions for the year ahead.
But as you do so, might I suggest adding another resolution to your list: Share less with LLMs. And remember that what you do share they may never truly forget.
