The holiday season is merry, bright, and hectic. Its hard to cram every moment of cheer into just four weeks and keep your sanity.
If you find yourself behind and needing to grab last-minute presents, run errands, or pick up a stick of butter on Christmas Eve, know that you are only human.
After taking a couple of deep breaths, read on to see which stores are open and closed on the night before the big night.
Are banks open on Christmas Eve?
Christmas Eve is not a federal holiday, so most banks are open. Some may choose to have reduced hours, so it is a good practice to check with your local branch ahead of time to save you the potential headache.
If you missed your window, dont forget that online banking and ATMs can come to the rescue.
Is mail delivered on Christmas Eve?
Yes, mail is delivered on Christmas Eve. The U.S. Postal Service is operating, although some branches may close early.
Is the stock market open?
Yes, you can buy and sell on Christmas Eve. (Perhaps to stuff the stockings with stock?) Both the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq are open for business, but only until 1 p.m. ET.
Which stores are open?
Here’s a cheat sheet for grocery store hours this year:
Trader Joes: Reduced hours; open until 5 p.m.
Aldi: Reduced hours; check your local store for details.
Whole Foods: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Publix: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Kroger: Store closes at 8 p.m.; pharmacy closes at 5 p.m.
Safeway: 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.
And here’s one for popular retailers:
Walmart: 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Target: 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Costco: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Kohls: 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
TJ Maxx: 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Macys: Closing at 7 p.m.
Starbucks is open but with reduced hours. Check your local store for details.
Are pharmacies open on Christmas Eve?
If you’re feeling under the weather on Christmas Eve, you can turn to CVS or Walgreens. Both major pharmacy chains are open, though they are expected to close early. Check in with your local store before heading on a run for cough syrup.
The bottom line
Never fear. Most stores are open on Christmas Eve with reduced hours. Double-check the hours at your local shop so you dont waste a trip. And try not to worry. Everything will get done and be holly jolly.
The best-selling video game console this Black Friday was the PlayStation 5. That surprised no one. The number-two spot went to the Nintendo Switch 2. Again, that was expected.
But the bronze position wasn’t held by Microsoft’s Xbox, as you might suppose. Instead, it was claimed by the Nex Playground, a small gaming system that almost no one had heard of two years ago.
The Playground has since grown into one of 2025’s hottest gifts. In 2023, just 5,000 units of the controller-free small cube were sold. In 2024, that number spiked to 150,000. This year, the company is on track to sell 600,000 units.
While it has a loyal (and growing) fan base, there are still a number of people scratching their heads at the Playground’s sales surge. If you’re one of them, we’ve got answers to all of your questions about this little gaming device that’s managing to carve out a new market in the video game world.
What is the Nex Playground?
The Nex Playground is an Android-powered console that utilizes a motion camera, meaning you control the onscreen action with movements, rather than a controller. The system uses AI to detect player movements, with a focus on keeping things simple. That’s a strategy Nintendo embraced several years ago with the Wii, offering a gaming console for the masses rather than one that was focused on the core gaming customer (though one that didn’t eschew those financial whales either).
[Photo: Nex Playground]
The Playground doesn’t look like any gaming system you’ve seen before. It’s a three-inch multicolor cube with a camera lens staring at you. Instead of sitting on the couch, slumped back and passively enjoying a game, Playground players jump around and burn calories as they play their favorite titles. And they can play communally, rather than being isolated or playing with strangers online.
[Photo: Nex Playground]
It’s a system designed for people aged five and upbut the younger focus doesn’t mean the games aren’t fun for adults. (You won’t, however, find shooters or mature titles.)
How much does a Nex Playground cost?
The Playground carries a suggested retail price of $249, though it has sold for less than that during some periods this holiday season. That’s roughly half the price of a PS5 or Switch 2. That affordability has made it a popular choice for families, especially those with young children this year. The trick, these days, is finding one in stock and available before the holiday.
Who created the Nex Playground?
David Lee is cofounder and CEO of Bay Area-based Nex. A father of two daughters, he initially wanted to create a company that would use games to strengthen bonding time between family members, rather than turning kids into screen zombies. As he worked on the Playground, he used his daughters and his mother for feedback, looking for ways to make it accessible to a wide range of players.
What games are available on the Nex Playground?
The Playground’s catalog leans more toward family-friendly titles, bypassing action games like you’d find on traditional consoles. The system comes with five titles installed: Fruit Ninja, Party Fowl, Whack A-Mole Deluxe, Goal Keeper, and Starri. The full catalog has more than 30 options, with new releases coming every month.
How did the Nex Playground become so popular?
Two things contributed substantially to Nex’s success: TikTok and the pandemic. The company initially made a basketball shot-tracking app, but when families were stuck at home in 2020, the team began offering more gamified activity, which brought a surge of new downloads. That led the company to begin work on what would become the Playground.
Once it launched, word of mouth began to slowly spread, then TikTok cast its eye upon the Playground and things changed fast. The TikTok Shop couldn’t keep it in stock. Retailers began having trouble doing so as well. The harder it became to find, the more people talked about it. And by Black Friday, it had reached a tipping point.
Is the Nex Playground sold globally?
Not yet. The Playground is not sold on sites like Amazon UK. Given its domestic success, though, an international expansion in the months or years to come seems a logical assumption.
Does the Nex Playground have a monthly subscription fee?
Yes and no. You don’t have to sign up for any of the company’s PlayPass program, but that’s the only way to get new games added to your Playground. Once you tire of the core five titles, you can get a 12-month subscription to PlayPass for $89. That will get you a new catalog of game titles ever month, along with things like workouts for adults.
Its been a rough year for American workers. Unfortunately, 2026 isnt looking all that much better.
The year began with tariffsjust as inflation was finally starting to coolfollowed by AI anxiety and headline-grabbing layoffs, before ending with Americas longest ever government shutdown.
Surveys suggest many American workers didnt get a raise in 2025, and most are unsatisfied with their current compensation. They feel, however, as though they cant leave their jobs or ask for more moneydespite an increasing cost of livingfor fear of making themselves vulnerable to future layoffs.
Instead, most relied on secondary sources of income to make ends meet, further fueling disengagement and burnout at their day jobs.
The story of the U.S. job market this year is definitely one of struggle and strife, says Jasmine Escalera, a career expert with the résumé-building platform Zety.
That sense of desperation is largely the result of a tough job market, where layoffs are on the rise, job openings are declining, and more Americans are falling into long-term unemployment.
We have employees that are in survival mode, feeling as though they can’t make any requests because they don’t want to rock the boat, Escalera says, adding that there could be negative repercussions for employers as well. When you are in survival mode, you cannot also be in creativity and innovation mode. Youre just thinking about how to keep this job.
Americans are feeling underpaid, but afraid to ask for a raise
According to a recent survey of 1,000 American workers by Zety, 41% of American workers havent had a meaningful raise in more than two years.
Overall, 36% feel underpaid, but 66% have avoided asking for more money. And half say theyre grateful just to have a job in this economy, in a trend known as job hugging.
The cost of living is still increasing, and we have employees that are unfortunately not feeling as though they can ask for a pay raise, Escalera says. Theyre incredibly concerned about job security and will do whatever it takes to stay in the role they have.
The Zety study is consistent with a global survey conducted by online résumé and cover letter builder Kickresume, which found that only 28% of workers are satisfied with their current compensation. Among those who feel underpaid, over a third believe they should be earning 30% or more than their current salary.
Only about half of Americans who took part in our survey have had a raise in the past year, and more than 25% havent had a raise in more than two years, says Martin Podu¹ka, editor-in-chief at Kickresume, who co-authored the study.
Further adding to workers frustration is the feeling that employers don’t sympathize with their financial struggles, with 80% saying theyre skeptical that their boss comprehends the cost-of-living strain theyre under.
People who have a job should probably hang on to it and wait it out if they can, Podu¹ka advises. There will be a day where we will be able to complain again, but this is probably not the year.
Instead, theyre turning to side gigs to make ends meet
Unable to find a new full-time gig that offers a higher salary, and unable or unwilling to ask for a raise in a difficult economy, many are instead turning to gig work and side hustles to make ends meet.
According to a recent survey conducted by MyPerfectResume, 71% of workers relied on secondary income to stay afloat. Among them, 42% say they use the extra earnings to pay off debts, and more than a third relied on it for essentials like housing and groceries.
When you feel like you dont have control over whether or not youre going to get laid off, you can take control or just soften the blow by figuring out a way to make more money with a side hustle, explains MyPerfectResume career expert Toni Frana. That was a big deal for people in 2025, and it allowed them to be more resilient.
How to prepare for the worst (while hoping for the best)
The challenges workers faced in 2025 had many causesranging from tariffs and AI anxiety to inflation and recession fearsand unfortunately, few of those underlying causes appear poised for a resolution in the new year.
“Struggle and strife may be the new normal for many American workers, but that doesnt mean theyre helpless to improve their situation.
Some, for example, will continue to turn to those side hustles to up their earnings in lieu of a raise or a higher paying job in a difficult economy. Others may want to advance their skills or add new capabilities that can help them stand out in a tight job market.
If youre worried, make sure youre taking care of yourself and your career, Frana advises. Are you tracking your career accomplishments and wins? Do you know where you bring value to your organization and what that value proposition could be for your next role? Do you have a good handle on your career story?
Those can make for a softer landing if you suddenly lose your job, she says.
As AI data centers spring up across the country, their energy demand and resulting greenhouse gas emissions are raising concerns. With servers and energy-intensive cooling systems constantly running, these buildings can use anywhere from a few megawatts of power for a small data center to more than 100 megawatts for a hyperscale data center. To put that in perspective, the average large natural gas power plant built in the U.S. generates less than 1,000 megawatts.
When the power for these data centers comes from fossil fuels, they can become major sources of climate-warming emissions in the atmosphereunless the power plants capture their greenhouse gases first and then lock them away.
Google recently entered into a unique corporate power purchase agreement to support the construction of a natural gas power plant in Illinois designed to do exactly that through carbon capture and storage.
So how does carbon capture and storage, or CCS, work for a project like this?
I am an engineer who wrote a 2024 book about various types of carbon storage. Heres the short version of what you need to know.
How CCS works
When fossil fuels are burned to generate electricity, they release carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for centuries. As these gases accumulate in the atmosphere, they act like a blanket, holding heat close to the Earths surface. Too high of a concentration heats up the Earth too much, setting off climate changes, including worsening heat waves, rising sea levels, and intensifying storms.
Carbon capture and storage involves capturing carbon dioxide from power plants, industrial processes, or even directly from the air and then transporting it, often through pipelines, to sites where it can be safely injected underground for permanent storage.
The carbon dioxide might be transported as a supercritical gaswhich is right at the phase change from liquid to gas and has the properties of bothor dissolved in a liquid. Once injected deep underground, the carbon dioxide can become permanently trapped in the geologic structure, dissolve in brine, or become mineralized, turning it to rock.
The goal of carbon storage is to ensure that carbon dioxide can be kept out of the atmosphere for a long time.
Types of underground carbon storage
There are several options for storing carbon dioxide underground.
Depleted oil and natural gas reservoirs have plentiful storage space and the added benefit that most are already mapped and their limits understood. They already held hydrocarbons in place for millions of years.
Carbon dioxide can also be injected into working oil or gas reservoirs to push out more of those fossil fuels while leaving most of the carbon dioxide behind. This method, known as enhanced oil and gas recovery, is the most common one used by carbon capture and storage projects in the U.S. today, and one reason CCS draws complaints from environmental groups.
Volcanic basalt rock and carbonate formations are considered good candidates for safe and long-term geological storage because they contain calcium and magnesium ions that interact with carbon dioxide, turning it into minerals. Iceland pioneered this method using its bedrock of volcanic basalt for carbon storage. Basalt also covers most of the oceanic crust, and scientists have been exploring the potential for sub-seafloor storage reservoirs.
How Iceland uses basalt to turn captured carbon dioxide into solid minerals.
In the U.S., a fourth option likely has the most potential for industrial carbon dioxide storagedeep saline aquifers, which is what Google plans to use. These widely distributed aquifers are porous and permeable sediment formations consisting of sandstone, limestone, or dolostone. Theyre filled with highly mineralized groundwater that cannot be used directly for drinking water but is very suitable for storing CO2.
Deep saline aquifers also have large storage capacities, ranging from about 1,000 to 20,000 gigatons. In comparison, the nations total carbon emissions from fossil fuels in 2024 were about 4.9 gigatons.
As of fall 2025, 21 industrial facilities across the U.S. used carbon capture and storage, including industries producing natural gas, fertilizer, and biofuels, according to the Global CCS Institutes 2025 report. Five of those use deep saline aquifers, and the rest involve enhanced oil or gas recovery. Eight more industrial carbon capture facilities were under construction.
Googles plan is unique because it involves a power purchase agreement that makes building the power plant with carbon capture and storage possible.
Googles deep saline aquifer storage plan
Googles 400-megawatt natural gas power plant, to be built with Broadwing Energy, is designed to capture about 90% of the plants carbon dioxide emissions and pipe them underground for permanent storage in a deep saline aquifer in the nearby Mount Simon sandstone formation.
The Mount Simon sandstone formation is a huge saline aquifer that lies underneath most of Illinois, southwestern Indiana, southern Ohio, and western Kentucky. It has a layer of highly porous and permeable sandstone that makes it an ideal candidate for carbon dioxide injection. To keep the carbon dioxide in a supercritical state, that layer needs to be at least half a mile (800 meters) deep.
A thick layer of Eau Claire shale sits above the Mount Simon formation, serving as the caprock that helps prevent stored carbon dioxide from escaping. Except for some small regions near the Mississippi River, Eau Claire shale is considerably thickmore than 300 feet (90 meters)throughout most of the Illinois basin.
The estimated storage capacity of the Mount Simon formation ranges from 27 gigatons to 109 gigatons of carbon dioxide.
The Google project plans to use an existing injection well site that was part of the first large-scale carbon storage demonstration in the Mount Simon formation. Food producer Archer Daniels Midland began injecting carbon dioxide there from nearby corn processing plants in 2012.
Carbon capture and storage has had challenges as the technology developed over the years, including a pipeline rupture in 2020 that forced evacuations in Satartia, Mississippi, and caused several people to lose consciousness. After a recent leak deep underground at the Archer Daniels Midland site in Illinois, the Environmental Protection Agency in 2025 required the company to improve its monitoring. Stored carbon dioxide had migrated into an unapproved area, but no threat to water supplies was reported.
Why does CCS matter?
Data centers are expanding quickly, and utilities will have to build more power capacity to keep up. The artificial intelligence company OpenAI is urging the U.S. to build 100 gigawatts of new capacity every yeardoubling its current rate.
Many energy experts, including the International Energy Agency, believe carbon capture and storage will be necessary to slow climate change and keep global temperatures from reaching dangerous levels as energy demand rises.
Ramesh Agarwal is a professor of engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Fluorescent lights that softly hum. Magazines nobody reads. A television mounted in the corner playing cable news as a receptionist mispronounces my last name.
I am at my first of several doctors appointments intentionally scheduled during the winter holiday season.
Not because I’m sick. Because it’s the only week of the year when nothing work-related is fighting for my time. The office is closed. The investors aren’t emailing. The product update notifications have stopped. For seven days I can put my body first.
So I schedule the bloodwork. The dermatologist. The physical I’ve been postponing since March. The dentist I keep rescheduling because there’s always a board meeting or a customer call or a crisis that feels more important than my teeth.
I came to this ritual the hard way.
I spent my entire career building venture-backed technology companies while ignoring what my body was telling me. I did everything right by founder standards. Didn’t drink, didn’t smoke. Exercised when I could. I told myself the stress was temporary. I told myself I’d rest after the next milestone.
My kidneys failed anyway. Twice: once in 2016 and once in 2025. End-stage renal disease. Two transplants. A decade of dialysis and hospitals taught me something simple: your body doesn’t negotiate. Listen to it while it’s still whispering.
The culprit? Stress. Work-related stress that I knew was hurting me and still gave myself permission to ignore.
I got a second (and third) chance. Not everyone does.
I lost a close founder friend to suicide. He was brilliant and successful by every external measure. I noticed him pulling away. I gave him space, thinking that’s what he needed.
I was wrong.
We don’t talk enough about what this life actually costs. Research shows that founders are twice as likely to suffer from depression, three times more likely to struggle with substance abuse, and 72% report mental health issues.
We celebrate the wins and go quiet about everything else. The founder who sold and can’t get out of bed. The one who shut down and disappeared. The one still building but running on empty.
The physical toll hides in plain sight, too. Burnout isn’t exhaustion you recover from with a vacation. It’s an occupational phenomenon the World Health Organization recognized in 2019. For founders who delay or forgo health checks, it can show up as heart disease, autoimmune disorders, and a nervous system that forgets how to stand down.
And the damage doesn’t stay contained.
Research shows 57% of employees can read their founder’s stress through tone, energy, and body language. The same report shows teams led by highly stressed founders report lower well-being, higher burnout, and less psychological safety. When founders suffer, everyone around them absorbs it.
Taking care of your health
We defer our health because something always feels more urgent. If youre a founder, this is a 15-minute exercise to start listening to your body while it’s still whispering this holiday season.
Minutes 05: List What’s Been Avoided
Write down every health-related item that’s been put off. Appointments postponed. Symptoms ignored. Checkups overdue. Include everything.
Minutes 510: Identify the Cost of Waiting
For each item ask: What’s the risk of continuing to defer? What would a friend say about ignoring it? Mark the ones where waiting feels the most like avoidance.
Minutes 1015: Schedule One Thing
Pick the item that’s been waiting longest or carries the most risk. Open the calendar. Find a time in the next 30 days and book it. Not a reminder. The actual appointment.
Why This Works
We treat health as something we’ll get to when things calm down. Things don’t calm down. One appointment won’t fix everything. But it can break the pattern of deferral.
How a founder is doing is the leading indicator of how their company will do. Not the pitch deck. Not the cap table. The person. It’s a core driver of investment ROI.
Nobody talks about it that way.
Instead, investors scrutinize market size, competitive moats, and unit economics. But the biggest risk in any portfolio isn’t the market. It’s the founder who burns out and starts making questionable decisions. Or walks away entirely. If either of those happens, every dollar invested to back them is on the line.
Heres the truth: wellness isn’t a reward founders claim after the exit. By then, relationships are broken, bodies are compromised, and purpose is lost. Wellness is the foundation that makes the hard work of being a founder possible.
To quote Vince Vaughn in Four Christmases: “You can’t spell families without lies.” That’s a cynical view, for sure, but when it comes to talking about one particular thing around the family dinner table at the holidays, it might be especially true.
That thing? Work.
According to a recent survey, young people are seriously bending the truth when it comes to talking to family members about their professional lives. The survey of 2,000 young U.S. adults (ages 21 to 35) from the digital skills course provider Elvtr found that a third have bailed on family events simply to avoid conversations about their jobs or career progress.
Even more say they have stretched the truth: A staggering 58% of young professionals have lied about their jobs, whether that means downplaying or exaggerating their success.
Interestingly, there’s a pretty big gender divide when it comes to how young people misrepresent their work life. Men were about twice as likely as women to inflate their success while talking to family. Women, meanwhile, downplayed their income, success, or responsibilities.
Per the report, if a promotion or raise occurred, “some women reported understating their accomplishments around relatives, whereas men more often admitted to inflating theirs.
Talking about jobs seems to get more stressful the more infrequently people see their families, which is why holiday visits can stir up so much anxiety. Those who spend time with family only once a year reported stress at a higher rate: 44% of those who saw their relatives annually said they were anxious about work chat, while only 25% of those who saw their families more regularly shared the concern.
Roman Peskin, CEO of Elvtr, says that a big part of why people lie to their families about work over the holidays may have to do with sibling rivalry. All the sibling comparisons and proving to your grandma that youve made it in the big city add up fast. Whats striking is that the influence doesnt stop at the dinner table,” Peskin stated in a press release. About 55% of respondents report that such comparisons happen sometimes, and 19% say they happen frequently.
The CEO also notes that young people allow the weight of family approval to dictate their work decisions at a surprisingly high rate. Nearly half (45%) have considered or made career changes due to family expectations. And 22% would actually sacrifice their dream job in favor of family approval.
“So maybe skip the classic ‘Why arent you a doctor yet?’ or ‘Your cousin just got promoted’ lines this Christmas,” Peskin urges. “Well-meaning advice can push young adults down paths that arent theirs to take.”
Likewise, the anxiety seems more intense for the youngest workers, perhaps because they are just starting out in their careers and feel more pressure to show their success. (Or maybe it’s because they’re the anxious generation.)
Overall, 35% are very or somewhat stressed about the conversation, and 42% in their 20s are stressed. Only 29% of those in their 30s say the same; suggesting that the older one gets, the less inclined that person may be to care deeply about their family’s take on their job.
While job questions can be stressful, young people can rest easy. Eventually, family members will switch to the dreaded “So, when are you giving us a grandbaby?”
This story first appeared in Advisorator, Jareds weekly tech advice newsletter. Sign up to get more insights every Tuesday.
On a recent evening, I had a mild panic after trying to call my wife and repeatedly getting the same error: Your call could not be completed as dialed.
She was supposed to come home late that night from an out-of-town trip with some old friends, but I hadnt heard from her that day and couldnt recall the timing of her flight. If her phone was merely in Airplane mode, my calls should have gone to voicemail instead of failing to connect outright.
In the end, it was just a random network connectivity glitch, solved by a reboot after my wife got off the plane. But as a member of the in-law family group chat was quick to point out, I could have avoided this brief feeling of unease by simply tracking my wifes location through her phone.
Of course, Im well aware of the location-sharing features that smartphones offer. Apple and Google both make it easy to let friends and family track your whereabouts, which in turn gives those companies valuable location data (and, in Apples case, reinforces the social pressure to have an iPhone).
My wife and I have just never wanted to track each other this way, having agreed that itd be creepy for either of us to do so. This weekends travel blip did not change our minds.
Part of the problem is that to enable these features, your phones mapping app must check your location constantly, not just when youre looking up a business or getting directions. But the bigger concern is simply about personal privacy, and being able to go somewhere without it becoming anyone elses businesseven people you know and trust.
I can see the other side of the argument: Youd regret not having this feature when you really need it, and its not like you have anything to hide.
True, but thats always the kind of argument tech companies use when a product erodes personal freedoms. As a result, you can no longer walk down the street without being monitored through neighbors doorbell cams, and pretty soon you might be recorded by anyone wearing a pair of sunglasses. Meanwhile, the entire ad-supported tech economy revolves around being so invasive that it feels like your phone is recording you, which it turns out people find unsettling even when theyve done nothing wrong.
While I cant control those larger dynamics, I can at least second-guess whether my own fears justify yet another layer of surveillance. No judgment if you come to a different conclusion, but Im not ready to make that leap even after some momentary nervousness. (Ask me again about this in couple years, though, when my kids have smartphones and are old enough to get into actual trouble.)
How to see whos tracking your location
Location sharing between iPhone users:
To find out who can see your location, open Apples Find My app and head to the People tab. Turn off location sharing by tapping a persons name and selecting Stop sharing.
If you do want to share your whereabouts with another iPhone user, there are several places to do so:
In the Find My app: Under the People tab, tap the + button, select Share My Location, then select one or more contacts.
Via iMessage: Tap + in any chat window, select Location, and choose how long to share.
In the Family Sharing menu: Youll find this under Settings > Family > Location Sharing. Selecting a person here will also share the location of all your Find My-compatible devices, including Apple Watches, iPads, and AirPods.
In Apple Maps: Swipe down and select Share Location. This only shares your current location and does not automatically update.
Location sharing is indefinite when enabled through the Family Sharing menu.
Note that once youve shared a location with someone, they can set up notifications for each time you leave an area, arrive at a place, or fail to show up at a location during a set schedule. Your approval is only needed for recurring alerts, not one-time notifications.
As an alternative to sharing your location indefinitely, consider sharing for just one hour or the rest of the day. You can choose this option in the Find My app or iMessage, but not the Family Sharing menu.
Location sharing for Android and Google Maps users:
The Location Sharing menu in Google Maps.
Google has its own location sharing system that works across Android and iOS. If you have an iPhone and arent sharing through Apples Find My app, you ay still be sharing through Google Maps instead.
Heres how to see who can track you via Google Maps:
In the Google Maps app (iOS and Android): Tap on your profile picture, then select Location Sharing. (Those youve shared with in the Find Hub app will also appear here.)
In the Find Hub app (Android only): Just look under the People tab. (Those youve shared with in Google Maps will also appear here.)
Location sharing in the Find Hub app for Android.
If you do want to share your location with others, you can do so by hitting the + button in the menus above. Both allow you to share for one hour, the rest of the day, or indefinitely, while the Find Hub app has an additional option to share for a limited number of hours.
As with Apples system, anyone who can see your whereabouts can also set up alerts for when you leave or arrive at a location. Youll get an email when this happens, but the only way to disable it is to stop sharing entirely.
This story first appeared in Advisorator, Jareds weekly tech advice newsletter. Sign up to get more insights every Tuesday.
At the Exceptional Women Alliance, we enable high-level women to mentor each other to achieve personal and professional happiness through sisterhood. As the nonprofit organizations founder, chair, and CEO, I am honored to interview and share insights from thought leaders who are part of our peer-to-peer mentoring.
This month, I introduce you to Malika Begin, the CEO and founder of Begin Development, an organization development firm based in Malibu, California. Known for her signature approach to building heart-centered, high-performing cultures, Malika partners with leading organizations to strengthen executive teams, design transformational leadership programs, build cross-functional trust, and create systems where people and performance thrive together.
Malika believes the most effective leaders of the future will not only embrace technology but will also deepen their humanity. In her words, Self-awareness isnt softits strategic.
Q: Everyones talking about AI, productivity, and innovation. Why talk about self-awareness right now?
Malika Begin: Because the more the world automates, the more human leadership matters. AI can replicate skills, but it cant replicate self. When everything is shifting around you, knowing who you areyour values, your patterns, and your impactbecomes your anchor. You have to be clear on your motivators, how you engage with others, and how you distinctly move through the world.
AI can replicate skills, but it cant replicate self.
Brené Brown often says that leadership used to be about muscle, then brains, and now its about heart. I couldnt agree more. The heart of leadership is self-awareness. Its empathy. Its the courage to show up as you are. The leaders who know themselves and are committed to continued growth and development make better decisions, build stronger teams, and create workplaces where people actually want to stay and invest.
Q: Youve said that professional assessments are mirrors, not boxes. How does that fit into this idea of human and heart-centered leadership?
Malika: Tools like CliftonStrengths, DiSC, Strengths Deployment Inventory, or Enneagram dont define you; they describe you. They give you language for what you already sense about yourself. The point isnt to label people but to understand patterns: how you lead, how you communicate, how you react under stress.
That insight is gold right now. When you can name your wiring, you can also recognize it in others. Thats what builds trust, belonging, and compassion, everything that makes a team feel human and valued again. The value isnt in the label, its in the insight.
Q: So, self-awareness is also about connection?
Malika: Completely. Self-awareness is the gateway to empathy, and empathy is the gateway to performance. Gallup found that teams that focus on their strengths every day are six times more engaged and 12% more productive. But thats only part of the story. Leaders who understand their own style and the styles around them create psychological safety, clearer communication, and faster trust, which directly translates to lower turnover, higher collaboration, and stronger results.
People dont just work better; they work together better. In a business environment where retention, engagement, and innovation drive profit, that kind of relational intelligence has real ROI. You cant automate trust. You have to build itand self-awareness is where it starts.
If AI is scaling data, then self-awareness is how we scale connection.
We talk a lot about psychological safety, but it starts with emotional honesty. You cant create a sense of belonging if youre disconnected from yourself.
Q: You tell leaders, Stop auditioning for roles that were never meant for you. What do you mean by that?
Malika: Its freedom. When you know who you are, you stop wasting energy trying to be everything to everyone. You make decisions that align with your values. You build relationships that align with your strengths.
In a world thats constantly shifting, self-awareness is your competitive edge. Author Tasha Eurich told the Harvard Business Review in a podcast that self-awareness is the meta-skill of the 21st century. The best leaders arent defined by certainty; theyre defined by clarity.
Q: Whats one practical way to start developing this skill?
Malika: Write your superpower statement. Its one or two sentences that capture you at your besthow you show up and the value you bring. Something like: Im at my best when Im focused on possibilities and relationships. My positivity helps others feel seen and confident in their own strengths.
Its not bragging. Its clarity. And clarity builds confidence. Clarity is contagious in your organization, and its the thing organizations need now more than ever.
Q: If you had to summarize your philosophy of leadership in one line?
Malika: When you know yourself, you stop performing and start connecting. The future belongs to leaders who lead with heart, who pair self-awareness with empathy, courage, and authenticity. Machines might build efficiency, but humans build meaning and connection. The meaning and connection are everything.
Larraine Segil is founder, chair, and CEO of the Exceptional Women Alliance.
Leadership is becoming both easier and harder.
Artificial intelligence has revolutionized how we work, especially over the past year, as its transitioned from a secret aid to a welcomed enterprise partner. As a partner, it streamlines work processes, leaving more time for big-picture decisions and strategizing. Each decision, in turn, becomes more impactful. And honestly, it can be overwhelming. Leaders need people around them who challenge their thinking and keep their foot on the gas for innovation.
According to Harvard Business Impacts 2025 Global Leadership Development Study, respondents are looking for more strategy and creativity from leaders. People now deem skills like leading change, fostering innovation, strategic thinking, and decision making more important than last year.
These insights reveal the expectations people have about business needs. How can leaders ensure they meet these expectations and rise to the occasion? They can either ask people or technology. The catch is, theyre both likely to agree with you.
With people, it’s human nature to agree. Team members get in the habit of wanting to impress their boss, avoid confrontation, and be nice. Ive seen this firsthand in the two years since I became a CEO. While it can be a nice ego boost, Ive become apprehensive about any type of perennial support.
WHY YES IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE
Yes might be one of the most positive words in the world, but in the business world, it can be counterproductive.
Why? Because its overused. We hear it too much, especially in leadership. Sometimes its hard to tell when a person is being supportive of a genuinely great idea, or if theyre just afraid to ruffle any feathers.
AI has intensified this concept. Large language models (LLMs) are the ultimate yes man. Ive found they reinforce my perspective by default unless explicitly instructed to counter me. They often double down, even giving me some of my most complimentary feedback.
Even when chatting with colleagues online, its so easy to merely react with a thumbs-up emoji over Slack, exacerbating this phenomenon.
People and LLMs have both been trained to agree. But progress stems from challenging that status quo. Leaders responsibility now entails building teams that question both human and technology-generated work. Our value lies in asking the nuanced questions that an algorithm cant.
HOW TO BREAK THE LOOP
Break the loop by finding ways to incorporate dissent. For me, this opportunity arises whenever we do biannual planning at Scribd, Inc. Its a chance to dig into the nitty gritty, strategize, explore different paths, and think big. And its where I try to ensure we dont fall into the trap of silence after someone asks, Any questions?
I dont pretend to know it all, but here are a few guidelines Ive found beneficial to encourage this kind of open, strategic conversation.
1. Admit your mistakes. When youre open, it reassures people that imperfection is okay. Make it clear that youre not perfect, that you dont know all the answers, and you sometimes make mistakes. This can prompt others not just to vocalize their own mistakes, but to feel comfortable pushing back and engaging in productive debate as a partner.
2. Foster a culture that treats mistakes as learnings. One thing I love at Scribd is that everyone regularly shares their wins as well as their setbacks, whether in a company all-hands, monthly metrics meetings, or just a quick update in Slack. Beyond the transparency, this allows teams to highlight what they learned when something didnt go as planned. Ultimately, thats a win. When people are afraid to fail, they become scared to try anything new. A culture of learning counters this.
3. Bring in the devils advocate. Encourage what if questions to promote deeper conversations. Model this behavior. After you propose something, instead of closing with What do you think?which can yield a one-word answerask a conversation starter like, What are the potential outcomes here, positive and negative?
4. Give context. Instead of issuing vague asks that result in employees spinning their wheels to deliver something over-the-top or not aligned with your vision, include the why. Share your intent. Where ultimately do you want to end up? This calibrates the end state, and allows the team freedom to execute.
5. Encourage your people. Build a good team around you. Make them experts in their area. Include them in decisions. Stimulate debate. Get a variety of different types of people. Encourage them to instill this behavior in their own teams.
In todays world, we all need to work a little harder to break out of our comfortable bubble. Be open to learn, debate, and be wrong. And start looking at disagreement as positive.
Tony Grimminck is CEO of Scribd, Inc.
In a recent meeting with a large retailer, my contact shared that each buyer on her team receives over 100 emails daily referencing data on a variety of topics, from out-of-stock issues and inaccurate pricing to recommendations for driving e-commerce. On the supplier side, the situation is similar: delivering Monday morning reporting to retailers, preparing for line reviews, monitoring out-of-stocks, and pushing new promotions. Emails and Excel are still the primary drivers of the $5 trillion retail industry, in the U.S. alone.
The opportunity for error in complex retail supply chains is immense. If demand forecasting and inventory management across thousands of store locations are inaccurate, the cost is tremendous. The combined cost of overstock and out-of-stocks are $1.77 trillion globally, just in 2023. These if only moments are coordination failures, and the root cause lies with siloed data and manual processes.
Tariff uncertainties, climate change, and geopolitical instability are driving additional waste and operational inefficiencies that strain an industry already operating on razor-thin margins. The disconnect between retailers and suppliers is unsustainable and presents the most challenging operational issue across highly complex retail supply chains.
COLLABORATIVE AI AGENTS
Improved collaboration between retailers, suppliers, and AI technology can overcome disconnects. Those gaps can be between product design, procurement, marketing and promotional planning, and product distribution. AI is often described as something a single company should leverage, but verticalized AI agents that specialize in retail can streamline manual tasks and facilitate collaboration across multiple companies so humans can spend time on what drives the business: being strategic.
Collaboration is at the core of a successful retail strategy. Agentic AI will change the way retailers and suppliers communicate and collaborate by surfacing alerts and making autonomous decisions that give retail the optimization boost it needs. It will not completely hand over management to agents, but it will enable humans to focus on higher level collaboration and informed decision making.
Currently, retailers, suppliers, and distributors each hold only a slice of the truth, thanks to complex workflows, fragmented data, and cross-company processes that lack connectivity, transparency, and context. AI agents can automate, negotiate, coordinate, and problem solve across organizational boundaries. They turn coordination into a competitive advantage. Companies that master agentic AI orchestration will (finally) gain complete visibility and optimization.
AI agents will become specialized AI teammates that coordinate across organizations to achieve shared goals and resolve problems independently and proactively. These autonomous agents can share insights (without exposing sensitive raw data), adapt to changing conditions in real time, and offer a path forward for retailers and their consumer packaged goods (CPG) partners to achieve immediate and long-term operational goals.
Notably, an agentic AI network requires more than technology itself. Many organizations focus on the latest agent-to-agent and multi-agent tools and frameworks, such as A2A, Microsoft AutoGen, or CrewAI. These tools support autonomous actions and support cooperation between AI agents, but they do not solve the more complex problem of building trust and standard AI operating procedures across companies.
Beyond the base technologies, these networks need a governance framework. Large enterprises are already adopting standards such as ISO 42001 and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework. These provide essential guidance, but they do not create the integral shared smart contract, a set of agreed-upon rules and goals that everyone trusts. Once this advanced framework is established, agents can take independent actions within predefined boundaries to work towards common goals shared by retailers and suppliers.
For example, price optimization is a critical joint business objective where AI agents can help. By tracking inventory levels, monitoring competitors pricing, and analyzing consumer behavior patterns, agents can recommend pricing adjustments when needed and offer ways to optimize promotional spend to help retailers and suppliers deliver value to their consumers while preserving profitability.
AI AGENTS IN ACTION
AI agents can address and solve coordination failures across many aspects of retail supply chains.
Reducing out-of-stocks: Every empty shelf means lost sales, weakened brand loyalty, and an open door for competitors to capture the shoppers choiceand purchase. Demand forecasting, which relies heavily on lagging data, often misses real-time shifts in demand, resulting in incorrect ordering. For example, phantom inventory (inventory noted as in-store but not actually on shelves due to misplacement), results in misaligned forecasts. AI agents can improve out-of-stock rates and deliver value directly to the bottom line for CPGs and their retail partners.
Manage trade promotions: Trade promotions are one of the CPGs largest P&L investments, but they quickly become discounts that drain profits. Poor measurement and inconsistent analysis lead to unprofitable promotions being repeated. CPGs often deploy a one-size-fits-all approach to promotion, offering discounts across categories rather than accounting for shopper and pack dynamics. PwCs recent 2025 Future of Consumer Shopping Survey predicts that the most successful CPG companies will leverage AI to optimize pricing and promotion strategies in the coming years, unlocking significant incremental sales and margin uplift.
E-commerce execution: Poor e-commerce execution wastes advertising spend and causes CPGs to cede the digital shelf share to the competition. Attribution and measurement are often muddied by limited cross-channel visibility. Messy product catalogs, missing attributes, or inconsistent product mapping can degrade (re)targeting campaigns. The Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey reports that marketing leaders are increasing their investment in GenAI to improve the efficiency of marketing tasks. By improving media spend effectiveness, AI can support brands in transforming wasted spend into profitable, scalable growth.
UNPRECEDENTED COLLABORATION
Collaborative AI agents designed for retail represent a significant structural shift in how the industry operates. The most challenging pain points and time-sensitive decisions that were if only we knew moments will be replaced by unprecedented ross-organizational collaboration, driven by informed and autonomous agents, allowing humans to focus on strategy.
Are Traasdahl is CEO and founder of Crisp.
