Happy (almost) Thanksgiving! Bad news for most flyers: The FAA predicted that this’ll the busiest travel week for the holiday in 15 years. Good news for two specific flyers: Gobble and Waddle, a pair of North Carolina turkeys, were pardoned by the president yesterday. Today we’re exploring:

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Americans are eating less turkey, even as the birds keep getting bigger

Turkey season is back, and so is the price war for another inflation-squeezed Thanksgiving. Last month, Walmart rolled out its cheapest turkey deals since 2019, offering a 10-person holiday meal for under $40; Aldi announced a similar $40 package, while Kroger joined in with a bundle priced at under $4.75 per person.

So, how are holiday meals staying cheap when everything else is going up?

Retailers are absorbing much of the turkey costs — a classic “loss leader” to draw cost-conscious shoppers in — even as wholesale turkey prices are expected to rise 40% year over year in 2025, per the USDA. Part of that jump reflects a supply crunch, with production now at a 40-year low amid an avian flu wave that’s wiped out more than 2.2 million birds this year.

Zooming out, however, America’s turkey problems started long before the latest outbreak.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, per-capita turkey consumption in the US nearly doubled after it gained popularity as a leaner alternative to red meat. However, consumption has dropped 25% since peaking in 1996, while chicken, pork, and beef continue to dominate. With turkey demand down — whether that's because it’s too hard to cook, too big for everyday meals, or there are simply tastier cold cuts available  production followed suit, slipping to a 30-year low last year.

Ironically, despite shrinking appetites, the birds themselves have been growing. The average turkey now weighs about 32 pounds, nearly double the figure from 1960, per USDA data. While decades of selective breeding and artificial insemination created today’s “meatier” (and more profitable) birds, it also produced an unintended side effect: the modern supersized turkey, which accounts for 99% of those sold in grocery stores, is disease-prone, biologically fragile, and increasingly hard to breed. 

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Teens are sad they can’t speak to Character.AI’s chatbots anymore

As far as execs at Character.AI are concerned, (role) playtime’s over for under-18s, as they start to ban the age group from using the platform’s chatbots this week. The company, which clocks about 184 million web visits around the world each month — and millions more app sessions — per Similarweb data, announced last month that it would be rolling back access to its open-ended chat feature for minors. 

A selection of young “power users,” as The Wall Street Journal termed them in a piece on the anguish some teens are experiencing as a result of the move, have a weeks-long grace period where they can still access hour-long, open-ended chats with characters to “help minimize disruption.”

Clearly, AI-generated conversations with popular characters like Yor Forger, “a loving mom who’s definitely not an assassin,” and Itoshi Rin, who “only loves soccer... and you,” have many (mostly younger) users in the site’s full thrall.

According to US-specific figures from Similarweb, of the 1.7 million monthly unique web visitors Character.AI notched on average from August to October, some 52% were aged between 18 and 24, compared to a 26% share on ChatGPT.

A lot to talk about

Character.AI’s younger users tend to be way more locked in, too. Per the data, they visited 26 times each month on average and spent 18 minutes in a typical session using Character.AI — much higher than ChatGPT users, who visited the OpenAI chatbot 13 times on average across the month, spending around 6 minutes per visit.

Those sorts of numbers, paired with deaths linked to the platform and increasing concerns around the detrimental effects of chatbots more generally, were likely factors in the move to pare back teen user access, which, at least according to Character.AI CEO Karandeep Anand, “wasn’t a very hard decision.”

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Ripple’s RLUSD Stablecoin surpasses $1 billion market cap

Ripple's RLUSD is one of the fastest-growing stablecoins in the world right now. Its market capitalization has seen more than 10x year-to-date growth (surpassing $1B market cap as of November 3) and it’s now one of the world’s top ten stablecoins by cap.¹

But what does the rise of RLUSD mean for global markets? 

RLUSD empowers businesses to level up on cross-border payments to keep pace with the demands of the globalized digital economy. By enabling near-real time payments and short-term financing solutions like repurchase agreements, stablecoins provide connective tissue between finance and the digital economy — and Ripple has the resources you need to prepare for a stablecoin-enabled future.

On Ripple’s Block Stars podcast, industry-leader David Schwartz dives into the biggest themes in blockchain technology, for business and beyond.

2025’s biggest movies are family-friendly PG flicks and R-rated horrors

As we step further into the holiday season, the all-too-familiar argument of which movie to watch with miscellaneous relatives will once again rear its head.

This festive period, it’s likely that the kids will get their way, given PG movies comprise many of 2025’s biggest hits; though it’s not as probable that they’ll stay up while the rest of the family settles in for one of several box office-topping horror films from this year.

Genre-straddling

We’re in the midst of a golden era for family-friendly flicks, as detailed in a WSJ piece last week. Indeed, the incredible success of PG-rated films like “Lilo & Stitch” and “A Minecraft Movie” in recent months could be matched, or even bested, by new “Wicked” and “Zootopia” installments.

However, as animated youngsters have dragged their parents to big screens, the overwhelmingly R-rated horror genre has been another frighteningly bright spot in an otherwise inconsistent year for movies.

Although PG-rated movies, per data from The Numbers, have seen their share of domestic ticket sales drop to 31.7% at the time of writing since overtaking PG-13s last year, R-rated movies have captured a 34.5% share to date in 2025.

The box office was once dominated by PG-13s — a genre “edgy enough to appeal to movie-loving youngsters but nowhere near grizzly enough to give them sleepless nights,” as we noted last December. However, with G-rated films effectively becoming extinct, titles that cater to the two more extreme ends of the demographic spectrum are clearly matching the pull of PG-13s. 

Still, despite their mainstream appeal, R-rated horror and PG-rated movies don’t often attract any real Best Picture Oscar buzz — though that could change this awards season with fan favorite “Sinners.”

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The rise of RLUSD – Ripple’s high-performing stablecoin proves adoption is growing faster than ever, bridging the gap between blockchain, business and institutional finance. Stay up to date with the Block Stars podcast.

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Off the charts: In honor of one of the most beloved Thanksgiving pies, which variety of apple is America’s favorite? [Answer below].