• Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis urged teens to lean into learning about AI.
• Hassabis said learning AI tools and maintaining STEM skills can help them in future jobs.
• He predicts that AI advancements will disrupt some jobs and create "more valuable" ones.

Teens should consider learning AI tools now or risk falling behind, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says.

Just as millennials had the internet and personal computers and Gen Z had smartphones and tablets, generative AI is the transformative technology of Gen Alpha's time — and they should embrace it, the AI leader said on a recent episode of "Hard Fork," a podcast about the future of technology.

"Over the next 5 to 10 years, I think we're going to find what normally happens with big new technology shifts, which is that some jobs get disrupted," he told co-hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton.

However, he said, "new, more valuable, usually more interesting jobs get created" in the wake of that kind of disruption.

The generative AI arms race began in earnest with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022. The technology has advanced rapidly ever since, sparking both excitement and concern for how it will revolutionize the workplace and the world at large.

Google DeepMind is the research lab behind Google's AI projects, including Gemini, the company's chatbot. Hassabis is leading Google's charge toward the AI race's ultimate prize — artificial general intelligence.

There is little agreement on a definition for AGI, but generally, it is considered an AI model that can reason in the same way a human does. Hassabis said Tuesday during a live interview at the Google I/O developer conference that DeepMind is less than 10 years away from creating its own.

"Whatever happens with these AI tools, you'll be better off understanding how they work, and how they function, and what you can do with them," Hassabis said, referring to young people.

He advised those headed to college to "immerse yourself now" and strive to "become a sort of ninja using the latest tools." Hassabis said they should spend time "learning to learn" — the same advice he gave to students at the University of Cambridge.

Other AI leaders have also encouraged teenagers anxious about AI to learn about it. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told young people to play with the new technology and learn its weaknesses. In higher education, Rice University announced Tuesday that it will join a growing number of colleges offering AI degrees.

That doesn't mean they should abandon the building blocks that make for a good STEM student, Hassabis said. He still recommends getting good at coding and building up fundamental skills for success.

"Creativity skills, adaptability, resilience. I think all of these, sort of meta skills, are what will be important for the next generation," he said on the podcast.

• Blythe Graham-Jones left a career in advertising to renovate and sell homes in the Hamptons full-time.
• Her first project was a home she purchased for $635,000 that Zillow now values at $1.8 million.
• She partners with brands, promoting their products to her Instagram followers, to help defray renovation costs.

This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Blythe Graham-Jones, 39, a former advertising executive who now flips and rents out homes in the Hamptons, documenting her projects for 10,200 Instagram followers @Via_Norfolk. Graham-Jones makes money from renovating Hamptons homes, renting them out on Airbnb, consulting on design projects, and various social media revenue streams, including brand partnerships. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I used to work in advertising. I worked with some of the most amazing creative minds, but didn't really consider myself a creative. I was the organized, left-brained person for these amazing talents.

My husband Cody was a real estate agent when we started dating back in 2008. Now, he works in tech sales, but we have both always loved real estate. We used to be the ones who'd organize a Montauk share house for our friends. We loved driving around looking at rentals together.

We never believed that your first purchase had to be your primary home. In 2017, we were still renting in Brooklyn and expecting our first child when we bought a three-bedroom home in East Hampton for $635,000.

It wasn't a hot property. The previous owners were in the middle of a divorce, and it was a bit neglected. People just didn't want to deal with the hassle.

There were boxes everywhere. They hadn't even cleaned out the medicine cabinets. It was a weird layout, too: The refrigerator was in the hallway, the living room was in the back of the house, and there was no primary bedroom.

Renovating my first Hamptons home inspired me to change careers

We had renters that first summer. By September, I was on a mission to fix up the house for cheap. I got white paint and Ikea rattan furniture.

For two years, we continued to rent it out on Airbnb and reinvested every penny back into the house. We started out charging $1,000 per night during peak season.

In 2019, we refinanced and pulled out a home equity line of credit, or HELOC, for $250,000. With that money, I finally got to do a big renovation. I ended up opening up one bedroom to make a living room and an open kitchen. I added a bathroom to make a primary bedroom.

Now, the home is valued at $1.8 million, according to Zillow.

I realized that doing this was my thing. I could see the potential in homes. Managing through the chaos was natural for me from my previous role. At the time, I also wanted to spend more time with my kids, who were 1 and 3. I left my corporate role in 2021 to pursue renovations full-time.

I grew my social-media brand early, and it helped make renovations cheaper

One of the first steps I took was hiring a freelance designer on UpWork to build a brand identity. For $2,000, she created my website, brand identity, logos, colors, and official fonts. I think it really helped me land deals with brands.

For instance, I work with home and kitchen fixtures company Kingston Brass. For three properties, they've gifted me an entire house's worth of products — probably $20,000 worth — for showing them off during my renovation videos on Instagram. It definitely helps for the ROI of the eventual sale.

Now, the goal is to sell one house each year while renting out the other two on Airbnb. Last year, our two properties in the Hamptons brought in $360,000 in Airbnb revenue. Both have five bedrooms and pools.

I only invest in homes in East Hampton because I like its rules regarding short-term rentals. There are minimum two-week stays, but with four exceptions you can use them throughout the year, which I usually time around holidays like Thanksgiving.

There's the profit from flipping, our Airbnb rental income, and the brand partnerships I bring in through Instagram. I also offer design consulting that starts around $1,000 or $5,000 a month to work on retainer. I also generate income from my LTK page, where people can shop the products I use in my renovations.

Instead of one job, I have multiple streams of income now.

I arrived at Mexico's Happy Coast stressed, anxious, and, frankly, unhappy.

Within minutes of arriving in Puerto Vallarta, I was standing at the rental car company, utterly confused. Three hundred unplanned dollars later, I was driving three hours on a pothole-filled road to my first resort in Costalegre.

As I crawled behind slow mopeds and put my rental car's suspension to the test on countless speed bumps, I couldn't help but wonder if the nausea from the winding roads and the scratch in my throat from nearby wildfires would be worth it.

I also questioned how a place earned a name like the Happy Coast if it feels impossible to reach.

Situated on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, Costalegre is a roughly 200-mile stretch of coastline between Puerto Vallarta and Manzanillo. It's a region of extremes — small seaside towns sit near multimillion-dollar resorts.

For years, it's been a quiet retreat enticing the elite, where everyone from Mick Jagger to Bill Gates has vacationed. The properties — and the thousands of acres surrounding them — are mostly privately owned and developed by families who have promised to keep the ecosystems largely untouched.

I spent a week driving dirt roads, sipping margaritas with strangers, and resort hopping across Costalegre. Before landing in Mexico, luxury vacation destinations were synonymous with extravagance. Costalegre challenged those beliefs.

By the time I said goodbye to the rocky coastline, I was captivated by a remote region that prioritized nature and weaved luxury into every aspect of the stay.

If you know, you know

When I told friends and family I was heading to Mexico, they assumed I was setting off for Cancún or Tulum; maybe Mexico City. Not a single person I spoke to had heard of Costalegre.

"It's still unknown," said Alba Garcia, the director of rooms at the Four Seasons Tamarindo, a luxury hot spot in Costalegre. "It's an 'if you know, you know' kind of vibe."

Maria Campos, the director of client services at Las Rosadas, a collection of private villas and residences along Costalegre, grew up in the small town of Chamela, where she said the coast was typically called Costa Sur. In 1990, the state of Jalisco officially deemed the region a priority tourism area and named it the Costalegre Ecological Tourism Corridor.

Unlike Finland, which has data to support its designation as the happiest country in the world, Costalegre, which translates to "coast of joy," taunts its title casually and confidently.

When asked how guests wind up in the region, I was rarely told it was because they wanted to visit Costalegre. Some people stumbled on a property while researching Puerto Vallarta; most received a rave review from a friend.

Likely, if you've heard of Costalegre, it's because of the private community of Careyes.

In 1968, Italian banker Gian Franco Brignone flew over Mexico's Pacific Coast. Impressed by what he saw from the small Cessna plane, he purchased 13,000 acres of the coastline to build a colorful retreat. (Careyes declined to share how much Brignone paid for the land.)

"There was not anything when my father first started," Emanuela Brignone Cattaneo, Brignone's daughter, told me over dinner one evening. "My father would show friends, and then those friends would buy land."

Careyes now sits on 35,000 acres with a 25,000-acre biosphere, 46 multimillion-dollar villas, 40 casitas, 55 suites, and three bungalows. It's a colorful neighborhood with villas in cobalt blues, highlighter yellows, and dusty pinks. A few dozen permanent residents call it home, but most properties cater to vacationers throughout the year.

"It's Mediterranean meets Mexico," Kim Kessler, a Careyes resident and the founder of KIPR Global, the public relations agency that represents Careyes, explained.

While Careyes' architecture and color palette leave an impression, its visitors are what put it on the map.

It's where Heidi Klum and Seal married and Cindy Crawford posed for Playboy. It's known for its annual Lunar New Year party, and celebrities like Tom Ford, Naomi Campbell, and Uma Thurman have vacationed there.

Careyes might've been the first luxury development, but it certainly wasn't the last.

Two decades later, French-British financier and politician James Goldsmith started building an estate nearby. Today, it's the luxury resort Cuixmala. Following Cuixmala's construction, the 18-suite Las Alamandas opened in 1990. More recently, in 2002, the Four Seasons Tamarindo opened its doors, and the smaller operation Las Rosadas popped up along the coastline in 2005.

For now, there are just a handful of luxury resorts on the rocky coastline. (Xala, a billion-dollar development, is set to open a Six Senses resort in 2026.)

With limited properties, the vacation experience is far from a Cabo, Cancún, or Tulum. Once you arrive at a resort, you won't see other buildings stretching into the sky. There are no middle-tier resorts with crowded pools or clubs bumping the bass late into the night. Souvenir shops are limited to small resort boutiques with local art instead of shot glasses and T-shirts.

Instead, Costalegre is quiet and private.

Multiple times throughout my trip, it was just me and my travel partner on a beach in complete solitude, something that feels impossible to discover in today's world.

This seclusion is exactly what appeals to the residents and vacationers enamored by the Happy Coast.

"I don't think there are too many places in the world where you can walk three kilometers down the coast and there's no one there," Viviana Dean, who lives full-time in Careyes, told me while sipping a margarita overlooking the ocean. "Even after 30 years, I can't believe I'm alone in this beautiful place."

While plenty love Costalegre, Kessler said that's not the case for everyone.

"For people that want Chanel and Gucci and all of that, you won't find that here," Kessler said. "I think it has far more of a refined but understated clientele that appreciates luxury and nature."

A rich realization

By the end of the trip, I realized what makes Costalegre rare is an equation of simplicity, seclusion, and splendor.

Yes, the remote seashell-filled beaches at Las Rosadas were impressive, but having that paired with a private infinity pool made the entire experience luxe.

Sure, the pristine jungle at the Four Seasons Tamarindo was memorable, but fresh pastries and a concierge just a text message away created a five-star experience.

When Kessler invited me to a morning yoga class at Careyes, the setup was simple. We lowered into Warrior 2 and listened as waves crashed nearby.

After class, I overheard a group chatting.

"There are three brands everyone, everyone around the world knows. Versace, Gucci, and Armani," one woman said.

As the debate turned into a story about partying with Gianni Versace, I laughed to myself. This is the quintessential conversation I pictured having on a vacation in this wealthy hot spot.

The group dispersed. Some headed to their private villas, where chefs had breakfast waiting for them. Visitors, on the other hand, might pop between the area's five pools or walk along the coastline to take in the rugged scenery.

For vacationers, itineraries tend to be light. There aren't museums to check off or popular archaeological sites to explore. Unsurprisingly, the focus is on the outdoors.

At Las Alamandas, for instance, afternoons can be spent on horseback navigating the property's 2,000 acres, and evenings picnicking during sunset.

It's a slightly different scene when you reach towns like Barra de Navidad and Melaque, which cater to locals, snowbirds, and regional tourists. Here, you'll find streets lined with colorful beach supplies, buses shuttling in people for day trips, karaoke nights, and beach vendors slinging mangos, pineapples, and coconuts.

There's much more action in these seaside towns, but the wealthy travelers I spoke to rarely had plans to head that far south.

Leaving happy

I ended my trip back at the Puerto Vallarta International Airport, overwhelmed by crowds, noises, and intercom announcements.

It was a harsh welcome back to reality, but I was calm, relaxed, and — you guessed it — happy.

Sitting at my gate waiting for economy class to board, I thought about why Costalegre felt remarkable.

Yes, it was the stunning resorts, but it was also pristine nature and the welcoming people I met.

Families like the Brignones and resort owners like Isabel Goldsmith, who owns Las Alamandas, light up when discussing their properties and the ecosystems that surround them. They said they plan to keep Costalegre's habitats largely undeveloped.

The hope is for it to remain a hidden gem, although each property I visited also shared plans to grow.

Kessler said Careyes would max out at developing 7%. Meanwhile, the Four Seasons, which sits on 3,000 acres, has only developed 2% of the land with plans to cap the number at 3%. A small percentage of Las Alamandas is developed, but Goldsmith said she plans to add residences to the property in the coming years.

Campos said she hopes the area where she grew up will largely remain untouched.

"I pray it will never get overbuilt the way the other places have," Campos said. "I go to Cabo, and it's just exploded."

These moments of solitude, bookended by down duvets, meals by award-winning chefs, and the most breathtaking pools, made me pray, too.

And I'm not a religious person.

• JPMorgan is scaling AI tools across various business lines.
• At its Investor Day, the bank's leaders shared how AI is changing workflows across its main businesses.
• JPMorgan's tech spending is $18 billion, focusing on AI, machine learning, and cloud.

When JPMorgan CFO Jeremy Barnum recently took some time to experiment with "vibe coding," he was amazed.

Computer scientists at the firm told him that using plain-language prompts to generate code with AI — known as vibe coding — has improved their efficiency, too. Barnum told investors and analysts at JPMorgan's 2025 Investor Day on Monday. "We have high hopes for the efficiency gains we might get," he added.

Barnum's remarks on how artificial intelligence is reengineering workflows were far from the only mention of how technology is reshaping America's largest bank. From fraud detection and call center automation to portfolio management and wealth advice, AI is no longer something the bank is just experimenting with through pilot projects; it's now scaling its tools and seeing measurable results.

The first step in adopting AI technology across the firm was rolling out its proprietary, in-house generative AI platform to over 200,000 employees. It has about 100 genAI tools in the pipeline, too, according to Barnum's presentation.

"Certain key subsets of the users tell us they are gaining several hours a week of productivity, and almost by definition, the time savings is coming from less valuable tasks," Barnum said.

The firm's spending outlook for technology is $18 billion, up by $1 billion year over year — the highest among Wall Street banks. As AI, machine learning, and cloud innovation lower the barrier to new features and tools, speed is critical to staying competitive, Barnum said. It's also a way to keep costs down going forward, especially on the hiring front.

"We were early movers in AI," the CFO said. "But we're still in the early stages of the journey."

Here's how that journey is taking shape—business line by business line.

Consumer & Community Banking

Before turning it over to Marianne Lake, CEO of JPMorgan's consumer and community bank, Barnum talked about how AI was being used by the unit's call centers, helping agents service customers more efficiently by anticipating customers' needs or quickly responding to questions.

Lake, the next speaker of the day, followed by saying that the bank reduced servicing costs by nearly 30% in part because of AI, but also because of "good old-fashioned" process automation and organizational efficiency.

"The operations team is at the tip of the spear on using and leveraging new AI tools and capabilities," she said.

She predicted a 10% head count reduction in operations with the help of AI, a division focused on fraud, statement, payment processing, and account services.

"I would take the over on this projection, and I'll bet we will deliver even more as the tools and capabilities just keep getting better and better."

The technology has also played a "very significant" part in reducing fraud, even as hackers and cyberattacks become more sophisticated.

The bank is now looking at ways to use technology to continue personalizing what people see when they open their mobile phone apps in hopes of better promoting relevant products and services. Personalizing for to people's interests and behaviors has helped increase engagement rates by 25% so far, she said.

Asset & Wealth Management

In wealth and asset management, AI is not just a tool, Mary Callahan Erdoes, the unit's CEO, told the audience. "It's reimagining workflows and it's changing the loading capacities for thousands of people on the front line and in the back," she said.

Portfolio managers and analysts at JPMorgan are using Smart Monitor, which the firm has estimated helps reduce time researching a topic by 83% by pulling in data from earnings calls, market moves, and filings, generating tailored alerts and analysis.

"I thought that you would be the last people to use this stuff because you think 'I'm too smart for AI, and I have to do it my way,'" she said, speaking to the investors in the room. "It saves so much time."

She said the tool that's caught the most attention is Connect Coach. The program, which prompts suggestions or recommendations to a wealth manager in real time, was rolled out to private bankers last year, Business Insider reported, and in the last week, it was launched to the banks' 7,600 wealth management advisors.

If a JPMorgan private banker hears from the bank's top researcher about European stocks in a meeting, the tool automatically pulls up who in the banker's client book does not have exposure, Erdoes explained. It'll bring up fund fact sheets, sample emails, or talking points to call clients with.

Advisory productivity is up 3.4 times, thanks to the firm's investments in technology, she said.

Commercial & Investment Bank

AI is being deployed across the workflow in JPMorgan's investment bank, from onboarding new clients — where costs to verify clients are down 40% — to client insights and portfolio optimization, Doug Petno, co-CEO of the commercial and investment bank, said.

He added that the bank now has over 175 AI use cases in production, focusing on predictive analytics and operational efficiency, including helping its bankers with risk—based decision-making.

In its payments business, the firm has used AI and machine learning models to reduce friction in payment transactions. Umar Farooq, cohead of JPMorgan's payments business, said that in the past few years, transaction volumes have gone up by more than 50%. Part of that is down to AI models cutting down on transactions that require human intervention to be resolved, often caused by things like account number mismatches or failed fraud detection checks.

"This is just a small example of how our dataset will be to the future of our business as we expand and lean ever more so into technologies like Generative AI," Umar Farooq, cohead of JPMorgan Payments, said.

• Google's announcements at its I/O developer conference this week had analysts bullish on its AI.
• AI features could be a "Trojan horse" for Google's Android products, Bank of America analysts wrote.
• Apple's AI mess has given Google a major mobile opportunity.

Google's phones, tablets, and, yes, XR glasses are all about to be supercharged by AI.

Google needs to seize this moment. Bank of America analysts this week even called Google's slew of new AI announcements a "Trojan horse" for its device business.

For years, Apple's iOS and Google's Android have battled it out. Apple leads in the US in phone sales, though it still trails Android globally. The two have also gradually converged; iOS has become more customizable, while Android has become cleaner and easier to use. As hardware upgrades have slowed in recent years, the focus has shifted to the smarts inside the device.

That could be a big problem for Apple. Its AI rollouts have proven lackluster with users, while more enticing promised features have been delayed. The company is reportedly trying to rebuild Siri entirely using large language models. Right now, it's still behind Google and OpenAI, and that gap continues to widen.

During Google's I/O conference this week, the search giant bombarded us with new AI features. Perhaps the best example was a particularly grabby demo of Google's "Project Astra" assistant helping someone fix their bike by searching through the bike manual, pulling up a YouTube video, and calling a bike shop to see if certain supplies were in stock.

It was, of course, a highly polished promotional video, but it made Siri look generations behind.

"It has long been the case that the best way to bring products to the consumer market is via devices, and that seems truer than ever," wrote Ben Thompson, analyst and Stratechery author, in an I/O dispatch this week.

"Android is probably going to be the most important canvas for shipping a lot of these capabilities," he added.

Google's golden opportunity

Apple has done a good job of locking users into its ecosystem with iMessage blue bubbles, features like FaceTime, and peripherals like the Apple Watch that require an iPhone to use.

Google's Pixel phone line, meanwhile, remains a rounding error when compared to global smartphone shipments. That's less of a problem when Google has huge partners like Samsung that bring all of its AI features to billions of Android users globally.

While iPhone users will get some of these new features through Google's iOS apps, it's clear that the "universal assistant" the company is building will only see its full potential on Android. Perhaps this could finally get iOS users to make the switch.

"We're seeing diminishing returns on a hardware upgrade cycle, which means we're now really focused on the software upgrade cycle," Bernstein senior analyst Mark Shmulik told Business Insider.

Without major changes by Apple, Shmulik said he sees the gap in capabilities between Android and iOS only widening.

"If it widens to the point where someone with an iPhone says, 'Well my phone can't do that,' does it finally cause that switching event from what everyone has always considered this incredible lock-in from Apple?" Shmulik said.

Beyond smartphones

Internally, Google has been preparing for this moment.

The company merged its Pixel, Chrome, and Android teams last year to capitalize on the AI opportunity.

"We are going to be very fast-moving to not miss this opportunity," Google's Android chief Sameer Samat told BI at last year's I/O. "It's a once-in-a-generation moment to reinvent what phones can do. We are going to seize that moment."

A year on, Google appears to be doing just that. Much of what the company demoed this week is either rolling out to devices imminently or in the coming weeks.

Google still faces the challenge that its relationships with partners like Samsung have come with the express promise that Google won't give its home-grown devices preferential treatment. So, if Google decides to double down on its Pixel phones at the expense of its partners, it could step into a business land mine.

Of course, Google needs to think about more than smartphones. Its renewed bet on XR glasses is a bet on what might be the next-generation computing platform. Meta is already selling its own augmented reality glasses, and Apple is now doubling down on its efforts to get its own smart glasses out by the end of 2026, Bloomberg reported.

Google this week demoed glasses that have a visual overlay to instantly provide information to wearers, which Meta's glasses lack and Apple's first version will reportedly also not have.

The success of Meta's glasses so far is no doubt encouraging news for Google, as a new era of AI devices is ushered in. Now it's poised to get ahead by leveraging its AI chops, and Apple might give it the exact opening it's waited more than a decade for.

"I don't know about an open goal," said Shmulik of Apple, "but it does feel like they've earned themselves a penalty kick."

Have something to share? Contact this reporter via email at [email protected] or Signal at 628-228-1836. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

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Nicola Peltz’s billionaire parents, Nelson and Claudia, are being sued by their former housekeeper, who is alleging their pit bull caused her injuries in multiple dog attacks.

According to a Page Six report published on Friday, May 23, the Peltz’s ex-housekeeper, Mileydis Morejon, is suing for $75,000.

Per the outlet, documents show that Morejon claimed the “vicious” and “untrained” family dog Houdini attacked her several times in 2023 in the family’s $100 million Florida mansion.

In the documents, Morejon claimed the pit bull “ripped” her clothes in one incident, while in another incident, Morejon “fell to the ground attempting to escape” after the dog reportedly  “lunged at and attempted to attack the Plaintiff,” per the Page Six report. In one incident, Morejon claims she was forced to try to defend herself with a vacuum.

Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz’s Wedding Drama and Lawsuit: What to Know

According to the outlet, Morejon described Houdini as having a “vicious nature” and “vicious disposition,” as well as “a propensity to attack/or attempt attacks which was known or should have been known by defendants.”

In the lawsuit, which was filed in December 2024, Morejon is accusing her former employers Nelson, 82, and Claudia, 70, of “negligence,” and is claiming she suffered “physical and mental pain and suffering, disability, physical impairment, disfigurement,” as well as “mental anguish.” The plaintiff is also claiming to have suffered loss of earnings and a loss of “capacity for the enjoyment of life.”

Per Page Six, Morejon also cited hospital and medical bills in the lawsuit due the alleged injuries caused by the dog attacks.

Nelson and Claudia denied negligence in the case, and filed a response in May 2025, reported the publication.

The response claimed that it is “undisputed” that Morejon “did not suffer from a dog bite” and alleged that the former housekeeper did not come into physical contact with the dog, and therefore should “not be entitled to recover compensation” due to the alleged incidents.

Nicola Peltz's Dad Slams 'Malicious' Wedding Planners Over 'Desperate' Suit

According to Page Six, Nelson also claimed that as the housekeeper, Morejon “interacted” with, “routinely encountered,” and “cleaned up after” Houdini and because of this, could have adjusted to its behavior.

Us Weekly has reached out to the Peltz’s representatives for comment.

Nelson and Claudia became parents-in-law to Brooklyn Peltz Beckham in 2022, when he married their daughter Nicola in 2022.

Nicola, 30, and Brooklyn, 26, are currently embroiled in their own drama as rumors of family continued to circulate.

The couple skipped out on the 50th birthday celebrations for Brooklyn’s father David Beckham earlier this month, sparking renewed interest in the potential bad blood within the extended family.

• Sabrina Soto made her name transforming homes. Now she wants to transform lives.
• Our homes are closely linked to our mental health, well-being, and success.
• To set ourselves up, she believes our kitchens, offices, and bedrooms should be clutter-free.

Growing up as a "latchkey kid," home became incredibly important to Sabrina Soto.

"Home sort of became my best friend," she told Business Insider. "I had this unspoken agreement with the house: If I'm going to be home alone with you, I'll take care of you if you take care of me."

Soto believes our home environment profoundly impacts mental health and well-being and that little adjustments can make a big difference in our self-development.

She said we should ensure three clutter-free spaces in our homes to set us up for success: our kitchen, bedroom, and office.

"If you are overwhelmed, but you look around and there's constant visual clutter, just start there," Soto said. "The old junk papers, the junk mail, just the piles of stuff that are getting in the way — clearing your desk space up will free up your mind a lot."

Soto told BI it sounds "woo-woo," but homes hold energy.

"Our homes hold our lives and our memories. You should be proud of that space and look forward to being in that space. So whether that means a spring cleaning, decluttering, or moving furniture to refresh, it's a mutual relationship. Those small changes can go a long way."

Soto said cleaning windows and mirrors is another small but effective way of improving our environment.

"I notice in people's bathrooms, if they have a full-length mirror, there's toothpaste on there," Soto said. "When you're getting ready in the morning, having a clear vision of yourself is key."

Her secret, she said, is 70% rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle: "It's streak-free, every single time." It also works on windows, which we "look through every day."

"Natural light brings joy into your life," Soto said. "People who are in a dark mental space usually have their curtains closed, and it's darker in the house. But opening up your curtains, letting the sunlight in could bring a little bit more joy into your life."

Get rid of that stuff

The next thing you can tackle is getting rid of the stuff you don't need, such as clothes you've never worn, because it's all "holding space and holding dust, too," Soto said.

"The more stuff you have, the harder it is for your space to be clean," she said.

Soto built her career by helping people curate a home they loved on HGTV. She's now presenting "The Sabrina Soto Show" on The Design Network, where she digs deeper and helps people find new routines and habits.

On her new show, which premiered in March, Soto speaks with experts to merge home improvement and wellness.

She saw on her previous shows how people's lives and mental health would improve when she helped them transform their physical spaces, and wanted to go further than just fixing a room's aesthetics.

Light at end of the tunnel

Soto finds it ironic that she makes people's homes beautiful because her parents went through a tough financial time when she was younger and were evicted from their house.

"It just goes to show that even when you think you're in a rut or a breakup or loss of a job or whatever the case may be, there's always a light at the end of the tunnel," she said.

Soto, 48, is also divorced and now in what she describes as her first "really healthy relationship."

"Because of my background and having gone through a lot of different changes in my life, I wanted to hold people's hands who are going through the same," she said. "And realize that no matter where you are in your life, the smallest little shifts can impact the much bigger picture."