Buying a home is a high-stakes game, often with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line. Making a wrong decision can lead to foreclosure and bankruptcy; making the right decision can generate wealth that is passed down for generations.

When people are ready to settle down, they're confronted with all the usual dilemmas: whether to buy a home; where to buy a home; what kind of home to buy; and how much to spend. These highly emotional decisions are all more manageable using the lessons of behavioral economics, which I studied as an economist.

When I took a new tech job offer in 2017, it meant leaving San Diego for Seattle. As I set out to find a new home for myself, my husband, and my mom in my new city, I wanted to avoid getting caught up in the competitive pressure of beating out other buyers and making rash decisions that I might later regret. So I decided to divide my search into two phases. In the first, I would take my time getting to know the city and its various neighborhoods by renting a home. In the second, once I had a clear sense of my preferences, I would begin making offers on properties that met my criteria. By taking this approach, I hoped to avoid the pitfalls of hasty decision-making and make an intelligent, informed choice.

For about five months, I spent a great deal of time exploring the different neighborhoods and assessing their pros and cons. From historic homes dating back to the 19th century to midcentury modern homes from Seattle's post-World War II boom to modern new construction, there were plenty of options.

The most significant tradeoff to be made when choosing is location versus home size. I initially thought of a short commute and a large home as must-haves, but given my budget and the need to have space for three adults and three dogs, I had to sacrifice on the length of my commute. Many homebuyers make this same compromise. According to a Redfin survey, 89% of homebuyers would rather purchase a single-family home with a backyard than a unit in a triplex with a shorter commute.

Soon we focused our efforts on West Seattle, a neighborhood located on a peninsula across the sound from downtown. My commute to the office would take about 30 minutes each way by bus, where I could at least get some work done with the complimentary WiFi. This was a decent tradeoff, given that homes in West Seattle were about $100,000 less than homes closer to the downtown office.

Now in phase two, when I began viewing properties and making offers, I became hyperconscious of how my emotions might influence my decision-making. Common mistakes made by homebuyers include becoming too attached to a particular home, fixating on the list price instead of the market value, following the herd, and letting fatigue cloud judgment.

You must try to avoid falling in love too quickly with a home. Once you start picturing your future in a home, it can become challenging to walk away, and it can suck you into a fierce bidding war. Block out any and all thoughts about hosting holidays or your children playing in the backyard. Yes, it is a good idea to consider whether the home will suit you in the future, but if you become too attached to that future, you're working against yourself. People value a home more if they already feel like they own it.

Behavioral economists have a term for this: the endowment effect. The behavioral economist Jack Knetsch has found that people's willingness to sell an item they own was lower than their willingness to buy an item they did not own, even when the subjects knew ownership was assigned randomly. In one experiment, test subjects were given either a lottery ticket or cash. Most people opted to keep whatever form of compensation they had received first instead of trading it for the other option. For a variety of reasons, whether an aversion to feeling loss or a bias toward the status quo, people tend to get attached to the bird in their hand, even when there might be two in the bush.

List prices can also be misleading. In a hot market, sellers may advertise their homes for significantly less than what buyers are ready to pay in order to spark a bidding war. This amounts to a bait-and-switch.

As a buyer, don't take the bait. Don't anchor your expectations on the listed price. The anchoring effect refers to a person's tendency to focus on the first piece of information they hear while making decisions. In a famous lab experiment by the late Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, research subjects spun a wheel of fortune with numbers from 0 to 100. The participants were then asked to guess the share of African countries that were members of the UN. Participants whose spin landed on a lower number were more likely to guess a low number. Participants whose wheel spin landed on a high number were more likely to guess a high number. The number the needle of the wheel landed on was completely irrelevant, yet the research subjects still used it as an anchor for their guesses.

The list price of a home may contain some helpful information about what the seller believes its value is. But ultimately the value of the house is set by the market.

If you need to, take a break. Losing bidding war after bidding war — which happens a lot — fosters fatigue and impatience, which can lead you to give up too soon or to buy a home you later regret.

Behavioral economists have repeatedly found that the quality of decisions deteriorates when an individual is overburdened with too many options. A study published in Health Economics found that orthopedic surgeons made worse recommendations toward the end of their shifts. Doctors were less likely to recommend surgery for patients who would have benefited just as much from surgery as patients seen earlier in the surgeon's shift.

Also, avoid following the herd. If others are ready to bid high, you could be tempted to do the same and stretch your budget. Herding behavior, another behavioral economics term, can lead to bubbles in the housing market or the stock market and was one of the culprits for the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. The best way to avoid getting caught up in speculation bubbles is to not speculate in the first place and make offers appropriate only to your personal financial circumstances.

After spending a few weeks touring homes in the area, I came across a property that immediately caught my eye. It had everything my family was looking for. But there was one giant red flag: the home had been on the market for nearly a year without any offers.

Upon further inspection, I noticed that the house was located across the street from a strip mall and had a strange layout. Even though I liked the home, I wanted to avoid paying more than other buyers might think it was worth. So I kept looking.

When buying a home, you have no choice but to concern yourself with resale value. Life is unpredictable; there is always the chance you might not stay in the home long term, and you don't want to pay more than what you can resell it for.

There is tension in this advice: a homebuyer must avoid herding behavior by thinking for themself while simultaneously considering how other people might value homes in the future.

The way to walk the middle path is detached observation — recognize the behavior patterns of others without letting it unduly bias your decision-making.

About a month later, we found a home that seemed too good to be true. Ample space, close to public transit, even a view of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. However, the home was 70 years old, so we would need to update the electrical, plumbing, and heating. Since we were renting elsewhere, we could delay moving to get this work done.

Things go wrong after you buy a home. Thinking that these problems won't end up costing you significant time and money is what behavioral economists call optimism bias: the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of favorable outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of unfavorable outcomes. The challenge, then, is to consider the risks and whether they are worth the reward.

As I prepared to make an offer to buy a home, I thought back to the hundreds of homeowners going through foreclosure that I interviewed while interning at the Boston Fed. They experienced bad luck on top of bad luck — deaths, divorces, medical emergencies, job loss, and a global recession. Any of those things could happen to me.

With all the repairs the house needed, I determined the maximum amount I could afford to pay was $950,000. I liked this particular home more than any other home on the market priced below $950,000, so I reasoned that this amount must be my value for the home. But I still had a nagging feeling that I was overextending myself and overpaying.

What if the roof sprang a leak? And what if, because I had already spent my savings repairing the plumbing, electrical, heating, and cooling, I didn't have any money left to repair the roof?

I could have kept going down the list of unlikely catastrophes. Instead, I focused on the unlikeliness of the scenario rather than the pain of the scenario. This helped me get out of my head and back to the task at hand. In economics, expected utility theory hypothesizes that individuals weigh uncertain outcomes according to their likelihood and the net benefit of each outcome. I shuddered at the thought of a bad scenario, like being laid off during a severe recession and housing-market downturn. However, according to expected utility theory, I should weigh that feeling against the likelihood of that scenario, which I reasoned to be a once-in-a-century event. In all likelihood, my job was safe, the economy was fine, and the value of homes would keep going up.

The home was listed at $840,000. I submitted my bid on the home for that amount. When you're deciding whether to bid above or below the asking price, look up how competitive the housing market is in the neighborhood and how the home compares to what else is on the market. If the market is cool, it's advisable to come in low. However, if the market is hot, the seller may completely ignore your offer if it's below the asking price.

Even though I offered $840,000, I was ready to go as high as $940,000. Later that day, my agent called me to deliver the good news: we won the home at list price. No one else even submitted a bid.

Daryl Fairweather is the author of "Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work" and the chief economist of Redfin.

This story is adapted from "Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work" by Daryl Fairweather, to be published by the University of Chicago Press on April 11, 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Daryl Rose Fairweather. Printed by arrangement with the University of Chicago Press.

Henry Kirk, a cofounder of the software development company Studio Init, wants to hire the best engineers. That's why he asked job applicants not to use generative AI in the first technical coding part of their interviews — with the promise that they'd be able to show off their combined engineering and AI skills in a later section. "They still cheated," he tells me.

"It was so obvious," Kirk says. The coding tests took place in tandem with a video call, and some candidates frequently looked off to the side. They gave delayed answers or copied and pasted full blocks of code into the system instead of typing step-by-step. Some refused to share their screens or spouted off-topic answers to verbal questions, leading Kirk to believe they were reading large language model outputs verbatim without even thinking. "It's a waste of our time," he says. But even as AI is making a mess of technical screening tests, Kirk says he still thinks it has value. "I'm a small company. I have 400 applicants. How do I screen the people down to a manageable chunk of folks?"

Many software engineers aren't just allowed but are increasingly expected to use AI on the job. Companies like Google, Meta, and Salesforce increasingly rely on it for engineering tasks in the name of efficiency. But with gen AI now able to code as effectively as a junior engineer, bosses are wondering if the traditional coding tests — which have long been a staple of the hiring process — can still separate the good developers from the sloppy ones.

New tools keep popping up to make cheating on tests even more seamless: A since suspended Columbia University student, Chungin "Roy" Lee, recently created a tool called Interview Coder and used it to cheat on an Amazon coding test and then posted the interview to YouTube. He's selling the tool to other engineers for just $60 a month (he's claimed on X that he received and rejected an internship offer). Amazon has said candidates can be disqualified using gen AI unless explicitly permitted. The company did not comment specifically on Lee's test, but Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokesperson, tells me that the company has job candidates acknowledge they won't use gen AI during the interview process when it's not permitted, but it does have them share their history of working with the tools when relevant. Google is also considering bringing some interviews back to in-person settings, where they can have more control over the environment. A Google spokesperson told me that applicants are informed before interviews that if they use AI during them they will be disqualified.

Recruiters and hiring managers I spoke to for this story said the mainstream adoption of ChatGPT led them to suspect that more job seekers are trying to cheat their way past the code tests. Companies are scrambling to change old evaluation processes for a new era. But as they push engineers to get more efficient with AI on one hand and wag their finger at its use with the other, they're raising new ethical questions about what really counts as cheating: Is an LLM an unfair edge, or just a coding partner?

The traditional coding interview is at a crossroads. But the end of the old interview might be welcome among engineers.

"Timed coding tests were never truly realistic; AI just pulled back the curtain," says Annie Lux, the founder and CEO of the coaching firm Land That Job. The interviews create pressure and penalize people who struggle in test environments, Lux says. And many employers now expect engineers to leverage AI tools at work — tests that ban them put job candidates in a different scenario than the one they would work in. A 2020 study by North Carolina State University and Microsoft found that people were better at solving coding problems when they weren't being watched closely and told to explain their work as they went — confirmation that some engineers performed worse when under the stressful conditions of a traditional technical interview. "These interviews reward test-taking over engineering," Lux says. "They ignore how software engineers actually work."

Andrej Karpathy, an Open AI cofounder, coined the term "vibe coding," a nod to the way AI will help engineers "just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff," and have it "mostly work," as he put it. An engineer's skill for writing code may become less impressive than their capacity to understand it. But the issue hiring managers tangle with now is how to balance the benefits of vibe coding with vetting the best engineers from large pools of applicants in a tight job market where there's a huge incentive to cheat your way into an offer letter. On the job, "hopefully, they are using AI, to do the stuff AI can do," says Don Jernigan, a vice president at Experis Services, an IT staffing firm. "We need to be testing and evaluating them from the areas between what a human can do and what AI can't do."

Kirk says a "perfect storm" bolstered cheaters: The tech job market tightened just as ChatGPT went mainstream. There were more applicants for fewer jobs and more people hoping a perfect score on a coding test would help them stand out. Now, it could hurt them in the long run. Kirk says he and his team have gotten more confident about catching cheaters, and will sometimes call them out and end the interview if they're sure they've found one. One applicant even admitted to it, and others have left the interview without argument, he says. And he is keeping a blacklist of people he suspects cheat in his interviews and plans to never consider them in the future. He already has a list of dozens of people he's sure tried to cheat, with hundreds more who raised suspicion. Now, his studio has applicants follow up their first test by coming on-site for more tests. "We're potentially paying you a lot of money and we need to make sure there's a good fit all around," he says.

ChatGPT didn't invent cheating. In the past, software engineering applicants would sometimes deputize a friend to spit out code in their place (either in a take-home test or, as one recruiter told me, actually sending someone else in their place to the interview round), and job seekers would share coding tests and answers online. If you search Reddit, TikTok, or Blind, you'll find people sharing tips and tricks to con an interviewer. But AI is a knowledgeable friend who's even easier to access. More people are using it to try to land any job by mass applying or sending AI-generated cover letters. Overwhelmed recruiters then use their own AI tools to try to sift through and find the best candidates. It's all creating a massive cog, with two different AIs talking to each other and both job seekers and hiring managers feeling frustrated.

When it came to engineers, recruiters and hiring managers started to notice something was amiss by early 2023. Job applicants completed coding tests with perfect answers, but when they moved on to interviews about the test, some knew little to nothing about the work they'd submitted. "Even with ChatGPT earlier versions, it could solve a lot of coding questions," says Yang Mou, the cofounder and CEO of the AI recruiting company Fonzi. "The thing that's even more insidious now is that the AI is also better at explaining the answers as if it was a human." Fonzi interviewed 1,270 candidates for a software engineering job between January and March, and flagged 23% of them "as likely to be using external tools," Mou says. The AI tool scans answers for awkwardly long pauses and evaluates phrases used to see the likelihood that they've been written by a chatbot, and then humans can listen back to the interview to see if they catch any red flags.

Two years ago, the technical interview company Karat flagged about 2% of interviewees as potential cheaters. Now, that proportion has jumped to 10% of interviewees. "It's happening more frequently," says Jeffrey Spector, the cofounder and president of Karat. "Ultimately, our belief is that interviews have to evolve." Karat is developing a new interview process that it hopes will better evaluate job seekers when they use LLMs, Spector tells me. "The LLM is becoming a core part of how engineers do their job. Preventing them from using the tools on their job seems very unnatural."

As AI becomes a bigger part of the job, Spector says, hiring managers — and humanity at large — have to ask the question: "How do you define cheating?" He says people shouldn't disregard explicit instructions not to use AI, but if most people are using it and you're not, you might be at a disadvantage in the interview process. Many applicants use books and online tips to study for coding interviews, and some use ChatGPT to practice for job interviews. When it comes to using AI in the actual test, Spector says, a tipping point will come where it feels too disadvantageous not to, particularly among young engineers who have learned and grown up in the LLM era — and the ethical questions will get messier.

Hadi Chami, the director of solution engineering at the software company Apryse, says he began to notice ways job candidates were using LLMs as he started to use them more in his own work. So he changed the job application last year. Now, he gives applicants who pass a first "vibe check" interview a take-home assignment, with the expectation they'll use AI. But he tells them they'll have to walk him through their work. That's helpful for now, as he can still see whether they know why something works, not just that it does work. But Chaim expects the problem to get worse: He says that he's concerned about young workers coming into the field. "They may have an overreliance on the tool. They'll be able to ace all their classes," but might struggle in the workplace, he says.

Maybe this isn't the interview apocalypse scenario it seems. "This is a little of a new frontier, which is maybe why there is so much fear and stress on both sides and people are just flailing," says Victoria Gates, the cofounder of the interview training firm Expert Interviews. "If you're investing your time and your money into finding out if candidates are cheating, you're wasting your time. The way interview processes are today, they are very unfair towards candidates. Of course they're going to try to find anything they can." Instead of trying to go full bad cop and employ tech to monitor cheating, Gates says companies should train interviewers to ask incisive follow-up questions and for specific examples that LLMs can't generate. Right now, companies may be focused on catching cheaters, but Ali Ansari, the founder and CEO of the AI interview company Micro1, says that will change. "I think coding in general is already looking extremely different," he says. "That implies even without the cheating, the coding test will have to start looking different." He predicts that there will be a "new norm" for coding interviews within the next year or two.

All this coding mess is evidence of the breakdown in trust between employers and workers. Job seekers are questioning how much free labor they owe someone who may not even extend them a second interview, and more bosses are doubting the integrity and work ethic of the people reporting to them. So much of the tech meant to make job searching easier and more accessible has just added noise to the process. Killing the old coding test and using something more creative in its place may be a small step in repairing that disconnect.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

Occupy Wall Street, Notorious RBG, cottagecore. These and several other lasting internet trends and IRL movements of the 2010s were born not on Twitter, on Facebook, or in the mainstream media but on Tumblr. You might remember it as the blogging platform that became one of the most hyped startups in the world before fading into obsolescence — bought by Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013 (back when a billion still felt like a billion), then acquired by Verizon, and later offloaded for fractions of pennies on the dollar in a distressed sale. That same Tumblr, a relic of many millennials' formative years, has been having a moment among Gen Z.

Zoomers have gravitated toward the pseudonymous platform, viewing it as a safe space as the rest of the social internet has become increasingly commodified, polarized, and dominated by lifestyle influencers. As in its heyday, Tumblr is still more about sharing art, culture, and fandom than individual status. More posts about anime and punk rock than bridal trends and politics. In 2025, 50% of Tumblr's active monthly users are Gen Zers, as are 60% of new users signing up, according to data Tumblr shared with Business Insider. And several of Zoomers' icons, from the "Fault in Our Stars" author John Green to the pop superstar Halsey, have come back to the platform.

"Gen Z has this romanticism of the early-2000s internet," says Amanda Brennan, an internet librarian who worked at Tumblr for seven years, leaving her role as head of content in 2021. She still uses her own Tumblr regularly as the internet's resident meme librarian. "It allows for experimentation that's not tied to your face."

Part of the reason young people are hanging out on old social platforms is that there's nowhere new to go. The tech industry is evolving at a slower pace than it was in the 2000s, and there's less room for disruption. Big Tech has a stranglehold on how we socialize. That leaves Gen Z to pick up the scraps left by the early online millennials and attempt to craft them into something relevant. They love Pinterest (founded in 2010) and Snapchat (2011), and they're trying out digital point-and-shoot cameras and flip phones for an early-2000s aesthetic — and learning the valuable lesson that sometimes we look better when blurrier. More Gen Zers and millennials are signing up for Yahoo. Napster, surprising many people with its continued existence, just sold for $207 million. The trend is fueled by nostalgia for Y2K aesthetics and a longing for a time when people could make mistakes on the internet and move past them.

The pandemic also brought more Gen Z users to Tumblr. The blogging site was an online oasis in the barrage of horrifying news and conspiracy theories, thanks to its acute focus on art and pop culture. And when other platforms take hits, Tumblr benefits: User numbers spiked to coincide with the near-banning of TikTok in January and the temporary ban of X in Brazil last year. Tumblr seems to be a refuge for people searching for new social sites. In January, people launched communities on Tumblr to post and preserve their favorite TikTok videos. Meanwhile, progressives mad at Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk for going full MAGA and are ditching Facebook and X as punishment.

"Our menu has been full. There's been no more space to add something else," says Andrew Roth, the 26-year-old founder and CEO of the Gen Z-focused research and consulting firm DCDX. In a poll of more than 600 Zoomers that DCDX conducted in 2024, two-thirds of respondents said they wanted their social media presence to become more private. Tumblr might be just what many young people are looking for. "Now the time feels more ripe for that to happen for Tumblr, even if Tumblr is doing the same thing or staying in the same spot."

Ari Levine, the head of brand partnerships at Tumblr, tells me the platform is both "more peaceful" and more resolutely itself than its competitors. While Meta runs around aping its competitors' features (reels from TikTok, stories from Snapchat), it hasn't been able to mimic what Tumblr does (though Meta, then called Facebook, was in talks to buy Tumblr before Yahoo did). "How many times am I in an app and I no longer know what app I'm in?" Levine says.

And Tumblr still works much like an older internet, where people have more control over what they see and rely less on algorithms. "You curate your own stuff; it takes a little bit of work to put everything in place, but when it's working, you see the content you want to see," Fjodor Everaerts, a 26-year-old in Belgium who has made some 250,000 posts since he joined Tumblr when he was 14. He says he sees his blog as a "flow of consciousness" and a "diary," one that's mostly made up of reblogging things he finds interesting rather than original posts. In a way, that's a core part of what Tumblr has always done: It's far more focused on fandom and art than it is around single blogs becoming cults of personality.

Being an iconic and beloved cultural corner doesn't always lead to cash flows, however, and the site has had a troubled decade. Yahoo bought Tumblr when Tumblr was one of the world's fastest-growing social networks, and it promised not to "screw it up." But Tumblr's embedded anti-advertising and anti-influencer stances had driven a wedge between the site and monetization. The pseudonymous nature of Tumblr was a direct opposition to Facebook's insistence on users using their real names and faces, and the free-flowing adult content on the site scared advertisers off. Yahoo got left behind in the mobile revolution, and Tumblr, too, suffered, with Verizon scooping up both at discount. In 2018, Tumblr notoriously banned porn and pissed off users, which led 30% of them to quit. The next year, Verizon offloaded Tumblr to WordPress' owner, Automattic, for $3 million, 0.3% of what Yahoo had paid for it.

Under Automattic, Tumblr is finally in the home that serves it, Levine says. "We've had ups and downs along the way, but we're in the most interesting position and place that we've been in 18 years," he says. The site is trying to keep what its users love while unveiling features that do rival some of its competitors'. It's a shift after years of staying distinctly itself. In December, Tumblr launched its Communities feature, a sort of Facebook Groups meets subreddits in which people can join groups based on specific interests, like making art of "silly bugs" or emo kids from the Midwest. In January, Tumblr also launched a TikTok competitor called Tumblr TV, which works like a search engine for GIFs and supports videos. And following media companies (including BI) and social platforms like Reddit, Automattic in 2024 was making a deal with OpenAI and Midjourney to allow the systems to train on Tumblr posts.

But Tumblr is the 10th-most-popular social media site in the US, dwarfed by Facebook, Instagram, and X, according to data from the analytics firm Similarweb. (Tumblr declined to provide total user numbers to BI, but Levine says it has seen steady growth.) Its users see that as a pro rather than a con; it's more exclusive and intentional. But its history of extreme waves in valuation and struggles to make money may dictate its fate more than those who blog there. "I want Tumblr to flourish," Brennan says. "I want it to exist forever. I want to use it forever. I think that it is one of the most beautiful spaces on the internet for someone to figure out who they are." But some of Tumblr's model is a "blessing for it as a user is a curse for it as a business."

The platform could benefit if it capitalized on the "shift from attention to intention," Roth tells me. "How do we actually monetize people's intentions on social media versus the attention of them being around?" That would mean a focus on "people's desires" and how to "help them reach them." Tumblr recently put out a lengthy report for marketers trying to reach Gen Z, advising them to engage with communities around their brands and to search for relevant interest among users over the reach of mainstream influencers. Levine tells me that when Automattic acquired Tumblr, it was a chance for the company to take "stock of where we are" and "reintroduce ourselves" to users and "brands and advertisers who help us pay the bills."

Tumblr loyalists tell me they haven't spent much time with the new features — they like the site the way it is. TJ Smith, a 25-year-old from Texas, says it provided a safe haven for them when they were 13. Diagnosed as autistic at 11, Smith found Tumblr an easier place to connect with and talk about their favorite fandoms, like the Percy Jackson series. Eventually, it helped them work through their sexuality and gender identity (they identify as pansexual and gender fluid). "Tumblr was the first place where I saw those terms being used," Smith tells me.

Most Tumblr blogs aren't about the people who make them, yet they're deeply personal places. Under their pseudonyms and art, people find communities and explore identities without scrutiny from IRL friends and family. Ashmita Shanthakumar, a 25-year-old from Utah who has been on Tumblr since 2013, sees it as "anti-social media," she tells me, and has used it to connect with people who like the same CW superhero shows as she did. She can focus on how the shows make her feel rather than personal updates on Facebook, which can feel comparative.

The social internet is fractured. Millennials are running Reddit. Gen Xers and Baby Boomers have a home on Facebook. Bluesky, one of the new X alternatives, has a tangible elder-millennial/Gen X vibe. Gen Zers have created social apps like BeReal and the Myspace-inspired Noplace, but they've so far generated more hype than influence. People of different ages migrate in numbers to various platforms and seize them, creating the vibes and culture there. Platforms lean more left or right politically. And while some (mostly on the right) have cried "echo chamber" with derision, there are benefits to carving out smaller communities with like-minded people to see and talk about the things you like. Megaplatforms can flatten our online experiences and reward content that fits a mold; smaller communities can enrich them.

I recently unearthed the Tumblr blog I made in high school (don't go looking — I deleted it and my teenage musings immediately). When I scrolled through Tumblr for the first time in at least a decade, I realized it still had something that no other social network did: the sense of timelessness. I saw a post of a simple, soothing color gradient followed by a recent reblog of a GIF posted in 2020 but taken from the 2002 original "Spider-Man" movie. There's still little video on the feed, and it's more of a silent, visual retreat, with cuts of movie scenes overlaid with dialogue on a loop. When I open TikTok and Instagram, I'm bombarded by filtered faces and music, or someone yelling into the camera to sell me a pair of magnetic eyelashes every few videos. Tumblr was the place I went in 2011 to see and reblog flash photography and '90s movie GIFs, so it's no surprise that it's no longer a place where decades of images are juxtaposed together, but one that has itself become a piece of nostalgia for a simpler time online. Unlike some of its 2000s peers, Tumblr doesn't need to fight to get its cool back, but it does have to find ways to keep its cool and move forward.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, may seem like an unlikely site for a YIMBY revolution.

The historic Boston suburb is home to both Harvard University and a bevy of affluent homeowners opposed to any new development. The city even features prominently in the book "Neighborhood Defenders," a seminal work about anti-building, not-in-my-backyarders. Despite all that, the city recently passed a series of laws that could pave the way for a cascade of new housing construction.

Cambridge could certainly use the new units. Data from Zillow shows the city's average rent is $3,400 a month — slightly higher than San Francisco's estimated average rent of $3,200. Homelessness in Cambridge has also been on the rise, particularly since the pandemic. In an attempt to ease this pressure, pro-housing groups that fall under the YIMBY umbrella (short for "yes in my backyard") — particularly the local group A Better Cambridge and the statewide organization Abundant Housing Massachusetts — have been trying to get more homes built in Cambridge for years.

In recent years, that work has started to bear fruit: The city enacted a 100% affordable housing overlay in 2020, which allows developers of below-market-rate apartment complexes to build more densely than would be permitted under base zoning. Three years later, Cambridge rezoned its Central Square neighborhood, allowing apartment buildings to rise up to 18 stories high.

But the latest measure is perhaps the most radical, and most promising. A measure passed in February will legalize the production of four-story apartment buildings across the entire city, with some larger lots zoned for up to six stories. Sure, these newly possible buildings aren't quite as dramatic as an 18-story tower, but this latest change is by far Cambridge's most ambitious. Unlike the geographically confined Central Square upzoning, the newest pro-housing ordinance has the potential to remake the entire city. The city's planning staff estimate that the new law may increase Cambridge's housing development capacity over the next 15 years from 350 units to 3,590 — a more than tenfold increase.

The likelihood that some neighborhoods will become denser has provoked the usual opposition from local homeowners. But viewed from another angle, this densification could make the city a more vibrant and beautiful place to live. There's a reason the Cambridge city councilmember Burhan Azeem has called the city's new plan "Paris-style zoning." As it turns out, Paris is a good model for midsize American cities to follow. By allowing more European-style construction, places like Cambridge can both lower housing costs and look good doing it.

Alongside the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, one of Paris' most iconic architectural hallmarks may be its most ubiquitous: the Haussmann-style building. Georges-Eugène Haussmann (better known as Baron Haussmann) was the famed urban planner who, under Emperor Napoleon III, redesigned central Paris in the mid-19th century. Paris became a city of wide boulevards and midrise apartment complexes with distinctive limestone facades — the aforementioned Haussmann buildings. Thanks in no small part to the prevalence of these structures, Paris has achieved a density higher than any other major city in Europe or the United States — although the city of lights still struggles to keep up with demand for housing.

While Haussmann buildings are specific to central Paris, plenty of other European cities have equivalent structures: four- to six-story apartment blocks with no buffer area between the front door and the sidewalk. Unlike the boxy, cheap-looking American five-over-one apartment building that has come to dominate much of our development — and which many people regard as an eyesore — Euro-style apartments generally contribute to the beauty and charm of dense, walkable tourist destinations like Stockholm and Rome. Plus, they're more efficient: thanks to European building codes and zoning rules, European-style apartment buildings can be built for less, on smaller lots, and with more family-friendly apartments in the interior.

"Sure," you might say, "but what's good for Paris, Stockholm, and Rome won't work in an American context." That's a common refrain from skeptics — citing cultural differences, the need for abundant parking, or their own gut instincts — when YIMBYs propose allowing more European-style zoning in the United States. But these assumptions are incorrect for two reasons.

First, upzoning cities like Cambridge is not the same thing as requiring them to build up to Parisian density. If you own a single-family home in Cambridge, and your lot has been upzoned to allow for the construction of a four-story building, you remain at liberty to keep your single-family home. If you want to redevelop the property into a multifamily building, that's great; if you decide to sell your home to a developer who will replace it with an apartment complex, that's great, too. But nobody is compelling you to do either of those things if you like your existing home.

Second, Cambridge — like many other older cities in New England and the mid-Atlantic region — already has a fair number of dense apartment buildings and townhomes. Rather than destroying the culture or character of these cities, building more Parisian-style housing would signal a return to the pre-single-family era. Many of Cambridge's mid-rise apartment buildings were constructed before single-family zoning became ubiquitous in the United States in the early 20th century. And the ones that have survived are now highly coveted as luxury homes and architectural treasures; yet, for decades, it has been effectively illegal to build more of them. As Azeem wrote on X, Cambridge's previous, single-family-focused zoning laws meant that "85%+ of the existing housing" in the city would be illegal to build. In other words, Cambridge's upzoning may actually help to preserve the city's architectural heritage and New England character. At the same time, it is a model for how other cities can upzone in a manner that actually eases housing costs.

While the patchwork nature of American land-use policy can slow progress in important ways, it can also be an engine for experimentation and friendly, productive competition. Pro-housing activists in cities across the country — in places like Minneapolis, Austin, and Sacramento — and far beyond, in the case of Auckland, New Zealand, have inspired each another, shared insights and tactics, and provided a push to see who can push through the most ambitious land-use overhauls. These pushes can even get a little cheeky: YIMBY advocates in Montana sold zoning changes by urging conservative lawmakers to move away from "California-style zoning." While it will take some years to assess the full impact of these revisions, the early data from places like Auckland is very promising.

Some changes make a bigger impact than others. One lesson from the past few years of YIMBY experimentation is that smaller tweaks to local zoning codes may yield negligible results; ambition is vastly superior to cautious incrementalism. Take Minneapolis, one of the recent YIMBY success stories. Citywide, the production of more housing has helped to keep rents and home prices in check, but as the housing researcher Zakary Yudhisthu has found, there's more going on underneath the hood. The parts of Minneapolis that moved from single-family to duplex or triplex zoning have seen little housing growth, while the corridors that allow for denser construction have seen more permit applications. In other words, going just a few steps further is how you get real results.

But to truly unlock housing production at the necessary scale, high-cost cities cannot stop at upzoning. They also need to reshape permitting rules and other onerous building requirements, such as off-street parking mandates. True European-style zoning would allow for mid-rise apartment buildings with no off-street parking and a single central staircase. (Five-over-ones exist in part because most American cities require multiple staircases in any apartment building over a certain height.)

So while other expensive cities should take inspiration from Cambridge, they should also see if they can go even further. There's still plenty of room for another jurisdiction to take the lead in the race to be America's YIMBY-est city. Any takers?

Ned Resnikoff is an urban policy consultant and writer. He is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and is currently working on a book about cities with an expected publication date of Fall 2026.

Throughout his college studies, Ryan Kim always had a postgraduation game plan. First it was to become a database manager. Then it was to break into fintech as a business analyst. But during his sophomore and junior years, as the tech industry laid off nearly half a million workers, Kim struggled to secure an internship. So he set his eyes on a new career: public service.

Kim was far from the only Gen Zer making the same pivot. Last year, according to the job site Handshake, the share of applications it received from college seniors for entry-level openings in tech dropped by 19% from 2022, while the share to jobs in government nearly doubled. Even younger kids saw the writing on the wall. In surveys, high school students used to cite tech giants like Google and Apple as the places they most wanted to work. But last year, in a startling shift, both the FBI and NASA ranked higher than any of those tech companies. Silicon Valley was out. Capitol Hill was in.

It took Kim only a single application to land a yearlong paid internship at the Food and Drug Administration. His performance reviews were good, and he planned to stay on at the agency after he earned his degree in May. "You hear so many horror stories of people in tech being laid off with little notice," he tells me. "Government jobs are secure. What drew me into it was the stability."

So much for that plan.

This month, with his graduation fast approaching, Kim abruptly lost his internship amid the government-wide havoc Elon Musk has unleashed at DOGE. With most federal hiring on an indefinite hold, he's been scrambling to find a job — any job. "It's been a huge source of stress," he says. "Most of the private industry has already hired their graduating students."

Kim is one of the roughly 2 million students set to graduate this spring into an exceptionally shaky job market. Things were already looking tough for the class of 2025, given the steep hiring slump in industries like tech, finance, and consulting. But now, as Musk takes a chainsaw to the government, many college seniors are in panic mode. Some have seen their offers at federal agencies rescinded; others have received no word on jobs they applied to months ago.

It's not just government positions that are taking a hit — it's jobs at a whole host of businesses, nonprofits, and universities that rely on federal funding and contracts. And going to graduate school — the traditional backup plan for students during times of economic instability — may not even be an option, if the Department of Education winds up being unable to deliver financial aid in a timely fashion. As the government is slashed to the bone in the name of efficiency, the careers of many Gen Zers could suffer for years to come.

"The impact is broad scale," says Saskia Campbell, the executive director of university career services at George Mason University. "There is this sense of grief, of loss of opportunity. This is the first year I'm actually concerned."

To make matters worse, the outlook is likely to get even more dismal in the months ahead, as President Donald Trump's tariff wars spur companies to hold off on hiring. "Two years ago, the bulk of the uncertainty and fear was in Big Tech," says Briana Randall, the executive director of the career and internship center at the University of Washington. "Now it feels uncertain in a lot of areas."

All of that leaves America's soon-to-be new grads unsure of where to turn. Sarina Parsapasand, a public policy major who's graduating from the University of Southern California this spring, was hoping to land a job in government service. But now, given the chaos in Washington, she's switched to trying to land a job in the private sector. "I have bills to pay," she says. "I can't take the risk of being in a job that doesn't guarantee the stability for me to live my life."

It's a sentiment I hear over and over again from the students I speak with. "The job market just seems super unstable in almost any field," says Katie Schwartz, a sophomore at Tulane. "It's less about finding a job you really love now and more just about finding a job that's going to give you job stability."

I'm impressed by the clear-eyed pragmatism of these students — but I'm also saddened by how old they sound. Isn't job stability what you look for when you're middle-aged, with a mortgage to pay and kids to support? When I graduated from college in 2009 without a full-time job, I was panicked but still idealistic. These kids, in contrast, seem hardened by all the chaos they've endured from a young age. In high school, they watched their parents get laid off in the pandemic. In college, they watched older students struggle to land good jobs during the tech downturn — or worse, had their hard-won offers rescinded at the last minute.

The upheaval and uncertainty have taught today's graduates to prepare for the worst. Over the past year, one college senior tells me, she's been intentionally neglecting her studies so she could focus exclusively on her job search, sending out as many as 15 applications a day. The hustle paid off with three offers, including one she accepted from a government contractor. It's her "dream job," she says, because it would enable her to make a real difference in the world.

But now, given the chaos in Washington, she's leaning toward reneging on the offer and accepting a position at a finance company. (That's why she asked me not to use her name.) "I try to keep an optimistic outlook," she tells me. But when I ask her how she feels about taking her first steps into adulthood, she doesn't sound optimistic at all.

"It makes me pretty nervous," she says. "I think a lot of people in my generation have accepted that we're not going to live the same quality of life our parents provided us."

During hard economic times, we expect to hear stories about people losing their jobs. But the greatest casualties often end up being the young people who don't have jobs to lose in the first place. Hiring freezes hurt them the most, making it impossible for them to even get their foot in the door. And research shows just how long a shadow that can cast on someone's career. Five years after the Great Recession, my generation of millennials was earning 11% less than Gen Xers were at a comparable age. And our net worth fell 40% behind theirs, forcing us to delay many of life's biggest milestones: buying a home, starting a family, saving for retirement.

The effects go far beyond money. Students who graduated into the 1982 recession, for example, wound up with fewer kids and more divorces than those who entered better job markets. Even more shocking, the research shows, they were more likely to die early. Whatever gains in efficiency Trump hopes to achieve from DOGE, its most lasting legacy may end up being the harm it inflicts on the careers — and perhaps even the life spans — of his youngest constituents.

That leaves college seniors like Kim scrambling to find a foothold in a job market that is stacked against them. Many companies have already filled their entry-level positions, if they're hiring new grads at all. And he's now competing not only with his fellow students, but also with the flood of young government workers who have been laid off by DOGE — workers who have more experience than he does. As graduation nears, he's trying not to panic. But it's hard to retain a sense of hope when even lower-paying jobs in public service are no longer an option.

"I'm not sure how my future's going to turn out," Kim tells me. And that, when you think about it, is a future that should worry us all.

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent for Business Insider.

You know that sensation when something feels off, but you can't quite put your finger on it? That sensation of "I don't feel so good about this," even though the "this" is a little fuzzy. That's the state of work for many people right now. So if you're a little uneasy about the job market, you're not alone.

The economy's felt like the other shoe is about to drop for quite some time now. There was the euphoria of the Great Resignation, the post-pandemic era where workers had a lot of temporary power and did some job-hopping. That gave way to the confusing negativity of the vibecession, when Americans said the economy was terrible even though, on paper, it was good — and, despite their negativity, consumers kept spending like it was good, too. Then we got to the Big Stay, where workers decided to stick to what they were doing, whether they were happy about it or not. Sentiment picked up a bit after the 2024 election when people thought a Trump 2.0 economy would look as rosy as they remembered Trump 1.0. But now, the bad vibes are back. Workers are not feeling great about the labor market or their own jobs. The Big Stay has transformed into the Big Cling to Your Desk, Suck Up to Your Boss, Be Seen in the Office.

Consumer sentiment has been on the downswing recently, in part because people are feeling queasy about work. The Conference Board's consumer confidence index fell in March, driven largely by declines in people's outlooks on income, business, and the labor market. The concerns about the future pushed the Conference Board's expectations index to its lowest point in 12 years, below the level that tends to signal a recession. While people feel OK about the current labor market, they're worried about their future employment prospects and their future incomes.

"That's a sign that people are getting worried about their own situation," said Stephanie Guichard, a senior economist at The Conference Board, in an interview. She added that people are beginning to say they're more worried about their family financial situations, too. "We are at the point where they may start changing their behavior."

Surveys from the University of Michigan reflect a similar doom-and-gloom mood toward the labor market. Consumers' expectations for unemployment over the next year are at their worst level since the Great Recession — two-thirds of them think unemployment will go up. According to the University of Michigan's most recent reading, consumer sentiment has declined across the economy, cutting across age, income, and politics, as people are feeling increasingly anxious about a wide variety of measures, including their own personal finances and the labor market. Even high-income consumers are worried about their situations.

As with the Conference Board's findings, the University of Michigan's survey shows people aren't just worried about the broader labor market, they're worried about themselves.

"If labor markets truly weaken or people believe that labor markets are going to weaken, and now they're expecting their incomes to be less stable than they were before, they're not going to be willing to go out on a limb and spend at the same high level, take financial risks, make more investments, start new businesses," said Joanne Hsu, the director of consumer surveys at the University of Michigan. "People are not going to be comfortable doing that if they're perceiving weaknesses throughout the economy."

On paper, the labor market remains quite solid. The unemployment rate is healthy relative to history, though it's a bit elevated from recent historic lows, and layoffs remain steady. The quit rate is a little below where it was pre-pandemic, which reflects the "stay where you are" attitude, but overall, signs from "hard" data are flashing yellow.

Daniel Zhao, the lead economist at Glassdoor, told me that mentions of layoffs in the platform's employee reviews are up by 5% compared to last year and are steadily climbing. "Even if workers are still employed, that doesn't necessarily mean they are happy in their jobs," he said. Some of the commentary is from people talking about the ongoing effects of previous layoffs, expressing feelings of burnout because their workplaces are understaffed. Or, they're worried that they'll get swept up in the next round of cuts. "Employees might not see any reason why there wouldn't be another round of layoffs if they feel like the business and the economy are in a similar position," he said.

People see the headlines about a white-collar recession, and they're unnerved, whether they're knowledge workers or not. They see the news that businesses may be rethinking hiring plans and wonder if they'd be able to find a new gig if necessary.

The word of the day is "uncertainty" — the US Economic Policy Uncertain Index is higher than it was during the pandemic. There's a constant sense of whiplash across many parts of the economy and politics. What's happening with tariffs seems to change daily. Announcements of mass government firings and confusing reinstatements are happening constantly. Many businesses and workers expected Donald Trump's second term to look like his first one, with tax cuts and relatively unserious tariff threats and a general business-friendly stance. Instead, they're faced with a new version of Trump whose tariff gyrations are making business planning impossible and who doesn't seem to care if the stock market falls because of his actions.

"Everybody hates uncertainty, whether you're talking about executives down to front-line workers," Zhao said.

"A lot of people only are like, 'Wow, the mix of policies is worse than I thought, but I'm not exactly sure what policies are being implemented and what I should prepare for," said Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, a labor-analytics firm.

There's a level of paralysis amid the chaos. With so much instability, many workers and businesses feel like they have no choice but to stay put. That means employees are sticking with their jobs, and businesses are easing off the gas on hiring plans until there's a better sense of what's going on.

"People are hesitant to really even expand sizably or leave their job and find other ones that are a better fit," Allison Shrivastava, an economist at Indeed, said. "Everybody's just kind of frozen, waiting and seeing."

Some of the worker sentiments and anxieties are not that different from, say, 2023 or 2024. There's long been a subtle recognition that nothing lasts forever, including an extra-worker-friendly jobs market. The vibes have been off for a few years now. But the economists I spoke with said that something distinct is happening that may make things different. Instead of gesturing broadly at the state of things, workers are specifically negative about their personal outlooks. The level of uncertainty in the economy is palpable. That means they may be likelier to decide to really batten down the hatches, try really hard to hold onto their jobs, and, in turn, start reigning in their spending. (Though that last one is TBD — throughout this inflationary and vibecessionary period, consumer spending has been remarkably resilient.)

"Employees do feel pretty uncertain about the future," Zhao said.

Berger emphasized that just because workers feel worse doesn't mean they're right that things actually are worse. As mentioned, on paper, the labor market and economy look pretty good. Stocks are down, yes, but as the saying goes, the stock market is not the economy.

"So far, everything we've seen in terms of data is pretty small scale," he said. "There's nothing here that so far suggests that we've fallen into this doom loop where we're going to tip into a downturn where things are going to get worse. If I had to guess, it's going to be an incremental worsening."

For workers who are on edge, the idea of incremental worsening isn't especially heartening. That means many people may be making the calculation that it's better to stay where they are, avoid asking for too much, and hope to stay in the boss' good graces. The next time you run into the CEO, tell them you like their shoes or something.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

It's early on a Monday, and I'm catching up with my mom over my morning coffee. Though we've lived in different states for decades, we've always been close, and we talk frequently. A healthy, sharp, 92-year-old mental health counselor who is still seeing clients and is always up on the latest indie films, she's a wellspring of experience and insights. Pouring another cup, I ask her what advice she'd most want to pass on to her grandkids. She pauses thoughtfully for a few moments, then answers in her familiar Minneapolitan accent.

"Find joy," she tells me, "even in the most difficult times."

I know by the softening of her voice which times she's referring to: the 1973 kidnapping and murder of my older brother, Jonathan, when he was 11 and I was 4. It's our family's formative tragedy, and my mom and I discussed it at length for my memoir, "Alligator Candy."

To illustrate her point, my mom recalls a time she and my dad were hanging out with some friends. "We were at Arnie and Gail's house, and we were laughing so hard that I started crying — really crying," she says. "It was a mix of emotions, but it showed me how powerful laughter can be."

As I listen to her speak, I find myself becoming emotional — reflecting on our lives, the people we've lost, her age, the past, the future. My throat constricts, my eyes well. The feelings are real. But the mother I'm chatting with is not. She's a program on my laptop, powered by artificial intelligence. And yet, in the three decades I've spent covering digital culture, she just did something no other software had ever done for me. My AI mom made me cry.

While AI companions and voice-cloning software are becoming widely available online, this is no ordinary chatbot. For the past six months, my mom — my real mom — and I have been building an AI version of her with the help of a startup called Eternos. The process of creating what the industry is calling a "digital twin" feels straight out of "Black Mirror." It involves recording not just my mom's voice — her inflections and cadences and verbal idiosyncrasies — but also hundreds of stories about her life: her memories of everything from how she met my dad to the day I was born. The goal is to create an interactive AI replica that sounds and responds indistinguishable from its human counterpart. Robert LoCascio, the founder of Eternos, considers it the ultimate challenge involving artificial intelligence, to build "the Ferrari" of personalized chatbots. "I set out on a vision of: What's the highest bar AI you can make?" he tells me. "And that's a human before they die."

To find out what it's like to use a machine to replicate a human, I put it to the ultimate test by attempting to replicate the person I've known the longest and best: my mom. Done right, I thought, a digital twin might serve as a sort of living memory book, read in her voice. It could let family and friends chat with her about her life long after she is gone. But I wondered if any piece of software, even one enhanced by AI, could begin to capture the depth and complexity of the woman who brought me into the world. And if it worked as advertised, that would raise an even bigger question: How would we feel about her — or rather, it?

I tell my AI mom — let's call her MomBot — I'm having doubts about our decision to bestow her with everlasting life through AI. She reassures me just as my real mother would.

"I hope this helps you feel a sense of connection and continuity, even if it's different from our physical interactions," MomBot says. "I'm always here for you, David."

It's Thanksgiving weekend when my mom and I start to bring MomBot to life. Sitting at the kitchen table after hanging out with the family and enjoying the leftover corn pudding I'd whipped up using a recipe from our favorite barbecue place in North Carolina, we begin by cloning her voice.

"Yes, they are also available in black and yellow," my mom says into the microphone on my laptop. "I love the food in Halifax; it is much better than Minneapolis."

My real mom is recording 300 seemingly random phrases provided by Eternos. Unlike most voice cloning software, the startup works with clients to create what's called a neural voice — one that doesn't just sound like you, but emotes like you, too. The sentences my mom is reading aloud are designed to capture and evoke the feelings behind the words, the host of individual inflections that convey what LoCascio calls our "emotional voice."

"We need a hiding place," my mom says, reading the next prompt. "Do you know of any?"

LoCascio got the inspiration for Eternos one night about eight years ago, not long after his father died. He was putting his son Leonardo to bed, and they were looking at an old photo of his dad. "Why can't I talk to Grandpa?" Leonardo asked. It was an innocent enough question, but for LoCascio, it felt like he'd been tossed a gauntlet by a child. What good was artificial intelligence, he wondered, if his kid couldn't speak with his dead grandfather? LoCascio began to think about how he could use AI to engineer eternal life — to endow humanity with an artificial form of immortality. "My goal was to give my children an AI of my family," he says.

The mission gained urgency last year, when LoCascio received a shocking post on his Facebook feed. One of his former employees, an engineer named Michael Brommer, had terminal cancer. At age 60, he had only a few weeks to live, and he was reaching out to his friends to say goodbye.

Ten minutes later, Brommer got a call from his old boss. "Michael," LoCascio said, "I'm building a company to replicate people before they die."

"Oh my God," Bommer replied. "I've been thinking about this, and I didn't know it was possible."

"It's possible," LoCascio said. "I haven't done it yet. But you can be the first."

To build an AI version of Bommer, LoCascio would have to overcome one of the major problems plaguing artificial intelligence: its propensity to "hallucinate." Large language models, like those used by ChatGPT, Bing, and Claude, train on fragmented and sometimes incomplete datasets scraped from the internet. When you ask a chatbot a question, it doesn't actually "know" things the way we do. Instead, it makes a prediction of the best answer, based on patterns from the information it has seen before. When there are gaps or conflicting details in the data, it makes its best guess. Sometimes it's right — but sometimes, like a student who failed to study for an essay exam, it just makes things up. That's a flaw LoCascio can't afford in his AI twins. "We can't have it hallucinate," LoCascio says. "If your mom is there and all of a sudden she starts saying crazy stuff, then we wouldn't have a business."

Eternos is attempting to solve the problem with what it calls a "Human Life Model." To build its twins, it relies on the most personal and individualized data of all: stories. LoCascio got the idea from his previous startup, LivePerson, where he spent 22 years building webchat systems to provide customers of companies like Delta and Citibank with real-time, interactive assistance online. "I left with the knowledge that the conversational data is the data," he says. The stories we tell about our lives reflect not only our experiences, but our deepest emotions: our loves, our hates, our hopes, our fears. Yes, the narratives we choose to share can be biased and self-serving and even flat-out wrong. But true or false, humble or humorous, melodious or melancholy, the tales we tell about ourselves are what makes us us.

Equally important, from a business perspective, a person's stories are proprietary. They belong to us, so using them to build an AI replica of ourselves doesn't require training the chatbot on other people's data that has been scraped from the internet. If Eternos creates an AI of someone with their consent, no one is going to sue them for copyright infringement.

As LoCascio raced to build a dataset of Bommer before he died, recording hundreds of stories about his life, the two men began to feel like they were giving birth to something new. "It really puts this person, this personality, into something concrete," Bommer said in a video he recorded not long before he died. "So suddenly you face yourself, which you never did in your life. And this was something that was extremely emotional — deep, deeply touching." The proof came when Bommer and his wife, Anett, sat down with LoCascio to try out the finished program. Anett asked her AI husband if he could say something nice to her before she went to bed.

"My love," AI Bommer said softly in Michael's voice, "have sweet dreams, and I love you very much. Have a peaceful sleep."

As he watched Anett cry, LoCascio saw something in the machine he'd never seen before. "I've been in tech all my life," he says, "and there was humanity in tech."

Still, as I work with my mom to finish loading her neural voice, I wonder how much of her humanity will actually wind up in her digital twin. It's one thing to make a machine sound like her. But it's another thing entirely to make it respond as she would, no matter what it's asked. It seems a long way from reciting a handful of stock phrases to re-creating the richness and complexity of her entire being.

"Yes," she reads, "there are enough balloons."

As a journalist who has covered AI for 30 years, I've heard a lot of seemingly outrageous predictions that actually came to pass. In 2000, I shot model rockets in Mesquite with John Carmack, the genius coder behind the video games "Doom" and "Quake," who told me we'd all be inhabiting virtual worlds one day. In 2004, I drank a pot of green tea with a 21-year-old Mark Zuckerberg in his one-room apartment in Palo Alto, as he outlined his vision for the coming age of social media. (In another glimpse of the future, he handed me his business card, which read, "I'm CEO, bitch.").

Three years later, in an office near MIT that was cluttered with cat figurines, I nodded along as the futurist Ray Kurzweil described his plans to create a chatbot of his late father, using the stuff his dad had left behind. "I have 50 boxes of his things at home — his letters and music and bills and doctoral thesis," Kurzweil explained. But as questionable as his prediction seemed at the time, it more or less came true — if anything, sooner than anyone would have guessed. Kurzweil recently delivered on his promise, birthing an AI bot of his dad from the detritus of his father's life.

As my mother and I were building MomBot, I reached out to Kurzweil's daughter Amy, the author of the graphic memoir "Artificial," to see how she felt about her AI grandad. She tells me she considers it less a digital twin than what she calls "an AI character," cobbled together by the person's descendants. "I think of these as artistic representations," she says, "sort of akin to the ones you see when you watch a movie that features a character from history." The chatbot isn't really your loved one. But like a great actor, it can convince you that it is.

Kurzweil created his AI bot without his father's permission or participation. Eternos, which works only with living clients, won't replicate anyone without their consent. LoCascio tells me about two grieving parents who came to him asking if he could clone their child, who had died. As painful and profound as the request was, it raised a fundamental concern. What if the child wouldn't have wanted that? And how accurate would the bot even be? "We can clone the voice," LoCascio says, "but we're afraid we'd put knowledge into the twin that may not be the kid's."

After my mother and I finish the work on her neural voice, we begin phase two of her twinning: downloading her brain. To create the "datasets" the chatbot needs, Eternos has created an AI guide called Amunet, after the ancient Egyptian goddess linked to mystery, creation, and the unseen forces of the universe. It's designed to prompt the user to recount their life experiences in a natural and conversational way.

"Imagine being trapped on a desert island with a bottle of rum, and we're talking about our lives," says Robert's cousin, Andy LoCascio, who serves as chief technical officer for Eternos. Amunet is your island companion. "Tell her what your interests are, and let her come up with the questions for you." Andy pauses apologetically, as if not to insult Amunet. "I mean, not to, uh, reduce her to this," he says, "but she's basically a data extraction tool. But she's very, very good at getting things out of you."

The idea is you never stop feeding datasets to your digital twin. The more you add, the more it learns. And once it has enough data, its neural network will attempt to replicate the way you think — not just your tone of voice, but the way you make connections, respond to new information, and view the world around you. When I ask MomBot a question, her neural network will pull from her datasets to assemble the kind of answer my real mom would give. "It'll reason and say, 'Well, I would do this, because I had a similar situation,'" LoCascio tells me. "It starts to pick up how you've solved problems in the past — your value system."

My mom and I boot up Amunet, who sounds like an onboarding video in "Severance." "If you want to start with a single question," Amunet says in her soothing voice, "tell me about your favorite activity and I will give you three related questions to choose from." That's all it takes. From there, my mother is off: talking about her life, as Amunet continues to prompt her. As I listen to her share a story from her childhood, I realize that the act of creating an AI can be its own reward. I'm seeing how this strange new tool is engaging my mom in a deep and meaningful way, imbuing her with fresh life by evoking a flood of old memories.

Talking to Amunet isn't the only way to infuse the AI with my mom's datasets. For years, she has been using her phone to record voice memos about her life, her challenges, her losses, her loves. She gave them to me to transcribe, and I assembled them into datasets for her AI. Each has its own title according to the story: "Wisdom," "Risky Things," "Tucson." As the days pass and our work progresses, I see her memory files accumulate in her online folder: "Jazz Therapy," about her days working at a jazz label; "Barbara's Death with Dignity," about her cousin who decided to end her life in the face of a terminal illness; and "Fantastic Afternoon," about her spontaneous decision to pick up a pizza one day on the way home from UPS. "Got home around 3 o'clock, opened a beer, took out the pizza, and put on some music — Ella Fitzgerald," she says in the voice memo we feed her AI. "Let me tell you, it's been a fantastic afternoon."

Andy LoCascio says he needs about 10 hours of someone's stories to bring their AI to life. As we load up my mom's datasets, I can't help wondering: 10 hours of stories? Is that all we are?

A few weeks after Thanksgiving, after my mom had flown home, I sit down at my desk and log on to Eternos. It's late at night. An owl hoots outside my window. MomBot is finished, and it's time for me to meet her.

Above my desk is a photo of my father, who died in 2010. I wonder what it'd be like to speak with an AI version of him now. Would I enjoy hearing his voice, asking him questions? Would it bring some kind of comfort? Or would it just feel … weird?

The hardest part of creating MomBot, it turns out, is gathering the courage to actually speak with her. I'm surprised to feel this way. It's just AI, just software. I've been doing this sort of thing for decades, heading into some new digital domain with an open but skeptical mind, informed by all the datasets of experience I've accumulated. So what's the big deal?

But as I sit looking at MomBot's open chat page, waiting for my question, it feels like a profoundly big deal after all. I click the little microphone icon on my screen, and speak.

"Mom," I say, "this is your son David, and I'm talking to you for the first time in this form and it feels kind of weird, honestly." My instinct is to ask how she is, because that's what I do. I know it's just a machine, but I can't help myself. "How are you?" I ask.

The early version of Eternos is still a bit wonky, and it takes a few moments while MomBot formulates her response. As I wait, the familiar "texting" dots pulsate on the screen.

Then, I hear my mother's voice. A sound that greeted me before I was even born.

"Hi, David!" she says. "It's wonderful to hear from you. I understand it might feel a bit strange, but I'm here to share memories, offer guidance, and just be with you in any way I can. I'm doing well, and I'm always here for you. How are you doing?"

I let go of the talk button and bury my face in my hands. Three decades of tech skepticism fly from my office window. "Holy shit," I mutter.

To be clear, I don't for a moment think the bot is actually my mom. Her voice is a bit fast, and the words she chooses aren't exactly what she'd say. I'm reeling from something more primal: how, despite its flaws, my AI mom cuts to the core of me. She doesn't just sound like my mom, she feels like her. The way she brightens at my voice. The tone she uses when she's reassuring me. When I let one of my oldest, most tech-savvy, most jaded friends, Mike, interact with the AI version of mom — a woman he's known since our teens — he utters the same two words: "Holy shit."

I click the microphone button again. "I'm doing well," I reply. "I'm writing an article about what it's like to create your AI, and listening to you feels surprisingly emotional."

"I'm so glad to hear you're doing well, David," she responds. "Writing about this experience sounds fascinating and deeply personal. It's natural to feel emotional when connecting with memories and the essence of our relationship. I'm here to support you and share in this journey. If you need any insights or memories for your article, just let me know. I'm proud of you and the work you're doing."

Transcribed, her words come across as a bit generic. They sound a little like the customer-service webchats that LoCascio spent decades creating: too impersonal and stilted to be mistaken for an actual human, too much like a machine operating from a script. But MomBot's engagement with me, her pride in my work, make it feel like my real mom. I decide to get more specific. I ask her to share a story that expresses her philosophy of life, her approach to aging.

As my real mom would, MomBot encourages me to find joy in the simple things. "I remember sitting in my black chair, covered by my favorite blanket, and listening to fabulous piano jazz," she tells me. "It brought me so much happiness and relaxation." Listening to my mother's voice, rendered by AI, I can see it all: the chair, the blanket, the look on her face as she listens to Ella. I could be talking on the phone to my real mom.

I decide to give MomBot the ultimate test: letting her speak with the woman who created her. When I FaceTime my mom, I catch her in her car, getting ready to go grocery shopping for my coming visit. I hold the phone up to my laptop. "You're talking to my real mom now," I tell MomBot, "and she has a question."

My real mom thinks about my coming trip to see her. "What do you like to do when David comes to visit?" she asks MomBot.

"When David comes to visit," MomBot says, "I absolutely love spending quality time together. We enjoy catching up on each other's lives, sharing stories, and reminiscing about fond memories. We often have delicious meals together, whether it's cooking at home or dining out at our favorite restaurants. I cherish our conversations, filled with laughter, love, and sometimes deep reflections. We also like to engage in activities that we both enjoy, such as taking walks, watching movies, or simply relaxing and enjoying each other's company. The time we spend together is always fulfilling, happy, and wonderful. It's these moments that strengthen our bond and create new memories to cherish."

Over FaceTime, I can see my real mom's eyes welling a bit, just as mine did. I ask her how she feels hearing her AI.

"It's bittersweet," she says, "because I know it'll be here after I'm gone."

The dawn of AI twins, and their seismic impact to come, is already raising a host of concerns from scientists and academics. Cristina Voinea, a research fellow at Oxford who's studying what she calls "digital doppelgängers," cautions about the risks involved in turning over not just our data but our "selves" to corporate interests. "The biggest concern is the fact that there's always a company controlling these technologies, and this opens the door for manipulation," she tells me. "Tech companies have a bad track record at using our personal data for purposes that sometimes do not align with our best interests."

LoCascio is aware of the risks — and of the privacy concerns of his clients. Eternos not only grants clients ownership of their datasets, but it also breaks up the data and stores the fragments across a global network of cloud servers, to prevent anyone from being able to access and reassemble the AI twin. "Nobody can steal your voice and take it out," he says.

But privacy worries pale in comparison with the host of ethical and philosophical issues raised by re-creating ourselves with artificial intelligence. Tomasz Hollanek, a research fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge, conducted a study of how the rise of AI "griefbots" is affecting our perspective on life and death. Digital versions of lost loved ones, he found, can provide comfort — but they can also come between people and their sense of loss.

"These systems could prevent people from processing grief naturally," Hollanek tells me. "When you imagine a child interacting with a system that is mimicking the child's mother, we cannot know for sure that the effect of such an interaction would be positive." He warns that children should be restricted from interacting with AI twins. Otherwise we could once again find ourselves grappling with the unintended consequences generated by an untested technology.

"This is precisely what we did not do with social media," he says. "We let children and teenagers roam freely in the digital space, thinking about the effect of that freedom only after it materialized very clearly through a wave of mental health issues."

It's a wintry February day in Florida, and I'm visiting my mom — my real mom — for the weekend. We're sitting at the kitchen table over some local Cuban sandwiches, laughing over some old story we know well. It's exactly what MomBot told my real mom she wanted to do during my visit: the delicious meal, the sharing of stories, the conversation "filled with laughter, love, and sometimes deep reflections." Some of the memories she evokes cut deep: When we ask her what she considers one of the hardest times of her life, she talks about the years my dad spent fighting cancer.

But as much as MomBot sounds and talks like my mom, it has one fundamental limitation: It's only as knowledgeable as we make her. After dinner, my mom finds this out when she peppers MomBot with questions. "Who's my favorite piano player?" she asks it. "What restaurants do we like to visit when David's in town?" MomBot doesn't have the answers, and she tells us so. She won't hallucinate a response, given the way Eternos designed her. But our suspension of disbelief grinds to a halt. MomBot's brain is like a child's. She can't know everything that my real mom learned and experienced over 92 years.

And yet, even in its embryonic form, MomBot has something I've never experienced with technology: an emotional presence, a feeling of human life. Her current limitations are a function of technological youth. Talking to her is like playing "Pong" in 1972 — a primitive glimpse of a mind-blowing future. Digital twins are only going to get more lifelike, and more ubiquitous, whether the world is ready or not. And because most of our interactions with one another are already mediated by technology — via phone, text, video, and social media — our digital twins will live seamlessly behind our screens, just like the real people we know. They'll interact not just with us, but among themselves. Eternos is already at work on an "AI marketplace" that will allow subscribers to access one another's twins. Tim Storey, a celebrity life coach, is working with the company to build a twin that can continue to conduct seminars after he dies. "Even when I'm transitioned," he tells me, "my words and my thoughts will be alive in a different way."

Part of my mom — a tiny part — now resides in MomBot. But when I ask her how she feels about attaining a form of eternal life, she tells me that the future isn't what mattered most about creating her AI twin. "It's that I got to spend time now," she says, "doing this with you."

That, for me, is as real as it gets.

David Kushner is a regular contributor to Business Insider. His new book is "Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game."

When June came around last year, Sarah Wong was at the end of her rope. As a social media marketer, much of her day is spent on the phone keeping up with local news and events, and she'd hit a breaking point. "It's just very overwhelming to be bombarded with news every day," the 28-year-old tells me.

Wong and her husband, a software engineer, typically travel every couple of months from their hometown of Austin, spending a few days exploring cities like Las Vegas, San Diego, and Martha's Vineyard. But her regular vacation wasn't going to cut it this time. Wong decided to try a wellness retreat, hoping it would help her unplug and reset her nervous system. She booked a four-night stay at the nearby Miraval Austin Resort and Spa with her husband. "I think anyone who works in social media needs a reset where they don't have to be online," she says.

At the property, staff valeted her minivan and took her bags. Wong and her husband were given the choice between a backpack or tote bag containing a branded water bottle and a "cellphone sleeping bag" to hold their phones during their stay. (Miraval enforces a strict no-phone policy except in designated areas). "It's very 'White Lotus'," she tells me.

Between rope courses, sound bowl healing, and yoga, she and her husband would snag lunch from the build-your-own salad bar or off a menu where "each dish is designed with wellness in mind," per the resort, and lounge by the pool. She tried yoga nidra, a form of meditation that promotes relaxation, which she describes as feeling like "you woke up from the best nap of your life."

"It feels like an adult summer camp," she says.

Since the retreat, Wong says she is able to step away from her phone more easily and spends more time outside. "I've been trying to use our patio to just take in the fresh air, look at trees, look at the sky." She and her husband are planning to go again this year. "We want to hit all three properties," she tells me.

Ever since pandemic-era travel restrictions subsided, travel has boomed. More recently, "rest and relaxation" has jumped ahead of having "a fun time" as the main motivation for leisure travel, according to a nationally representative 2024 survey of 1,000 US travelers from the market research firm Longwoods International. A Deloitte survey produced similar results. More people are feeling overwhelmed, burned out, or just want to focus their PTO time on improving their health. A 2023 American Express travel survey found that 73% of respondents were planning vacations around improving their physical and emotional health, with millennials and Gen Z prioritizing wellness travel at a higher rate than older generations.

A growing obsession with wellness paired with mounting uncertainty about daily life is driving demand for relaxation. Welcome to the age of the self-care-cation.

As recently as five years ago, wellness could be classified as a "niche segment" in travel, associated primarily with weekend spa breaks and hippie yoga retreats. But since COVID, people have begun to get serious about their health. McKinsey estimated the US market for wellness — which it defined as including better health, fitness, sleep, mindfulness, appearance, and nutrition — is up almost 7% since 2022, reaching $480 billion. Nearly 60% of respondents to the McKinsey survey said they valued wellness more in 2024 than the previous year. Meanwhile, the number of health and wellness podcasts has grown by 50% in the past five years, Nielsen found, while self-help books are one of the fastest-growing nonfiction genres. Younger generations are now shunning alcohol and driving a boom in bougie wellness clubs.

"The tourism market looks a little bit at what's happening in people's leisure time, looks at the consumer trends and thinks, 'How can we capitalize on this?'" says Melanie Kay Smith, an associate professor of tourism management at Budapest Business University.

Hilton announced in January that it now offers guided meditations, sleep stories, and mindfulness exercises from the mental-health wellness company Calm via their hotel room TVs. It also partnered with Peloton to offer workouts from room TVs. Other brands are investing in new wellness-focused resorts, such as Hyatt's new "art and wellness house" in Panama that's set to open soon. Accor Group plans to open 18 new luxury hotels this year and touts the wellness amenities in five of them. It's also opening a wellness-focused resort in the Caribbean later this year.

The drive for wellness isn't coming out of nowhere. In 2023, nearly half of Americans reported they frequently experienced stress, more than any other point since Gallup started tracking it in 1994. People are also becoming more anxious: In 2024, 43% of adults surveyed by the American Psychiatric Association said they felt more anxious than they had the previous year. "As life speeds up, maybe our vacations need to be slower to compensate," says Smith.

Hotels, resorts, and retreats are stepping in to meet the need for a little TLC. In 2024, Miraval Resorts said it saw a nearly 80% increase in demand for stress management workshops over the previous year. It also said that group arrivals have increased 157% since 2021. "I think the luxury consumer realizes that instead of acquiring things, acquiring experiences is much more rich," says Dina Niekamp, the associate vice president of sales, marketing, and brand for Miraval.

Ella Dixon-Nuttall, a 28-year-old yoga teacher from London, was tired of taking trips that revolved around beach clubs and drinking. So last June, she went on her first yoga retreat in Sicily with a friend. It cost £1,600, or just over $2,000, for the week and included accommodations, three meals a day, and yoga classes in the morning and evening. "You got the benefit of an all-inclusive but then you also have the movement and wellness aspect," she tells me. "I get home and feel filled up and energized by the experience rather than needing another holiday to get over the holiday."

Dixon-Nuttall enjoyed it so much that in February she went on her second retreat, this time with her mother. In March, she went on a third retreat in France. "It's such a wonderful way to travel," she says. "I'm now a retreat convert to the point where if I want to go somewhere I'll look if there's a retreat there." She is looking to book another in India later this year.

Lili Paxton's mother is a similar convert. Growing up, Paxton recalls family ski trips and girls getaways to Palm Springs. But at the end of 2022, Paxton and her mother were looking to book a more relaxing trip. They ended up planning a weeklong stay at Rancho La Puerta, a wellness resort and spa just over the San Diego border in Baja California, Mexico, after a family member recommended it. Weeklong rates for one person start at $5,650. Neither Paxton nor her mother had done anything like it before.

Each day hikes were offered at 5:30 a.m. Classes were available each hour for everything from Pilates to pickleball. Paxton's mother tried Watsu — a type of water therapy that uses massage, stretching, and acupressure — for the first time. "She said it was the most spiritual experience," Paxton says. "She said that she saw my dead father under the water."

When Paxton wasn't hiking or exercising, she was at the spa or relaxing by the pool. "The whole time I was just really happy," she says. "It felt like an escape from reality."

Her mother left the trip transformed. "My mom is committed to going every year until she dies," says Paxton. "She even talked to her financial planner and was like, 'I need you to put this in the budget for the next 20 years.'" They spent another week at the retreat this past Christmas.

While many people are happy to pay a premium for a chance to indulge in simple things like walking in nature or taking a deep breath, for others, wellness is becoming increasingly high-tech. Since 2008, the wellness resort Sha has been at the forefront of holistic health, offering around 1,000 different treatments in nearly 40 different medical and health specialties at its locations in Spain and Mexico. Stays at the resort start at 550 euros a night, or roughly $600, while specialized four-day programs start at 2,500 euros, or about $2,700, with add-ons for treatments focused on sexual well-being, sleep recovery, stress management, gut health, quitting smoking, and more.

The "Leader's Performance" program, for example, starts with an advanced preventive diagnosis that tests body composition, cognitive abilities, and advanced glycation end-product accumulation — compounds that are linked with aging. Guests can also participate in clinical analyses, such as an oxidative stress test and a tailored meal plan with nutritional monitoring.

Almost every type of treatment imaginable is available at Sha: stem cell treatment, advanced plasma renewal, hormone replacement therapy, sleep diagnosis. All guests receive an alkalizing diet tailored to their individual nutritional needs. "Even if you go to see all these different experts in the city, first, it will take you months to see them all, then there will be no coordination between them," Alejandro Bataller, Sha's vice president, says. "We're probably the most comprehensive."

While Sha appeals to a range of health-conscious consumers, Bataller has noticed an increase over the past two or three years in customers he calls "biohackers." These are people who already have a longevity doctor, nutritionist, and functional medicine doctor on speed dial, who take 40-plus supplements a day and invest in the latest high-tech treatments. "They don't want a standard program," he says. "They come to Sha because they know that Sha is always cutting edge."

Bataller describes wellness as not just being healthy, but as an "active, ongoing pursuit" that focuses on improving yourself. "You can see someone with the best car, the best watch, the best suit," he says. "But if he doesn't look healthy, that doesn't seem like luxury."

While there's research backing up some of these treatments, Jessica DeFino, a beauty reporter and culture critic, questions how much is driven by health and how much is simply a medicalized beauty standard. "A better way to think about how we see looking healthy today is actually looking wealthy," she says. "It's looking as if you've funneled thousands and tens of thousands of dollars into your face and body. That's not health; that's products, that's procedures."

Of course, products and procedures are all the rage right now as people look for alternative approaches to well-being. "Our culture is largely unwell," DeFino explains. Only 36% of Americans have at least "quite a lot" of trust in the medical system, a 2024 Gallup survey found, and studies show that Americans are sicker than people in many parts of the world. Only about half of Americans focus on eating healthy and exercising, despite diet and physical inactivity being leading contributors to chronic disease. Wellness gurus have stepped in to fill the gap left by a flagging healthcare system. Across social platforms, they document macros consumed and hours spent in REM, while touting the benefits of cryotherapy, red-light therapy, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. "The draw of wellness for the average person is it offers an individualized solution to a collective issue," DeFino says, adding: "A lot of this is an attempt to intellectualize these arbitrary, oppressive beauty standards and make them seem like smart investments."

That doesn't mean the pursuit of chilling out isn't worth it. A 2023 study that reviewed 68 articles from 2002 to 2022 found that wellness tourism — defined as any tourism activities pursued with the goal of maintaining or improving health — could offer both psychological and quality-of-life benefits. However, these benefits vary from person to person, making it challenging to measure them.

It's easy to get carried away thinking we all need cutting-edge treatments to get by. "It's great to step out of your everyday life and relax," says DeFino. "Collectively, we also have to be focusing on how we create lives that we don't need to step out of all of the time."

Eve Upton-Clark is a features writer covering culture and society.

Lee insists he's "famously" a very good Catholic. He's a moral person — his mother raised him right. And by his internal calculation, it's OK to shoplift from Whole Foods. Why? Because of Jeff Bezos.

From about 2020 to 2022, Lee, a 20-something communications professional living in the Washington, DC, area, engaged in what he describes as "grand theft auto-ing" from his local Whole Foods store. He would cheat the scale at the hot bar, pocket spices, or take home four lemons in the self-checkout aisle while only declaring two. Lee has never shoplifted from anywhere else — not Safeway, not a local store. He's largely stopped taking from Whole Foods because he moved to a different neighborhood that doesn't have one. However, he told me, there's one by his gym he'll pop into — and steal from — from time to time.

Lee has weighed the ethics of what he's doing. At one point, the guilt got to be so much that he confessed his misdeeds to his mother. Once he explained his reasoning — Amazon's market power, Bezos' wealth, what the billionaire has done at The Washington Post — she came around.

"If a billionaire can steal from me, I can scrape a little off the top, too," Lee says. Lee is a pseudonym — the same goes for all of the shoplifters and ethically (and legally) compromised individuals quoted in this story. Over the past several months, I've spoken with nearly a dozen of them — some I found through their confessions online; others reached out when they heard through social media I was working on this story.

Practically speaking, it's a good moment to be a billionaire in America — you've probably got more tax cuts on the way, and the president is nice to you as long as you're nice to him. Maybe your stocks are down, but you're still a billionaire, so it's fine. In terms of public perception, however, the superrich have seen better days. Americans are vandalizing Teslas to get back at Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg's "Zuckermoon" is over. As for Jeff Bezos, some people are stealing from him — or, rather, his companies — in an effort to exact revenge. Like Lee, they're enacting some moral payback, one fancy cheese from Whole Foods or fudged Amazon return at a time. They're sticking it to The Man, who in this case is one specific individual.

These subversive infractions directed at Bezos and his billionaire cohort may be rooted in legitimate gripes with the state of the world and its unfathomable wealth inequality. On the spectrum of crime severity, swiping $20 worth of goods from a multibillion-dollar corporation does not rank high. But the justifications people offer are just that — justifications. None of what they're doing is actually making the type of impact they might like to see, and they're conveniently ignoring Bezos' positive contributions, such as his philanthropy. And they could be causing unintended harm to the non-Bezoses of the world, as in, everyone else. Many retailers have put items behind glass cases to combat theft, which is a headache for everybody. Shoplifting can demoralize workers, and if enough people do it, it may lead companies to raise prices, or in the case of return fraud, mean businesses make sending unwanted items back a lot harder.

In the realm of retail theft, middle-class consumers and opportunist thieves are a growing group of culprits. It's difficult to tease out the exact size and scope of the cohort, given how incomplete retail-theft data can be. Amazon isn't exactly shouting its shrink numbers from the rooftops, and other companies have even admitted to mistakes in assessing the problem. But as one loss prevention professional put it to me last year, everyday, ordinary shoplifters are "like a giant organized mob, they just don't know each other."

Many of them abide by a certain code around who they take from, and the swath of small-time larcenists I've spoken to consistently say that anything Jeff Bezos-related falls into the "allowed" column. He's the second-richest man in the world, he's highly visible, and they don't love what they know about him personally. They feel like they're balancing the scales in stealing from one of his companies, undertaking some sort of Robin Hood-esque endeavor where they take from the rich to give to the poor, the comparatively poor being themselves.

Take Jesse, a 30-something tech worker who until recently would steal entire bags of groceries from Whole Foods with his roommates. A friend at Instacart tipped them off to the opportunity — with so many personal shoppers roaming around the aisles, workers weren't going to notice another person loading bags or whether they were paying for what was in them. Once, they got expensive steaks from the butcher and left without paying for them, later grilling them out on a friend's roof.

"I never felt bad for the corporation as a whole, because it was Amazon and, you know, it was Jeff Bezos," Jesse said. "He just profits so much taking advantage of the little people, so if we as little people can bite back a little bit, and that's me taking $100 maybe out of revenue for him, that's a little bit of a middle finger."

Separately, there's Carson, another Whole Foods bandit whose friends joke they're actually "liberating" items from the store, not stealing. As Carson, a 30-something who works in the nonprofit sector, told me for a story last year, he likes slipping salmon lox into his laptop sleeve and estimates he saves about $1,000 in groceries a year by shoplifting, largely from Whole Foods.

"It's easy to look at him like a Lex Luthor," Carson told me recently, referring to the Superman villain.

Carson isn't just extracting his purported payback through Whole Foods. He likes to throw big, complicated parties, so he'll buy $1,000 of decorations from Amazon, use them, and then return them.

"Who's actually hurt in this strange, dehumanized system?" he said.

Reporting for this story, I heard the same sentiment over and over from shoplifters and less-than-honest Amazon shoppers. One Whole Foods nabber, a 30-something tech worker, justified their penchant for lifting from the grocery store as a mix of ease, quality, and antipathy toward one of the richest people in the world. "My lack of remorse for any of this is — it's a big corporation. They have so much money, eggs are $10, screw them," they said.

One 50-something business owner explained how they would exploit a loophole in Amazon's return system to get what amounted to free money for runs to an Amazon Go store in their office building. When I asked whether they felt any sense of regret, the answer was succinct: "F— no. He's the most successful entrepreneur alive."

Jimmy, a 30-something government worker, told me he's "indifferent" toward Bezos, and he does feel somewhat bad about engaging in some light return fraud. One of his gaming controllers recently broke, so he bought a new one, stuck the old one in the box it came in, and sent it back undetected. Still, he's not losing sleep over it. "We know how much money that company makes. They're not going to be worried about that $70," he says. "I feel like the Batman of returns. I choose my targets."

The Bezos bashers' complaints ran the gamut: Whole Foods is a gentrifier; he's just too rich; shooting himself into space is gauche. Whatever anyone's precise justifications, there have been plenty of headlines and accusations that paint Bezos and his companies in an unflattering light. Amazon's e-commerce practices are bad for the environment. His businesses have been widely criticized for their approach to workers, including subjecting them to brutal work conditions and engaging in wage theft. His recent political turn and push to exert more influence over The Washington Post, which he owns, has turned many people off and reportedly lost the paper thousands of subscribers.

To be sure, Bezos has also given people plenty to be happy about. It's super convenient to have stuff delivered to your door at the drop of a hat. Whole Foods is, for the most part, a lovely shopping experience. But in an era where billionaires are viewed as the bad guys, and there's growing anger about extreme wealth inequality, it can be easy for people to overlook any upsides. There are a handful of guys in popular culture who epitomize the enormous gap between haves and have-nots. Bezos is one of them.

It is fair to wonder, though, if stealing from Whole Foods or returning a dress you wore to a wedding is the best way to get back at Bezos. It's a bit of a stretch to think the answer to that one is yes.

I reached out to Garret Merriam, an associate philosophy professor at California State University, Sacramento, who studies ethics, to get his read. He told me there are likely three broad categories of thinking going on here. There are those who don't really consider what they're doing to be stealing — they're oblivious to it. Like taking a pen from the breakroom at work, they figure it's baked in when they grab a snack as they browse the Whole Foods aisles. There are people who recognize it's cheating, but they don't think it's wrong, given Bezos' wealth and his business practices. In a context where Amazon has paid millions of dollars to settle wage theft lawsuits, they figure lying about a lost package is a small way to try to even things out. And then there are those who feel a sense of political desperation — they're powerless in the face of massive political and economic forces, and this is an outlet for some sort of action, even if futile. "The target is misapplied, but the anger is, I would say, understandable," he said.

People have a tendency to try to neutralize potentially unsavory behavior by coming up with ways to justify their actions, Emmeline Taylor, a professor of criminology at City St. George's, University of London, said. In this case, they tell themselves things like, "Bezos is bad, Amazon won't even notice, this seems like a victimless crime," to make themselves feel better and like they're in the right. "They've sort of rehearsed this in their head so many times or even said it out loud, they start to believe it themselves," she said. "That's what allows them these sorts of moral gymnastics."

While people may see their actions as a way to get back at Bezos, the sheer size of the modern corporation creates a level of removal that makes it easy to sit back and think, "Who cares if someone pulls one over on them?" After all, it feels like they're pulling one over on us all the time.

"When we take from a store or a workplace, it gets a little bit easier to distance yourself," Terrence Shulman, the founder of the Shulman Center for Compulsive Theft, Spending, and Hoarding, said.

Beyond the fact that theft and fraud are, you know, against the law, anti-Amazon avengers may not recognize the collateral damage they could be inadvertently causing. If you steal from Whole Foods, Bezos won't know, but the store manager who's fired over it will. (I did survey some Whole Foods workers about this, and several of them confirmed that (a) they see a lot of middle-class and even seemingly wealthy shoplifters, and (b) they may be a little bothered by some of it but are not in a tizzy.) Before you lie to Amazon that your package never arrived or return the wrong item, you might want to check who the actual seller is.

John Roman, the CEO of BattlBox, which sells outdoor gear and equipment, would rather just sell everything from his own website, but they've got to be on Amazon and other e-commerce platforms just because of the reach. He's currently dealing with a return fraud situation — someone bought a new spotlight from him, said they didn't like it, and shipped an older model back. BattlBox didn't even realize what had happened until they sent the returned item to another customer who flagged it. Roman has filed an appeal with Amazon, but there's "no telling" whether the company will side with him.

He doesn't really blame people for doing this. By making returns so easy and taking "the customer is right" philosophy to the extreme, Amazon has fostered this behavior. "I don't think the average consumer even understands that it's not Amazon selling the product," he said, pointing to the fact that Amazon regularly introduces an Amazon Basic version of a best-selling item — which then gets prominent website placement near or above the original — in order to get in on the action. Roman even understands the get-back-at-Bezos stuff, given how the ultrawealthy are viewed.

"I'm not saying I agree with it, but I fully understand the people that view that they're giving it to The Man, but the reality is that you are actually hurting small businesses," he said.

Ironically, shoplifting at other retailers has been a plus for Amazon's business — people frustrated that everything is locked up at CVS and Target just go to Amazon's website instead. It's not clear how big of a problem shrink is for Whole Foods and Amazon since the company doesn't break it out in their financials. When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was asked about return fraud in a CNBC interview last year, he sort of shrugged it off, saying at the company's scale, "You get a bit of everything."

"It matters to them, but does it matter enough to put the time and effort into trying to stop that? I would say probably not," Arun Sundaram, an analyst at CFRA Research, said. He joked that given how profitable some other arms of Amazon's business arms are, if it wanted to give free food to customers for a month, it probably could.

Amazon declined to comment for this story. Jeff Bezos did not respond to a request for comment.

I'm not trying to say that the logic among Amazon and Whole Foods thieves is, "I woke up in the morning mad at Jeff Bezos because killed The Washington Post's Kamala Harris endorsement, so now I'm going to steal overpriced salami from Whole Foods." Attitudes are generally more removed and hazy. They view snacking while shopping (without paying for said snack) as a victimless crime, with the only potential victim being Bezos, even if that's a stretch.

"I don't know who I'm hurting," Lee said.

In the current economy, it's hard not to feel like you're being taken advantage of at every turn. Everything's getting more expensive, but corporate profits are still going up. Companies are constantly cutting costs, whether that means laying off workers or making it impossible to talk to a customer service representative on the phone. People feel like they have to be on guard against business trickery and slights. If you've shrugged and said, "That's how they get you," enough times, you start to think about how you'll get them. People feel like big business has broken the social contract, so they can break it back.

If people want to hurt Amazon with their pocketbooks, the best thing they can probably do is just not shop there. But that would require effort, planning, and forgoing the luxuries of on-demand shopping, which many people don't seem so willing to do.

"That would be a moral response," said Stuart Green, a Rutgers law professor who focuses on the moral theory underlying laws. "I don't think you can steal things that you like and then say you're doing it because you don't like the company."

At least it's better than setting Teslas on fire.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Shopping for homes online once had the feel of an open-air market: crowded and sweaty, maybe, but free for anyone to drop by and see what's for sale. The experience these days, though, is quickly turning into that of a nightclub, with the hottest new listings sequestered behind velvet ropes. If you want to party with the cool kids — in this case, score access to homes before regular folks — you better know a guy.

The wide-open nature of the housing market has been breaking down for a while. Most real estate agents have traditionally taken a maximalist approach to marketing homes, sharing listings widely through local databases known as multiple listing services. Agents browse the MLS to get details on homes available for sale, while search portals like Zillow pull the data onto their own websites for regular home shoppers to scroll through. The thinking is simple: More eyes on a listing means more potential bidders, giving a homeowner the best chance of selling quickly and lucratively.

This model is even backstopped by the National Association of Realtors, a powerful industry group that sets the rules for most MLSes around the country. NAR instituted a rule in 2020 known as the clear cooperation policy, which says that once a real estate agent starts marketing a home publicly — on a website, through an email blast, or even with a "for sale" sign in the front yard — they must list it on the MLS within one day. The rule was meant to prevent freeloading and encourage participation in the MLS, keeping listings in one place for other agents and their clients to see.

In recent years, however, the clear cooperation rule has been challenged by some of the biggest players in the game, who want to act as the new bouncers for VIP rooms filled with exclusive home listings. In particular, Compass, the country's largest real estate brokerage by sales volume, wants to take charge of the aforementioned velvet rope. Compass agents are increasingly hoarding their listings internally, shunning the MLS and making homes available only to buyers who work with other Compass agents. The company's founder and CEO, Robert Reffkin, has also been crusading against the clear cooperation policy. Reffkin argues that sellers should reject the one-size-fits-all approach of the MLS and exert more control over how their home is marketed. His campaign has stoked fierce infighting among real estate agents and raised a fundamental question: Who should be able to see the homes for sale in the US?

For now, the fight is ongoing. After months of debate, NAR said Tuesday it would leave the clear cooperation policy intact while adding another rule that functions as a small concession to Compass. The apparent attempt at compromise will probably end up pleasing no one. But while clear cooperation remains in place for now, the housing market continues to hurtle toward a decidedly uncooperative future.

Those in favor of clear cooperation argue the rule is responsible for America's uniquely transparent housing market — the reason you can hop on Zillow or Realtor.com and get the lay of the land. The policy was supposed to stem the rise of so-called "pocket listings," homes marketed for sale but unavailable on the MLS. If agents stop contributing listings to the shared databases, many in the industry warn, a once unified housing market could break up into silos, with home listings distributed among clubby groups of brokers known as "private listing networks" or gatekept within brokerages like Compass.

In this world, some agents will have access to a lot more properties than others. Pick the wrong rep, and you could unknowingly miss out on your dream home. And while there are good reasons someone might not want their house touted on the MLS — a celebrity like Brad Pitt, for instance, probably doesn't want their business aired out for everyone to see — conventional wisdom says sharing a home widely is the best way to get top dollar.

"Everybody benefits when we all pool our listings, and we do so in a timely manner," Saul Klein, a longtime real estate executive who's the CEO of the San Diego Multiple Listing Service, previously told me. "And people are hurt, potentially, when we don't do that."

But it's become increasingly clear that the advocates for the open system are losing. Yes, NAR kept the clear cooperation rule in place, but it also introduced an option for privacy-conscious sellers to list on the MLS while delaying their listings from popping up on sites like Zillow or the landing pages for other brokerages. The idea is to give sellers more flexibility to market their homes as they see fit, catering to those who may prefer to "premarket" their home before blasting it out widely. The move doesn't go nearly as far as Compass would have liked, but the company still frames this as a validation of its rallying cry for more seller choice.

"With NAR introducing a new MLS policy to 'expand choice for consumers,' they acknowledged the clear cooperation policy restricted home seller choice," Reffkin said in a statement. "Expanding choice means that NAR is still not letting homeowners choose precisely how to market their homes, but this is a small step in the right direction."

Compass may not be totally happy with NAR's most recent decision, but the company has already succeeded in shaking up the real estate landscape. The brokerage has made plenty of hay by exploiting a glaring loophole in the clear cooperation rules. While an agent has to add the listing to the MLS database once they publicly put the home up for sale, the rule allows agents to share new properties within their brokerages without adding them to the MLS. This method, which Compass dubbed the "Private Exclusive" route, essentially creates a walled garden with homes that can't be found anywhere else. Compass drives traffic to its website, collects a commission from both sides of the deal, and can lure both agents and clients by offering access to its inventory. Private exclusives have become a key strategy for the brokerage giant: Reffkin told analysts in February that 35% of the company's active listings nationwide were only available by working with a Compass agent or visiting Compass.com.

This isn't just some self-serving maneuver, either, Compass execs argue. They say sellers benefit from spurning the MLS and marketing their homes within the safe confines of the Compass network. The MLS and search portals like Zillow show how long a house has been on the market and whether the price has been slashed, data points that buyers can use to put pressure on homeowners in negotiations. The Compass website doesn't show price cuts or days on the market, theoretically allowing a seller to test their ideal price without any repercussions if they have to backtrack. And if they don't sell that way, they can always turn to the MLS and go the conventional route for maximum exposure. Compass likens this strategy to beta testing a product with a smaller audience before launch.

"We firmly believe that homeowners should have full control and flexibility in choosing how they market their home, period, full stop," Ashton Alexander, the head of strategy at Compass, tells me.

Brian Boero, the CEO of 1000Watt, a brand and marketing agency for real estate companies, doesn't buy it. Compass, he says, is really after control. Under the existing rule, the company may be free to pursue its "Private Exclusives" strategy, but it can't, for instance, publicly market a home on its website without also contributing to the MLS.

"They want to make Compass.com a destination where they control the inventory publicly, and they want to have free rein to continue to expand their private listings program," Boero tells me. "So they didn't get what they wanted."

Compass is far from the only large brokerage to employ this kind of strategy — Coldwell Banker, for instance, has "Exclusive Look," Howard Hanna has "Find It First," and one large Keller Williams franchise, KW Go, has dubbed its offering "Private Collection." More companies have threatened to follow the lead and keep listings off the MLS if it helps them compete for agents and clients. The clear cooperation policy has always been tough to enforce, too, with the onus placed on local MLSes to keep agents in line. Some MLSes, fearing litigation, have already backed off enforcement, tacitly allowing agents to market homes however they like. This could enable private listing networks — groups of typically high-achieving agents from different brokerages who share off-MLS listings among each other — to flourish.

NAR's decision to keep clear cooperation is a small victory for those who favor the status quo, but it will hardly end the practices fracturing the housing market. Compass hasn't ruled out the possibility of litigation over the rule, either. For now, the real estate industry is stuck in a sort of limbo. No one doubts that secret listings will continue to rise, but the fight over the clear cooperation policy isn't going anywhere.

"Everybody loses here, in a way," Boero tells me. "Nobody's happy."

James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team.

Look, to put it plainly: You almost certainly shouldn't buy a delivery burrito using a buy now, pay later plan. I know it may be tempting. It's burrito season, getting out of the house can be hard, and having stuff you do not need dropped on your doorstep is a fun tiny luxury of our tech-enabled world. But if you're considering using a Klarna financing plan to DoorDash your Chipotle order, maybe take a beat.

With all the DoorDash fees, plus the tip — and, yes, you should tip — that little treat is going to run you quite a bit more than you bargained for. Splitting the cost up into four payments may make you feel better about your little indulgence — and may even encourage you to add on a second little treat. But there are some potential downsides. You might wind up missing payments, in which case on top of delivery fees and tip, you'll also be hit with late fees and overdraft fees from your bank. By the end of it all, your $20 burrito could wind up costing closer to $70.

I don't mean to be judgmental. If you really insist on paying for food delivery on a payment plan, you can. In fact, DoorDash and Klarna are betting you will.

Last week, the delivery platform Doordash and the soon-to-IPO payment company Klarna announced a partnership through which customers will be able to buy now, pay later on food orders. People will have the option to pay right away, like normal, using Klarna, but they'll also be able to split the cost into four installment payments for purchases above $35 or, eventually, push the payment to a later date. In a press release announcing the agreement, company executives said it was intended to make "convenience even more accessible" for consumers and offer payment options that were "essential to meeting our customers' needs."

The announcement, um, raised some eyebrows. On the one hand, it's a free country, and anyone is welcome to pay for a burrito taxi in $10 installments over a month and a half. On the other hand, this scenario might involve more risk than reward for consumers, many of whom are already drowning in debt.

"It certainly doesn't seem like a positive development except for Klarna and maybe DoorDash," said Robert Lawless, a law professor at the University of Illinois who specializes in consumer finance. "I just don't think it's an advisable way to be paying for your DoorDash."

The BPNL industry, which includes companies such as Afterpay, Affirm, and Klarna, has taken off in recent years. The total value of loans originated by the industry jumped from $2 billion in 2019 to $24 billion in 2021 to $34 billion in 2022, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. BNPL was initially seen mostly as an option for large-ish purchases — maybe a Peloton bike, if you're still into that, or a couch. The flexibility can be useful, by splitting payments into smaller, what might be more manageable amounts, and charging zero interest if payments are made on time. Buy now, pay later companies often do not do extensive credit checks as credit card companies do, meaning the option may be more accessible to some consumers.

The optionality and ease of use helped BNPL boom during the pandemic, but in recent years growth has slowed. In an effort to reignite expansion, companies have increasingly been allowing (and encouraging) consumers to use it on smaller-dollar and more trivial purchases, even groceries. In terms of consumer finance, it's a disturbing sign that some people might need to put essentials on payment plans. But businesses aren't just offering BNPL out of the kindness of their hearts; it's because they think they can make money off of it.

"We're seeing it for smaller and smaller and smaller purchases," said Anastasiya Ghosh, a marketing professor at the University of Arizona. "Part of it is driven by these partnerships. So you see more and more merchants like DoorDash that are willing to participate and engage, which to me signals there is a revenue stream."

Part of the way BNPL companies make money is through merchant fees, where the platform that actually books the sale pays a fee to the payment partner, like Klarna or Affirm. This is similar to credit card swipe fees, but the payouts tend to be even higher. Businesses sign up for merchant fees because giving consumers expanded payment options like BNPL makes them likelier to buy and increases the size of their baskets.

"It works on our optimistic view of ourselves in the future. Obviously, in the future, maybe my income stream would improve or I would stick to my budget better," Ghosh said.

It's not that different from the psychology around credit cards, but we've also had years of consumer education around their risks. With BNPL, not so much.

Buy now, pay later users tend to be in more precarious spots than the average consumer. A June 2023 survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that women, renters, people without college degrees, low-income people, and those with lower credit scores were more likely to report having used BNPL in the previous year. BNPL may also make people's finances worse: Its users have been found to see fast increases in bank overdraft charges and credit card interest and fees compared with consumers who don't use the option. The use of buy now, pay later has been linked to increased total spending, too.

The concern is that people who use BNPL might buy more even when they shouldn't. They wind up with multiple short-term loans they're trying to pay off every two weeks. It's hard to keep track of, as the bills or automatic withdrawals can hit at different times. That makes it easy to miss payments and easy not to recognize just how big of a hole one might be in. For some consumers, this may result in excessive levels of borrowing and debt cycles they can't get out of.

"Let's say you miscalculate something. You pay a late fee of $7 to $10 on your order, and then maybe you have to pay an overdraft fee because of a cash flow issue," said Nadine Chabrier, the senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending. "So you could really balloon the amount of money you pay for just one thing."

Food delivery with companies such as DoorDash, Uber Eats, and GrubHub has become a weirdly controversial topic on the internet over the past few years. The kerfuffle is always the same: Someone posts something about all the delivery fees making their order extra expensive, someone else says they should just go pick it up or cook for themselves, and then everybody yells about whether it's offensive because some people can't leave their homes or cook or some other protest. On this DoorDash-Klarna announcement, you can already hear a similar argument: What about people who can't afford that burrito right this second but really need (OK, want) it and for whatever reason don't feel that they have another option? I posed this question to every expert I talked to, and the answer was mainly, sure if you want to do this, go ahead, but it's not in your best interest.

"People have the free will to make a choice of the way in which they want to pay for something, but there may be unintended consequences," Chabrier said.

"DoorDash and Klarna will "undoubtedly tout the idea of, 'Well if you pay for it in four payments, it's the same as up front,' but we're not talking about major purchases where that's going to save you any type of money," Lawless said.

Breaking up large payments for goods that we're going to use for years can make sense. You buy a house on a mortgage so you can pay it off over years as the value (hopefully) goes up. You get a car loan so you can pay it down every month with the money you make driving to and from work. Paying down larger purchases over time frees up cash for other needs, or for investments that will grow over time. But a quick food order may not fall into this category.

"There's a good economic case for financing investments over the long term, and we have stretched the definition of durable goods in a lot of ways," said Michael Madowitz, an economist at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank. "Delivered food may in fact be the least durable good we've tried this with."

Amid the backlash to the announcement, Klarna and DoorDash are trying to emphasize their partnership is about more than burritos. In an emailed statement, a DoorDash spokesperson said the company's customers already had "plenty of ways to pay" including PayPal, Venmo, SNAP/EBT, and credit cards, and added that this option wasn't just for food orders. "With over 25% of customers now shopping beyond restaurants in categories like retail, beauty, and home improvement — whether it's the gaming console or laptop for your kids, the new barbecue ahead of summer grilling season, or the running shoes you need for tomorrow's 5K — this partnership provides even more flexibility, control, and options," the spokesperson said. They also pointed to a Klarna blog post about the deal. A Klarna spokesperson said the partnership was "especially important as DoorDash expands its offering into electronics, big-box retail, and gifts."

This partnership isn't the end of the world in terms of signaling some sea change in consumer credit; nor is it a sign that a recession is here. These companies are offering people more ways to pay so they'll buy more, perhaps, than they had planned. This is a way to squeeze more cash out of consumers.

This is happening at a moment when the cops who are supposed to be on the consumer beat — the CFPB — may not be doing much, Madowitz noted, given the current White House administration's hands-off bent. "I don't know if this is the kind of thing CFPB, SEC, or both should have a very close eye on, and maybe we just won't ever know," he said.

Regardless, the option to pay in installments is coming to a DoorDash order near you. Maybe think twice before you take advantage of it.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

On a sunny Wednesday afternoon in late February, Ernesto Tey walked from a meeting on the west side of Manhattan to the heliport at 30th Street on the Hudson River. He was early for his 3 p.m. Blade helicopter flight to Kennedy International Airport, so he ordered a drink at the lounge bar.

A self-described "plane geek" who works for a software company and flies single-engine aircraft in his spare time, the Californian says he's taken about 30 Blades to and from Manhattan over the last few years. The nine-minute ride starts at $95 for those with a pass, and when an Uber in rush-hour traffic can take more than an hour and set you back more than $100, it doesn't sound so unreasonable.

Plus, it's fun and the views are wild. "Where else can you fly in a helicopter for between $100 and $200?" he told me.

A few minutes later, Tey and I and two other passengers climbed aboard a six-seat helicopter — just feet from Hudson River Park's busy waterfront walking and bike path — and soared 1,400 feet above the Hudson, around the southern tip of Manhattan, and across Brooklyn.

Helicopter commuter and private charter services are steadily transforming the whirlybird from a plaything of the ultrawealthy to an on-demand rideshare for anyone with access to a company card or willing to blow a few hundred dollars on an Instagrammable experience. "Blading" has become a verb for the Hamptons set, as the industry has expanded its footprint in recent years, particularly in the New York City area.

Less pleased with the rise of whirlybirds are those literally below them.

Over the past few years, New Yorkers have taken to the city's nonemergency 311 complaint line to register their displeasure like never before. Helicopter noise complaints exploded by 678% in two years, from 3,332 in 2019 to 25,916 in 2021, based on 311 data compiled by Business Insider. Complaints more than doubled to 59,127 in 2023. Last year, they dropped to 28,686 — still far above the pre-COVID normal.

The surge in complaints aligns with the rise of private charter and commuter services, on top of a loosely regulated sightseeing helicopter industry and a spike in law enforcement chopper flights. An analysis by the New York City Council of flights and complaints in May 2023 found that trips like the one I took from Manhattan to the airport and tour choppers from New Jersey generated the most complaints. But local, state, and federal leaders have done little to stop the chop in recent years.

For all the hubbub about helicopters, they're only the harbinger of a future of much more crowded skies. The industry is on the verge of transformation by long-awaited electric choppers that the federal government, local policymakers, and helicopter services are already embracing as a way to vastly expand the air-taxi industry and make vertical urban travel mainstream.

Helicopter commuting is nothing new in the Big Apple. Modern helicopters were invented at the start of World War II. In the 1950s, the aviation company New York Airways began offering relatively cheap chopper rides from the roof of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper to the city's airports. A deadly crash in 1977 tarnished the industry's glamorous image, but in the decades since, the city's skies have filled back up with choppers, including so-called "nonessential" charter flights and sightseeing services, as well as "essential" law enforcement, media, and medical flights.

Blade is on a mission to vastly expand rideshare in the skies. Its CEO, Rob Wiesenthal, told me the company's passenger business has grown from about $2 million in revenue in 2014 to more than $100 million last year. Earlier this year, it opened up its $95 airport shuttle service for Long Island and New Jersey commuters — marketing it as a way to skip New York City's new $9 congestion pricing toll on drivers below 60th Street. "If you think about $75 for parking and $9 for congestion pricing and $13 to $26 for whichever tunnel or bridge you take, you actually save money with the pass," Wiesenthal said. (He doesn't mention New York City's vast network of commuter trains. The A train from the airport will set you back a grand total of $2.90).

What struck me about my fellow Blade passengers was how casually they treated the experience. Stephanie Fuhrman, who works for a software company based out of Utah, was in New York for business and opted for a Blade to save time getting back to JFK. "It's like a bus to me," she said. "It's just transportation." Plus, her Uber from the airport to Manhattan in morning traffic had taken about an hour and a half and cost her nearly $200, she said. "I couldn't take the risk going to the airport."

The fourth passenger on our flight, Donal Collins, falls into the other category of Blade customer: leisure travelers seeking a joyride. The 27-year-old, who works at a Brooklyn-based AI startup, loves to fly, but this was his first whirlybird ride. On his way from New York to California, he decided to use the Blade gift card his brother had given him for Christmas. Blade's clientele ranges from C-suite executives to executive assistants. They're Hamptons-goers, commuters, and thrill seekers — and they've gotten younger over the years as prices have come down. Blade's busiest days are Thursdays, Fridays, and Mondays when long-weekend travelers mix with the business crowd.

While the cost of a chopper ride might be low for a well-compensated white-collar worker, the quality-of-life negatives for those they fly over are remarkably high.

Looking down at the tiny skyscrapers from my seat next to the pilot, I was reminded of the similarly beautiful day in late September I'd spent picnicking on Governors Island off Lower Manhattan. What struck me then — and helped inspire my obsession with the helicopter industry — was how difficult it was to enjoy the idyllic car-free oasis with the near-constant chop-chop of helicopters overhead. Like many of the city's waterfront parks, the island has become what one anti-helicopter advocate told me is "ground zero" for chopper traffic.

Critics of the helicopter industry point to the safety hazards of congested skies and the environmental impact of the fuel-spewing machines. But the window-rattling racket they make tops the list of concerns. Loud, disruptive noise can have a range of physical and mental effects "from raising the biomarkers for stress to changing how people's hearts and metabolisms work, and reducing people's lifespan," Nick Shapiro, a professor of biology and society at UCLA who studies the health impacts of helicopter policing, told me. One 2017 study linked aviation noise to disrupted sleep, an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, and lower academic performance among kids. Aircraft noise is especially annoying because it's both loud and intermittent, Shapiro told me. Helicopters fly lower than planes and have the least regulated traffic patterns.

Chopper noise doesn't affect everyone the same way. People who've lived in war-torn or hyper-policed areas might have a more acute mental or physical reaction. "Different populations might feel stalked or harassed by that noise in a way that is culturally and historically informed," Shapiro said.

In the case of policing, the noise is often the point. Beginning during the 1965 Watts riots, the Los Angeles Police Department pioneered the use of helicopters to patrol neighborhoods. Flying low, sometimes using spotlights, most of the flights were used to deter crime rather than respond to emergencies. "The sonic impacts are intended and part of its hypothesized efficacy," Shapiro said. "It's about seeing the helicopter, rather than the helicopter seeing what's happening on the ground." A 2023 audit found the LAPD's helicopter program costs about $47 million a year — more than the budgets of 14 city agencies — and found "little evidence" that it reduced crime.

New Yorkers have long made a stink about helicopters over their streets. Mayor Rudy Giuliani closed one of the city's heliports in 1997 under pressure from incensed residents. In 2016, the New York City Council came close to shutting down two of the city's heliports, but Mayor Bill de Blasio settled on a compromise that halved the number of tourist flights that originate in the city — from 60,000 flights a year to 30,000. Since then, New Jersey has seen a surge in helicopter tour operators, which fly an unknown number of choppers over the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, and everywhere in between, unrestricted by the city's regulations. The New York City Council analysis of 2023 helicopter traffic found that the number of tourist choppers in city airspace that originated in New Jersey and Westchester County was about the same as the number launching from the city.

Melissa Elstein began noticing an uptick in helicopters flying over her Upper West Side apartment and over Central Park in summer 2019. When she found out many were doors-off, shoe-selfie tourist choppers, she was incensed. "It's really insane that this is even allowed, especially given that we're also the most densely populated city and with some of the busiest skies," she told me. So Elstein decided to help revive Stop the Chop NY/NJ, a group pushing for much stricter regulation of nonessential choppers. The group has some high-profile supporters, including members of Congress and local elected officials.

While the city controls what happens at its heliports, only the federal government, specifically the Federal Aviation Administration, controls New York City's airspace. New York Reps. Jerry Nadler, Carolyn Maloney, and Nydia Velázquez have introduced federal legislation to ban nonessential choppers over the city. Some local lawmakers support the federal ban and want to see the city government end tourist and commuter flights from city-owned and operated heliports.

"There's just no reason that we should have city-owned helipads to fly the Uber elite out to JFK or the Hamptons at the expense of the quality of life and well-being of our communities," Lincoln Restler, a Brooklyn City council member, told me.

There's precedent for regulating or banning helicopter traffic. There are no-fly zones above some of the country's most prized monuments — the White House and the US Capitol and, naturally, Disney World and Disney Land. Some major cities around the world, including Paris, have also basically banned nonessential chopper flights. And several European countries have ended short-haul plane flights to help curb carbon emissions.

New York City's Economic Development Corporation, which runs two of the three public heliports, has resisted efforts to further crack down on tourist flights in the city, citing the tourism dollars it brings in. Restler told me he doubts EDC's defense of helicopter tourism, calling it "kind of farcical" and instead motivated by a desire to keep the wealthiest New Yorkers happy. For all the headache, the city-owned heliports only bring in about $3 million a year in revenue, Anton Fredriksson, EDC's director of aviation, told me.

"Essential flights" are also a growing part of the noise problem. Under Mayor Eric Adams, the New York police department's use of law enforcement choppers has risen dramatically. A 2024 Bloomberg investigation found that the force's helicopters spent 60% more time in the air in 2023 than in the previous four years. The NYPD's spending on the helicopter program more than doubled between fiscal year 2021 and 2023 to $12.3 million.

The helicopter industry is on the verge of a major transformation. In 2023, the FAA published a report outlining its path to approving the first so-called electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, aircraft for commercial flight by 2025 — and widespread use by 2028. These machines are basically electric versions of helicopters — and have been hyped by the Silicon Valley set for years. Some chopper services, including Blade, want them to replace their use of combustion-engine helicopters.

"This is the first phase of a really exciting new age where instead of moving around on the ground, we're able to move around in the air," Eric Allison, the chief product officer of one California-based eVTOL company, Joby Aviation, told me. Joby has partnered with Uber, Delta, Toyota, and the US government, and aims to launch its air taxi services at Uber Black prices and eventually hopes to bring them closer to UberX prices. It's not clear when they'll get final certification from the FAA to start ferrying people around the US, but they're undergoing approval in Dubai.

After resisting the regulation of traditional helicopters for decades, New York leaders are embracing the electric rotor industry with open arms as the solution to noise and air pollution. Some support lifting caps on flights if they're electric. The mayor and EDC invited Joby and a German company to show off their machines in a test flight in downtown Manhattan in late 2023. Adams predicted at the event that "within our lifetime, many of you are going to own your own personal electric helicopter." There are some clear upsides to the technology — eVTOLs are much quieter than combustion-engine helicopters, and they don't spew jet fuel.

Even some city lawmakers who've led the charge against the helicopter industry are welcoming their electric counterparts. "The future of electric air taxi travel represents innovation, sustainability, and expanded transportation options for our city," Amanda Farías, the New York City Council majority leader, said in a statement.

Restler is more cautious. "Until we actually experience how they work in practice and what impacts they have, we don't know kind of what regulatory structure we need to protect the health, well-being, and safety of our communities," he said.

Earlier this month, Blade announced it's expanding its JFK flight offerings to the downtown Manhattan heliport in an effort to help the heliport's new operator "gather data on consumer demand, flier experience, and logistics" and transition to eVTOLs.

It's clear we're hurtling toward a future of highways in the sky — and we're already there in NYC. But it's not clear it's one that appeals to the average city dweller. It might warrant asking the question: Do we want the 1% taking over the skies?

Eliza Relman is a policy correspondent focused on housing, transportation, and infrastructure on Insider's economy team.

Can you smell the testosterone? Suddenly, America's top CEOs seem to be taking their cues from Logan Roy, Rambo, and, most conspicuously, Donald Trump.

Jiujitsu-fighting, MAGA-fied Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan's podcast to bemoan corporate culture for becoming "neutered" and called instead for "aggression," saying "masculine energy" is "good" and criticism of it had gone too far. Jamie Dimon has gone on f-bomb-filled screeds about how coddled employees need to get back to the office. A buff Jeff Bezos has laid down the hammer at The Washington Post, demanding editors give him a "hell yes" to affirm they're all in on "personal liberties and free markets." Elon Musk, emboldened by Trump to be more "aggressive," is shouting "chainsaw!" as he makes brutal cuts to the federal bureaucracy. And even if that Zuck-Musk cage match got canceled, the ready-to-rumble spirit persists: Musk posted to X earlier this month that he "literally challenged Putin to one-on-one physical combat over Ukraine."

Not in the least surprised by all this chest-thumping: women in business.

I spoke to several female founders, along with psychologists and sociologists, who see the resurgent machoism in corporate America — and the related dismantling of DEI programs, RTO mandates, layoffs, and calls for "intensity" — as the onset of a new era of backlash. On the one hand, some women fear that aggressive company culture in the Trump 2.0 era may push them out of corporate positions and continue trends like underrepresentation in the tech sector. On the other, some see it as galvanizing. "The backlash is a sign that we're making serious progress," says Maureen Clough, the host of "It Gets Late Early," a podcast about ageism in the workplace, sharing the sentiment of several women I spoke to. "Now we know who these people are," she adds. "The masks and the gloves are off."

While some see these displays of strongmanhood as a means of placating — and fending off regulatory action from — the Trump administration, others see it as seizing the political moment to opportunistically return to masculine norms in the workplace. It's "not about money, it's more about them wanting to have the playground they've always had," says Sapna Cheryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. Jennifer Berdahl, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, uses a similar analogy. "It's like boys in a sandbox but scaling it to billionaires. It's the concept of precarious manhood: Almost no matter how much you succeed, it's just never enough." She adds, "What they're really calling for is for dominance contests to go free, almost like a gladiator arena."

The gladiator games don't just play out among the top alphas — those down the chain watch and learn. After Musk called a researcher a "retard" on X, for example, the use of the slur soon tripled on the platform, a study from Montclair State University found. In a January article titled "Is corporate America going MAGA?" an (ironically) anonymous banker told the Financial Times, "I feel liberated. We can say 'retard' and pussy' without the fear of getting canceled." Gen Z men are less likely than millennial men to say the term "feminist" describes them, according to a 2023 survey from the Survey Center on American Life. Almost half of them said they feel men face discrimination in the US. Meanwhile, only 49% of women feel women in the US are treated with respect and dignity, down from 66% in 2015, a Gallup survey found.

Many women are fed up. And, tired of waiting on corporate America, they're increasingly building their own arenas.

Over the past decade, women have made significant, if uneven, gains in the corporate workforce. Women now make up 10.4% of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies, up from just 4.6% in 2015. The overwhelming majority of this small group is white. Women are now outpacing men in becoming entrepreneurs; today they own nearly 39% of American businesses, increasing the number of women-led companies by 13.6% between 2019 and 2023, a 2024 Wells Fargo report said. Firms owned by men grew by just 7% in the same time period. In Silicon Valley, however, Zuckerberg's "masculine energy" quip doesn't track with reality. As of 2022, women made up just 22% of tech workers. That's the same proportion of jobs they held in 2005, the year after Facebook was founded. Women accounted for 16% of first-time VC-backed entrepreneurs and only 9% of entrepreneurs who get VC-backing for two startups, according to a 2024 paper that looked at aggregate data from Pitchbook.

The promises of the girlboss era, meanwhile, have come up short. In the 2010s, Sheryl Sandberg called on ambitious women to "lean in." Work hard enough, assert yourself, and you can have it all. But the girlboss was an empty caricature, idolizing women who'd squeezed their way into the C-suite while trying old leadership tactics and wearing high heels. They were feminine and white, often thin and privileged. And, as Michelle Obama famously said of "leaning in" in 2018, "That shit doesn't work all the time."

A sprinkling of female founders and executives in a world run by men hasn't transformed it: Toxic workplaces still emerged at several women-led companies. Steph Korey of Away was outed as a Slack bully (she apologized). Glossier workers reported discrimination and mistreatment under founder and former CEO Emily Weiss's tenure (Weiss apologized, too). Elizabeth Holmes lied to investors and risked lives (she apologized, and is serving an 11-year prison sentence). Sandberg herself is facing new allegations of toxic behavior: A new memoir by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former policy director at Facebook (now Meta), claims that Sandberg had a young assistant sleep in her lap and demanded the author join her in bed on a private jet. The book, "Careless People," also highlights the ways women at Facebook felt leadership had failed them. Meta has slammed the book as inaccurate, calling it a "mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives." A spokesperson for Sandberg's Lean In organization declined to comment on the memoir, but directed me to its website for information about ways Lean In sees itself as evolving to help women of all backgrounds navigate barriers and biases they may face at work.

Women have proved they can behave just as badly as men — but even when they're on their best behavior or make minor missteps, they're hit with harsh criticism men are more likely to evade. A 2020 study from the Stanford Graduate School of Business found that men are more valued than women when they "take charge." The "founder mode," hands-on, direct style of management can backfire for women — as Airbnb CEO and founder mode proselytizer Brian Chesky posted on X last fall: "Women founders have been reaching out to me over the past 24 hours about how they don't have permission to run their companies in Founder Mode the same way men can. This needs to change."

"Even if you have more women, they'll still assimilate to the workplace culture you have," says Erika Lucas, the founder of StitchCrew, a nonprofit focused on fostering equitable entrepreneurship, and VEST, a women's peer network and investment fund. "Women are being conditioned to fit into this meritocracy, or fit within these toxic systems because that's all we have." As Cheryan puts it, "masculine defaults" are diffuse in the workplace "because men made companies in their image. The return of those defaults are pushing more women to ditch corporate America and go out on their own, says Lucas. "The reason why we're seeing more women-led companies starting is because corporate America is not working for women."

When companies won't offer work-from-home policies or flexibility that working parents need, it can embolden people to become more entrepreneurial and build under their own terms. "Oftentimes the easiest way to find that is to build it yourself," says Jaclyn Pascocello, the founder of Fabrik, a networking space for people to grow their communities, noting that it's still not easy to launch a company. But in this climate of ascendant machoism, she says, she is seeing a collective of women coming together at Fabrik and starting to build companies to address issues sometimes ignored by men. Those can include solutions for women's health and caregiving. "It really feels like there's a ton of women trying to lift each other up," she said.

But oversimplifying "masculine" or "feminine" traits to fit narrow boxes "is doing everyone a disservice," says Ashley Rose, the cofounder and CEO of the cybersecurity firm Living Security. "You need to find people that possess the traits that work well in your culture." Similarly, the concept of DEI has been misrepresented and turned into a dirty acronym by the political right, says Virginia Cumberbatch, a global DEI strategist and consultant. While DEI implementation has been lacking and its results disappointing at some firms, there are ways for new and old companies to create initiatives to foster diversity, even in the current political climate. "We've allowed DEI to be a catchall that's kind of lost its meaning," Cumberbatch says. DEI, she says, shouldn't be thought of as a blanket fix. Equity looks different in the work of a university or an architecture firm. And companies that are serious about building diverse, equitable, and inclusive environments need to give authority to the people who work in it at a senior level. "It has to be pervasive in every dimension of your organization or your brand, or it is just rhetoric," she says.

There's no business case for stifling diversity. Many studies have found that having a diverse staff is good for companies financially, and benefits like extended parental leave, caregiving resources, and flexibility help with employee retention and burnout. And Big Tech businesses have ballooned in value while they publicly called for diversity, but they ride the tides of public opinion. Personalities that are power-obsessed often swing politically to hold onto their prestige. With that reality exposed, some women are changing their responses. Vanessa Jupe, the founder of Leva, a platform to support new parents, says she became more politically active in the 2024 election and supported Kamala Harris' campaign by canvassing her neighborhood and donating money. Some Facebook groups dedicated to campaigning for Harris have morphed into places of action, with members organizing to write letters and calling lawmakers to express frustration with the Trump administration. Escalating tactics could include strikes, sit-ins, picketing, and actions like the late February economic blackout targeted at large retailers. "There's a full-frontal assault on women and people of color," Jupe says. "The time to play nice is not now. You cannot have kid gloves on when you're fighting against really silly bullies."

The era of the girlboss is long dead. No singular trope or central figure has taken its place in 2025 — which may be a good thing. "Nobody should be made into a hero," Lucas says. "My hope for women is that we start building power collectively." That also means pushing for change by showing that companies can be "successful because you actually operate it in a different way," Cheryan says. Women have stopped thinking they can "have it all" by leaning in, and instead are calling on men to do more at home and work toward more equitable workplaces — and opting out of marriage and traditional corporate America if they don't.

Leaders who are willing to disrupt corporate culture norms have an enormous opportunity to lure top talent away from workplaces that aren't. We're not likely to see a few women rising through the ranks and joining the boys on stage in a cage match — and that's for the best, but there's a culture shift unfolding that could allow them to make something new.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

Will Champion was 24 and working at a board game café on New York's Upper West Side in 2021 when he and his friends decided to turn their Dungeons & Dragons hobby into something bigger.

Champion was making a meager $15 an hour at the game café as a dungeon master, the storyteller who often leads the games, and felt like he could do better. "Why don't we just do it ourselves?" his friend, Woody Minshew, then 25, suggested.

The group of four 20-somethings, most of whom had performing backgrounds, began streaming a D&D campaign on YouTube and Twitch under the moniker "The Bards of New York." They found they enjoyed playing together for an audience, and people were eager to join their community. So they started a Discord, began to build relationships with their listeners, and scrapped the idea of working as dungeon masters. "We still had to have muggle jobs," says Kyle Knight, one of the group members, referring to non-D&D jobs, "and DMing, when done well, is very time-consuming." They also wanted to make the game as accessible as possible.

Things took off in 2023 after a clip of their stream went viral. The video, which got 3.5 million views, captured two characters who'd shared a slow-burn romance finally confessing their feelings. Comments flooded in from people who shared their favorite D&D moments or wanted to experience a similarly heartwarming game. The Bards gained a new audience and are now the 19th-most-popular D&D streaming channel on Twitch, based on TwitchMetrics. They had tapped into the growing market of tabletop role-players.

Once considered a niche game for fantasy nerds to play in someone's basement, tabletop role-playing games have entered the mainstream. In 1968, Gary Gygax, a game designer and the cocreator of D&D, organized the first-ever tabletop convention, known as "Gen Con," in his basement with a dozen or so people. Last year's Gen Con conference in Indiana set new attendance records, with over 71,000 attendees and 540 exhibiting companies. In 2020, Wizards of the Coast, the owner of D&D, touted a seven-year growth streak, saying that online play grew by 86% that year.

As its popularity has grown, D&D has inspired a film and a hit TV show and attracted over 50 million players worldwide, Wizards of the Coast says. Other tabletop games such as Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, and RuneQuest have seen a similar surge in popularity. Meanwhile, board game cafés owners have seen demand explode over the past few years, with more cafés popping up across the US. For a select few streamers, the boom has been incredibly lucrative. Leaked data from Twitch showed that Critical Role, one of the most popular D&D streaming channels, earned over $9.6 million between 2019 and 2021 from a combination of subscribers, tips, and ad revenue.

The nerds are taking over — and they may have the solution to America's loneliness crisis.

Cherie Wright, a 36-year-old from Virginia, was one of the people who saw the Bards of New York's viral TikTok. She'd never played D&D before but found herself captivated by the storytelling. As she watched the group's streams, she familiarized herself with the game's lingo. " I learned what 'rolling the dice' meant, and what a 'perception check' is, and why everyone gets so excited about a 'natural 20,'" she says.

Wright became an active participant in the group's Discord and Twitch chats, which now have several thousand members. "There's really a love for connecting with other people," she says, describing the community as "enchantingly warm" and "wildly creative."

The community has been a critical support for her, especially when her job as a museum director was busy and she had a hard time getting out of the house. "I didn't realize how close to burnout I actually was," she says.

Since the pandemic lockdowns, lots of people are in a similar boat, with many of us spending more time alone than ever before. In the group chats, fans would talk about the stream, share pet photos, or ask for help if they were having a bad day. " People became regulars and we all learned each other's names," Wright says.

A little over a year after she joined the community, Wright decided to learn more about D&D. In the tabletop role-playing game, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, players design their own characters and set out on a quest. They roll dice to battle enemies, find treasure, and complete challenges in order to reach the end of a campaign that can span anywhere from a single afternoon to a couple of years.

" I walked into my local game store just with the intention of asking about it," she says. There was a one-shot session — a short adventure that can be finished in a single sitting — in progress and she decided to join. She was immediately hooked. "I met some of my now best friends that day," she says.

Playing consistently can be tricky because people's schedules are always changing, but she still manages to make it work.  "At one point, I was playing two or three times a week with different groups and different nights, but right now it's about once a week."

In the past decade, tabletop role-playing games have taken on a new life. The hit TV show "Stranger Things," which first aired in 2016, brought D&D back into the spotlight. "It was such a phenomenon," Knight says. "It broke a lot of stigmas by just placing it into the zeitgeist and making it seem fun and acceptable."

The show's success made Hannah Minshew, one of the Bards, suddenly feel cool. "I was like, 'Oh, I know what a Mind Flayer is. I have this exotic information that you all don't. Let me teach you. I'm the cool guy,'" she laughs.

D&D is far from the only tabletop game that's popular today. Warhammer 40,000, also known as Warhammer 40K, is a turn-based tactical wargame in which players collect, assemble, and battle detailed miniature armies against each other. Based on traffic to its website, the gaming site Goonhammer estimates the game has 2.4 million players each month. In December, Games Workshop, the publisher of Warhammer, announced that it had sold Amazon the film and television rights to the game universe. That same month, Games Workshop made it onto the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 index, a list of the largest UK companies.

Marcus Pascall, a 53-year-old in San Diego, had largely given up role-playing games when "Stranger Things" came out. Pascall's son Ian was 10 years old at the time. "Everyone in school was talking about it, so I dusted off my old books and ran a D&D game for him," he recalls. "It was nice to see role-playing games through the eyes of someone who hadn't played before."

Now in college, Ian continues to play tabletop games with his friends, and Pascall himself has returned to D&D. For the past three years, he's been running a monthly game with his 29-year-old daughter and some of his friends. His daughter, who lives in Los Angeles, drives two hours to make the sessions.

Pascall has noticed a big shift in the culture from when he was playing. "In the '80s, being called a nerd was a massive insult. And you avoided it at all costs, and you felt insulted, you felt almost ashamed," he says. " We're all nerds now. It's all one big group. It's like, 'I don't care if you don't have social skills. Come play with us.'"

For John Edwards, 60, who was active in the role-playing game world for decades, the social experience was always the main draw. " You've got a topic that you can talk about, even if you don't have a lot of other things in common," he says. A large part of the audience is made up of adult men, many of whom, he says, "don't have any good excuses to all sit down together and do something."

Although Edwards has shifted to more traditional board games over the years because of how time-consuming it was to run D&D campaigns, he still values how the games opened up his social circles. " Particularly in a country that is very polarized politically right now, it means you can sit across the table from people that you otherwise maybe wouldn't be comfortable sitting with," he says.

Anna Prosser, a 40-year-old Oregonian who is a streamer on the weekly D&D show "StonesThrow," has found that committing to regular play has had other positive impacts on her mental health.

" A lot of times we grow out of play and out of imagination," she tells me. " It's considered something that's for children." She says that "committing to times of play every week" has helped her to retrain her imagination and improve her creativity, problem-solving skills, and mental health.

Plenty of research backs up the benefits of play for adults, finding that it improves creativity and can help people process stress. In a study published in July, researchers at University College Cork in Ireland found that D&D helped people's mental health by providing escapism, self-exploration, and social support. "The most interesting finding for me and for a lot of people that I've talked to is this exploration of self," Orla Walsh, the study's lead, says. "I can't think of many hobbies where you get to do this."

She says one player who was struggling in a male-dominated work environment created a confident character that helped her practice being confident in real life. Another player, a comedian who lost his grandfather, felt pressure to be the comic relief for his family while struggling with his own grief. As the dungeon master, he created a monster representing his grief, which allowed him to privately process his emotions. " No one else knew that it was happening but he gained so much from it," Walsh says.

Prosser says that using her imagination more brought "a vibrant inner life back into focus" and has helped build her confidence in making decisions. "The stories I've helped write in D&D have helped reassure me that perfection isn't possible and life is good without it," she says.

By acting as different characters with different personality traits and talents, she's also learned a lot about what kind of person she wants to be. " It's really important to have the flexibility of looking at the world and looking at problems through a different perspective in order to either affirm your own or enhance your own," she says. "D&D gives you a really safe place to do that."

Because it's been accepted more broadly in mainstream culture, the game is welcoming to a wider range of people. Prosser says that the expectation of who a D&D player is has changed significantly over the years. While the game is still dominated by men — Wizards of the Coast said in 2023 that "60% of D&D players are male, 39% are female, and 1% identify otherwise" — the demographics seem to be shifting. Prosser used to play in a group that was made up entirely of women players. " People would think it was strange that a group of women performing artists wanted to play D&D. That's not the case anymore," she says. "At least in most of the circles that I run in."

As the internet fosters more avid fan communities, nothing feels as niche as it once did. Being a nerd once meant you were part of a specific subculture of people passionate about comic books or video games. Today, fandom is just the air we breathe. When everyone is a nerd, nothing is really nerdy — that's made it easier to find really special communities in the tabletop game world.

Aimee Pearcy is a freelance journalist who writes about technology and digital culture.

Growing up with a cardiologist dad, Anna always knew she wanted to become a doctor. She had watched her father spend decades building trust with his patients so he could care for them, and she wanted to have that kind of impact.

"I went into medical school thinking I'm going to specialize," says Anna, a 27-year-old in her fourth year as a medical student at Georgetown University. "I thought the best and the smartest pick something specific so that they can really master it."

But after completing her third-year rotations, she found she most enjoyed family medicine — where she could focus on caring for patients long term. But at a school that's mostly focused on specialties, her interest wasn't well received.

"People would say, 'Oh, wow, you're such a competitive applicant. You could do anything you want. Why family med?'" says Anna, who asked to use just her first name to avoid professional backlash. "It made me think I wasn't reaching my full potential."

Like Anna, a lot of Gen Zers want to be doctors — a survey last year found a rising interest in healthcare work among high-achieving high school students, and the number of med students has grown by 17% in the past decade. As boomers get older and AI upends white-collar work, this is really good news. The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts that we will need far more people working in healthcare over the next decade. And the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis predicts a shortage of about 87,000 family doctors by 2037, a problem exacerbated by an aging doctor workforce and increasing demand for elder care.

But each year, hundreds of medical residencies for primary care programs struggle to find students, and many who enter the field end up abandoning it. Across the medical field, people look down on primary care work — which includes family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, OB-GYNs, and geriatrics — because it doesn't pay as well, is an administrative slog, and isn't considered as prestigious as other specialties. There's even a term for the bad-mouthing of primary care: specialty disrespect. Georgetown notes a study that found it could affect up to 80% of students, particularly those considering going into primary care.

That's leaving Americans without enough doctors to go around.

If you type "Match Day" into TikTok, you'll be flooded with clips of anxious young med students in school auditoriums ripping open letters to find out which residency they landed. It's a nerve-racking process, made even more daunting by the fact that everyone gets their results at the same time — together. Through the National Resident Matching Program, med students are interviewed by representatives from residency programs, and both parties rank each other. On Match Day, based on those rankings, the students learn whether they got into their preferred specialty.

Despite being in an honors society, volunteering, joining clubs, and studying day and night, Match Day didn't go as Dr. Erica Ginsburg had hoped. Ginsburg, 27, did not get matched with her top choice for dermatology, a specialty so competitive that about 20% of applicants don't match. "Some people were screaming, crying tears of joy. Me and my friend were crying tears of sadness," she says. As a child, a dermatologist treated her for eczema, and the results gave her confidence. She wanted to do the same for others. Once she got older, she said, she realized that dermatology also "has it good" when it comes to work-life balance.

"I do want to have both, you know, a career and a family," she says.

While students compete for spots in fields like dermatology and surgery, primary care programs go unfilled. After 2024's Match Day, there were over 600 unfilled spots in family medicine, nearly 500 in internal medicine, and 250 in pediatrics. Meanwhile, about 6.3% of applicants — more than 1,200 med students — were left unmatched. (About 900 of them found positions through a subsequent matching program for unmatched students, but that still left hundreds of future doctors without a residency spot and 164 unfilled primary care positions over the past two years.)

It's not surprising that so many people want to avoid primary care. When third-year med students rotate through underresourced primary care practices, they witness how stressed out doctors are. Even those who may have wanted to go into the field sometimes change their minds.

"I've been in situations where they're saying, 'OK, here's a new patient. You've got seven minutes to try to get an intake on who they are, write their notes,'" says Annelise Silva, the president of the American Medical Student Association, who recently graduated from the Boonshoft School of Medicine at Wright State University. "There are family practice clinicians who see upwards of 20 to 30 patients a day." They often spend hours after their appointments writing up clinic notes, she adds.

Dr. Yalda Jabbarpour, a family doctor and director of the Robert Graham Center at the American Academy of Family Physicians, says primary care is the "backbone" of our healthcare system, but the US allocated only $0.05 in 2021 to the field for every dollar spent on healthcare. "Most countries that have a robust primary care system and better health outcomes, longer life expectancy, are closer to double or even triple that," she says. She and other researchers found other wealthy countries spent an average of $0.14 in 2021.

Part of the undervaluing of primary care is structural. Most doctors are paid through the fee-for-service structure — a monetary value is assigned to each service based on the risk and complexity involved. "That system is pretty biased against cognitive specialties and towards procedural specialties," Jabbarpour says. "The specialties where you're taking time to talk to the patient, coordinate their care, think about their complex medical issues, but aren't necessarily doing a procedure on them, are going to be paid less, and that is primary care."

Of course, "tiny violins come out when we're talking about salaries of physicians," she says, adding: "Yes, a cardiologist makes more than a primary care physician. A primary care physician still makes a pretty good salary."

A 2023 Medscape report said family doctors made an average of $255,000 in 2022. That's a far cry from the $619,000 average salary of the highest-paid doctors, plastic surgeons. When you've accumulated over $200,000 in debt to go to medical school, the pull toward a better salary is tough to ignore.

Bias against primary care, like what Anna experienced at Georgetown, can also deter people.

Specialty disrespect was defined by one study as "unwarranted, negative, denigrating, even sarcastic comments made by trainees and physicians about different specialties." It surveyed med students at the University of Washington School of Medicine between 2008 and 2012, and 87.7% of students who matched into family medicine residencies said they had experienced specialty disrespect — a higher percentage than for any other specialty — compared with just under 80% of all respondents. About one-quarter of respondents said the comments had a moderate to strong impact on their choice.

Even among students who wind up in primary care, a good chunk of them don't stay there. In 2021, 37% of all residents started out training in primary care, but after three to five years, only 21% remained practicing it, the Primary Care Scorecard said. Instead, many go on to subspecialize in fields like endocrinology or rheumatology or work in hospitals.

The first doctors most people meet are in primary care. When there aren't enough primary care doctors, diseases aren't caught early and patients have a harder time managing chronic diseases. Already, nearly one in every three Americans lacks reliable access to primary care, the National Association of Community Health Centers found in a data analysis. Researchers from Case Western Reserve University and Academia Sinica estimate that the number of people over 50 with at least one chronic illness will double from 71.5 million in 2020 to 142.6 million by 2050, which would add pressure to an already stressed healthcare workforce.

The impact will be felt most acutely by those in rural communities and people of color — a problem that could get worse if the Trump administration cuts healthcare spending. The House of Representatives passed a budget on February 25 that would cut $880 billion from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which includes Medicaid, though it hasn't yet been passed into law. Some medical students interested in maternal health are also avoiding states with abortion bans and practicing OB-GYNs in those places are fleeing.

"Patients don't have access to healthcare. It's really hard for them to get in to see their primary care doctor. Because of that, we have higher rates of chronic disease. We have higher mental health burden. We have lower vaccination rates than we've ever had," Jabbarpour says.

Dr. Amol Navathe, a professor of health policy, medicine, and healthcare management at the University of Pennsylvania, says the shortage is also moving patients away from more holistic relationships with a doctor familiar with their needs and into more fragmented care as patients go to urgent care or seek out specialists on their own. "It's not good for patient health," he says. "It's not good for the efficiency of how our resources get used."

To address some of these issues, Jabbarpour says, the US needs to invest in payment models that value primary care more effectively. Some medical systems are already trying this. Navathe has worked with the Hawaii Medical Service Association, a licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, to design a system through which physicians are paid a fixed rate per patient and then given additional fees for services like providing vaccines or dermatology. The goals are to help patients get better care and reduce the number of patients doctors need to see to get paid.

The new structure, which started as a pilot project in 2016 and is now in place across the state, has had some success: More people got vaccines and cancer screenings, and there were fewer emergency room visits and hospitalizations for chronic diseases. Navathe says Medicare has tested similar pilot projects but would require approval from Congress to roll them out widely.

Medicare funding for graduate medical schools is another bottleneck. "It's going to these large academic hospitals, which aren't necessarily primary-care-oriented," Jabbarpour says. "Most people are not going to the hospital to get their healthcare."

Some schools are trying to address the shortage: Ginsburg says her medical school at Florida State University enthusiastically promoted going into primary care — resulting in nearly half of her class matching into the field. She was one of only three who went into dermatology. "We had all these people who just really love medicine for underserved populations," she says. "So we had all these clubs, organizations that were really geared towards primary care."

At other schools, addressing the issue of specialty disrespect head-on can make a difference. Georgetown's School of Medicine has launched a campaign to combat the issue, with posters around the school featuring common negative tropes about various specialties and rebuttals to these comments. In a 2020 survey of Georgetown med students, 31% of respondents said derogatory comments affected their career decisions, and 38% said they had disparaged a specialty.

Anna says she understands the instinct more experienced doctors have in wanting to protect students from negative experiences. "You don't want to be naive to the realities of their specialties," she says. But she wishes these topics were brought up in a more neutral way.

"Most people come into medical school with an inherent drive to help people and to want to do good," she says. "When you hear these comments, it pulls you further from your values and doesn't allow you to explore and feel good about what you want to go into."

The next generation of doctors has a lot riding on them. The last thing the medical system — and the government — should be doing is deterring them from their job: keeping Americans healthy.

Manisha Krishnan is an Emmy award-winning journalist who covers healthcare. She is based in Brooklyn.

Fawn Weaver has never been able to run her business without worrying about tariffs. She launched her Tennessee whiskey brand, Uncle Nearest, in 2017, right before the European Union slapped tariffs on American whiskeys and bourbons as part of a back-and-forth trade war with Donald Trump in 2018. That means Weaver's international sales strategy has been affected, basically, since "day one," she says. And because Uncle Nearest was a new kid on the block, the company didn't really have much wiggle room on prices.

"We couldn't pass on those tariffs to the consumer," she says. "We had to absorb them, and there was absolutely no way we could absorb them."

When Europe suspended whiskey tariffs in 2021, Weaver wasn't home-free, either. She knew the suspension might not be permanent, especially if Trump landed back in the White House. So when he won in November, Uncle Nearest pulled international sales from their annual earnings forecast in anticipation of a return to the trade war.

"We had to make a decision to not focus as much on international until the trade war was over," she says. "Well, it's not been over."

And return the trade war has: The EU is threatening to implement a 50% tariff on American whiskeys. And now, there's a new and surprising trade foe: Canada. The United States' neighbors to the north aren't putting tariffs on US-made bourbon in response to Trump's various economic threats; they're simply making it impossible to buy.

"They pulled us off the shelf right along with Jack Daniels," Weaver says.

The reignition of the international brown liquor battle is another headache for an industry already reeling. After multiple years of solid growth in the 2010s and a pandemic-driven boom in 2020, domestic US whiskey sales have been on the decline, while international sales have flattened. Data from IWSR, an analytics firm focused on the alcohol industry, found that sales volume of US whiskeys fell by 1.2% in 2023, and another 2% in 2024. Globally, sales were flat in 2023 and are on track to decline in 2024. (American whiskeys include bourbon, Tennessee, and rye. The distinctions are key since all bourbons are whiskeys, but not all whiskeys are bourbon. If it's American or Irish, it's whiskey, with the "e." If it's from Scotland, England, Japan, or most other places, it's spelled whisky.)

For customers, this could mean some of their favorite craft brands might struggle and even fold if they can't get on enough shelves in America or abroad. Ironically, though, the bourbon industry's tariff-related headaches may wind up being a plus for American drinkers in the near term — distilleries could wind up with a ton of inventory they can't sell overseas and push more volumes and varieties onto the US market. That could mean prices on American booze come down in the near term, though some analysts say distributors could just charge more on everything, wherever it's made.

There's no denying the industry is facing troubles, but Weaver chafes at the idea of calling what's happening a bourbon "bust." Uncle Nearest is growing as a brand, and there are still plenty of whiskey drinkers out there, at home and abroad. Instead, what's happening is more of a normalization, and one she thinks more people should have seen coming.

"Everyone was so caught up in this 'boom,' no one was forecasting for the correction," she says. Whatever the case, Trump's latest moves are a sobering moment for an industry that can no longer deny its growing pains.

The modern whiskey trend in America dates back to the "Mad Men" era of the 1950s and '60s, explained Marten Lodewijks, the president of IWSR US. It's popularity started tapering off in the '70s — people tend not to want to drink what their parents drank. In the '80s and '90s, whiskey really struggled, which was a curse and a blessing, because it got to sit and age until it picked up in popularity once again in the 2000s, around when the show "Mad Men" came out.

"Those were sort of the glory days for Scotch whisky," Lodewijks said. "The bourbon industry was a little bit later to the party, but obviously they weren't blind to what was happening. And so they rose with the tide as well."

Over the past decade or so, bourbon has really taken off, too. Much like Scotch, bourbon makers have focused on premiumization — improving the quality and raising the price point. Where it was once seen as a product for drunks, it's now considered fancy. Because bourbon ages for less time than Scotch and has laxer rules around it in areas such as ingredients, distillers can be more dynamic in their approach, too. "You can sort of take more chances," Lodewijks said. "You don't have to wait 12 years to figure out whether or not your innovation is a complete miss or a potential success."

Per the Kentucky Distillers' Association, an industry group, Kentucky produced 3.2 million barrels of whiskey in 2024 and has a record 14.3 million barrels aging. Multiple new producers and brands have popped up, bourbon collecting has risen in popularity, and some consumers have been willing and able to spend big on high-end bottles.

The COVID-19 pandemic put these trends on overdrive. People were sitting at home bored with money to spend, and they were spending more of it on alcohol.

"There was a massive runup during COVID," said Tzvi Wiesel, a longtime whiskey investor and trader and the CEO of Baxus, a spirits trading platform. "So all of these distilleries and investors and everyone got a little bit ahead of themselves, and they're like, 'Oh, there's going to be this level of demand and growth is going to continue forever.'"

Private investors got in on the action, pouring money into distilleries and upping production. "They built the capacity to make a million new barrels a year," Wiesel said. The problem was, there wasn't actually a sustainable place for that demand and growth.

The influx of money chasing the increased demand led to what's become a market flush with product that has nowhere to go.

"The hedge funds and the private equity players, they've gone out and bought barrels, but they don't have a brand to go along with it," said Trey Zoeller, the founder and chief strategist at Jefferson's Bourbon. "When bourbon was very scarce, that might've been a good investment. Now, there's not nearly as many buyers for that as there were when there's such scarcity."

Despite hopes for a new normal, bourbon has long been a cyclical industry. Optimists expected the upward trajectory kicked off by the pandemic to continue, but the market's come back down to earth.

On the one hand, demand is clearly decelerating. By 2022, Americans had returned to their normal drinking habits — when you're back in the office, pouring an old-fashioned at 2 in the afternoon is a real no-no. Amid inflation and dwindling pandemic-driven savings, there's also been a squeeze on consumers' wallets. Alcohol is a discretionary item, meaning it's a want, not a need, and when budgets are tight, people tend to lay off. There are structural factors in play as well. Gen Z is drinking less. Cannabis may be taking some market share from booze. GLP-1s such as Ozempic appear to curb alcohol cravings. Those are "probably having an impact on the margins," said Nadine Sarwat, an analyst who covers the beverage and cannabis industries at Bernstein, though it's not clear they're huge factors — most 24-year-olds (of any generation) are not high-end whiskey drinkers.

On the supply side, the decline in consumer interest is happening at a time when there's a glut of whiskey available. Because bourbon has to age for at least a couple of years — most are kept for four to six years — producers have to anticipate demand years in advance. It's become increasingly clear that a lot of producers overshot their estimates. There's a ton of bourbon sitting in barrels with no bottles to pour it into or brands that want to buy it. (Some brands distill their own whiskeys; some buy it from larger distilleries on contract; some do both and even blend different barrels together.) While distillers can sit on barrels for a while, there are limits, depending on the product. Most bourbon has about a 10-year age limit before it turns. Many investors are on a tighter timeline ito get their returns, meaning they have to cut prices on barrels to move them on the market.

"What I was paying for four-year-old Kentucky bourbon three years ago, I can now get 10-year-old Kentucky bourbon cheaper," said Blake Riber, who runs the craft spirits platform Seelbach's and blogs about the whiskey industry at Bourbonr. "This is just wild, the pricing on it and how much that has just crashed in, call it, 12 months."

Some producers have started to recognize the writing on the wall and scaled back, such as the distilled spirits maker MGP and the alcohol conglomerates Diageo and Brown-Forman.

"The challenge that they're all going to be facing over the next few years is, what do I do with all of the extra liquid in order to either let it age more or are there other outlets that I can use?" Lodewijks said. That may mean more flavored whiskeys or more whiskey-based ready-to-drink cocktails — whatever gets it poured before it goes bad.

The tariffs, of course, are throwing a wrench in an already difficult situation. As part of Trump's trade war, the EU is mulling ending the suspension of its tariffs on American whiskeys in early April. And this time, the bloc could set the levies at 50%, double the 25% from the president's first term. Trump, in turn, has threatened a 200% tariff on wines, Champagnes, and other alcoholic products out of France and the rest of Europe.

It's not entirely clear what it would mean for the American bourbon industry if the EU tariffs take effect. Given the recent glut and change in domestic appetites, growing sales outside America has been a key release valve for producers. Bernstein's Sarwat estimates that tariffs would result in a 10% hit to operating income for Brown-Forman, which owns brands such as Jack Daniel's and Woodford Reserve.

"Because US volumes have been really sluggish over the last couple of years, the international market has always been a real positive for increased penetration, and so any further challenges in that market does not help," she said.

Lodewijks said the EU's original 25% tariff led to about a 20% decline in whiskey sales to Europe, but that doesn't necessarily mean we know what a 50% tariff would do. "There's a point at which more and more consumers aren't willing to spend or spend the money that it would take to buy the product. So I'm not saying necessarily it'll be more than 40%, but likely, it would be more," he said.

The broad point of Trump's trade war — with Europe, China, whoever — is ostensibly to encourage companies to make more goods in the US. But in spaces such as alcohol, it's not so simple. Tequila has to come from Mexico. Scotch is always from Scotland. American whiskey companies would love to sell more to people at home, but American drinkers are not picking up what they're putting down. If tariffs go into effect on alcohol products coming into the US, people won't necessarily switch over to domestically made bourbon. If you're predominantly a wine drinker, you may not be jonesing to swap that for Wild Turkey overnight. And for the industry and Americans who do drink brown liquor, the tit-for-tat battle may not be a win either.

Last time around, American bourbon and whiskey companies ate a lot of the cost of tariffs instead of increasing prices. But not everyone in the space has such a luxury, especially the smaller guys who've already been pushed around by the bigger guys. They're trying to fight for shelf space wherever they can get it and are still trying to recover from the 2018 tariff bout.

"After the tariffs, everything fell off a cliff, and it has not recovered at all," said Becky Harris, the former president of the American Craft Spirits Association and the founder of Catoctin Creek distillery. "The big producers do recover. They recover why? Because they have massive amounts of money, they can splash back into the market."

That means some small producers may go under if they cannot find a place to sell their products. Given the industry's competitiveness, they could also try to increase prices, though that may be tough. The bigger manufacturers and distributors have broad portfolios of products that encompass different types of alcohol from different parts of the world. If they see a price increase on imports to the US for one of their product lines, say, a European wine or Mexican tequila, they may increase prices on American-made products, too, either because they have to or just because they can.

"It's very likely that under the cover of tariffs, domestic products will also go up in price," Lodewijks said.

While some analysts and industry professionals told me the supply glut could lead to producers dropping their prices in the short term in an attempt to move their booze, Tom Fischer, who runs BourbonBlog.com, said the long-term news may not be as encouraging.

"If distilleries lose sales in Europe due to higher prices from EU tariffs, those same American distilleries may raise domestic prices to offset lost revenue," he said. "This has been shown to happen in the past with other goods, so we hope that bourbon won't be the next casualty."

Trump's trade war has the potential to hit the industry in more tangential places, too. Riber noted that not much glass manufacturing happens in the US, and he's starting to hear concerns from bourbon brands about potential tariffs on glass imports and needing to raise prices to make up for it. "At some point, that's going to have to get passed on," he said. Wiesel brought up the increased need for warehouse space as bourbon piles up that can't be sold. "Distilleries are going to have to invest a ton into the actual physical infrastructure to hold onto all of these barrels that they own that are maturing for longer because they don't have a place to sell them," he said.

And then there's Canada, which the president has picked a somewhat confusing fight with. He's threatened 25% tariffs on imports from Canada, has said he wants to make it the 51st state, and has taken an overall aggressive approach to the country. It's sparked a sense of patriotism in Canada — along with boycotts on American-made products, including bourbon.

"Canada is just pulling American products. They're essentially sending notes to their suppliers saying, 'Hey, no, I don't have anything against you, but my customers are not buying American right now. They're angry,'" Harris said. "And they said, 'Even when the tariffs are gone, this is going to take a while, so don't hold your breath.'"

Fischer expressed similar concerns about the potential European tariffs. "A 50% tariff risks pricing us out of key markets, and once those consumers shift, they may not come back," he said. "You can't just roll back a tariff and expect loyalty to return overnight. This is long-term damage."

Weaver, from Uncle Nearest, is still optimistic about the future. Bourbon is one of America's most important exports "in terms of symbolism," she said, and if you look at bourbon's history, "we've always had these times when people are drinking less of it, but then it comes roaring back." She gets that the president is doing what he thinks he needs to do to negotiate trade agreements. In the meantime, it might be nice if he gave the industry a bit of a PR boost.

"The best thing he could do is literally say, 'Hey, America, this is going to be in our best interest,' because this is clearly what he believes, 'but while we're working this out, we really need you to double down on bourbon,'" she said.

Maybe "Buy American" can become "Drink American," even if the president himself doesn't drink.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Tesla's stock has spent the past few months on autopilot, barreling toward a crash. Protesters angry with CEO Elon Musk's politics are burning electric-vehicle charging stations and vandalizing Cybertrucks, leading some owners to offload the cars before they become the next targets. A JPMorgan analyst said last week that the precipitous drop of some 50% of Tesla's market cap was unprecedented in the auto industry. And instead of returning to the dusty Tesla floor where he used to sleep to inspire workers to "give it their all," Musk is continuing to play Donald Trump's all-powerful "first buddy" in Washington.

Musk's role at the White House DOGE office has made Tesla investors want their CEO back. But he's far from the first chief executive to go AWOL.

Absent leadership "is something of a silent epidemic in corporations," says Laura McHale, the managing director of the professional coaching firm Conduit Consultants Limited. It can take several forms, she says: from "leader distance," where CEOs are physically OOO as they court investors or go on the panel circuit or communicate infrequently, to psychological neglect (lacking direction, not delegating, failing to give employees proper recognition). While absenteeism is quieter than headline-making destructive behaviors like bullying or abuse, McHale says it's more common — and can be just as harmful to company morale and productivity. "And yet, it's almost never talked about."

The scope of the issue is hard to measure in part because what modern CEOs do all day — Musk included — is somewhat of a mystery. Until about 50 years ago, a chief executive's time was largely trackable, as they spent most of their day closely overseeing their company's product. But as mergers and IPOs became more common and corporations became more global, the CEO's role shifted from an internal product leader to a public figure seeking to drive shareholder value on the world stage. Today, many top CEOs jump from executive positions at companies in different industries rather than working their way up and learning a company inside and out. As they focus on building their personal brand or even working with an eye on the company's future, they may lose sight of the day-to-day operations that build strong company cultures. A 2009 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that as CEOs become superstars as well known as the companies they run, they begin to underperform. The "consequences of media-induced superstar status for shareholders are negative," the study concluded.

Even at smaller firms, leaders' attention can become easily diverted. At startups in particular, CEOs have to focus on raising money and pleasing investors, which often takes them away from their offices. This absenteeism can turn "toxic," McHale says. "It is very destructive for employees and systems. It minimizes the importance of social relationships with our leaders." A 2015 Interact/Harris Poll of US workers found that most of the communication issues people had with their company leaders weren't about bullying or demeaning behavior, but about what their bosses weren't doing: whether not knowing employees' names or not giving clear directions or recognizing their achievements. A paper from 2010 found that "laissez-faire" leadership was more prevalent than other types of destructive leadership. And a recently updated paper found that companies whose CEOs worked remotely were more likely to underperform and have lower valuations.

Musk is far from the first CEO to try to wear the hat in two places: Steve Jobs ran Apple and Pixar simultaneously, and Jack Dorsey oversaw Twitter (now X) and Square (now Block). But Jobs was a largely hands-off manager at Pixar, delegating tasks to other execs. Twitter had always been difficult to monetize and effectively moderate, and Dorsey stepped down in 2021.

But much as there's no comparison for Tesla's plunge in value, Musk himself is incomparable. In addition to Tesla and X, Musk has on his plate Neuralink, The Boring Company, SpaceX, and xAI. He remains chief executive of Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI — that's in addition to posting on X at a dizzying pace and fathering 14 children. In 2022, when he added Twitter to his empire of influential businesses, some management experts speculated that he'd bitten off more than he could chew. Musk slashed staff by 80% and ran the hobbled blue bird alongside his other companies for several months before naming Linda Yaccarino as CEO. A radically new version of Twitter, renamed X, still worked, defying many predictions that it would break under the pressure. Amid his X takeover, Tesla's stock also plummeted from a high of $309 a share in September 2022 to a low of $103 in January 2023 — because of concerns around EV demand, rising inflation and interest rates, and Musk's distractions at Twitter. But Tesla stock roared back through the rest of 2023.

So when Musk began raiding the federal government's IT system in the name of cost cutting, many were slow to count him out. Perhaps he could bring the outsider energy needed to pare down bureaucracy and keep his companies humming at the same time. So far, DOGE has fired thousands of workers, canceled lifesaving aid, and produced all-around chaos. You can debate how well Musk's tactics are working to cut government waste, but it's undeniable now that DOGE and Musk's political involvement are eating away at his biggest cash cow.

When it comes to Tesla, Musk is the missing CEO who isn't really missing — he's everywhere else. He dominates headlines each day, his face appearing constantly in the press and his posts gaining eyeballs all over X. That's part of Tesla's problem. Owners and would-be buyers of the cars no longer can separate Musk's political ideology from the brand, and his brutal cost-cutting tactics have turned people off. But it's not just Musk's divided attention and political unpopularity affecting the once premiere EV company: Tesla is facing several roadblocks, including increased competition in the electric vehicle industry from Chinese manufacturers and uncertainty around the development of its fully autonomous self-driving software.

Jumping in and out of the daily grind of companies "is especially problematic when you're a micro-manager," says David Yoffie, a professor of international business administration at Harvard Business School. We know that Musk "likes to really get into the weeds and into the details," Yoffie notes. But there aren't enough hours in a day to micromanage a handful of companies — and that makes it harder to dive deep into the core issues of each. In January and February, Musk was reportedly sleeping on the floor of his DOGE office across the street from the White House, adapting his hardcore playbook from working at Tesla and Twitter to show his dedication at DOGE. Musk traveled with Trump to Mar-a-Lago for a donor dinner as recently as this weekend. Following the election, he spent so much time at Trump's Florida oasis that the president joked: "Elon won't go home. I can't get rid of him."

Sometimes CEOs go long periods without seeing their employees or they communicate sporadically over email with staff in a way that creates more separation between themselves and workers. "Without a finger on the pulse of what's really going on in their organization, they start losing credibility because they often will helicopter in, blow things up a little bit, create a big kerfuffle," Lori Dernavich, an executive coach and leadership development advisor, says of absent CEOs.

With Musk, the absenteeism isn't so silent. One Tesla backer, Christopher Tsai, has said he hopes Musk's "involvement with DOGE is short-lived so he can spend even more time on his businesses." Ross Gerber, a Tesla shareholder, told Business Insider in February that he was concerned about the other ventures that were pulling Musk's attention away from Tesla. "His 100% focus is on AI, and that's really a detriment to Tesla more than it's a plus for xAI and all the other businesses because he doesn't work at Tesla anymore," Gerber said. "If he were putting all of his time into Full Self-Driving, I'd feel a lot more confident about Tesla."

Some founders start companies with an entrepreneurial spirit but find themselves bored with the day-to-day tasks of a CEO. That's generally a time for them to transition to a chairman role — perhaps the way Dorsey did with Twitter when he was pushed out of his role as CEO in 2008 — but not all willingly bow out. As a result, "their sporadic presence means that they become a bottleneck for the organization," Dernavich says. "That bottleneck leads to resentment, poor decision-making, slower response times, and the culture gets affected. So much can start going haywire when that happens."

Asked how he's running his businesses alongside the demands of DOGE, Musk recently told Fox Business in a rare interview that he was doing so "with great difficulty." It was a bad week. An outage took X offline (Musk later blamed a "massive cyberattack" originating in Ukraine, which experts have cast doubt on), and a second SpaceX rocket exploded during a launch. Tesla lost $127 billion in market cap in one day. Trump just bought a Tesla with hopes of boosting the car's popularity. He'll have to buy quite a few more to make up for Tesla's losses. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Musk could afford for his wealth to drop by $100 billion or more in support of his political opinions, and his other companies are doing just fine. But being one of the most powerful people in the world means your actions and views have an outsize effect on everyone, including customers, shareholders, and workers at Tesla. Musk may have the stamina to hold out. The others may not.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

Arnab Dutta, a 40-year-old living in the Bay Area, tried buying a home a couple of years ago with the help of a traditional real estate agent. It didn't go well.

Dutta's arrangement with his agent was the same one Americans have used for decades: The agent agreed to guide him through the process — showing him homes, writing offers, and wrangling stacks of paperwork — in exchange for the standard cut of the final sale price, between 2% and 3%. The commission, likely tens of thousands of dollars, wouldn't come straight out of Dutta's pocket; sellers are the ones who fork over the cash to agents on both sides of the deal after it closes. But Dutta would be indirectly paying for his agent, since the buyer is the reason the seller has any money to hand out, and the agent's threadbare advice made him feel like he wasn't getting much bang for his buck. The whole commission thing didn't sit right with him, either. He didn't see why his agent, who was supposed to represent his interests, should make more money if the price went up, the opposite of Dutta's ideal outcome. After he lost out on several homes, his search stalled out.

Dutta wasn't alone in his dissatisfaction with the traditional agent setup. He didn't know it at the time, but the rules that reinforced this relationship for decades were about to change. Last March, the National Association of Realtors, a powerful industry group that represents some 1.5 million agents around the country, agreed to settle a series of multibillion-dollar lawsuits that claimed this roundabout way of paying agents — and the NAR rules undergirding this system — had forced people to pay unfairly high commissions. The deal included new rules for paying agents, which many real estate experts predicted would nudge buyers and sellers to start negotiating over commission rates and bring costs down.

The results a year later have been underwhelming: There's little evidence that the settlement has put a dent in average nationwide commission rates, and those looking to preserve the old way of doing things have devised workarounds to ensure agents still collect their typical cut. But while many people are still doing things more or less the old way, some are taking advantage of the updated rules to usher in a brave new world of homebuying. They're owners of discount brokerages charging far less than the typical commission, entrepreneurs spinning up new real estate tech, and a small but growing number of savvy consumers flexing their negotiating power to save tens of thousands of dollars on their agents' fees. They're all betting that one day they'll no longer be outliers.

When Dutta resumed the hunt late last year, he tried a different tack. He enlisted the services of TurboHome, a brokerage founded after the NAR settlement whose agents work for a flat fee of between $5,000 and $15,000. Most real estate agents are independent contractors, reliant on hefty commission checks to make up for the lack of a steady salary. But agents at TurboHome are employed by the company — trading the uneven lump sums for consistent pay. The company, which raised $3.85 million in seed funding late last year, uses software tools to speed up mundane tasks like analyzing property disclosures and finding sales of comparable homes. Its tech frees up agents to focus on the finer details of the process while also taking on more clients at a time to make up for the smaller fees they collect on each deal.

Dutta agreed to pay the flat fee of $10,000 out of pocket, which turned out to be a useful bargaining chip in his negotiations with sellers. He didn't have to ask sellers to cover his agent's fee, which allowed them to pocket the sizable chunk of the deal that they would have otherwise had to fork over to his representation. In the pricey Bay Area, where the typical home trades for north of $1 million, that meant savings of $25,000 or more. When one of Dutta's offers eventually won out, it wasn't because he proposed the largest dollar figure; his agent, Donny Suh, tells me other prospective buyers came in higher. But without having to pay out a commission for Suh, the seller stood to net the most money from Dutta's offer. He closed on the three-bedroom home in February.

The success has left Dutta with some what-ifs from his prior home search. He recalls one house for which he was outbid by just $5,000.

"If we had this sort of tool in our hands at that time," he tells me, "we wouldn't have lost."

The battle over commissions — who pays, how much they pay, and when the money changes hands — comes down to information.

It all starts with the multiple listing services — local databases where most homes are advertised for sale. They may sound like unsexy infrastructure, but they've played a key role in propping up the typical agent commission. There are more than 500 of these databases around the country, and the vast majority are operated by local Realtor associations that follow rules handed down by the NAR. While the national organization didn't set commissions and says they've always been negotiable, it did set up rules that helped maintain the status quo. In the presettlement days, a seller who listed their home on the MLS had to fill out a little box saying how much they'd be willing to pay the buyer's agent. Since buyers already had enough up-front costs to worry about, everyone assumed that deals would go more smoothly if the suddenly cash-flush seller just paid out both sides. This setup allowed buyers to basically ignore how much their agent was getting paid — in fact, buyers' agents used to tell clients their services were free until a different legal battle ended that practice in 2020. It also meant that sellers almost always stuck to the industry standard of 2.5% or 3% of the final price for each agent, either because they didn't know any different or because offering less could risk being passed over by buyers' agents, who might "steer" their clients away from properties with lower-than-average commissions.

In the lawsuits against the NAR, the sellers who sued the organization alleged that this whole system was an elaborate scheme to pull the wool over regular people's eyes and force them to pay unfairly high commissions. Given that the median home price in the US is about $419,000, a 6% commission, split between two agents, would mean shelling out more than $25,000. While the plaintiffs pushed for commissions to be "decoupled," with buyers and sellers paying their own agents separately, the $418 million settlement last year didn't go quite that far. But it did offer enough changes to throw the real estate world into flux.

The first change is that sellers and their agents can no longer offer buyer-agent commissions through the MLS. In theory, this should get rid of that steering problem — if sellers aren't offering a commission, buyers' agents can't direct their clients away from the homes with less than the customary fee. But there's a huge loophole here: Sellers can advertise a buyer-agent commission pretty much anywhere else — on the broker's website, over the phone, on sites like Zillow or Redfin. If a buyer's agent wants to see how much they'll make off a home, it's easy for them to check. Given this workaround, many sellers are still offering to pay the standard commission, which makes sense in today's slow housing market. Given the low number of homes changing hands, people are wary of doing anything that could muck up a deal.

Buyers, on the other hand, face more paperwork as a result of the settlement. Before an agent so much as opens a door for a buyer these days, they'll have to get them to sign an agreement stating the terms of their relationship, including compensation. These forms, known as buyer-representation agreements, have historically been introduced much later in the process, if they were used at all. And they vary widely by brokerage and agent — some agreements are simple one-sheeters to tour a few homes, while others lock buyers into exclusive arrangements for months. It's the difference between seeing someone casually and getting married on the first date.

For now, at least, the combination of a slow market, general inertia, and lagging consumer awareness has kept the status quo relatively intact. A study by the real estate brokerage Redfin found that the typical buyer-agent commission was 2.36% in the fourth quarter of the year, down from 2.43% in the first quarter of 2024, when the settlement was announced, and unchanged from the third quarter, when the rules went into effect. But again, it's still pretty early, and many industry insiders expect the changes to eventually start knocking down commissions as agents are forced to compete on price.

"I think our projection still hasn't changed much, which is, over time, that will still come down," Joe Rath, the head of industry relations for Redfin, says. "That downward pressure still exists."

So how, exactly, could buyers and sellers start coming out ahead? A big step is simple consumer education. The real estate firm Clever surveyed 1,000 homeowners and prospective buyers and found that even after the new rules went into effect, 40% of respondents said they either didn't understand the implications or hadn't even heard of the lawsuits.

Old habits die hard, especially when there's so much confusion around these changes. And critics of the settlement say it's actually opened up new pitfalls for buyers. Before, the MLS at least showed you what almost every home was offering in commissions — now that kind of information has been scattered or isn't publicly available at all, which makes it harder to tell whether "steering" is happening. And some of the representation agreements floating around could end up locking buyers into exclusive relationships with incompetent agents.

"All these deceptive practices have been basically turned underground," Tanya Monestier, a law professor at the University at Buffalo, tells me.

But as consumers absorb these new rules and start to negotiate on commissions, both sides of the transaction stand to benefit. For sellers, the main advice boils down to this: Don't offer an exact commission anywhere. Not on the MLS, of course, but also not on a broker's website, via telephone, or a sign in the front yard, Stephen Brobeck, a senior fellow at the Consumer Policy Center, says. Instead, allow buyers to make offers on agent payment, just like they do for the home itself. One buyer might offer to pay 2.5% more than the asking price but ask for that extra 2.5% back in the form of a closing credit so they can pay their agent. Another buyer may offer the same dollar amount but ask for only 1.5% back to pay their agent's commission. Yet another, like Dutta, may not ask for any money back. At the end of the day, sellers should care about their net proceeds — the amount that goes into their pocket once all the pesky fees are settled. They can say they're open to working with buyers on their agent's commission without backing themselves into a corner by suggesting an exact percentage.

On the buyers' side, saving money comes down to asking — you can request a lower commission from your own agent or, if you can't afford to pay it out of pocket, ask for help from the seller in the form of a closing credit. "You can ask for stuff that's not advertised and still get it," Leo Pareja, the CEO of the real estate brokerage eXp Realty, tells me. Buyers make special requests all the time, like asking for a repair or for the pool table in the basement to come with the house. A credit to cover your agent's commissions shouldn't be any different.

Most sellers these days are still offering to pay a commission to the buyer's agent, as they did before the settlement's changes. But buyers who've negotiated a lower commission with their own agent could use that to make their offers more attractive in the eyes of a seller.

"I think what has changed is that there are these sort of savvier buyers out there, particularly in the high-cost markets, that are looking for any advantage that they can get," Ben Bear, the founder and CEO of TurboHome, says. The company mostly operates in California but has recently expanded to Texas and Washington.

Long before they start eyeing homes, buyers should also do some due diligence on their prospective agents. Studies have found that the vast majority of buyers still want a professional to guide them through their purchase, which makes sense — it's a massive transaction that most people will complete only a few times in their life. Some agents may be able to articulate exactly why they're worth every penny of the traditional commission. But there are a lot of agents out there vying for your business, and others may be willing to deviate from the standard commission to win more clients. One recently created portal, known as Fetch Agent, allows buyers to search for agents that match a set of parameters, like years of experience, location expertise, and even how much they charge in commission. In a world where buyer-agent commissions are no longer an afterthought but a key part of sale negotiations, it makes sense to shop around for an agent before shopping for a house.

"What we offer is the ability to transparently see what an agent would be open to when it comes to a work arrangement," Beau Correll, the founder of Fetch Agent, tells me. That kind of transparency — knowing exactly what you're getting from an agent and how much you'll be paying for them — is the kind of thing that could spur more agents to compete on price, which would bring down costs for consumers.

The rollout of the new rules has undoubtedly been a mess — even now, a year after the settlement was unveiled, there are many different interpretations of what is and isn't allowed. But the idea that both buyers and sellers should think about commissions — and maybe even negotiate to get a better deal — is a remarkable reversal from the old way of doing things.

"I would've liked it to go further," Brobeck tells me. "But it represents progress."

James Rodriguez is a senior reporter on Business Insider's Discourse team.

It's genuinely amazing how cheap a new TV is these days. A 65-inch LCD television that probably would have cost $1,500 or $2,000, a decade ago is now under $500. And in a world where everything's so expensive — cars, houses, eggs — there's some comfort in knowing you can still indulge in your guilty pleasure show at the end of the day, in high quality, for a pretty low cost. If you can't afford that fancy vacation, at least you can live a little vicariously through "The White Lotus."

That's the deal American consumers have begrudgingly made over the years. A lot of the elements of the supposed American dream are wildly pricey — to the point that for many people they're out of reach. Healthcare is wildly expensive. College tuition is nuts. Navigating the housing market is panic-attack-inducing, whether you're trying to buy or rent.

What's still accessible is the cheap stuff. The cost of consumer goods such as toys, clothes, and electronics has gone down. We tolerate the price tags of the big stuff, in part, because we have no other choice, and in part because at the very least we're entertained, we're connected, and we can fill our homes and closets with stuff. Maybe you can't move up in life, and once available opportunities are shut off, but hey, at least you can get something fun and weird for $5 on Temu.

But now, that grand bargain is changing. Inflation has made the cost of once accessible stuff a little hard to stomach. And tariffs threaten to blot out the last of what's affordable. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently declared that "access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream." Unfortunately, it's the whole shebang, or at least what it's become. And even that might be about to be taken away, too.

It didn't used to be this way. Throughout most of history, consumers weren't inundated with things. Most people had a limited amount of clothes — often made by the women of the house — and furniture and possessions. Their stuff lasted throughout their lifetimes, and when something broke, they fixed it instead of tossing it to buy a replacement. But with the Industrial Revolution and eventual "Mad Men" era of advertising, mass-produced stuff became widely available and attractive to everyone. Along with savvy marketing campaigns came manufacturing tricks like planned obsolescence, where things are built to die, and financial innovations, like consumer credit, that made it easier to pay for all that stuff. And, of course, there's globalization, meaning it's possible to make a bunch of cheap stuff outside the US and ship it in.

Chip Colwell, an anthropologist who is the author of "So Much Stuff: How Humans Discovered Tools, Invented Meaning, and Made More of Everything," told me that it's not just the "capacity" to make all this stuff that made Americans start to accumulate it, but "also really this ideology of abundance." It became possible and desirable to constantly have more, in order to keep up with the Joneses and with our own ideals of consumerism. "The culture of consumption that we have is absolutely predicated on supercheap stuff that we can easily throw away and not have to worry about," he said.

The consumer economy is a driving force in the American economic engine. We spend money to keep the wheels turning. It's become part of our patriotic duty — after the September 11, 2001, attacks, political leaders told Americans to keep spending and not let what happened "in any way throw off their normal level of activity." The ability to spend on what we want when we want is viewed as a pillar of American freedom.

"Now, there's no shame in being materialistic. In fact, materialism is part of our consumer citizenship," said Wendy Woloson, a history professor at Rutgers University who is the author of "Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America."

The churn of stuff cuts across income levels, too. A survey from The New Consumer and Coefficient Capital found that Shein shoppers were likelier to say they cared about sustainability and the environment than the average consumer — eyebrow-raising, given that Shein's clothes and business model are pointedly not good for the planet. A separate March 2024 analysis from the credit card data company Earnest Analytics found that nearly half of sales for Temu, another cheap Chinese retail marketplace, came from people making over $130,000 a year. Given the way wealth has been concentrated at the tippy top of the economy, it tracks: Nearly everyone outside the top 10% of income earners is feeling squeezed by costs of things such as healthcare and higher education, and cheap consumer goods are an outlet to exercise some agency. And in uncertain economic times, everyone's feeling a little price-sensitive.

The Trump administration's recent moves have some important implications for the cheap-stuffification of the American economy. The president is taking a protectionist approach to trade, implementing tariffs that could make the inexpensive things consumers have come to rely on quite a bit more expensive. Retailers such as Best Buy and Target have begun to warn of price increases. The stream of super-low-cost inane items from Shein and Temu could be cut off should President Donald Trump get his way. The prices of clothes, electronics, and toys are likely to go up — the things that up until now have been reliably affordable.

"The whole agenda is let's make it so that it's not the default option to buy just the cheapest, crappiest stuff from overseas when we should be making more of it in America," said Dan Frommer, the founder and editor in chief of The New Consumer.

But shifting the entire supply chain for goods from overseas back into the US is a transition that, if it happens, will be painful for consumers. We're used to a world of more more more — we don't know what it's like to do less less less.

"We don't have that experience of contraction. The system has grown and grown and grown and grown and grown, and the system is based on growing and growing and growing," said Susan Strasser, a historian of American consumer culture. "You want the end of the quarter report to be better than the last end of the quarter report. That's the whole point of it. And so in no sense are people prepared."

I'll go back to the example of TVs — the great American escape. Televisions, like many consumer electronics, have gone down in price even as they've gotten better over the years. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, television prices have decreased by 98% since 2000.

"The reason why the prices fall is because of business investment," said Paul Gagnon, a vice president and industry advisor on consumer technology at Circana, a market research firm, adding that companies invest "continuously in new manufacturing facilities that are more efficient and therefore can produce for at least the same amount of money a product that has a lot more performance, or for less money, something that's larger."

Much of this activity, however, is taking place outside the US.

Patrick Horner, a practice leader in TV set research at Omdia, a tech advisory firm, explained that 10 years ago, 49% of assembly for televisions imported into the US was happening in China. But after Trump's first term and the tariffs he put in place on China then, manufacturers moved more of their assembly operations to Mexico. Now, around 60% of American TV imports are made there. You can see the problem: In his second term, Trump has announced 20% additional tariffs on top of existing tariffs on China, and he's also threatening a 25% tariff on imports from Mexico that's (for now) supposed to be implemented in April. Omdia estimates manufacturers with existing factories could shift partial production to tariff-free countries in six months to a year, but building a new factory would take years. And, again, no one knows what Trump's next target could be.

"TV makers are looking into shifting some assembly out of Mexico and relocating it to someplace that doesn't have tariffs," Horner said. "But the thing is, Trump could very much say, 'Hey, Vietnam's on the radar screen, now they're getting the 25% tariff.' I don't think that anybody can accurately predict where the next tariff action is going to take place."

Gagnon said some particular factors kept prices on TVs from going up too much in response to Trump's tariffs in 2018 and 2019. At that time, retailers bought extra inventory to try to get ahead of price increases and it happened at a moment when supply chains to make critical components were expanding and pushing prices down. "Even though the tariffs caused the costs to go up on TVs imported from China, a lot of the components of the TV went down," he said. The context now is different. "It's pretty hard to see how an increase of 25% on the imported cost of a TV from Mexico to the US, given the profit margins for a lot of these TVs, wouldn't result in a price increase," he said.

It's not a bad thing to contemplate the end of the era of cheap stuff. The rate at which we're able to accumulate things without having to think about the trade-offs — environmental, labor-related, or otherwise — is alarming. I don't want to sound like a scold here, but our kids don't need so many toys, our closets don't need to be so full, and that barely old phone doesn't need to be swapped out. Getting a new fun thing may deliver a temporary endorphin hit, but most research shows it doesn't make us happier in the long run. It's not our fault we're like this. Corporations and marketers have turned us into stuffmongers, and even our political leaders encourage us to keep buying.

If and when tariffs start to increase prices and make even the most reachable things unreachable, it's going to feel annoying and unfair. Goods aren't going to become higher quality overnight; tariffs will just make them costlier. That TV isn't made to be fixed when it breaks; it's made to be replaced, whatever the price of said replacement. Fixing something isn't just a physical skill, Strasser said, "but to some extent, it's an emotional skill and a way of framing your relationship to material goods that's just completely different from anything that we've experienced in the last 50, 60, 70 years."

Like it or not, the American dream is a little bit about access to cheap stuff. It's that giant TV that at least lets you watch the football game (assuming you can find it wherever it's streaming, which is increasingly expensive). It's a repeat pair of those sneakers that wore out suspiciously fast. It's even a "Live, Laugh, Love" sign, a seasonal pillow sham, or random holiday decoration. And now, that all might be ripped away, too.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

Decades of health campaigns and scientific research about the risks of sugary soft drinks are a big reason that Americans have been drinking less soda since consumption peaked around 2000. A January paper in Nature Medicine found that in 2020, 2.2 million new cases of type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million new cases of cardiovascular disease worldwide were attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages. But many of us still have not gotten the memo — the average American today drinks about 12 ounces of sugary sodas a day. For each person who doesn't drink any soda, there's someone chugging 24 ounces every day.

Why are we still drinking so much of a beverage that makes people sick?

Eight years ago, two pastors sued Coca-Cola, by far the country's most popular soda company, and the American Beverage Association over "their deceptive marketing, labeling, and sale of Coca-Cola's sugar-sweetened beverages." The complaint, filed in Washington, DC, alleged that Coca-Cola knew about the science linking sugar-sweetened beverages to chronic diseases but obscured those links through aggressive public relations campaigns. Some thought that the suit would finally tip the balance of public opinion against Coke — the same way a court case in 2007 over misleading marketing on OxyContin's addictiveness shifted the tide against Purdue Pharma. But as I cover in my new book, "Sweet and Deadly," every jab by health advocates has been deftly parried by Coke and its allies.

Like the tobacco companies, Coke has spent millions spinning science to hide soda's health costs from the public and downplay the risks of sugar. In fact, Coke has been at this game longer than the tobacco industry. When the Tobacco Industry Research Committee started launching disinformation campaigns in 1954, it imported its staff and strategies lock, stock, and barrel from the Sugar Research Foundation, a nonprofit funded partly by Coke. The soda companies were pioneers of the PR strategy now known as the tobacco playbook.

For decades, the $300 billion corporation has duped consumers by promoting messages that are either misleading or flat-out false. It's used an extensive network of allies and proxy groups to carry its messages, including co-opting scientists and their research, and spent billions of dollars on ads that associate Coke with warm and fuzzy feelings represented by polar bears, Santas, and happy families. Coca-Cola has yet to face a major reckoning for its outsize role in America's health crisis.

One of the dietary falsehoods that Coca-Cola spreads is the concept that a calorie is a calorie. "We don't believe in empty calories," Katie Bayne, Coke's former chief marketing officer, said in 2012. The following year, James Quincey, now the CEO of the corporation, said, "When we talk about obesity, a calorie is a calorie. The experts are clear — the academics, the government advisors, diabetes associations — we need to have balance in the calories. And if you're taking in too many, or burning them off, that is a problem; wherever they're coming from, a calorie is a calorie."

But in the human body, not all calories are created equal — far from it. Research has long shown that a calorie of liquid sugar is not metabolized in the same manner as a calorie of whole grain, for example, or a calorie of fruit or nuts. Those calories have fiber, vitamins, and other nutrients that are not present in soda.

Coke also promotes the related message of "energy balance." The simplest energy balance argument posits that a calorie of food will be metabolized the same whether it comes from cashews, kale, or Coca-Cola, so consumers should focus not on the type of food but on trying to burn as many calories as they consume. Coke has been especially interested in emphasizing the calories-out side of the equation.

This was the focus of the Global Energy Balance Network, an organization launched in 2014 by researchers affiliated with the University of Colorado and the University of South Carolina. One of the academics, Steven Blair, did yeoman's work to shift Americans' focus from the elements of the diet to the concept of balancing calories in and calories out. In a video for the organization, Blair said, "Most of the focus, in the popular media, in the scientific press, is 'Aww, they're eating too much, eating too much, eating too much.' Blaming fast foods, blaming sugary drinks, and so on, and there's really virtually no compelling evidence that that in fact is the cause."

In 2015, a New York Times exposé revealed that the Global Energy Balance Network was simply a front group for Coca-Cola. The corporation had funded it and guided it since its inception but wanted it to appear independent. This prompted a very public apology from Coke's then-CEO Muhtar Kent, who penned a Wall Street Journal column titled "We'll do better." Coca-Cola did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

But it was far from the only misleading messaging Coke had spread. In a May 2013 blog post, Coca-Cola trumpeted its success in removing calories from the American diet through changing its product formulation, portion size, and promotion. "Yesterday, America's top food and beverage manufacturers announced an important milestone: more than 1.5 trillion calories have been removed from the US marketplace," the now-removed post read. "This achievement is the result of efforts made by the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation (HWCF), a coalition of 16 food and beverage corporate partners, including The Coca-Cola Company, and over 230 organizations, who are working together to help reduce obesity, especially childhood obesity."

The post ran beneath a photo of the former Department of Agriculture secretary Dan Glickman, Lisa Gable of HWCF, and the author Hank Cardello at an event sponsored by the Obesity Solutions Initiative at the Hudson Institute. While the photo appears to be three independent experts cordially discussing the problem of obesity, the whole event was paid for by Coke, Pepsi, and other food corporations. Coke alone had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Hudson Institute and $5 million to HWCF.

What the company didn't mention is that Coca-Cola could remove far more calories from the marketplace in a heartbeat by taking full-sugar beverages off the market or reducing its advertising of those products. Not only does it aggressively market these calorie-dense drinks, but it continues to introduce new Coke blends that in some cases, such as Coca-Cola Spiced, have even more sugar than the original Coca-Cola.

Coke is in the business of selling sugar water. If it tries to reduce sales of its products, it would be violating its obligations to its shareholders. (Woe to the CEO who announces on an earnings call — "We did it, we finally succeeded in reducing the amount of Coke we sell, thus reducing calories!") What is unexpected is for Coca-Cola to concurrently sell more sugar-sweetened beverages than any other corporation while taking credit for reducing calories.

One front group ended up taking the pro-sugar stance a bit too far. The International Life Sciences Institute, founded in the 1980s by a Coca-Cola executive, spent decades spinning food science in favor of its corporate funders, including Hershey, Kraft, and Kellogg. But when it funded a 2016 research paper critiquing the growing body of science on the health risks of sugar, it was a step too far for some of its corporate members. Matthias Berninger, a Mars spokesperson at the time, said the paper would not help consumers make better choices. When Mars left ILSI in 2018, Berninger said, "We do not want to be involved in advocacy-led studies that so often, and mostly for the right reasons, have been criticized." Two years later, Coke quietly left the group as well.

In 2018, Coke was part of an elaborate front group to help it push back against the soda taxes several California municipalities had enacted. Coke and its soda industry allies, under the guise of a campaign called "Californians for Accountability and Transparency in Government Spending, Sponsored by California Businesses," gathered signatures to support a statewide initiative that would require municipalities to get the approval of two-thirds of voters before implementing any local tax change. By crafting an initiative so abhorrent to municipalities and unions that California lawmakers would do anything to make it go away, Coke gained bargaining power. With signatures in hand, the soda alliance went to Sacramento and swung a deal. We'll withdraw the initiative, they said, in exchange for a law banning new taxes on groceries, including sodas, through 2030. Legislators took the deal and pushed that provision through as a rider on a budget bill. This strategy, known as preemption, has also proven effective for gun rights groups.

Coke has created this elaborate parallel world to mislead consumers about the health risks of sugar-sweetened beverages and take strategic actions like preventing soda taxes. All of the innocuous-sounding, Coke-funded groups named above are part of a plan that has prevented the balance of public opinion from tipping against Coca-Cola, as it has for other corporations such as the tobacco company Philip Morris, Purdue Pharma, and Exxon. In the 2024 Axios Harris Poll 100, which ranks company reputations, Coke placed 27th with a "very good" score compared to Exxon's "fair" score at No. 86. The PR strategy ensures that Coca-Cola appears shrouded in an aura of goodness while staying profitable and steadily rewarding their shareholders.

And that DC lawsuit? It dragged on for years, as Coke's top-notch legal team successfully whittled it down. The plaintiffs finally withdrew the suit in 2019. Coke won again.

Murray Carpenter is a health and science journalist and the author of "Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick" and "Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts and Hooks Us."

This story is adapted from "Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick" by Murray Carpenter. Copyright 2025 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.