• Katelyn Jonozzo, 31, lived a very active lifestyle and had no symptoms of colon cancer.
• She was diagnosed in February when she suddenly felt a sharp pain and extreme bloating.
• Jonozzo needed an emergency colostomy and adjusted to running with a colostomy bag.

From a young age, Katelyn Jonozzo took pride in being very active.

Up until she was 18, she practiced gymnastics 4 to 5 days a week. "I loved the discipline, I loved having a regimented schedule," Jonozzo, 31, told Business Insider. "That instilled how important health and fitness are to your lifestyle."

In her 20s, she gravitated toward marathon running. A supply chain analyst, Jonozzo would regularly wake up at 4 or 5 am to lift for two hours and run before going to work. In 2024, she qualified to run the Boston Marathon. She couldn't wait to run it in 2025.

That was before she felt a sudden, sharp stomach pain in February.

Jonozzo started experiencing flu-like symptoms and throwing up. She chalked it up to norovirus, which was going around at the time in her Cleveland suburb.

"My stomach started to get really, really bloated — I looked like I was almost pregnant," Jonozzo said. "But that was also a symptom of norovirus, so I kind of just lumped it into that."

When the pain got worse — stabbing sensations in her sides and nonstop vomiting — her two best friends urged her to go to the ER instead of waiting another day. Jonozzo complied, assuming the worst-case scenario was appendicitis.

After an emergency surgery to remove part of her colon, she learned she had stage 3 colon cancer, with secondary cancer in her abdomen.

Jonozzo said her training mindset helped her navigate her new reality. "I'm definitely a tunnel-vision person," she said. "I think I cried for about 30 seconds. Then, I looked back at the doctor, and I was like, 'What's the plan? What do we do?'"

Zero warning signs

Jonozzo said she was initially dismissed when she went to the hospital and told she might just have a stomachache or gassiness. She insisted that she had a high pain tolerance and wouldn't come in unless it was serious.

Eventually, she had an MRI done, which revealed a three-inch tumor on her colon — one that was about to rupture.

Within the next 48 hours, she had an emergency colostomy that removed one-third of her colon and installed a colostomy bag. "I was just in so much shock and so much was going on that I didn't really know what was happening," she said.

After recovering from a catatonic state for 10 days, she learned her exact diagnosis. Her doctor estimated that the tumor had been growing for about a decade, Jonozzo recalled.

"How have I been running marathons?" she said. "How have I been working out when I had a tumor on my stomach?"

Working out with a colostomy bag

Weeks after the surgery, Jonozzo began her chemotherapy treatments. At first, she stayed positive: making poster boards with affirmations to leave around her house.

"It still didn't really ever sink in, the journey that I was about to go through, until I would say probably around three or four of chemo," she said.

By that point, she started to lose her hair and taste, experience skin changes, and develop neuropathy, losing sensations in her hands and feet. "That's when I realized, 'Ok, you have cancer. This is not just something that we're going to duck our head down and go through."

One challenge was working out. During treatment, her usual routine was out of the question. "I definitely had to tone everything down," she said. She swapped long training runs and weightlifting for outdoor walks and three-mile jogs.

The biggest obstacle was the colostomy bag. "I was obviously super self-conscious about the bag in the beginning," she said. But as she started to connect with other young cancer patients through The Gathering Place support group and the Colorectal Cancer Alliance, she began to embrace the bag.

"I would go to the pool in a bathing suit, with the bag out, or I would lift my shirt up at the gym and let people know that the bag was there, which I guess made me just gain confidence," she said.

Looking for the positives helped her keep up her normal routine as much as she could. "I think it's amazing that they found out how to pull your intestine out and you could still go to the bathroom," she said. "It's a great contraption, if you ask me."

She's running a marathon with her cancer support group

After seven months of treatment, Jonozzo was deemed cancer-free. She finished chemotherapy in August and had a colostomy reversal in November. In mid-December, her first screening since finishing treatment, she'll learn more about her future screening schedule, which she already knows will include two colonoscopies a year.

She'll also be officially cleared to work out after her surgery — and is eager to go back to her old routine.

"I'm a little nervous just because normally I can just pop out and run and do those things, but I have to take baby steps back into it," she said. She plans to run three marathons in 2026, with the hopes of re-qualifying for Boston through one of them.

She's especially excited for the Cleveland Marathon in May. She'll run it as the team captain for her cancer fundraising group, which she said awakened new passions in her. "I love advocating, I love talking to people," she said. "I've always loved doing that — I just didn't have the confidence to do so before."

It's just one of the ways that her cancer experience changed her, she said, along with becoming more present.

"People think I'm crazy for saying this, but I truly believe it was one of the best things that ever happened to me," she said. "I would not trade this experience for anything. I really wouldn't."

• Cybersecurity firm ThreatLocker rewards its two most helpful employees with luxury cars each year.
• CEO Danny Jenkins said he values teamwork, given the company's fast-paced nature.
• The company also selects 14-16 employees and rewards them with an all-expenses-paid group trip.

Companies are getting creative with rewarding standout workers, but few are giving out $170,000 luxury cars or cruises to the Bahamas.

ThreatLocker, an Orlando-based cybersecurity firm with about 700 employees, gives luxury cars to its two most collaborative workers at its annual holiday party, the company told Business Insider.

The firm, which also has offices in Dublin, Dubai, and Australia, receives hundreds of votes each month for the two most helpful employees — one in the US, and one abroad. It flies in its international workers in for the holiday party.

Additionally, every manager votes for the best performer on their team that month. At the end of the year, the total votes for the top performer and the most helpful employee are combined to determine the two car recipients, the company said.

The firm usually awards an electric model, but has also handed out a $125,000 Porsche Panamera. The company hasn't announced its car for this year yet, but told Business Insider one of the models is worth $173,000.

The tradition began in 2021 as a prize for the top performer, but CEO Danny Jenkins said it created a "dog-eat-dog" work environment. In the cybersecurity industry, teamwork is crucial to the company's success, he said. Jenkins said the firm operates 24 hours a day with an average pick-up time of 23 seconds for any customer support issue, and colleagues need to work together to achieve that.

"Everything we do is with this matter of urgency," Jenkins said. "So if you don't have this teamwork where people are willing to get on a call at 2 a.m. in the morning and help each other and collaborate, then it doesn't work."

Jenkins said he works about 100 hours a week, and he keeps his phone on 24/7 in case issues arise.

Retaining the top

AI development has led to a boom in the cybersecurity industry, resulting in heightened demand for qualified talent. Jenkins said the company has never done layoffs and is currently hiring 40 to 50 people a month.

"I'd like to be in a situation where I don't feel like we're drowning because we're constantly struggling to hire and onboard people fast enough," said Jenkins.

That makes it all the more worthwhile to retain top talent and those who contribute to a strong culture.

He said that before the car winners are announced, between 14 and 16 runner-ups are honored in front of the company, and then offered a spot on a fully paid long-weekend getaway.

Jenkins said the trip has included a Royal Caribbean cruise to the Bahamas, as well as trips to Boston or New York. The group typically includes employees from various departments, and they all receive a spending budget of $2,500 on their trip, he said.

ThreatLocker also offers other perks to standout employees. Jenkins said that most employees work 40-hour workweeks, but sometimes teams may have to put in 18 or 19 hours straight to address an issue. Jenkins said when workers push through tight deadlines or go above and beyond, the company may reward them with court-side seats at games in the Orlando Kia Center, where the company has a permanent box.

Jenkins said the trip and car giveaway have bolstered employee success and that no car recipient has ever left the company.

• Jensen Huang has been the CEO of Nvidia for more than 30 years.
• He guided Nvidia through near bankruptcy and now leads the world's most valuable company.
• Huang said the "sense of uncertainty" while leading Nvidia never goes away.

Leading a multi-trillion-dollar company that has become a foundational pillar of the latest AI boom is a tall order. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO for more than three decades, is acutely aware of that.

In an episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience" published on Wednesday, Huang spoke frankly about the mental toll of steering his chip company out of near bankruptcy and ensuring Nvidia remains ahead of the curve in the AI race.

"The phrase '30 days from going out of business' I've used for 33 years," Huang said in the interview. "The feeling doesn't change. The sense of vulnerability, the sense of uncertainty, the sense of insecurity — it doesn't leave you."

Before Nvidia became one of the most valuable companies in the world — with a $4.4 trillion market cap as of Wednesday — the chipmaker was on the brink of bankruptcy at least three times in the '90s.

Those days are far behind Nvidia, but that hasn't allayed Huang's fear of failure — nor does Nvidia's latest success make him any less of a workaholic.

"I work a lot," Huang said, adding that he's running the company seven days a week.

Here's what Huang had to say on leadership and what it's like leading Nvidia.

A spokesperson for Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment.

Vulnerability and leadership can go together

Huang, one of the longest-serving tech CEOs in history, told Rogan that he believes vulnerability and leadership aren't mutually exclusive qualities.

"I think there's nothing inconsistent with being a leader and being vulnerable," he said. "The company doesn't need me to be a genius, right all along, right all the time, absolutely certain about what I'm trying to do and what I'm doing. The company doesn't need that."

The CEO said that being vulnerable allows him to be open to feedback from his peers and consider different strategies if he's ever wrong.

"If we put ourselves into this superhuman capability, then it's hard for us to pivot strategy — because we were supposed to be right all along," he said. "And so if you're always right, how can you possibly pivot? Because pivoting requires you to be wrong. And so I've got no trouble with being wrong."

He's in a constant 'state of anxiety'

The Nvidia CEO said part of what drives him is a "fear of failure."

"I have a greater drive from not wanting to fail than the drive of wanting to succeed," Huang said, adding that he's "always in a state of anxiety."

He recalled some of the near-death experiences his company brushed with in the '90s, including one of the first moments when Nvidia was unable to fulfill a contract with Sega, a Japanese video game company. The Sega CEO at the time, Shoichiro Irimajiri, decided to hand Huang a $5 million lifeline.

Those were formative experiences that gave Huang his mantra — "30 days from going out of business" — for the next three decades at Nvidia.

"I'm not ambitious, for example," Huang said, facetiously, "I just want to stay alive."

The Nvidia CEO also doesn't hold any illusions about success.

"There's long periods of suffering and loneliness and uncertainty and fear and embarrassment and humiliation," he said. "All of the feelings that we most not love."

Huang has previously emphasized the importance of "pain and suffering." He reiterated the point to Rogan.

"I think it's good that we pass that forward and let people know that — that it's just part of the journey," he said. "Suffering is part of the journey."

Huang reads thousands of emails a day

Huang told Rogan that he typically wakes up early, checking his inbox for the first few hours of his day. And there are thousands of emails to read, according to the CEO.

It's part of his routine to maintain what he called a "culture of staying super alert."

"There's no easy way of being alert except for paying attention," he said. "I haven't found a single way of being able to stay alert without paying attention. And so, you know, I probably read several thousand emails a day."

There are no days off in the Huang family

Huang has previously revealed that he's a workaholic, working 14-hour days and through holidays.

That relentless work ethic has apparently been passed down to his two kids, who are both employees at Nvidia.

"Both of my kids work at Nvidia," Huang said. "They work every day. I'm very lucky."

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Justin Fenchel, the 41-year-old CEO of BeatBox Beverages, based in Austin. Mark Cuban joined for a portion of the interview and is an investor in BeatBox Beverages. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I was an equity analyst for almost five years but realized I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. I was 27, unmarried, and childless, and I thought there was more out there for me.

I went to business school in 2011. There, Brad Schultz, one of my best friends and a cofounder of BeatBox, and I had an idea for a party version of boxed wine. We met Aimy Steadman, the third cofounder of BeatBox, in business school.

We went on ABC's Shark Tank in 2014, and Mark Cuban invested $1 million for a third of the company.

BeatBox Beverages continued to grow after that and is now worth over $200 million. It's a balancing act to be a husband, father, and CEO.

Here's what a typical day looks like.

I wake at 6:15 a.m. when our 13-month-old baby wakes up

I'm more of a night person, although my schedule has shifted significantly since our baby arrived. If there's something I need to do, I do it. Having my phone with me always means I can accomplish something.

When I wake up, I can't help myself and grab my phone. I want to see the sales numbers. I don't respond to emails then, but I do like to get a sense of what the day looked like.

I always try to drink a full liter of water as soon as I wake up. I make coffee for my wife, Michelle, and me with the Nespresso machine — I'll have coffee with a little vanilla syrup. I like a cold brew sometimes, and I mix it with a product called Momentum, a longevity powder supplement.

I'm with the baby from 6:30 a.m. to 8 a.m.

I spend a couple of hours with the baby and my wife.

I schedule my first meeting for around 8:30 to 9 a.m. I used to travel frequently, but having the baby helped me prioritize my time more effectively. When I'm home, I'm deeply involved in being a husband and father.

We've been a remote company since our inception, but we now have an office in the Austin area that about 40 people visit. I visit the office a couple of times a month. I've found that I'm productive in my home office.

I handle investor relations, strategy, and any urgent matters that arise. My office doesn't have a fancy three-monitor setup or anything like that. I use my laptop, and I finally have a cool background on my shelf.

I have a DJ booth in the office, and I like to have a fun work environment. I haven't DJed during any meetings (yet). That's what the BeatBox brand stands for — this feeling of fun, togetherness, inclusion, and party.

My calendar is dialed in with the day's meetings

I have meetings with almost everybody on the sales side, so I spend a lot of my day talking to our team. When I'm traveling, I have meetings at conferences, major retailers, or our big distributor partners.

I try to avoid any important meetings on Monday mornings, because I mean, who wants to do that?

It's been a lot of work scaling from four years ago to our current 260 employees. I check in with my team to see what we can do to create a fun and better work environment, and I'm as transparent as possible about what's happening with the company. My job is to keep our team energized.

I also speak to our investors, such as Mark Cuban

I speak with Mark often. He said he invested in BeatBox because he liked the taste of the product. He's a great addition to our team.

(Editor's note: Cuban, who joined the interview, said, "I had the iced tea and the raspberry, and it brought me back to my college days. I liked the form factor at the time; it was fun. I think it's perfect for college kids.

The BeatBox team is fun. I've got the easy job. I show up and play rah, rah! Having fun is great, and now and then we have to answer some questions. They're smart, and so when you have entrepreneurs who are smart, who are driven, who don't get down when they run into a problem, my job is easy," Cuban said.)

I try to eat a healthy lunch when I'm home

My wife usually cooks something awesome for dinner, and I often have the leftovers for lunch the next day.

My afternoon involves more meetings. It'll vary depending on whether I'm on the road or not.

There are things on the calendar, and then there's always something new to discuss. Typically, my calendar is pretty clear in the afternoon.

By 2 p.m., I'll meet with our CFO to discuss the current status

I'm a pretty even-keeled person, and I tend to thrive in a bit of chaos, which you just have to be OK with in a business that's growing and evolving as fast as BeatBox.

There will be fires that arise or unexpected things that you have to deal with in real time, but I remain grateful and grounded that I get to do what I love with incredible people.

I end my workday around 5:30 p.m. or 6 p.m.

Some moments make me feel drained, but I think it goes back to when you're doing something you love and are so passionate about; it makes the hard days not so hard.

I definitely have to find the time to relax. I feel like I'm at my best mid-week. If it's a day when I'm on back-to-back-to-back calls, I'll certainly feel like I have less brain power at the end, but I'm usually good at powering through.

After work, we usually go on a family walk with the baby, and then we'll take our dog for a one-hour walk. We'll come home, have dinner, and unwind. I might have a phone call with somebody after dinner, and then we'll eventually settle on the couch and have some BeatBox wine.

My wife and I try to sneak in our shows, and we have all the streaming services. We like The Penguin and The Righteous Gemstones. We watch a couple of episodes, and it takes us forever to finish them. I don't read that much, but I should read more.

Each day is exciting, and watching this baby grow is truly surreal. It's the coolest — cooler than anything in business.

I work a bit on the weekends and hang out with my cofounders

I've got my phone, and if there's an email I can get to or a text I can respond to, I'm available. I have to, and in fact, I want to be better about not always being on. I'm learning to tell myself that if I put the phone down, everything will be fine for a couple of hours.

I love to unwind on the weekends, and that's what BeatBox Beverages is all about: unwinding. I've tried all of our drinks. I often attend concerts with my wife, and we recently saw Jack White.

My cofounders are also my best friends, and we spend our weekends together. Outside BeatBox, I also enjoy beer and tequila. We're always talking about BeatBox, but we're also having drinks, going to the pool, and hanging out together.

Every night, I'm in bed by 10 p.m. and asleep by 11 p.m. I wake up and do it all again.

• RMFG has raised $4.5 million in pre-seed funding to bolster US manufacturing with AI.
• Its 32-year-old founder taught himself to code while working in gas station maintenance.
• RMFG wants to jump in on the white-hot robotics industry.

AI-powered manufacturing startup RMFG has raised $4.5 million to help revive US production.

RMFG was launched in July 2024 by Kenneth Cassel, a 32-year-old college dropout and Y Combinator graduate, as well as a father of four. Cassel grew up in a large, blue-collar family in Texas and taught himself to code while working maintenance at a gas station company.

"We're in this kind of renaissance where there's a lot of renewed interest in manufacturing," Cassel told Business Insider.

RMFG says it helps startups that don't want to deal with the costs of building their own facilities or face the security risks of going overseas.

Its AI-powered sheet metal factory, located in Dallas-Fort Worth, handles work that is usually done manually, using AI agents and other technologies to handle quoting, automate quality control, and tweak designs. This cuts lead times from months to weeks, the company said.

In the past, factory jobs lacked status, Cassel said, though technology has transformed the industry, and more people are interested in physical products "because they're seeing AI capabilities erode the value of pure software startups," he said.

RMFG is jumping in on the white-hot robotics industry, where most of its clients operate.

"These companies have raised venture capital, they're scaling, they're trying to build out really quickly," Cassel said. "Ultimately, I think it's going to be larger than automotive."

Y Combinator, Day One Ventures, and Soma Capital participated in RMFG's pre-seed round, along with angel investors Balaji Srinivasan, Patrick Collison, Charlie Songhurst, and Joshua Browder.

RMFG says it has shipped more than 100,000 parts in the last year and has about 200 customers, including drill-rig startup Durin, cloud-seeding company Rainmaker, and robotic fulfillment startup Nimble. It offers laser-cut sheet metal parts and plans to expand into additional services, Cassel said.

RMFG has nine employees — mostly in manufacturing. Cassel said the startup will primarily use funds to grow its technology team, which consists of himself and a founding engineer.

Here's a look at the pitch deck RMFG used to raise its $4.5 million pre-seed. Slides have been redacted so that the deck can be shared publicly.

• Economists, hedge fund investors, and tech executives compete in a forecasting contest each year.
• OpenAI's ChatGPT participated in the 2025 game for the first time.
• The competition tested AI's ability to make predictions without clear online content as a guide.

The ability to forecast the future is a valuable sign of intelligence and a good test of AI's capabilities. How good is ChatGPT at prediction?

An answer to this fascinating question emerged recently when economist David Seif wrapped up an annual forecasting contest he runs for a secret group of economists, hedge fund investors, and tech executives.

In its seventh year, the challenge requires contestants to predict roughly 30 events. The 2025 game kicked off in late 2024, when Seif sent out the list of events to predict in fields such as politics, business, science, economics, pop culture, and sports.

One question asked the contestants to forecast whether Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce would announce their engagement by April 1. Another: Would Bulgaria adopt the euro as its official currency on or before July 1?

Sam Leffell, a director at a hedge fund firm, was filling out his probabilities in December and had an idea.

"When I was answering the questions, I had the ChatGPT screen up. I wondered, what it will say to these questions?" he recalled in a recent interview.

ChatGPT had to learn complex rules

Leffell reached out to Seif to ask if ChatGPT could take part, and Seif said, go for it. So, Leffell got started by pasting the game's rules into ChatGPT.

These are complex rules, covering multiple pages. Contestants must assign a percentage based on the likelihood of each event happening. As the results come in over the year, these predictions are scored a bit like golf. The lowest score wins.

"You get points equal to the square of the difference between what you put and the results," Seif said.

For example, if you assign a 90% chance of something happening and you get it right, you get 10 points. That number is squared, resulting in a total of 100 points. Excellent work.

The opposite is more painful. If your 90% probability event doesn't occur, you are stuck with the difference between 90 and zero. That 90 score is then squared for a total of 8,100 points. Ouch.

And this is only the scoring system. There are whole pages of rules on other aspects of the game. Leffell pasted all this into ChatGPT.

A few seconds later, the AI chatbot responded, "Thank you for providing the detailed rules of the forecasting contest. Please share the clean list of prompts for which you need a probability estimate, and I will provide a single number for each as per the contest's guidelines."

Leffell pasted in all 30 questions at once, and ChatGPT quickly replied with its percentage probabilities for each event. Leffell sent those to Seif, who entered the responses on ChatGPT's behalf.

Even while setting this machine-prediction experiment up, Leffell noticed something intriguing.

"For one question, related to an NFL wild card outcome, it gave a mathematical response that was statistically correct," he said. "It was doing math rather than qualitative stuff. That was notable because ChatGPT, at the time, was not supposed to be good at math."

ChatGPT makes predictions

As 2025 began, 160 contestants had submitted their predictions and began waiting for the future to unfurl.

This is when I first heard about the game through friends of mine who were participating. One is a hedge fund manager. The other two are a chief marketing officer and a lawyer.

They became insufferable at parties, discussing their various forecasts, along with the intricacies of the scoring system and other rules.

It's the type of conversation that bores me to death. However, when one friend mentioned that ChatGPT was taking part for the first time, I got hooked.

Could a machine outperform 160 humans in predicting all these events? AI models are great when there's existing data. When the future's involved, there's a lot less information to lean on.

I'd recently tested ChatGPT's stock market forecasting ability. Could it excel at this more complex challenge, or are humans uniquely adept at foreseeing the future through experience, extrapolation, and intuition?

As the year progressed, some events occurred, and others didn't. Some happened too late, while others developed in weird, unexpected ways. As life does.

Each time a question was resolved, Seif updated a central spreadsheet and sent a ranking to all the contestants.

My friends seized on every update. Who was winning? Who was lagging? And most of all, where was ChatGPT ranked?

Strange symmetry

The game wrapped up on November 13.

"For the first time in the seven years we've run the contest, I pulled off the win myself," Seif wrote in his final email update of the 2025 competition.

ChatGPT came 80th, he wrote, "and we had 160 players."

Strange symmetry. I immediately texted my friends: This means ChatGPT is no better than the average human! Not very impressive.

One of my buddies, the CMO, replied: No, this means ChatGPT is as good as the average human. Incredible!

ChatGPT missed a benchmark

I asked Seif about this, and he had a different way of measuring ChatGPT's predictive power, or lack thereof.

If you'd put a 50% probability for each event happening, you'd have gotten 75,000 points. That's Seif's benchmark for whether contestants added value or not.

ChatGPT got 82,925. So it missed that benchmark, essentially adding negative value, according to Seif.

When there was a lot of existing data to help with forecasting and calculating probabilities, ChatGPT did better, he said.

For instance, the chatbot analyzed this event well, giving it a 70% chance of happening: The winning team of the FIFA Club World Cup is from the European Union.

ChatGPT performed worse when there was a lack of data, or it missed new information that altered the likelihood of an event occurring.

For example, the chatbot assigned a 95% chance of this happening: Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore safely return to Earth by March 1.

By the end of 2024, news announcements made it clear that this rescue mission was highly unlikely to happen by March 1, 2025, Seif said.

"ChatGPT just wasn't up with the news on that one," he added.

Maybe ChatGPT won?

Leffell, the hedge fund manager who entered ChatGPT in the game, drew different conclusions and shared some important caveats.

He asked ChatGPT to make these predictions in December 2024. OpenAI's chatbot has improved since then, so its forecasting ability may be better now. Better prompting may have also helped ChatGPT perform better.

Leffell also said that ChatGPT took only a few minutes to understand the complex rules of the game and make 30 predictions—a lot faster than most human contestants.

Leffell himself spent many hours, over several days, to understand the questions and research the events, coming up with his own probabilities.

"It did better than half the people, and it spent a lot less time than everyone else on the challenge," he told me. "If you look at results per minute of work, maybe ChatGPT won?"

As an investor, he's in the business of assessing as many probabilities as possible, so ChatGPT and similar AI tools have become essential, he said.

"What if you are not having to predict 30 events quickly, but 30,000 events instead? What if it's good enough at making all these predictions quickly?" Leffell said.

"It's become ubiquitous in everything I do, in my personal life and at work," he added. "We're using it a lot. ChatGPT is table stakes at this point."

Sign up for BI's Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.

I find myself cackling on the phone as Steve Johnson, 72, wades through his basement in the Atlanta suburbs, describing "all the crap" his four adult children have left behind. There are vinyl records, Braves bobble-heads, Pink Floyd posters, a drum, guitar stands, books, mounds of CDs. "Is this a picture of Bob Marley? Oh my God. Bob Marley is in my basement still," Johnson says, one of half a dozen exclamations invoking the Almighty's name during our conversation. His daughter's old exercise ball gets an audible, "Ugh." The camping gear from his kids' festival days gets another, "Oh my God." A violin from a child's ill-fated middle-school music career gives rise to an, "Ope."

"Sorry as I walk through memory lane here," he says.

Johnson, who recently retired, has asked his kids to figure out what to do with everything they've left behind in their family home, with limited success. "Best I can tell, they don't care anymore, which is fine," he says. Except getting rid of all the stuff can be surprisingly hard — Goodwill, other charities, and secondhand stores won't take just anything. During a remodel, he used a half-full dumpster to offload some things, but he didn't love doing it. "I feel bad about that, honestly, just trashing stuff," he says, sounding exasperated as he spots an old flamingo in the basement that his wife probably wants.

Much has been made — including by yours truly — of the impending avalanche of baby boomers' stuff. But in boomers' defense, they are not the only ones who've accumulated useless things they can't bring themselves to get rid of. Many younger generations — Gen X, millennials, and, soon enough, Gen Z — are using their parents' homes as storage units. They haven't failed to launch, they've just failed to load up their rocketships, leaving their parents drowning in yearbooks, prom dresses, and Little League trophies.

Many storage freeloaders have built lives and families of their own, and they don't have the time or energy to whittle down their old comic-book collections or toss out the college notes piled up in their parents' garages. Others still haven't bought homes or are living in small spaces, hoping that someday they'll have room for everything they left behind — even though "someday" is increasingly looking like once they're AARP eligible. Their parents may feel time closing in, but they don't feel that same urgency.

When something still lives at your dad's house, it's easy to pretend it's not your problem — even though it very much is. That's how adulthood works: the gradual but jarring realization that the responsibility is yours.

---

When people move out of their parents' homes, it's natural for them to leave things behind — (hopefully) nobody's hauling their childhood toys to the college dorms or filling their first apartment's closets with high school outfits. Even when people get a place of their own, it's often in tighter quarters than the homes they grew up in. Leaving things with their parents seems not only convenient but also logical. Plus, many older parents like to keep their children's stuff around. It helps mitigate empty-nest syndrome, allowing them to continue being the anchors of the family. Or, they just feel weird about throwing their kids' things out.

The result: Mom and Dad don't want to cut the strings, and the kids want the option of keeping their stuff without the responsibility.

"A lot of times, the parents just feel like it's not their place to make a decision," says Mindy Godding, the owner of Abundance Organizing in Virginia. Meanwhile, their children just kick the can down the road. "Instead of having to actually go through that stuff and make some decisions, the kid doesn't want to deal with it."

They haven't failed to launch, they've just failed to load up their rocketships.

Alex Kovalenko, 44, knows he should move the junk that's taking up a big chunk of space in his dad's work warehouse about 30 minutes away for a decade. But Kovalenko and his wife, who live in the Toronto suburbs, have three kids and full-time jobs, and they feel like they're just too busy to carve out the time to sort through it all. He doesn't know what he'd do with everything anyway, and doubts he'd make much money selling it. "I don't think it's fair," he says, especially since his dad's paying for and needs the space, "but I don't think we have any other option that's feasible at this time." His wife has suggested carving out a couple of weeks next summer to go through everything, but that would cut into vacation.

Kristina Markos, 41, is also in the not-dealing-with-it stage. Her in-laws still house stuff above their garage that she and her husband left behind when they moved from Chicago to Boston back in 2013. Her in-laws don't have plans to downsize, and if they do, she figures she'll fly out and rent a U-Haul. "Today, it's not posing a problem for anybody," she says. Markos hopes that her Gen Alpha kids will want some of the things she's stowed away once they're old enough to move out, including curtain rods, sheets, pillows, and tools, after all, her father-in-law just shipped out an old trumpet for her son. "That's the sustainability piece and the money-saving piece where I think it works for everybody," she says. Trumpet aside, I wonder what condition many of the possessions she's described will be in by the time her kids head to college, or whether Gen Alpha, like their millennial parents, will spurn their elders' hand-me-downs.

For some people, it's not just logistics or laziness that get in the way. Grief and guilt can turn a small box of old stuff into an emotional minefield. Ripley Neff is acutely aware of the headache it can be to get rid of abandoned possessions. She was forced to sort through a lifetime of physical memories when her grandmother died in 2022 and again when her mother died in 2024. Perhaps that's part of why she avoids dealing with the stuff she's got stowed away in the room she grew up in at her living grandmother's house, who she calls her "Grammy." Neff, 31, and her husband have just bought a house in Memphis, but she has no immediate plans to take all those odds and ends with her, and her grandmother doesn't seem pressed about it. Her husband encouraged her to get ahead of it, but she's been thrust into a situation many people don't encounter until they're later in adulthood: being in charge. "There are times when I know he's right, but then there are also times when I feel like it's all being put as my responsibility, and I am the child and the grandchild," she says. "I wish someone else would think about this, too."

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These types of dynamics are nearly universal. The more I asked around, the more stories bubbled up. One friend acknowledged that while it's a little ridiculous to have saved all of her middle school and high school notes for 20-some years, it's been a hoot going through them with her parents. A colleague mentioned his parents have declared that the stuff they've stored for him and his siblings be reduced to a two-box maximum over the holidays. One woman told me she was too afraid to have her stuff shipped from her parents' home because in a previous attempt to send a few boxes, prized possessions had been lost. I am guilty on this front as well — last Christmas, my mom pulled out a box of old Barbies I didn't remember existed. Instead of giving my blessing for them to be sold on eBay, I insisted I'd take care of it. I did not.

Sometimes, what we see is the parents have the sentimental attachment, and they're projecting that on the kid.

This entire conversation is about more than boxes and Barbies. It's about the emotional weight we put on physical objects, the obligations we have to our loved ones, and the fear of letting go. Throwing away college notes and textbooks means finally admitting you're not going to grad school. Agreeing to give away the drums in your parents' basement is the death knell of your rock-and-roll dreams. On the other side of the equation, older parents often put more weight on their kids' stuff than their kids do — they remember more vividly that third-grade spelling bee victory or the first lost tooth. Parents feel a sense of responsibility as guardians of their children's things and memories.

Godding recalls working with a client whose two children's bedrooms were still in pristine '90s condition. When the mom reached out to her kids, her son insisted that he be allowed to go through everything before she made any decisions, and her daughter said she didn't care about anything and could toss it. "Her mom turns to me and is like, 'I think she's going to regret that decision, I should put that in a storage unit for her,'" Godding says. "Sometimes, what we see is the parents have the sentimental attachment, and they're projecting that on the kid."

The thing about this dynamic is that eventually decisions have to be made. No one lives forever, and even if they did, very few people would want their attics filled with their progeny's My Little Ponies and Hot Wheels for all eternity. These leftover items become an unspoken negotiation between generations, and grievances that, at some point, have to be aired. Both sides tend to tread carefully, afraid to make the wrong call.

A couple of years ago, Nicholas Budler's uncle set a deadline on the stuff he'd been stashing at his place since college. So Budler, now 29, put together a "keep" pile of things that could fit into his adult apartment in San Francisco: his degrees, a homerun baseball he'd caught as a kid, and one trinket from each of the important places he'd traveled to. He tossed clothes, decor, and useless chargers.

"That's where it's like, 'Can I envision this in the future in my actual home now as an adult, or did I just want to keep this somewhere without having it to be in my space?'" he says. "If it's moving from junk drawer to junk drawer, it's probably not something that you really care about."

Budler does regret giving away so many books, and he's now replenishing his library.

For the Gen Xers in the room, I have some good news for you: You're actually pretty good about this! Millennials are generally guiltier of treating their parents' homes like giant lockers, Godding says. They don't have the independence streak Gen X latchkey kids did.

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I first got in touch with Johnson, the boomer dad in the basement, because he emailed me after a story I'd written about the impending baby boomer stuffpolcalypse, asking, "What's a boomer to do???" with their kids' stuff. So, I turned to the experts.

When I ask Tonya Kubo, who until recently worked for Clutter Free Academy, a platform dedicated to all things decluttering, she tells me older parents need to have a "hard conversation" with themselves to decide whether they're keeping their children's stuff because they want to or simply out of obligation. If the answer is the latter, the kids have to take responsibility for it now, because "the fact is they're going to have to take responsibility for it when you die," she says. She recalls working with a mother who was holding onto three of her son's motorcycles in her garage while she and her husband paid for two storage units filled with their own things. Kubo had assumed the son was in his early 20s — he was 40, married, with kids. "It had never occurred to her" to ask him to get rid of them. Once she did, they were sold in two weeks.

For kids, it's essential to confront the reality that if they're comfortable not having something now, they probably don't need it or value it as much as they think. "If I don't have a place for it now, am I really going to make a place for it later? And when I do want to make a place for it, does it even fit into my life?" she says.

Godding encourages her downsizing clients to send their kids photos of items and ask whether they matter to them. "We're always trying to peel apart the storytelling," she says.

Every generation in this country has a consumption problem.

Another tip: Set a deadline or, at the very least, a goal. The kids don't have to spend the entirety of the next visit combing through their stuff, but they can set aside some time to edit it down. And if you're thinking about a storage unit, really think about it. Again, if you don't want the things today, or even don't have the space for them, how likely is it that you will ever change?

As for where to take things, Godding prefers Buy Nothing groups and local charitable organizations. While some people may have their gripes with Goodwill, it's often a convenient option. Still, the truth is that it's hard to offload a lot of things if they go out of style or are difficult to handle, from furniture to figurines. And the American consumer machine churns on buying, not reusing.

"Every generation in this country has a consumption problem," she says. "We are hardwired to buy new."

Inevitably, what this may wind up looking like is Gen Xers, millennials, Zoomers, and beyond sitting with all their accumulated stuff in their own homes eventually, perhaps on top of the stuff they received from their parents. That's what's happened to Jon Spike, 37, from Wisconsin. A month after he and his wife bought a house, his mom showed up with boxes of the stuff she'd kept from his childhood. Now, they're sitting in his basement. The stuff cycle begins anew.

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

• Russia's oil exports remain steady, but energy revenues have dropped sharply this year.
• US sanctions on major Russian oil firms has forced Moscow to reroute shipments via smaller producers.
• Falling oil revenues strain Russia's funding for its war in Ukraine.

Russia's oil companies are still shipping nearly the same amount of oil after the US Treasury cracked down on its biggest producers recently — but the country's energy profits are falling fast, a Goldman Sachs analysis shows.

In late October, the US Treasury announced sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft, Russia's biggest oil producers. The changes sent seaborne shipments from these companies down 42%, to about 1.7 million barrels a day.

However, Russia's total oil exports slipped by just 100,000 barrels per day after the sanctions came into effect. This means that Russia rapidly rerouted shipments through smaller, non-sanctioned producers.

"Russian oil trading networks are reorganizing quickly while Russia oil exports revenues dropped," analysts from Goldman wrote in a note published on Tuesday.

Even so, the steady flow of barrels masks a far deeper financial squeeze.

Russia's oil export revenues, measured in rubles, have plunged 50% this year, tumbling from the equivalent of 7.6% of GDP to just 3.7%, according to Goldman's analysis.

The bank's report landed just as the Russian Finance Ministry disclosed that oil and gas tax revenues fell 34% from a year ago, underscoring the fiscal strain.

The revenue collapse stems from a combination of a stronger ruble and sagging Brent prices, widening discounts on Russian crude as buyers demand steeper price cuts to offset the risk of sanctions.

The divergence between stable exports and collapsing revenue has major implications for Moscow's ability to finance its war in Ukraine.

Oil and gas revenues have historically accounted for more than a third of Russia's federal budget, and energy remains one of the country's most significant sources of funding.

But even as Russia boosts weapons production and ramps up defense spending, the money flowing in to support that buildup is shrinking.

The timing is particularly sensitive. Ukraine has intensified its drone campaign against Russia's energy infrastructure, a trend Goldman highlights as a growing geopolitical risk.

Despite those attacks, Brent prices have barely moved, suggesting markets remain unconvinced that Russian supply is in immediate danger — a dynamic that keeps global prices low and Russia's revenues even lower.

An end to the war in Ukraine appears elusive nearly four years after Russia's full-scale invasion, despite renewed diplomatic attempts.

On Wednesday, the Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump's top envoys did not reach a compromise on a possible peace deal after a five-hour meeting.

• Annie Leibovitz, 76, says being an older mom comes with its own set of challenges.
• The photographer says her three daughters urge her to prioritize her health so she can live a longer life.
• Beyond parenting, Leibovitz says she enjoys growing older because it lets her slow down.

Annie Leibovitz, 76, says she has worries about being an older mom.

In an appearance on Wednesday's episode of the "Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus" podcast, the famous photographer spoke about the realities of becoming a parent later in life.

Leibovitz recalled a moment in her late 40s when she suddenly realized she didn't want to miss out on motherhood.

"You know, what happened was I was seeing my doctor, and I was just crying. I said, I realized it was my late forties. And I said, I just can't believe I'd let this time go by. And I haven't done this, and I haven't had children," she told host Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

Leibovitz said her longtime partner, author Susan Sontag, who died in 2004, "wasn't interested in children."

"And I would talk about it every now and then, and she was not interested. Besides, we didn't really have that kind of relationship. We had two separate apartments," Leibovitz said. "We had our own world, but we really supported each other tremendously."

However, Leibovitz's doctor told her she still had that option. "So he said to me, 'You can do it.' I said, 'Really?' And I did it," Leibovitz said, adding that she has three daughters who are now in their twenties.

Having kids later in life has made her more aware of the realities of parenting as an older mom, she said.

"Still, I mean, if I'm having any issue now about being older, is that I decided to have them older. And my older daughter gets mad at me if I don't take care of myself. 'Mommy, I want you to live longer.' And you worry about that," Leibovitz said.

However, she says she wants to continue focusing on her career and give her daughters space rather than hovering over them.

"And not necessarily being so smothering and so close, because I just knew I was an older mom, and I knew they were going to have to deal with me leaving earlier than possibly being around," Leibovitz said, adding that part of the reason for having more than one child was so they would have each other.

But beyond parenting, Leibovitz says aging has been something that she has come to genuinely appreciate.

"I just love getting older. You kind of know what you're doing. It doesn't mean what you're doing is good or better or whatever. It's still hard work, but you kind of know what you're doing, and there's something really nice about that," she said.

She doesn't have to rush through everything anymore, she added.

"And then things, I think, naturally are slowing down, kind of after running around like crazy, starting when I was very young. And so it's nice to kind of slow down a little bit," Leibovitz said.

Leibovitz isn't the only one who has spoken about having children later in life.

In May 2024, Eva Mendes said it was a good thing she waited til she was 40 to have kids.

"In my 20s, I shouldn't have even been around a child. I was foul-mouthed and smoking. I definitely could not have raised kids in any other era of my life but now," Mendes told People.

Speaking to Business Insider in September 2024, Hilary Swank said she's happy to be an older mom. Swank gave birth to twins at age 48.

"I'm in a place where I just have a lot more patience and a lot more grace to give, not just my children, but others around me," she said. "I can give them so much more than I could have at that point."