• Snacking on junk food can harm your health even if you're careful to eat nutritious meals.
• A nutritionist said packing 2 simple healthy snacks at work helps her stay on track and energized.
• Aim for snacks that provide fiber as well as protein to help you stay full for longer.

Eating more snacks can make it easier to stay on track with a healthy diet, according to a top nutritionist — if you pick the right kind of snacks.

Researcher Federica Amati said smart snacking has been a game-changer for her personal eating habits on a busy schedule.

"If I've got a really busy day, sometimes I don't get time to have a proper lunch. If I have these snacks with me, I'm good and I'm feeling good. If I don't, then I'm ravenous later," she told Business Insider.

Amati, medical scientist and head nutritionist at the nutrition app ZOE, has also seen the power of snacking first-hand in her work.

Even if you're careful with most of your diet, snacking on junk food can leave you struggling with metabolic health issues like weight gain, low energy, high cholesterol and high blood sugar, she said. That's backed up by research from ZOE and other experts.

"Crappy snacks can basically outdo a lot of the greatness you are doing for yourself with good food," Amati said. "Snacking per se isn't good or bad for you, but what you snack on has a massive influence on your metabolic health."

She shared the two foods she always carries for a nutrient-dense boost, and how to optimize your snacking routine for a healthier diet.

Fresh fruit + nuts = A perfect dose of fiber and good fats

Amati's go-to snack combination at work is an apple and a small jar of mixed nuts.

The pairing of fruit and nuts offers gut-healthy fiber, plant-based protein, and healthy fats — all satiating nutrients that tell your brain you're full.

"It doesn't have to be some sort of chef situation," Amati said."It's just about having a very different mentality to snacking. If you are hungry, eat something that's a food."

What's key is that you reach for whole foods. If you snack on ultra-processed foods, like a granola bar loaded with additives like sugar, fat, and salt, it's easy to overeat.

Why? Because the nutrients in ultra-processed foods are already broken down, leaving you with less to digest. So, they offer a temporary energy fix but leave you crashing afterward, often leading to overindulgence at your next meal or snack.

"It's nutritionally pretty void. So though you may temporarily not be so ravenous, your body's not benefiting from it, and your hunger will remain later that day," Amati said.

Plus, the benefit of Amati's fruit-and-nuts snack is that it's relatively inexpensive and requires zero prep: just grab and go.

The specifics aren't crucial — you can make a healthy snack from fruits like berries and other nuts and seeds, from almonds to pepitas.

Start snacking early

Whatever you choose to snack on, being proactive about your hunger cues can lead to better results, according to Amati.

Eating early helps you stay in tune with your circadian rhythm to feel consistently energized and make better choices throughout the day.

"We're primed to more efficiently deal with nutrients and with energy storage and distribution from fats or sugars at the beginning of the day," she said.

Skimping on early meals and snacks can leave you so hungry by dinner that you double-down on dessert or late-night snacking, often with less-healthy choices.

While timing your snacks can be a matter of personal preference, eating when you're hungry but not hangry can stave off temptations for a more balanced diet.

"You'd be surprised how many people who struggle with their weight or who struggle with poor metabolic health don't eat enough during the day," Amati said.

• A CEO was surprise-diagnosed with late-stage colon cancer at 42.
• The diagnosis forced her to be more vulnerable and transparent with her co-workers.
• She shared three basic rules she's developed for managing her workday and diagnosis in tandem.

When Jennifer Goldsack woke up after emergency surgery last Christmas, she was waiting to hear she had a stress ulcer. Maybe appendicitis. But not this.

The surgeon had news that made no sense to her, as a 42-year-old CEO and former athlete: late-stage cancer.

Goldsack had always prided herself on being able to get anything done — Olympic training schedules, corporate roadmaps, back-to-back meetings.

Cancer forced her into a new, uncertain kind of leadership: one built on vulnerability, delegation, and uncertainty.

"Good leadership is to be able to be clear and to have a plan," Goldsack, head of the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe), told Business Insider. "Or, to at least have a plan to make a plan. And I wasn't able to do that."

She is sharing her story to highlight the pressures that today's leaders face, often having to shoulder pain and stress in silence. And to share how she's learned, over the past 10 months, to lead her organization with more vulnerability than she ever imagined she'd allow.

She dismissed early signs of cancer as personal failures

As a world-class Olympic rower, Goldsack knew how to push her limits. She had perfected the art of identifying her strengths and working effectively as part of a team.

That helped her move seamlessly into leading a company. As a CEO, she prided herself on being the kind of boss who never asks her employees to do more than she would. "Be humble, be hungry, and always be the hardest working person in the room" was her mantra.

The early signs of cancer crept in slowly over time. With the omniscience of hindsight, it's easy to say Goldsack should have realized something was really wrong last year. In the moment, she just thought she was run down.

She was rejected from giving blood for two months in a row, because her iron levels kept getting lower and lower — too low to help others. She was dealing with stomach pain that was bordering on excruciating.

Through it all, she was telling herself she was a failure. This was her fault. How else to explain it? She'd perfected the art of training hard and recovering smart over many years. Inexplicably, her winning strategy wasn't cutting it anymore.

"It was almost an affront on how I defined myself as a person because I didn't know what I was doing wrong," she said. Her self-talk disintegrated. "You idiot, suck it up, get it together, you need to get better with your sleep."

She was so tired in a way that a good nap on the couch simply couldn't fix. Picking at meals, stopping for Pedialyte at the gas station regularly. Was she experiencing the "hot girl IBS" that everyone on the internet was buzzing about? Did she need to start drinking one of those expensive green supplement powders every morning?

How foolish she had been to let the stress of her work get to her like this, she thought. Becoming that sad kind of character who eats girl dinner over the sink each night.

"My self-talk was really poor, that it was my fault," Goldsack said. "I sort of absorbed pretty aggressive symptoms of a pretty frightening disease and allowed myself to drift until it really was a late-stage diagnosis."

3 big leadership lessons: clear communication, vulnerability, and a 'take 5' attitude

For Goldsack, one of the hardest parts of being a CEO with colon cancer is the endless uncertainty.

Her cancer diagnosis was a crash course in living in the moment — not in the eat-pray-love and meditate way (she hates that stuff) — but because she had to constantly reassess her prognosis day by day. She was out of work for a month in January, living in the hospital.

Unable to eat, she lost 40 pounds, dropping almost a third of her body weight. She felt like a frail little bird. Even walking was exhausting, and she needed help with everything.

As a result, she got better at communicating vulnerability and signposting her own limits for others. Some of the learnings were small, but meaningful; others were radical shifts in the way she delegated her work. Here are three of her biggest lessons:

1. Create clear schedules with calendar blocks

Goldsack uses green to block off anything health-related on her calendar. Chemotherapy appointments and infusions are clearly marked as such on the work calendar, so everyone can see when she's out and know when she'll return to her desk. At first, the shift felt radical, but as a leader juggling cancer treatment, it's been crucial to her workflow.

"I've really leaned into using my calendar and being really clear about what I'm up to," she said. She expects her team to carry on while she's away, knowing she'll get to her work when she can. "Really communicating with them early: 'Look, this is what's going on with me.'"

She hopes the transparency helps foster more open lines of communication, even as she juggles care. "You don't have to be my gatekeeper," she said. "I will be my own gatekeeper."

2. Radical transparency and consistent communication

She also began to feel more comfortable stepping back, at least sometimes.

On mornings when she felt unwell, she'd tell her team she had to go back to bed or cancel her meetings for the day — something she would have never done before.

"It's been interesting for me on a leadership journey, but also thinking about what it means to have a healthy workforce, and healthy in every sense," she said. "Me saying 'guys, I can't do it today,' and I'm giving myself space, and I'm being very transparent about that and hopefully creating an environment where you guys know that you can do this too, and you will be supported."

It was a kind of vulnerability she'd never experienced before. She asked the chair of the board at her organization if he wanted to "bench" her. He didn't.

"50% of Jen's effort is like 150% of a normal person," DiMe chairman Dan Karlin said. "Together we came to the conclusion that staying engaged while making sure to make time to attend to her treatment and her needs, her physical needs, of course, she needs to do that."

3. "Take 5" minutes

Back-to-back meetings during cancer treatment quickly became an untenable situation.

So, Goldsack started giving herself five minutes at the top of every call. She starts meetings at :05 and :35 now. Those few extra minutes have been game-changing during treatment. She uses them for grabbing a drink, using the bathroom, closing her eyes for a few minutes, or vomiting. Everyone found them restorative and replenishing, to the extent that "take 5" has become an unofficial company policy.

"That's now sort of become best practice across the organization," she said. "People realize it's actually quite nice when you're stacked with calls."

Looking ahead

After a year of cancer, Goldsack's anxious to get back to normal life. She had a public speaking gig at a major industry conference in Las Vegas in October and has her sights set on more in 2026.

Her treatment course is technically over, but the odds of remission are still high, so she's being closely monitored, in a kind of cancer limbo.

The good news is that her feet no longer feel like they're stuck in flippers. Now, she's able to work out more, regaining her muscles.

She knows she's lucky. But she's also frustrated by the time she's lost.

Working has been such a gift during treatment, she said, to be able to be something other than a cancer patient. And yet the way she works has been forever changed by this year of cancer treatment.

"I always used to think that by being the toughest person, I was leading by example in the best possible way," she said. "This has been an interesting way for me to think about leadership through a different lens."

• American Airlines' new A321XLR will replace its dated A321Ts and expand its transatlantic network.
• There is no more first class, but business class comes with more privacy and better bathroom access.
• I like the Bluetooth-capable screens and the cozy premium cabins, but I'd avoid row 25.

Out with the old and in with the new: American Airlines' niche cross-country Airbus jet is getting a major upgrade.

On Thursday, I toured American's first-ever Airbus A321XLR — a stretched narrowbody that can fly up to 5,400 miles (11 hours) nonstop thanks to an extra fuel tank. It's the first among US carriers.

American's A321XLR will replace roughly a dozen of its aging A321T jets that fly select domestic routes. The "T" stands for transcontinental, and the specific aircraft type is an Airbus A321-200.

For about a decade, the A321T has shuttled high-paying business and first-class passengers across the US as American's bi-coastal workhorse.

The modern A321XLR, which will launch its first cross-country route from New York to Los Angeles on December 18, retains the A321T's signature three-class layout and enhanced meal and drink service.

But the most premium cabins will feature a distinctly different design. There's no more first class; instead, a single front business cabin in a 1×1 configuration will give travelers direct aisle access.

There is also a premium economy cabin. And the coach cabin has been fine-tuned with more comfortable seats, USB-C outlets, and Bluetooth-compatible seatback screens.

Fares on New York—Los Angeles flights hover around $200 round-trip in economy, $1,000 in premium economy, and $2,000 in business in early 2026, rising during the busier spring break, summer, and holiday seasons.

Unlike the A321T, the A321XLR will also fly transatlantic routes, beginning with New York to Edinburgh in March and eventually expanding to other European destinations. Tickets start at $600 in coach, $2,700 in premium economy, and $3,700 in business before peak-season increases.

Transatlantic flying is central to the A321XLR's appeal: its range makes longer routes viable and opens access to far-flung cities that can't support a widebody (e.g., a Boeing 767 or an Airbus A330) or are out of reach for older narrowbodies. Think New York to West Africa or Florida to Northern Italy.

American sees the A321XLR as an opportunity to tap into this growing market for long, thin transatlantic routes while rebuilding a long-haul footprint to catch up to Delta and United, which have recovered and expanded faster post-COVID.

Still, it also marks the end of an era for the A321T. But I think most customers will likely welcome the upgrades — particularly business class' sliding doors and easier bathroom access.

Though there are a few asterisks: American said the doors won't be usable for a couple of months, and economy passengers in row 25 should expect a windowless view.

The aircraft is premium-heavy with just 155 seats.

American has abandoned its A321T Flagship First for a single Flagship Business cabin with 20 private pod-like suites.

There are also 12 premium economy recliners, and 123 regular economy seats. This is down from the 190 on the A321T

American designed the A321XLR to cater to high-paying business and leisure passengers who want added space and comforts at 39,000 feet, and the dated A321T was no longer cutting it.

Business takes up every possible inch of cabin space.

Fitting a suite-style business seat onto a narrowbody jet is a careful game of Tetris to ensure every foot of cabin real-estate is making money.

And American packed in a lot: a bed, a large tray table, a Bluetooth-capable screen, a remote control, charging ports, and storage space.

I liked all the amenities and found the cabin to be chic, modern, and spacious overall.

You won't have a neighbor blocking you from the bathroom.

The A321XLR suites are arranged in a 1×1 layout — a major upgrade from the A321T's 2×2 business configuration that essentially trapped window-seat passengers whenever their neighbor went lie-flat.

Now, every A321XLR business-class passenger gets direct aisle access. The A321T's first class is 1×1.

The A321T does not have doors.

Among the biggest comfort requests from premium travelers worldwide is better privacy in business class.

The A321XLR achieves this with a redesigned layout and sliding doors that give it the feel of a flying mini-hotel.

The A321XLR's door comes with a tradeoff.

The bulkier business seats narrow the cabin's single aisle to the point where there's barely any room to squeeze by another person. That tight space could create bottlenecks near the lavatory or make the aisle impassable during meal service.

Another caveat: an American spokesperson told Business Insider that the new sliding door can't be used until the airline secures certification for the feature, which they said is expected in the "coming months."

There is no oversized front-row "studio" option.

JetBlue Airways offers a two-passenger front-row "Mint Studio" on its A321LR (the A321XLR's predecessor). It's a conference-style setup that allows the airline to charge a premium for the extra space.

American's A321XLR lacks this suite, meaning it can't capture the potential extra revenue, but it preserves lucrative cabin real estate.

The A321XLR offers a true premium economy.

Unlike the A321T, American's A321XLR will have a dedicated premium economy section.

The 2×2 cabin features winged recliners, adjustable leg and footrests, elevated food and beverage options, 37 inches of pitch, and an amenity kit. Customers also get priority check-in and boarding.

Although the recliners do not offer the same bedroom-like experience as those at the front of the plane, they are sometimes hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars more expensive than coach.

Economy is consistent with American's other long-haul cabins.

Customers can expect the standard seatback screen, adjustable headrests, 31-inch pitch seats, and food already offered on American's A321T and most transatlantic flights.

Extra legroom seats make up the first few coach rows and are distinguished by their brown headrests. Standard seats have a blue one.

It's still much glitzier than the A321T.

The A321T seats have a different color scheme and dated amenities compared to the A321XLR.

There was one particularly noteworthy new perk.

I was happy to see that the screens in every cabin, including coach, are Bluetooth-capable. The A321T is not.

I can finally use my AirPods instead of the often scratchy and uncomfortable airline-provided wired headphones.

I would avoid row 25.

There is almost always one row on these new narrowbody planes that does not have a window. On American's A321XLR, that's row 25.

Customers here will be treated to a wall panel with no outside view — so it may be worth paying extra to avoid these windowless seats.

Though some customers may prefer it for sleeping.

I always get a kick out of people's reactions when I bring up what I've come to think of as "mini crimes" against big businesses — small acts of deviance that average shoppers commit without really even thinking about it. At first, there's usually denial: "No, I would never engage in the slightest level of fraud." But pretty quickly, the confessions start to roll in. "OK, I sometimes ring up my organic apples as regular at the grocery store, and sure, I've returned an item after wearing it a time or two. Honestly, I'd forgotten sneaking snacks into the movie theater was a no-no."

Ask whether people feel guilty about it, and the answer is generally, not really. It's tough to lose sleep over a bit of rule-bending amid the state of corporate power and inequality in America.

Our economic machine is more impersonal than ever. Having a friendly local grocer and corner store guy who's known you since you were a baby is increasingly rare. They've been replaced by ever-larger, colder conglomerates that are willing to ax workers on a dime, pad executives' pockets, and focus on little other than profits. Corporate America's favorite new toy — AI — promises efficiency and riches for them and precarity and anxiety for us.

Against that backdrop, some people have turned to petty fraud, policy abuse, and small acts of sabotage as a means of getting back at their economic overlords. They're engaging in spurts of shoplifting, taking part in return shenanigans, and using their credit cards for "friendly fraud" that's anything but. They see — or at least excuse — these acts not as stealing but as small moments of deserved vengeance in a system that violates their sense of basic fairness at every turn.

For this story, I spoke to one man who once paid his rent in quarters, nickels, and dimes after the apartment management company dragged its feet on making a needed fix in his bathroom. "I don't know if I'd do it again," he told me, "but in the moment, it felt fun." I heard from one woman who is still working through a pile of forever stamps she took from an old job that mistreated her years ago. "Every single time I mail a note, a birthday card, a bill, etc., I think about how that company will pay for my mail probably for the rest of my life," she said. I talked to another woman whose dad would regularly sneak the family into the same hotel's breakfast buffet to eat for free after church.

These minuscule attempts to even the score may be ethically dubious, but they're also a sign of the times: The context doesn't excuse the behavior, but it makes rationalizing it a hell of a lot easier.

"If Elon Musk is negotiating a trillion-dollar pay package, and I'm fighting for an extra 50 cents per hour to work at the poultry processing plant, well, what really is going on here, and how high and mighty should I be about someone stealing some chicken tenders from the freezer?" says Stephen Mihm, the author of "A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States."

Eyal Elazar, the head of market intelligence at Riskified, an e-commerce fraud prevention platform, has noticed a rise in what he calls a "Robin Hood mentality" among shoppers. Many of them aren't your typical "bad" guys — they're middle-class, middle-aged consumers who engage in some white lies. And they don't dispense their convoluted justice equally: They differentiate between retailers they view as being able to absorb the loss and deserving of it, and brands they feel a connection to and some level of loyalty. Basically, they're much more prone to slighting behemoths like, say, Nike or Walmart than they are Chewy, he says.

People view certain big companies as "having enough money or making a living off our backs," Elazer says. By contrast, it's hard to be too mean to a company whose whole purpose is to be nice to your dog.

When everything seems like a scam, it's easier to justify becoming a scammer.

This is a story partly about the evolution of modern-day consumer culture and partly about human psychology. Mass production is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back to the 20th century, when technology made it easier to manufacture goods cheaply and distribute them on a large scale. The marketing machine, in turn, ramped up to convince people they needed to buy the new and discard the old in order to keep up with the Joneses. This was accompanied by an increasingly widespread corporate attitude that treated work like little more than a commodity to be bought and sold, and a growing understanding that employers feel they owe employees nothing beyond exact (and often meager) compensation for their inputs. Twenty-first-century developments have kicked all of this into high gear: The internet makes everything even more distant; megacorporations have mushroomed; shareholder primacy reigns. Loyalty is dead, and customer service is an avenue for constant cost-cutting.

Trust in institutions has declined, and while Americans tend to think small businesses are good, they're often suspicious of the big guys. A 2024 PwC survey on trust in US business found that while 90% of business executives believe customers highly trust their companies, just 30% actually do. While people may feel OK about a particular brand, they are under no illusions about their business practices. Many consumers are well familiar with — and frustrated by — corporate tactics such as roping people into unwanted subscriptions, engaging in shrinkflation, and piling on inexplicable fees.

"The idea that consumers feel exploited is just on people's minds a lot," says Kathleen Vohs, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. "If you couple that with consumers feeling insecure about their own financial futures, I think then that can provide the perfect storm for people to feel like it's time to take back a little bit."

This breakdown in the social contract leads many Americans to feel that everyone is trying to pull one over on them, so why not return the favor? When everything seems like a scam, it's easier to justify becoming a scammer.

Human beings are hardwired for fairness, and when we see an injustice, we instinctively want to rectify it. Evolutionarily, that's served as a deterrent for bad or antisocial behavior — if I'll suffer more than I'll benefit from acting unfairly, I'll think twice. Fairness-driven justice isn't always rational for the avenger, and sometimes, we undercut ourselves in the act. The ultimatum game — a popular experiment in economics — gives two players $100 and asks the first to decide how to split it, and the second to decide whether to accept it, knowing that rejecting it will result in neither player receiving anything. If the second person feels the offer is too small, they say no to it, even though rationally, it would be better to accept the money, regardless of the amount.

"There's an amount that people are willing to say, I'm willing to cut my nose to spite myself, right? I'm willing to lose money to punish you," says Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. In the consumer context, the issue is that Player One — the business — is playing a very technically rational game and doesn't concern itself as much with fairness. "They don't understand the emotional component," Ariely says. "Companies do things to hurt people under the general guidelines of, 'It's only business, that's how business is done, it was written in small letters in the fine print.'"

Attempts to teach businesses a lesson for perceived unfairness can take many forms and come with various excuses. Reporting on other "mini-crime" stories over time, I've heard all sorts of justifications. People defend stealing at self-checkout because companies use the technology to cut workers. They request credit card chargebacks because there was a slight hiccup in a transaction, or simply because it's been a minute since they've asked for one, and figure they'll get away with it. Many of them claim to target major corporations and said they'd never intentionally hurt the small guys. The system is rigged, and they feel validated in doing some rigging of their own.

It's clear that much of this sentiment boils down to rationalization, often done after the fact. The reason you swiped a fancy cheese from Whole Foods was because you wanted to make a cute little charcuterie board after work, not because you were on some noble crusade against Jeff Bezos and wealth inequality. There's an inherent selfishness to this conduct: Many of us are open to engaging in dishonest behaviors when we think we can get away with them and have something to gain, explains Christian Miller, a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University. At the same time, we hold moral values that tell us those things are wrong, and we want to consider ourselves honest people. These small fibs allow us to maintain that frame.

"You don't see people in life often cheating in dramatic ways or stealing in dramatic ways, because they think they're going to get caught, and also, it's hard to continue to think of yourself as an honest person if you do," he says. "When the opportunity arises to cheat or steal in some minor way, we're willing to overlook that, because we can still think of ourselves as honest people, rationalize it, and benefit in the process."

Criminologists call these rationalizations "techniques of neutralization" — tactics offenders use to mitigate their feelings of guilt and evade accountability. These include denial of responsibility (it wasn't in my control), denial of injury (nobody was harmed), denial of the victim (they had it coming), condemnation of the condemners (it's somehow your fault, or you did it too), and appeal to higher loyalty (to help a friend). It's not hard to see how some of these small-scale consumer revolts fit into this. You don't see who you actually hurt when you snatch a shampoo from a major pharmacy chain. If you keep making up email addresses to take advantage of a streaming service's free trials, aren't they doing the same thing when they charge people after they forgot they signed up? Plus, there's some thrill to it.

We've long been told the customer's always right, which some customers have interpreted as they can do no wrong.

"The people who are doing these kinds of low-level stuff, none of them will see themselves as criminal," says Nicola Harding, a criminologist based in the United Kingdom who specializes in fraud and financial crime. They can tell themselves a story that "paints them as the hero."

Just because the victim of a crime is hard to see or even empathize with doesn't mean they're not there. If enough people shoplift, companies will raise prices, hurting families already on tight budgets. Increased return fraud and shady credit card chargebacks mean businesses will eventually tighten their policies, a headache for consumers who aren't eager to jump through even more administrative hoops. People swapping out a broken three-year-old coffee machine for a brand-new one in an Amazon return may not notice that the ultimate casualty of the transaction is a small business that's just trying to scrape by. Jumping the subway turnstile means less money to fund the strapped transit system, and calling in sick to play hooky further stretches the exhausted coworker you generally like. Retail workers probably aren't shedding tears over lifted mascara, but watching customers blatantly shoplift all day is demoralizing, and they'd rather not have to run around unlocking anti-shoplifting display cases.

It's hard to wrap your head around how we've gotten here. The economy feels more complex and overwhelming than ever. The veneer of big business caring about people or communities fades more every day. Citizens are stressed and frustrated as prices rise, and inequality has become increasingly impossible to ignore.

Americans' identities are intertwined with consumerism — we see what we buy as an expression of our values, of who we are. And, sometimes, the value we want to express is, "I hate you, internet company," by refusing to return a modem, "You're price-gouging me, stadium," by slipping in our own beer, or "You're the worst, boss," by grabbing some extra avocados from the office kitchen.

There's also a layer of entitlement to this — we've long been told the customer's always right, which some customers have interpreted as they can do no wrong.

Marianna Sachse, the founder and CEO of Jackalo, a sustainable children's clothing company, thinks a fair amount about the time a customer sent back pants with spaghetti and tomato sauce caked on them, expecting a full refund. She understands that people have become accustomed to dealing with e-commerce giants with hyper-generous return policies, but they don't realize she can't offer the same terms. To combat some of the depersonalization, she tries to run a "founder-forward" operation, ensuring that communications feature her name and face to drive home the fact that she runs a mom-owned business. "Sometimes, I think people don't really understand that there are real people behind businesses," she says.

Or they do, and they don't care.

There's a pervasive sense of nihilism shared by a growing number of Americans. It manifests in rampant gambling and speculation, where people feel that the economy presents such limited opportunities that there are few avenues besides taking irresponsible risks. It shows up in people cheering on Luigi Mangione despite a horrific crime and vandalizing Teslas out of anger toward Elon Musk.

Our politics are an increasingly consequence-free zone. While the elites may trade barbs in public, in private, they know their interests are ultimately aligned. Watching the ultra-rich hobnob at the White House and take frivolous trips to space while you're figuring out how to swing your grocery bill for the week can be infuriating. Of course some people are going to lash out, even in misguided, unethical ways.

If everything feels like a game where only one side has all the chips, knows all the rules, and rigs the outcome, it's only natural that the other side might be inclined to do some cheating.

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

• High mortgage rates have revived interest in creative financing options, including seller financing.
• Home sellers offering loans to their buyers is increasingly common in higher-end transactions.
• It appeals to self-employed or cash-rich buyers, as well as sellers looking for an edge in the market.

Carson Austin began to worry after his home had been sitting on the market for a couple of months with barely any interest from potential buyers.

It was early 2025, and he had listed the 4,600-square-foot Georgetown, Texas, property for $1.6 million, which he thought was a competitive price, comparable to other large homes in the area. But mortgage rates were hovering around 7%, keeping buyers out of the market and sales stagnant.

So Austin decided to try something a bit unconventional. He offered seller financing — an agreement in which the seller acts as the lender, typically providing the buyer with a short-term home loan. In Austin's case, he held firm on the home's sale price, but offered a below-market interest rate to entice buyers.

As soon as he offered the creative financing option, interest picked up. Within two days, the house was under contract with a buyer who agreed to a 35% down payment and a six-year seller-financed loan with a 4% interest rate. The sale closed just days later. Austin worked with a firm, MORE Seller Financing, to facilitate the deal, vetting and approving the buyer, and structuring the transaction with the help of lawyers and other specialists.

Austin said his buyer only came to see his house because of the below-market interest rate.

"I 100% know that the only reason that house sold, especially in that timeframe, was the owner financing — they told us that," he said.

Seller or owner financing gained popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, when interest rates were sky-high, but it developed a bad reputation for lacking sufficient protections, particularly for buyers. Federal regulators have criticized the model for exploiting low-income buyers with high interest rates on low-quality homes in poor neighborhoods.

However, as mortgage rates have soared since 2022, the creative financing strategy has regained popularity, despite remaining a niche offering. The practice is increasingly common in higher-end home sales, according to Realtor.com. Sales involving seller financing grew by 8% in dollar volume to more than $30 billion between 2023 and 2024, according to Note Investor.

"This used to be kind of a sketchy thing that happened with really cheap properties and really under-qualified buyers, and now the median price is on par with what's on the market as a whole," said Joel Berner, a senior economist at Realtor.com. "So it's moving upmarket, becoming more widespread, happening on higher dollar properties."

The upsides and risks of seller financing

Seller financing often appeals to buyers who want a below-market interest rate or who are struggling to qualify for a traditional mortgage. The so-called bridge loan from the seller, typically lasting about three years, provides the buyer with time to wait for rates to come down and find a traditional mortgage. Meanwhile, sellers can get an edge in the market and benefit from earning interest on the loan.

Sellers often use the financing strategy to market a home that isn't selling. Both buyers and sellers can benefit from a quicker timeline and can avoid fees, including mortgage origination and appraisal costs.

"At its best, seller financing creates genuine win-wins," said Ryan Leahy, who founded MORE Seller Financing. "Sellers often preserve more equity and earn predictable income, while qualified buyers benefit from payments that can be meaningfully below market rates."

But the practice can be financially and legally risky without the right protections. Leahy conceded that seller financing can have "lots of pitfalls and risk if it's not done right." He argued that his firm helps protect both parties by educating them about the process, ensuring the agreement is in compliance with the law, and connecting them with all the specialists they need, including residential mortgage loan originators, lawyers, title companies, and other servicers.

It's more popular with wealthier people in part because the transaction "requires financial stability and liquidity of the seller," Berner said, while the buyer needs "to be able to either change what's keeping them from getting a mortgage in three to five years, or rates to come down considerably in three to five years."

But while the financing type has gained popularity, it remains a niche practice. Less than 1% of home listings mention private financing, Berner said.

MORE deals with higher-end homes — typically valued between $800,000 and $3 million, Leahy said. Sellers typically have a fair amount of cash and equity in their property, allowing them to wait several years before receiving the full cash from their home sale. MORE's approved buyers are often self-employed with income that can be challenging to account for, making it more difficult to qualify for a mortgage.

"There's so many people out there self-employed or have income that doesn't qualify for a traditional mortgage, meaning you have influencer income, crypto income, side hustle income," Leahy said. "Seller financing isn't going away."

When another of MORE's clients turned to seller financing to sell his multi-million dollar Austin, Texas, home, he realized that his potential buyers faced a different conundrum. They could afford to buy a home all-cash, but preferred to invest their money elsewhere, avoiding high interest rates.

James S., who requested partial anonymity to protect his privacy, eventually sold his 5,200-square-foot house for $2.9 million in January 2025, providing the buyer with a three-year loan at a 5.5% interest rate.

"It's always that question: pay cash for a house or use that money for other things," he said. "People could take the money, and they could go invest in the stock market, they could do other business ventures."

James and his wife also didn't need all the cash from their home sale immediately. They haven't bought a new home yet and are instead living in furnished short-term rentals in California as they figure out their next steps.

"My mortgage is being paid down," James said. "And we make some money per month as well, so that's also good."

• Rivian unveiled a version of its coming R2 model that comes installed with lidar.
• The company said the sensor will support its future plans to roll out fully autonomous driving.
• Rivian's autonomy chief, James Philbin, told Business Insider that using the sensor is a "no-brainer."

For Rivian's chief of autonomy, the decision to put in lidar for the EV company's coming R2 SUV was obvious.

James Philbin, Rivian's VP of autonomy and AI, told Business Insider that the price of lidar has decreased significantly enough in recent years to be able to put the sensor inside a personally-owned, mass-production vehicle.

"It's been on this incredible cost curve, where 10 years ago, it would be just unimaginable that you could put a lidar on a consumer vehicle. And now it's getting into that price point, kind of in the range of a radar," Philbin said. Radar, a sensor that uses radio waves, is commonly seen in modern cars that have an advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) or blind spot detection.

Lidar is a sensor that uses laser light to measure depth. While it's historically been used for topography, the sensor has gained more visibility in the automotive world with the advent of self-driving cars.

Most notably, Waymo's robotaxis have multiple lidar sensors, including the spinning lidar on the roof of the vehicle. Waymo has said that lidar provides additional safety to the vehicle's AI driver.

On Thursday, Rivian announced a road map to fully autonomous driving, which includes building an in-house chip and installing a lidar sensor in the company's coming SUV, the R2.

Philbin, who previously worked at Zoox and Waymo, told Business Insider that lidar makes an autonomous system "more robust" and can help the company get to its self-driving goal "faster."

"It's very affordable," he said. "The performance it gives you for that cost is really amazing. And so to me, it's kind of a no-brainer that you would want more sensors and more modalities for something that's so safety critical."

Using lidar diverges from the strategy of Rivian's main EV competitor, Tesla, which has taken a strong stance on pursuing self-driving with cameras only.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk once called lidar an expensive "crutch."

In the late 2000s, during the days of the Google Self-Driving Car Project, a single lidar unit could come with a five-figure price tag. Today, industry leaders say a similar unit could cost a few hundred dollars.

Rivian employees, including Philbin, did not disclose the cost of the lidar unit in the R2 when asked by Business Insider.

R2 will first be launched without the sensor in early 2026. It's slated to be Rivian's cheapest car to date, with a starting price of $45,000. The company aims to launch an R2 with lidar in late 2026.

When asked what the cost difference was to put a lidar in the R2, Philbin declined to comment but said that it was "not a significant consideration."

• Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock said he saw 176,000 résumés since the year his startup launched in 2022.
• Only about 425 people were hired, he said, giving his company a .24% acceptance rate.
• Adcock said the company goes through résumés "one by one," and most of them were "slop."

A humanoid robotics startup in Silicon Valley appears to have an acceptance rate lower than any Ivy League university.

Figure AI has been flooded with résumés since its founding in 2022, according to the startup's founder and CEO, Brett Adcock.

"Just checked, 176,000 job applications at Figure the last 3 years," he wrote in an X post on Saturday. "We've hired ~425 people."

That amounts to a hiring rate of about .24% within the three years. Adcock wrote that most of the submissions were "slop."

The spread of the 176,000 applications over the three years is unclear. Adcock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Even if the number of applications were divided equally among the years Figure AI was operating — just under 59,000 applications a year — the acceptance rate would still be lower than that of the hardest university to get into. Caltech had the lowest acceptance rate of 3%, according to US News & World Report's rankings list.

Adcock wrote in the comments of his X post that the review process has been a slog.

"We go through these one by one like a monkey — it's incredibly time consuming," he wrote.

According to the CEO, the "ATS" or applicant tracking system — a software employers use to sift through résumés — can't save a lot of time if a company is being barraged with hundreds of thousands of applications.

"In the ATS it takes at least 20 seconds of button clicks per submission even if it's garbage," he wrote.

Adcock did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A company like Figure AI sits right in the intersection of two trends within the job market.

Today's job candidates aren't applying to just a handful of roles. Business Insider's chief correspondent Aki Ito reported that the average job opening saw 242 applications, citing data from Greenhouse, a leading ATS platform.

"Applying to a job in 2025 really is the statistical equivalent of hurling your résumé into a black hole," Ito wrote.

On the other hand, Figure AI operates in one of the hottest spaces of the tech industry, that is, robotics and artificial intelligence.

Top tech firms like Meta and OpenAI are in the midst of an AI talent war, offering up to seven- to nine-figure pay packages just to poach superstar AI researchers.

Even tech startups are scrapping for AI talent, floating higher equity packages and other perks that may not come as easily at a big company, such as a co-founding title or more time for research.

Figure AI happens to be one of the leading names in the humanoid robotics space.

The company recently raised more than $1 billion in its Series C funding round — with backing from Parkway Venture Capital, Brookfield Asset Management, and Nvidia, among others — for a $39 billion valuation.

Adcock said on X that he may need to find another way to sift through résumés.

"Need a model to do this for us better, maybe I'll work on one," he wrote.

• OpenAI overtook SpaceX as the world's most valuable private company in October.
• Now, a secondary share sale could catapult SpaceX back into the top spot — by a long shot.
• It's the latest turn in the long-running rivalry between Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

If Elon Musk and Sam Altman like each other, they hide it well.

In the latest turn in the rivalry, the two are battling over the top spot on the list of the world's most valuable private companies.

While the two cofounded OpenAI together back in 2015, the partnership has frayed spectacularly since.

Musk left OpenAI in 2018 and later founded rival startup, xAI. Musk or his company, xAI, has filed lawsuits against OpenAI.

OpenAI held a secondary share sale in October that valued it at $500 billion, taking the lead from Musk's SpaceX by a cool $100 billion.

Not one to cede ground to a rival, Musk is now planning his own secondary share sale at SpaceX, according to an internal letter to employees seen by multiple outlets. It would value the company at a whopping $800 billion. If that happens soon, it means Musk would have only let Altman hold the mantle for a couple of months.

Musk also confirmed on X this week that the company is exploring a blockbuster initial public offering, which might be the only way OpenAI can regain its lead as a private company. OpenAI this year restructured its business, which would allow it to also pursue its own eye-watering IPO in the future.

While this valuation battle between the two billionaires is maybe cringeworthy theater for the average earner, it underscores a significant shift: investors are pouring unprecedented money into technologies once viewed as speculative science projects.

SpaceX, which aims to make life multi-planetary and colonize Mars, and OpenAI, which seeks to develop a theoretical AI that can reason like humans, are two of the most visible examples, but they are part of a broader surge in frontier-tech valuations. AI, robotics, and defense tech startups have all notched multibillion-dollar valuations in the past year — bubble be damned.

• Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said he's not trying to lure AI talent with sky-high pay packages.
• Suleyman said he focuses on selective hiring and team culture over high compensation.
• Silicon Valley is facing intense competition for AI talent, with salaries reaching record highs.

The talent wars continue to rage across Silicon Valley as companies vie for the best and brightest minds in AI. There is, however, one major AI company that says it is not giving in to pressure.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said on Bloomberg Podcasts that he doesn't plan to compete with tech giants like Meta by offering top dollar for talent.

"I don't think anyone's matching those things," Suleyman said of the $100 million signing bonuses Meta has been offering engineers, and the $250 million packages it's been using to lure top AI researchers.

"I think that Zuck's taken a particular approach that involves sort of hiring a lot of individuals rather than maybe creating a team, and I don't really think that's the right approach," he said.

Suleyman said he was "very selective" about new hires when he previously worked at DeepMind. At Microsoft, he said he has hired "incrementally," prioritizing candidates who aligned with the team's culture and had the right skills, and let go of those who did not.

In Silicon Valley, the top ranks of AI talent are commanding pay packages in the millions.

In June, Meta spent $14.3 billion on an investment in Scale AI — a deal widely seen as an acquihire of its CEO, Alexandr Wang. Google also made a similar move, acquiring the leaders of Windsurf, an AI coding platform. in a deal worth $2.4 billion. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that Meta tried to lure his employees away with $100 million signing bonuses, which Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said OpenAI later offered to match.

Even at smaller startups, someone in an AI leadership role can command between $300,000 and $400,000 in base pay, Shawn Thorne, managing director at executive search firm True Search, previously told Business Insider.

Suleyman said "rotation" is part of the industry, given the small pool of talent. He cited Microsoft's corporate vice president of AI, Amar Subramanya, decamping to Apple earlier this month as an example.

Microsoft recently brought in several new hires from DeepMind and OpenAI, he said.

"There's certainly no 'no poach' agreements, that would not be legal," he added. "People can go work for whoever they want to work for."