• I spent four nights on the new Carnival Firenze cruise ship in May.
• The ship has plenty of free activities alongside enticing up-charged options.
• Take a look at all the amenities on Carnival's new Italian-themed vessel.

Carnival's new Firenze cruise ship is filled with upcharged options. But if you look past them, you'll be pleasantly surprised by their complimentary activities.

The company's second Italy-themed ship came highly anticipated. In early April, Firenze's naming ceremony "triggered a step up in bookings," Josh Weinstein, the president and CEO of Carnival Cruise Line's parent company, Carnival Corp, told analysts in late June.

Two weeks after the ceremony, Carnival Firenze set sail on its maiden voyage from its homeport in Long Beach, California, marking the 27th vessel to join the cruise line's fleet.

This boost in bookings might not come as a surprise after seeing its prices.

New cruise ships generally command an inflated fare. But it seems the new 5,245-guest Firenze ignored this tradition, with 2024 fares currently starting at almost $360 per person for a four-night cruise.

Not too bad, given all of its amenities.

Firenze is more than just another towel animal-toting Carnival cruise.

In 2022, Carnival acquired Firenze and its sister ship from Costa Cruises. Firenze then underwent a two-month refresh to be outfitted with the "Carnival Fun Italian Style" theme.

If you're an American who loves campy European-themed venues — think a cheaper version of the Venetian in Las Vegas — Firenze could feel like an Italian getaway. The theme is hard to miss, from the white statues to the giant photos of Florence, Italy.

I went on Firenze's four-night cruise about two weeks after its maiden voyage.

I previously wrote a less-than-glowing review of Carnival Firenze, although I was impressed with the vessel's complimentary activities, a rarity on many popular cruises.

Norwegian's newer ships, for example, have $10 mini-golf courses and VR arcades that cost $29 for an hour of play. Similarly, Royal Caribbean's new ultra-giant, ultra-popular Icon of the Seas has a $49-per-person ropes course that can be completed in less than a minute.

Carnival Firenze also has a mini-golf and ropes course — but they're both free, albeit not as exciting or modern as the cruise line's competitors.

Unfortunately, the arcade isn't free. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a complimentary one anywhere.

Like Icon of the Seas, brave guests must be harnessed in before walking Firenze's ropes course.

But unlike Royal Caribbean's adrenaline-pumping walkway, Firenze's course takes several minutes to complete. And while it's less showy and dramatic than Icon's, it is free to go on as many times as you'd like — and for that, a better deal.

Want to keep the adrenaline going? Carnival's new ship has waterslides near the children's water playground.

Nearby, there's also cornhole, a giant chess set, and an outdoor sports court for an afternoon of shooting hoops. If you're lucky, you can also claim one of the open-air foosball tables.

If not, there's an indoor foosball table near the ping pong table and a collection of board games and books.

Speaking of indoor-outdoor options, Firenze has two pools, one outside and another under a glass roof.

The latter is also home to the makeshift nighttime movie theater, so long as viewers are OK with paying $4 for popcorn and the background sound of screaming children at the pool.

If you want to escape the kids, Firenze has the obligatory cruise ship spa, casino, and boutiques.

Or go to the adult-only outdoor lounge outfitted with rows of lounge seats, two hot tubs, and, most importantly, no children in sight. It's also where you'll also find the ship's salad bar — one of Firenze's 15 dining options.

Of the 15 restaurants, eight venues are complimentary

But there are some caveats.

Some included options, like the pizza kiosk and buffet, have up-charged items. Others, like the aforementioned salad bar and grill stand, remained frustratingly closed until the last day of my cruise.

But if you don't consider these stipulations, Firenze's free-to-upcharged restaurant ratio isn't abnormal. About half of competitor Icon of the Seas' 21 dining venues also cost extra.

Carnival Firenze's specialty options include an empanada stand and classics like sushi, teppanyaki, and Italian restaurants.

Travelers ready to splurge on food could pay as little as $1.50 for an empanada or almost $50 for a steakhouse dinner.

Dining at the free buffet but eyeing the up-charged chicken wings? They'll be $5 for six pieces. Having breakfast at the free main dining room? A fresh juice will be $5.

Want a dinner lobster roll from the seafood shack? It'll be another $18.

During the day, the seafood shack serves as a complimentary chicken stand, joining eight other free options.

Cruisers can live out their "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives" dreams at the Guy Fieri-branded burger counter, where heavy accouterments like fried mozzarella slabs and onion rings are commonplace.

Or, head up a deck to Il Mercato for grab-and-go Italian sandwiches.

Firenze has two main dining rooms for a more formal sit-down dinner. Just note that the dinner buffet serves the same menu as these restaurants. And while the food is fine, it's not great — and I did find a piece of plastic hidden in my pasta.

As with any mass-market cruise ship, alcohol isn't free.

Cocktails are about $13, while beers and seltzers are about $9. But if you can't cruise without booze (it is Carnival, after all), the new ship has plenty of venues for your needs.

Bars like Piano Bar 88 and Tuscan Lounge have live music.

Amari offers options that fit the ship's Italian theme, like aperitifs, digestives, and Negroni sbagliatos ("stunnin'!").

Meanwhile, Heroes Tribute Bar and Lounge is great for guests who want to sip a beer, watch sports, and surround themselves in American military garb.

If you enjoy doing karaoke, you'll love karaoke night at the stylish and contemporary Moda Bar and Lounge.

And if you crave Aperol spritzes the moment the sun comes out, you could find yourself frequently visiting the bubbly-forward, new-to-brand Frizzante.

While not technically a bar, the coffee shop also sells boozy milkshakes and floats for almost $12.

But then again, everything at JavaBlue Cafe has a price tag, from the $4.50 latte to the icy $7.25 frappe. And if you want a sweet treat with your pick-me-up, it'll be $4 for a doughnut or cupcake.

(If you don't want to pay for caffeine, the buffet has free black coffee, Bigelow's green tea, and Lipton tea.)

It wouldn't be a cruise without live entertainment, either.

The atrium hosts musicians and singers dressed in Venice Carnival — or "Eyes Wide Shut" — style masks, while the smaller Limelight Lounge is the go-to for stand-up comedy. There's also an interactive "Deal or No Deal" game show, although participation costs $25.

But if we're talking about traditional theater shows, my four-night cruise included the cheesy "Dear Future Husband" song-and-dance production and the interactive "What's Age Got To Do With It?" game show.

If laughter from the crowd indicates success, the game show — which sources participants from the crowd — was a hit.

A show where half the players are children is sure to be entertaining.

Is the entertainment better on Norwegian and Royal Caribbean’s newest ships? Yes.

Does Carnival Firenze have as many pools as its competitors' latest vessels? No.

But is Firenze's mini-golf and ropes course free? Yes.

Plus, with four-night voyages starting at almost $90 a night, Firenze's 2024 itineraries are both shorter and cheaper than several other new cruise ships on the market. (Norwegian Viva's cheapest 2024 itinerary is more than $1,520 per person for an 11-day sailing, while Icon of the Seas starts at almost $1,770 per person for eight days.)

So, if you can resist the enticing upcharges, Carnival's new Firenze could be a great pick for families looking for a cheap and fun vacation at sea.

• Meta's Threads just celebrated its first anniversary.
• The social platform broke records when it first launched — and it's still growing.
• Meta is still betting Threads can overtake X, but the platform still faces challenges. 

Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter-killer, Threads, celebrated its first birthday.

The platform became the world's fastest-growing app when it launched after hitting 100 million users in just five days.

A year on, Threads is still growing, albeit not as quickly. Zuck said last week the X rival now has more than 175 million monthly active users.

Threads owes much of its early success to its close links with Instagram.

The ability for users to sign up with their Instagram login made it easy to create an account and find contacts. It also launched when some were seeking an alternative to Twitter following Elon Musk's takeover.

In contrast, X's growth is stalling. The platform said its number of global daily active users had increased by 1.6% to 251 million in the second quarter of this year, The Financial Times reported Tuesday.

That represents a 1.6% year-on-year increase and contrasts with the double-digit growth the platform then called Twitter generally posted before Musk bought it.

In a recent interview with Platformer, Threads and Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said the aim was still overtaking X. However, Threads was focusing on differentiating itself from X in a bid to win more users.

"Another key focus is how do we double down on one of our differentiators, which is just to be a less angry space," Mosseri told the outlet, adding that undertaking some "basic content moderation" had helped.

Zuckerberg originally promoted Threads as a "friendlier" alternative to X. But a year on, it does not appear to have yet become a genuine threat to Musk's platform.

"In the short term at least, Threads does not pose a significant challenge to X," Paul Carter, CEO of telecommunications firm GWS, told Business Insider.

"Threads needs to do more to set itself apart if it's going to pose a significant challenge or even look to overtake X in the future."

Engagement issues

Meta says Threads has 175 million active monthly users. Still, data provided to the FT from analytics company Sensor Tower estimates the platform only has 38 million visitors daily, suggesting that users open the app less often than other platforms.

In April, Sensor Tower estimated Threads had averaged 28 million daily active users in the US, while X averaged 22 million.

However, according to data provided by GWS, Threads still had a problem engaging users.

"Despite recent growth, it is struggling to keep its users on the platform for a sustained period," Carter said. "As of June 2024, users spent just six minutes on the app each day, compared to X at 23 minutes or Instagram at 36 minutes."

"New entrants into the social media market can succeed — just look at the rise of TikTok. For Threads, however, the platform simply isn't sufficiently setting itself apart," he added.

An Instagram add-on

While Meta still backs Threads to overtake X, the platform still very much exists alongside Instagram.

"Threads remains highly dependent on Instagram — in fact, it is hard to see how Threads would have amassed its audience without Instagram," Carter said.

Mosseri acknowledged the platform was still "deeply integrated with Instagram," but said he planned to make it more independent.

"We're working on things like Threads-only accounts and data separation," he said. "As we iterate on the product, it's gonna differentiate more and more."

But given that it's so intrinsically linked to Meta's vastly more popular app, it's difficult to see Threads fully escaping from Instagram's shadow in the near future.

• Biden canceled a meeting with Olaf Scholz, saying he had to go to bed, according to a report.
• The meeting was an informal gathering during the G7 summit to discuss Ukraine.
• The White House has faced scrutiny over Biden's mental acuity and ability to run for a second term.

President Joe Biden canceled an early evening meeting with the German chancellor Olaf Scholz at the last minute because he had to go to bed, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper reported that the event was an informal gathering in Germany amid the G7 summit in June 2022, and was meant to be a low-key meeting to discuss Ukraine.

Two unnamed people who were there told the Journal that Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that Biden would not make an appearance because he had to rest.

According to the report, the chancellor and his aides were surprised by Biden's absence and Blinken's appearance.

In a statement to the Journal, a spokesperson for the State Department denied the report, while another official stated that the White House had informed the participants early on that Biden would be unable to attend.

Business Insider could not verify the details or the specific reason for needing to rest, and the White House did not reply to a request for comment.

Axios, citing people close to the president, has previously said that Biden worked best between the 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. window and struggled to function outside that timeframe.

The Journal report said that the White House has consistently reduced Biden's daily schedule and shielded him from impromptu meetings.

Both CNN and The New York Times have reported that Biden told governors he needed to get more sleep and stop holding events after 8 p.m. The White House has not responded to these claims.

It follows a disastrous debate against Donald Trump, which was marked by verbal gaffes and confusing statements.

Biden dismissed queries about his competence as a presidential candidate in a taped interview with ABC's George Stephanopolous on Friday, saying he would step aside only if the "Lord Almighty" asked him to.

High-profile Democratic Party donors have voiced their concerns about Biden's mental acuity.

Abigail Disney, Walt Disney's grandniece and a longtime Democratic donor, announced she would halt donations to the party until he makes way for a replacement at the top of the ticket.

Biden now faces intense scrutiny as he heads into NATO's summit this week, which was meant to draw a line under the strategy for the Ukraine crisis and discuss the shifting China-Russia dynamic.

A summit of this stature would normally not be an issue for Biden, who formerly served as the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Now, it will serve as a public test of his mental sharpness and ability to run against Trump in the elections.

Alliance leaders will be hosted by Biden in Washington for three days of discussions and public activities, which will end with a solo press conference on the afternoon of July 11th.

• President Joe Biden is trying to "run out the clock," a former Obama advisor told CNN.
• David Axelrod said that after the NATO summit and GOP convention, time gets too short to make a change.
• Biden has come out forcefully against calls for him to step aside following last month's debate.

President Joe Biden is trying to "run out the clock" so that time becomes too short to make a change, a former Obama advisor said in an interview with CNN.

"I do think he is trying to run out the clock," David Axelrod told the outlet on Monday, citing an upcoming NATO summit in Washington, DC, as well as next week's Republican convention.

"And then time gets very short if you were to make a change," he said.

Biden has been under considerable pressure to exit the presidential race following his disastrous debate performance on June 27.

But he's come out forcefully against any suggestions that he should drop out.

In an ABC News interview released on Friday, Biden said only God might convince him to drop out of the race.

And in a call with MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Monday, he said he was "not going anywhere" and goaded Democrats who wanted to push him aside.

Biden also sent a letter to Democratic members of both chambers, telling them to end questions about how to move forward, saying: "I am firmly committed to staying in this race."

Axelrod described the letter to CNN as "pretty dismissive," with no "real acknowledgment of the concerns or addressing of the concerns" brought up by Democrats.

Axelrod told CNN on Sunday that Biden was "dangerously out of touch" with the ground sentiment and was "not winning this race" against former President Donald Trump.

The Democratic National Convention is scheduled to start on August 19, leaving Democrats just over five weeks to pick a new nominee, if they choose to try to force Biden out.

It's not too late for Democrats to pick another candidate, although the precedent isn't one they will look at favorably.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson dropped out of the race in 1968, his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, entered the Democratic primary, won the nomination, but went on to lose the election to former Vice President Richard Nixon.

According to Reuters, if Biden stepped down after the Democratic convention, the 435 members of the Democratic National Committee would then need to select a new candidate.

Growing calls for Biden to end his bid for reelection have worried some in the Republican Party.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and longtime Trump ally, told CBS' "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan" Sunday that a new Democratic challenger would make the race "dramatically different" for Trump.

• I've worked as a sales associate at Coach for two years, and I've seen customers make mistakes. 
• Buy a bag that actually fits your essentials, not just whatever's trendy.
• Keep your receipt and don't assume highest prices means highest quality and best bag for you. 

I've worked as a Coach sales associate for two years, so I've learned a lot about designer bags.

Maybe you want one as an investment that can be resold for six figures down the road, or perhaps you just want to ferry your belongings to and from work in style. Either way, you'll definitely want to be smart when putting your card down.

Here are the five mistakes I often see shoppers make when buying designer bags and how you can avoid them.

Avoiding the outlet stores

Luxury bags can be affordable if you know where to look. Fortunately, a lot of designer brands have outlets with great deals.

The Coach Outlet features many collections and a wide variety of high-quality bags, wallets, and accessories for up to 70% off.

Overlooking practicality

Beyond aesthetics, practical features such as compartments, closures, and strap options contribute to a bag's functionality.

Ask an associate to see if they can fit your belongings inside the bag you're looking to buy. Then, try it on. Make sure you like how the bag sits on you and how it looks full of your stuff.

Overlooking key features can result in you buying a bag you won't actually use — I've seen many customers return bags they thought they could make work for their lifestyle but couldn't.

Only buying a bag because it's trendy

It's fun to keep up with the latest trends, but don't buy luxury bags based on them. Make sure it actually fits your needs and is versatile.

If the bag matches your personal style and meets your requirements, you'll feel much more confident in your purchase.

Not buying the products to maintain a good bag once you've got it

When investing in a high-quality bag, you should also consider buying items that will help you keep it in great condition, like special cleaners or leather moisturizers.

I often see customers not buy cleaners because they're not nearly as exciting, but they can really help you keep your bag looking brand new.

If you're stumped, ask an associate or research your bag's specific needs, which can vary depending on what material it's made of.

Not keeping the receipt

Keep your receipts when buying luxury bags because many companies have warranties or price adjustments that require proof of purchase.

It may also come in handy if you choose to resell your bag down the line. At Coach, you can also sign up as Coach Insider, so all your purchases will be tracked digitally, and receipts will be sent to your email.

• Dennis Dabney, 57, supercommutes from Texas to Arizona nearly every week.
• He said it was the best thing he could've done for career advancement.
• But it can take a financial toll, and it can be difficult to be away from family.

Dennis Dabney, 57, is no stranger to travel.

After serving in the Air Force for 26 years, Dabney started working for his current employer in 2016 in Virginia. As a military family, his wife and two children were used to moving, so when his company asked him three years later to relocate to Fort Worth, Texas, that's what they did.

Then 2022 rolled around, and Dabney was offered a promotion within his company to be a program director — in Phoenix. Dabney was excited about the opportunity, and he viewed it as the perfect chance to advance his career and boost his income.

His wife and two teenage kids, however, had set down roots in Fort Worth and didn't want to move again, and the same applied to his 88-year-old mother, who lived with his family.

So Dabney made the decision with his family to purchase an apartment in Phoenix, live there during the workweek, and commute back to Fort Worth on the weekends.

"I couldn't do this without the support of my family and my wife. And that has been crucial to decisions that I've made over the years about where to go and where to work," Dabney told Business Insider.

"You have to continue to have open communication with your family unit because things change, attitudes change, and you just have to figure out when things are getting out of hand or when things are going smoothly," he said.

Every other Friday, Dabney gets the day off from work, and that's typically when he chooses to book a 2 ½-hour flight back home using a budget airline such as Spirit or Frontier. His family also sometimes visits him while he's in Phoenix. While he said his company helped him with relocating costs, he estimated the supercommute was costing him roughly an extra $20,000 each year.

Supercommuting has grown increasingly popular over the past few years, with more Americans taking advantage of hybrid work environments to opt for longer commutes to work to boost their earnings. The American Community Survey data from the US Census Bureau found that, as of 2021, 3.1 million Americans fell into the supercommute category, or a journey to work that takes 90 minutes or longer.

Dabney loves his job, and while it can be difficult to be separated from his family, he's grateful they allowed him to pursue this opportunity. But he recognizes it's not a possibility for everyone.

"It's just my mindset, my background, and how to leverage all of that and learn how to create the quality of life that I want," Dabney said. "And it's just been a growing and development phase for me in figuring out what I want and what the art of the possible is."

'The whole experience has been very gratifying'

This wasn't Dabney's first experience with a supercommute. Prior to his new role in Phoenix, he was driving five hours to Louisiana every week for a different position in his company, and he made sure to come home every weekend to see his family and support his kids at their various sports tournaments.

"It was a nonstarter ripping my kids out of high school to go to Louisiana and then eventually Phoenix," Dabney said. "We moved quite a bit, but after we got to Texas, I got a clear signal from my family that they didn't want to move anymore."

If his kids were younger, Dabney said, being a supercommuter wouldn't have been possible for him. Doing so at this stage in his life allowed him to become an executive, earn more money to support his family, and find a job that gave him a sense of purpose — helping him feel confident in his decision to work more than a thousand miles away from home.

"The whole experience has been very gratifying," he said. "Having the experience to live in another part of the country that I probably wouldn't have lived in before has also been good."

Of course, the long commute has cons. Dabney said the airfare and second home were expensive, and he recommended that those considering a supercommute be transparent with their company about negotiating a compensation package that could help cover some of those costs.

He also said that, given his military background, he was used to traveling, but those who might not do so as frequently should consider whether they can manage hours each week in a car or on a plane.

As BI previously reported, data from the Stanford economists Nick Bloom and Alex Finan showed commutes of at least 75 miles increased 32% after the height of the pandemic, with hybrid work expanding living options.

It's a signal that more people may start considering the lifestyle Dabney has taken on — and while he said he had "no regrets," he cautioned that those taking on a long commute should have full clarity on its implications.

"I think the way the company looks at it, you are making a choice not to relocate your family to wherever the job site is, and you are deciding on your own to do the supercommuting away from your family," Dabney said. "It took me a while to realize that they don't really owe you anything else."

Are you, or were you, a supercommuter? Are you considering a supercommute? Share your story with this reporter at asheffey@businessinsider.com.

• Danielle Meinert, 31, developed a restrictive eating disorder when she was two.
• She could only eat bread and cheese, and exposure to new foods through therapy was very distressing.
• Meinert tried psilocybin and now eats salads, sushi, and fruit.

The Mediterranean diet, considered the healthiest in the world, emphasizes whole foods like fruits and vegetables with limits on red meat, sugar, white bread, and dairy.

But some people with Avoidant /Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) can only eat ultra-processed ones. ARFID is defined by extreme aversions around food, which could stem from a fear of vomiting to disgust with certain textures.

Danielle Meinert, 31, was one of them. As a baby, her family affectionately called her the "garbage disposal" because she would eat anything given to her. But that changed when, aged two, she underwent ear surgery because she was born mostly deaf.

"The moment that I woke up and my parents gave me food for the first time after the surgery, they said that I didn't eat and I refused all the food that they had given me," Meinert told Business Insider.

Meinert said she became afraid of most foods, and most of them read as inedible to her. The list of what she could eat was a lot shorter than what she couldn't: various forms of bread and cheese, such as grilled cheese, buttered toast, and plain cereal.

People with ARFID can experience severe consequences to their health, including starvation, malnourishment, and intense anxiety around eating in public.

Meinert started going to food therapists at five years old, but it wasn't until she tried psilocybin — the psychedelic property in "magic" mushrooms — that she felt her symptoms fade.

A lifelong struggle with food

When Meinert was eight and going to food therapy twice a week, her therapist brought in chicken nuggets for her to try that day.

"There was an immediate gag reflex for me," Meinert said. When her therapist or other adults pushed her to try the food anyway, she felt a fear set in. "It was like I was being forced to do something that my body thought would hurt me," she said.

She started to feel self-conscious that her food preferences stood out to people. Growing up, she coped by making jokes about herself to "try to get to the punchline faster."

As an adult, she would order a small side of mac and cheese at company steakhouse dinners. When that wasn't an option, she'd find some safe food to eat alone in her hotel room later on work trips.

Eating only gluten and dairy, she had "a stomachache pretty much all the time," she said. "I would feel bloated and then in an hour or less, I'd be hungry again." She took iron supplements and drank low-sugar protein shakes to compensate for the lack of vitamins she was getting.

In 2022, she found an ARFID therapist who helped her introduce 16 new foods to her diet such as seaweed. Still, Meinert felt progress was agonizingly slow and involved "force-feeding" herself foods that scared her. She didn't look forward to spending the rest of her life that way.

An eating disorder treatment in 'magic' mushrooms?

In 2022, Meinert watched Michael Pollan's documentary, "How to Change Your Mind," which explores the potential uses for psychedelics like psilocybin. Meinert wondered if psilocybin could treat her ARFID.

While some early research suggests psilocybin can help with eating disorders like anorexia, there are no existing studies on its effects on ARFID, since ARFID itself is a fairly new term (it was only added to the DSM-5, the bible of psychiatry, in 2013).

Meinert knew that if she was going to use psilocybin to treat her disorder, she would have to do it on her own. She spent about six weeks reading clinical trials, therapist guides, and Johns Hopkins' research on psychedelics to compile a 12-page plan for her and her partner.

There are some disadvantages in taking it outside a clinical setting, Dr. Natalie Gukasyan, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, told Business Insider. Gukasyan led a pilot study of psilocybin-assisted therapy for people with anorexia nervosa, and has seen first-hand how delicate a treatment it can be.

"Psilocybin is not without risk, and some of the more serious risks include possibly precipitating a manic or psychotic episode," Gukasyan said. Cardiac episodes are also possible — one person in her pilot study was sent to the hospital for cardiac monitoring a week after taking her dose. Milder side effects include headaches, nausea, anxiety.

Meinert said she felt safe trying because her family had no history of certain mood disorders and she doesn't have any heart conditions.

To prepare for the session, Meinert and her partner went grocery shopping, adding foods she was always afraid of like nectarines, kale salad, and "a million ingredients" for a sandwich.

They set up their home to be as cozy as possible, cleaning the house and putting all devices on airplane mode. During the experience, she wore an eye mask and listened to a psychedelics playlist curated by Johns Hopkins researchers. Her partner sat beside her, feeding her foods she couldn't fathom eating before, like oranges.

Unlocking motivation to do hard things

While Meinert could still hear her brain's "protective voice" during the session, she said it became easier to tune it out. "I felt calm and I found that so hilarious because my whole life, that's what I'd wanted," she said. "I wanted to just try a food and be able to take a second bite and a third and to be fine with it."

This area of research is still in its infancy stage. Still, Gukasyan said it is promising. We are starting to understand how psilocybin helps to treat patients with complex psychiatric disorders.

Some early psilocybin research indicates "increased cognitive flexibility" that can "reopen critical periods for learning," she said. Plus, in her pilot study on anorexia, Gukasyan saw multiple patients experience "a big shift in perspective and renewed motivation to carry on the work of recovery." That's crucial, Gukasyan said. Confronting an eating disorder is tough, and requires stamina to keep doing hard things.

After one session, Meinert resolved to try one new thing with every meal, such as eating the basil on top of a frozen pizza instead of plucking it off. Oranges, which once smelled disgusting to her, are now among her favorite foods — she could "eat a whole bag" in a day. Friends and family are shocked to see her order salads. And she always wants to have her birthday dinners at conveyor belt sushi restaurants, where she can "try so many different kinds in a short period of time." Meinert said that she feels like she has been re-learning to eat, almost like she's a toddler again.

She still ended up disliking some new foods. The difference was that it was driven by personal preference, not by distress. "I don't have to get joy from eating a raw cucumber or banana slice," she said. "I just have to know that I can try new things."

While psilocybin helped Meinert, she also acknowledged that it took mental preparation and perseverance to make real changes. "I knew that psilocybin can open the door for these positive experiences," she said. "But you've got to keep walking through that door every day, regardless of whatever it is you're trying to heal in yourself."

• Tesla gives special treatment to data from VIPs, including Elon Musk, when training its self-driving AI.
• Current and former staff say they were told to work on routes Musk drove as well as influencers.
• Experts say it means Tesla's resources toward self-driving vehicles are being unevenly distributed.

Tesla's self-driving cars seem like a marvel of machine learning.

But in reality, the company relies on a small army of human "data annotators" who continuously improve how the cars drive by reviewing camera footage from thousands of Tesla drivers and teaching the vehicle how to behave like a human driver, like deciding when it's appropriate to use a blinker or identifying a construction cone.

Business Insider has learned that those annotators focus their efforts on two high-profile categories of drivers: Tesla CEO Elon Musk and a select set of "VIP" drivers.

BI spoke with over a dozen current and former Tesla employees, all but one who spoke on condition of anonymity, who said images and video clips from Musk's Teslas received meticulous scrutiny, while data from high-profile drivers like YouTubers received "VIP" treatment in identifying and addressing issues with the Full Self-Driving software. The result is that Tesla's Autopilot and FSD software may better navigate routes taken by Musk and other high-profile drivers, making their rides smoother and more straightforward.

That means, experts say, Tesla's resources are being unevenly distributed and could serve as a distraction toward the company's larger mission of truly autonomous driving.

Each Tesla is equipped with nine cameras, and owners can opt to share video from those cameras to improve Tesla's systems.

Tesla's legion of data annotators review the clips shared with Tesla and use the images to train the system to execute a proper left turn or identify a stop sign (and stop at it). The workers also review situations where the system failed to respond properly and a driver had to take back control of the vehicle.

The annotators label videos where the system worked properly and instances when it malfunctioned. By ID'ing issues, the data-annotation team can update Tesla's global database with new information to clear up any confusion for other Teslas that encounter the same situations. Put simply, they teach Tesla's AI that the stop sign at First and Main is part of a four-way stop.

Analyzing data from Musk's vehicles has been a priority since the program's inception, multiple workers said.

Eight workers said they recalled labeling data that they believed was associated with the billionaire. Two workers said they labeled a route in 2021 that went in and out of the driveway of a mansion in Hillsborough, California, that they later discovered belonged to Musk. The Tesla CEO sold the house in November 2021 for $32 million.

Several workers said they spent a significant amount of time labeling routes in and out of Tesla's Austin and Fremont, California, factories, as well as the SpaceX office in Hawthorne, California.

While the annotators could have been viewing data from other Tesla employees or SpaceX workers who owned Teslas, they said the same focus was not given to other factory or office parking lots in California or elsewhere. In addition, one recalled labeling a series of clips from late 2022 and early 2023 that involved Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco. The worker said the team was told to focus on data from areas near Twitter headquarters during the same time period that Musk took control of the social-media company.

John Bernal, a former Autopilot analyst and test driver, and three other former workers told BI they were informed they were working on data from Musk's car and specifically told to treat the clips with care. While workers at the data-labeling plants are typically rated on how fast they can annotate the data, Bernal and two other workers said they were told to take more time with data from Musk's vehicles, adding that the clips would go through an extra round of quality assurance as well.

"It seems pretty clear that Elon's experience would be better than anyone else's," one former employee said. "He was seeing the software at its best."

Another worker said they had some misgivings about the initiative.

"It seemed like we were purposely making his car better to make Autopilot look different than it was," another former employee said. "It felt dishonest."

Four other workers said they believed they'd labeled routes associated with Musk but had not been expressly told by supervisors. When annotators view the data, they can see a timestamp from when the footage was taken and the geolocation, but they're unable to view anything that explicitly identifies the specific vehicle or driver. Instead, annotators said they could rely on context clues, particularly the routes and locations the vehicle visited.

Some workers said the cost of failing to label Musk's data correctly could be high. Two former workers recalled an incident where a data annotator was terminated shortly after labeling a clip they believed came from Musk's car. The worker was escorted out of Tesla's facility in Buffalo, New York, the workers said, after the data labeler failed to properly label a highway exit sign. One former worker said it was highly unusual for someone in data annotation to be fired without warning and that the employees were typically put on notice if they were not hitting their metrics.

One former worker told BI they recalled labeling a route in 2020 from a house in Los Angeles to SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, where the software struggled to identify the lines on the road toward an off-ramp. Tesla's Autopilot software has struggled to follow patchy lane markings in the past. In Walter Isaacson's biography on Musk, the author said that earlier on in the Autopilot program, Tesla persuaded a "Musk fan" at the California Department of Transportation to repaint the lines on Interstate 405 after Musk encountered issues with Autopilot as a result of the faded lane markings.

However, one former worker said there was no way for any of the labelers to know with certainty whether the clip belonged to any one driver, adding that anyone who thinks they know the owner of the car would be operating on "pure speculation."

Representatives for Tesla and Musk did not reply when reached for comment.

Tesla influencers also get extra attention

Musk isn't the only driver that gets special treatment.

Since FSD was released in 2020, Tesla fans and critics alike have taken to social media to share videos of the technology succeeding and failing, from clips of it navigating difficult routes without human intervention to buggy videos showing the car running over toddler-sized dummies or mistaking the moon for a stop light.

These videos do not go unnoticed by Tesla staff. In fact, the company created a system to prioritize data from drivers most likely to share their experience online, three current and former workers with direct knowledge of the issue told BI. These drivers are internally referred to as "VIP" users and their data is at times put in VIP queues, according to the workers.

Data collected from VIP users, including high-profile Tesla drivers who post on YouTube, is scrutinized more heavily and more likely to be labeled, three current and former workers said. They said they'd been specifically told by leads on their teams that they were working on "VIP data" and had received overtime pay to work on the data ahead of FSD updates.

"We would annotate every area that car regularly drove in," one former worker, who said they were told by their manager they were working on "Tesla influencer" data, added. "We'd home in on where they lived and label everything we could along that route."

Bernal said that Tesla sent multiple test drivers out to routes YouTubers had driven, including routes driven by Raj Balwani and Chuck Cook, two YouTubers who often review the software.

Bernal said he was one of eight or nine test drivers who went to Lombard Street to work on a solution, after Balwani, also known by his YouTube account Tesla Raj, posted a video of FSD repeatedly attempting to veer off the famously curvy road. The company eventually coded invisible barriers into the system to fix the issue specifically for Lombard Street, according to Bernal. (Bernal was terminated in 2022. He said it was the result of sharing a series of videos on his YouTube channel of his personal Tesla malfunctioning while using FSD.)

Balwani told BI he'd never been contacted by any Tesla employees regarding his videos but that he saw the company's focus on online feedback as a positive sign.

"I think this just means that their teams are monitoring and are engaged in the areas that they need to be," Balwani said

"For most of what I've recorded and done since I've had FSD, almost everything has been solved, which is pretty incredible," he added.

In 2022, Musk congratulated Cook on Twitter for giving Tesla a "tough case to solve" after the carmaker rolled out an update meant to address an issue with unprotected left turns that Cook had pointed out in his videos.

Cook told BI he's very aware of Tesla's focus on his content — in fact, he said, he sees test drivers in his neighborhood on a weekly basis. The YouTuber said he'd attempted to reach out to Autopilot engineers over email and social media but that they never responded and the test drivers in his neighborhood had been very "tight-lipped" about their work.

Cook said he sent an email in 2020 to an account for FSD beta testers asking whether Tesla was really looking at his data.

"They sent a screenshot of what my camera was seeing in my car just 30 minutes prior," he said.

Cook feels Tesla is focused less on handpicking influencers and more on gathering the best data for training, he said.

"They know I'm not just blabbing and fanboying or overcriticizing," Cook said. "I'm fair."

One worker with knowledge of the issue said the VIP system wasn't designed to give preferential treatment but served as an additional method for Tesla to improve FSD for all drivers.

YouTubers are "going out and constantly trying to break the system," the worker said, adding: "They're identifying difficulties that could be translated to other routes and calling attention to them."

"In a way, they're a second tier of test drivers," they added.

But Tesla's focus on Musk and VIP users could be detrimental to the company's efforts to achieve truly autonomous driving, Missy Cummings, a former safety advisor for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said.

"It's going to be hard to make a self-driving car for the masses if it's only operating well around Elon's house," Cummings told BI.

The issue comes down to whether Tesla's focus on VIP users contributes to niche improvements like the fixes to Lombard Street or ones that will benefit the entire community, Philip Koopman, a computer-engineering expert out of Carnegie Mellon University, told BI.

"I expect there is marketing pressure to make the VIP drivers look good in their videos, and it's hard to know how much of that is theater and how much is reality without Tesla disclosing the amount of safety improvements provided by each change," Koopman said.

Tesla's self-driving in the regulatory spotlight

Tesla has come under increasing scrutiny from regulators over the self-driving software and the company's marketing of the service. In April, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's investigation into Tesla's Autopilot and Full Self-Driving linked it to hundreds of crashes and dozens of deaths, citing inadequate measures to ensure driver attention.

Additionally, the US Justice Department is investigating whether Tesla committed securities or wire fraud over claims that it misled investors and consumers about its electric vehicles' self-driving capabilities.

Meanwhile, Musk has repeatedly said Tesla is getting closer to its self-driving goal, including plans to unveil its Robotaxi service later this year.

Musk sees Autopilot and FSD as existentially important for Tesla. Self-driving, he said in a 2022 interview, is "really the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero."

Do you work for Tesla or have a tip? Reach out to the reporter via a non-work email and device at gkay@businessinsider.com or 248-894-6012.

• A Bank of America Institute report shows the median pay raise for job-to-job movers has cooled.
• Job switching has slowed from its Great Resignation era highs.
• Middle- and higher-income job seekers could "have somewhat less leverage," per the report.

Here's some less-than-great news if you're looking to job-hop because of your pay: People changing roles likely won't be getting as big of a wage bump as past job switchers.

"If you'd have done the same thing a year ago or 18 months ago, you'd have probably got double the pay rise you're going to get today," David Tinsley, senior economist at the Bank of America Institute, told Business Insider.

That takes away from one of the main ways people get raises overall: changing jobs for higher pay.

"You don't change jobs unless you get a pay rise, and firms will pay more for incoming people than they will for their existing employees," Tinsley said. "There's always that going on, but it does seem like there is a weakening in that premium right now."

A new Bank of America Institute report found the median pay gain for those switching jobs was around 20% during the Great Resignation in 2021 and 2022, based on the bank's internal data. However, the report said that "median pay raises appear to have moderated to around 10%" as of this past May.

"People are still moving, but at the same time, the pay rises they're getting are below pre-pandemic levels," Tinsley said. "That seems to suggest there's been a sort of supply shift."

He added, "the desire to move jobs might be outpacing the demand from firms to take people right now."

The Atlanta Fed's Wage Growth Tracker has also shown pay growth cooling for job switchers since the highs seen in the summer of 2022, based on the three-month moving average of median wage growth.

New data out Friday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggested wage growth for private employees generally has moderated slightly. Average hourly earnings rose by 3.9% from June 2023 to June 2024, following a year-over-year increase of 4.1% in May.

The drops in the median pay raise for job-to-job movers from 2022 to 2024 were felt across workers in all income groups, the Bank of America Institute found. Still, the report noted that lower-income Bank of America customers — those making under $50,000 a year — had the highest median pay gains. Meanwhile, the medians for middle- and higher-income job changers aren't even in the double digits anymore.

The report said that those middle- and upper-income job seekers may "have somewhat less leverage and bargaining power in negotiating a raise on taking a job."

Tinsley linked that drop to turbulence in some particularly high-paying sectors. "Obviously, there was a shakeout of jobs in tech and to some extent in finance last year, and I guess that has probably backed a little of the bargaining power out of those areas," Tinsley said.

The report also shows that job-hopping might be slowing down. Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data also showed that the quits rate has consistently been 2.2% for seven months, and the quits level was around 3.5 million in May, far below its Great Resignation high of 4.5 million in April 2022.

Still, Tinsley said there still is a reasonable rate of job-to-job changes happening even with the pullback in raises. He said there's a risk and a reward when people change jobs. The risk, he explained, could be the track record you have to build up at your latest workplace, while the reward could be related to money.

The job-changing data implies there are still some optimistic job searchers in the still-strong labor market.

"Another way of thinking about it is if you move jobs and that job doesn't work out, are you confident that you could move jobs again? And when the labor market's in reasonable shape, then people will have that confidence, and that still seems to sort of be the case in our data," Tinsley said.

Have you made a job change, and how did the pay and benefits compare to your previous role? Are you an employer or recruiter finding job candidates' expectations for pay have changed? Reach out to this reporter to share at mhoff@businessinsider.com.

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