Tag: News

• A NATO drone maker said smaller, frontline NATO members have two key weaponry needs.
• They need autonomy because they have smaller populations, and cost-effective ways to stop attacks.
• Latvia's Origin Robotics makes drones and drone interceptors, and has systems in Ukraine.

A drone maker that's been arming Ukraine and designing systems to protect NATO says it's learned what the alliance, especially allies sharing a border with Russia, will need to fight — and win — a war.

Drone maker Origin Robotics, which is based in Latvia, one of NATO’s smaller eastern edge allies bordering Russia and Belarus, is among those considered most at risk of a potential Russian attack. Facing a growing threat, countries along that frontier have played an outsized role in shaping NATO’s urgency toward Moscow.

CEO Agris Kipurs recently told Business Insider that these smaller front-line states need to invest in autonomy and lower-cost ways to take down enemy mass.

These are the kind of solutions that the technology company is working on. It has supplied some systems to Ukraine and has R&D contracts with Latvia's defense ministry. And Belgium recently agreed to buy Origin's interceptors.

Origin Robotics produces autonomous aerial and airborne systems, including an AI-enabled drone interceptor called BLAZE and a drone-launched precision-guided weapon known called BEAK. The latter is in use in Ukraine.

Kipurs said the company is using Ukrainian feedback to shape how it's building its new systems with NATO in mind. "We take the learnings of Ukraine, but we adapt those weapons systems specifically to be used in a NATO country," the market they are building for, he said.

Western militaries see real-world experience from Ukraine as key for industry. Luke Pollard, the UK's armed forces minister, said earlier this year that any Western drone companies that don't have their gear in Ukraine "might as well give up."

A need for autonomy

Russia has one of the world's largest armed forces. In Ukraine, Russia has shown a willingness to send waves of soldiers forward to relentless stress and overwhelm defenses — tactics often described as "meat waves." It has roots in Soviet doctrine, though it's not a 1:1 comparison to the fatal forward charges of the Second World War.

Smaller militaries with fewer troops can counter that mass with autonomy, Kipurs said. That kind of tech allows armies to be bigger than their numbers. Autonomy can give life to drone swarms, converting a single operator into an army of their own.

"For a NATO country, you need a scalable solution," he said. Compared to Russia and Ukraine, "our armies, in terms of head count, are a lot smaller." The alliance as a whole commands substantial forces, but force multipliers like autonomy can make alliance military might much greater.

"We have to build systems which can be deployed within a smaller army where one operator has to accomplish way more than an operator in Ukraine is accomplishing," he said. "And pretty much the only answer to that is autonomy."

Autonomy allows militaries to scale, Kipurs explained. "We don't have the numbers in terms of infantry, in terms of any army operator. So they have to be able to accomplish more."

Ukraine, one of Europe's largest countries, is still struggling against Russia's superior manpower and is increasingly turning to autonomy to offset that disadvantage. It also wants technology that protects operators by keeping them farther from the front lines, a crucial need as drone pilots have become top Russian targets.

Low-cost counters

Kipurs said finding cost-effective ways to stop large-scale attacks is also critical for nations with limited budgets, not just smaller militaries.

A key Russian tactic has been launching massive drone and missile barrages across Ukraine. This is something the West is increasingly worried about, with many officials acknowledging a gap in its defenses. There are not enough air defense systems, particularly affordable ones. It's not sustainable to fire a $4 million Patriot missile at a Russian drone worth only thousands.

Kipurs said that "when you look at the current offering for precision strike technology or weapon systems that can deliver precision strikes at the lowest end, you are talking hundreds of thousands per one successful strike." Some missile systems are worth millions, which is what higher-end interceptors are made for.

In Ukraine, both sides have recognized that exquisite precision strike capabilities are simply not sustainable in the long run, so they've been augmenting barrages with cheaper drones and loitering munitions.

It's cheap mass, not the expensive weapons that top armies have prioritized for decades. Addressing this problem, Kipurs said, is an "opportunity" for European entrepreneurs.

Front-line perspectives

Latvia and its neighbors, countries at risk that have grappled with Russian hybrid attacks and airspace violations, warned early on that Russia posed a threat and are now among Ukraine's strongest backers.

They're also some of NATO's most vocal members, warning that Moscow could strike elsewhere in Europe. These nations rank among the alliance's top defense spenders relative to GDP and have built new border defenses to blunt any potential attack.

They're protected by NATO's mutual-defense clause — it essentially states an attack on one is an attack on all — meaning that despite their small size, they have the backing of major militaries like the US, UK, and Germany.

But officials in these countries remain concerned about how quickly NATO could respond, insisting that Russia must not be allowed to seize even an inch of territory. That urgency is driving them to build stronger deterrents and homegrown defenses, a focus shared by companies like Origin Robotics.

The uncertain state of the US commitment to NATO and European security has only heightened those concerns across the region.

• Tesla is stepping up its efforts to get self-driving cars on the road in Europe.
• The EV maker is offering Full Self-Driving ride-alongs in France, Germany, and Italy next month.
• Tesla aims to have FSD approved in Europe by February, but regulators have cast doubt on the timeline.

Tesla is going on the offensive in its campaign to roll out its self-driving tech in Europe.

The EV maker is offering Full Self-Driving (FSD) ride-alongs in Germany, Italy, and France next month, as it inches closer to introducing the self-driving software in Europe.

According to Tesla's website, the ride-alongs will allow Europeans to experience FSD — which the company says can handle almost all driving scenarios autonomously but requires human supervision — during a test drive from the passenger seat.

FSD has been available in the US since 2022, but Tesla has struggled to roll it out internationally.

The automaker said in a Saturday X post that after pushing hard to ship FSD in Europe for over a year, it expected to get approval from the Dutch regulator RDW in February 2026.

However, the regulator quickly fired back, saying that although the agency had drawn up a schedule to grant approval by February, it "remains to be seen" whether that timeline will be met.

The RDW also asked Tesla fans to stop contacting them after the company called on European owners to get in touch with the regulator and "express your excitement."

Tesla has been testing Full Self-Driving for months on European roads, posting videos of cars driving through the streets of Rome and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Business Insider previously reported that Tesla employees working on FSD approval have expressed impatience with the extensive testing required by Dutch regulators, with one employee telling officials that FSD approval was "mission critical" to Tesla's leadership.

CEO Elon Musk has regularly complained that European bureaucracy is holding up Tesla's attempts to roll out its self-driving tech.

In a July earnings call, he said the company was navigating a "Kafkaesque" labyrinth of regulations, and predicted that Tesla's sales in Europe would surge once the company got the regulatory green light.

Tesla could use the boost. The company's sales in Europe have plummeted this year amid backlash over Musk's support for the far-right German party AFD and fierce competition from the Chinese EV giant BYD.

In October, Tesla's European sales were down nearly 50% from the previous year, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association, while BYD's sales surged by over 200%.

• Hedge funds have been quick to use artificial intelligence to help their investing teams.
• The so-called smart money has also been quick to invest in the trend across public and private companies.
• Quant funds have used machine-learning techniques for years.

Artificial intelligence has already changed the way many industries operate, and hedge funds are no exception.

The $5 trillion field is diverse in the type of strategies different firms employ and the type of securities they invest in. But everyone wants to be the smartest manager in the world — or at least the best-informed.

To do that, funds have pumped resources into building out generative AI capabilities and use cases. Many firms, especially quantitative traders, are expanding initiatives they were already pursuing in areas such as machine learning. And nearly every firm is putting capital behind the trend that has dominated the public and private equity markets for several years now.

Business Insider rounded up how some of the biggest and well-known managers are leveraging and backing the development of AI. It's an extensive, but not exhaustive, rundown.

How funds are using AI

It is, first and foremost, about the data.

Hedge funds have spent countless hours and astronomical amounts of money to get more information than their rivals as fast as possible. Their insatiable appetite for new and unique data has created a thriving alternative data industry, which is filled with firms scouring the world for new information to sell.

As Umesh Subramanian, the chief technology officer of Ken Griffin's $69 billion Citadel, said at a Bloomberg event in October, the data firms like his are now consuming is in petabytes. A single petabyte is 1 million gigabytes and can store hundreds of millions of photos or hundreds of thousands of high-definition movies.

The only reason funds like Citadel are able to consume this amount of information without feeling overwhelmed is because of AI. And, given the hypercompetitive nature of the industry, even the slightest advantage over a competitor is worth the cost.

"It's an arms race to be able to consume the right kind of data in the right kind of way to be able to make the right decisions," Subramanian said.

$29 billion hedge fund Balyasny has built an AI bot that it believes will be able to do the grunt work that typically falls to senior analysts — a potential huge timesaver for investment teams. The manager told Business Insider in 2024 that roughly 80% of the firm's staff use its AI tools, which include the internal chatbot BAMChatGPT, and recently hired Matthew Henderey, one of the CIA's AI developers, as a data science executive.

Balyasny isn't the only firm that has its own chatbot. Man Group and Viking Global have also developed their own internal offerings.

Quant funds like D.E. Shaw, Bridgewater, and Two Sigma and proprietary trading firms and marketmakers like Jane Street, Citadel Securities, and Hudson River Trading have been at the cutting edge of AI and machine learning for years.

For example, Two Sigma's Mike Shuster, who is the head of the quant's core AI team, said at a Columbia University event in November 2024 that his firm had been using generative AI for more than five years at that point. Bridgewater launched a $2 billion fund in the summer of 2024 that is run by machine learning; the manager's CEO, Nir Bar Dea, said this year the strategy produces "a unique alpha uncorrelated to what our humans do."

To stay at the vanguard of a new technology, you need top talent. These firms have often been able to lure top technical talent with eye-popping pay packages, but AI companies have been able to match, and in some cases, surpass compensation offers.

As Business Insider reported, young quants drawn to the work AI startups are doing now "don't even have to take a pay cut" to choose Silicon Valley over East Coast trading floors.

How funds are investing in AI

One of the reasons AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic can afford hedge-fund talent is the tens of billions of capital that have been invested into them by big-name venture capital firms, as well as Tiger Cubs like Tiger Global, Coatue, and D1. Tiger Cubs are hedge funds with connections to the billionaire Julian Robertson and his firm, Tiger Management, that often focus on growth stocks in industries such as technology.

Stockpicking funds like the Tiger Cubs have increasingly turned their attention to the AI trend in the public and private markets. Stocks like Nvidia, AMD, and Korean chipmaker SK Hynix are often significant holdings in their public portfolios, alongside tech giants such as Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta.

Maverick, a smaller Tiger Cub run by Lee Ainslie, focuses less on picking the winners and losers among AI players and more on supporting the chipmaking ecosystem. The firm's private fund, Maverick Silicon, which invests in that space, is run by one of the firm's longtime investors, Andrew Homan.

Steve Cohen, whose $40.5 billion Point72 has dozens of teams that invest in equities, was so convinced by AI's potential that he created a standalone strategy in October 2024, named Turion, a play on the famous computer scientist Alan Turing's name, to invest in the space. Point72 rarely offers new funds outside its flagship.

Turion, which is run by portfolio manager Eric Sanchez, has outperformed the manager's flagship offering in 2025.

Where AI still falls short

While some firms have turned over investing decision-making to AI, other industry leaders are not yet convinced that the machines can outperform the market.

Citadel's Ken Griffin said at an October conference that AI can not yet beat the markets. Man Group's Numeric unit has created an internal "large language model-based workflow" called AlphaGPT that "still requires human oversight and strategic direction." Elliott's Paul Singer said in a podcast at the start of the year that AI's use cases are "way exaggerated."

There's no doubt that funds are using AI more than ever before and processing more data than ever imagined. However, human creativity remains important for investment giants, and, for the most part, AI is seen as a tool, not a replacement, for flesh-and-blood traders.

At a London quant conference in October, the conclusion many systematic funds reached is that humans, not machines, are the edge required to beat the markets, Business Insider reported.

"Our key takeaway so far is that AlphaGPT doesn't replace human judgment but amplifies it. The most effective use of the system involves human researchers working alongside AI, with each contributing their unique strengths," a pair of Man Numeric executives wrote in a note on AlphaGPT from earlier in November.

"Numeric Humans provide strategic direction, market context, and final decision-making, while AlphaGPT handles the heavy lifting of data processing, hypothesis generation, and initial analysis."

• Miles Wu, 14, won a $25,000 award for his research project combining origami and physics.
• He measured the weight that Miura-ori origami patterns can hold across various benchmarks.
• Wu said the pattern could help improve deployable structures used in emergencies.

While most 14-year-olds are folding paper airplanes, Miles Wu is folding origami patterns that he believes could one day improve disaster relief.

The New York City teen just won $25,000 for a research project based on an origami fold called Miura-ori, which is known for collapsing and expanding with precision.

"I've been folding origami as a hobby for more than six years, mostly of animals or insects," Wu told Business Insider. "Recently I've been designing my own origami, too."

For his project, which won the top prize at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge in October, Wu spent months determining whether the strength-to-weight ratio of the Miura fold can be leveraged to improve deployable structures used in emergency situations.

Essentially, Wu tested how much weight the Miura fold could handle across different types of paper, parallelogram heights, parallelogram widths, and parallelogram angles.

Wu got the idea while learning about natural disasters, like January's wildfires in Southern California and Hurricane Helene, which hit the Southeast US in 2024. He also studied how people use origami in STEM disciplines, including the medical field.

"A problem with current deployable structures and emergency structures is, for example, tents are sometimes strong, sometimes they can compact really small, and sometimes they're easily deployable, but almost never are they all three, but Miura-ori could potentially solve that problem," Wu said.

"I found that Miura-ori was really strong, light, and folds down really compactly."

Wu tested 54 variations and underwent 108 trials

When using the Miura-ori, a sheet of paper is folded into a smaller area with repeating parallelograms.

To figure out the winning combination, Wu tested three different parallelogram widths, three different parallelogram angles, and two different parallelogram heights. He also tested three different types of paper.

That means Wu tested 54 hand-folded variations and oversaw 108 trials.

"After folding them with the help of a cutting machine for accuracy, I placed them between guardrails to keep my experimentation the same throughout my trials," Wu said. "Then, I placed a lot of heavy weights on top."

Wu would gradually place more weight atop each test variation until they collapsed. To his surprise, the origami variations were quite strong. He used every book in his home as a weight before having to ask his parents to purchase exercise weights for his research.

Wu believed "smaller, less acutely angled panels made of heavier material would yield a greater strength-to-weight ratio."

By the end of his trials, his hypothesis was partially correct. While small and less acutely angled panels showed a better strength-to-weight ratio, Wu found that copy paper — not heavier materials —had the strongest strength-to-weight ratio.

"The final statistic I got about the strongest Miura-ori that I tested was that it could hold over 10,000 times its own weight," Wu said. "I calculated that to be the equivalent of a New York City taxi cab holding over 4,000 elephants."

Wu took the top prize at the competition in Washington, D.C.

Taking top prize at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge is no small feat. To apply, middle schoolers must compete at local science or engineering fairs, where judges nominate the top 10% of projects.

Of the 2,000 or so applicants, judges select 300 before narrowing it down to just 30. Those 30 kids then travel to Washington, D.C., where they present their work and participate in challenges.

Those challenges play a role in how judges decide who will take home an award.

Maya Ajmera, the president and CEO of the Society for Science, which collaborates with Thermo Fisher Scientific to host the competition, told Business Insider that Wu excelled in those challenges.

"We're not only looking at their project. We're looking at do they deal with creative problem solving, how they deal with setbacks, how they bring everyone in a collaborative mode," Ajmera said. "Not only did Miles have an extraordinary project, but he shined as a leader in these challenges."

To Ajmera, introducing STEM education to young people is imperative.

"We're looking for the next generation of innovators," Ajmera said.

Ajmera said that many of the kids participating in the competition are considering careers in STEM fields.

"That is really important for global competitiveness as the United States, being the global leader of innovation and also solving the world's most intractable problems," Ajmera said. "I think we have a duty to really nurture the curiosity."

Wu said he and his parents decided to put the $25,000 award toward higher education. Although it's been nearly a month since Wu won, he's already thinking ahead about how to bring his vision to life.

"One thing I really want to look into is prototyping one of these Muira-ori to create a real emergency shelter that could be used in real-life situations and actually help people," Wu said. "But overall, I would love to keep working on origami-related research. Not only Miura-ori folds, but origami as a whole, and in other fields, too."

• Major retailers, such as Walmart and Target, are integrating AI into their shopping experiences.
• Retailers have partnered with AI companies, such as OpenAI, and developed their own tools.
• AI assistants can help with product recommendations, checkout, and customer service.

Retail is becoming a major battleground in the artificial intelligence arms race.

Since the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022, AI chatbots have had a meteoric rise in popularity. This year, more major retailers got in on the hype, unveiling plans to offer AI tools that can make shopping easier for consumers.

They're investing time and money in partnering with AI companies like ChatGPT maker OpenAI, or building their own large language models to create shopping assistants or simplify the checkout process.

Shoppers are already using AI. In an October survey from PwC, more than half of the respondents said they planned to use AI for price checks, trip planning, or writing messages this holiday season.

And the retailers aren't the only ones building AI-powered shopping experiences. OpenAI is bringing e-commerce to ChatGPT with its Instant Checkout feature, where users search and purchase items from some retail partners right in their chats.

Here's what seven major retailers have said publicly about how they're using AI to transform the way we shop.

• Retailers are marketing affordability and value to attract increasingly cautious consumers.
• Consumer sentiment is at historic lows, driving demand for lower prices and essentials.
• Retailers are adjusting their promotional strategies and messaging to encourage spending.

Retailers are responding to the affordability crisis this holiday season.

In recent earnings calls, Target, Walmart, and Sally Beauty Holding addressed the cratering consumer sentiment and discussed their pricing strategies as the busiest time of year for shoppers approaches.

Consumers are feeling the pinch. According to the University of Michigan's survey of consumers, sentiment dropped to 51 points in November, which is the second-lowest score the index has ever recorded since 1952, narrowly topped only by a score of 50 in June 2022.

Mark Cohen, the former director of retail studies at Columbia Business School, said that retailers are responding by investing more in lower-priced items and "adjusting their assortments" to give their customers the opportunity to buy from them at a lower price.

"Retailers have been getting more and more promotional for years in the main, but now they're doing it with their feet standing on thin ice because they don't know what to expect," said Cohen. "The last thing they want is to have overhang inventory for the holidays when the season is over, so they have been discounting frantically."

In Target's third-quarter earnings call, Rick Gomez, the executive vice president of Target, said that because consumer sentiment is "at a three-year low amid concerns about jobs, affordability, and tariffs," shoppers are looking to "celebrate with loved ones without overspending."

"Guests are choiceful, stretching budgets and prioritizing value," said Gomez. "They're spending where it matters most, especially in food, essentials, and beauty, while looking for trend-right deals in discretionary categories."

"Given our focus on affordability, we recently lowered prices on thousands of everyday food and essential items to help families further manage their budgets," Gomez added.

Target is struggling with declining sales and had to cut its profit guidance for the end of the year, but companies that are faring better have similar concerns.

In their respective Q3 earnings calls, Home Depot said that "consumer uncertainty and continued pressure in housing" is driving down demand for larger home improvement projects, Lowe's is expecting comp sales to remain "roughly flat" due to "a cautious consumer," and Sally Beauty Holdings said it saw shoppers "leaning into value a bit more," especially for those with low-income.

"The disparity in wage growth between those cohorts was as large as it's been in almost a decade," said John David Rainey, CFO of Walmart, during the company's Q3 earnings call in reference to the relatively stagnant wage growth for low-income households.

"If pocketbooks are being stretched and consumers are being choiceful and value seeking, it stands to reason, if there's more pressure on the consumer, they're only going to become more so," Rainey added, citing the value Walmart provides as a reason why the company is gaining market share in this economic environment.

The Federal Bank of New York wrote in its latest report that total household debt has reached a record high this year, totaling $18.59 trillion from July through September. Compared to the end of 2019, before the pandemic, overall debt levels have increased by $4.4 trillion.

Not every retail company is feeling equally cautious this holiday season. Best Buy hiked its sales forecast on "better-than-expected" sales in the third quarter because of strong results across computing, gaming, and growth in wearables. Gap Inc., in its Q3 earnings call, said that external data points to "macro pressure on the low-income consumer," but the company raised its full-year guidance.

A change in messaging

Dax Dasilva, the CEO of Lightspeed Commerce, a retail analytics company, told Business Insider that shoppers now are "highly price-savvy" and drawn to transparency in pricing and offers that are easy to understand.

A consumer sentiment survey from Lightspeed Commerce found that of the 1,500 respondents in the US market, almost one in four of the surveyed individuals said they will use Black Friday only for everyday essentials, such as groceries and household basics, while 13% said they weren't planning to spend at all.

"The brands winning right now are those showing empathy, not extravagance," said Dasilva. "Messaging that celebrates practicality like 'shop smarter,' 'stretch your dollar' resonates far more than indulgent tones like 'treat yourself.'"

Dasilva added that despite low consumer sentiment, sectors like bike, outdoor, sports, and self-care are still performing resiliently, which gives some indication toward what consumers are currently willing to invest in.

Jean-Pierre Dubé, professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said that retailers are developing strategies to offer deals without permanently lowering prices, in fear that this may "recalibrate consumer price expectations" to be lower.

"Retailers like promotional discounts because they are temporary in nature, facilitating a necessary price reduction without leading the consumer to expect the lower price to persist," said Dubé.

Dubé pointed to the rise of the "everyday-low-price" model, now widely used by chains like Walmart and T.J. Maxx, which he said is experiencing surprisingly good results because of the guarantee of consistent low prices within a specified period, without needing to wait for a big annual sale.

"Depending on how much inventory retailers acquired for the holiday season," Dubé added, "I anticipate some exceptionally aggressive discounts and promotions."

• Ben Tye is the CEO and managing partner of a business consultancy.
• He is also a qualified and practicing psychotherapist, who sees private clients every Monday.
• When negotiating a four-day week, he argued that stepping away from work would give him a fresh perspective.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 55-year-old Ben Tye, the CEO of Gate One, who is based in London. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

My late 30s and early 40s were a difficult time. I had a successful career in management consulting, yet I was struggling with what I now know was depression and anxiety.

When I was 41, I started seeing a psychotherapist who recommended a book called "The Middle Passage" by James Hollis, which is about making the second part of your life, after your 40s, richer and more meaningful.

It really spoke to me and helped me to understand that, for some, midlife is a time of necessary suffering in order to prompt questions like, "who am I really?" and "what does my life want from me?" rather than, "what do I want from life?" It's really quite profound and far from any "self-help" manual.

Six years later, in 2017, I began studying and training during the evenings and on weekends to qualify as a psychotherapist. It involved a one-year foundation certificate, a four-year post-graduate diploma, and a two-year research component.

All the while, I continued having my own therapy sessions on Tuesday evenings. That was while I was also running my own consultancy business.

The psychotherapy training took six and a half years and over 700 hours of supervised client contact time.

I pitched my four-day week as a way to get a fresh perspective on the business

I joined Gate One in 2018, and in 2021, when I was a partner, I was given permission to work a four-day week and run my own therapy practice on Mondays. We have a very flexible working policy so the negotiation I had with the company owners and other leaders wasn't difficult.

I pitched that stepping out of the business a day a week would give me a fresh perspective and clearer headspace when I returned to work the next day. I recommend people who work a four-day week to have Mondays off, because it's easier to start the week doing something else than it is to finish.

I typically see five clients a week out of a room in a beautiful building in central London's Little Venice, overlooking a canal.

Little Venice is considered upmarket, but it's a very mixed area socioeconomically, and clients bring a range of issues to sessions related to bereavement, addiction, relationships, work, their sense of self, and body image. I had experienced or known close friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances who had experienced several of these issues.

My fee is £90 ($118) an hour, but I ask my clients to pay what they can afford. Even if it's a symbolic amount, it represents an investment in themselves.

Mine and other people's boundaries are clearer now

It's been going well at work, as I make sure everyone knows what they should be doing when I'm off. The ability to delegate and trust people to do their work is a key leadership skill.

I received many in-person comments from colleagues, particularly women, who have said that they appreciated seeing a man in a senior role adopt a flexible working style. The policy has been in place for many years, but perhaps people felt it gave them "permission" to take advantage of it.

Balancing a third element of life alongside work and personal commitments brings boundaries more clearly into focus: yours and other people's. There's something really positive about having a better awareness of how one is spending one's time, what one is working on at any given moment, and making sure things aren't getting dropped or one isn't taking too much on.

Completely separating myself from my work environment each week puts me in a very different headspace, which has helped me step away from the day-to-day business of being a leader. I'll check my emails on a Monday evening after I've finished with my clients, and return to work on Tuesday with a fresh perspective.

I can't give advice as a therapist, but I have to be direct as a CEO

But I do have to make sure I'm separating my two roles of psychotherapist and CEO.

Being a psychotherapist certainly makes you a good listener, gives you patience, and the ability to be curious and appreciate where others might be coming from. Work-wise, you also develop an understanding of group dynamics and the unconscious roles that people play.

As a leader, you have to be authoritative and direct, while a therapist shouldn't tell people what to do or give direct advice. There's no way I would ever slide into therapist mode with colleagues or professional clients, because that boundary needs to be maintained really carefully.

I hope I can be a therapist for longer than I'm a business consultant

I haven't considered going full-time as a psychotherapist, as I'm quite senior in my business career and like to think I can add a lot of value.

But I am 55 and heading toward that final furlong of my work life. One of the reasons I became a therapist is to work longer than I might ordinarily be able to do as a business consultant.

Since training as a therapist, I have also done a two-year psychodynamic executive coaching program. That takes the theories and practices of psychoanalytics and psychotherapy and applies them to coaching. That's the third leg that sits between what I do as a psychotherapist, and what I do as a consultant and a business leader.

After I hand over the baton to Gate One's next leader, I anticipate I will do a mix of executive coaching, leadership development, and psychotherapy.

Therapy has given me a nice pathway for the last third of my life, allowing me to extend my career and do something really interesting and fulfilling, as I begin to dial down my other commitments in years to come.

• Richard Detty has driven for Uber and Lyft in Honolulu since 2017.
• Detty says it's a flexible side hustle, but Hawaii needs laws protecting drivers' pay.
• Some ride-hailing drivers have said their earnings have fallen over the past few years.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Richard Detty, a 58-year-old ride-hailing driver for Uber and Lyft in Honolulu. Business Insider verified Detty's earnings through screenshots he provided of his payments. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

A Lyft spokesperson told Business Insider that "ensuring driver success is vital to our mission, and we're continually looking to increase driver pay in smart, deliberate ways." For example, the company has pledged that drivers will make at least 70% of the weekly rider fares after external fees, and has recently started paying drivers for the time they wait for a rider, starting after one minute.

An Uber spokesperson said, "We're committed to policies that support flexible work and sustainable earnings without reducing opportunities or raising costs for riders." Most Uber drivers drive for the app part-time, the spokesperson said.

Rideshare is my side hustle.

I grew up on Kauai, Hawaii, and spent years on the US mainland. In 2017, I moved to Honolulu. My main business is selling products from Hawaii, such as mochi crunch cookies, on Amazon. When I'm not doing that, I drive for Lyft and Uber.

Tourism is a big industry here, and there are plenty of rides to take. I often drive between the airport, Waikiki, Pearl Harbor, and other places that tourists want to go. I feel safer driving here than on the mainland, where you never know who you're going to pick up.

There are also some unique challenges. I can't tell you how many times I've picked up riders with wet bathing suits at the beach and had to dry out my seats before my next ride.

When I was in college here in 1991, I drove a cab part-time two or three times a week. I would give the guy who ran the taxi yard $35, and I could drive from six at night to six in the morning. I paid for the gas, but the taxi company covered everything else, including maintenance.

Back then, a ride from Waikiki to the Honolulu airport paid up to $25. Now, Lyft and Uber are offering me up to $12 as the base rate for the same ride. When I first started driving for the apps here, that same trip would've paid $18. Without tips, I'm dead in the water.

I wouldn't mind some of these rates if Uber and Lyft provided me a car. But I'm now responsible for all the costs. I have to handle all my maintenance, and if my car breaks down, I'm out of luck.

What makes the pay harder to shoulder is that Hawaii is an expensive place to live. Everything costs more here than on the mainland because everything has to be shipped here. I've paid more than $4 a gallon for gas at Costco, and I've seen milk here for around $8 a gallon. The base rate for rideshare drivers needs to go up here.

Driving for Uber, Lyft full-time didn't work

When I moved back to Hawaii eight years ago, Lyft and Uber advertised that drivers could make up to $35 an hour. That was very easy to do at the time.

Now, they advertise that drivers make $27 an hour, yet if anything, the fares I've seen seem to have gone up in that time. Where did the other $8 go? For me, it's been one pay cut after another.

In 2022, I worked full-time for Lyft and Uber. I did it for 10 months because I wanted to save money to invest in my Amazon business.

Around that time, I started to notice that the payments I got were falling. I found that doing this full-time wasn't livable, so I went back to doing it as a side hustle. I drove 30 and 40 hours a week and put close to 1,000 miles on my car each week.

The only thing that keeps me coming back to Uber and Lyft is the flexibility. I can go in and out when I want. I think Uber and Lyft count on that: It seems like they want people to be part-time drivers.

I'm lobbying the Honolulu city council, the mayor, and the state legislature to do something about the pay situation for ride-hailing drivers. We need laws similar to those that gig workers in Minneapolis or Seattle have, which promise a minimum wage and provide other protections. I could make a decent living getting paid like that. In Minneapolis, drivers are being paid at least $1.28 a mile and $0.31 a minute. That's close to double what I make.

We need a pay rate that's fair. So many costs that have gone up. We need to be able to make a living.

Do you have a story to share about Uber or other gig work? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or 808-854-4501.

• Jim Kukral, a cancer survivor, quit his sales job last month to feel alive again.
• He's launching a party boat business in Cleveland to bring people together for screen-free connection.
• This is the third installment of a four-part personal essay series, Quitting Without Regret.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jim Kukral, who resigned from his sales job in early October to start a party boat business called Cleveland Floaters at age 54. This story has been edited for length and clarity.

I've been building my own brand by speaking and writing books for over 25 years, but I took a sales job at a coaching company in 2019 because I needed some stability, income-wise.

For four of those years, I was the top sales rep, and then for two and a half years, I was the director of sales. I actually liked the job, but I quit because I really just stopped feeling alive in it. I just said 'thanks very much,' and gave two weeks' notice. They were cool with it.

I recently beat cancer. I have everything. I'm not rich, but I've got a great family. I've had a really good life, but after COVID and the existentialism of beating cancer, I felt like I was slowly disappearing. I was tired of performing.

I'm guessing most people quit their jobs out of frustration, but for me, it was quitting out of hope. I'm hoping the joy isn't gone with humans. Maybe it's all just hiding under social media and phones and all that stuff.

I grew up in the '70s and '80s. Somewhere along the way, the last couple of years, we've started to do things like trade experiences for content. I feel like we've optimized ourselves into oblivion.

The thing that I'm building, and the reason that I want to build it, is to get real humans together, sweating on a boat, singing, dancing. We've got to reclaim what the screens stole from us.

The idea for my business, Cleveland Floaters, is to get people together to connect authentically and to exist fully in the moment. You have to have them put their phones in their pockets and put them in a room together — or in this case, on a boat — and entertain them. I think that's where things are moving.

I'm betting really heavily that over the next 20 to 30 years, we're going to see a real big push back to live experiences and human connection. I just really feel strongly about that, and that's what I want to champion.

We will start selling tickets for our first cruises in the spring. We're working really closely with Destination Cleveland, the Ohio Tourism powerhouse. It's very, very real. It's so real, it's kind of scary at this point. I haven't drained my 401(k) yet, but I'm about to start writing some checks.

This is all me. It is a private venture. It is really about creating something that makes people feel human again, and that's the journey I'm on, too. After 25 years of internet marketing and staring at a computer screen, I'd much rather bring together people on a boat.

It is going to be controlled chaos, so dancing deckhands, DJs, comedy, and improv. It will have a very Cleveland tone to it. We want to put Cleveland on the map. It's one of those flyover places. They fly over us and look down on us, but we're pretty awesome here. I want to build something that someone from Japan will get on a plane for and say I'm going to Cleveland, not New York.

Starting this business is extremely frightening. It's a ton of imposter syndrome because it is such a big swing out of my comfort zone. I have a lot of ups and downs. One minute, this is the greatest idea I've ever had, and then the next morning, this isn't going to work. I'm an idiot.

I think what stops most people from taking the leap is that they're scared of losing their income and insurance. But if I don't do it, I feel like I can't break free from this matrix of a world that we've created for ourselves.

My kids are grown. They're used to me being an entrepreneur, so they're like, "Great job, Dad, can't wait to see you pull it off!" My wife has a little more trepidation. It's our retirement at stake.

It's a tough time out there. Inflation's bad, people are scared, and not spending as much money. But I believe that people will spend money on experiences that bring humans together, and I'm going all in on that.

• Severe burnout led Audrey Wang to experience chronic hives and health issues.
• The high-pressure demands of her luxury estate management career were a trigger.
• Wang recovered by prioritizing health, shifting to coaching, and embracing intentional living.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Audrey Wang, a 42-year-old business and executive coach in LA. Business Insider has verified Wang's employment history with documentation. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I burned out so severely in my last job that I broke out in hives that lasted six years. The baseline was all over my body, from head to toe. On my face, it started as a small hive on both cheeks and gradually grew to the point where my entire face was swollen.

They would peak for one whole week. Then it would take three weeks to return to normal and start up again in the fourth week. The hives on the rest of my body moved around aggressively.

I worked in high-end estate management, overseeing multiple luxury properties, managing household staff, and handling a wide range of requests.

I had to quit, and now I'm a business and executive coach. Once I got my stress levels under control, my hives went away.

My first job in 2010 was incredible

I managed a 20,000-square-foot estate in Santa Monica and continued to take on additional clients. Everything grew through word of mouth. It's a high-turnover space, and private professionals are always in demand, especially those who can step in quickly and handle high-pressure environments with discretion.

As I moved on to larger and wealthier clients, the demands got more extreme. One client was a die-hard U2 fan and wanted to charter a helicopter from Santa Monica to the Inglewood stadium. He insisted I find a way for his helicopter to fly directly over LAX, which is a no-fly zone. It was absurd and obviously impossible.

I worked for two families, including one from the UAE

I would spend two to three months a year living in the UAE to work for them. They were essentially government officials and highly discerning, and their escalating requests were so constant that there was barely time to sleep or eat.

The remainder of my year was spent working full-time with another family, based mainly in LA, from about 2013 to 2016. In 2015, the work environment became very difficult to manage. I was also getting married soon, and I was so stressed that the hives started.

That's when I hit my breaking point

My face was so swollen and disfigured that I couldn't be seen in public. I was in tears daily. Thankfully, I'd saved enough to take a year or two off to recover.

In 2016, I moved back to Playa Vista, but my hair started falling out. Doctors told me I probably had severe adrenal fatigue or even possibly cancer. It forced me to ask myself: Do I really want to keep doing this for the rest of my life?

The money was amazing, but was I willing to die for an early retirement?

During that break, I leaned into things I actually loved, like organizing

I discovered Marie Kondo's KonMari method. I wondered if my health issues were caused by allergies, so I started giving away everything and stopped buying anything new. It felt meditative. I helped friends declutter, and sometimes they paid me for my help.

The hives continued at first. Doctors put me on steroids because they believed it was stress-induced, but nothing helped. I didn't work for three years because my skin was so unpredictable. One month it'd clear up, and the next I'd have a lupus-like rash.

I was eventually diagnosed with chronic idiopathic urticaria and angioedema. Sometimes when I bit into something, my lips or eyes would swell, so I carried an EpiPen everywhere.

I concluded that the root cause must be internal

I'd tried everything in Western and Eastern medicine, so I enrolled with the Nutritional Therapy Association. Their clinical partners tested my deficiencies and confirmed I had adrenal fatigue and sky-high cortisol.

They gave me hormone-balancing supplements. I thought, Really? Vitamins? But I had no other choice, so I stuck with it.

A few weeks later, my hives improved. Three months in, they were completely gone. My blood pressure dropped. I felt like a different person.

I knew I could never go back to estate management

Instead, I grew my home-organizing work into a full-time business. Word spread, and I found myself back in some of the same mansions organizing people's lives, again. That evolved into motivational coaching and eventually high-performance coaching.

I teach that less is more. My work at Invitation to Succeed bridges the KonMari method with high-performance habits. But high performance isn't what people think it is. It's not about hustling so hard you sacrifice your health and relationships. It's about doing what truly matters and brings you a life worth living.

If you think being productive means working nonstop, you've got it twisted

Real high performance is intentional. It means analyzing what really matters — your health, relationships, and joy — and aligning your life around them.

If I could do things differently, I would've quit the minute a client disrespected me. I'd tell my former self: Your integrity is your compass. When you start betraying it to keep the peace, you've already lost yourself.

Self-respect is the quiet decision to choose yourself, even when it means sacrificing comfort or approval. The moment I got hives, my body was speaking the truth my mind was trying to rationalize. That was my wake-up call, a physical boundary screaming, "Enough."

Today, I protect my peace like a non-negotiable. Integrity, self-worth, and self-respect are the foundations of every decision I make now.