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• Chris Rojas barely touched alcohol until he entered the restaurant trade and drank with colleagues.
• His drinking got worse as he got older, and he had bad hangovers after consuming beer and whisky.
• The dad of four finally realized he wasn’t being present for his children and got sober.

This story is based on an interview with Chris Rojas, 41, of Tucson, Arizona, where he works in food distribution. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Some of my friends growing up were into recreational drugs and drinking, but I was big into sports and stayed away from all that.

Then, at 18, I got my first job in the restaurant industry. My colleagues and I would work hard all evening and then party when we were done.

We’d hit the bar scene around 10 pm or go to someone’s house. I drank heavy beers, whisky, tequila, gin, vodka, and anything else I could get my hands on.

I used alcohol to soothe myself

Then I got hit by a drunken driver. I was left with a lot of soft tissue damage, and I couldn’t stand up for more than 30 minutes for about a year.

There was a lot of pain involved, and I used alcohol to soothe myself. I got married and divorced within two-and-a-half years, which didn’t help.

Still, I met my second wife, and we got married in 2013. It wasn’t long before our first child arrived. We went on to have three more.

I didn’t go out so much because I had kids, but I would drink whisky and beer in my home office after helping them with their homework and eating dinner.

I was a bit of a workaholic with several side projects that I was passionate about. I’d stay up late working and drinking every night or every other night.

Alcohol dominated my thoughts. I’d drive to the supermarket to buy 12-packs of beer as soon as my supply got low in the fridge.

Stress got to me

The hangovers were awful, and I felt slow and sluggish. I was constantly tired from lack of sleep and wasn’t as connected to my little ones.

In 2022, I tried to reduce my drinking and was successful for about 18 months. Then I was demoted twice over the course of six months and earned 45% less than my previous salary.

The stress got to me, and I suffered from my prior injury to my back. My solution was drinking again.

Then, on November 15, 2024, I woke up with yet another hangover after a binge. I finally realized I couldn’t keep punishing my body.

I was giving up my energy and attention to my kids to a substance that was parasitic. I downloaded an app that offered advice on both reducing and eliminating alcohol consumption.

It was a life-changer, and I haven’t touched a drop since then. I read about the neurological and physiological effects of long-term abuse and what it was doing to my relationships.

I feel so much closer to my children

I created a routine of waking up, lifting weights at home, and committing to not drinking.

Unfortunately, my second marriage ended. It was traumatic, but it would have been 10 times worse if I’d been drinking.

Best of all, I feel so much closer to my children. I spend a whole lot more time with them and am fully present.

They’re young, but I’ve talked to my kids about my past through a filter. My 11-year-old recently told me that she was proud of me. It felt like the ultimate praise.

• Yale Budget Lab researchers are tracking the impact of AI on the job market.
• They found that AI isn’t causing major unemployment, and its impact is similar to the internet’s early days.
• The new technology is changing the nature of work, making companies reevaluate their bottom lines.

It’s easy for job seekers to feel stuck in an AI doom loop.

Chatbots have overhauled white-collar 9-to-5s, agents are rewriting the rules for basic tasks, and C-Suite leaders can’t stop talking about productivity gains. If you’re struggling to land a new role right now, however, new research found that technology likely isn’t the main culprit.

An analysis by Yale Budget Lab found that AI has had a modest impact on America’s job market since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. So far, AI has changed jobs more than it has eliminated them, the researchers said — a pattern similar to the impact of other major advances, such as the internet and computers.

Yale’s team put it bluntly: AI usage has “no connection” to changes in employment or unemployment.

AI is changing work, but not eliminating it

While it may not be obliterating jobs just yet, AI has undoubtedly changed the nature of those jobs. Business Insider has heard from Americans without a tech background who vibecoded solutions to their biggest problems, and business leaders who are using chatbots to streamline their workflow.

A solid benchmark for AI’s actual impact on jobs, Yale’s researchers found, is to compare it with other tech advances, such as the introduction of computers in the 1980s and the dawn of the internet in the 1990s. AI’s effect is slightly sharper in the months after launching, but not the work revolution some Silicon Valley leaders have heralded.

Some sectors have been hit harder than others. Finance and business are more vulnerable than a profession like nursing. Occupational churn, which measures growth and decline in the job market, however, is following a similar trend line to these other moments in tech history — not causing a massive reset.

The Yale report also found that high AI exposure doesn’t have a stark impact on how long job seekers are unemployed — those who have been out of work for less than 5 weeks have a relatively similar trend line to those who have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more. The number of unemployed workers whose jobs were automated is also fairly static.

It’s not to say that the job market is rosy. A lack of vacancies, widespread hiring freezes, and layoffs — which some CEOs say are somewhat related to AI — have boxed people of all ages out of offices. And relatively low quit rates mean that open positions have been few and far between. Jobs numbers are recovering a bit this summer after months of disappointing results, though that dip may have had more to do with high interest rates than tech disruption.

Giants like OpenAI and Anthropic are also reevaluating how they price their products, meaning companies will have to shell out a lot more money if they want their employees to use AI regularly. And, as Business Insider has reported, much of the current AI use in the corporate world isn’t translating to major profits or productivity gains.

It’s still early days for chatbots at the office, and the tech is evolving rapidly. But, at least for now, it’s unlikely to cause a sudden wave of unemployment.

• The Education Department announced a one percentage point interest-rate reduction for borrowers who enroll in autopay.
• Borrowers who are already enrolled in autopay do not need to take any action.
• It comes just weeks before Trump’s sweeping student-loan changes take effect.

Want a lower interest rate on your student loans? Enroll in autopay.

On Thursday, the Department of Education announced that federal borrowers who enroll in autopay by September 30, or who are already enrolled, will receive a one percentage point interest-rate reduction through June 30, 2028.

The reduction provides moderate savings: A graduate program borrower with $50,000 in student debt and a 7.94% interest rate could save nearly $23 per month over the two-year period.

Autopay is a feature available to all federal borrowers that allows the servicer to automatically deduct their monthly student-loan payment from their bank account. Borrowers currently enrolled in autopay receive a quarter percentage point interest-rate reduction.

“This interest rate reduction will help borrowers as they consider new, affordable repayment plans and work to repay their loans on time,” Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent said in a statement. “We expect this temporary incentive to drive up repayment rates and significantly improve the overall health of the federal student loan portfolio.”

According to the department’s press release, borrowers who are already enrolled in autopay do not need to take any action — their servicers will reduce their interest rate by an additional three-quarters of a percentage point. Borrowers in default are not eligible for the benefit until they return to good standing.

Interest rates on federal student loans range from 6% to nearly 9%. High interest rates have been a primary reason for surging student-loan balances; if a borrower does not maintain consistent monthly payments, their balances will grow due to interest, sometimes exceeding the amount they originally borrowed.

This announcement comes just weeks before President Donald Trump’s sweeping student-loan repayment overhaul will take effect on July 1. The changes include new borrowing caps and new repayment plans, including the Repayment Assistance Plan, which waives unpaid monthly interest. Borrowers are expected to still see their monthly payments increase on that plan, some by hundreds of dollars.

Have a story to share about your student loans? Contact this reporter at asheffey@businessinsider.com.

• OpenAI says more than 230 million people use ChatGPT for health and wellness advice each week.
• Researcher Karan Singhal leads the effort to grow that number by improving the company’s technology.
• Singhal spoke with Business Insider about his work in providing medical context in ChatGPT.

OpenAI is pushing further into its health research as more people turn to ChatGPT for pressing medical questions.

More than 230 million people use the tool for health and wellness advice each week, according to OpenAI. That growth is partially thanks to researcher Karan Singhal, who spoke exclusively with Business Insider about the company’s lofty healthcare ambitions.

Singhal leads a high-stakes goal: make ChatGPT so good on health that it changes people’s lives for the better, avoids calamity, and sways the skeptics. He wants to aid a shift he already sees underway, in which more patients trust OpenAI’s latest model as a “protector in their care journey.”

OpenAI’s GPT-5 model family is the company’s first to be trained specifically at every stage of development to be better at health advice, he said.

“You definitely want the models to be ahead of everything else,” Singhal said.

At OpenAI, healthcare has grown into a top priority

Before joining OpenAI, Singhal made his name as a researcher at Google, helping develop a series of AI models known as Med-PaLM, specifically designed for medical questions. Since then, Google has cut investment in Med-PaLM, Singhal said, because AI developers favor general-purpose models.

In the middle of 2024, when Singhal joined OpenAI, GPT-4o was the company’s flagship model. It would later come under fire in lawsuits alleging that it had encouraged suicidal ideation and given harmful advice. Those lawsuits are still unfolding — OpenAI has denied liability and wrongdoing.

In the meantime, the company hasn’t shied away from health-related use. In fact, it has dug in further.

Singhal said that when he joined, he felt a “responsibility” to improve the quality of the models’ health answers. He quickly set about building a new team of health researchers, and kicked off partnerships with more than 200 physicians — a bet, as he put it, on “aggregating the wisdom of the crowd.”

About a year later, he helped launch HealthBench, a series of evaluations that the company created with the physician group to measure AI systems’ health capabilities.

“Once you know how to evaluate it, it becomes a lot easier to improve it,” Singhal said.

OpenAI’s latest free model, GPT-5.5 Instant, scored better than both physician-written answers and GPT-4o in tests, the company said Thursday. Comparing billions of anonymized messages about health, they also said they found a 71% drop over the last two months in responses that were flagged for inaccuracy.

There’s pressure to keep those improvements going for both patients and clinicians who use the tools. Singhal said he’s seen doctors rapidly adopt ChatGPT for Clinicians and other AI tools, and he doesn’t feel that hospitals and clinics are resistant to AI.

“If you think about the adoption of technology in healthcare broadly, it’s actually incredibly, insanely fast,” Singhal said.

Singhal wants ChatGPT to get to know you better

Google Search has, for years, been the dominant peddler of healthcare information online, connecting users to websites like WebMD. Singhal sees chatbots as an upgrade, where back-and-forth conversations give people more specific advice.

One of the biggest challenges to getting valuable health information from a chatbot is how little it knows about the patient. A doctor might have your medical records in their hand or know you from a yearslong relationship. OpenAI is trying to simulate both.

For one, in January, the company announced a health-focused product within ChatGPT that connects to health apps and lets users upload medical records. Singhal gave the example of uploading his sleep data from his Apple Watch. He let the app analyze it, and learned that he was missing out on deep sleep because his bedroom was too warm.

ChatGPT Health still has a waitlist more than five months after its launch.

Singhal’s team sees the effort to make an AI model seek additional information as a top priority: a chatbot should ask questions like a doctor would, so it can say the right thing.

The team also wants to make the case that AI can bring value to everyone in health, not just “power users.”

“People’s adoption will only move at the speed of people’s readiness in practice, and so you have to guide people towards that, especially as the technology improves,” Singhal said.

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• Some lucky New York office workers scored a prime view of the New York Knicks parade on Thursday.
• Photos show office workers hanging out of windows to watch the Knicks celebrate their 2026 NBA Championship.
• The massive crowds snarled early morning commutes for New Yorkers working in the financial district.

New York office workers faced a dilemma on Thursday: Go to work or the historic Knicks parade. Why not both?

While crowds swarmed into lower Manhattan for a chance to watch the New York Knicks NBA Championship parade, some workers were able to enjoy the action from the comfort of their office.

The parade’s route made working out of a building overlooking Broadway in the financial district the hottest office perk on Thursday.

And while some New York office building windows don’t open, many on older buildings do — offering a chance to toss confetti or hear the full volume of the crowd’s chants.

Employees quickly took advantage of the coveted elevated viewing angle, with some hanging out of their building’s windows.

Business Insider was able to join in the excitement. Our reporters and editors stood on furniture along the windows in our New York newsroom.

The only catch for office workers: You had to first get to your building, which meant navigating jam-packed subways and closed-off streets.

It’s been 53 years since the New York Knicks last won an NBA Championship. The Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs 4-1 in the Finals.

Here are more photos from the revelry:

• Gary Bartley, UBC’s head groundskeeper, is prepping pitches for Team Canada’s World Cup training.
• He said he has learned a great deal about his trade, even after 48 years on the job.
• At 66, Bartley said the World Cup is a career highlight and a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Gary Bartley, 66, who is helping prepare the training pitches that Team Canada will use during the 2026 FIFA World Cup. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I’ve been in the industry since 1978, but I’ve never taken on a project this big before. Working on the World Cup is like working on the Super Bowl.

As the University of British Columbia’s head groundskeeper for the National Soccer Development Centre (NSDC), where Team Canada will train during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, this is already a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Even after 48 years on the job, it’s still a huge learning opportunity at 66. I’ve had the chance to work with some of the top pitch managers, professors, and educators in the field, and it will really change how I work moving forward.

A typical day as a head groundskeeper

I started in turf care in 1978, when I was a teenager. My first job was on a golf course, and I worked my way up to a superintendent position before moving into sports equipment sales. Through that role, I was introduced to the people at the Vancouver Whitecaps, a professional soccer club that trains at the NSDC, and about 11 years ago, I joined the team at UBC.

When the Whitecaps are training here, which is usually five days a week, I get to work at 7 a.m. Before the players arrive, my team of seven is out on the field cutting grass, repairing divots, and doing whatever prep work is needed for the day’s session.

The Whitecaps usually arrive around 10:30 a.m., and one of us stays nearby to help with any watering needs. Once training is finished, we’re repairing divots, cleaning up the pitch, and preparing it for the next day. On non-training days, we’re usually doing maintenance work, such as vertical cutting or top dressing. Our normal shift runs from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Getting the pitches World Cup ready

The World Cup hasn’t changed our workday too much, but the main difference is that we’ve had to raise our standards and maintenance practices to meet FIFA’s requirements. As a training site, we’ve got to keep conditions as close as possible to the main match pitch to ensure things are equal and fair for all teams.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve gone through major renovations since the Whitecaps finished training here in May. It was a very labor-intensive process. We carried out heavy verticutting, top dressing, overseeding, and re-sodded parts of the pitches.

Working on divots and repairs is physically hard work, and, even more so, mentally tedious. Walking-mowing the two pitches takes three mowers about 2.5 hours, and our staff can cover around 20,000 steps in a typical morning doing that.

Learning from experts has been so rewarding

The biggest surprise has been the level of detail involved. We’re used to maintaining pitches for Major League Soccer, but FIFA’s attention to detail has been eye-opening. They have invested a great deal of time and effort in researching improved agronomic practices and maintenance procedures.

I’ve got to learn about this from leading scholars from the University of Tennessee and Michigan State University, which has changed how we’ll approach our practices moving forward with the Whitecaps. It’s been a really rewarding process.

I’ve also been amazed by the level of detail around the whole tournament, from security to hospitality to guest services. These are areas you take for granted and that were on the periphery of my attention, but it’s become clear how much work goes into staging the World Cup at this level.

It’s a career highlight

My family is very excited and proud that I’m involved in this. I wasn’t a soccer fan before I joined the Whitecaps. Now, I’m still not a fanatic, but I am a fan.

It’s very rewarding to sit and look at a pitch and realize that world-class soccer players will be training on it. It makes you want to make it the best possible.

I got into this industry 48 years ago because I loved it, and I still do. Being as old as I am, it’s amazing to have the opportunity to be involved in the World Cup and put an asterisk beside my career.