Quantcast
Channel: Business Insider
Viewing all 115285 articles
Browse latest View live

Why kickboxing is a better full-body workout than boxing, according to the venture capitalist and COO duo who started a gym dedicated to it

0
0

FLYKICK   Tom Joy [ FK5955 ]

  • Combat sports are more popular than ever in the fitness world.
  • Boxing is on the radar of most mainstream gym-goers these days, but kickboxing classes are also on the rise.
  • We visited a boutique kickboxing studio in central London to put the workout to the test.
  • Flykick's founders spoke to Business Insider about the muscles you work in a kickboxing class compared to boxing.
  • Scroll down for our verdict.


Boxing was one of the biggest fitness trends of 2017 — and if you're partial to throwing a punch or two on the bag, then you might want to give kickboxing a go.

Its champions say you'll get a better full body workout and ultimately burn more calories in a kickboxing class — so we went to Flykick, a new pay-as-you-go kickboxing gym that recently opened in Central London, to see how it compares to boxing.

The gym is owned by American former venture capitalist Charlie Kemper and Irishman Ben Leonard-Kane, an ex-management consultant and COO.

The pair, who had both been practising kickboxing or Muay Thai for a number of years, left the corporate world to embrace their passions for fitness.

They've also brought Greg Wootton, a professional Thai boxer and two-time world champion, on board as a coach.

Boxing vs. kickboxing

Thanks to the likes of the Victoria's Secret crowd, boxing is on the radar of most mainstream gym-goers these days. Many celebrities and influencers claim it's the best way to get shredded.

However, Leonard-Kane argues that you'll gain significantly more from a kickboxing class.

When you first start out boxing, you won't initially get a good full body workout, he said. "Obviously the conditioning side of it it is, but you’re not kicking, and you're probably not transferring your weight properly. You're not ducking shots, so your legs aren’t getting a workout.

"From day one here, even if you haven’t done a kickboxing class before, your legs are going to get a good workout. If you're standing on one leg, you're strengthening that leg, and kicking with the other — you're engaging all of the big muscles in your legs, the quads, glutes, hamstrings, that are much bigger than the muscles in our upper body."

Three classes in one

As with many boutique boxing classes, Flykick's 55-minute session is divided into sections, in this case three.

You begin with a high-intensity-interval training session — which is like a hard HIIT class in and of itself. Think one-minute non-stop tuck jumps, then another of burpees, and another of squat jumps — the jumping is relentless.

Once you've got your heart racing – which trust me, you will – it's eight minutes of flow before hitting the bag.

"Stretching is the element that gets neglected most in high-intensity workouts because people put it at the end," said Leonard-Kane. "People nip out because they want to be the first in the showers. I've put it in the middle so it's compulsory. You can't miss it by coming in late or leaving early."

He added that it's particularly important to stretch your legs properly if you're kicking at rib height, but that it also allows for social interactions: "I can't ask you what you did at the weekend when I'm asking you to do one minute of burpees!"

They also throw a mini-ab burning circuit in right at the end, just for fun.

FLYKICK   Tom Joy [ FK3750 ]

Disguising the burn

Kickboxing is very core-centric, added Kemper. He says you spend most of the class engaging your abs like you would in a plank, but you last longer because you're kicking and punching, which in turn distracts you from how much you're working the core, "try holding a plank for 55 minutes," he said.

"It’s just disguised," Leonard-Kane went on. "You're standing on one leg and rotating the weight of your body around that one leg. It’s almost impossible to do an isolated core exercise that's going to pull in so many muscle groups."

He added that everyone will come out of a kickboxing class feeling different little muscles that they never knew they had.

The personal touch

With the added kicks, there's more choreography to learn in a kickboxing class than your average boxing class.

And Leonard-Kane and his team of trainers are meticulous about correcting your moves. They man each class with at least two trainers, to the point where after a few 2.5 minute rounds on the bag, you might actually start to dread seeing the blue vested-instructor approach you.

"Learning a skill is what makes young professionals tick," Leonard-Kane said. "That's why we'll always have two to three instructors in a class, to actually give people at least one, if not two, meaningful interactions while they're on the bag to help them progress — that's a real USP for us.

Kemper added: "If someone can give you one tip every class, you’ll want to come back for one more tip next time."

FLYKICK  Tom Joy  [ FK6227 ]

'When you strike something, it feels good'

Leonard-Kane says that as you learn the craft, the class will become more enjoyable.

"Once you put a bit of concentrated effort into getting the basics right, when you learn to transfer your weight you’ll be able to hit harder, which is enjoyable and a stress release. It also makes you stronger and means you're burning more calories — it’s all self-propelling."

"And kicking is fun," Kemper added. "Even if you’re not doing it right, football is built around people kicking a ball because when you strike something it feels good. A lot of people [that come here] say they've never kicked something before."

flykick.JPG

Our verdict?

When I put the class to the test, I found it challenging. The kicks make the sequences trickier to get a hang of, and coordination really is key, so it might be easier if you've done a few boxing classes to begin with.

The class felt much longer than my usual HIIT class — which admittedly is only 30 minutes — and I was definitely worked harder than I have been for a while in a class. There was no slacking allowed!

I saw a few seemingly fit men and women taking breaths with their heads in their hands or leaning on the walls in between pounding the bag — so I certainly wasn't alone.

But the following day I could feel muscles in my back that I haven't felt since the time I kayaked down a river for four hours straight— and my glutes and backs of my legs felt noticeably tighter after just one session.

I'll be back — but maybe after a few more boxing classes, to get a grounding first.

SEE ALSO: The personal trainer brothers of Jourdan Dunn and Rosie Huntington-Whiteley share the single most important thing you should do after a workout

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How a tiny camera startup is taking on Amazon and Google


7 awkward questions you should ask on a first date — and 3 you really shouldn't

0
0

couple dating bench

There's plenty of debate about what you can and cannot ask on a first date. Some people say you shouldn't go in too hard with the interrogation because it'll make your date think you're desperate. Others say the probing questions help you really learn about each other.

Ultimately, it's hard to know what to do.

According to Erika Ettin, a dating coach and the founder of the dating site A Little Nudge, it's best to keep things light the first time you meet someone.

"A lot of people love to compare their sob stories, like woe is me, tell me about your divorce, when was your last relationship," she told Business Insider. "Let's see if you like each other first ... You want to learn who the other person is today. You can get to know them, then learn more about the past."

On the other hand, if you date a lot, you might not want to rehash the same questions. You might have run out of patience and want to know some quick-fire ways to see if someone has potential, without sending them running.

Scroll down for seven "awkward" first-date questions you can ask to set up a more interesting conversation — provided you ask them right — as well as three you should never ask, just so you're absolutely sure where to drawn the line.

SEE ALSO: The 13 biggest mistakes you're making on dating apps — and how to stop

1. DO ask: 'What are you looking for in a relationship?'

On a first date, this seems pretty obvious., but a surprising number of people are too timid to ask. According to the dating site eHarmony, it's important that you determine whether your date is looking for someone to settle down with or a quick fling before you invest emotionally. At the same time, you should think about what you're looking for too; otherwise you're just wasting each other's time.



2. DO ask: 'Am I what you expected from my profile?'

If you met on a dating app — which, to be honest, basically everyone does now — you will probably have analysed each other's profiles excessively. Some people are transparent and you get exactly what you expected, but others come across completely differently on their profile than in person.

Sometimes it doesn't matter and you feel a spark anyway. Other times you can feel a little cheated, because you don't really know how to talk to the stranger you're sitting with.

But even if this happens, it doesn't have to be a waste of time. According to Elite Daily, it's a good way to get feedback. For example, you can be honest about the fact you didn't feel the chemistry, and you were misled by someone's profile. Even though you're saying no to a second date, you haven't wasted their time.



3. DO ask: 'What’s something I should know about you?'

This question can be quite a smart move, because it allows the other person to be as revealing or as reserved as they like. According to eHarmony, it gives you a glimpse of who they really are.

During a first date, people may be more willing to be open about who they are, what they like, and if they have any unusual habits. You haven't invested in each other yet, and you have relatively little to lose.

"Use this to your advantage," eHarmony suggests. "Ask them to reveal something that they may not reveal otherwise ... It's better that you know these answers early on before you get too invested."



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

People are hoping Meghan Markle's wedding dress could include pieces of Princess Diana's dress from 1981 — here's what that could look like

0
0

meghan markle

  • Meghan Markle's wedding dress remains a mystery, but plenty of rumors are swirling.
  • Some rumors have included the possibility of Markle paying homage to Princess Diana with her wedding attire. 
  • Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are getting married on May 19, 2018.

Meghan Markle's wedding dress remains a mystery.

Markle is expected to wear a traditional gown with a unique detail for the royal wedding on May 19.

Rumors around which designer she'll choose and how much money it will cost are swirling — including the rumor that it might include pieces of Princess Diana's 1981 wedding dress that was worn during her ceremony.

The list of potential designers for her wedding dress include Markle's friend and designer Roland Mouret — whose line of wedding dresses includes seemingly simple designs with structured lines. Israeli designer Inbal Dror has also been speculated. Dror's 2018 collection incorporates more lace, sheer fabric, and gems than Mouret's. Rumors of Burberry's Christopher Bailey designing the royal wedding dress have also been discussed.

Markle may very well wear wear two wedding dresses— changing into something slightly more casual after the ceremony. This move would echo Kate Middleton's dress change during her wedding in April 2011.

Rumors have also been flying that, like Markle's engagment ring— which includes two stones from Princess Diana's collection — Markle's dress or floral bouq might reference Princess Diana.

Below, take a look back at Princess Diana's wedding dress.  

SEE ALSO: Meghan Markle is taking fashion risks and dressing like no royal before her

DON'T MISS: What the average wedding budget looks like in America, from the engagement ring to the wedding dress to the venue

Princess Diana's wedding dress was designed by husband-and-wife team David and Elizabeth Emanuel. The gown had sequins, lace, and 10,000 pearls.

Source: Town and Country



The value of the Princess Diana's wedding dress was estimated at $115,000.



Designs of the dress were kept under wraps and only revealed on the day of the wedding.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

We visited Abercrombie's store to see just how much the brand has changed — here's what we found

0
0

Abercrombie

  • At Abercrombie & Fitch's investor day on Wednesday, the company's CEO Fran Horowitz assured Wall Street that the brand has changed and outlined its strategy to grow into a $5 billion business.
  • The company, which also owns Hollister and Abercrombie Kids, has been working hard to execute a turnaround by investing in its stores, closing unprofitable locations, improving its product assortment, and working on its marketing strategy.
  • This is paying off – in the third quarter of 2017 the parent company reported positive sales growth for the first time in six yearsIn the fourth quarter of 2017, the Abercrombie brand alone had its own comeback, reporting an impressive 5% increase in same-store sales.
  • We visited one of the Abercrombie stores to see how much it has changed.

Abercrombie's CEO Fran Horowitz had a strong message for Wall Street at the company's investor day this week: "we are not the Abercrombie & Fitch that you once knew," she said, according to The Street.

The retailer has been working hard to shake off its '90s reputation of having oversexualized ad campaigns and dimly lit stores where the air is thick with the smell of cologne.

“Our stores were notoriously dark and very intimidating," Horowitz told The Street on Wednesday.

Horowitz, formerly chief merchandising officer who took over as CEO in February 2017, has executed a turnaround for the company by investing in stores, closing unprofitable locations, improving product assortment, and working on its marketing strategy.

And it seems to be paying off. In the fourth quarter of 2017, the brand reported an impressive 5% increase in same-store sales numbers. In the previous quarter, the parent company, which also owns the Hollister brand and Abercrombie Kids, reported positive same-store sales growth for the first time in six years.

Its stores are at the forefront of its turnaround effort. We visited one of its Manhattan locations to see how much it has changed:

SEE ALSO: Abercrombie & Fitch has spent millions on making over its image — and it looks like it's finally paying off

We headed to an Abercrombie store in lower Manhattan on a sunny Thursday afternoon.

This is one of only two stores in the city. The second is located in Midtown.



From the outside, the store looks dark and it's hard to see in. We approached with caution, remembering its dimly lit stores of the past.

Instantly, we can see its oversexualized ads have been toned down and there are no topless models to greet customers. 



Instinct tells us to recoil a little as we open the door. But we are pleased to find that there is no booming music and only a faint whiff of cologne.

On the first impression, the store appeared to be well organized. 



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

I really want to like Snapchat's new camera glasses — but the new model doesn't solve the biggest problems I had with the first version (SNAP)

0
0

snapchat spectacles glasses

On Thursday, Snapchat's parent company Snap Inc. introduced the second-generation version of its camera glasses, called Spectacles.

I actually tried the first-generation Snapchat Spectacles in November 2016, and I have to say, as much as I loved the concept behind the camera glasses, I wasn't impressed with the overall design or execution of this particular vision.

Unfortunately, the new second-generation Spectacles don't solve the biggest problems I had with the first model. Let's dive in:

First, the pros: Snap did make some improvements in Spectacles 2.0.



The new Spectacles are slimmer, and so is the charging case it comes with.



Snap also removed those ugly yellow circles around each camera from the 1.0 model, which you can see below.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told us about his favorite recent Netflix series

0
0

reed hastings

  • In an interview with Business Insider, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings called the dark comedy "The End of the F---ing World" his favorite recent Netflix original series.
  • "'The End of the F---ing World.' Just because it's different. It's like something that I've never seen before," Hastings said, when asked to name his "favorite show from the last few months."
  • Hastings previously praised the show in advance of its January release, writing in a Facebook post that the series was Netflix's "most engaging addictive original wild show in a long time."

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings sat down with Business Insider Poland's Adam Turek in Rome this week to discuss a few recent developments for the company, including its new partnership with the European cable network Sky and its decision to pull out of the Cannes Film Festival.

In the interview, Hastings also talked about what he called his favorite recent Netflix original series, "The End of the F---ing World," a critically acclaimed dark comedy about two runaway teens in England. 

"'The End of the F---ing World.' Just because it's different. It's like something that I've never seen before," Hastings said, when asked to name his "favorite show from the last few months."

"You really don't like the characters at the beginning - at least I didn't like them," he continued. "They were weird. And then you really start to grow into liking them - and at the same time, they grow into liking each other."

The debut season of "The End of the F---ing World" earned laudatory reviews and a 98% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The Atlantic called it "a surprising tour de force."

Hastings also praised the series in advance of its release in January, writing in a Facebook post that "The End of the F---ing World" was Netflix's "most engaging addictive original wild show in a long time."

Hastings previously listed the Netflix animated comedy "BoJack Horseman" as his favorite original series in 2015. 

Read the full Reed Hastings interview here.

SEE ALSO: MoviePass subscribers are no longer allowed to watch the same movie more than once

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Inside Cook Out, the South's most underrated restaurant

I took portraits of combat-tested soldiers at Fort Bliss — and they told me their incredible stories

0
0

Fort Bliss army soldier

FORT BLISS, Texas — I wanted to ask the soldiers about their stories.

I wanted to ask them why they joined the service, if and where they had been deployed, what their experiences were like overseas, what it was like coming home, and more. 

But it was difficult.

I only had a few chances to speak to individual soldiers in-depth as I toured a number of different weapons systems during my trip to Fort Bliss.

The conversations were sometimes difficult. "I feel like a d--k for asking those questions," I told one of the public affairs officers after interviewing an officer who became emotional while describing an incident in Afghanistan. "But I think it's important for people to know these things."

"Yes, it is," the PAO said.

SEE ALSO: Soldiers don't believe this rare antelope-like animal is roaming around a Texas army base — but we saw one up-close

The first chance I got to speak to soldiers in-depth was when I met a couple of Abrams tank crews.



Name and rank: Sergeant T. Wilder.

Wilder, 27, of Athens, Tennessee, is an Abrams tank commander who said he's been in the service for eight years. 

"I joined right out of high school, like any typical high school kid does to get out of their hometown, pay for college, make something of themselves," Wilder told me. "I got about 12 more years, and I can retire."

Wilder said he deployed to Iraq in 2011 and 2012. 

"I was part of the initial drawdown," he said. "I was everywhere from Kalsu all the way down to Echo and K-Crossing."

"It was fun," he said. "I deployed in an infantry platoon so I was out doing route clearance patrols, patrols, convoy overwatch, and stuff like that."

Wilder said clearing IEDs was "slow, long, about 16 hours at about 20 mph," and that he saw all different kinds. "We saw several that were made out off 155 rounds, 105 rounds, saw one out of a propane tank, bunch of stuff stuck in water bottles and coke cans and stuff."

He said he took "a little bit [of contact], but nothing major."

When I asked him if he'd share any particular stories, he understandably shook his head no.



Name and rank: Specialist Christian Pena.

Pena, 22, told me he has been in the Army for two years.

"I'm originally from Mexico, but I moved to Arizona when I was 10," he said.

"I joined the Army 'cause this country has given me so many opportunities that I'm so grateful for — and it's my way of repaying it," he said.

He said he hasn't deployed yet, but that "it's definitely something I look forward to."

"Man of few words," the PAO said jokingly.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Jeff Bezos reveals what it’s like to build an empire and become the richest man in the world — and why he's willing to spend $1 billion a year to fund the most important mission of his life

0
0

Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, recently sat down with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to talk about the early days of creating Amazon, what he's learned since then, how he funds his rocket company Blue Origin, and what it's like when the president of the United States is your biggest critic.

The sit-down interview happened in Berlin, Germany, where Bezos received the Axel Springer Award 2018. You can read the complete transcript of their talk below.

Mathias Döpfner: Jeff, welcome to Berlin.

Jeff Bezos: Thanks, it's great to be here.

Döpfner: I have to tell you, when we were sitting in the first row just a couple of minutes ago when the heartbeat was there, Jeff looked at me and I was breathing in and out and he looked at me and asked, "Matias are you nervous?" I said, "Yes, I'm always nervous on occasions like that." And he said, "So am I." I said, "Really? "The richest man in the world is nervous "because he receives the Axel Springer Award?" So be a bit forgiving, we are both nervous. Jeff, we are so glad to really celebrate you tonight. Most importantly apart from all the reasons that we heard because you are a role model for other young founders, entrepreneurs who really have great ideas, crazy ideas, unconventional ideas and need encouragement to simply do it and go for it and you have shown that to the world. So that is really, for me, the most important thing and in that context the first question, you used to work in New York as an investment banker. So an investment banker is actually the exact opposite of an entrepreneur, he's delegating risk to other people and basically, how did you find out or how did you think that you should move from investment banking to really launch a company?

Bezos: I think I'd always wanted to do it ever since I was a kid, had the idea, every time I look at something, it looks like it could be improved, there's something wrong with it so I go through it like how could this restaurant be better, so I've always had that kind of idea. By the way, before we really get into this, how about this amazing production that you and your team have put together? This is truly incredible for its originality like these boxes that you were filming live that's just crazy cool so thank you. Truly it's incredible. But I think the great thing about humans in general is we're always improving things. And so entrepreneurs and inventors, they follow their curiosity and they follow their passions and they figure something out, and then they figure out how to make it better and they're never satisfied. And you need to harness, in my view, you need to harness that energy primarily on your customers instead of on your competitors. And so I sometimes see companies and even young small start-up companies, entrepreneurs, go awry — they start to pay more attention to their competition than they do to their customers. And I think that in big mature industries that might be a winning approach in some cases, kind of close following, let other people be the pioneers and go down the blind allies, there are so many things that a new, inventive company tries won't work and so those mistakes and errors and failures do cost real money. And so maybe in a mature industry where growth rates are slow and change is very slow. But as you see in the world more and more, there aren't very many mature industries, change is happening everywhere. You see it in the automobile industry with self-driving cars, but you could go right down the line of every industry and you would see it.

Döpfner: Do you have any idea where your ambition really comes from? What was driving you?

Bezos: I really don't know. I've been passionate about certain things forever and I fell in love with computers in fourth grade. I got very lucky. My elementary school had a teletype that got connected to a mainframe computer that some business in downtown Houston donated a little bit of computer time to. This is, you can picture these teletypes, they had the punch tape and they had a 300 bot modem, you would dial up the phone, you'd put it in the cradle. And so we had some time sharing on that mainframe computer and none of the teachers knew how to use it so me and two other kids stayed after school and sort of figured out how to do it, figured it out and kind of taught ourselves programming from books. I think one thing is I got very lucky early in my childhood. Look, we all get gifts, we get certain things in our life that we're very lucky about, and one of the most powerful ones is who your early role models are.

Döpfner: It was your grandfather.

Bezos: It was in a big sense. My mom and dad but my grandfather too. My mom had me when she was 17 years old and she was still in high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico and this is in 1964. I can assure you that being a pregnant teenager in high school was not cool in Albuquerque, New Mexico at that time. So it was difficult for her. My grandfather went to bat for her — they tried to kick her out of school. They're incredible. So the gift I had is I had this incredible family.

Döpfner: Could you describe a little bit the role of your grandfather? Because John has mentioned it and I think it was really important.

Bezos: It was super important for me and I spent an unusual amount of time with my grandparents, especially with my grandfather on the ranch. So he had a ranch in South Texas and I would spend my summers there from age four to 16. And when I was four, they were taking me for the summer to kind of give my parents a break, 'cause they were so young and it was useful. I was a handful I'm sure. Anyway, he created the illusion for me when I was four years old that I was helping him on the ranch which of course could not have been true but I believed it and then by the time I was 16 of course I was actually helping on the ranch. I can fix prolapsed cattle, we did all of our own veterinary work. Some of the cattle even survived. And we fixed windmills and laid water pipelines and built fences and barns and fixed the bulldozer that you guys talked about, and so one of the things that's so interesting about that lifestyle and about my grandfather is he did everything himself. He didn't call a vet if one of the animals was sick, he figured out what to do himself.

Döpfner: So what does it mean, no delegation?

Bezos: Being resourceful, I think. If there's a problem, there's a solution, and of course as you mature and get into the business world and anything you do on a team, you very quickly realize that it's not about just your own resourcefulness, it's about team resourcefulness and how does that work. But that attitude of my grandfather's was very ... he was full of wisdom. John mentioned the story about the words my grandfather gave to me at one point, of it's harder to be kind than clever. That story, the slightly longer version of that story, 'cause this was really powerful wisdom is that I made my grandmother burst into tears and the way I did it was we were driving on a long road trip and she was a chain smoker and this was, I was probably, I don't know 10 years old so this was around 1974 and it was in a period of time where there were heavy radio advertisements sort of anti-smoking radio advertisements trying to convince people to stop smoking. And one of the advertisements had this figure in it that said something like, every puff of a cigarette takes so many minute off of your life, I think it was two minutes but I can't remember. So I sat there in the backseat on this long car ride and calculated how many years she had taken off of her life and in my 10 year old mind, I had been extremely clever to do this. And so when I was finished with my arithmetic, I proudly announced to her how many years she had taken off of her life and I got a reaction I did not expect with her bursting into tears. So my grandfather stopped the car and he took me out of the car and I had no idea what was about to happen because he had never said a cross word to me and I thought, he might actually be angry with me but he wasn't. He took me out so we had some privacy from her and he said these incredible words, he said, "You're gonna figure out one day "that it's harder to be kind than clever."

Döpfner: Wonderful. Actually, your brother also plays an important role, you have a very good relationship. Is it actually true that he's still a firefighter?

Bezos: He is, he's a volunteer firefighter in Scarsdale, New York. He's also the funniest person I know. When I'm with him, I'm just laughing continuously. First of all, I'm a good audience. I laugh easily but he is really very funny and my sister too, we're all very close and I have my mother to thank for that because she worked hard to make sure as we grew up that we stayed close together, and she takes all the grandkids for one week every summer so that me and my sister and our spouses can go on a trip together. So we end up spending a lot of time together.

jeff bezos mark bezos summit 2017

Döpfner: For me the most moving image that we saw tonight is the one that John showed where you and Mackenzie are preparing the table, the famous table, which is very moving because it shows how you really started from the very scratch and also it illustrates symbolically that the launch of Amazon was really something that you did together. Could you describe a little bit what Mackenzie's role was?

Bezos: Well first of all, Mackenzie, she had married this stable guy working on Wall Street, and a year after we got married, I went to her and said, "I want to quit my job, move across the country, and start this internet bookstore." And Mackenzie of course, like everybody that I explained this to, her first question was, "What's the internet?" Because nobody knew, this is 1994. But even before she could say what's the internet she said, "Great, let's go." Because she wanted to support it and she knew that I had always had this passion for invention and starting a company. And so again, I think, Mackenzie is an example of this, but I was talking about with my mom and my dad, who's a Cuban immigrant, he came to the US when he was 16 [to] a refugee camp in the Everglades — they are so loving and supportive that when you have loving and supportive people in your life like Mackenzie, my parents, my grandfather, my grandmother, you end up being able to take risk because I think it's one of those things, it doesn't, you kind of know somebody's got your back and so it's just an, I don't even think you're thinking about it logically, it's an emotional thing.

Döpfner: That's really interesting, you think that unconditional love, if you feel and experience unconditional love, it helps you to take risk?

Bezos: And by the way, I think it's probably true of all kinds of risks in life, not just starting a business. Life is full of different risks. So I think that when you think about the things that you will regret when you're 80, they are almost always the things that you did not do, they are acts of omission. Very rarely are you gonna regret something that you did and it failed and didn't work or whatever, but the acts of omission, and again, I'm not just talking about business things, it's like, I loved that person and I never told them and 50 years later you're gonna be like, why didn't I tell her, why didn't I go after it? So that's the kind of life regret that is very hard to be happy about when you're telling yourself in a private moment that story of your life. So I think it's, anyway, I won that lottery, I won that lottery of having so many people in my life who have given me that unconditional love, and I do think Mackenzie's definitely one of those. And so we moved and then Mackenzie, who has basically no skill in this area at all, really, I mean you're the least-suited person for this, she did our accounting for like the first year — was it the first year? Something like that. And she did it well, that's what's amazing. My wife is a novelist, she's won the American Book Award. Toni Morrison, the Nobel prize-winning author who was Mackenzie's teacher at Princeton, said on The Charlie Rose Show that Mackenzie was her best student ever. Anyways, Mackenzie is a very talented novelist but she is not an accountant but she pulled it off. Again, we all get done what we need to get done.

Jeff Bezos wife Mackenzie

Döpfner: Did she then suggest that you focus on the book business at the beginning, being an author?

Bezos: No, I picked books, it is true, she's a big reader, I'm a big reader, but that's not why I picked books. I picked books because there were more items in the book category than any other category, and so you could build universal selection. There were three million in 1994 when I was pulling this idea together, three million different books active in print at any given time, and the largest physical bookstores only had about 150,000 different titles. And so I could see how you could make a bookstore online with universal selection — every book ever printed, even the out-of-print ones — that was the original vision for the company, and so that's why books.

Döpfner: And when did you know that Amazon is going to be something way bigger than just a bookstore?

Bezos: Well, I knew that the books, strangely, 'cause I was very prepared for this to take a really long time, I knew that the books business was gonna be successful in the first 30 days. I was shocked at how many books we sold. We were ill prepared. We had only 10 people in the company at that time and most of them were software engineers. So everybody including me and the softwares were all packing boxes — we didn't even have packing tables — and we were on our hands and knees on a concrete floor packing the boxes, and at about one or two in the morning, I said to one of my software engineering colleagues "Paul, this is killing my knees, we need to get knee pads." And Paul looked at me and he's like, "Jeff, we need to get packing tables." And I was like, "Oh my God, that is such a good idea." The next day I bought packing tables and it doubled our productivity and probably saved our backs and our knees too.

Döpfner: But nevertheless, Amazon had serious crises. In 2002, you went almost bankrupt. So what went wrong and what did you learn from that?

Bezos: We had so many, there've been so many, I haven't had any existential crises, knock on wood, I don't want to jinx anything, but we've had a lot of kind of dramatic events. I remember early on, we only had 125 employees when Barnes and Noble, the big United States bookseller opened their online website to compete against us, barnesandnoble.com. We'd had about a two-year window. We opened in '95, they opened in '97, and at that time, all of the headlines and the funniest were about how we were about to be destroyed by this much larger company, we had 125 employees and $60 million a year in annual sales, $60 million with an "m" and Barnes and Noble at the time had 30,000 employees and about three billion dollars in sales. So they were giant, we were tiny and we had limited resources and the headlines were very negative about Amazon and the one that's most memorable was just "amazon.toast." And so I called an all-hands meeting, which was not hard to do with just 125 people, and we got in a room 'cause it was so scary for all of us, this idea that now we finally had a big competitor that literally everybody's parents were calling and saying, "Are you okay?" It was usually the moms calling and asking their children, are you gonna be okay? And I said, "Look, it's okay to be afraid but don't be afraid of our competitors because they're never gonna send us any money — be afraid of our customers." And if we just stay focused on them instead of obsessing over this big competitor that we just got, we'll be fine. And I really do believe that. I think that if you stay focused and the more drama there is and everything else, no matter what the drama is, whatever the external distraction is, your response to it should be to double down on the customer, satisfying them, not just satisfying them, delighting them.

Jeff Bezos Amazon

Döpfner: Today Amazon is employing 566,000 people. You're probably the biggest job creator of recent times. At the same time, you're aggressively criticized by unions and by media for paying low wages, for inappropriate working conditions. How do you deal with these accusations?

Bezos: Well, first of all, with any criticism, my approach to criticism and what I teach and preach inside Amazon is when you're criticized, first look in a mirror and decide are your critics right? If they're right, change, don't resist.

Döpfner: Are they right?

Bezos: No, not in this case, but we've had critics be right before and we've changed. We have made mistakes and I can go through a long list of, probably one of the early most painful ones is — it's so stupid it's hard to believe how we ever did it — but in the early on with the Kindle, maybe the first year of the Kindle or the second year of the Kindle, we had accidentally illegally sold, or given away I guess, copies of the famous novel 1984 because it had a complicated copyright history —  it was in copyright in the US and not in the UK or something strange like this so it was in the public domain, but only in certain geographies, and we had screwed that up. And somehow, and this is the kind of mistake that only a corporation can make, an individual can't make this mistake because somehow it happens at the intersections of the different teams. So you've got the legal department saying, "Oh crap, we've made this mistake" and you've got the books team. Anyway, the answer that the company came up with was to, without any notice or warning, just electronically go into everybody's Kindle who had downloaded that book and just disappear it. So it would be as if we walked into your bedroom in the middle of the night, found your bookshelf, and just took that book away. And so we were rightly criticized for that and we responded to that. On the issue of working conditions, I'm very proud of our working conditions and I'm very proud of the wages that we pay. In Germany, we employ 16,000 people, we pay at the high end of the range for any comparable work.

Döpfner: Will the union fight because the union want to make sure that you are unionized or what is the real substance of the conflict?

Bezos: Well, it's a good question and this is in my longer version of how to deal with critics, there are two kinds of critics: There are well meaning critics who, they're worried it's not gonna work, but they do want it to work, so I could give you an example of customer reviews would be one of those. When we first did customer reviews 20 years ago, some book publishers were not happy about it because some of them were negative and so it was a very controversial practice at that time. But we thought it was right and so we stuck to our guns and had a deep keel on that and didn't change. But there's a second kind of critic which is the self-interested critic and they come in all shapes and sizes. So they can be any kind of institution, competitors, of course, and so when you are doing something in a new way and if customers embrace the new way, what's gonna happen is incumbents who are practicing the older way are not gonna like you and they're gonna be self-interested critics. And so you do need, as you're looking yourself in the mirror, to try and tease those two things apart. In our view, we have workers counsels of course and we have very good communications with our employees. So we don't believe that we need a union to be an intermediary between us and our employees, but of course at the end of the day, it's always the employees' choice and that's how it should be. But for sure, we would be very naive to believe that we're not gonna be criticized. That's just part of the terrain, you have to accept that. One other thing I tell people is if you're gonna do anything new or innovative, you have to be willing to be misunderstood. If you can't afford to be misunderstood, then for goodness sake, don't do anything new or innovative.

Döpfner: Maggie Thatcher said, "Leadership is not to be pleased by the moment." But your most prominent critic at the moment is the president of the United States. People are even saying that he may be willing to prepare initiatives to break up Amazon because it's too big, it's too successful, it's too dominant in too many sectors or for other reasons. First of all, is this scenario of a break of something that you take seriously or you think it's just a fantasy?

Bezos: For me, again, this is one of those things where I focus on and ask our teams to focus on what we can control, and I expect, whether it's the current US administration or any other government agency anywhere in the world, Amazon is now a large corporation and I expect us to be scrutinized, we should be scrutinized, I think all large institutions should be scrutinized and examined, it's reasonable. One thing to note about us is that we have gotten big in absolute terms only very recently. So we've always been growing fast in percentage terms, but in 2010, just eight years ago, we had 30,000 employees. So in the last eight years we've gone from 30,000 employees to 560,000 employees. So for us, it's kind of, in my mind, I'm still delivering the packages to the post office myself, you see what I'm saying? I still have all the memories of hoping that one day we could afford a forklift. And so obviously my intellectual brain knows that's just not the case anymore, we have 560,000 employees all over the world and I know we should be scrutinized and I think it's true big government institutions should be scrutinized, big non-profit institutions should be scrutinized, big universities should be scrutinized, it just makes sense. And that's, by the way, why the work that The Washington Post and the other great newspapers around the world do is so important, because they're often the ones doing that initial scrutiny even before the government agencies do.

jeff bezos

Döpfner: But in a way, the general sentiment towards the big innovative tech companies has changed. Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, they used to be seen as the nice guys in tee shirts that are saving the world and now they are sometimes portrayed as the kind of evil of the world. And the debate about the big four or the big five, The Economist is suggesting a split up, other powerful people like Josh Soros are giving speeches in Davos, the EU Commission is taking pretty a tough positions here. Do you think that there is a change in mindset in the society? And what should the big tech companies, what should Amazon learn from that or do with that?

Bezos: I do sense, I think again, I think it's a natural instinct. I think we humans, especially in the Western world and especially inside democracies, are wired to be skeptical and mindful of large institutions of any kind. We're skeptical of our government always in the United States — state governments, local governments — I assume it's similar in Germany, it's healthy because they're big powerful institutions, the police, the military, whatever it is, it doesn't mean that you don't trust them or that they're bad or evil or anything like that, they're just, they have a lot of power and control and so you want to inspect them, maybe that's a better word, you kind of always want to be inspecting them. And I think if you look at the big tech companies, they have gotten large enough that they're going to be inspected. And by the way, it's not personal. I think where some of the, you can go astray on this if you're the founder of a company, one of these big tech companies or any other big institution, if you go astray on this you might start to take it personally, like why are you inspecting me? And I think that, I wish that people would just say, "Yes, it's fine."

Döpfner: The whole attitude towards data protection and privacy has always been different between Europe and the United States, but is also at the moment in the context of Cambridge Analytica changing in the United States. What are the consequences for a company like Amazon?

Bezos: My view on this for Amazon—

Döpfner: —Is it hysterical or is it inappropriate?

Bezos: Honestly, I think this is one of the great questions of our age. I think of the internet, so the internet is this big new powerful technology, it's horizontal, it affects every industry. And then if you think of even more broadly tech and machine learning and big data and all these kinds of things, these are big horizontal powerful technologies, and in my view, we've been at scale. The internet is quite old at this point, it's been around a long time, but at scale, it's really only been around 10 or 15 years, 'cause go back in time 20 years, it was tiny. And so at scale, the internet's been around only 10 or 15 years and we haven't learned as a civilization, as a human species, we haven't learned how to operate it yet. So we're still, we as a civilization are still figuring that out. And so it has fantastic, gives us fantastic capabilities. The fact that I can look up almost anything on Wikipedia in five seconds is an unbelievable capability that just simply didn't exist 20 years ago and so on and so on and so on, there's so many good things but we're also finding out that these powerful tools enable some very bad things too, like letting authoritarian governments interfere in free democratic elections around the world. It's an incredibly scary thing.

Döpfner: So you're advocating a balance of let's say entrepreneurs who are really moving their businesses forward, politicians and regulators who are finding a certain framework, a society, journalists who are asking unpleasant questions?

Bezos: So my view on Amazon's role in this, which is what you asked me, is I think first of all, we have a duty on behalf of society to try and help educate any regulators, give them our point of view on this sincerely without any cynicism or skepticism, this is what we believe, but it's not ultimately our decision. So we will work with any set of regulations that we're given. Ultimately society decides that, we will follow those rules regardless of the impact they have on our business and we will find a new way if need be to delight customers. So we will always be, again, some of these things, what you have to worry about is the problem, what I would not want to see happen is that you don't want to block invention and innovation. So that's always one of the things, one of the unintended consequences often of regulation is that it really favors the incumbents. Now Amazon at this point is an incumbent, so maybe I should be happy about that, but I wouldn't be because I think for society you really want to see continued progress. So to the degree that we have regulation, you want to be sure that it is incenting innovation and not blocking it, while at the same time protecting. But data security, privacy, encryption, how do you safeguard people's physical safety against terrorists and bad actors all over the world and how do you balance that against privacy? These are very challenging questions.

Döpfner: We are running out of time but I have a couple of—

Bezos: We're not gonna answer them in even a few years. I think it's gonna be an ongoing thing.

Döpfner: But data security and privacy is going to be a competitive advantage for companies or disadvantage if they're not respectful with that?

Bezos: I 100% agree with this and I think with customers, one of the reasons we have been able to extend into new business areas and new product categories, going way back, we just sold books and then we started selling music and DVDs and electronics and toys and so on and then we've extended into electronic reading with Kindle. The reason customers have been receptive in large part to our new initiatives is because we have worked hard to earn trust with them. Earning trust with customers is a valuable business asset and if you mistreat their data, they will know, they will figure it out. Customers are very smart, you should never underestimate customers.

Döpfner: People are getting hungry but I have some brief questions left. You are preparing a second headquarters, it's going to be in the US. Why didn't you consider to do it in Europe?

Bezos: I wanted it in a time zone either in, we looked at Canada, US and Mexico—

Döpfner: So it's not an anti-Europe decision, it's for practical reasons.

Bezos: It's not an anti-Europe decision.

Döpfner: I'm glad to hear that. When you bought the Post, there were people saying well that's just a personal toy, he wants to have some political influence. Other people thought that is a new strategic element of Jeff's strategy. So what was it?

Bezos: Yeah, of course, you can explain things to people but you can't understand things to people. And so all I can do is say what really my thought process was. And I was not looking to buy a newspaper. It had never even crossed my mind, and so when the opportunity came up, it had only came up because I had known Don Graham at that point for more than 15 years. Any of you who are lucky enough to know Don, knows that he is the most honorable gentleman that you'll ever meet — you know Don very well — he's a remarkable guy and he so loved The Post that he believed, even though this was a huge personal sacrifice for him because it had been in his family for so long, that he needed to find a new home for it. I think he was, there were certain purchasers he was hoping would not end up buying The Post because he wanted it to remain independent. So when he approached me with this I said, "I'm the wrong guy because I don't know anything about the newspaper business." And he said, "That's okay, 'cause we have a lot of people at The Post who know a lot about the newspaper business and what we really need is somebody who knows something more about the internet." And The Post was in a very difficult financial position at that time and so for me, I had to decide was it hopeless? And I didn't believe it was hopeless, I was optimistic that The Post could be turned around. And then second, I had to decide did I want to put my own time and energy into this? And that for me I just had to ask the simple question, is it an important institution? And the answer to that question is yes, it was very obvious to me, as soon as I thought that way. I was like, okay, I think I actually can help, I can help in two ways. I can provide financial resources while this turnaround occurs and I can also help with my internet knowledge. And then is it an institution worth saving? You bet. It's the most important newspaper in the most important capital city in the Western world. Crazy not to save that newspaper. I'm gonna be very happy when I'm 80 that I made that decision.

Döpfner: I assume that you have seen Steven Spielberg's film The Post?

Bezos: I have, yeah, I've seen it a couple of times.

Döpfner: So what is the lesson that you learned from that and could you imagine also to buy and save other newspapers?

Bezos: No, I get that request monthly, I really do and I tell them, no, The Post is it for me, I'm not interested in buying other newspapers. But I watched that movie and it's helpful, I love that movie and also reading Katherine Graham's memoir which won a Pulitzer Prize and is an amazing book because it gets me ready. As the owner of The Post, I know that at times The Post is gonna write stories, they're gonna make very powerful people very unhappy.

Döpfner: Are you upset if they are writing critical stories about Amazon, which they do?

Bezos: No, I'm not upset at all.

Döpfner: Did you call and interfere?

Bezos: Never, I would be humiliated to interfere. I would be so embarrassed. I would turn bright red and it's nothing to do with, I don't even get so far, I just don't want to. For me, it would feel icky, it would feel gross. It would be one of those things when I'm 80 years old I would be so unhappy with myself if I interfered. Why would I? I want that paper to be independent. So we have a fantastic editor in Marty Baron, we have a fantastic publisher in Fred Ryan, the head of our technology team, a guy named Shilesh, is fantastic. They don't need my help in the newsroom for sure. First of all, that's also an expert's job. It would be like me getting on the airplane and going up to the front of the plane and saying the pilots should move aside, let me do this.

Döpfner: You are not getting on the airplane but you are sending workers to the space.

Bezos: That's the best segway ever by the way.

Döpfner: Could you share with us briefly the vision of Blue Origin and the idea of kind of space tourism with renewable rockets?

Jeff Bezos Amazon Blue Origin

Bezos: This is super important to me. I believe on the longest time frame — and really here I'm thinking of a time frame of a couple hundred years, so over many decades — I believe, and I get increasing conviction with this with every passing year, that Blue Origin, the space company, is the most important work I'm doing. And so there is a whole plan for Blue Origin.

Döpfner: Really? So you'd say retail, online ecommerce, publishing, that's all less relevant than the space project?

Bezos: Yes and I'll tell you why. First of all, of course, I'm interested in space because I'm passionate about it and I've been studying it and thinking about it since I was a five-year-old boy, but that is not why I'm pursuing this work. I'm pursuing this work because I believe if we don't, we will eventually end up with a civilization of stasis, which I find very demoralizing. I don't want my great grandchilren's great grandchildren to lie in a civilization of stasis. We all enjoy a dynamic civilization of growth and change and let's think about what powers that. We are not really energy constrained. And so let me give you just a couple of numbers. If you take your body, your metabolic rate as a human as just an animal, you eat food, that's your metabolism, you burn about 100 watts, your power, your body is about 100, it's the same as the 100 watt light bulb, we're incredibly efficient. Your brain is about 60 watts of that, amazing. But if you extrapolate in developed countries where we use a lot of energy, on average in developed countries, our civilizational metabolic rate is 11,000 watts. So in a natural state where we're animals we're only using 100 watts. In our actual developed world state, we're using 11,000 watts and it's growing. For a century or more, it's been compounding at a few percent a year, our energy usage as a civilization. Now if you take baseline energy usage, globally across the whole world, and compound it at just a few percent a year for just a few hundred years, you have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells. So that's the real energy crisis and it's happening soon, and by soon, I mean within just a few hundred years. And so we don't actually have that much time. So what can you do? Well, you can have a life of stasis where you cap how much energy we get to use, you have to work only on efficiency, by the way, we've always been working on energy efficiency and still we grow our energy usage. It's not like we have been squandering energy, we have been getting better at using it with every passing decade and still we grow it. So stasis would be very bad I think. Now take the alternative scenario where you move out into the solar system. The solar system can easily support a trillion humans, and if we had a trillion humans, we would have 1,000 Einsteins and 1,000 Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources from solar power and so on. Why not, that's the world that I want my great grandchildren's great grandchildren to live in. And by the way, I believe that we'll move all heavy, in that time frame, we will move all heavy industry off of Earth and Earth will be zoned residential and light industry and it will basically be a very beautiful planet. We have sent robotic probes to every planet in this solar system now and believe me, this is the best one. It is not even close.

Döpfner: But Jeff, when can I buy the first ticket to do a little space tour?

Bezos: So the first tourism vehicle, we won't be selling tickets yet but we may put humans in it at the end of this year or at the beginning of next year. We're getting very close. We've been working on it for more than 10 years and we're building a very large orbital vehicle, we've been working on that for more than five years. It'll fly for the first time in 2020 and the key is reusability. So you mentioned it. We cannot, this civilization I'm talking about of getting comfortable living and working in space and having millions of people and then billions of people and then finally a trillion people in space you can't do that with space vehicles that you use once and then throw away. It's a ridiculous costly way to get into space.

Döpfner: The most recent thing that Amazon is planning is home robots. So I assume it's more than Alexa walking. So what's the vision behind it?

Bezos: I saw that rumor in the press and I can't comment on that.

Döpfner: I see, so it seems to be very serious. Jeff, you are one of the most longterm-thinking entrepreneurs. If it is about companies and products and services, if it is about philanthropy, you recently said that you are a very short-term thinker, you really want to deal with the now and here. Can you explain that approach? I think that's also very innovative.

Bezos: And I'm gonna end up doing a mixture of things. We started doing in Seattle, there's a homeless shelter called Mary's Place run by a woman named Marty and that has really impacted my thinking on this issue, because what I'm seeing is that when you, of course I'm in favor of all the, longterm-oriented philanthropy also is a good idea. So I'm not against that. It's just I'm finding I'm very motivated by the here and now there. A lot of the homelessness at Mary's Place works on is transient homelessness. So when you go study homelessness, there are a bunch of causes of homelessness. Mental incapacity issues are a very hard-to-cure problem, serious drug addiction, a very hard-to-cure problem, but there's another bucket of homelessness which is transient homelessness, which is a woman with kids, the father runs away, and he was the only person providing any income and they have no support system, they have no family. That's transient homelessness. You can really help that person. And you by the way, only need to help them for like six to nine months, you get them trained, you get them a job, they're perfectly productive members of society.

Döpfner: Last week we had Bill Gates for dinner here and he said that he has a ridiculous amount of money and it's so hard to find appropriate ways to do good with the money. So what does money mean for you being the first person in history that has a net worth of three digit amount of billion?

Bezos: The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. So that's basically, Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune, and I'm currently liquidating about a billion dollars a year of Amazon's stock to fund Blue Origin — and I plan to continue to do that for a long time. 'Cause you're right, you're not gonna spend it on a second dinner out. That's not what we're talking about. So for me, I'm very lucky because I feel like I have a mission-driven purpose with Blue Origin that is I think incredibly important for civilization longterm, and I am gonna use my financial lottery winnings from Amazon to fund that.

Döpfner: With regard to your personal lifestyle, there are no guilty pleasures that you are doing, unreasonable things?

Bezos: Well, I don't think they're that guilty. I have lots of pleasures and we just came back from an amazing trip with the kids, Mackenzie and I did, she planned the whole thing, it was her birthday trip but she planned it all. We went to Norway for three days and we stayed in an ice hotel, we went dog sledding, we went to a wolf preserve and actually got to interact with these timber wolves. It was really an incredible vacation, an incredible holiday, and we got it all done in three and a half days. So it was amazing.

Döpfner: Wonderful. Jeff, John mentioned, it's the last question, John mentioned that you are an ideal family man, your kids are extremely important, you just mentioned that when we spoke earlier. If we would talk to your kids, where would they criticize their dad?

Bezos: They would make fun of my singing.

Döpfner: Okay, can we get a— ?

Bezos: No, God no. They would make fun of my inability to remember exact words. I'm always quoting Churchill or something and getting it wrong and they're like, "That's not even close to what Churchill said." They would probably, depending on the moment, they might criticize my laugh. They're kids. I'm lucky, I have a very good relationship with them, this work-life harmony thing is what I try to teach young employees, actually, and senior executive at Amazon too, but especially the people coming in. We're asked about work-life balance all the time and my view is that's a debilitating phrase because it implies there's a strict trade off and the reality is if I'm happy at home, I come into the office with tremendous energy, and if I'm happy at work, I come home with tremendous energy. And so it actually is a circle, it's not a balance. And I think that that is worth everybody paying attention to. You never want to be that guy, and we all know, we all have a coworker, who is that person who as soon as they come into the meeting they drain all of the energy out of the room. You can just feel the energy level go whoof — you don't want to be that guy. So you want to come into the office and give everybody a kick in their step.

Döpfner: Jeff, thank you very much. We congratulate you for all you have achieved, and congratulations.

Bezos: Very nice, thank you.

 

Disclosure: Business Insider is owned by Axel Springer.

Join the conversation about this story »


The 5 most anticipated TV shows returning in May

0
0

kimmy schmidtThe spring TV season is well underway, and some fan-favorite shows are returning with new seasons next month.

To find out which returning shows audiences are anticipating the most, the TV tracking app TV Time analyzed data from its 2.1 million global users to see which upcoming TV shows viewers had followed the most frequently on its platform.

The list includes the upcoming seasons of Netflix's sitcom "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" and the USA Network's science-fiction drama, "Colony."

Here are the 5 returning TV shows that viewers are anticipating the most in May, according to TV Time:

SEE ALSO: The 5 most anticipated new TV shows premiering in May

5. "SIX" (Season 2) — Premieres May 28 on The History Channel

Summary: "The ten-episode second season of 'SIX' follows Navy SEAL Team Six in a mission to destroy the terrorist network responsible for the shooting of their former team leader Richard “Rip” Taggart (Walton Goggins)." 



4. "Animal Kingdom" (Season 3) — Premieres May 29 on TNT

Summary: "The series following a Southern California crime family stars Ellen Barkin as the matriarch of the Cody clan, Scott Speedman as her second in command and Shawn Hatosy as her volatile, mentally unstable eldest son."



3. "Colony" (Season 3) — Premieres May 3

Summary: "Set in the near future, 'Colony' centers on a family who must make difficult decisions as they balance staying together with trying to survive."



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

A former dominatrix reveals two straightforward ways to deal with jerks and sexual predators

0
0

me too march los angeles

  • Former dominatrix Kasia Urbaniak has started a unique school in New York City, where she teaches women powerful ways to speak up.
  • She says learned "speechlessness" adversely affects women and people of color in all kinds of relationships, and promotes unfair power dynamics in society.
  • To counter the issue, she's developed a few simple verbal ways for women to question creeps, including asking more questions and taking a dominant, outward-facing stance in conversations.
  • But she cautions that her straightforward communication techniques aren't completely bulletproof: "It doesn't work if one of the people is a sociopath," she says.

 

When Kasia Urbaniak first started a new kind of power-training school for women, she had a tough time getting people to understand what the place was all about.

The New York City-based "Academy" Urbaniak runs is aimed at teaching women how to communicate in influential and powerful ways, and get more of what they want in all kinds of relationships, from the office boardroom to the bedroom.

But the former dominatrix says the very premise all of her trainings is based on — the idea that hidden power dynamics often impact minorities and women in unfair ways — seemed totally foreign to so many would-be students five years ago when she started teaching.

That's no longer the case, as social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo have thrust the power dynamics that she highlights in her own New York City classroom onto a cultural main stage, and made her work more accessible and understandable.

"Suddenly, I could begin a conversation with a student or person about the topics that I teach," she told Business Insider. "No prologue, no introduction, no 'hey, do you guys know that there are a lot of things women don't say?'"

As allegations continue to rain down on powerful media moguls (like the recently-convicted comedian Bill Cosby), as well as high-profile politicians, doctors, members of Congress and male journalists, the idea that power can be a dangerous tool of manipulation is shifting into the mainstream.

Urbaniak says everyone is beginning to catch on to the troubling ways that toxic power dynamics can play out in the world, and not just in the traditionally "dominant" and "submissive" roles of a dominatrix session, the realm where she previously worked.

Now, she's on a renewed mission and says she wants to reach 50,000 women with her power-wielding techniques and tips. She shared two of her biggest pieces of advice on how to steer some potentially creepy conversations into more neutral territory with Business Insider. Here they are: 

In a threatening or uncomfortable situation, turning attention away from yourself when someone's being creepy can help break a paralyzing freeze.

sexual harassment work

Urbaniak says one of the most important things she learned from being a dominatrix is how to lead and read a room. She says that typically, there are two roles one can play in a conversation: a dominant role, and a submissive one. 

Being submissive can often show up in self-reflective language, which puts more attention on yourself and focuses the conversation on you. A more dominant stance tends to demonstrate agency, putting the attention outwards and on to another person, question, or idea. This is what Urbaniak mastered when she was a dominatrix.

Today, one of her favorite ways to teach women to counter potentially creepy remarks is by answering a threatening or uncomfortable question with another question. The goal here is to turn attention away from yourself, which means the question won't be about you.

Say someone asks something blatantly offensive, like "did being a woman help you get this job?" You could answer that question with a question of your own, like "Do you like asking provocative questions?"

Urbaniak says this kind of turning attention outward really works, and can help people step out of what can be a kind of temporarily paralysis or a verbal freeze. 

"Women are trained to keep their attention on themselves," she said, an assertion that's backed by some of the latest social science. "So the first thing to do is get attention off of you." 

Urbaniak says one of the simplest ways to do this in a conversation is to start asking more simple, probing questions that don't involve any "I's."

Like "is that true?" or "why do you think that?"
"After you deliver even two lines about something outside yourself, the freeze is broken," she said.

Another tactic she suggests is to re-focus or re-phrase what the other person is saying, to clarify any ambiguous language or surface any potential unspoken weirdness.The Academy, Kasia Urbaniak and Ruben Flores

This battle-tested communication technique isn't specific to the dominatrix world.

Social scientists, psychiatrists, and conflict mediators around the globe have relied on this tool for years to help solve marital woes, foster better communication between psychologists and their patients, and even mediate international conflicts between warring parties.

The Search for Common Ground, a non-profit which aims to reduce the number of violent conflicts being fought around the world, even lists the re-phrasing skill as an essential ingredient in non-violent conflict resolution. The group says this kind of paraphrasing is one of the best ways to extract the "most important insights" about an opponent. 

The non-profit even encourages mediators the world over to use phrases like "so what you are saying is…" and "if I hear you correctly, you think that…" to better communicate with and understand someone who may not think like them.

That's a technique that can be equally effective when you're speaking to a colleague, a loved one, or a creep, too.

In her school, Urbaniak sees this research-backed method as another potential tool to confront aggressors, in a way that again, takes the focus off of a woman or subject in the conversation, and instead shines a spotlight on what's being said, especially if what's being said has some potentially creepy undertones.

One of Urbaniak's favorite ways to do this is using the term "it seems like."

In one of her workshops, she gives the example of a superior saying to an employee "I think this project will be a lot more successful if we got to know each other better ... how about we continue this meeting upstairs in my hotel room?"

Her advice? Use the "it seems like" formula, and continue asking questions, taking the focus off of yourself, and putting it back on the other person's words, like this:

"It seems like you are no longer interested in talking about business and it seems like getting to know each other better may mean something different to me than it does to you. Is that true?"

That questioning and re-phrasing gives the other person a chance to step back and realize what they (perhaps unintentionally) are implying. It highlights unspoken weirdness, without letting anyone off the hook.

Of course, the formula, and all of Urbaniak's courses, are not going to be a fix-all for every weird or uncomfortable situation. Urbaniak would never assert that these language tools could ever stop a truly determined aggressor, or prevent all unwanted advances. 

"It doesn't work if one of the people is a sociopath," she said.

SEE ALSO: How women can wield power to get what they want at work and in their personal lives, according to a former dominatrix

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 'I didn't even apologize to my wife': Trump denies all sexual assault allegations

'Equalizer 2' director Antoine Fuqua talks about getting Denzel Washington to do his first sequel ever — and teases a 'Scarface' reboot

0
0

Antoine Fuqua Ethan Miller Getty

  • Director Antoine Fuqua spoke to Business Insider before revealing footage of "The Equalizer 2" at CinemaCon on Monday.
  • The movie marks the first time both he and the movie's star, Denzel Washington, have ever made a sequel.
  • Fuqua also gave his thoughts about President Trump's remarks after the Parkland school shooting that movie violence is to blame for school shootings.
  • And the director addressed the reports that he's in talks to direct a reboot of the Brian De Palma classic, "Scarface."


Antoine Fuqua has pulled off something no other director working with Denzel Washington has done before: getting him to do a sequel.

“The Equalizer 2” (in theaters July 20) marks not just the first-ever sequel done by Fuqua, but also Washington. The two have worked on numerous projects, from “The Magnificent Seven” reboot to Washington’s Oscar-winning performance in “Training Day.” But it’s Sony’s unlikely hit thriller about a man (Washington) with a mysterious past who disrupts his quiet life to rescue a girl that the two felt was fertile ground to continue with a sequel.

Before Fuqua presented footage of the movie at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Monday, Business Insider sat down with him (in a backstage room with the film’s producer Jason Blumenthal), to talk about the movie, Trump, and if he’s going to direct the much-rumored “Scarface” remake.

Jason Guerrasio: This is the first time you and Denzel have ever done a sequel. What did Sony have to do to talk you guys into doing another?

Fuqua: It was a conversation that we had toward the end of making “Equalizer 1.” We had a lot of fun together just making the movie. All of us: me, Denzel, the producers. And we were talking about it and it's hard to talk about that stuff with Denzel because he just wants to make this one good. The one we're doing. But we were all kind of like, "Hey, if this works let's do it again." It came out and did well, the audience enjoyed it, and the guys went off to write another. And it wasn't that long, three months after the release.

Equalizer 2 Sony finalGuerrasio: Wow, three months after it opened?

Fuqua: Yeah. They gave me the script and I read it and it was better than the first script and much more emotional and deeper. And it hit all the things that I think a lot of people wanted to see. When I would be in an airport people would ask, "Are we going to find out more about this or that?" And the script did those things. And when I read it, Denzel read it as well, and he called me and he said, "This is good!" And I was like yeah, and he said, "Let's do it again!" So that's how it worked.

Guerrasio: I would imagine this was not the first time a sequel to a movie you've done has been floated by you. What sequel pitches have you gotten in the past?

Fuqua:“Olympus Has Fallen,” they wanted me to do that, there were rumors about “Training Day" —

Guerrasio: How can you do “Training Day” again?

Fuqua: I think like a prequel. Yeah, it's been a few times. It’s just not exciting to me to do that really because you have already been down that road and it's rare to get someone like Denzel so you have got to make it right. The script has to be very different from the first one, and it has to be a character he wants to play again, but have enough differences that he feels like he's doing something else. He's an actor's actor, so for him, he's not doing the exact same thing. I can't even get the exact same take. So you think he's going to do a movie twice? [Laughs.]

Guerrasio: I’m thinking about your filmography now, you could probably do another “Magnificent Seven.”

Fuqua: Yeah. I would love to do another one. That's not up to me but I would love to do one. With the right actors. Because that's tricky. You have to get all those guys’ schedules on the same page at the exact same time.

Guerrasio: And do audiences still want to see Westerns?

Fuqua: It's tricky. You never know. The audience sometimes will surprise you. It's timing. You think you know and then the next Western comes out and makes a billion dollars.

Guerrasio: The only thing that will make me disappointed is Vincent D’Onofrio will not be in it. Because he was so entertaining in that movie.

Fuqua: We do it as a prequel. You see what happens? You got the opportunity to do a movie with a great actors and then you kill them off, how do you do another one? [Laughs.]

Equalizer 2 SonyGuerrasio: I don't want you to give anything away about “Equalizer 2,” but in the trailer there's a shot of Denzel telling a guy to do the Vulcan salute from “Star Trek” and then breaking his fingers when the guy shows him the salute.

Fuqua: That's all Denzel.

Guerrasio: He came up with that?

Fuqua: He did that. That's the fun of it. He's not going to say the exact same line every time the exact same way. Someone on that level, you have to have some fun with it.

Guerrasio: Almost all of your movies deal with gun violence. It's a topic that's big again in society because of the Parkland school shooting. But when you hear President Trump say that school shootings are due to the violence kids see in movies, how do you react to that?

Fuqua: I’m not into politics, I'm a father. I'll say that first. I grew up watching movies — Westerns, war movies, gangster movies, comedies. But are movies the reason people are shooting and killing each other? I don't think so. I would hate to think that's true in any way. We've been making movies since, what —

Guerrasio: Over 100 years.

Fuqua: It seems it's something that's been happening more and more recently, so it's hard to blame something like that on movies. When the president says something like that it's sad because I don't think you should put the blame on one thing. It's all of our problem, not just movies.

Parkland Florida shootingGuerrasio: What you see in society, does that affect what stories you want to tell going forward?

Fuqua: It does. That's why I wanted to do “Equalizer.” Because “Equalizer” is about justice. You talk about gun violence, yeah, of course, I'm tired of seeing young black men get shot down in the street like animals. I'm tired of seeing anybody get shot down in the street. Especially innocent people. So you can make a movie with a positive use as well. If you put it in the hands of the right people: Air Force, military, Navy, Navy Seals, Marines, and I'm friends with a lot of these guys and I'm friends with a lot of cops, too. Thank God they are there when you need them, strapped. What I'll say is when you make a movie you have to have a reason you want to make it. I wanted to make “Equalizer” because it's about justice and I think that's the thing we all want. When you see young people die it's heartbreaking, but as a director you can only do a movie to say something. You could get involved with politics if you want to, but I'm not a politician.

Guerrasio: I want your take on the inclusion rider that's been a buzz term since Frances McDormand brought it up at the Oscars. As one of the few African-American directors working regularly in Hollywood currently, do you use that? Do you want to use it more?

Fuqua: I don't know.

Jason Blumenthal: It hasn't been an issue with Antoine, to be honest. We know he wants a very diverse and eclectic group of people around him as a filmmaker. He thrives on that. So we run these colorblind sets. And just so you know, the inclusion rider wasn't even a thing when we shot this movie. Denzel has also been big on that with us, too. He's always wanted us to give people a shot. He's never said, "Give the black guy a shot."

Fuqua: Denzel says, "Give the woman a shot."

Blumenthal: It comes from the top down, so if we weren't running an inclusive set and Antoine and Denzel said we better do that it's going to happen because it needs to happen. But it's been happening with our movies for the last five to six years.

Fuqua: We just do it. There's not really a conversation. We do what's right and who's the best person for the job. And we help bring people up along the ranks as well.

Guerrasio: So I know you're working on a Muhammad Ali documentary.

Fuqua: Yeah.

scarface pacinoGuerrasio: After that, are you taking on the “Scarface” reboot?

Fuqua: I don't know. We are still finishing up “Equalizer 2.” Editing a little bit, shaping here and there. Not a lot. The music and all the final stuff we have to do. We did a test last week and it scored through the roof. Scored a little higher than the first one. So “Scarface, “I don't know, man. When I get the script.

Guerrasio: That's such a classic film that if it's going to be attempted I assume, if you were to take it on, you would do it completely different than Brian De Palma's.

Fuqua: Very different.

Guerrasio: Like how De Palma's is completely different from the 1932 original movie.

Fuqua: Exactly. You have to. And you have to find the reason to make it, any movie. I have to find my reason to make the movie. So “Scarface” is one of those movies that I've been talking to the writer and different people about it and I know a lot about that world, it's just making sure when I get the script it's the right reason to make “Scarface.” In today's society everyone feels injustice like Tony Montana. Everyone feels like they are the small guy.

Guerrasio: And hustling to make a better life.

Fuqua: The hustle. So the feeling of that is in the air and coming back to “Equalizer” that's what's important about doing that. It's about justice. When I did “Training Day” it was about street justice. So it always comes back to justice, so I have to figure out what “Scarface” is about for me.

Guerrasio: You're doing “Scarface.”

Fuqua: [Laughs.] 

SEE ALSO: The 32 movies coming out this summer you can't miss

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump tried to cut a secret deal with Planned Parenthood — here's what happened

A Yale skin cancer expert says the popular notion that you need to soak up Vitamin D from the sun is a total myth

0
0

when to apply sunscreen

  • The body needs to produce or consume Vitamin D to stay healthy and grow strong bones.
  • You can get Vitamin D from food, supplements, or produce it yourself by soaking up some sun.
  • But a multi-disciplined cohort of doctors from the Yale School of Medicine say most of us get more than enough bone-growing Vitamin D just by eating vitamin-rich foods like salmon, tuna, milk and oranges, plus seeing the sun on a regular basis.
  • There's no need to tan or forgo sunscreen to keep your body strong, even if you live on a northern latitude.

No doubt about it: your body needs Vitamin D to stay strong and healthy. The naturally occurring steroid helps our bodies absorb calcium and build bones.

Without enough of the vitamin, kids can develop a brittle bone condition called rickets, and adults can suffer from a similar condition called osteomalacia.

But while many love to talk about getting outside for a fresh hit of the "sunshine vitamin" every day, the truth is that most people already get plenty of the nutrient from the things they put in their mouth, like foods and supplements, as well as a normal, unagressive amount of sun exposure.

There's no need to crisp your skin to get your needed dose of Vitamin D.

How much Vitamin D is enough?

sunburn skin cancer

The US National Institutes of Health recommends the average adult consume around 600 IU (international units) of Vitamin D a day. Their recommended dose is a little less for babies (400 IU) and a little more for adults over 70 years old (800 IU).

For reference, that means you can pretty get close to an entire day's supply of Vitamin D from eating a three ounce serving of salmon (~450 IUs), plus downing one cup of fortified milk (~120 IUs), or sipping on a cup of Vitamin D-fortified orange juice (~140 IUs).

How much Vitamin D you can get from being out in the sun depends on a host of factors, including air pollution, the shade of your skin, as well as your age, weight, and even how warm your skin is when you're outside.

As many as 41% of American adults between the ages of 20-64 may not be getting their recommended amount of Vitamin D. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that African-Americans, who have some of the highest rates of Vitamin D deficiency, have greater bone density than other ethnic groups, and fewer fractures. This suggests the Vitamin D and bone health equation is more complicated than just a numbers game.

David Leffell, author of "Total Skin: The Definitive Guide to Whole Skin Care For Life," and chief of dermatologic surgery at Yale School of Medicine, told Business Insider that going unprotected in the sun just to get an additional hit of Vitamin D from baking in the sun is a pretty dangerous idea, and completely unnecessary.

"You don't need to live under a rock," he said, but staying protected from skin-burning UVB rays when you're outside this summer is an important way to prevent skin cancer.

Leffell recommends his patients carry some sunscreen with them when they spend time outside, even on cloudy or rainy days, so they can have it on hand and apply some if the sun does start to shine. This is especially important during the warmer summer months, when the UV Index rises and the sun becomes more potent.

How much sun protection do you need? And where should you put it?

Leffell says he uses an SPF-30 cream himself, and for most people, that gives enough of a shield to fight off about 96% of the damaging, burn-inducing UVB solar rays at the beach. More sensitive and fairer-skinned folks may opt for an SPF-50 option, but Leffell says any SFP higher than 50 only offers "minimal" extra benefits.

Whatever dosage you pick, remember that it doesn't last all day. SPF numbers indicate the level of protection you can get only for the first two hours after you apply a sunscreen. After that, they're no longer as effective.

belle brockhoff sunburn

So Leffell says while he knows it's a chore, it's essential to "refresh" sunscreen in burn- and skin cancer-prone areas of the body and face like the top of the ears, the forehead, the cheeks, and the nose.

Sun-protective clothing can also help out with other hard-to-reach spots like the back and shoulders.

And there are a few choice spots on the body where it's especially important to re-apply, because they tend to be zones where men and women develop skin cancer most often.

Leffell says women should be especially careful to protect the "v" of their chest from getting burned, since damage there is "very hard to reverse cosmetically with lasers."

For men, he recommends anyone who's lost a bit of hair should liberally apply sunscreen to their bald spots and their neck, and add a hat, too.

"We see a lot of skin cancer on the scalp," Leffell said.

SEE ALSO: You're probably putting on sunscreen all wrong — here's how to apply it the right way, according to a dermatologist

DON'T MISS: You are probably not getting enough sleep, and it is killing you

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A dermatologist reveals the fastest way to get rid of sunburn

This is everything tennis icon Roger Federer eats and drinks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner

0
0

Roger Federer

Roger Federer is skipping the clay season so he can be as fit and fresh as possible for the 2018 Wimbledon Championships.

Even at 36, Federer continues to marvel on the courts and triumphed at the first major of the year — the Australian Open.

But to maintain his sporting dominance, Federer has to eat right. So what sort of food does a 20-time Grand Slam tennis champion eat?

Here's everything Federer likes to have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

SEE ALSO: People are asking who would win in a match between Roger Federer and Serena Williams — and the winner is clear

DON'T MISS: This is the one record Roger Federer has set that future tennis players will struggle to beat

This is 20-time Grand Slam champion Roger Federer, who is widely considered as the best male tennis player of all time.



To start his day, Federer prefers to go sweet rather than savoury and reportedly enjoys homemade waffles with a fresh fruit compote on the morning of a match.

Source: The Guardian.



To wash the waffles down, Federer has fresh juice, coffee, and a vinegar shot.

Source: The Guardian.



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Here's what you should do if you arrive on a first date but don't fancy the person — and what not to do

0
0

couple first date

  • If you go on a lot of dates, sometimes you just won't fancy the person you meet.
  • That's fine, but there are good and bad ways of letting the person know.
  • Make sure you're upfront about not pursuing anything romantic, but keep yourself open to friendship, business connections, or setting them up with someone else.
  • Absolutely do not, whatever you do, ghost them.


When you're getting ready for a first date, you're likely to feel butterflies, unless you're a dating aficionado. If you met on a dating app, you'll probably be nervous and hoping the person you meet likes you and you come across well. It's exciting, but also a nightmare.

And then there's the chance that you won't fancy them, which is a totally different matter.

Erika Ettin, a relationship expert and founder of dating site A Little Nudge, told Business Insider there's no substitute for chemistry, and you should try and get to a date within a week of matching. Too many people leave it too long, and the desire to meet fizzles out, she said.

It also means you can work out if you feel a spark together fairly early on. That way you don't feel like you've wasted that much time, and you can move on.

But it is incredibly awkward when you arrive on a first date and you realise there's just no attraction. It's even worse when you think they might actually fancy you but it isn't reciprocal. Ettin said even if this happens, you should remind yourself you're sitting with another human being.

"Some people treat people they meet online as lesser, but they're still people, and it's important to remember that," she said. "Too many people cancel at the last minute, are flaky, are late. Just remember that the other person has feelings too. At the end of the day it's still real people who are still making the time to meet you."

Also, just because you don't feel anything, it doesn't mean the whole date has to be a waste.

"I can't encourage highly enough, if you're already there, to try to make the most of it," Ettin said. "Too many people just tune out at that point. You've both made the effort to be there so see what else you can get out of it."

You might learn something from each other, make a business connection, or even become friends. Maybe you realise you could set them up with one of your single friends, or vice versa. Whatever it is, don't mentally check out.

"Don't kind of exit the date but still sit there," Ettin said. "You're making the experience worse for both of you if you don't even try to engage."

Honesty is the best policy

Ultimately, it's best to be honest if you're just not feeling it. This is easier when it's obvious neither of you are attracted to the other. But it's still not ideal to blurt it out in the first five minutes.

If someone makes themselves vulnerable to you and asks you out again, that's when you have to be upfront about how you feel.

"I recommend something like, 'thanks again for the drinks, but I just didn't feel the spark I was looking for,'" Ettin said. "I just didn't feel a connection romantically, but all the best. Tactful and honest."

Ghosting is the absolute worst thing you can do. That's where you stop responding to texts and calls, and the other person effectively thinks you've vanished into thin air.

"You think you're sparing someone's feelings but really all you're sparing is yourself from having an awkward conversation," Ettin said. "It doesn't have to be awkward at all. Someone can be disappointed you don't feel it, but they're not going to be angry at you for having feelings, or not having feelings — as long as you're nice about it."

Ghosting is a cowardly move, and it often happens when the end of the date is open to interpretation. So don't allow any ambiguity. If you feel the spark, say so. If you don't, then it's fine to make that clear too.

SEE ALSO: 7 awkward questions you should ask on a first date — and 3 you really shouldn't

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Why Apple makes it so hard to get a new iPhone battery

This is what it's like to be a woman with a sex addiction — and what everyone gets wrong about it

0
0

sex addiction

  • Erica Garza is a recovering sex addict.
  • In her new book, she details many of the experiences that led up to her realising she had a problem.
  • She used to prioritise staying at home watching porn over leaving the house, and sought out a string of partners for unprotected sex.
  • Ultimately, she struggled to separate pleasure and shame.
  • She told Business Insider there are many misconceptions about sex addiction.
  • For example, it's not just men who have it — it affects nearly as many women.
  • Also, you don't have to have been through any sort of trauma to develop a sex addiction.


Having a string of partners and watching hours of porn isn't necessarily the way to achieve sexual liberation. While many people are empowered by owning their own sexuality in this way, for some, it can mean the exact opposite. Rather than enjoyment and affection, sex can be intertwined with shame and used as a weapon on the path to self destruction.

For Erica Garza, life was about pursuing romantic partners, watching porn, and putting herself in potentially dangerous situations, all for the sexual release that helped her forget about everything else she was trying to ignore.

"The best way to put it is just feeling a lack of a powerlessness and a lack of control when it comes to expressing your sexuality," she told Business Insider.

In her book "Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction," Garza, 35, tells her story of how she would continually cancel plans to stay in a dark room and masturbate, and have strings of partners who she didn't use protection with.

Sex and shame were so fused together, she would seek out situations that she thought were "revolting," and other adjectives like it, just to be able to orgasm. Unprotected sex, for example, gave her an extra charge of adrenaline.

"I felt like I needed to have a combination of shame and pleasure in order to feel satisfied with a sexual experience," Garza said. "And so if I didn't use protection, it was something I felt really bad about because I knew I should be treating my body better. I knew that something could happen, and I couldn't believe I was putting myself in those destructive situations — but it felt too good not to."

Women are nearly just as likely to be sex addicts as men

Garza's book has received a lot of publicity since it was released, largely because it provides a side of sex addiction many people haven't previously been made aware of. Women in particular are thought to be under-represented in seeking help for sex addiction because of the stigma and shame they may feel about it. In fact, a third of all sex addicts are women— but this figure is thought to be lower than reality.

Also, in the media it's almost always a man who claims to be going to rehab for a sex problem, like Harvey Weinstein did last year.

After all, going to a Times Square peep show and slipping a woman $20 notes isn't something people often associate with women — but that was one of the many ways Garza escaped from life.

She said women probably have an extra layer of shame if they are addicted to sex, or even in relation to sex in general. It's still something of a taboo to be a woman who needs, or even just likes, sex.

"Because of that idea that men want sex more, when women don't fit that narrative, they feel bad about it," Garza said. "We know the language that we have associated in our culture with women who have a lot of sex. We use terms like 'sluts' and 'whores,' while with men we just shrug it off and say that's normal. It's just 'boys being boys,' that sort of mentality. And I'm really hoping my story is going to open that up a bit more."

Another common misconception about sex addiction is that you have to have gone through some sort of trauma early on in your life. For Garza at least, that wasn't the case at all. She grew up in a Catholic Latino household, which meant sex was very much off the table as a conversation topic, leading her to associate it with more shameful feelings. But all in all, Garza was raised in a safe, supportive home and she felt loved and cared for.

"When your story doesn't sit into that narrative of trauma or sexual abuse, you feel this extra layer of shame because you feel like you can't talk about it," she said. "Like your pain isn't justified. And I don't think anything diffuses shame more than being able to talk about it."

Like all teenagers, Garza did face her own struggles with self-esteem. For example, she was diagnosed with scoliosis and had to wear a back brace for two years, which made her feel really insecure and self-conscious. She found that if she watched more porn and masturbated, she could get a break from those feelings. After that she continued using sex as a crutch, until she was truly ready to face everything.

Sex addiction has its skeptics because it's hard to define

Unlike other addictions, like heroin or alcohol, you don't have to go cold turkey to recover from a sex addiction. You don't have to stop having sex or even watching porn. It's more about developing a healthier relationship with sex, and learning not to use it in destructive ways.

"I think a lot of people who go into a 12-step program are so scared they'll go back into their old patterns of behaviour, they cut themselves off completely," Garza said. "That's not living either. That's not happiness either. And that becomes a whole other problem. It's a lot more about finding balance and forging a new pathway with your sexuality rather than giving up sex completely."

Finding this balance was one of the most challenging parts of Garza's recovery, particularly when it came to setting her own boundaries and stepping over them occasionally. But over time, she began to realise it wasn't her sexuality that was the issue. It was the shame, the lies, and putting herself in unnecessary danger.

Because sex addiction is so completely personal and different for everyone who suffers with it, it is a hard thing to define. Garza said this is probably why there is doubt in the psychological community that it exists at all. But, she said, this isn't really the point.

"I think that's unfortunate, because its a hard thing for a person to admit that they have a problem with sex," she said. "Saying it doesn't exist just makes people feel like they should just stop talking about it, and they don't have a problem, and they don't know how to change. They cant take any actions to change because there's no context for helping them."

Once someone can admit to the problem, there are resources available. By taking that off the table and saying it doesn't exist, people don't know what to do for help.

As certified sex addiction treatment specialist Robert Weiss told me in a previous article, when a person comes into treatment, that individual is in crisis. As a therapist, it is his duty to do what he can to help, regardless of definitions or how they have gotten to that point.

"Is the client coming to treatment in an attempt to appear sympathetic, or does he really want help? I say who cares," he said. "Whatever it is that motivates the client to enter treatment, once [they are] there, we can perform a clinical assessment to see and understand what we're really dealing with, and we can implement a treatment plan to help the individual based on that."

Research has shown that the part of the brain associated with reward is activated in the same way whether you are addicted to anything; cocaine, food, gambling, or sex.

"It's just the way of using a normal human behaviour in a destructive way," Garza said. "And fine, if they want to say sex addiction doesn't exist, then I think we need to call it something else. I think there needs to be a larger conversation to explain how people feel powerlessness with their sexuality in some ways and they engage in destructive behaviours in a compulsive way."

Recovery is an ongoing process

Garza is now happily married with a young daughter. She said she plans to be incredibly open with her daughter about sex in the future, so she can always come to her with questions when she's making the same discoveries Garza felt she had to hide away from and feel ashamed of.

"I don't want to be a source of shame for her. I don't want to be a source of silence. She's going to get that from the world around her and I don't want to be that place for her," Garza said. "I'm certainly going to be as honest and open as I can be with her, and just be real."

Hopefully this means she will grow up knowing she is worthy of pleasure and desire isn't a bad thing, she said. Unfortunately, a sex-positive upbringing is something people in even the most progressive societies can struggle with. It may take a while for parents to openly discuss the existence of porn with their adolescent children.

Nonetheless, the conversation is broadening, and Garza is playing her own part in that. She's grateful for how her recovery has gone, but it's an ongoing process, and there have been stumbles along the way.

"I do feel like I'm in a much better place, because when I feel triggered, I don't feel the need to just destroy my life again," she said. "I don't need to just close the shades and binge on porn.

"I'd rather talk about my feelings and talk about whats triggering me and what I'm feeling... I keep taking steps in that direction of revealing and being vulnerable, and that's being the biggest help, rather than closing off and shutting down — which I used to do."

SEE ALSO: Sex addiction might not be a real condition — here's why

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The surprising reason we boil lobsters alive


There's a hidden shortcut for rearranging all of your iPhone apps at once — here's how to do it (AAPL)

0
0

red iphone 00015.JPG

  • There's a hidden mode that lets you rearrange the apps on your iPhone much quicker.
  • Here's how you do it. 

It's easy to rearrange the apps on your iPhone: Simply hold down until they start wiggling, then move them into the screens and folders of your choice.

But if you want to rearrange a lot of apps at once, it can take a while — unless you know this new trick that Apple included in the most recent version of iOS software, iOS 11. (We only learned about it this week via Finertech.)

It lets you move multiple apps at once. Here's how you do it:

  1. Hold down one app until it wiggles.
  2. Move it out of its slot.
  3. Then, with a second finger, tap on any apps you want to add to the stack.
  4. Then, you can move the entire stack to another page or into a folder.
  5. You're done!

Here's a gif illustrating how to do it:

 

SEE ALSO: Apple made a controversial change in 2016 — but now all of Silicon Valley is playing catch-up

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's the best smartphone camera you can buy

A tech company is giving each employee $1,500 to spend on experiences — and it's a millennial's dream perk

0
0

flight travel

  • Software-maker Qualtrics is giving each employee $1,500 per year to spend on experiences that they wouldn't otherwise do or be able to afford.
  • So far, some employees have swam with sharks, skiied the Austrian Alps, trekked the Great Wall of China, and completed acts of charity abroad.
  • Millennials, who make up the majority of Qualtric's workforce, prefer new perks and benefits over a pay raise, surveys have shown.


Millennials have a reputation as the "job-hopping" generation. In 2016, aGallup pollrevealed that 21% of millennials said they changed jobs within the past year (more than three times the number of non-millennials who reported the same), and 60% are open to new opportunities.

As a result, companies are hatching creative solutions to keep their millennial-aged workers on the company's payroll longer, from providingpaid time off for exploring naturetoon-demand career coaching.

Qualtrics, a company whose software allow enterprises and researchers to gather data that help improve their customer, employee, and brand experiences, may take the cake in providing over-the-top company perks for its roughly 1,700 employees based in Provo, Utah; Seattle, Washington; and abroad.

In January, Qualtrics began giving each employee $1,500 to spend on an experience "they wouldn't normally be able to have." So far, some employees have swam with sharks in the Galapagos, skiied the Austrian Alps, trekked the Great Wall of China, and delivered books to children in the Philippines.

To qualify, workers must be full-time employees who've been with the company for at least a year. There's no travel itinerary or application required; employees are free to spend the money as they wish.

"We don't tell you what to do. We just want to say we helped you cross something off your bucket list," said Mike Maughan, Qualtric's head of brand growth and customer insight.

For millennials, it's all about the perks

Americans, for better or worse, are spending more and more of their waking lives at work. Millennials in general work more hours, forfeit more vacation days, and retire much later than previous generations. They also make less money than their parents did at the same age.

These conditions can result in burnout, a lack of engagement at work, or quitting, which may be why some companies, including Facebook, Google, and Netflix, pony up for sweet perks.

travelers millennials happy

According to career site Glassdoor, more than half (57%) of all workers said perks and benefits are among the top things they consider when deciding whether to accept a job. Nearly 90% of younger employees ages 18 to 34 said they would prefer new or additional benefits over a pay raise.

"Benefits and perks matter because they're an added piece of the total compensation puzzle," Scott Dobroski, Glassdoor's career trends analyst, told Business Insider's Rachel Gillett.

Founded in 2002, Qualtric's entire business is centered on helping companies satisfy their customers. Major airlines use Qualtric's software to gather customer flight feedback and create experiences that surprise and delight fliers, while retailers use Qualtrics to help them launch targeted ad campaigns, conduct pricing studies, and understand how customers are using their mobile sites.

"We work on experience management all day long," Maughan said, adding that the new "experience bonus" shows employees that "this company walks the walk."

In addition to the experience bonus, Qualtrics offers its employees fully paid healthcare for their families, 401K matching, catered lunches that bring workers across teams together at the communal tables, and "swag bags" delivered twice annually with the latest Qualtrics gear.

Qualtrics isn't the first to offer a travel stipend as a company perk. Airbnb gives its employees an annual allowance of $2,000 to travel and stay in an Airbnb listing anywhere in the world.

Roughly 80% of Qualtric's employees are millennials born between 1982 and 2000, according to Maughan. He said the new perk was not motivated to keep millennials around, though it's an obvious benefit.

"I think we're very aware of the [workforce] trends relating to millennials," Maughan said. He added: "The primary motivator is that we genuinely care about our employees. We want to make sure we're providing them with an opportunity that they really want to do and that they wouldn't do otherwise."

So far, 668 Qualtric employees have taken advantage of the experience bonus in 2018.

SEE ALSO: Companies like Facebook and LinkedIn are paying for employees to get on-the-clock 'life coaching'

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A leadership expert says too many 20-somethings make the same mistake when they take a new job

The world's most famous tailor has followed one simple plan that has grown his tiny Hong Kong shop from a small business into a global brand

0
0

WorldsMostFamousTailor FashionAdvice (1 of 1)

  • Roshan Melwani is the third-generation proprietor of Sam's Tailor, a family-owned small business started by his grandfather Naraindas "Sam" Melwani in 1957.
  • Sam's Tailor has become world famous for the stylish bespoke suits and clothing it has made for celebrities, world leaders, Hong Kongers and tourists.
  • Some of its most famous clients include US President Bill Clinton, David Bowie, Russell Crowe, and Bruno Mars.
  • Melwani said he has made his small business extremely successful by following one plan: Give the customer what they want.
  • When clients don't know what they want, he said, it's his job to figure it out — excellent advice for any small business.

Roshan Melwani and his father Manu are the second and third-generation proprietors of Sam's Tailor, a wildly successful Hong Kong-based family-owned small business.

Sam's Tailor has built a reputation over its 60+ year-history as a world famous tailor by providing bespoke suits to an impressive roster of celebrities and world leaders — everyone from Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton to celebrities like David Bowie, Russell Crowe, and Bruno Mars.

In many ways, a trip to Hong Kong isn't complete without a stop at the Melwanis' shop.

The success of Sam's Tailor, according to Roshan, comes down to one simple plan: Give the client what they want, even when they don't know it themselves.

When 41-year-old Melwani first began working at his father's shop at 23-years-old — after studying business at New York University and working in London for a year — he approached suit-making like an artist, dictating to his clients what he thought they should have. Such an approach, he said, gave him a lot of success early on in his career, as he gained a reputation for producing very fashionable and flashy clothing.

"The more I dictated to them, the more amazing pieces I made, and the more people flew out to see me," Melwani said.

BestSmallBusinessPlan HongKongTailor

But as Melwani has matured, he said he began to realize that it was more important for him to give clients what they wanted — rather than what he wanted to give them — and to make suits that clients will feel comfortable wearing once a week rather than once or twice a year.

When clients don't know what they want, he said, it's his job to figure out what they are looking for and give it to them. Still, Melwani said it's important to steer clients in a more stylish direction at times.

"If someone flies 8,000 miles to get a plain grey suit, I try to talk them out of it," he said.

While he used to make very flashy suits, these days, he said his "message and mantra" is closer to the suit he made for me: a grey suit I can wear to most occasions, from formal to casual, that is versatile and packs well.

Melwani made it more fashionable with a slimming cut, "bird's eye" suit fabric, a stylish Alexander McQueen lining, and other bespoke touches — perfectly elevating what I had in mind.

SEE ALSO: The world's most famous tailor has one simple rule he follows to stay fashionable without emptying the bank account

DON'T MISS: Inside the most expensive part of the world's most expensive city, the Hong Kong billionaire enclave where Alibaba founder Jack Ma may have bought a $191 million mansion

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Leslie Odom, Jr.'s $500,000 gamble that led to 'Hamilton'

Here's what time Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's royal wedding will start where you live — and how to watch it

0
0

meghan markle prince harry engagement

  • The wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will begin at midday (UK time) at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle on Saturday, May 19.
  • At 1 p.m. the newly married couple will embark on a carriage procession through Windsor Town.
  • An early afternoon reception hosted by Her Majesty the Queen will follow at St George's Hall for the couple and guests from the congregation.
  • Around 200 guests have also been invited to an evening reception at Frogmore House in the evening, hosted by Prince Charles.
  • Kensington Palace has confirmed that Prince William will be Harry's best man.
  • Scroll down to see what time the celebrations will start where you live and how you can watch it both in the UK and from abroad.


All eyes have been on the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge this week as they introduced their new baby boy, Louis Arthur Charles, to the world. But now Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are likely to return to the spotlight as the countdown to their royal wedding begins.

As the public eagerly awaited the announcement of the youngest Prince's name, Kensington Palace revealed that Harry has asked his older brother William to be his best man.

It's been reported that the Duke of Cambridge will miss this year's FA Cup final which falls on the same day, which, as president of the Football Association he was expected to attend. In order to make both he'd have had to leave the wedding reception early, The Guardian reports.

The wedding will be held at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle on Saturday, May 19.

The day will begin at midday (UK time) with a service conducted by the Dean of Windsor, and the Archbishop of Canterbury will officiate as the couple make their vows.

Here's an outside look at the Chapel...

St George's Chapel Windsor Castle

...and here's a glimpse inside.

st george's chapel

At 1 p.m. Harry and Meghan will embark on a carriage procession from St George's Chapel through Windsor Town returning to Windsor Castle along the Long Walk, which will offer some members of the public a glimpse of the newly married couple.

They've invited over 2,000 members of the public into the grounds of Windsor Castle to watch the couple and their guests arrive, and to watch the carriage procession as it departs from the castle.

The Queen will host an early afternoon reception at St George's Hall for the couple and guests from the congregation, of which there are expected to be around 600 guests.

Here's a photo inside St George's Hall:

Around 200 guests have also been invited to an evening reception at Frogmore House in the evening, hosted by Prince Charles.

It's not yet known exactly which celebrities are invited to the wedding, although the palace announced there would not be an official list of political leaders in attendance— meaning British Prime Minister Theresa May won't be there — despite the fact that her predecessor David Cameron attended Kate and William's wedding in April 2011.

What time does it start where I am?

If you want to mark it in your diary, here's what time the royal wedding will start in major cities across different time zones on Saturday, May 19:

  • London (BST) 12 p.m.
  • Paris (CEST): 1 p.m.
  • Moscow (MSK): 2 p.m.
  • Tokyo (JST): 8 p.m.
  • Sydney (AET): 9 p.m.
  • Honolulu (HAST): 1 a.m.
  • Los Angeles (PT): 4 a.m.
  • Las Vegas (PT): 4 a.m.
  • Denver (MT): 5 a.m.
  • Chicago (CT): 6 a.m.
  • New York (ET): 7 a.m.
  • Seoul (KST): 8 p.m.

How can I watch it?

UK

BBC, ITV, and Sky News, will all be covering the big day.

US

Live coverage will be available on CBS, streamed on CBSN, The Today Show (NBC), PBS, and BBC America, according to Harper's Bazaar.

Australia

Channel Nine will air the wedding, Marie Claire reports.

South Africa

ITV Choice (DStv 123), according to Times Live.

SEE ALSO: 'Knocked Up' and 'Grey's Anatomy' star Katherine Heigl has confirmed she's joining the cast of 'Suits' as Meghan Markle departs

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Jeff Bezos reveals what it’s like to build an empire and become the richest man in the world — and why he's willing to spend $1 billion a year to fund the most important mission of his life

A new kind of probiotic could change the $38 million market by relying on real science — and Cameron Diaz and Peter Thiel are into it

0
0

tongue pills vitamins supplements mouth

  • Seed, a new company with some big names behind it, is about to break into the $38-million probiotics industry
  • They aim to rely on real science to create their product, a probiotic designed to support the vibrant ecosystem of bacteria in your gut.
  • Seed's scientific advisory board includes a microbiologist who chaired the World Health Organization panel that first defined the term "probiotics."
  • Investors include actors Cameron Diaz and Jessica Biel as well as entrepreneur Peter Thiel.


Seed, a new company with some big names behind it, is about to sprout onto the $38-million probiotics scene— with a product that is designed to improve your digestion and health based on scientific research.

As supplements, probiotics are largely unregulated by the US Food and Drug Administration. That means that most of them don't have any proven scientific results.

Seed aims to be different.

Backed by Cameron Diaz, Jessica Biel, Karlie Kloss, and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Seed is slated to launch this week with a probiotic that is informed by peer-reviewed scientific research. The product's ingredients were selected based on results of clinical trials.

The company is being steered by a team of scientists who study the microbiome, the delicate ecosystem of bacteria blossoming in our gut. Probiotics are meant to foster that ecosystem.

Ara Katz, one of Seed's co-founders and CEOs, told Business Insider that the company wants to "improve the standards of probiotics and bridge microbiome science — not the commercialization and the dilution of the term, but actually reclaim the term 'probiotics' for science."

Still, Seed's probiotics are not drugs. As such, they cannot make claims to treat or prevent any condition or disease. But they can claim to improve overall health — which the probiotics industry thus far has largely failed to demonstrate it can do.

Here's what to know about the new supplements and what they may be able to do for you.

Other probiotics likely never make it to your gut

abs situps workout fitness exercise woman gym sit upsFor years, pricey pills that claim to improve digestion and wellness by fostering the growth of beneficial bacteria in your gut have dominated the supplement scene. Probiotics are a big business, with a market that some analysts have said could rake in $64 billion in ingredient sales over the next four years.

But while the probiotic industry has boomed, the bacteria in our guts have failed to respond in kind.

Most scientific studies suggest the pills do very little to help our stomachs and may not even provide any measurable benefits to our overall health at all. That's because very few of the beneficial bacteria in the supplements make it to our guts or stick around long enough to have an effect, Ian Orme, a professor of microbiology at Colorado State University, told Business Insider.

But a new kind of supplement could change that.

Synbiotics are the future of the probiotics industry

prescription-pills-medicine-in-handSeed's supplement isn't just a probiotic. It's a synbiotic, meaning that in addition to beneficial bacteria, it includes another ingredient called a prebiotic.

Prebiotics are designed to keep helpful microbes alive. The combination of the two is synergistic, meaning each ingredient is designed to enhance the other's effect — hence the term syn-biotic.

Studies suggest that synbiotics accomplish their goal using a one-two punch: while the probiotic settles in and pushes out the "bad" bacteria, the prebiotic — essentially a sugar — acts as its food supply, ensuring the supplement sticks around and does its job.

"There’s kind of a notion that it’s two products in one," Katz told Business Insider of Seed's supplement.

In the first large-scale clinical trial of synbiotics last year, researchers working in rural India found that newborns who were given a synbiotic were at a substantially lower risk of developing sepsis, a potentially fatal condition characterized by severe infection.

Some small studies have suggested that synbiotics could provide benefits related to a range of other conditions influenced by the gut microbiome as well, including obesity, diabetes, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. But the FDA has yet to approve any drugs made using those ingredients.

Still, Gregor Reid, Seed's chief scientific officer and a microbiologist at Canada's Western University, believes the company is onto something.

"I started on this journey over 35 years ago when people laughed at the idea of probiotics," said Reid, who chaired the United Nations and World Health Organization panel that first defined the term.

"It’s been a long journey but I think it’s exciting that all our work on the microbiome has led to this step. This really is the next phase of probiotics," he added.

The science that went into Seed and future directions for the company

Before coming up with an ingredient list, Seed's team looked at several peer-reviewed studies on strains of bacteria and kinds of prebiotics (the "food" for that bacteria).

The final product — capsules that are designed to be taken three times a day — reflects that work, Katz told Business Insider.

The company's prebiotics are sourced from Scandinavian pine bark, Indian pomegranate skin, and a special type of mushroom. Its bacterial strains are the ones studies suggested were the most closely linked with measurable health outcomes.

One of those studies, published last year in the journal PLOS One, suggested that taking one of the strains of bacteria in Seed's product was linked with reductions in LDL or "bad" cholesterol and increases in HDL or "good" cholesterol.

That promising result could mean that someone taking Seed's supplement might see moderate cholesterol benefits, but that effect is still untested for Seed's final product.

Seed aims to finish its own clinical trials on the product this month, Katz said.

"We’re really aiming to raise the bar of how the scientific process is done," he said.

SEE ALSO: Why a pill with barely any health benefits could be the 'most important' new supplement in 20 years

DON'T MISS: The $37 billion supplement industry is barely regulated — and it's allowing dangerous products to slip through the cracks

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: You're probably bending over all wrong — here's the right way to do it

Viewing all 115285 articles
Browse latest View live


Latest Images