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What It’s Like To Attend A $3,400 Public-Speaking Coaching Session

The command was simple: Create an intro to any story beginning with the word “imagine.” The leader gave us all a topic to talk about: energy conservation. I had 10 seconds to prepare. After a pause, I theatrically pointed at my head and said, “Imagine.” I then tried to fill in the blanks, talking about a future where open fields were filled with wind turbines. But my thoughts became jumbled and terror filled my face. I tried to set the scene of a utopic future where there was neither an energy crisis nor global warming, but the sentences didn’t link, and all that escaped my mouth was gobbledygook.

The woman beside me, my partner for the time being, was kind. “The beginning was good,” said the PR executive, 40. But it was clear I had bombed.

We were attending a two-day conference: me, this woman, and about 90 other people all together in a large auditorium. The event—hosted by the company Own The Room—dubbed itself a retreat where “executives from different industries come to learn to communicate more effectively and have a great time in the process.” The price tag was indeed C-Level at $3,400, but it did boast Sheryl Sandberg’s endorsement.

The room was filled with many people who occupied spots near the top of their org charts. The people attending were separated into about nine different groups. My enclave included a VP from Johnson & Johnson, someone from PepsiCo, and a few CEOs and founders. I surveyed the room and found other groups contained similar rankings. I even spotted the brother of a well-known politician in our midst.

Most of the people I talked to generally had the same goal in mind: They frequently gave presentations—be it to a small group of employees or to hundreds of people—and wanted to improve their performance. Some had issues with engaging people, others just wanted to be more dynamic. One woman sitting beside me—a health care company executive—was filling in for a colleague of hers, but had heard about it from numerous other people. While people were happy to chat about why they were attending, nearly everyone declined to be named, as they were all there on their companies’ dime.

As for me, I’ve always considered myself an okay public speaker. I know how to tell a good joke, and audiences generally react well enough. But I’ve never focused on the exact things that I say, or the way that I relate to an audience. Comparatively, most other people in the room seemed to have led more than a few important meetings. I was probably the least experienced public speaker in that room.

The day was segmented into large and small group activities. The first hour, we just worked on introducing ourselves. We learned the tricks of drawing in an audience. “Tell a story,” the coach told us. Never begin with your name. The very first exercise was learning how to master this seemingly simple task. We were partnered with someone else, and then told to introduce ourselves in an engaging way—without leading with our name.

This led to some intriguing, if not necessarily business appropriate intros. One person, a 40-year-old man who worked for a company that helps people with substance abuse, opened, “I am a recovering alcoholic.” A dark-haired man in his thirties said, “I know more about breasts than you,” and then went on to talk about his lactation-focused business. It’s true, if these people had merely stated their names, I probably wouldn’t be as interested in what they do. I simply opened with, “I like to tell a good story.”

Another key “trick” was learning to hone language. One coach explained that most language spoken day to day is “weak”—that is, the “uhs,” “ums,” “yeahs,” etc. We spent the rest of the day trying to pry these vocal tics from our repertoire. A participant—another corporate VP—and I were asked to deliver an engaging 15-second presentation about where we see ourselves in 10 years. The catch: Every time we uttered those weak, bad words, we had to drink a sip of watered-down Coke (it was a “drinking game,” get it?). I went first and had to drink four times. My partner went second and didn’t drink once. “It’s easier going second,” he conceded.

If you’ve ever been to a session about how to present, these exercises and tricks aren’t necessarily new. Own The Room fits squarely in an industry that’s been around for decades: executive coaching and education. Since boardrooms have been ground zero for presentations, employees have worked to enhance their ability to communicate and engage.

The market is quite big, too. One report from 2014 put the global corporate training market at over $130 billion. And another 2015 report saw that same market growing from 2015-2019 at compound annual growth rate of 8%. Everyone I talked with agreed that they saw this as an opportunity to have a few days off and practice these skills. A few had been to other Own The Room events, and simply liked attending because it gave them the ability to work further on honing the craft.

Of course, there have always been people claiming to have the secrets for good group communication, much like business and personal gurus have long claimed to know the “secrets to success.” The cult of entrepreneurship bleeds into Own The Room’s pitch. There are zen-like secrets for mastering a good business presentation, as well as allusions that the greatest executives are the most persuasive and masterful of language. Every mini session had one, if not many, catchphrases that were both helpful and grandiose. “Tell a story,” repeated one presenter. Another coach’s mantra: “Get over yourself.” A session I attended was simply titled, “Connect First.”

With all of these tools, the ultimate goal is for the participants to be able to have a more commanding presence over an audience. The event culminated with each person giving their own two-minute presentation about whatever they choose. Hopefully they would take these tools back home and lead a great meeting, or deliver a perfect pitch, or give the best presentation.

But as Own The Room CEO Jack Harvey told me later on in the day, the executive coaching space is fractured. There are dozens of individual coaches out there—each with their own specialties—and a few companies offering events like this. But the offerings are still all over the place and there’s no one leader.

One company, Reboot, is similarly positioned. It calls itself a coaching company that helps “entrepreneurs and their teams deal with the internal ups and downs of entrepreneurship.” Like Own The Room, it hosts bootcamps and coaching sessions. But Reboot is tailored more for the startup environment and the growing and learning entrepreneur. And there are big names—especially in Silicon Valley—known as guru coaches including Bill Campbell (who worked at both Apple and Intuit and has reportedly coached numerous tech giants) and Ron Conway (a well-known angel investor who’s been known to pitch in for the companies in his network).

Jack Harvey

Own The Room appears to want to court both entrepreneurial upstarts, as well as be used in Fortune 500 boardrooms around the world. According to Harvey, in the last year his program has been used by about 100 companies (including Facebook and LinkedIn) in 27 countries. He adds that bigger corporations with upwards of 300,000 employees have begun to bring the Own The Room program into their offices.

Harvey sees this as proof that there’s a market opening for a big name in the executive coaching industry. More importantly, he doesn’t consider Own The Room a one-off coaching session provider. Instead, it’s a “communication methodology.” Like the coaches under him, Harvey uses big ideas to underscore what his company can do. It’s not just showing people how to present in public, he assured me, it’s something more: “How do they release their full potential?”

This is the kind of language you hear at both an executive training session and a new agey self-realization retreat. And to the untrained eye, the two are quite similar. Harvey—along with all the other coaches—would, of course, balk at this comparison. He reminds me that no Own The Room employee ever lectures while giving a coaching session. Also, the presenters never talk about themselves. “You will not find a bombast,” he says. And he is right—the sessions I attended were neither self-reflexive nor philosophy laden. And they were very interactive.

The grandiose sense is perhaps just the name of the game at these events. If you’re paying the hefty price, then you might as well feel like you’re in a special club of highfalutin gesticulations and potential professional realization. And everyone I talked with seemed okay with this. One HR executive saw a dual sense at the event. While the coaches seemed like they were teaching life tips, she didn’t quite get that. “I feel like I’m acting,” she said. “I want to feel more authentic.” The coach assured her that would come with practice.

In the end, I did learn some good public speaking tips that I’ll likely use in the future. But I’m probably still not qualified to stand in for your next executive conference. My full potential has yet to be realized.

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YouTube First Major Platform To Launch Live 360 Video

YouTube today will become the first major platform to offer live 360-degree video.

Since March, the Google-owned service has offered 360 video, which allows viewers to see what’s going on in a scene in 360 degrees. Facebook, too, has made 360 video available for some time.

Until now, though, no one of any scale has offered it live. Music fans will be among the very first to experience it when YouTube live-streams the famous Coachella festival in 360-degrees this weekend. YouTube has live-streamed the festival for years, but this will be the first time it has broadcast both weekends of the two-weekend event. Coachella teased 360 video during the first weekend, but it wasn’t live.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JSAKQuEj7w?rel=1&autoplay=0]
Coachella teased 360-degree video this weekend.

For users, the video will be available on any device—be it an iPhone, an Android tablet, or the web. People with virtual reality headsets like Google Cardboard or Gear VR will also be able to take advantage of the new service.

In the early going, content creators will be able to automatically produce live 360 YouTube video using one of two consumer-level or prosumer-level cameras—either the ALLie, or VideoStitch’s Orah 4i. Each of those systems comes with technology that auto-stitches imagery from multiple lenses. Creators will eventually also be able to use other 360-degree cameras, like Ricoh’s Theta S, to automatically produce live 360 video, but for now, such devices will require an API.

Facebook did not comment on its plans for live 360 video. Some, like tech commentator Robert Scoble, think widely available live 360 video will be a reality within months. At its recent F8 developers conference, the company unveiled a reference design for its own high-end 360 degree camera.

YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan told Fast Company that its on-demand 360 video will also feature spatial audio that will allow users to hear what’s happening in the direction it was filmed. That’s a key factor in making realistic VR video, as well as a critical element in VR storytelling.

In the early going, spatial audio for live YouTube 360 video will only be available on Android devices, but the company expects to soon add iOS support, Mohan said.

As for live 360 video, Mohan added that the quality will be high, with support for 1440p at 60 frames per second.

“You can imagine making it feel like you’re in that front-row seat for that Beyoncé concert,” Mohan said. Or, this weekend, for Coachella.

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Why LinkedIn Is Changing The Way It Interacts With Students

LinkedIn has spent years trying to reel in students. Since 2014, it had an entire portal dedicated to helping students find universities, connect with other students, and even choose potential majors. Now the company is retooling the way it interacts with students.

Starting today, LinkedIn’s sole student focus is to get them jobs. In fact, it’s doing away with many of its student services because they’ve found that students just want help finding a job. LinkedIn is launching a new app—dubbed LinkedIn Students—that does just that.

According to the app’s product lead Ada Yu, the company spent the last year surveying students and found that most simply wanted employment help. Before, the company offered a variety of services for students—many of which were tailored to life inside of college. They included tools that would help high school students find compatible colleges and other programs that gave students information about potential fields of study. Those services will all be gone on May 16.

In their place, LinkedIn is offering this new app. It asks the users three questions: What school are you in?; What major are you?; What year do you graduate? From there, LinkedIn Students connects students with alums who are in similar fields, recommends entry-level jobs at companies within the students’ network, and also recommends articles that may be relevant to the users’ interests.

According to Yu, students have found LinkedIn’s offerings up until now to be daunting. “They don’t have anything to put on their profile,” she said, so why would they consider using the site?

What’s also important, says Yu, is getting the students connected to the right people. And in this modern age, the way to actually get a job (or at least an interview) is to know someone who has an in. In fact, most of the 2015 graduates who found jobs on LinkedIn were in technology and professional services, which often require finding someone within the industry to connect with.

Yu and her team hope this new app will help get students more new jobs in more industries. The ultimate goal is to give students access to opportunities and, with LinkedIn’s millions of users, Yu says it’s “in the position to facilitate some of these conversations.”

Now she and her team wait to see if students will use the app, and whether this will change 2016’s job demographics.

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Starter Auction House: Paddle8 Guides Affluent Millennials Into The World Of Fine Art

Fashion entrepreneur Andy Spade is known for bringing a retro-chic sensibility to the clients he advises through his Partners & Spade branding studio. But fans got a rare look at his personal style and decorating choices this winter when he consigned dozens of artworks and collectibles from his recently sold Long Island home through the virtual auction house Paddle8. By the time the sale closed in early February, the startup had sold everything from a Jean-Michel Basquiat drawing (valued at $50,000) to a six-foot-tall stuffed giraffe ($200 to $300).

The sale was a triumph for Paddle8 cofounder Alexander Gilkes, who first floated the idea when he ran into Spade at a dinner at Tory Burch’s New York apartment. Gilkes, a former Phillips auctioneer and Old Etonian with a penchant for tweed jackets, launched the auction house in 2011 with cofounders Osman Khan and Aditya Julka. Their audience: the rising tide of affluent millennials just beginning to build art collections. While have-not millennials living at home and paying off student loans capture headlines, research firm FutureCast reports that there are 6.2 million millennial households in the U.S. earning $100,000 or more each year. “Today you’re buying a $1,000 print,” says Khan. “Over the next few years, hopefully you grow with us and you’re the purchaser of a million-dollar work.”

The key to unlocking the potential of these customers: providing them with inspiration and guidance to start their own collections. In addition to hosting theme-based sales, Paddle8 courts novice buyers by asking prominent figures in the worlds of art, entertainment, and fashion to curate auctions. Some of these tastemakers, including Spade and the writer–bon vivant Bob Colacello, list pieces from their own collections. Others coordinate with Paddle8 specialists to source work by their favorite artists. Such was the case when Vogue‘s Grace Coddington curated an auction of prints—all nudes—by photographers such as Mario Testino and Annie Leibovitz. Ellen DeGeneres opted for items from her collection, as well as pieces that inspired her line of home decor. “We’re big believers that people can learn to collect through the eyes of great collectors,” Gilkes says.

This strategy helped Paddle8 sell about $70 million worth of art last year—double its 2014 total. That puts its 2015 revenue in the ballpark of $20 million, based on the commission fees it charges the buyer (20%) and the seller (8%). The momentum persuaded investors, including artist Damien Hirst and gallerist David Zwirner, to pour $34 million into the company last year. “Our gutsy view of the world is that with time, there will be three auction houses: two serving the upper end of the market and Paddle8, serving the middle market,” says Gilkes, in a nod to auction giants Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

That may be optimistic, considering the established auction houses are increasingly entering Paddle8’s medium of online sales—and, with it, that coveted middle ground. “The things you could buy at Sotheby’s are surprisingly accessible,” says David Goodman, Sotheby’s head of digital development and marketing. After joining the company last summer, he spearheaded a series of online-only sales hosted by eBay. The sold-out auction of Star Wars memorabilia (which included hundreds of action figurines and a 42-inch-tall Chewbacca toy) attracted 400 new bidders. Christie’s, for its part, has Christie’s Live, a platform for participating virtually in a live auction, and expects to host more than 80 online-only sales this year.

One difference between buying a Luke Skywalker figurine from Sotheby’s and, say, the Darth Vader Companion by KAWS on Paddle8 is how the items are verified and shipped. Paddle8 uses photographs and documentation to verify items remotely, then ships directly from consignor to buyer. Specialists at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, even for online sales, confirm the authenticity of all works in person. “That’s what differentiates us, that peace of mind,” says John Auerbach, managing director for e-commerce at Christie’s.

Gilkes stands by the Paddle8 model, which he says enables lower fees. The company employs specialists to virtually authenticate every item; if records are missing or concerns remain, Paddle8 arranges for an in-person inspection. Once the company owns the rights to sell a piece, it can execute the transaction in a matter of weeks. “There are fewer pain points: We’re not printing a catalog or setting up an exhibition, so we’re able to move more nimbly,” says Kate Brambilla, a Christie’s veteran who now manages Paddle8’s collector-driven auctions.

“I think there’s a deep-seated interest to see how people live with art and objects, to see how somebody pairs a contemporary work of art with an antique desk accessory,” she says. “There’s an appetite for that—not only seeing into these collectors’ personal lives but also how you can bring it into your own home.” Ikea shelving optional.

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Why Netflix Is Binging On “Chelsea”

“This place is so vast!” says Chelsea Handler, nearly breaking into a Mary Tyler Moore–like twirl inside an empty soundstage on the Sony lot.

“There’s so much room to maneuver!” In a few weeks, carpenters will begin construction on the set of her upcoming Netflix talk show, scheduled to begin streaming in 190 nations on May 11. But for now, on a warm February afternoon in Culver City, as Handler takes in the 16,000-square-foot space for the first time, all she has is her imagination.

“I’ve never actually been in here before,” she says. “I’ve only seen where the green room and the guest rooms are going to be. And”—she pauses for effect—”where they’ll be putting the bar.”

If all goes according to plan—and things usually do in Handler’s world, even if she insists she never has a plan—the 41-year-old stand-up comedian turned E! network star turned streaming pioneer will be spending a large chunk of the next several years inside this soundstage. The exact contours of the show are still being worked out by Handler’s staff of 50 producers, writers, editors, and researchers. What’s certain is that the program, called Chelsea, will stream three nights a week—Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays—and feature interviews with a variety of guests about often touchy topics: “abortion, parenthood, the electoral college . . .” she says, by way of examples, plus a regular dose of Handler’s bawdy, transgressive humor. It will feature taped field reports—mini versions of the four hour-plus Chelsea Does documentaries that debuted on Netflix back in January. There will be a live audience and lots of wild-card elements; earlier in the day, Handler held auditions for a child correspondent (“I’m looking for a 10-year-old with attitude,” she says). All of this will be packed into a running time of 30 minutes, more or less. In the world of streaming video, nobody is watching the clock too closely.

Right now, she’s in the middle of a series of creative meetings. “People come and pitch me ideas,” she says, gesturing vaguely toward where a lazy Susan–style stage she’s proposed might go (“There’ll be a section if I’m interviewing three or four people, the way Dick Cavett sometimes did, and another if I’m interviewing one of the show’s correspondents,” she explains). “That’s how I’ve always worked. Give me options. I’ll tell you what I like and don’t like. I know what the show is. I just can’t put it in words. But it won’t be regimented. You’re not going to turn it on three nights a week and have an opening monologue, a guest, and a band. It’ll be completely different.”

In one respect, it already is: It’s on Netflix.

Talk shows on broadcast airwaves have censors, commercial breaks, and nightly ratings. Talk shows on basic cable—such as Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal, on TBS—get away with racier conversations but still have to cut to ads (and deal with jittery advertisers). Even pay-cable talk shows, like John Oliver’s, on HBO, follow relatively traditional formats—a guy behind a desk—and exist within an old-fashioned corporate bureaucracy. But a talk show that runs on a streaming service—especially one that prides itself on giving talent virtually unlimited creative freedom, that is intent on rewiring the viewing habits of the whole world, and that has a $6 billion budget with which to do all of this—can be pretty much whatever its host wants it to be. On Netflix, there are no ads, no ratings (the company has never revealed how many people watch its shows, much to the annoyance of its competition), and no network notes, at least none that Handler can recall. The company “is amazing,” she says.

Netflix’s laissez-faire attitude toward talent has resulted in some groundbreaking programs, including Beau Willimon’s presidential soap opera, House of Cards, and Jenji Kohan’s women’s prison dramedy, Orange Is the New Black (as well as a few stinkers, like the recent Full House reboot, Fuller House). Even so, Handler’s show will mark a major departure. For one thing, the company that popularized binge viewing will be releasing episodes in a radically old-fashioned way: one at a time. Each will go live at 12:01 a.m. and remain on servers indefinitely, for subscribers to stream as they please—but it’s as close as Netflix has ever come to traditional appointment television.

What’s even more unusual for Netflix is that the show will be covering current events in some degree of real time. This is a move that CEO Reed Hastings and chief content officer Ted Sarandos had hinted at during an earnings call last October. “On the news side, we are definitely being more adventurous,” Sarandos told reporters, somewhat cryptically. When Hastings responded by asking Sarandos, “What’s the likelihood that we compete with Vice in the next two years?” Sarandos answered, “Probably high.” The Internet immediately lit up with talk of Netflix’s grand new plan to expand into news, and the streaming service quickly backpedaled. In a follow-up email, a corporate spokesperson attempted to clarify these remarks by telling reporters, “We’ll leave the news business to folks like yourself.”

Chelsea Handler Solves Your Thorniest Work Problems

Handler, of course, isn’t a newsperson. But talk shows are by nature tethered to the stories of the day, and having her on the air discussing them marks a shift for Netflix, transforming the media company from a simple streaming service, such as Hulu or Amazon Prime Video, into a living, breathing part of the news cycle. “It doesn’t have to be ripped from the headlines every episode,” Sarandos says of the show’s content, backpedaling a little bit more. “If Chelsea is picking the right topics, the conversation is going to be around for a few weeks. But, yes, it’s definitely more topical and timely than what we usually do.”

There are risks for Netflix. After all, the company is putting its money and reputation (and 90 minutes a week of bandwidth) behind a button-pushing, controversy-prone comedian who once dressed a little person as Adolf Hitler to celebrate Germany’s World Cup win, whose sharp tongue has made enemies of everyone from Angelina Jolie to Nick Cannon, and who has posted more topless photos of herself than Vladimir Putin (which may explain some of her 5.8 million Twitter followers and 2.1 million Instagram followers). Talk-show hosts function as brand identifiers: Jimmy Fallon is in many ways the face of NBC, just as Jon Stewart was for Comedy Central. Placing an unpredictable force like Handler behind a talk-show desk (even if she doesn’t end up having a desk) could put Netflix in awkward situations.

At the moment, though, Handler is just looking for a place to sit down. After winding through hallways and taking some stray turns (“Is this an office?” she asks after opening a door into what looks like a closet), Handler finally finds the only part of the soundstage with furniture—a large backstage lounge with a couple of old sofas presumably left behind by a previous tenant. As the star settles into a couch, the production assistant asks if he can fetch her a bottle of water.

“No,” she says, deadpan. “Just bring us a condom.”


Ted Sarandos was chatting with his wife at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in February 2014 when Handler crashed their conversation. “She asked me if I was the Netflix guy,” recalls the exec, who’d never met the comedian before. “She asked a lot of questions. She was really tenacious about it. She wanted to know how things worked, how Netflix was different. It was a real deep dive. It was almost as if she was on a fact-finding mission.”

Which, in fact, she was.

At the time, Handler was in the middle of her seventh year hosting Chelsea Lately, the entertainment-news channel E!’s popular five-day-a-week, late-night talk show in which she engaged in gossipy banter with Hollywood celebs and poked fun at her little-person sidekick, Chuy. The gig had made her rich (the network reportedly paid her between $8 million and $12 million a year) and famous (each episode drew upward of a million viewers) and even something of a groundbreaker: the first female comic to succeed at late-night-TV hosting, something not even Joan Rivers was able to do. Reruns of her show aired so many times a day that it sometimes seemed like the only thing on the network. There was even a spin-off, After Lately, a semi-fictitious reality series in which the cast and crew of Chelsea Lately was shown bickering and engaging in other backstage shenanigans. That drew a million viewers per night as well.

But after taping more than 1,000 episodes (and interviewing almost as many Kardashians), Handler was miserable and ready for a change. She was tired of celebrity gossip, appalled at the audience’s hunger for it, and, most of all, fed up with being on the network that produced programs like Leave It to Lamas and Bridalplasty. “It was incredibly frustrating,” she says. “You’re a reflection of the company you keep, and I wasn’t impressed with anybody. The people I was working with on the network side, they never could think big. I just wanted to leave, to be somewhere else.”

Handler has trusted her instincts ever since she was a kid in suburban New Jersey. “I never really have epiphanies,” she says, “I just have thoughts and act on them. I’m impulsive.” Her dad was a used-car salesman and Jewish; her mom, a German-born homemaker, was Mormon. (“We celebrated both Christmas and Hanukkah, but I consider myself Jewish,” she says.) The youngest of six children, she was raised without much supervision, and it clearly left her with an independent streak. After about “10 minutes” of community college, Handler says she left for L.A. to become an actress, moving in with relatives who had nine children, three dogs, and a parrot. Living in what she calls a “disgusting” environment, she waited tables between auditions for commercials and sitcom parts, growing more and more restless. “I just wanted my life to begin,” she says. “I wanted everything to start. I wanted my break.”

It came soon, in the unlikely form of a DUI conviction. On the eve of her 21st birthday, while driving home from a bar with an equally sloshed friend—”midway through [singing] the second chorus of Whitney Houston’s ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody,’ ” as Handler describes the incident in her 2008 best-selling memoir (the second of five), Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea—she was pulled over by the police. After a night in jail, she was sentenced to DUI classes, and it was there, while regaling fellow offenders with the details of her arrest (like how she called the white cops who busted her “racists” and drunkenly complained about being “racially profiled”), that she realized her calling. “You ought to do stand-up,” her DUI classmates told her.

“Stand-up was my entrée into the entertainment world,” she says. “I didn’t have to act out somebody else’s words. I could just stand there with a microphone and nobody would interrupt me. It’s the most narcissistic thing you could probably do.”

Next act: After leaving E!, Handler was drawn to Netflix by the freedom to explore.

Within about six years, she had landed development deals with Paramount and NBC. She scored her first regular role, on an Oxygen network sketch-comedy program called Girls Behaving Badly (sort of an estrogen-infused Punk’d), and started getting invitations to appear on the E! network’s “countdown” reports, in which various comedians riff on news and celebrity gossip.

Ted Harbert, who was then the head of the Comcast-owned network, spotted her and saw potential. In 2005, he offered Handler her own sketch-comedy program, The Chelsea Handler Show, which tanked. A year later, he tried again, giving her Chelsea Lately. Around this time, Handler began a relationship with Harbert (now chairman of NBC Broadcasting) that had E! employees gossiping around watercoolers for four years, until they broke up. “Now that I look back on it, it was very odd,” she admits. “It was tricky. But my mom had just died. And he was the president of the network. He was this older guy who thought I was the greatest thing in the world. So I returned the favor.”

As she says: She has thoughts and acts on them.

Handler did so again in March 2014, a month after chatting up Sarandos at that Oscar after-party, when she decided to leave E! and broke the news to her bosses in a way that only Handler might think was a good idea—by all but announcing it on The Howard Stern Show. “E! has just become a sad, sad place to live,” she said on the air. “They don’t know what they’re doing, they have no ideas . . . everything they do just is a failure.” Handler says she was surprised when E! execs assumed it was a ploy for a fatter contract. “Because I felt unhappy, I just assumed that they knew,” she explains. “But they thought I was negotiating. I told them, ‘You don’t have to give me more money. It’s not about that. I don’t care. I don’t want to be on this network anymore.’ ” An E! spokesperson says, “Chelsea called E! home for seven years, and it’s disappointing that she continues to criticize the network that launched her career.”

Working blue: Handler looks forward to being free from traditional network restrictions.

Handler’s next move became a subject of intense speculation in the TV world. That spring, the late-night airwaves were in flux. At CBS, Letterman had announced his retirement from Late Show, and Craig Ferguson’s contract with The Late Late Show was about to expire. Once Handler left E!, rumors began to circulate that she was after one of those jobs. An Instagram photo that she posted showing a packet of papers with the CBS logo on them and a caption reading “business meeting” didn’t do a lot to dispel this talk. But Handler was merely stirring the pot. “Those were just meetings that people wanted to take,” she says. “I was offered several jobs. I was offered syndication late-night shows. But they were all conversations that didn’t get far, because there was no point. I was never interested. I didn’t want to step into somebody else’s shoes. I didn’t want to be on some other late-night show doing the same shit again.”

What she was interested in—and why she sought out Sarandos at that party—was Netflix. “House of Cards was on, and I just thought it was cool,” she says. “I thought they were smart, that they knew what they’re doing, and that I could do something different there. I thought, I want to work at that table.”

She asked her manager, Irving Azoff, to set up a meeting with “the Netflix guy” at the streaming service’s Beverly Hills headquarters. (Azoff did nothing to dissuade her. “He never tells me what to do—he knows better,” she says.) Sarandos, who attended the meeting, along with Netflix’s VP of content acquisition, Lisa Nishimura, and VP of original content, Cindy Holland, was “stunned that Chelsea hadn’t signed with one of the CBS shows,” he says. “But it wasn’t like we were looking to make a talk show. It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s find a host.’ She came in, and we met, and it was more like one of those we-don’t-know-if-we-should-do this-because-we’ve-never-done-anything-like-this-before kind of things.” Turns out those are Netflix’s favorite types of meetings. “We’re all about experimenting,” says Nishimura. “And the timing was terrific.”

Although Netflix didn’t do any formal crunching of Handler’s numbers—there were no focus groups or analyses of her ratings on E!—the company had detected signs that the streaming audience was receptive to a Netflix talk show. “Anecdotally, if you look at what’s happening in late night, increasingly people want consumer control,” says Nishimura. “Whether it’s digital clips of Fallon’s celebrity lip sync or [James] Corden’s singing with celebrities in cars, you’re starting to find that consumers aren’t watching late night as appointment TV.” Though Netflix is a closed system, it plans to share video clips via YouTube and its social channels to drive viewers to the show.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcIAMiH6bIE?rel=1&autoplay=0]

“Near-live,” is what BTIG Research analyst Rich Greenfield calls this new form of entertainment consumption. “People love the late-night conversation, but they want to watch it on their own terms. And Netflix wants to be a part of that.” Near-live programming, he explains, fits with the company’s push to keep people paying $7.99 a month. “That’s the most important thing for Netflix. They don’t care about nightly ratings—they care about subscribers coming back. And with Chelsea Handler, they see a talent with a passionate fan base and a person who knows how to use social media to drive awareness.” When Handler isn’t posting risqué photos of herself (“I think nudity is funny, especially when it’s inappropriate,” she says), she’s tweeting out a cascade of zingers, put-downs, and comedic observations. “I found a piece of pretzel in my underwear this morning,” she tweeted recently. “Conclusion: I was intoxicated, unsupervised, and abstinent.”

Surprisingly, Handler says social media doesn’t come naturally to her. “Would I do these things if I wasn’t famous?” she ponders. “No. If I didn’t have something to promote, I wouldn’t. It’s just something you have to do right now. But once I got the hang of it, it has been fun to interact with fans. As silly as it sounds, it feels good to do it.” It also makes smart business sense, undoubtedly providing leverage in negotiating with, say, major streaming companies. In June 2014, Handler and Netflix signed a deal reportedly valued at $10 million—or five times what John Oliver is said to be paid by HBO—for the show, the docuseries, and a stand-up special for Netflix (Uganda Be Kidding Me Live, released in October 2015). Then she acted on impulse again, announcing that she’d be taking a break. She didn’t come back for 18 months.


Handler is lounging poolside at her Bel Air home, getting high. And then doing leg squats.

She’s filming one of her talk show’s field reports, this one focusing on a personal trainer who believes that inhaling marijuana before a workout enhances the exercise experience. He’s brought complicated-looking vaporizing devices, which Handler needs help operating—”I’m more of a drinker,” she says apologetically, after coughing up a lungful of cannabis—as well as some brutal-looking sports equipment. A camera crew is capturing it all, as Handler’s two furry mutts, Chunk and Tammy, watch with weary detachment from the other side of the pool.

Handler has shot a number of these mini docs, not all of them in the comfort of her tastefully decorated home—which happens to be Esther Williams’s old mansion, remodeled with ultramodern conveniences, including a guest bathroom with an electronic toilet control panel so high-tech you need a degree in physics just to flush. Last week, she had flown to Moscow (“a horrible place,” she notes, making a face) to do a segment on young girls in the Russian figure-skating program. Next week, she’ll hop over to Las Vegas to watch a hypercompetitive youth baseball tournament. There will also be segments on a vocal coach who teaches trans women how to sound more feminine and a visit to the home of a polygamist family. Judging from what’s going on around her pool—Handler, high as a kite, swinging a kettle bell so clumsily it’s a wonder she doesn’t accidentally propel herself into the pool—these taped segments will be pretty hilarious.

But like her four heavily promoted Chelsea Does docs, which premiered on Netflix in January, they’ll aim to be more than merely amusing. One reason Handler was drawn to Netflix was that she could express a smarter, more intellectually curious side of her personality. “When we were on the network, I can’t tell you how many times we had to take jokes out because of advertisers,” she says. “It was constant bickering back and forth. You can’t do this, you can’t do that. There was no creative license.” But with Netflix, if she wants to get high and do push-ups, it’s not a problem. If she wants to spend 30 minutes discussing presidential politics, that’s cool too. If she wants to take an epic hiatus before starting the show—traveling the world, buying a house in Spain, and having a brief fling with a crew member aboard a ship—nobody is going to complain.

“I sat down at Netflix and told them I want to take [time] off, and then I could come back and do some documentaries, if they would hook me up with some of [the filmmakers] they had access to,” she recalls. “And they were like, ‘Great!’ ”

The Chelsea Does docs—about racism, marriage, drugs, and Silicon Valley—were Handler’s idea, but from Netflix’s point of view they were a savvy segue into a talk show, a tone test for a new sort of Chelsea. They’re not exactly Ken Burns–level productions, but they are certainly more intelligent and thought-provoking than anything Handler ever did on E!. In the Silicon Valley episode, she ventures to the tech capital to “talk to them about their algorithms—and find out what an algorithm is.” She rides a hoverboard, interviews an AI robot (“Are you trying to annoy me?” it asks her), and pitches her own app, an iPhone program that fakes an incoming call or text so that you can sneak out of meetings (Gotta Go! went on sale on iTunes the week the doc was released).

“The docs gave us the opportunity to try a new format,” says Sarandos. “The interview style, the roundtables, the outside segments—all of those are things that will be in the talk show.” As Handler puts it, they “served as a great bridge. I wanted to show people that I’m taking a real big jump into something new, that I was reinventing myself.”

To continue that evolution on the talk show, Handler has enlisted Bill Wolff, the producer who, in 2005, discovered an obscure Air America Radio host named Rachel Maddow and turned her into MSNBC’s No. 1 star (he left in 2014 to help launch Vice for HBO). “Chelsea and Rachel are actually similar people,” Wolff says, “smart, funny, hard-working, and transparent. When you meet Chelsea or Rachel, they’re just as they appear on TV.”

Handler spoke with several potential producers before connecting with Wolff. (“We met at a hotel bar for one drink—and that became 10 drinks,” she says.) Wolff for his part, appreciated Handler’s creative instinct. “The vision was essentially in place,” he remembers. “She told me that she wanted to put together a show in her voice, but that was about the broader world.”

The process of creating a talk show is always the same, Wolff says, whether the host is a wonky Rhodes Scholar with an Elvis-like ‘do or a community college dropout (who says she reads 75 books a year and who has written five best sellers of her own). “You spend a lot of time together,” he explains. “You find out what she’s interested in, what she likes to do, the things she finds funny. And over the course of weeks and months, you piece together a proper form for her self-expression. You try to exploit the things that make that person special.”

What’s tricky about Handler is that the very things that make her unique—an instinct to push buttons and a fearlessness about offending—aren’t traits typically associated with talk-show schmoozers. Netflix has content deals with other stars—Adam Sandler, the Duplass Brothers, Brad Pitt—but the person the company has chosen to beam into subscribers’ bedrooms, night after night, in 190 countries, happens to be the one capable of insulting entire nation-states with a single zinger (she still hasn’t apologized to Serbia after an offhand remark about that country being a “disappointment” sparked a nationwide boycott of her E! show).

Still, Chelsea—and Chelsea—may be a gamble worth taking. “Neflix is about reaching all four quadrants,” explains analyst Greenfield. “Fuller House is very different from House of Cards, which is very different from Orange Is the New Black. And Chelsea is different, as well, which is what Netflix wants. If you think about what a video bundler does,” he goes on, “it provides a little bit of food programming on a food channel, a little comedy on a comedy channel, a little drama, a little bit of everything. And that’s what Netflix is doing with Chelsea Handler—it’s providing a totally different type of content. Because, remember, Netflix doesn’t really want to be a network, it wants to be a video packager. Its goal is not to replace HBO. It wants to replace Comcast.”

That stoned woman by the pool, lurching around with a kettle bell? She is merely its latest secret weapon.

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How Apple Could Make the iPhone 7 Completely Warrant-Proof

Apple’s face-off with the government over providing access to the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters may be over, but the re-awakening of another case in Brooklyn, New York, proves that the two parties are destined to dance again—perhaps many times over, unless Apple can find a way out of the dispute. It might.

The FBI won a court order in Riverside, California, compelling Apple to go as far as to write a new OS for the phone used by Syed Farook in order to break into the device. It has since abandoned that order, but the Justice Department has now petitioned a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, to force Apple to help it access the contents of an iPhone owned by a convicted drug trafficker.

Apple has been put at a disadvantage in these jousts by having to admit that enabling access to these phones was indeed technically possible. Apple’s basic position is that while it has the technology and expertise to hack into encrypted data on an iPhone, it’s the wrong thing to do. Creating even a single hack, Apple says, could endanger the security of millions of iPhones because there’s always a chance that the hack might somehow be released into the wild.

Apple has indeed helped the government access encrypted data on iPhones, but when the FBI demanded in open court that it create a special operating system to hamstring the security features on the Farook phone, Apple drew a line in the sand.

In the future, Apple may not be put in this position. It could design the iPhone 7 and change iOS in ways that will make the answer to the question “can you break into this criminal’s iPhone?” a truthful “No.”

But how? That’s where things get a little intense.

When you power down an iPhone or put it to sleep the device automatically generates an encryption key, which can only be re-opened with a decryption key. The decryption key is automatically generated by the phone when the user inputs their passcode. Prior to iOS 8, the decryption key existed on the user’s device and with Apple. Since iOS 8, the decryption key exists only on the user’s device.

So Syed Farook’s iPhone 5c, which ran iOS 9, limited the number of times the FBI could guess Farook’s passcode to 10. After the tenth incorrect guess the phone would disable the decryption key—data gone, game over. The OS also put progressively long time delays between login tries, making the process of guessing the passcode using a computer take years.

By building these features into the OS, Apple essentially removed itself almost entirely from the business of securing and accessing the data on a user’s iPhone. But, as we learned from the San Bernardino case, it didn’t remove itself completely. That is, Apple has the ability to create a different version of the OS that, when loaded onto the phone, shuts all those security measures off. Then, a computer program can quickly run through thousands of possible password combinations to eventually guess the correct one and unlock the device.

Could Apple remove itself completely from the security chain, so that it couldn’t do anything to help open an iPhone—even if the device contained, say, the immediate location of a hidden dirty bomb?

That’s very likely, but there are big trade-offs involved, security experts tell me. The more Apple removes itself from the secure relationship between user and phone, the more it gives away its ability to access the system when something needs fixing.

Cooper Levenson attorney and security expert Peter Fu explained it like this: If you’re trying to get rid of all the rats in the sewer system, you can cement over all the drains so no rats can get in. But if the rats get in some other way, you have a big problem getting down into the sewers to remove them.

Apple could almost certainly alter iOS to preclude the user, Apple, or anybody else from downshifting into an earlier OS version with weaker security measures.

“It can remove all of its administrative privileges altogether,” Fu says. This seems extreme, but then “no one would have guessed that Apple would have written itself out of the ability to recover lost passcodes,” Fu says.

Nobody knows exactly what would happen if Apple went to these lengths. There would almost certainly be unforeseen and unintended consequences.

One consequence would be Apple losing the level of access it needs to fix security problems in the OS that come up over time.

As in the “rats” analogy, Apple would be effectively sealing off its own access to its OS, eliminating its ability to fix security exposures that might be revealed as time goes on.

“Who says there’s not another Heartbleed?” Fu says. “We are removing our ability to combat those kind of vulnerabilities.”

Better to leave the drains open. “In order to make a secure system, you need to make it a little less secure,” Fu says.

Also, Apple may have a few of its own secret methods of bypassing security and accessing user data—methods that are used only in Cupertino. It may not want to give those up.

The Hardware Approach

The other general method of hacking into a locked iPhone is by compromising the hardware.

The reason the FBI gave for backing off the San Bernardino court order is that a third-party had emerged with a technique for breaking into the Farook iPhone without Apple’s help. Some in the security community speculated that the third party supplied a method that calls for the removal and duplication (“mirroring”) of the phone’s NAND memory module, where the encryption and decryption keys are stored. With the contents of the NAND mirrored on another module, a fresh copy of the encryption keys can be swapped on a new module every time the 10 login limit is reached, effectively extending the number of possible passcode guesses to infinity.

The most obvious way for Apple to thwart this kind of attack would be to relocate those encryption keys to a more secure place on the phone—someplace that can’t be physically removed from the device. One possibility is the Secure Enclave in the CPU, where the unique transaction codes for mobile payments are stored.

But this approach, security people say, comes with serious drawbacks. The reason the crypto-keys are kept on the NAND module is so that they can be quickly accessed when the user enters a passcode or passes the fingerprint scan. After all, we unlock our phones thirty times a day or more. Storing the keys on the CPU would slow down the act of unlocking the phone. And the CPU itself might have to grow bigger to handle the increased power requirement, which in turn could compromise the svelte design of future iPhones, Fu says. Moreover, making such a radical change to the CPU would take time.

“Apple needs time to re-spin hardware, so don’t expect any Secure Enclave updates until the iPhone 7s,” says security researcher Dan Guido.

A more practical idea, perhaps, is to keep the crypto-keys on the NAND module and make the module much harder to remove from the circuit board of the device. This might be done by attaching the module to the circuit board with heat glue, Fu says. Attempting to remove it would break the module or the circuit board. Either way, the phone becomes inactive.

Pushed To The Defensive

Over the past couple of years Apple has been steadily tightening the security on its phones and making it more difficult for law enforcement to execute search warrants that extend to the contents of the devices. The matter came to a head when the FBI won its court order requiring Apple to help hack the Farook phone.

When the FBI called “time out” in that case, I believed Apple might continue to strengthen the security of its phones, but still leave a tiny crack in the backdoor in case the government presented a profound need to break into a terrorist’s device in the future.

My opinion changed when the Justice Department recently revived a criminal case in Brooklyn, New York, again trying to compel Apple on the strength of the antiquated All Writs Act. The Brooklyn case involves a convicted drug peddler, while the San Bernardino matter involved mass murder by people with connections to international terrorist groups. The government has an even lesser need to gather information from a locked iPhone in the Brooklyn case than it had in the San Bernardino case.

The Justice Department’s reviving of the matter proved that the stand-off over the Farook phone was no one-off, and that the government was looking to establish precedent for using the All Writs Act to quickly gain access to private iPhone contents in a broad array of future cases.

Now that this card has been played, it becomes very likely that Apple will do everything it can to further remove itself from the secure relationship between user and phone. If the government has a warrant to search a locked iPhone, and the user—like Farook—isn’t around to enter the passcode, Apple will simply, truthfully, be unable to help.

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How Women Entrepreneurs Can Get More Funding

The number of women-owned firms increased by one-and-a-half times the national average between 1997 and 2015—74% versus 51%, according to The 2015 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report by American Express OPEN.

And other research tells us that those women are crushing it. Seed-stage venture capital firm First Round Capital found that its investments in companies with women founders performed 63% better than those with management teams that were all men. A September 2014 study by Babson College found that businesses with a woman on the executive team are more likely to have higher valuations at both first (64% higher) and last (49% higher) funding rounds.

More Profits, Less Capital

But, when it comes to money, the numbers are much bleaker.

Businesses with women on the executive team received just 7% of venture funding between 2011 and 2013, according to that Babson study, and only 2.7% of those companies had a woman CEO.

In 2015, just 11% of Small Business Administration 7(a) loans went to businesses where a woman had majority ownership.

Lack of access to capital is a problem that affects the entire growth trajectory of many women-owned businesses, says Amanda Brown, executive director of the National Women’s Business Council (NWBC), a nonpartisan federal advisory council created to serve as an independent source of advice and counsel on economic issues of importance to women business owners. The organization’s 2014 report, Access to Capital by High–Growth Women-Owned Businesses, found that, on average, men start their businesses with nearly twice as much capital as women ($135,000 versus $75,000). This disparity is slightly larger among firms with high-growth potential ($320,000 versus $150,000), and much larger in the top 25 firms ($1.3 million versus $210,000).

A Complex Problem

Brown says that gender bias is a big issue in accessing capital. The world of venture capital is dominated by men, and “people put their trust in people that look like them,” she says. On the lending front, she says bias is also a factor.

“We’ve talked to women that literally report the fact that they’ll walk into a bank, and they’ll ask for information about a loan, and the loan officer will run to the back of the room and come back with a pink pamphlet on loans. That sort of bias is still very much built in,” she says.

Brown says there are other related factors, too. Women-owned businesses are often one-person shops or in industries that don’t have the high-growth potential that VCs demand. They employ just 6% of U.S. workers and contribute less than 4% of business revenue, according to the 2015 State of Women-Owned Businesses report. When large publicly traded firms are excluded, they make up 31% of privately held firms, contribute 14% of employment, and 12% of revenue, the report says.

But that’s also a chicken versus egg factor, says Deborah Jackson. She and fellow Wall Street veteran Andrea Turner Moffitt founded New York City-based Plum Alley Investments, a private investment platform that connects women entrepreneurs with people who want to invest in their businesses. Women need mentorship to show them how to think bigger and grow their businesses, she says.

“What happens over time, people go, ‘Oh, women entrepreneurs aren’t that successful.’ Well, why? Because they don’t get the funding. Funding is like oxygen for companies,” she says. And while the first round of funding is tough to land, second and third rounds are even more scarce, she says.

Brown says that because women tend to bootstrap longer, using personal credit cards and funds to keep their businesses going, they’re more likely to suffer dings on their credit report from high debt loads or late payments. That can make getting a loan more difficult, too, she says. Together, all of these factors stifle the growth of women-owned businesses.

Finding Solutions

Jackson says one of the primary keys to solving the problem is to get more women investing—and that can come from more women. According to the 2014 report, Harnessing the Power of the Purse: Female Investors and the Global Opportunity for Growth, coauthored by Moffitt and published by the Center for Talent Innovation, U.S. women exercise decision-making control over $11.2 trillion. That’s a whopping 39% of the nation’s estimated $28.6 trillion in assets that can be invested. And nearly half of that amount—$5.1 trillion—is managed solely by women. Plum Alley’s goal is to move more of that money through the pipeline to women entrepreneurs.

Independent producer and entrepreneur Nely Galán, former president of entertainment at Telemundo, says women need to look for where the money is. In her new book, Self-Made: Becoming Empowered, Self-Reliant, and Rich in Every Way, she advises women to look for “hidden money.” This may include contests or grants designed for women-owned businesses. And while it’s not investment money, she says women entrepreneurs should seek out large companies’ supplier diversity initiatives that may offer lucrative business opportunities.

Brown is optimistic about the future of investment in women-owned businesses. She points toward companies like Plum Alley and Golden Seeds, another early-stage investment firm with a focus on women-led businesses as examples of innovative solutions to getting more money to women. Providing incentives to banks to offer the smaller loans that women-owned businesses often seek is another solution, she says.

She says the entrepreneurial marketplace is also responding. Alternative lenders are cropping up, although sometimes their interest rates are shockingly high. However, Able, an Austin-based lender, offers loans to entrepreneurs who secure a portion of the amount from their friends and family. Able’s growth level offers loans from $25,000 to $1 million to borrowers who secure the first 25% from their own network. Interest rates for such loans start at just 8%.

Brown also says that greater transparency about capital is important. The NWBC is actively speaking to lenders and venture capitalists about the disparity and working to create change. But it’s a slow process that requires making some people aware that there’s a problem in the first place, she says.

“I would like to think that it’s not that men are just trying not to give to women, it’s just that it’s not a priority, it’s not an opportunity. It’s an unconscious reality at this point, so it’s harder to then legislate change,” Brown says.

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How Wendy’s Is Making Ghost Peppers Safe For Middle America

If you’ve never had a ghost pepper before, be warned: They’re one of the world’s hottest peppers. Properly known as the bhut jolokia, the peppers are 107 to 417 times hotter than the jalapeño on the Scoville scale, which measures chili pepper heat. And they’re part of an emerging taste for spicy food in the United States that led Wendy’s to add them to their menu.

For the second year in a row, Wendy’s is adding ghost pepper-flavored items to their menu as part of a temporary promotion. Ghost Pepper Fries and a ghost pepper-ified Jalapeño Fresco Spicy Chicken Sandwich are now on the menu at the chain’s American restaurants; both items prominently feature a ghost pepper sauce that mixes small amounts of the ultra-hot pepper with a high amount of spicy food marketing.

The two dishes are intended to specifically target a specific and very loyal niche at Wendy’s: customers who love spicy fast food and patronize chains offering extra-spicy menu items, Lori Estrada, the chain’s senior vice president of R&D, tells Fast Company.

“It’s not necessarily a product that would rise to the top in traditional screening tools, but a lot of customers told us they want chicken in a spicier format,” Estrada added. Kurt Kane, the company’s chief concept and marketing officer, noted that the ghost pepper-ified chicken sandwich in particular didn’t do as well as other items in test marketing. But he adds, “As people dug into the data behind this one, a lot of consumers said that they made a special trip to Wendy’s for this product.”

Yet there’s a secret behind the ghost pepper chicken and fries: They don’t contain that much ghost pepper.

Both dishes rely on a sour cream-based hot pepper sauce. Like most fast food condiments, they’re a wonder of chemistry and culinary science. The 20 ingredients include a variety of natural and artificial flavoring agents and preservatives. But of the 20 ingredients, ghost peppers are only No. 16 on the ingredient list. Jalapeño, by comparison, is No. 4 on the list.

So why ghost peppers? Wendy’s has to walk a difficult tightrope act in selling the menu items. Spicy foods are a reliable money generator for Wendy’s; their menu also boasts non-ghost pepper spicy chicken sandwiches, wraps, and nuggets. According to Estrada, “Consumer tastes evolve over time, and they get more used to spice. There is more [consumer] diversity as well, and tolerance for spice has changed over time. . . . We looked at our current product and looked for ways to ramp it up to a spicier level.”

While Wendy’s patrons might demand spicier menu items, it’s also a very mainstream fast food chain. Specialty establishments such as Atlanta’s The Vortex and Iowa’s Xtreme Smokehouse offer ultra-spicy burgers that provide an intense (some would say masochistic) eating experience. Wendy’s is a multinational corporation that wants to ensure diners come back and spend more money.

That means offering a sauce that is a jalapeño-ghost pepper mix instead of a traditional ghost pepper hot sauce. And the chicken sandwich features different layers of heat, which offer creaminess and cooling sensations to temper the spice. Alongside the ghost pepper/sour cream sauce, there’s a jalapeño cheddar bun, diced jalapeños, and Colby pepperjack cheese. “We played with other pepperjack cheeses, but the Colby gives some more creaminess. The ghost pepper sauce has sour cream as well—it’s a counterpoint for cooling,” says Estrada.

The ghost pepper fries, meanwhile, weren’t part of Wendy’s original plans for extra-spicy food. Kane says that the fries were the creation of kitchen staff at Wendy’s restaurants participating in original trials who came up with the dish—which covers french fries in the ghost pepper sauce, cheddar cheese sauce, and jalapeños—by improvising with ingredients from the chicken sandwich.

For Wendy’s, the two dishes performed well enough to reappear on the restaurant’s menu. They’ve also inspired an atypical fandom for fast food dishes that includes YouTube reviews and tribute videos and social media postings. They also fit well into an industry trend of increasingly spicier items aimed at a niche audience of repeat customers: Burger King recently introduced a super-spicy Angriest Whopper, chain Jack in the Box has sold a similarly ghost pepper-ified Blazin’ Hot Chicken Sandwich, and fried chicken chain Popeyes’ test marketed ghost pepper wings.

The ghost pepper chicken sandwich and french fries are now on sale at Wendy’s as a limited-time offering. An end date for the campaign hasn’t been announced; Kane expects they will be available at restaurants for the next four to six weeks.

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“Containment” Showrunner Julie Plec Looks Back On Her Long Journey To Writing

While many writers have a fervent—and sometimes even delusional—belief in their abilities, Julie Plec, the writer and showrunner best known for the CW’s gothic romance The Vampire Diaries (which she cocreated with writer Kevin Williamson) and its spin-off The Originals, spent years believing that she wasn’t a writer.

She traces this long-held conviction back to a class she took when she was a student at Northwestern University. “I had taken a playwriting class in college that another friend of mine, Greg Berlanti [currently the executive producer of The Flash, Arrow, and Supergirl], had taken, and it had cemented his love for the craft and made him certain that this was something that he could do and that this was his passion. I had the opposite experience,” Plec says. “I hated it. I was terrible at it. It was a miserable experience, and I came out of that being like, well, at least I know I’m not a writer.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE983cTD4Mg?rel=1&autoplay=0]

It’s actually hard to believe Plec ever felt this way because she is so successful and prolific. She has written several episodes of The Vampire Diaries and The Originals, and more recently scripted the pilot for and several episodes of the new limited series Containment. Based on the Belgian series Cordon about a mysterious viral outbreak, the show premieres on the CW tonight, and Plec is also its showrunner.

Here, Plec looks back on the evolution of her career and how she finally broke free of her “I’m not a writer” mindset.

Julie Plec

The Early Days In Hollywood

Plec, who grew up in a suburb of Chicago, didn’t think she was cut out to be a writer in college, but she did want to find a place in the entertainment industry. Landing a gig as an assistant to horror master Wes Craven set her on that path. It was only her second job in the entertainment business, and she loved it. “There were stacks and stacks of horror scripts that needed to be read. They put a stack on my desk and asked me to start reading, and I did. That’s what the bulk of my job was in that first six months I worked for him—just going through material,” she recalls.

Plec soon realized she had a knack for reading a script and writing a fairly thoughtful analysis and decided she would make a career for herself in development. “That was an epiphany I had early on. I thought, ‘Finally, something that’s my fit. That’s what I should be doing,'” she says.

After two years, Plec was promoted from assistant to Craven’s director of development, a job she held for another two years. “They were so good to me. They really saw the value of what I was contributing. We were very close and tight-knit as a group. Marianne Maddalena, Wes’s partner, really took me under her wing and made sure that I got credit where credit was due,” Plec says. “She was a woman perfectly happy to shower praise and draw attention to the skills of another woman, which is something that I learned early on, and I really appreciate.”

Scream, 1996Photo: Dimension Films

A Dip Into Writing Via Dawson’s Creek

After four years working at Craven’s company, Plec left to work for Kevin Williamson. “I met Kevin because one of the scripts that I read when I was reading all of Wes’s material early on was Scary Movie, which was the original title of Scream. It had come in as a spec that his current director of development, Lisa Harrison, had brought in, and I read it as she was reading it. We were both freaking out because we loved it so much and were desperate for Wes to do it,” she recalls.

Plec really got to know Williamson during the making of Scream 2, “I was, basically, the development executive for Wes during that movie, and that’s how we got our creative relationship really solid. Kevin got an opportunity to have his own deal and his own company, and he asked me to come run it with him,” Plec says.

Plec brought some talented writers into the fold, hiring Berlanti to write for Dawson’s Creek and helping to launch his career by doing so, and giving Damon Lindelof, who would go on to Lost and The Leftovers, a job writing for Wasteland.

It was while working with Williamson that Plec started writing. “We were just always behind. Everything that we ever did, we were late. He was wildly busy, so any time that we were trying to get something done, I would just lend a hand. I would pitch in. I would try to write the framework of something so I could hand it over to him so that he could fix it, flesh it out. When you’re that busy, you’re an assembly line, and you have to get it done,” Plec says. “What I was doing was trying to write like him so that he could then just take it and make it better.”

At that point, Plec still didn’t see herself as a writer but rather someone who was emulating Williamson’s style. She thought, “He’s doing the writing. I’m just helping.”

After two years working with Williamson, there were at least a dozen episodes of Dawson’s Creek that had aired on television and included some dialogue Plec had written. “If you write a good line, you write a good line, and the best line wins in television,” she notes. “It doesn’t matter if you’re the guy who gets the coffee or if you’re the showrunner—best line wins. That’s the beauty of television collaboration.”

Dawson’s Creek, 1998Photo: Sony Pictures Television, The WB

The Brewing Epiphany

If you think that hearing the witty teens on Dawson’s Creek speaking her lines made Plec realize she was meant to write, well, you would be wrong.

After she and Williamson parted ways, “I had taken another job that I didn’t particularly like. Then probably a year or two had passed without me holding a steady executive job, and I didn’t want one, so I wasn’t looking,” Plec says. “I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll be an independent producer. Oh, I’ll be a manager.’ I was going through all those things in my head and one night, late at night, I was having what I would now describe as probably a panic attack because there were so many unknowns. An almost literal voice came into my head telling me, ‘You need to write.’ I don’t pray. I’m not a deeply religious person. If I were a deeply religious person, I would say that I got a message from God.”

And then she began writing . . . uh, no.

“That was really the kind of breakthrough moment, which then translated into, hilariously, me producing a movie for the next two years,” Plec says.

She Finally Makes A Move

We are getting to the point in Plec’s career story where she takes the leap.

Plec accepted a gig as a non-writing producer on the ABC Family teen drama series Kyle XY, thinking, “If I can get the show on the air, then maybe they’ll give me the opportunity to write an episode.”

And that’s what happened. “The EP, David Himelfarb, just looked at me one day and said, ‘You should write an episode because you know the show better than anybody,'” Plec says.

Excited for the opportunity, Plec wrote a script for the show’s fourth episode, and it was well received. “The first words out of the network executive’s mouth were, ‘We always knew you had this in you. Now, we are so happy to be proven right.’ It was a thrill,” she says.

Did she finally believe she was a writer at that point? Yes. “That was the validation,” she confirms.

Why Did It Take So Long?

While Plec was slow to see the obvious, her colleagues through the years encouraged her to own being a writer. “I was developing with my friend Gren Wells. She’s a screenwriter, and I’d make notes in the margins, and I’d pitch dialogue, and I’d pitch structure. She would say to me all the time, ‘You know you’re a writer.’ I’d like like, ‘No, trust me, I’m not. I’m really not.’ “

Berlanti also pointed it out to her. “Greg would say that to me all the time because I was constantly developing with him. He and I were actually writing a pilot together at one point, which is funny because I thought he was so generous by wanting to share writing credit with me when I clearly wasn’t a writer,” Plec says.

Looking back and analyzing why she took so long to embrace her talent, Plec chalks it up to her practical nature as opposed to a crippling lack of confidence.

“As a kid, I was always decent at everything that I tried. Whether it be sports or theater or school, I excelled in certain areas more than others, but I had a natural ability—I could pick up a tennis racquet and hit the ball. But when I got to a place in any level of sport or club or school where I felt like I wasn’t good enough, I would move on to something else,” she explains, and that’s an approach she continued into adulthood.

“In doing that, I never quite latched onto the thing that I loved until it all solidified 10 to 15 years into my career,” she muses.

No Regrets

Looking back, Plec thinks her unusual path to writing for television—coming at it with the experience she got in development and producing—worked to her advantage. “Here’s the thing: I had the relative talent, I suppose,” she reflects. “Obviously, people liked the things that I wrote, and they made it through, and they got filmed. But had I at 26 said, ‘Hey, great news, everybody, I’m a writer!’ and tried to explore that career, I think it would have been a disaster. I don’t think I knew shit, you know? I think that 10 years of development and creative producing and working side by side with Kevin and with Greg and reading just from an outlier point of view—I had read so many scripts over those years that just by osmosis, I must have learned something.”

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