Dick Fuld, Disgraced Former CEO Of Lehman Brothers, Makes Bizarre Comeback

Dick Fuld, part villain and part unforgivably very confused bystander to the financial crisis in the eyes of most -- and a victim of the financial crisis to himself -- made a bizarre comeback at a conference in midtown New York hotel on Thursday.

In his first public appearance (other than sworn congressional testimony) since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Fuld blamed regulators, borrowers and rumors for the end of the 158-year-old, $47 billion firm he led. It was a “perfect storm” that sank Lehman, not his own leadership or decisions, Fuld said, while touting Lehman’s “success” to the audience. He also claimed that every one of the 27,000 employees who once worked for Lehman had been a risk manager, because they owned stock in the firm.

Lehman’s September 2008 collapse was the first of many bank failures and market seizures that fall. It sparked the financial crisis that ended in a $416 billion bank bailout and left the country mired in the Great Recession.

Fuld's comments were initially carried live on the financial news network CNBC, but the feed was pulled by conference organizers part way through his remarks. Technically, Fuld was at the Marcum Microcap conference to deliver a keynote address titled, "How Emerging Growth Companies Can Succeed in Today's Capital Markets: Perspectives from My Journey." His comments, however, were a well-rehearsed if less-than-convincing defense of his own actions leading up to the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.

He denied that Lehman was a failed company in September 2008 and intimated that he and the firm were victims of a conspiracy centered around former competitors in regulatory positions with a vendetta against him. Fuld, nicknamed the “Gorilla” during his career for his overly aggressive style, seemed temperamentally unchanged, telling one conference questioner, “Why don’t you bite me?”

Months prior to Lehman’s fall, Fuld had declared that “the worst of the impact of the financial markets is behind us” and pushed subordinates to take more risk, sidelining or firing those who disagreed with him.

Fuld is now working at his own firm, Matrix Advisors, which is focused on the kind of small deals he would have scoffed at as CEO of a massive investment bank. The venue itself was an indication of his fall: an otherwise barely noteworthy conference focused on selling shares in tiny public companies.

Women Need To Listen To This Advice Given To Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer

You may think the advice that one super-successful corporate titan gives to another super-successful almost-CEO is something you can safely ignore.

Yet the last thing that Google founder Sergey Brin told Marissa Mayer right before she ascended to the throne of chief executive of Yahoo is something we all need to hear. Especially women.

In an interview with Patricia Sellers at Fortune, Mayer dished about the guidance Brin gave her in the minutes before Yahoo announced her appointment back in 2012. She said that Brin gave her all sorts of minor advice that she later wound up acting on -- like changing the Yahoo logo, one of the first things she did as CEO.

But as she was headed out the door, Brin called her back, Mayer told Sellers. "'Marissa, wait! Don’t forget to be bold,'" he said.

That’s it. That’s the advice women need to hear. Because many of us have confidence issues. I reported earlier Wednesday on a new study that offered up more evidence of the problem. The study revealed that female college students are less confident about their job and salary prospects than men.

It is the latest brick in a hard wall of evidence that shows women hold themselves back at work by not aiming higher. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg talked about the issue in her highly publicized book “Lean In,” and the Atlantic published a long piece last year called the Confidence Gap that detailed a lot of depressing examples of women’s propensity to be very much not bold.

In one anecdote, authors Katty Kay and Claire Shipman tell the story of their friend who supervises two direct reports: Rebecca and Robert. Rebecca plugs away at her job, diligently doing good work. When she needs to talk to the boss, she makes an appointment. She doesn’t speak up in client meetings. When she gets tough feedback, sometimes she cries. Meanwhile, Robert is at the boss’s office door constantly with new ideas. A lot of them are bad, but he doesn’t seem to care.

Kay and Shipman wrote:

Our friend had come to rely on and value Rebecca, but she had a feeling it was Robert’s star that would rise. It was only a matter of time before one of his many ideas would strike the right note, and he’d be off and running—probably, our friend was beginning to fear, while Rebecca was left behind, enjoying the respect of her colleagues but not a higher salary, more responsibilities, or a more important title.

Of course, as the authors note, women are often in a double-bind when it comes to boldness. Women who are bossy and decisive at work are often labeled as "bitches." But things are changing, thanks to people like Sandberg and Mayer herself.

We can also thank some great new female comics. In a recent episode of “Inside Amy Schumer” called “I’m Sorry,” there’s a hilarious takedown of the female propensity to undersell ourselves and apologize for no reason. It involves a fake panel of women geniuses who step over themselves with self-deprecating nonsense.

You should check it out. Meanwhile, I’m so sorry for taking up your time with this.

Big Banks Plead Guilty To Market Manipulation, Will Pay $5.8 Billion

The age of multibillion-dollar bank fines with no admission of wrongdoing is over. The Justice Department announced Wednesday morning that five banks pleaded guilty to market manipulation, while also paying billions of dollars in fines.

Barclays, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan and the Royal Bank of Scotland admitted to illegally distorting foreign exchange markets. The banks formed what they called "The Cartel" and aimed to set a key currency marker, known as "the fix," at mutually beneficial values.

The fix is set every day at 4 p.m. London time and is used in the more than $5 trillion currency market to determine the price of trades and the value of large institutional holdings. Traders at the banks used instant messaging chat rooms to discuss where to set the fix.

In addition to admitting guilt, the banks will also pay fines. Barclays will pay $650 million, Citigroup $925, million J.P. Morgan $550 million and RBS $395 million. Barclays will pay another $1.3 billion to New York State, federal and U.K. regulators.

The Justice Department said it was charging the banks' parent companies because the wrongdoing was pervasive, and that the banks' punishment was "fitting considering the long-running and egregious nature of their anticompetitive conduct." To put the fines in context, in 2014, Barclay's net income was $3.5 billion, Citigroup's was $7.3 billion, J.P. Morgan's was $21.8 billion and RBS' was $3.9 billion.

A fifth bank, UBS, pleaded guilty to manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate, which is called Libor. Libor is the most important international interest rate benchmark. UBS will pay $545 million in fines to the Justice Department and Federal Reserve. The value of more than $300 trillion in debt is tied to Libor.

The five banks will pay a further $1.6 billion in fines to the Federal Reserve.

This story has been updated to include more information from the Justice Department and the 2014 income of the banks mentioned.

Takata Recalls Nearly 34 Million Air Bags

WASHINGTON (AP) — Under pressure from U.S. safety regulators, Takata Corp. has agreed to declare 33.8 million air bags defective, a move that will double the number of cars and trucks included in what is now the largest auto recall in U.S. history.

The chemical that inflates the air bag can explode with too much force, blowing apart a metal inflator and sending shrapnel into the passenger compartment. The faulty inflators are responsible for six deaths and more than 100 injuries worldwide.

The announcement was made Tuesday afternoon by the heads of the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which reached an agreement with Takata after sparring with the company for the past year over the size of the recalls and the cause of the problem.

Eleven automakers, including Honda Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp., have recalled 17 million vehicles in the U.S. and more than 36 million worldwide because of the problem. It's unclear which manufacturers will be most affected by the expansion of the recall.

The Takata air bag recall dwarfs last year's highly publicized recall of 2.6 million General Motors small cars for defective ignition switches and Toyota's recalls of 10 million vehicles for problems with unintended acceleration.

NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind said investigations by the agency and auto industry haven't determined precisely what's causing Takata's inflators to explode, but said the agency cannot wait for a cause to take action.

"We know that owners are worried about their safety and the safety of their families," he said. "This is probably the most complex consumer safety recall in U.S. history."

He said people who get recall notices in the mail should immediately make an appointment to get their cars fixed.

____

AP Auto Writer Dee-Ann Durbin contributed from Detroit.

Apple CEO Tim Cook Urges GWU Graduates To Develop Moral Compass

Apple CEO Tim Cook urged graduating George Washington University students to follow their values and find a job that helps them do good in a commencement speech delivered Sunday.

Cook talked of justice and injustice in a speech that paid homage to Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, delivered to a crowd on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., VentureBeat reported. The university expected about 25,000 people to attend the commencement exercises, according to the outlet.

The CEO mentioned the civil rights leader three times in his 20-minute speech, and said that King, along with Kennedy, had been one of his childhood heroes.

Cook, who grew up in Alabama, shared a story about his first visit to the nation's capital in 1977, at the age of 16. On the trip, Cook met with then-President Carter right after meeting Alabama's governor, George Wallace, who had opposed desegregation in the '60s. (Wallace is perhaps best remembered for his 1963 inaugural address that called for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.")

“Meeting my governor was not an honor for me,” Cook told the graduates. “Shaking his hand felt like a betrayal of my own beliefs. It felt wrong, like I was selling a piece of my soul.”

It was very different from meeting America's then-president, Cook said.

“Carter was kind and compassionate. He held the most powerful job in the world, and had not sacrificed any of his humanity,” he said. “It was clear to me that one was right and one was wrong."

Cook ended with a call for graduates to live their values and change the world -- and said that working at Apple had helped him do just that:

We believe that a company that has values and acts on them can really change the world. And an individual can too. That can be you. That must be you. Graduates, your values matter. They are your North Star. Otherwise it’s just a job -- and life is too short for that. ... You don’t have to choose between doing good and doing well. It’s a false choice, today more than ever.

Your challenge is to find work that pays the rent, puts food on the table, and lets you do what is right and good and just.

Words to aspire to.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article stated incorrectly that Cook spoke about John F. Kennedy. He spoke about Robert F. Kennedy.

The States With The Most Stay-At-Home Fathers

Not too long ago, it was practically unheard of for a father to raise his children full-time instead of working for money. In the 1970s, only six U.S. men identified themselves as stay-at-home parents. Not 6 percent -- six men, in the entire country.

Last year, by contrast, an estimated 1.9 million fathers remained home with the kids -- accounting for 16 percent of the stay-at-home parent population, according to a HuffPost analysis of U.S. Census data.

That’s definitely a huge step forward for fathers seeking to shed the stigma that still lingers around the idea of a man as primary caretaker. But the figure comes with a significant caveat: Most fathers aren't staying home voluntarily. According to one prominent researcher, 80 percent of those 1.9 million dads would be working outside the home if they could.

The reasons why any parent might stay home are complex and often very personal. The job market is certainly a factor, but the cost of child care and cultural issues also likely play a key role, says Noelle Chesley, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has researched stay-at-home fathers.

The Huffington Post took a state-by-state look at men as stay-at-home caregivers, as seen in the map and table in this article. We found some instances where high proportions of dad caregivers seemed to correspond with high unemployment rates. In West Virginia, for example, where men account for an estimated 30 percent of stay-at-home parents, the unemployment rate is 6.6 percent -- well above the national average of 5.4 percent -- and the percentage of adults who are employed is the lowest in the nation.

Yet elsewhere, the correlation did not hold. In South Dakota, for example, 39 percent of stay-at-home parents are fathers, but unemployment is comparatively low.

The very definition of "stay-at-home dad" is also up for debate. The Census Bureau defines the term very narrowly, excluding same-sex partners, single dads and parents of kids who are older than 15, as well the fathers in families where both parents do not work.

Our analysis used a broader definition: any father who's been unemployed for at least a year, and who is also at home with a child or children under 18. With this approach, we sought to replicate the methodology used by the Pew Research Center in a 2014 report.

[Click the column header to sort the data]

The States With The Most Stay-At-Home Fathers

Not too long ago, it was practically unheard of for a father to raise his children full-time instead of working for money. In the 1970s, only six U.S. men identified themselves as stay-at-home parents. Not 6 percent -- six men, in the entire country.

Last year, by contrast, an estimated 1.9 million fathers remained home with the kids -- accounting for 16 percent of the stay-at-home parent population, according to a HuffPost analysis of U.S. Census data.

That’s definitely a huge step forward for fathers seeking to shed the stigma that still lingers around the idea of a man as primary caretaker. But the figure comes with a significant caveat: Most fathers aren't staying home voluntarily. According to one prominent researcher, 80 percent of those 1.9 million dads would be working outside the home if they could.

The reasons why any parent might stay home are complex and often very personal. The job market is certainly a factor, but the cost of child care and cultural issues also likely play a key role, says Noelle Chesley, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has researched stay-at-home fathers.

The Huffington Post took a state-by-state look at men as stay-at-home caregivers, as seen in the map and table in this article. We found some instances where high proportions of dad caregivers seemed to correspond with high unemployment rates. In West Virginia, for example, where men account for an estimated 30 percent of stay-at-home parents, the unemployment rate is 6.6 percent -- well above the national average of 5.4 percent -- and the percentage of adults who are employed is the lowest in the nation.

Yet elsewhere, the correlation did not hold. In South Dakota, for example, 39 percent of stay-at-home parents are fathers, but unemployment is comparatively low.

The very definition of "stay-at-home dad" is also up for debate. The Census Bureau defines the term very narrowly, excluding same-sex partners, single dads and parents of kids who are older than 15, as well the fathers in families where both parents do not work.

Our analysis used a broader definition: any father who's been unemployed for at least a year, and who is also at home with a child or children under 18. With this approach, we sought to replicate the methodology used by the Pew Research Center in a 2014 report.

[Click the column header to sort the data]

AOL CEO: Verizon Deal Will 'Extend The Tarmac' For Mobile

NEW YORK -- AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said Tuesday morning that the company's $4.4 billion acquisition by Verizon would bolster AOL's hope of dominating the burgeoning and lucrative mobile ad market.

Comparing to the company’s mission to an airplane’s flight path, Armstrong said selling to Verizon was not changing direction but, rather, “extending the tarmac.”

“This is not a deal done out of necessity,” he said before a crowd of staffers gathered in the fourth-floor reception room of the company’s Manhattan headquarters. “This is a deal done out of where the future is overall.”

According to Armstrong, one benefit of the deal announced Tuesday morning will be that, thanks to AOL’s push to make its wide variety of media properties mobile-friendly, the merged company will have access to a huge amount of user data from those sites. And while Armstrong did not mention it, data could also flow in the other direction, from legacy Verizon businesses to AOL media properties. The elusive end goal for tech companies is to squeeze every possible penny out of, or 'monetize,' the data they collect. Monetizing data generally means sharing it with other companies, which tends to make the privacy-minded users who generate that data uncomfortable. Now, Verizon and AOL will be able to monetize their data without sharing it with outside parties.

Though Armstrong insisted Verizon wanted to buy AOL mostly for its content properties -- which include The Huffington Post, Engadget and TechCrunch -- many have speculated that the company’s newly launched automated ad platform, AOL One, is the real prize. AOL earned $995 million from display and search ads on its own properties last year. The company made almost as much -- $856 million -- selling ads for third-party sites, according to Fortune. Still, Armstrong said all editorial brands were included in the deal, allaying worries about spinoffs, at least in the near term.

The deal may also boost the companies' work around mobile video.

AOL began investing heavily in video two years ago, when ad sales for online video in the U.S. hit $2.8 billion, a 19 percent increase from the previous year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. That year, the company bought the programmatic video ad platform Adap.tv -- which became a cornerstone of AOL One. A month later, HuffPost launched HuffPost Live, the publication’s streaming video network.

“Mobile is the centerpiece,” Armstrong said. “We need to be on every single screen.”

Verizon, which streams television channels through its FiOS division, also has a hand in the lucrative live-sports business with the exclusive NFL Mobile app.

“You’re going to be at a company that does everything from NFL live games to HuffPost Live,” Armstrong said.

He said the deal was completed just after midnight, hours before the public announcement was made. It began as an operational deal, but became a merger. If the acquisition gets the green light from regulators, the deal will close before the end of summer, Armstrong said.

"This deal,” he said, “puts us at the big table.”

Jenny Che and Damon Beres contributed reporting.

Verizon To Buy AOL In $4.4 Billion Deal

Verizon announced Tuesday morning that it plans to buy AOL for $4.4 billion.

The all-cash deal between the telecom giant and the owner of The Huffington Post will reportedly be completed this summer, pending regulatory approvals.

The entrance to AOL headquarters at 770 Broadway in New York City is seen on May 12, 2015.

Lowell McAdam, Verizon chairman and CEO, said in a press release that the merger will help "provide a cross-screen connection for consumers, creators and advertisers to deliver that premium customer experience."

"AOL has once again become a digital trailblazer, and we are excited at the prospect of charting a new course together in the digitally connected world," McAdam stated. "AOL's advertising model aligns with this approach, and the advertising platform provides a key tool for us to develop future revenue streams."

Lowell C. McAdam, chairman and chief executive officer of Verizon Communications.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is expected to continue to lead the company once the deal goes through.

"The leadership at AOL is staying and I am staying – enthusiastically, and we made that part of the deal," he wrote in a memo to employees early Tuesday morning. "We know their team well and they know our team well. The cultures share very similar values and are both working on very similar ways to do good while doing well."

Armstrong also noted that the deal would mean better wages and benefits for AOL employees.

"For you this means growth, it means mobile, and it means compensation that will be equal or better to your AOL compensation. Your benefits will not change in 2015. We will eventually go on Verizon’s benefit plan, but that won’t happen until 2016 or later and we will work with Verizon to make sure the benefits are strong and cover important areas of people's lives," Armstrong wrote. "Your job and what you do on a daily basis should be enhanced by the market opportunity this deal is targeted to capture. The simple answer to the question of 'what does this mean for you?' should be, 'I just got more resources, more support and more growth opportunity.'"

AOL shares rose 18 percent in premarket trading to $50.27, the Wall Street Journal reported. Verizon shares fell 1.6 percent to $49.

The deal comes 15 years after AOL’s catastrophic merger with Time Warner. On the heels of the dot-com bubble burst, resulting in a $98.7 billion loss in 2002, the combined company was forced to write down the value of AOL, creating the biggest annual corporate loss in history.

In 2009, Time Warner finally spun off AOL. The company began investing heavily in media properties. AOL acquired TechCrunch in 2010. A year later, it purchased The Huffington Post for $315 million.

By 2013 -- when ad sales for online video climbed 19 percent to $2.8 billion, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau -- AOL began investing heavily in video products. That year, it bought the programmatic video ad platform Adap.tv for $405 million. A month later, HuffPost launched HuffPost Live, its streaming video network. Last month at the 2015 Digital Content NewFronts -- a convention for media companies to show off new content to advertisers -- AOL promoted a slate of new reality show programs starring celebrities such as James Franco and Oscar-winner Jared Leto.

In April, AOL launched One, an automated platform for buying ads across different media. The service, which provides open data to ad buyers, pits AOL against tech goliaths Facebook and Google, which limit the data clients can use.

1) Verizon just bought a strong ad tech stack and is probably going to be most advanced mobile to desktop player soon.

— Darren Herman (@dherman76) May 12, 2015

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is expected to stay on.

“The decision to enter into an agreement with Verizon was made over a long and thoughtful time period and both companies see significant opportunity to service consumers and customers in a differentiated and exciting way,” Armstrong told employees. “On a personal level, the decision to go forward with an agreement was predicated on giving our talent the best opportunity to build a multi-decade business that would be deeply growth oriented and aimed directly at the platform shift that video and mobile are offering the world -- today and 20 years from now.”

In recent years, investors have urged AOL to merge to Yahoo, the troubled online media and tech giant. As recently as January, the activist investor Starboard Value LP sent a letter to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, advising her to consider a deal with AOL.

Still, AOL's cash-cow remains its dial-up business, which had 2.2 million subscribers at the end of 2014. Subscription revenue reached $606.5 million last year, comprising about 24 percent of overall sales.

Seems like Verizon’s Fios offerings could cannibalize AOL’s lucrative dial-up business.

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 12, 2015

It's unclear whether Verizon will sell off its publications, the biggest three of which are HuffPost, Engadget and TechCrunch. Re/code's Peter Kafka, a veteran digital media reporter, suggested that the content brands could be spun off with a third partner, such as German publishing giant Axel Springer. Facing declining print ad sales in Germany, the publisher is adding digital properties to its portfolio, most recently by partnering with Politico to launch a European edition.

"We've spoken to partners about content and scaling," Armstrong told Kafka. "Obviously we've seen a lot of interest in the content brands we have. So over the course of the summer, stay tuned."

Still, the merger would mark the second time in less than a year that Verizon owned a media property. Last year, the telecom giant launched SugarString. The tech site was shuttered in December after drawing fire for refusing to let its reporters write about net neutrality or National Security Agency spying, two hotly debated issues in which Verizon held stake.

To be clear: This changes nothing editorially at @Engadget. We'll continue to cover Verizon, net neutrality, etc... the way we always have.

— Terrence O'Brien (@TerrenceOBrien) May 12, 2015

Here is Tim Armstrong's full email to employees:

AOLers –

As you have heard me say many times over the last 5 years since we became an independent AOL, we are building toward becoming the largest media technology company in the world. While there are search platforms, social platforms, and commerce platforms, we have built a very meaningful media platform and AOL today is a media platform company powering our brands and the brands of over 30,000 partners.

If there is one key to our journey to building the largest digital media platform in the world, it is mobile. Mobile will represent 80% of consumers’ media consumption in the coming years and if we are going to lead, we need to lead in mobile. Over the last 18 months we set a goal of moving AOL into a leading position in mobile, mobile video, and mobile registered consumers. We are approaching 400 million global consumers, we have built one of the best advertising platforms in the world, and we have one of the most talented teams in the world – and now it is time for us to fully open up the mobile frontier.

Today, we are announcing that the largest and most innovative wireless and cable company – and the one investing the most in high quality mobile content – is acquiring AOL with the strategy of building the biggest media platform in the world. The company is Verizon and the deal will game-change the size and scale of AOL’s opportunity. Just as AOL has propelled The Huffington Post, Adap.tv, TechCrunch, and other companies we have acquired, Verizon will propel AOL and comes to the table with over 100 million mobile consumers, content deals with the likes of the NFL, and a meaningful strategy in mobile video.

The decision to enter into an agreement with Verizon was made over a long and thoughtful time period and both companies see significant opportunity to service consumers and customers in a differentiated and exciting way. On a personal level, the decision to go forward with an agreement was predicated on giving our talent the best opportunity to build a multi-decade business that would be deeply growth oriented and aimed directly at the platform shift that video and mobile are offering the world – today and 20 years from now.

There are two important questions you might have at this point in the letter:
1. What does this mean?
2. What does this mean for me (meaning you)?

The deal means we will be a division of Verizon and we will oversee AOL’s current assets plus additional assets from Verizon that are targeted at the mobile and video media space. The deal will not change our strategy – it will expand it greatly. The deal will give our content businesses more distribution and it will give our advertisers more distribution and mobile-first features. The deal will add scale and it will add a mobile lens to everything we do inside of our content, video, and ads strategy.

For you this means growth, it means mobile, and it means compensation that will be equal or better to your AOL compensation. Your benefits will not change in 2015. We will eventually go on Verizon’s benefit plan, but that won’t happen until 2016 or later and we will work with Verizon to make sure the benefits are strong and cover important areas of people's lives. Your job and what you do on a daily basis should be enhanced by the market opportunity this deal is targeted to capture. The simple answer to the question of “what does this mean for you?” should be, “I just got more resources, more support and more growth opportunity.”

The leadership at AOL is staying and I am staying – enthusiastically, and we made that part of the deal. We have the opportunity to build a unique and globally scaled media technology company with the scale and resources we need to make that happen. Verizon and AOL are very large partners today – in content, in ads, and in the technology. We know their team well and they know our team well. The cultures share very similar values and are both working on very similar ways to do good while doing well. Diversity and women’s leadership are at the top of both companies’ agendas and we look forward to having a consumer and industry impact on those important issues.

The future in front of AOL and the industry requires scale, mobile, and video – and partnerships. In our lifetime, we will see the connection of the world on very large and very fast networks – and to play in that world with our strategy requires us to take the natural steps to secure our ability to shoot for the stars. This deal is aimed at the stars and we are going to pursue the joint vision of building the most significant media platform in the world.

I have been a buyer of AOL over the last 5 years – and that is an investment in one thing – our talent. We have reviewed every hire coming into the company over the last 5 years and we have taken extraordinary risks and faced extraordinary challenges over the last 5 years. There is nothing more meaningful than watching our team turn-around this great company and restoring it to growth when most people had left it for dead.

AOL is back and now we are joining forces with Verizon to build the best media technology company in the world. Let’s mobilize. - TA

Why This Live Nation Exec Quit The Business To Become A Meditation Guru

Something changed the moment six years ago when Jason Garner’s mother, sick with stomach cancer, took her last breath in his arms.

After mourning her death, Garner, then 37, returned to his job at event promotion giant Live Nation, where he served as chief executive of the concert division. He didn’t last another year there.

“I realized how much of my life had been subconsciously driven to make my mom proud, to make society proud, to do something, to be a good boy,” Garner, now 42, told The Huffington Post in an interview this week. “I realized there had to be something more. This emptiness and lack of fulfillment I was feeling -- there had to be something more.”

He embarked on a spiritual journey, meditating in the Shaolin Monastery in China and connecting with himself. Now running a consultancy from his home in Manhattan Beach, California, he has devoted himself to teaching business people how to meditate and find inner balance between work needs and personal, spiritual ones.

“As business leaders, we know that if we don’t take care of our workforce, we end up with a sick and diseased workforce,” said Garner, who authored a book on his experience titled … And I Breathed. “The same thing is true with the workforce that are the cells of our bodies. When we nurture them, they respond.”

Each year, American companies lose an estimated $200 billion to $300 billion because of issues related to workers' stress. Meditation can help. Meditating for just 25 minutes a day for three days in a row can decrease how much of the stress hormone cortisol the body emits, according to a 2014 study by Carnegie Mellon University.

Not everyone has the luxury of quitting a high-paying job to find inner peace on the other side of the planet, though. Fortune magazine twice featured Garner on its annual list of the highest-paid executives under 40. Near the end of his Live Nation tenure, he oversaw global tours by such musical acts as Madonna and The Police.

“Luckily, I had worked really hard my entire young life,” he said. “So I was able to put that money to really good use on taking care of myself and discovering these things about myself.”

But finding spiritual balance doesn’t require a Chinese monastery or a full-time commitment to meditation, he said.

“The idea of balance sounds like, if I spend 10 to 12 hours a day working, do I need to spend 10 to 12 hours a day doing some of these monk-like activities? No way,” Garner said. “There’s some really powerful activities that you can build into your daily routine.”

Start the morning with meditation, for instance. Practice yoga after work. Eat nutritious meals.

He compared mending a relationship with the body to making up after clashing with a boss at work.

“If you stopped by the boss’s office and said, hey look let’s smooth things over, they’d say OK and you’d move forward,” he said. “It’s never too late.”