• Before having kids I was an editor at "Parenting" magazine and shared parenting advice.
• I thought I was ready to be a mom and used the techniques experts shared in our magazine.
• My kids did not respond to them, and that's OK because all kids are different.

Before I had kids, I was an editor at "Parenting" magazine, where I gave expert-backed advice on sleep training, potty training, and using training wheels on bikes. So, when I had my first child in 2014, I thought I was well-trained.

A couple of years later, I became the editor in chief of "Working Mother" magazine — and a mom of two. Now that my boys are ages 6 and 10, I can safely say that the advice I printed on those pages has done little to help me successfully parent my sons.

Parenting is not so simple

For instance, we gave an oft-repeated tip in "Parenting." "If your child is having trouble picking what they want, or you need them to do something they're refusing to do, give your kid two choices you can live with. They'll happily pick one because they'll feel like they're in control without being overwhelmed." So I felt like a genius when I whipped out this old trick on my then-preschooler who wouldn't choose a meal at a restaurant.

"OK, you get to decide," I told my 3-year-old, ensuring he felt like he was in the driver's seat. "Do you want chicken nuggets or mac and cheese?" I envisioned being met with a wide smile and sheer elation to have a mother so well-versed in child psychology, followed by a definitive choice and contented peace.

The reality was far different. And louder.

"None of these!" my son shouted. Wails and flails followed. We had to cool off with a walk outside.

I tried this trick many more times on both kids. After all, I promised others it'd work. "Do you want to bring a pretend ice cube or an Indiana state magnet for I day for show and tell?" "Do you want to wear your green or black jacket?" "Do you want to hop into day care or tiptoe in?"

"None of these!" "None of these!" "None of these! (I had to stifle the urge to squeeze in a grammar lesson: "You mean neither of these.")

My kids did the opposite of what I thought they'd do

As the kids got older, I imparted wisdom ripped from the magazines, like telling them, "We don't talk about other people's bodies." Surely, my oldest would wind up being one of the good guys, given how often we discussed this.

On the last day of summer camp, a director called to say my 10-year-old was part of a group of boys who told a girl she'd break the trampoline because she was so big. Cue my shock and horror. My former fat self couldn't look at my son that night — probably not the most successful parenting strategy either.

We've given our kids chores, as I'd always written parents should do. The idea is to foster responsibility and instill confidence. Instead, there are weekly screaming matches about bringing out the trash. The tantrums over child labor subside more quickly when I up my firstborn's allowance. We've gone from a dollar for garbage schlepping to $5. I'm sure an expert I've quoted in articles would tell me I'm teaching my kids to throw a fit when they don't get their way. I'm also sure they've never seen the depths of destruction my 5'1 tween is capable of when he doesn't want to do something without pay.

Kids can suck sometimes

Now that I'm a decade into parenting, and not just a parenting editor, I know at least some of this is to be expected — and at least some of this isn't my fault. Every kid sucks a little. And some kids (like mine) can suck a lot.

But my kids aren't me, nor are they always a reflection of my parenting. They sometimes can't control their stupid impulses. Not everything I teach them sinks in. Besides, not every tip in parenting magazines applies to every kid anyway. Plus, parenting advice is more likely to work in a vacuum, not a desperate moment when a parent needs to do whatever it takes to calm their child.

So, I'm focusing on little wins. We recently had excellent parent-teacher conferences. My kids are usually kind to their classmates and try to be helpful. If our children are progressing toward being useful more than they're hurtful, then we parents are all doing something right. Even if we don't feel like the paragons of success magazine editors like me led us to believe we could become.

• Todd Fox founded Close Protection Corps and provides protective services, assessments, and training.
• The Marine veteran started the business in the 1990s doing ad hoc bodyguard trips to Mexico.
• Fox shares what it takes to protect C-suite execs and reflects on the UnitedHealthcare shooting.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Todd Fox, the 50-year-old CEO of Close Protection Corps about his work as a bodyguard for high-profile clients. He has no affiliation or direct involvement with UnitedHealthcare's security operation. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

In the late '90s, I came out of active duty in the Marine Corps to start my own private security business, Close Protection Corps, specializing in working with celebrities, dignitaries, and C-suite executives.

I did the bulk of my "on-ground" close protection of C-suite individuals from 1999 up until the COVID-19 pandemic while also managing my company. Now, I primarily spend my time consulting and training.

I've followed the news about the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting. Since the event, representatives from corporations have contacted us to assess their security programs. It's been a wake-up call for companies.

I started my own company after doing stints as a bodyguard

I joined the Marine Corps in 1992. I was based in California and trained in combat, riflery, and fitness, as well as general orders relative to security, like learning to protect a convoy or individual and plan for advanced military operations.

While a Marine, I was also a professional MMA fighter in LA. I would meet actors, producers, and directors in the gym or while working on sets as an advisor.

These people in the industry knew about my fighting skills, military background and that I could speak Spanish. They would sometimes ask me to work as their bodyguard and accompany them to Mexico on their vacations or work trips.

In 1999, Guy Ritchie was training at my gym in LA. He was dating Madonna at the time and asked if I'd join her security team so he could keep training with me while she was on tour. It was around this time that I started my company, Close Protection Corps. We provide protective services, assessments, and training.

Protecting a C-suite executive looks different from protecting a celebrity

When I start working with a close protection client, I initially collected information about the principal, or client: what is important to them, what sways them to make decisions, and what might make them vulnerable.

I then built a plan or structure of protection. It would cover their home, office, and vehicles, especially considering spaces that are exposed — such as the walk from the car to the office. I'd think about where their weaknesses were and try to "harden the target" by limiting exposure to risks.

On the job, I would be constantly aware of what is not normal compared to what is normal.

If I noticed something out of the ordinary — an anomaly — I'd evaluate whether it was benign or critical. If it was critical, then I'd make a choice. Maybe we'd change or modify our initial plan or behavior, cancel operations, or evacuate.

I'd wake up before the principal and meet them at the start of their day with a driver. In most cases, there'd be a second man, the advance guy, who'd go before us to check the environment we were heading into. I'd spend the rest of my day going wherever the principal went.

When the principal went to bed, I'd plan for the next day. I typically only got between four and six hours of sleep and worked 16 to 18 hours each day. It was very busy, and you see a lot of burnout.

C-suite individuals are extremely wealthy and will ultimately do what they want to do. They may not stick to the plan I set, so I'd put measures in place if things didn't go as planned.

When I was protecting a C-suite individual, my life became their life. I saw what they saw and heard what they heard. It's why NDAs and discretion are so important with bodyguards — we have access to things we shouldn't have access to, but there's no way around it.

C-suite individuals tend to be on the go, on private jets, in hotels and restaurants, and at speaking engagements. There's a lot of movement, and we move with them.

Protecting a celebrity requires even more fluidity. They don't have the same structured world that a business leader does and change plans on a whim. It can be challenging to create order. As a broad stroke, it's easier to find the baseline and anomalies for C-suite executives than it is for celebrities.

The UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting should be a wake-up call

When Brian Thompson arrived at that building, which was an expected plan, there appeared to be no one to advance the site he'd be arriving at, to receive him, or to look out for people who were acting weird or doing odd things that would have been concerning indicators.

Since the shooting, we've had large corporations' executive assistants and operations managers contact us to assess their existing in-house security programs.

I think the shooting was a wake-up call for companies. They need to protect their chief assets — their people — and if there's any known or documented threat or risk, it's overwhelmingly worth it to have security in place. The knowledge someone like a CEO has is worth the cost of a security protection team.

Editor's note: In response to a request for comment from Business Insider, a UnitedHealth Group spokesperson shared the following:

"We appreciate the media's interest in the real security threat that sensationalist media coverage can pose, but publishing an interview with a security expert lacking actual knowledge of the facts is simply another example of just that."

• A Swiss International Air Lines pilot started feeling unwell mid-journey.
• The flight from Zurich to Miami then turned around over the Atlantic.
• A return flight from Florida to Switzerland was also canceled because the aircraft was diverted.

Swiss International Air Lines passengers endured a four-hour flight to nowhere after a pilot fell ill.

Two hours after flight LX66 left Zurich for Miami on Monday, it U-turned over the Atlantic Ocean about 300 miles off the French coast, according to Flightradar24 data.

"One of the pilots did not feel fully fit after starting the flight," an airline spokesperson told Business Insider. "As a precautionary measure, the cockpit crew decided not to continue the flight and instead returned to Zurich Airport."

There were 123 passengers on board the flight, which landed back in Zurich at 2:24 p.m. local time — some four hours after departure.

The Swiss spokesperson added that the fire department was standing by, which was standard procedure given that the Airbus A330 was landing at a higher-than-normal weight.

The aircraft had enough fuel for a 10-hour flight, but lacked a fuel-dump system.

A diverted flight is not only frustrating for the passengers on board, but can also have knock-on effects on other journeys. People scheduled to fly on the same A330 from Miami to Zurich later on Monday had their flight canceled.

"We have rebooked the affected passengers onto alternative connections and would like to sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused," the airline spokesperson said.

They added that Swiss would cover expenses for passengers' hotel accommodations, taxi rides, meals, and phone calls until the next possible departure, rebook free of charge, or cancel the trip with a full refund.

• Airlines are facing a growing headache over rocket launches after Starship's fiery lift-off last week.
• Elon Musk's mega-rocket exploded over the Turks and Caicos islands, sparking airspace closures and widespread chaos.
• Experts told BI it's a sign of things to come, with the new commercial space race threatening more disruption for airlines.

Elon Musk celebrated Starship's explosive launch last week, writing on X that "entertainment is guaranteed." For some pilots and passengers, it was anything but entertaining.

Dramatic videos and images posted on social media showed fiery trails of debris streaking across the sky near the Turks and Caicos islands, minutes after the upper stage of SpaceX's mammoth Starship rocket exploded shortly after launching for the seventh time on Thursday.

The rocket's "rapid unscheduled disassembly" sparked chaos as some airspace throughout the Caribbean was closed for an hour and a half.

The Federal Aviation Administration activated a Debris Response Area, which it said is only used if a space vehicle's debris falls outside identified hazard areas.

Numerous flights entered holding patterns, circling around as they waited for the debris to pass.

Four Delta Air Lines flights diverted for refueling purposes due to the closed airspace, an airline spokesperson told Business Insider. Flights from JetBlue and Amazon Air were also among those forced to unexpectedly change course, as the FAA warned there was a risk of being hit by chunks of Elon Musk's rocket as it fell to Earth.

"SpaceX had a rocket launch and, uh, it didn't go so well," relayed one air traffic controller, per an audio recording archived by LiveATC.net. One pilot reported seeing "a major streak (of debris) going from at least 60 miles, with all these different colors."

As the chaos set in, pilots complained to air traffic control and expressed concerns about fuel levels. One pilot from Spanish airline Iberia appeared to run out of patience, declaring mayday so he could pass through the debris response area and land in Puerto Rico.

Those not already heading to Puerto Rico couldn't divert there, as one controller explained there was no parking space due to congestion, per LiveATC.net.

"It's been a rough day today," he added.

Rockets and planes face off

The incident — which saw the FAA launch an investigation and temporarily ground future Starship launches — is the latest disruption airlines have faced as a result of space launch activities.

Earlier this month, the Australian flag carrier Qantas spoke out about the disruption it has faced due to SpaceX.

It said it had to delay several flights between Johannesburg and Sydney due to the re-entry of SpaceX rockets over "an extensive area" of the southern Indian Ocean.

While the booster, or first stage, of a Falcon 9 is reusable, the upper stage is disposed of in the ocean. Qantas is asking SpaceX to be more precise with the areas and timings for such events.

Disruption has also occurred in both directions.

SpaceX was preparing to launch a Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday morning but called off the launch with just 11 seconds to go. The incident was put down to an aircraft possibly encroaching on the launch zone, though it remains unclear which aircraft, if any, was to blame.

Space race puts airlines under pressure

Airlines and rocket companies will likely find themselves sharing the sky even more in the coming years as the commercial space race heats up.

Hours before Starship's fiery demise, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin successfully launched its giant New Glenn rocket for the first time.

The Amazon cofounder's rocket company joins a handful of rivals, including SpaceX and startup Rocket Lab, in successfully reaching orbit. All three companies are planning to dramatically increase the number of launches in the coming years, with SpaceX potentially planning as many as 25 Starship launches and 180 Falcon 9 launches in 2025.

"The problem is there because we have also not only an increase in the number of launches, but also an increase in the number of entities with launch capabilities," Luciano Anselmo, an aerospace engineer at the Space Flight Dynamics Laboratory in Pisa, Italy, told BI.

"Just coordinating all these different actors is quite demanding. The system as it is up to now is under a little bit of stress," he said.

Anselmo added that the increased cadence of launches and the inherent riskiness of the space industry mean further incidents like the Starship explosion are unavoidable.

Ewan Wright, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia who studies space debris, told Business Insider that unplanned disruption from rocket explosions and controlled re-entries of upper-stage rockets, such as the Falcon 9, can have a significant economic impact on airlines, with delays and diversions in the air more costly than those on the ground.

Out of control

The bigger concern for Wright and Anselmo, however, is uncontrolled entries — large satellites or rockets that are left abandoned in orbit to plunge down to Earth at random.

Unlike controlled re-entries or debris falling from rockets that explode mid-flight, it is hard to predict where these objects might fall.

"The uncertainties are massive," said Wright, adding that forecasts are often so vague that they are "totally useless from an aviation perspective."

One such incident happened in 2022, when part of China's Long March 5B rocket made an uncontrolled re-entry into the atmosphere. In response, Spain briefly closed 100km of its airspace, although Italy and Portugal, which were also in the rocket's path, did not. Long March 5B eventually splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.

Although the individual chances of an aircraft being hit by a piece of debris from an uncontrolled re-entry are low, Anselmo said the risk of such an incident happening was starting to grow.

With the number of controlled and uncontrolled re-entries rising, Anselmo said regulators, launches, and airlines will eventually have to discuss who pays for the growing risk of disruption to commercial flights.

According to the Outer Space Treaty and Liability Convention, widely ratified agreements that form the basis of international space law, the "launching State" has absolute liability for any damage caused by falling space objects to the surface or to any aircraft. It is unclear whether that applies to travel disruption caused by such debris.

"If you do start closing airspace more and more frequently, then that is going to cost airlines money," said Wright.

"I think this is a sign of things to come. These things have a price and they will happen more frequently," he added.

• Some athletes who took podium spots at the Paris Olympics say their medals are deteriorating.
• Chaumet, a fine jewelry brand owned by LVMH, designed the medals.
• The International Olympic Committee said it will replace all "defective" medals.

All that glitters is not gold — and, as some athletes who competed in the Paris Olympics are finding out, even gold can lose its luster.

Since the 2024 Olympic Games last August, some Olympians who took home bronze, silver, and gold have taken to social media to complain that their medals are already showing signs of wear and tear.

They include French swimmers Clément Secchi and Yohann Ndoye Brouard, who posted photos on X of their gold medals in less-than-ideal shape in December.

"Paris 1924," Brouard wrote alongside crying face emojis in a post with images of his deteriorating gold medal.

The complaints mirror those of Team USA skateboarder Nyjah Huston. Shortly after the Games, he took to social media to show that his medal was already "looking rough."

"Olympic medals, we've got to step up the quality a little bit," Huston said in an Instagram story.

The medals were produced by the Monnaie de Paris, the French Mint, in partnership with the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Last week, the IOC said in a statement to France 24 that it was reviewing complaints and replacing "defective" medals.

In a statement to Business Insider, the Monnaie de Paris said it first received medal complaints in August, after which it "modified the varnish" used and "optimized its manufacturing process" to make them "more resistant to certain uses by athletes."

It also said it would replace and identically engrave "all damaged medals."

While the French Mint did not reveal the number of medals replaced, The New York Times reported on Tuesday that more than 100 athletes have issued complaints since the games.

Questions have also arisen for LVMH, the luxury conglomerate that partnered with the Olympics in 2024.

Ahead of the games, LVMH said that its fine jewelry brand Chaumet would design each medal — a task that the Maison embarked on with "creativity and passion," according to the LVMH website.

The Olympics marked one of the few highlights of 2024 for LVMH, a year in which its brands reported disappointing sales amid a widespread downturn in the luxury industry.

At the time, the Olympic partnership was a major marketing boost for LVMH, which — in light of the unfortunate medal situation — may no longer be the case.

This year is shaping up to be more promising for the French company. Its stock has risen sharply and and CEO Bernard Arnault's net worth is up almost $18 billion since January 1 to $194 billion, putting him in fifth place on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

LVMH and the IOC did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

• An AI startup in China just showed how it's closing the gap with America's top AI labs.
• Chinese startup DeepSeek released a new AI model on Monday that appears to rival OpenAI's o1.
• Its reasoning capabilities have stunned top American AI researchers.

Donald Trump started his new presidency by declaring America must lead the world. He just got a warning shot from an AI crack team in China that is ready to show US technological supremacy is not a given.

Meet DeepSeek, a Chinese startup spun off from a decade-old hedge fund that calculates shrewd trades with AI and algorithms. Its latest release, which came on Trump's inauguration day, has left much of America's top industry researchers stunned.

In a paper released Monday, DeepSeek unveiled a new flagship AI model called R1 that shows off a new level of "reasoning." Why it has left such a huge impression on AI experts in the US matters.

Some of Silicon Valley's most well-resourced AI labs have increasingly turned to "reasoning" as a frontier of research that can evolve their technology from a student-like level of intelligence to something that eclipses human intelligence entirely.

To accomplish this, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others have focused on ensuring models spend more time thinking before responding to a user query. It's an expensive, intensive process that demands a lot from the computing power buzzing underneath.

As a reminder, OpenAI fully released o1 — "models designed to spend more time thinking before they respond" — to a glowing reception in December after an initial release in September. DeepSeek's R1 shows just how quickly it can close the gap.

DeepSeek narrows the gap

What exactly does R1 do? For one, DeepSeek says R1 achieves "performance comparable to OpenAI o1 across math, code, and reasoning tasks."

Its research paper says that this is possible thanks to "pure reinforcement learning," a technique that Jim Fan, senior research manager at Nvidia, said was reminiscent of the secret behind making Google DeepMind's AlphaZero a master at games like Go and Chess from scratch, "without imitating human grandmaster moves first." "This is the most significant takeaway from the paper," he wrote on X.

DeepSeek, which launched in 2023, said in its paper that it did this because its goal was to explore the potential of AI to "develop reasoning capabilities without any supervised data." This is a common technique used by AI researchers. The company also said that an earlier version of R1, called R1-Zero, gave them an "aha moment" in which the AI "learns to allocate more thinking time to a problem to reevaluating its initial approach."

The end result offers what Wharton professor Ethan Mollick described as responses from R1 that read "like a human thinking out loud."

Notably, this level of transparency into the development of AI has been hard to come by in the notes published by companies like OpenAI when releasing models of a similar aptitude.

Nathan Lambert, a research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, noted on Substack that R1's paper "is a major transition point in the uncertainty in reasoning model research" as "until now, reasoning models have been a major area of industrial research without a clear seminal paper."

Staying true to the open spirit, DeepSeek's R1 model, critically, has been fully open-sourced, having obtained an MIT license — the industry standard for software licensing.

Together, these elements of R1 provide complications to US players caught up in an AI arms race with China — Trump's main geopolitical rival — for a few reasons.

First, it shows that China can rival some of the top AI models in the industry and keep pace with cutting-edge developments coming out of Silicon Valley.

Second, open-sourcing highly advanced AI could also challenge companies that are seeking to make huge profits by selling their technology.

OpenAI, for instance, introduced a ChatGPT Pro plan in December that costs $200 per month. Its selling point was that it included "unlimited access" to its smartest model at the time, o1. If an open-source model offers similar capabilities for free, the incentive to buy a costly paid subscription could, in theory, diminish.

Nvidia's Fan described the situation like this on X: "We are living in a timeline where a non-US company is keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive — truly open, frontier research that empowers all."

DeepSeek has shown off reasoning know-how before. In November, the company released an "R1-lite-preview" that showed its "transparent thought process in real time." In December, it released a model called V3 to serve as a new, bigger foundation for future reasoning in models.

It's a big reason American researchers see a meaningful improvement in the latest model, R1.

Theo Browne, a software developer behind a popular YouTube channel for the tech community, said, "The new DeepSeek R1 model is incredible." Tanay Jaipuria, a partner investing in AI at Silicon Valley's Wing VC, also described it as "incredible."

Awni Hannun, a machine learning researcher at Apple, said that a key advantage of R1 was that it was less intensive, showing that the industry was "getting close to open-source o1, at home, on consumer hardware," referring to OpenAI's reasoning model introduced last year.

The model can be "distilled," meaning smaller but also powerful versions can run on hardware that is far less intensive than the computing power loaded into servers in data centers many tech companies depend on to run their AI models.

Hannun demonstrated this by sharing a clip on X of a 671 billion parameter version of R1 running on two Apple M2 Ultra chips, responding with reason to a prompt asking if a straight or a flush is better in a game of Texas Hold 'em. Hannun said its response came "faster than reading speed."

AI censorship

R1 does appear to have one key problem. Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner pointed out on X that there are demos of R1 "shutting itself down when asked about topics the CCP doesn't like."

Toner did suggest, however, that "the censorship is obviously being done by a layer on top, not the model itself." DeepSeek did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

It is worth noting, of course, that OpenAI has introduced a new model called o3 that is meant to be a successor to the o1 model DeepSeek is currently rivaling. Lambert said it was "likely technically ahead" in his blog, with the key caveat that the model is "not generally available," nor will basic information like its "weights" be available anytime soon.

Given DeepSeek's track record so far, don't be surprised if its next model shows parity to o3. America's tech leaders may have met their match in China.