This is Bloomberg Business Wait inside from the reporters and editors who bring you America's most trusted business magazine, plus global business, finance and tech news. The Bloomberg Business Week Podcast with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck from Bloomberg Radio sad.
By.
So we're gonna talk a little bit about those boring old savings accounts. I'm gonna slow it down a little bit, everybody. The new we show, Bloomberg BusinessWeek is out on newsstands. This will all make sense in a moment. Be patient. It's on newsstands, online, a Bloomberg dot com slash BusinessWeek,
and of course on the Bloomberg. And we're talking about this week's domestic covery, which is something that the big bank CEOs over the past week or so have been asked about paying up more on bank savings accounts, which are increasingly looking pretty interesting. As a surgeon interest rates has waited on some of the more speculative corners of financial markets. Let's get more on this story. It's the remarks in a new issue and we get to uh,
of course, and it is the domestic cover. As I said earlier, Uh, the editor of Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine, Joel Weber and Bloomberg Market senior editor Mike Reigan both actually Jill visit our studio. Mike is there on zoom from New Jersey. Joe, we're you know, we constantly say we're living in there.
You're saving all your love forming. Uh, it's it's a whit the Houston favorite of mine. Yes, Deep Deep This week, so we've been perhaps you've noticed some offers from all over the place about how you can get four percent savings and Apple had that news betterments out with four point three five. Mike, do you remember when I could like invest in uh, you know, like a MC or pictures of digital apes and get rich really quickly. And it seems like the exact opposite is the cell now.
Yeah, absolutely, you know, Joel, the fascinating thing is in that sort of twelve thirteen years of rock bottom interest rates after the financial crisis, the banks kind of trained us all to forget about the whole notion of you know, they're supposed to be paying us money to give them our savings. It's really a fascinating I think period in history, really a historical because you know, never have interest rates
stayed that low. For that long, and even when the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates in twenty seventeen and twenty and eighteen, it was.
A very gradual, slow rise, and.
The banks didn't exactly react quickly to it by raising their own deposit rates, even though they were now able to make a little bit more money.
You know, in the credit markets and whatnot.
This time, it's a whole different scenario because that rise from the Federal Reserve has been so aggressive, so rapid, that a lot of banks have really reacted quickly to it. And you know, as you pointed out, Apple, sort of that news landed right as we were polishing off this story, so it was good timing on that. But the other fascinating thing is that not all banks have yet to
do it. You know, you look at your basic savings account at Chase or Bank of America, they're still at literally zero point zero one percent on a savings account. And there's a variety of reasons for that. You know, they have a lot of much more diverse business other sources of funding than bank deposits, but that disparity is
really fascinating. You know, zero point zero one percent to some banks, UFB Direct a small online bank offering above five percent, and now Apple and Goldman getting into the business offering over four percent. So it's it's a very dramatic and sort of newly competitive environment for banks to compete for these deposits, like like they haven't really had to do since before the global financial crisis in two thousand and eight.
Mike, should they be? And I guess I ask because, as you say, you know, it's not the old fashioned bank of you know, taking deposits and loan out to the neighborhood, you know, to buy homes, to buy things, and so on and so forth. The big banks today are much more complicated financial entities and they have a lot of different ways to make money. Do they care, maybe this is a naive question. Do they care whether or not they have those individual customer deposits? How important is that to a bank?
Well, you know, I think the bigger you get, the more diversified your businesses, the less pressure you're feeling, you know, especially when you look at a bank like JP Morgan Chase that saw actually saw a flood of deposits in the first quarter because of the concern about the smaller regional banks.
But the smaller you get.
The more you are closer to that standard banking model of you know, borrowing low and lending high. I think the more pressure you're feeling because the average consumer and businesses. Even more importantly, I've woken up to this idea that there's a better rate out there. Now it's finally worth my time and effort to sort of break up with my.
Bank, switch banks.
And the less I think many banks want to confront right now is a drop in deposits.
I mean that ultimately.
Didn't go over well.
It didn't go over well, it didn't go over well Silicon Valley back.
Now, that's obviously an exaggerated situation, but bank deposits in aggregate all US commercial banks dropped last year for the first time since like the nineteen forties, So that the competition is real, and not all banks have raised their rates. But I think there's more to come. You know, there's
this competition. It isn't over. There will be more banks reacting and raising rates, you know, if not to four or five percent, certainly the era of rock bottom interest rates on savings deposits, I think is really coming to a pretty swift end.
You know.
The thing they have going for them, though, is a inertia Mike. It's like really hard to pull out, you know, out of a bank where you've been banking forever and maybe you've got all those auto payments set up and auto checks and to like actually, you know, move from one institution to another, even going after you know, bank rates five point oh two percent. As great as that sound,
that's your thing. Like, man, inertia is a hard thing to overcome, So like, you know, what incentive do the banks really have to do this?
I believe they call it stickiness?
Yeah, stickiness right, yeah, you know, And that's we're kind of in that phase now where the inertia I think is still a big thing.
You know, say you have ten thousand dollars in savings.
If you're if you get a five percent rate on that, you're talking about five hundred bucks.
So is it worth it for you for five hundred bucks.
To really, as you point out, go through and take the effort and possibly have to rejigger all your automatic payments and stuff. But you know, the higher that savings goes up, if you have you know, one hundred thousand dollars and all of a sudden you're talking about five thousand dollars a year, Well, you know, it might.
Be worth it.
It's probably worth it, And I think that's a calculation that a lot of just average mom and pops are doing around the country right now, and businesses as well well.
Also that five hundred dollars, as an investor would tell you, if you put that back into your Schwab brokerage, that could be a lot more in the decades to come. But I want to ask you about how to suss out these high old savings accounts. I get fed constant ads about a variety of different high old savings accounts. My friends and I are always having this discussion of what to do with our savings.
Do they look like the cover of Bloomberg Business Week, which is the number four flexing with cool look very weird?
They look way less cool and way more sketchy, which is why I'm concerned about me and my friends getting scammed by non FDIC insured high yield savings account Do you have any advice for us?
Yeah, I mean, I think you know that's a great point. Obviously, you make sure you're dealing with a FDIC insured bank, which chah, they all all the banks are more or less FDIC insured now. But you know, I'm sure if you starch hard enough on the internet you'll find some sketchy operators that aren't actually insured, you know, especially if you're you know, dipping a tone of the crypto market
and that sort of thing. But you know, the other important thing is, well, what is You know that FDIC limit is two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, So if you're talking about moving an amount of money greater than that, you have to think about it a little bit harder.
And.
You know, perhaps split it up over a couple banks, or go to a money market mutual fund, which isn't fdi C in sort, but they have a very strong history of being pretty reliable. You know, I don't think I could be wrong about this, but I don't think.
Of money market fund has ever actually failed in the US.
You know, the reserve fund in the financial crisis, UH broke the book reading. You know, your assets dropped a little bit, but you know, so yeah, you got to do your research. And you know, some accounts require minimum balance, some don't. If you're talking about a CD or what they call time deposit, you might have to lock up your money for a year or two years something like that.
So you know, it's it's a good time to read the fine print for once.
Yeah, it also just makes me think, like I mean that fine print, like is there is there some fine print that we haven't thought.
About for a while even, you know, And.
I'm like, there's there's basis points with some of this stuff, Like so is there you know when the when the Reagan family sits down and assesses their options, you know what, what are you just going straight for the north of five percent, Mike, or are you somewhere north south of that?
Well?
I think what's fascinating to me is that there is this skepticism and this you know, it's too good to be true mentality towards towards a four percent savings rate when you know, I'm dating.
Myself here a little bit.
But you know, I remember back in the eighties, I mean, you know, you expected to get paid on your deposits, you know, and you shocked around and.
Found that best that best yield.
I remember taking my nickels and dimes from the paper route and put them in the bank knowing I, you know, I get a nice yield on it. So a little skepticism is healthy. But I think in the sort of spectrum of investments bank savings account you know, I would.
As boring as it gets, is as.
Boring and probably as safe as it gets. Granted, you know, if you're under that FDIC limit, especially that two hundred and fifty thousand dollars limit now there is there there was sort of this paranoia that erupted when SVB and the other two went under that you know, the the fd I C might not have enough money in its own accounts to cover to ensure the positive if if the dominoes keep falling at enough banks go under. I think that's subsided a little bit just because of.
The programs that have been put in place. And also to me, I think, you know, the FDIC.
Is such an important institution to this country that even though we have this you know, pro wrestling version of politics going on right now, where you.
Know, anything could happen.
We might default on treategeries in a few months. I think that FDIC is so important that it would, you know, if it were to not live up to its obligations, that the damage on both sides of the political aisle would be so great that they actually would you know, do what.
It takes to keep it afloat. So I think, you know, I.
Talk about a crisis of confidence if that.
Happened, absolutely absolutely yeah, and I you know, knock on wood, and I you know, I hope I'm not proved wrong about that, but I think, you know, it is such a you know, important bedrock of the entire US financial system that even in the toxic political environment we're in right now, I think they'd.
Find a way to to to keep it going.
Okay, So if it's point zero one percent on basic savings deposits at banks, Bank of America or or Chase, you know, like Mike Wake, what what's it gonna be? Is it gonna go point zero five? Or are they going to go to you know, zero point one?
You know, I think right now the CEOs that those banks are kind of sussing out exactly what they're gonna have to do because you.
Know, for one thing that the one big.
Competition for banks is money market mutual funds. Right because they're they invest in short term securities, they're able to be much more nimbler in raising and lowering rates.
As need be.
You know, uh, JP Morgan's got money market funds most of your big banks have these, So if they're leaving deposits on one side of the business, but they're going into the the other side, it's not as acute of an issue as your smaller traditional bank that really needs that traditional savings.
To posit it.
So, you know, I think I think the pressure is going to be much greater on the more simpler, uh you know right, borrow, borrow low, and lend high type of banks then the more diversified sort of financial supermarket banks.
Although you know, we did see that headline on the Blueberg money market funds have the biggest weekly outflow since twenty twenty from the Investment Company Institute. So yeah, no, but I mean banks maybe getting squeezed. You know what I really want to know, Mike, did you pose for the cover story at that stroll?
I think you didn't recognize the as it's not mine us.
Going through a men's health phase cover design.
There there were many versions of that cover that existed before we got to that one, and I'm just so glad that it became weirder than where we were because it was pretty weird, and then it got.
Even Weirderam, Like, what is it?
Text?
You just don't. Sometimes there's just questions that you don't want to know the answer to it.
But uh skipped right from Men's Health Inspiration to Crack magazine.
So the Business Week After Dark podcast. Catch it on your podcast.
You look too closely at the apps, it just gets your life gets really weird, really quickly.
Oh my god.
It all right, all right, guys, thank you so much. It is the domestic cover story Bloomberg Business Week, which is add on newsstands, online at Bloomberg dot com, Slash BusinessWeek and of course on the Bloomberg Mike Reigan, thank you so much. Senior editor, lead blogger for the Bloomberg Markets Live blog on zoom from New Jersey. Joe Webber, of course, the editor Bloomberg Business Week. Are you really on some kind of health wellness figs?
Uh sure, sure, I mean I work out. I'm intermittent fasting sometimes, you know, it's all true.
Fasting, a little fasting. All right, You are listening and watching Bloomberg Business Week.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekdays from two to five pm Eastern.
On Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business app, and you too.
You can also listen live to our flagship New York station, Just say Alexa, play Bloomberg eleven thirty, Oh.
My ladies, Pop Yo, bets with it, Pop.
Poply sap.
All right, everybody. We've just been talking a little bit about the markets and some of the stocks on the move, and once again we're seeing shares of WW International rally another eleven and a half percent as we speak, up
more than twenty two percent earlier in this session. But keep in mind, this is a stock that has almost doubled in the week alone, all largely on the news of the company's plan and then this week closing of its acquisition of a telehealth provider that will help it access the growing market for new OBCD drugs.
We knew we.
Wanted to hear more, so we wanted to go straight to the source. Joining us is the CEO of WW, Sima Sistani. She is co founder and a former CEO of also the social platform House Party, took off during the pandemic. She was also a senior leader at Epic Games. Sima, it is so nice to have you here with us. Great to be talking with you. How are you.
I'm great, Thank you. It's nice to be here too.
There's a lot going on, a lot of conversations and certainly within the analyst community and even in our newsroom about what you are doing at the company. Stock, as we said, has been on a tear. You completed the acquisition of Sequence, the telehealth provider. It sounds like you are getting into the weight loss drug business. Why why are you?
Look, we're in the midst of an evolving landscape and how the medical community and many consumers view obesity and overweight I believe that the zeitgeist is changing and more people are now recognizing obesity as a chronic condition, understanding its causes, including not just behavior but also biology, and there's an increasing openness to clinical interventions to help. And we have a next generation of medications that is really
game changing. And so when I joined over a year ago, I guess just over or ago we were talking about yes, thank you, thank you. We started talking about the possibility of building or buying around new modalities, and it was clear that these medications were going to be a paradigm shift in our industry. So it was really a no brainer to enter the space.
So I guess what we're all wondering then, is what's the relationship between the weight Watcher's core businesses We've all known it, and then the telemedicine medicine company excuse me that you're acquiring. Is it a case of thinking about current WW members getting into our getting onto weight loss drugs, or that the telemedicine company ultimately will help you attract more WW customers. How does it kind of work or how do you see it working out or both?
Perhaps yes, So let me take a step back. When we evaluated the space, we looked at over thirty different startups and it's mostly startups that are in this landscape, and we landed on Sequence because they have built a
tech stack better than anyone else. This is these these medications are really expensive and Sequence had built out a pre authorization engine, so essentially putting the insurance process on tech rails, and we thought that that was unique and great IP and would allow us the ability to scale. In addition to that, they have a really delightful user experience. The you know, it is a subscription business where you're essentially signing up for the care team model. These are
complicated medications. It's not like getting an D script where you can just you know, take a pill and close your eyes. You have to tie trace the dosage along your weight loss journey. And there's a lot of different symptoms to manage, and so Sequence has a care team model. It's like having you know, the clinician, fitness and structure and nutritionists all in your pocket like in a whatapp.
And then on the other side is the clinician platform, which had a really high MPs and UH in in the ability for clinicians to feel that they have the appropriate tool to help the members. So between that and the right sort of values and alignment, we thought, okay, this is a business that it will help us achieve our overall mission, which you know, at our mission is to we are currently the global leader and weight loss management.
We want to continue to be that and connect people through healthy habits no matter which pathway they choose, whether it's through behavior change, whether it's through clinical and potentially functional as well, and and our and and so therefore you know, the Sequence was Sequence was a great uh match for us to be able to provide our members, uh you know, and and new members any option along the way. But I think the biggest clarification in this is I've heard a lot of this in ovation about oh,
this is a pivot, but that's not it. This is an and these medications are all delivered alongside a behavior change program.
Well, Sima, I just want to pick up on that because it's such an important point and I hate to interrupt, but I am curious about you talk about the importance
of this not being viewed as a pivot. But as you I'm sure incredibly familiar, there is a bit of a controversy around ozebic, So I'm curious if you can share with us and our listeners, what is your criteria around prescribing it, Because there are a lot of people who might fit the BMI minimum, but they may not have the underlying health conditions as well, So what is your definition of who should be taking it?
Yeah, thank you for that question. So, going back to the sequence being the right values and alignment, you need to prescribe these medications only when medically appropriate, which means that you have a BMI of twenty seven or hire with a rate related condition or BMI of thirty or higher, and even in that case, there might be other reasons
why it's not medically appropriate. And if the clinician who we do not employ by the way, I think that it's important for us to have that separation if we don't make any money money on the prescription itself, if the clinician determines it is medically appropriate, that's where our subscription model comes into play, where we actually provide the support system in addition to trying to help the member get the medication ensured.
So see me.
I know you mentioned you don't make money off of it, but when you're thinking about your customer base as a CEO, are you thinking that the majority of the new customers you're going to get off of this deal are going to be people who are interested specifically in ozembic.
No.
I think that they come first of all, there's a wide range of medications that are are that are in the space. The only one right ones right now that are actually on label for weight loss is with gob and fixendas. There are some generics as well, they're just not the GLP ones that people are speaking to. And then obviously ozempic off label, where when again the clinician
has deemed it appropriate. I think that people are looking for clinical intervention and the benefit of the combination with weight watchers is when it is not medically appropriate, then we have a way to push those members to weight Watchers, and vice versa. If somebody is coming to weight Watchers, is above the BMI threshold and is interested in a medical intervention, then we can point them to Sequence.
So what do you think it does ultimately to you know, you know, a metric, A key metric for your company has always been the subscriber base, which has been you know, shrinking in recent years. We did see a pop certainly online during the pandemic, but the in person meetings right have also come down. What do you think this collaboration is acquisition will do in terms of that subscriber base. Do you have any thoughts in terms of projections there.
Well, I can't speak to that today. We'll report our Q one results in early May. I can say that on March sixth earnings call we said we expected to end Q one with four million subscribers.
Okay, but I would assume, I know, you can't maybe talk about you would assume that you're going to be able to tap into, you know, the acquisition in terms of its access, and that it will grow your subscriber base.
Well, I think that part of the reason that you know, we think that this acquisition made sense is around the the CAC efficiencies that we can achieve. The sequence business when we acquired it had twenty four thousand active members and that was without any paid marketing. So you could imagine that there is a real opportunity when a business like ours is investing a lot in paid mark getting
to basically to create at CAx efficiencies. Also, we have a B to B side of our business where we are partnering with employers to provide weight watchers, and so there are ways for us to help increase access around these medications, certainly.
And I appreciate that. And the reason I ask is there's a lot of analysts writing about it, talking about, you know, how much your subscriber base could could increase or as a result of this, now that there's maybe six million or eleven million, Like I'm hearing a lot of numbers out there, so just trying to get a feel I am.
I mean, it's still a very small population who is actually able to access and I think that's a bigger conversation that we need to be having, and that's the sort of the clickbait nature of these medications has unlocked an opportunity for us to have the important conversation, which is around chronic weight management treatments for people living with obesity.
And there's a lot of stigma still associated with these as quote unquote weight loss drugs, and we're losing the underlined critical importance that these are medications for people living with a chronic disease.
Well to your point on that, Seema, I know that you're also familiar with the fact that there are shortages of ozembic, specifically for people with diabetes who are using it. Can you talk a little bit about your thinking around, you know, promoting ozembic given that we are dealing with those shortages as well.
So there are a couple of things. One is that the nova Ortis has come out and said that there are no longer any supply chain issues with ozembic. Secondly, is we're not promoting ozembic. We are promoting access to
a clinical intervention. Now what the clinician actually prescribes is a different question, but I think even in that question lies a little bit of the concern of are we pitting people with diabetes versus people who are living with overweight and overweight and obesity and would we be saying the same thing if these were medications for people with cancer or for people with heart disease, because guess what, obesity is the leading cause of both of those things.
So I think that that's that's the conversation, is to really have us level up right how we perceive overweight and obesity in our society.
All Right, We're going to leave it there, seemit. Thank you so much. I feel like a very smart interview in terms of answering a lot of the questions that are out there about this.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekdays from two to five pm Eastern.
On Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business app, and YouTube.
You can also listen live to our flagship New York station, Just Say Alexa, play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
And that's no. He's in for Tim Stanvic along with Carol Masser. Let's turn to the lead feature in this week's issue of Bloomberg Business Week. Also a recent Bloomberg Big Take, a heart wrenching look at TikTok and it's ongoing trust and seeming safety issues.
In the third part of her series on the super popular social media app Bloomberg investigative reporter Olivia carvill looks at how its algorithm has led some teenagers down rabbit holes related to body image, self harm, depression, and even suicide. TikTok says it's making improvements as it now faces a flood of lawsuits after multiple user deaths. Olivia joins us now with more another incredible piece of reporting by you.
So take us through the individual and the family that you look at and what happened.
This story was focused on the death of a sixteen year old boy. His name was Chase Nesca and he grew up in Long Island and a small hamlet called Bayport. And he, or at least his parents felt like he had no history of mental illness. He was very successful in schooling. He was excelling academically. He was a high honors student. He was also excelling athletically. He was in three different soccer teams, playing for the Olympic Prep development team,
his high school team, swimming for his high school. So he was showing signs of you know, success even at the young age of sixteen, and he had a big group of friends. Wasn't involved in drugs or alcohol, but in February of twenty twenty two. He took his own life and his family, his friends, his soccer coach, his teachers, a lot of them I spoke to, and the word that I heard over and over again was blindsided. They
had no idea how or why this had happened. They felt like Chase hadn't shown any signs that he was struggling. And his mum, she was looking for answers. She didn't understand what had gone wrong, and so when she got his cell phone back from the police and she realized that it still she could turn it on. You know, she struggled to gain access to the account because it
had a pass code on it. So she spent two weeks just trying to open up some of his social media accounts, just because she was looking for a clue what had happened to her son. What couldn't she see And when she was finally able to gain access to his TikTok account, what she found was a barrage of videos that promoted and glorified depression, anxiety, unrequited love, and suicide. I've seen some of these videos and they are heartbreaking
to watch. It's not just the caption that says death is a gift or the perfect ending, or take the pain away, or I want to die. It is the sad music overlaid with the image as well can be really hard to watch them. And so when she opened his TikTok account, she saw what he had seen, and she also saw what the algorithm was continuing to push his account, which was a steady stre of depression, anxiety, and suicide content. And that is still happening to this day.
So what did that make you want to do?
Well?
When I started out reporting this story, as you mentioned earlier as the third part of a series on TikTok, I've been focused on child safety on the app, and what I've heard throughout the year I've spent researching this company is concerns about the algorithm, the fact that we don't understand how it works, and a billion people around the world use this platform, including kids, and there's a lot of concern externally about a lack of transparency around
what drives the algorithm, what power is it? And what I wanted to understand is what happens inside the company, how to internal TikTok employees feel about this recommendation engine, and what I came to learn is that that secrecy runs deep internally, even inside the company. The people who are working to protect kids online, the Trust and Safety team that's sole responsibility is to try and keep children and users of the product safe, even they don't understand how the algorithm works.
And going back to originally what happened with Chas, do we have an understanding of how the algorithm for him came to be what it.
Was because he's not here and he can't tell us that. I haven't been able to understand why his account turned so dark or so sad. But it was through twenty twenty one that his friends, they said that he had been sending them all kind of funny videos, sports related videos, joking videos, and then towards the end of that year, some of the content he was sending them was sad. It was depression related, anxiety related, and they didn't understand why.
But I did talk to some young people who experienced a similar situation with eating disordered content who were able to tell me their experience of using the product. And these were two teenage girls who both had a strikingly similar situation where they started using TikTok and they would watch sports videos, cheerleading dance videos. They noticed that what
they were seen started to change slightly. It became healthy recipes or EBB workouts, and then it turned into how to make your legs look skinnier, how to eat less calories in a day. And those two girls both told me independently in different interviews, I didn't search for this stuff. It just all of a sudden appeared.
What I want to do is shift gears into how this happens. What the company says, is it a case of and the employees or the former employees of TikTok that you talked to, who wanted who knew something wasn't quite right, and they couldn't even get answers internally. So what is it that we got on that side of things?
Yeah? Sure, And it is important to point out that suicide is complex. Nowhere in the story am I saying that TikTok is to blame. There's a difference between causation and correlation. So what I was able to find is what Chase saw before he died, and some of those
videos included the specific method he used to die. What the company said is they've been working on this issue for years back in twenty twenty one, they pushed out a press release saying they were going to try and stop repetitive streams of videos about sad content, whether that's eating disordered content, depression content, suicide content. They were going to break that up and try and create a more
diverse experience for the viewer. And I asked them, what's happened since you haven't sent out any updates since you said you were working on this two years ago, And they did push out a press release before we published it came out in March sixteenth, saying that they had made fifteen system updates over the past year to try and make the algorithm safer, to try and break up those steady streams of content. But what Chase NASCAR's account
shows is in some cases it hasn't worked. And I wanted to understand why.
Did you feel like, since you've been reporting this out for a long time and doing the investigative work, do you feel like what you're getting from the company is sufficient based on also than the conversations you're having with former TikTok employees about their own internal struggles to kind of understand this algorithm, especially when they saw things that maybe were a mess.
I feel like there's a disconnect between what I'm hearing from the company's communications team and what I'm hearing from former employees and insiders who worked on trust and safety. I will say that trust and safety is a huge department at TikTok. They have forty thousand people working there, and it's likely that some teams or departments feel frustrated at certain times. We need to remember that this company has exploded into popularity. It was created in twenty seventeen.
It hit the world stage in twenty eighteen. We're five years on from that and a billion people use the platform.
But in China things are limited, so things can be done right.
Well, in China, it's a different app app it's called dou Yin, and.
Could they apply some of the same principles to the app in the US well.
I asked that question of the trust and safety insiders, and TikTok CEO was hammered on this point during the congressional hearing. Why is it that the app you serve to people in China called dou Yin. It's also owned by Byteedance, It's a sister product at TikTok, and I understand that they share some of the same source code. Why does that app send content about museum exhibitions or science experiments and it has a limit of kids are only allowed to be on it for forty minutes a day.
Why do you send the spinach version of the app to kids in China? And you know, the fentanyl version of the app to people in the US, which is what some lawmakers have described TikTok as. And you know what I heard from the company is that these are different apps serving different communities or serving different countries, and
they are governed by different regulatory issues and policies. And I will say that even the trust and safety insiders I talked to did feel like the dou yin version of the app would not work in America because it would be a censored version of the app, and kids wouldn't think it was cool. No one would use it if you just sent kind of steam related, you know, educational content.
Hence the debate that's out there. So appreciate all the reporting you doing this. It makes us smarter and makes us figure out kind of where we need to be when it comes to social media, which is such a big part of our world. Oliver, Thank you so appreciate it. Bloomberg News investigative reporter Olivia Carville.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekdays from two to five pm Easter on Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business App, and you too. You can also listen live to our flagship New York station, Just say Alexa play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
So you know, all of you been listening and watching throughout the week. We've had a focus in honor of birthday that is this Saturday. All this week we've been tapping into our climate, talking about sustainable food production and agriculture, eliminating food and as a result, helping to reduce the massive negative contribution that ag and food waste make to climate change waste generally. You know, Maddie, it is a
big risk to our planet. We all make a lot of garbage and it's just really hurting us.
No, it's so true, and I think there's a lot of misconceptions about recycling, and the Recycling Partnership has some thoughts on how we can all be better stewards of our planet. So here to tell us all about it is the CEO of the Recycling Partnership Keith Harrison joining us in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker's studio. Thank you so much for coming in person to sit with us.
It's great to be here today, loving this.
How are you doing.
Oh, it's been a beautiful day in New York City. I've been walking all around glad to be here.
Well, we were so excited to have you in person with us. Give us like the top line here, recycling does it work?
So worthy effort, also worth the effort of improving it. Recycling Partnership is a nonprofit and I built us nine years ago because I knew we needed a better option. We needed a better system in the US, and that's what we're after.
We'll go backwards because I remember growing up in our grade school, we did paper drives all the time and my family we you know, stored our papers, tied them up and brought them in, you know, a huge station wagon full of papers. What is it that hasn't been working? Because we've been doing this for a long time. We all have offices where we separate out garbage. Go to different states and they separate things multiple ways depending on the state that you live in. What hasn't been happening.
So take us back there and give us kind of a snippet of what's going on.
We all learned about recycling in third grade. We understood that it was good for the planet, good to do, put your bottle, your can in the bin, take your papers back for the drive. So why are we still talking about this? Well, I have a quiz for you. You're ready, Yeah, I'm ready. How many recycling programs are there in the US?
Oh my god, I have no idea?
Tons nine thousand different recycling programs. So when you're like, why can I recycle that here but not there? What happens? Why is that nine thousand? Now? I bet a lot of people listening to this story think about supply chains, thinks about business. If we pull back and we understand, like, what is recycling? At its core? It's a feedstock for manufacturing. What feeds feedstock starts at nine thousand different points. That
is a really tricky supply chain. So when we ask ourselves why isn't recycling working like we want, we have to ask have we really built it? Or has it organically grown? Answer is a second right, it's grown over time?
Is it basically because states could do what they want, cities could do what they want.
Is it just as simple as nine thousand different do what you want? And that's the way that we work, right. Communities are different. We travel from one place to another, and some do some things better than others. And we've put recycling on the backs of communities. And I think it's time to ask should they be paying for that? Is that their job? We all want it to just work better. So would make it work better? Well, there's an important role for policy to play here.
So what would be the dream if you got to be, you know, the president tomorrow?
What would it look like?
I have written that down. I think about that a lot. So what does good recycling look like? It means a couple of things. One everyone can. Right now, forty million American families cannot equitably recycle. They have to drive it, they have to pay more, They just can't do it that forty million households. So one everyone can. Two everyone does. And they know what to put in. They trust it. They know what to do with those yogurt cups, those boxes. They understand.
We don't. I still don't know whether I'm supposed to rinse them out. I still do and you feel stressed out about it, right, I'm really serious, Like I'm like, oh, this isn't going to be recycled, so like you know.
But so so in the future everyone can everyone does because you know, clean and dry in the bin. Don't overstress about it and what goes in. That's the goal of what we're working towards. But we're not there yet. We can go deepch what is your question in the but lean and the dry.
Does everything that should that is divided up, that is clean and dried in the bin? Does it actually get recycled?
That's the big question And I think that's on the mind of public. Can I trust that this is worth my effort?
And can I ask you? Can I just tell you why? Because our kitchilll and team wrote a Bloomberg BusinessWeek's story I think it was last month. It tracked a plastic bag's two thousand mile journey across season continents quote revealing another world of contractors, brokers and exporters and a messy reality that looks like a less like a virtuous cycle and more like passing the buck. Those were the words
of our Kitchell who wrote this story. It was incredible so it didn't go where we all thought it was going to go.
And in that case, it did not go as smoothly as anyone would want it to go. Is that the ideal? No, So in the system that we design, everyone can, everyone does, and we know the fate that you can trust that it turns into something new. So for every one story of things not going well like that, there are a zillion stories of things going well. Yogurt cups turning into car parts, cans turning into more cans, plastic bottles turning into carpet. But the public, here's one story about that,
and they think, WHOA, I've been tricked. And everyone is so careful, you know, has their ear open for a trick right now. So it's a scary time. So why did that bag turn out that way? I think it's because we don't have a system. We have this loosely connected, highly dependent network that we think of as one thing recycling, but it's actually a whole bunch of stuff. Now, the fact that it left the US to go get recycled somewhere is that innately bad. No, not at the not necessarily.
There's lots of recyclables imported and exported just like there are purses imported and exported everything, So recyclables function like that too. But do we need more oversight into how things are designed for recycling, how the systems are run, and who pays for them? One hundred percent? That's policy and that policy.
Is that something that you would hope for at the federal level or where do you expect to see that shift?
Well, right now we're seeing it at the state level. Four states, California and Colorado, Oregon, and Maine have passed extended even bigger extended producer responsibility. And so what that means if you're a producer a company that makes packaging, you are responsible for putting money into a kitty that makes sure that the system in that state can take it. And there's variable fees, so if it's designed for cyclability,
you pay less. If it's not, you pay more. But what it's doing is shifting the economics to say, one we need a better system, two we need a stuff designed for that system, and the economics of it need to deliver the returns both for the planet and our pockets.
Keith, I want to ask you, Oh, I'm sorry.
No, it's it sounds like the pain that is on the company, not the consumer.
Right shifting. We're shifting that. We're saying company, it's not just enough to design it to be recycled. Company, we need you to be there to make sure that it actually happens and putting.
How do we do that though as a company.
Well, it's through a network. This is why I think the Recycling Partnership is pretty interesting. So we're a nonprofit and we're funded almost entirely by corporate entities, and a lot of times you could say, wait a minute, then who's calling the shots here? But I think we need more nonprofits like the Recycling Partnership because we were designed
to insist and assist. Now, what does that mean? When a company makes a pledge to recycle more, we say, great, we want to help you do that, but we don't we know that that's not your subject matter expertise, that's our So we're going to insist you get there and we're going to assist help you do it. We bring in subject matter experts. So I think you need transparency, you need data, you need open books to really see that the material is going where it should be going in the recycling system.
Do you feel like and we're talking with Keith Harrison, CEO of the Recycling Partnership here in studio. We've got about a minute then we'll come back and talk some more. But I do wonder you know ESG certainly under the microscope and for good reasons, as we try to really
create more transparency. Are we moving? Is there a will to move towards greater transparency when it comes to things like recycling, whether what a company is doing, and really the impact of understanding versus just you should be recycled. We create products that can be recycled, but you know, once it leaves, you know, a company or manufacturer, it's out of their hands.
Right.
I think that that call for transparency is across the board, and it's not just how is a product design, but what's the system there? And how do you follow Just like you said earlier that they follow those plastic bags, how do we follow it all the way through and make sure what we intend to happen happens. And that's how you present prevent greenwashing. But that's also critical to a healthy system, which is what we want. Recycling will protect the natural resources. We all need this to happen.
But it's calling out for better controls and better oversight.
But your groceries keyth they in those reusable bags that are supposed to be great for our environment. But we were saying, I am personally drowning in these reusable bags. I know that's an incredibly privileged, privileged position to be in, but what do I do?
Right? So I think this is the very nature of this conversation. Right, people want to do the right thing, but it's pretty easy to say, I don't want to choose the plastic container, so I'm going to choose paper. I don't want to use the single use bag, I mean, use a cloth one. But then the sticks actually get higher when you get up up the chain on heavy duty materials, and so the responsibility of making sure that you do something is there with those reusable grocery bags.
I would have to look for a donation place for that, but I think them.
So I guess the question is like, have we exchanged a bad problem for a even bigger problems?
I think we have, And it's all rooted in the we want to buy our way out of this or we need We're not We're looking for the quick fix, when really what our society relies on is convenience and serving busy people. Every person listening to this show right now has a million things going on between their company, their family, their next steps, and they don't need to be spending time worrying about do I need to rinse my peanut butter container or do I just put it
in the bin. And that's why that's why the recycling Partnership exists, is we're trying to pull together the public and the private sectors and overhaul this whole system so this public doesn't have to think about recycling all the time. The system exists. The system exists, so you can just
recycle without thinking. And here's how you get here. Okay, one you pass legislation that you change is the economics, that communities aren't carrying the bill carrying this on their backs, that they're not paying for this, that the economics are paid for by the same companies that are producing it. Make that whole system better organized to make sure that
what's designed for recycling is recovered. So we're going to not just hope for the best, but we're going to make sure that it's designed and recovered.
There.
Now, we did a report. We answered this question, what would it take to fix the US recycling system. Now, how do I define that? Can people recycle? Do people will recycle? And is the infrastructure there? The price tig seventeen billion dollars. What we can find seventeen billion dollars And here's the deal, thirty billion dollar return, A thirty billion dollar return in resource conservation and US jobs. I think that's an investment we can't afford not to make.
And you know what, we could do it in five years and talk about something else. What would you like to talk about?
Well, what I'm curious is would you go to Washington or talk to somebody in Washington? Is there any will to do something like this? It's not expensive, but I'm just curious.
So I've worked in recycling for twenty five years. I ran a recycling program. I worked for the State of North Carolina doing grants. I was a contractor with Boozellen working on EPA stuff. So I've worked all across the different sectors. And what I found is that everyone wants to say outcome, just make it work, but everyone wants
it for a different reason. And so we need a marriage counselor like someone who's saying, this is what our words mean and for the first time though in this twenty five years of working on this, it's only been the last two three years that federal policy makers have been saying, Hey, what's my role in it? And I think that's great. So there is a huge role for federal policy because, as I said before, break four states
have passed state level policy. But that's a hodgepodge approach that's better than the nine thousand different programs we have now. But think about what happens if we have one one where things are designed for system, things are recovered, and we get to address things like equitable access the environmental justice component of equal services.
So is the marriage counselor potentially the EPA and or the SEC. So you kind of dealing with publicly traded companies that there's a component that they're measured on, which is something we talk a lot about, and it comes to environmental impact and kind of doing it right, and recycling certainly could be a big part of it, probably should, And then the EPA, I don't know, like, how do you see it that it plays out.
I think there's a there's probably a lot of marriage counselors here, the recycling partnership as a nonprofit is one that pulls together the public and the private sector, big company, small companies, every human in this country. But I think there is a role for regulation, there is a role for standards. I'm really interested in data. How do we measure progress, transparency for the flow of material. You know, I'm keeping an eye on the UN Global Plastics Treaty.
That's going to be a legally binding instrument to align for some common standards. I think that if I was running a company that made stuff, I'd have my eye on that because it's gonna have what is that? So, the UN Global Plastics Treaty. I'm headed to Paris next month for the second I in C so that the International Negotiating Committee of this globally binding plat plastic pollution reduction instrument. And what that means is we can't just keep trying to solve things here and there. We need
to have a common approach across countries. And so will the UN have something that's really his teeth in it. That's yet to be seen. But what is happening is that companies are paying attention of do I want to wait to be told what to do? Or do I want to do that now, and that's the questions we get. So we work with nearly one hundred major global companies that either make stuff we use every day or sell stuff we use every day, and they are aligning on common goals.
What are they doing? What is the biggest the change you're seeing that make?
So the biggest change is that they're understanding it's not just what they do inside their four walls, but what they do outside of their four walls, meaning what happens to the bags inside your apartment, or what happens with your paper that your family makes that it has somewhere to go. So the biggest shift I see is our companies who are saying, Okay, I need to make sure that the infrastructure is there, otherwise my goals will not be met, not because I didn't design something, but because
those forty million American families just can't do it. If we can't do it, then don't tell the public to do it. Right?
Is it going to mean ultimately we continue kind of doing what we're doing, but just amp it up and maybe there's more divisions of plastic glass. I don't know. And then there is a place and just got about thirty seconds I'm just trying to well.
So out of ESD, you know, the thing that worries me most out of ESG is just this hot pot of opportunities where people are throwing money at, you know, venture ideas here and there that don't ladder up to system change. I think we have to stop and pause, use things like federal policy and the und Global Plastic Streaty to create consistency and shine a light on measurable transparent parency for change.
Can we do like biggest mistake consumers make?
Oh quick, right, I'm ready? Oh well, I think let's do some real fast so pizza boxes. Put them in caps on bottles, leave them on. I clean and dry on your materials, but you don't have to run them through the dishwasher. And the number one thing is, if you're in New York City, you use bags to recycle outside your apartment, but in most places in the country, don't bag your recyclables inside your cart. Leave them loose.
That's the best way to make sure that those all those beautiful recyclables get turned into something else.
Just throw them in a can and just empty.
Just throw them in your recycling bin, your recycling cart, keep them empty.
Really cool stuff thank you, come back after Paris Harrison, CEO of the Recycling Partnership.
Here in studio, you're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Podcast. Catch us live weekdays from two to five pm Easter.
On Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business App, and you too.
You can also listen live to our flagship New York station Just Say Alexa, Play Bloomberg e Love and thirty Soles.
Wait, Joe spar you.
Spa spa too?
All right, it is the game that was designed to be random chaos, elegantly rendered in circular motion. We are talking about Roulette, and even so it's the game that you're supposedly not being able to win. But even so, gamblers have come up with plenty of elaborate mathematical systems to beat it, thanks to a journey that includes a mathematician, a gambling pioneer, an MIT professor, dreams of a utopian community of hippie investors funded by gambling profits, and so much more.
So.
Let's get to the current cover story of Bloomberg Business Week and with us as Kitchillel, Bloomberg BusinessWeek Senior writer, with us on zoom from London and also with us the editor of Bloomberg Business Week, Jill Weber. He's here in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker studio.
Jill.
I feel like this is once again a story, a cover story. Everyone in the newsroom seems to be talking about it. My husband's like, hey, did you see this cool story from war Work business Week. I'm like, yeah, I know, it's about Roulette.
Yeah, And you know, there are some games out there that I think are just, you know, renowned at being good ways to lose money. And so I think there is a universal appeal to stories about Roulette, and also a universal peal whenever someone you know may have beaten Roulette. And so when Kit kind of surfaced and said that he was interested in this space and had found a character that deserved a narrative, I said, Okay, tell me, tell me more, tell me more. And that let him
down a little bit of a rabbit hole. And when he came out of the rabbit hole, he had maybe one of the most memorable stories that I published in my career. And I'm curious to hear again from you kid.
Where did that story begin?
Hey, Joel, So I heard a few years ago from another professional gambler, that it was possible, at least in theory, to beat roulette, but it was a bit of a struggle to find clear examples of that happening, especially of
people making money beating roulette. And so I did a troll through old newspaper reports and I came across this two decade old article in the British newspapers about a gang of guys from the Balkans, from Serbia Montenegro who had used a laser to take one point three million pounds in roulette games playing at the Ritz casino in London.
It didn't have their names or any other details really.
But as soon as I saw it, I kind of I had to know more about it, and so that set me off on a journey to sort of find out exactly who these guys were and how they've done it.
Okay, how would you go about using a laser in theory, because it turns out that maybe that wasn't used well.
The laser was a red herring.
It was a sort of a mistake that the British police made at the time because they didn't know what they were looking at. Because very few people do know the secrets of how to beat roulette, but the secret of really long term success in the game is being able to make a pretty good prediction about where that ball is going to settle. You don't have to get it exactly right. You just have to be slightly better
than average. If you can pick a settler of the wheel and it's likely to settle there, you've got a good chance of making some money.
We're only like one minute in Kit.
You can't give away all the secrets yet as you hold off on that, so so just push paths there long narrative, gotta delay suspense, Kit, I do want to I want to know more about the casino that this went down out, Like take us, take us back to London's West End and give us a sense of the vibe. And you know, the other thing to know here is like, you know, in casinos, I typically think of.
Blackjack as the way to beat the house.
So like, what is what are how does how does roulette rank in terms of what my odds are as a normal person walking into you know, take on the house?
Okay, Well, the London casinos scene is very different to Vegas. It's you know, it's high end, extremely high end members.
Only the normal crowd in a in a London.
Casino you know of a Saturday evening will include billionaires, hedge fund managers, olive archs. It's it's very fancy, but the stakes are high as well. You can bet a lot of money and with lots of money there and not attract too much attention, which is why gamblers like it. For the roulette roulette versus blackjack. The house edge in blackjack is pretty small, and so is the house edge
in roulette. Although it seems like a very random game that you can have little chance of winning, the advantage the house.
Has over the player is only about two or three percent.
So, like I say, it's achievable in terms of you know, if you want to win some money.
If you're Nico Tosa, tell us about this individual, then you do actually.
Win some who walked into that you know, high end London, West End casino and sort of changed the game.
What happened, Well, most most gamblers who use these methods are terrified of getting caught, so they'll go into a casino a better few thousand, win a few thousand, and try and leave for anyone notice what they're doing. Nicotosa has the opposite approach. He tried to win as much money as he possibly can space of time as he can. That's his way.
And so you know, actually from a standing start of about two or three thousand pounds, he got to one point three million and only a few nights play. So of course that attracts attention, but you know, in his mind he doesn't mind the attention.
He's one of the good guys.
He says, he's not cheating and it's his right go and play roulette as he wants.
So has that spurred other people to use a similar type of strategy when you see a number like that. As far as how much somebody could be raaking in like.
That, well, I don't know if that's the case.
It certainly spurred the casinos to get their act together and try and make their wheels a bit less predictable, and we saw widespread changes to the design of roulette wheels in response to the Nikotosa event. But in terms of how many people actually had the knowledge of how to do this and were able to pull it off, that number was small back then.
It's still small now.
Kit.
What's really cool, though, is and you do go step by step. We've all learned so much, but this whole idea when you play roulette, like really watching and watching.
The spin, are you going to go there? Are you going to give it away?
Now with the editor of Business.
Kit Let's frame it.
There have been countless matt peticians, physicists, you know, anybody who thinks they can crack this, looks at Roulette and as like we can crack this. But like Nikotos has seemed to have found a different way. So walk us through what he found.
Well, he found, like all the other people who have tried this, that roulette is actually more predictable than you imagine.
It to be. And the people who first made this discovery were scientists from MIT and Stanford working in physics laboratories, collecting data about the movement of the will and the movement of the ball and.
Calculating gravity and friction. And it took them years to work out actually, yes, it was possible to make a basic prediction, but none of them managed to make any money.
That was decades ago, that was back in the nineteen sixties.
Using roughly the same technique, you know, Nkotosa seems to have achieved what almost no one else has done, which is turned it into a living in a career, and he's made you know, millions upon millions of dollars over the years doing this.
Okay, you, like I said, you went down that rabbit.
Hole, Mari, where else did this rabbit hole take you? Because you did get to talk to some of those mathematicians and physicists and and and yet you know, here was this guy with none of that background who just figured it, figured it out right, and talk to us about what that even looked like at the table when he plays.
Okay, I mean, I think the most interesting thing that I discovered going down this rabbit hole was, of course, these days, most roulette is played online, and that's actually handled a big advantage to predictive players because if you want to use predictive software, if you want to have some program running in the background, your computer watching the screen, if you're playing roulette online, there's very little casinos can do about it. And there are people doing this right now.
They'll be playing were playing roulette online and will have a program churning away, making incredibly complicated calculations and winning money.
In real time. That just blew my mind that that's possible now.
Nico Toasta says that his technique is much simpler. He just you know, he asked him what his secret was and he said one word, practice, And then he showed me a picture of the ret world that he keeps in his house and he just sits and watches it over and over again, thousands and thousands of times.
Wait, so take us there too, because you tracked him down right.
Yeah, he wasn't easy to find. I mean, professional gamblers, they spend a lot of time trying not to be discovered. It's very bad for their jobs in the day jobs to be well.
Miss alive, go figure having working fingers.
Well, the casinos.
The casinos keep lists of people that you know, they call them problem gamblers, but really they're just people who can come and make money at their expense, so they try very hard to keep them out. So, you know, he works, He's worked very hard over the years not to attract any attention. So he probably wasn't delighted to hear from me. But I did manage to track him down to the place that he lives in Croatia, and he sort of reluctantly sat with me and we talked.
Through what he'd done at the Ritz all those years ago.
Do you buy it that there were no gadgets or anything. After you spent six months in you know, investigating this, doing this story, talking to lots of people, and then talking to him, do you buy it that it was just he was really good at making these cars.
I think I do believe him.
My reason for that is that even if you've got a very small computer and you're very good at hiding it, playing for twenty years, getting busted dozens of times, because you know, it's all over the world, getting arrested a few times, it's very likely that at some point someone will.
Catch you in the act of the device.
They'll find it in your shoe or your belt or your pocket. And in all the twenty years Nikots has been playing, and I know dozens of occasions when he's been caught, they've never found anything on him. So for me, that's pretty strong, a pretty good indication that he is coming the truth or that he's just got an exceptionally clever way of hiding his computer.
One of the two.
It does make me wonder, kid like you going down this rabbit or and I've sent you down some similar ones before, all of which are amazing, Like what did you learn about Roulette? And Nico like bringing all together. What were the things that you know captivated you as you worked on this well.
And the first thing is that you know that you can beat a game like roulette.
You know, I've played roulette like everyone else in casinos, and it just looks like the kind of game where you can't possibly get an advantage. But there's a certain kind of mindset to advantage gamblers who do this for a living, and it's kind of like an approach that relies on getting a tiny advantage.
Out of the house and exploiting it over a long period of time.
You know, they don't just go and win one or two hands of poker or blackjack. They have to they have to get a small edge and then grind it out over a period of time.
So it's a job just like any other.
It's incredibly difficult and it takes enormous amount of dedication skill to make it pay.
Do all the houses now basically say we're on to you or can we all just take charge?
Yeah?
Well, you know, a cynical part of me suspects that casino businesses won't be terribly upset that the secret about roulette is has sort of hit the headlines again, because you know, for the one or two or three players that actually are capable of beating these games, there are going to be one or two hundred more who think they can, but actually they can't. There's a there's an old quote going back decades of one of the Vegas casino owners who says, you know, we welcome system players.
We roll out our red carpet for them. You know, anything that gets people through the door playing roulette, probably losing money is fine by them.
Bloomber business week, good for business. Okay, get on that note.
How much Roulette was played in researching this article?
Zero games of roulette?
Okay, just just watched it.
I just watched it.
Not very good at gambling, Yeah, no, neither am I You know so from I just think the the allure of stuff.
Like this, it's just there.
Every once in a while we find stories that deeply resonate with people, and like this has been one of them. And to see how many people have read it so far, the time spent in the article, it's just I'm very much drawn to stories like this where there's something that we're fascinated by and somebody somewhere out there has spent a lot of.
Time thinking about it, much more than you have.
Well, I'm gonna be curious, like the gambling institutions around the globe like and all of a sudden, Roulette playing is up as a result of this kit. Thank you so much. We know it's late where you are, and so appreciate getting to talk with you directly about it. Kishialel, Senior writer at Bloomberg News. Joel is right, like everything he does, It's just incredible. On zoom from London and Joel, thank you so much. Joell Webber, editor at Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
Here in our interactive broker studio. It is the cover story how to Beat Roulette of the current issue at Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Now on newstands, online at Bloomberg dot com, slash BusinessWeek, and on the Bloomberg you're.
Listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Podcast. Catch us live weekdays from two to five pm Eastern.
On Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business App, and you too.
You can also listen live to our flagship New York station Just Say Alexa Play Bloomberg Eleve Them thirty.
Yeah.
Thank you Generative AI and chat ChiPT. You've given us all a lot to talk about and to talk to. I actould say I was actually playing with it. This weekend, the world definitely all in on AI, specifically generative artificial intelligence, you know, AI algorithms that generate new outputs based on the data that they have been trained on. That's being used to come up with meal plans, create art, write essays, term papers, teach robots, and as during the upcoming issue
of Bloomberg BusinessWeek points out for therapy as well. So let's get to it. This story in the new issue that'll be on newstands later on this week, already online burg dot com slash BusinessWeek on the Bloomberg terminal. Let's get into it. Let's talk therapy. Entering the era of chatbots with us. Is Bloomberg News AI reporter Rachel Metz here in studio along with the editor of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Joel Weber. It is every Are you real? Are you a chat GP tape?
I am?
I am real as far as I know. But the conversations that people are having with chet dvt's also real. Uh would you like that? Transition?
Is conversations are real and you can ask it anything, and people are and they're making all kinds of stuff, and you know, there's all kinds of questions about anxieties of what's going to happen to jobs and all kinds of other stuff. But the thing that I was really drawn to with Rachel's story, which reminded me a little bit of a Ellen Hewitt story that we did not so long ago, also a little bit about what where AI can go unexpected places?
This was one of those as well.
So what's happened because people are actually starting to use it in some very deeply personal places.
Yeah, No, it's it's been interesting to watch people are
finding all kinds of ways to use chat GPT. And one thing that some people are trying out right now that I started to notice is using it not really I haven't seen people really replacing therapy with it, like if you're seeing a human therapist, but using it to solve occasional problems, or realizing that for them there's something about it that seems to be helpful to them, at least with the people that I spoke to, which I thought was really neat.
So was this an intended use for what chat gpt?
This is not an intended use case. It is a general use chatbot.
It is not meant for that specifically, and in fact, if you look at open aiyes terms of use, they don't want it to be used for very specific medical use cases like diagnosing an illness or something like that.
Shame of them. I mean Google doctor, I mean, like how many times writes up that goes up?
I mean they know people are going to go all these crazy places, right, I mean I think that if you're able to use it and find it helpful, that I think that that's interesting and that I was actually a little surprised because initially my first thought was this sounds like a really scary, bad idea, But then as I.
Talked to people, I it was it's much more nuanced than that.
It help them.
Yeah, in a couple cases, although there was one. There's one person I spoke to who said, you know, it was like saying the right things, but I just couldn't get into it because I knew I wasn't talking to a person. But I also think it's really important to not think of it as an either or situation. Like it's not like you might one day have a human
therapist or a robotherapist. It's possible this could be used as Margaret Mitchell at hucking Face said, perhaps it could be used to help train people that answer phones for crisis lines that could help them to help more people at a time. And those kinds of people are vital and you could totally use more of them. This could be a way to make them more able to help people, which I thought was kind of cool.
It feels like the there's like some empathy.
It's like built into this of like I know what you're going through, Like there's got to be like a chat GBT training course and in terms of just like making sure people feel like they're being heard, right, But so, what did you hear from the people that you spoke to, and like what led them to hear and are they doing it instead of humans or in addition to real therapy not instead.
Of One of the people that I spoke to, Milo has a therapist, happened to miss the therapy appointment and had seen somebody on Twitter saying it was really helpful to them, and Milo was like, Hey, I'll just give this a try, and then found it really helpful and has used it repeatedly since then. Not everybody will feel that way, Obviously, I loved your.
Story that you talked to us tell us about that one of the earliest chatbots, Eliza, Right, So this takes us back to what the nineteen sixties.
This was new to me.
I did not have this.
I didn't know.
So Eliza was a supposed to mimic like a Rogerian style therapy, which is like, I guess, very like self reflective.
You know, why do you think that?
Or you know those kinds of like reflective questions. That was a much much simpler style of chatbot, which you would you would say something and it would be looking at or you would type something in that case, and it would be looking specifically for keywords that could be tied to certain types of answers.
You know what makes me That's the other thing. Like nineteen sixties, we keep thinking of this chatbot is kind of this whole big new thing, and I keep googling and trying like origins of artificial intelligence, like I want to know more because I'm trying to Rachel get my head around, like why all of a sudden are we just this is such an explosion, right, because it doesn't sound like it's totally new.
It's not new. I think some of what's new is the style. You can think of AI as having like different kinds of architecture. I think of it. An architecture is a word you'll see a lot in a lot of academic papers. So architecture with buildings, there's all different
kinds of buildings, right. Similarly, in AI, you have different styles of putting these AI systems together, and this generative style is newer and being able to do that is a newer thing, and it gets us closer to it makes it makes these systems better at mimicking human speech, but it doesn't it's not actually, you know, it isn't human in any way. It's essentially using math in a way that gets you to look at the answer and say, oh, you know, that looks like something a person could say.
Kind of close.
Yeah, man, that's the creepy part of it.
Another thing that I learned in this story is that there are chatbots that focus on mental health, yes, as opposed to chat gibt that can can do whatever it does, right, but so robot wisa, what are those and what are they doing?
Those do exist, They've been out for a while in this space, and people can pay for them, and that those can potentially also be helpful to people. So so it is kind of interesting, right that those things already exist, but people are saying, let me try this. I mean, this is very easy to access. It's exciting in many
ways because it's new. So I think it's going to be like a lot of different applications of chatchept where we kind of have to see how the dust settles and if people actually are using it for this and other things.
Carol brought up the nineteen sixties. It made me also think of in the nineteen nineties with ask Jeeves, which was obviously right, people kind of forget about that, but it was sort of this whole forget about people don't forget about Jeeves. But interesting during these other time periods where we've seen different things like this, when we think this is like something very new but interesting that we've kind of had different irradiations in a way and in the past.
Yeah, I mean, I think people like to personalize and anthropomorphize technology, and sometimes sometimes that could be totally fine. Sometimes that can go a little bit awry, like Rumba for instance, like people treat them a little bit like pets, perhaps, you know, and that's obviously it is a pet stuck.
Part of the family.
Hey, I have one that has a name, so you we're not all crazy.
No, but it is interesting about you know this, I am curious how effective or what are the medical community, like are people weighing in about because I just think about there's some very serious illnesses out there, and I'm just wondering ken a chat GPT pick up some of the nuances of somebody who obviously needs some serious help.
I talked to a professor who is also a clinical psychologist. He can he can imagine a future in which this might be useful for helping people along with human therapy right now. He was like, no, no, like this. You know, this is not for somebody who's got a serious mental health condition. This is not the way to go like so low. But he also but at the same time, he was saying that he could understand why people would find it helpful to talk to or at least or pleasant.
I can't remember exactly what He's right potentially well, unless I mean, it depends. If you want to talk to a chatbot like GPT four, you're gonna have to pay for it.
That's true, right, business, So you only curious about some of the privacy implications here, because I would think if I were letting my chatbot talk to people, I'd want to know how that chatbot was doing in a situation like this.
And and also you know, obviously that opens up a.
Can of worms for what the privacy implications looks like on the AI front as well.
So has anybody been talking about her looking into any of that?
Yeah, I mean I think that one of the people I spoke with, Margaret Mitchell also, she's from Hugging Face. That was something that she mentioned to me. And it's something that as like as a reporter, but also as a human who likes to use a lot of different technology products. I also think about a lot. When I use chat GPT myself, I try to avoid giving it any kinds of personally identifying information. And I think I've told many people the same. I just I don't feel
comfortable doing that. I know that open ai reviews users conversations. You can delete your account if you don't want them to have your data, but that can take up to four weeks according to their terms of service.
Doesn't this feel like all the tech CEOs are like, Yeah, no, my kids, I don't want them play with computers. Rachel says that, yeah, I don't do this. What's interesting too though in terms of data though, right, because if you put anything personal down there, that's how this all works, right, uses the data to kind of get smarter and smarter if you will.
Yeah, your data is helping could help train future iterations of this.
Sure, so you have to remember it's in there.
It's sticky, sticky chats, you could describe it.
I actually did use it myself, like a week ago to I haven't told anyone in my family this. I used it to to sort of talk through an argument, and I didn't give it any personally identifying details. I feel like you can if you spend a minute thinking about it, you.
Can totally do that.
Or is it helpful?
Yeah?
Actually it was.
I mean in the way that can I help you reason with a seven year old?
No, I haven't tried it with anything about my kids.
That's like you write it in and then like you don't get a response.
We don't have enough data on that's.
Yeah, it was helpful to be reflective, But you know what, Eliza might have been able to be similarly help me be similarly reflective.
I don't know, right.
When the answer is when did you go let it down?
Yeah?
Why do you think that?
You know, I have to I feel like this has been an interesting week. There are sixty minutes to another couple of pieces, and they were really leaning into and obviously talking to the head of Alphabet, Sundar Pichai about what.
They are doing.
And it's interesting, Like on Twitter, I was getting you know, I put out those pieces and people are like, wait, you know, everybody's like, oh my god, it's the end of the world. Well, how do you, as somebody who is obviously in a whole other plane when it comes to AI understanding talking to the voices who are in it, how do you see it? Because it does feel like headlines are coming at as fast and furiously, whether it's on therapy, whether it's on something else.
I try to remember to take a deep breath and like, honestly, like just kind of okay, and let's kind of look at the reality of what these things can do. On the one hand, we have AI systems that are increasingly powerful and can do some really interesting things, or perhaps in the near future, could do some really interesting things. Various cool medical applications like helping detect certain kinds of cancer. Things like that I think many people can agree are great.
On the other hand, there's a lot of things we need to keep an eye out for and some harms that are already here. I don't think that this is agi artificial general intelligence.
We are not there.
And also a lot of these things aren't an inevitability.
I think we have to or official general intelligence, like creating up stuff like creating another Jeel, creating another me kind of thing.
No, that's not happening.
Okay, that's okay, Okay, No.
I think I think a lot of it is trying to keep into respective where are we which is still this is still early days, even though AI in various forms has existed for many decades.
At this point, where else are you interested in watching chet GBT go into and sort of you know, maybe let's say disrupt That word.
Disrupt interesting, I mean it has it has a bit of a honesty problem. We we need systems like this that can be a little bit more reliable as far as you ask it a question and you get an answer that you then don't have to spend a really long time like confirming checking yeah, And that gets harder as if you're wanting right, Yeah, well yeah, if you're googling, and if you're asking a complicated question, you might have a whole bunch of different things. Then that you're like, okay.
If you're asking it for like a list of things, for instance, then you're like, okay, I have to run down everything on this list to make sure you know it's all accurate. So if we can get in that direction, I think it could be really interesting for maybe there's some interesting finance applications.
I love that it lies.
It's sometimes that's useful, though, you.
Are I am just a simple as.
It's a fascinating world and we are all obsessed with it and obsessed with you and really your take on it and reporting. So thank you so much. Rachel Metz. She's aar reporter here at Bloomberg News in our interactive Brokers studio along with the editor of Bloomberg Business Week, Jill Weber. This story talk therapy, entering the era of chatbots. It's going to be the new issue of Bloomberg Business Week, add on newsstands, online already at Bloomberg dot Cossage business
Week and of course on the Bloomberg terminal. Check it out. This is Bloomberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekdays from two to five pm Easter on Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business app and you too. You can also listen live to our flagship New York station, Just say Alexa play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
I'm Carol Master, along with Madison Mills, who's in for Tim Well. A new issue of Bloomberg Business Week is out, so too, of course, is the Pursuit section, devoted to all things that can bring us bliss, like burnout retreats.
And also the best cameras to use for all of us would be influencers, and New York's most exclusive new restaurant, Amex's Black Card members only club.
Weeah, good luck getting in unless you have a black cart.
All right.
The Pursuit section and team, led by the editor Pursuits Chris Rouser. All right, Chris, let's get to the opener though, of the section. Burnout retreats apparently the hot new thing, and Maddy and I were like reading through this and saying, yeah.
Let's go.
Yeah.
So the trend here is that really high end spas and rehab clinics are now hosting treatments just for burnout, which is when you're at your wits end with work, cortisol levels in your body are really high. It's beginning to affect your health.
It's an actual science thing, right, like medical thing.
And people since the pandemic started, people have been complaining about it a lot more and a lot of these are expensive. So you know, more than three quarters of white collar workers told Deloitte last March they were suffering from burnout and have said they regularly felt physical and mentally exhausted. And fifty nine percent of Americans overall have feelings of burnout, because let's be honest, we all feel burnout.
And yeah, you know, raise your hands if you're a burned out brands up here.
Yeah, and so there are. You know, these spas and places are sort of taking after the like drug and alcohol rehab programs, which is like you need to unplug from your life completely. You need to stop, we need to do some medical treatment. You need to basically have someone tell you what to do all day so you don't have to make any decisions and you can really take time off.
So it's more than a spot. It's not about getting a massage right.
Right, No, it's it's definitely a lot more. There's a lot of medical treatments, a lot of Eastern medicine treatments and and and some of them are in very nice places if you can afford it, like the Four Seasons sense A.
In Hawaii.
You're talking about Larry Ellison's by.
Larry's Allison's Island exactly, and you can there, you can do a thirty day sabbatical package, which is just like it's a mega month of They start off with a thermographic scan to find asymmetries, muscle stress pain points, and then they go from there and it costs twenty five thousand dollars for a month.
It is for a month. Come on, that's really that's a lot.
Yeah, what's the best one that we could afford?
Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, so one of the things about like being like, Okay, you're burned out, you need to do a burnout retreat. It's an extreme luxury even to be able, Yeah, to like check out for a week, let alone a month, which is like who can honestly, who can do that? That's like a
real luxury. At the Raffles in London, They have a training program where it's almost kind of like a check in every day or once a week with a trainer who you go in, they do some tests, they tell you, you know, what workout to do, or even maybe okay, you know you're really stressed out today, don't work out, that's just going to add to your your cortisol levels. Let's do some mindfulness, let's do some other treatments. Let's
let's do what you need right now. And getting these practices into your life going forward is really how you're going to fix burnout. Like everybody, Studies show that, like a vacation is great, but then when you get back from the vacation, within three weeks, you're back to where you were before. And a lot of these places are
going to teach you mindfulness techniques. Also, you know, there's life coaching to help you reorganize your life, figure out how to get some of these things off your plate.
All that.
Yeah, I love that. There Also there's one place, I guess looking into holding events on yachts in Croatia this fall.
Yeah, you know a lot of this is for white collar wipe out of it can be some of it can be used by you know anyone that a thing white color.
We made it up.
It's a thing that we wanted, a T shirt.
I wanted t shirt. It's really fascinating. I have to say this week on the Week in so we have two segments these burnout retreats and then we have another segment on microstresses. So yeah, I mean you can feel it hear I feel like we hear it with all of our colleagues constantly. Part of I think what's stressing us out? Like where shall we go? Where shall we go?
The cameras influencers use. I think it's interesting that I feel like there's this constant pressure on us to also do things out on social media, but you do get to the right cameras to use right.
Yes, there's a lot of pressure to make content, especially among young people. And you know, one of the interesting trends among younger people who are just who are on social media or creating content is they want to use kind of a camera that feels like analog. There's really a wave of people buying cameras that have analog features.
So like a lens that you hold you can twist knobs, dials, different lenses that you can exchange which takes a lot of training for people who are just used to pointing and clicking with the phone. But the Fujifilm X one hundred V was sort of sort of blew up on TikTok last November and the company had to stop on orders because so many people wanted to get the camera that the influencers were using. And it's it normally costs like fourteen hundred dollars and now you have to get
it on the secondary market. It's like twice sixth mounts.
Everyone has one and they're bringing it out to like the have you seen them out everybody? Seriously, all of my friends have one. I'm such a loser for not having one, Like I need to get on it, Chris.
But it is interesting with like I noticed with a younger generation or like my daughter, like they all want to go back to like older cameras or like the disposed, Like it's just interesting, like they're off their phone.
That's true, and you know exactly, someone runs around a party with a Polaroid and like everybody loves it. And it also feels grown up to own a camera. It's like a lot of times people's first adult purchase. But Sony and some of the other cameras companies that make these also say like it helps that they're cute, you know the look. They're fun to like to carry around.
If you want to be grown up by an end table. We don't have time for this story, but check it out.
Yes, the end table is the best supporting actor in a room. Sometimes it's your favorite character. Don't forget about them.
There's one that actually looks like a character. Because we have to get to this story about the American Express is impossible to book a new clubhouse in New York City.
Tell us about it, so you know how. American Express has the Centurion Card otherwise known as the Black Card, which is an invitation only card. It's for a very
high spend annual spend fees. And they opened a restaurant on the fifty fifth floor of one Vanderbilt Tower, which is right by Grand Central, And it's a restaurant in sort of lounge area and it's only accessible to Centurion card holders and a small number of reservations that you can get through Rezi, which is also owned by American Express. The chef is Daniel ballude I rode the elevator up with Daniel Ballud and you get to the fifty fifth
floor and the views are bananas. They're insane because there's not a lot of restaurants in Midtown that are at a high level. You can go to the top of the rock, you can go to the Rainbow Room, and that's sort of it. Like offices are that high. So you're just not used to being like looking out the window at the arches of the Chrysler Building like eye to eye, and then you know, all way downtown and then all the way.
Up the park.
So the food, the food is great, but really you're you feel like you're in a really special place. And it's been it's been full of cardholders like they've been. They've been doing really well with reservations. We've been checking to see if you can get in on Rezi and we have not seen any tables, but they say you can.
I just want to know, did you wear a navy or linen blazer?
So Nikki and Justin on our team went and when they did the review that's in the section they went before I did, and they were looking around and they were like, wow, it's really like a lot of dudes with expensive watches in like sort of electric blue suits. Okay, when I went, I will say it was not it was more. It was just a real mix of people. It was definitely a mix of people who like work hard for a living and then people who like don't maybe don't work for a living. It was good, it
was great. I had a burger like a Waggu burger, which was good. They did a Wagu tartar at the table where they bring the cart and they mix it up, which was There was this lobster pasta which was completely unbelievable. Yeah, the food is in standing blue. It's like you can't miss.
What did it cost? And I know if you have to ask.
It's like the use.
When they first opened, there were no prices on the menu, but there were when.
I was there.
It wasn't crazy, Like the burger was twenty eight dollars, which is not nothing, but for New York that's not bad. And then they kind of went up to like fifty sixty dollars for the entrees, and then at dinner it's a price like a fixed price menu, and that it's more expensive.
All right, do we have a spring nos? I know, Yeah, what's what's up?
It was like getting into Fortnite.
I tell you, Daniel can probably get you away just real quickly. Laser show. I love any like these equipment that you can get home.
Well, the Lima laser is like the kind of laser treatment that you would go to a dermatologist and get. Yeah, and it it sparks regeneration and builds protein in your skin. Basically cues your skin to like regenerate like from fresh and Hannah Elliott, who you guys know, tested it out. You use it every day for fifteen minutes, which is onerous. Her skin looks incredible. Really, She and I are both like skin people and we talk about it all the time.
And she lives in La She came back to New York after a couple months of using this and I was like, oh my god, Hannah.
This is it.
So are you using it now?
Well it's twenty seven hundred dollars so no, and you already want the story. Hannah has the sample, but it's legit. It really works, and needs to give it to loaned around the office.
That's right, to be.
Fair, to be fair, another great section, So much fun, Chris, Thank you, we really appreciate it.
Yeah, we feel like you have the coolest job in the world. Chris, also known as the editor of Bloomberg pursuits Chris Rouser.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Podcast. Catch us live weekdays from two to five pm Eastern.
On Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business App, and you too.
You can also listen live to our flagship New York station, Just Say Alexa play Bloomberg You Love Them thirty.
It does seem like the stress is starting to ease, certainly how investors see it based on what we are getting from the big thanks and more importantly from those regionals. And our next guest knows a lot about stress, writes about it in a new book. Karen Dylan is editorial director at the Family Business Advisory firm Banyan Global Family
Business Advisor's former editor of the Harvard Business Review. She's got a new book out, The micro Stress Effect, How little things pile up and become big problems, and what to do about it. She is on Zoom in Boston. Karen, I feel like it's a timely topic, considering the stress that seems to come at investors on a daily basis. Having said that, tell us about the book. What are micro stresses and some of the research you did specifically for to figure it out and what we can do to manage it.
Sure, I'm glad to be here.
So even just listening to the pre evil before it came on is stressful. There's no questions. We're all kind of swimming in the sea of stress all the time. But what we're talking about with our research is something a little bit different that most of us don't notice.
We don't even know how to talk about it.
We know how to talk about stock market stress and political stress and things like that, but we don't know how to talk about what we ended up calling microstress.
And this is a particular thing that we observed in.
Research with high performers, where originally the research was intended to look at what did they do better than the rest of us, How do they work more effectively with other people? How do they maintain their status as high performers? And we interviewed three hundred men and women equal numbers who were dubbed high performers by their organizations to try
to get at those best practices. And then early on in our research we started to notice after a bit of the veneer had gone off in the interview that little by little became clear that even these high performers were kind of barely hanging on.
They were swimming on.
What we ultimately called microstress, things that are so brief and so invisible to us that we barely notice them.
What cumulatively they add up?
And what specifically, can you give us a few examples, how does that sort of permeate in our day to day lives? Like what specifically would be an example of a microstress?
Sure, so we put them in three buckets, and I think you'll relate to all three of them, but in three categories. One or microstress is that drain your personal capacity, your ability to get things done.
And a really good example of that is.
Having unpredictable behavior from a person in authority, a boss or a manager, not a toxic boss or a jerk, but maybe a boss who stops you in the hallway to say.
He's got a new idea and are you supposed to be pursuing that or not? Are you putting other things aside or not?
Just not one hundred percent always knowing what's expected of you from the person above, or having a surgeon responsibility as a worker at home. That's category one personal capacity or another one that I think most of us experience in some way, or micro stresses that deplete our emotional reserve. So, for example, if you work around people who are just always stressed out, even if you're not stressed out, the
secondhand stress from them is going to affect you. Micro Stresses are things that happen in our interactions with other people that are so brief and so baked into our day that you literally barely remember them. And individually they're all manageable, but what happens is they layer up over the day, over the week, over the month, and they actually take your real big toll on you.
All Right, So media can be a very stressful world because it's just the way it is. So what is the connection? And some of us thrive on it. I mean I kind of like it when it's fast and furious, but not that isn't always the case, and you can't do that for one hundred percent of the time, otherwise you're just going to kind of pass out. But having said that, what is the relationship between stress and productivity?
There's got to be probably this interesting balance, right, because a little bit of stress gets the adrenaline going and can kind of in some ways maybe make you more productive. But I'm guessing too much, and that's not good.
Too much of that is definitely not good.
And again we started with high performers, So we started with people who were already seen widely seen as being better than the rest of us.
They were just really good at doing a.
Lot of work, being effective collaborators.
But as we started to peel back, we realized even they.
Really were almost overwhelmed by all this warm micro stress, to the point where it potentially threatened to derail their careers. What happens is you're always in reactive mode.
You're always you know, you open.
Your email first thing in the morning, and you're already feeling overwhelmed behind as opposed to any of us trying to shape and plant our day, and we're thinking about which balls can we get away with dropping, rather than how do I do my best work today or what do I actually want to focus on today.
It makes you in a.
Reactive posture rather than a proactive posture, and none of us do our best work when we're always trying to figure out again which balls can we get away with dropping?
Because we can't do it all.
What are the financial repercussions for letting micro stresses add up?
Well, Financially, it's not good for who you are. You're not going to be at your best, most effective you are. Potentially even one of the micro stresses that we identified is pressure to pursue goals that are out of sync with your personal values.
So it also career wise work that could be a detriment correct career.
Correct, it could indeed, if you are always sort of pursuing what someone else's version of success is and it's never feeling comfortable to you, or it's never who you are, you're never going to thrive really in the long run. You may you may have a good run five or seven years, but at some point you're going to realize this is not who I want to be. So you're not going to be your best. You're probably career wise not going to thrive in the way that you want to thrive.
And the most.
Importantly of all, you're you're not gonna like who you are. Eventually, it's going to kind of either way, you just small ways. So none of us are our best when microstress is overwhelming us.
And I like Karen, how you make the distinction certainly the book Between Stress, Microstress and Secondary micro Stresses thirty seconds. One piece of advice for those folks who are listening to this.
One piece of advice is to actually stop and have five minute clarification conversations with the people that you work with. So many of us were moving so quickly, and we're working with ever shifting cast of characters, people who are new at colleagues and things like that. We don't know how to work together very well, and we assume things, and that can lead to all kinds of micro stresses,
just misalignments or small performance misses. So literally take five minutes at the end of meetings and just clarify who, what, when, what's the next step?
Don't that simple step can make a really big difference in.
Your Workstrogical we do that sometimes in the newsroom where you're having conflicting stories. It's like, hey, everybody, get over here and for three minutes, let's set everything straight. K and thanks and a very timely conversation. Karen Dylan, Editorial Director and the Microstress Effect, her book.
This is the.
Bloomberg Business Week podcast, available on Apple, Spotify and anywhere else you can get your podcasts. Listen live each weekday starting at two pm Eastern.
On Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app tune In, and the Bloomberg Business app.
You can also watch us live on Bloomberg Quick Take every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg terminal