Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
This is Bloomberg business Week 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.
Hi, everyone, Welcome to the Bloomberg Business Week Weekend podcast. Acquired week with the back of US economic data released as the warm up act to this coming week's annual gathering of central bankers, policymakers, academics and economists at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium. The main attraction at that event fed Chair J. Powell's speech on Friday.
We're going to be all Jackson Hole guests in the upcoming presidential election and its outcome may come up, if not with Jair J. Powell, perhaps with others our take on the elections this week on how to raise a citizen of all that in just a moment.
Also this hour, what it's like when ozembic takes over an entire town, or when Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans talked to US troops deployed overseas.
All of that to come, We begin though, with something that might freak you out just a little bit. But it may not be all that surprising. According to the twenty twenty three Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey, nearly one in five Americans can't name a single branch of government. It's executive, legislative, and judicial.
By the way, that's twenty percent. I know it's a lot, all right. Perhaps it's not surprising given the state of civics education in the United States. According to the Committee for Economic Development that's the public policy center of the Conference Board, only seven states require a full year of civics or government in schools, and thirteen states have no civics course requirements. Tim, I say, I feel kind of lucky. We talked about news, current events, politics at home sometimes
againable heated with my older siblings. Same for my daughter. She's born into it, being the child of parents who are both in the news business. How about for you, what was it like grown up?
Oh?
Yeah, we talked about it all the time growing up. I'm trying to figure out what to do with my kids, are you.
Yeah.
The thing is is they're at the age now where you can't really listen to news in the morning when they're around. Because there's so much disturbing stuff happening around the world, you don't want them to hear those things. Yeah, so it's kind of a delicate balance. But let's just say there are a lot of questions coming up about the way society works.
You have super smart kids, especially your older one, who is really curious about things.
It is almost the younger one still can't talk about she's coming.
She's going to be right behind them.
Well, with some thoughts on how to teach our children about the government, we turned to Lindsay Kormack, Associate Professor of Political Science and director of the Diplomacy Lab at Steven's Institute of Technology. She's got a new book out called How to Raise a Citizen and Why It's up to You to do It.
Yeah, so you all are lucky, because that's that's atypical. Most of our families don't have those sorts of discussions. In research that we did for the book, we found that only twenty five percent of eighteen year olds report that they ever had an intentional discussion about politics or government with their parents. And my sort of stance on this is you can't start it too early because kids are just trying to make sense of the world around them.
They're soaking it up. So if they hear us talking, you know, like saying like politicians are all bad or they're negative, they're liars, they're cheaters, they're going to hear that. And so it's not that not talking to them doesn't give them a message. They sometimes just pick up the negative pieces. So it's up to us to kind of recast the narrative around this in front of them.
Okay, and I have a large family, a lot of nieces and nephews. What do you do though, when a twenty something year old or an early thirties like, yeah, all the politicians they're really lousy. What's the right response? How do you deal with that where they're kind of so set in their view.
Yeah, So when I hear something like that, I usually think that people are talking about federal politicians and I try to change the conversation and think about who their local and state representatives are. Yeah, because for the most part, the people who do this work at lower levels. They're not bad, they're not out there to do ill. They're really trying their best, and oftentimes they're not that well supported. Financially,
the jobs don't pay that well. People yell at them, and so really, I think most of the people doing our politics are trying their best.
You know, we hear what you said. We hear a lot from the mayors we talked to. We check in with mayors around the country quite a bit, and oftentimes they are Democrats or Republicans. They're required to have a party affiliation, but regardless of what party there in, they don't really consider themselves members of a certain political party because their job is to come up with solutions to you know, fixing potholes and making sure that things are running on time in a small city or in a
metropolitan area. And it's an interesting issue because there is this separation between the local level versus what happens on the federal level, and so much air is taken out by national politics. And that's sort of the vibe that people pick up on.
Yeah, that's absolutely true. You know, we talk about federal politics more than anything else, despite the fact that local politics is some of the most consequential for our quality of life decisions.
You know, it's funny my husband and I, as I said, he's a news guy too, and it just said, you know, when he was kind of and his way up, you always went to the town hall meetings and local politics. And part of it is, you know, the demise of local journalism, like there's just no reporting on it anymore. And so it's all kind of the same stuff, as you said, a lot of it at the federal level, but it's not really getting down to, you know, what's
happening on a different level. It is why I will be Tim's right, like we love talking to mayors, We love talking to governors, like what's going on in your state, what's going on in your towns. It's really important.
All right.
So you've got a five year old, how do you teach them about government?
Yeah, I think if you have a five year old, the point is just to make sure that you are comfortable doing it in front of them, have conversations around them, have conversations in front of them. We don't need to raise like little government trivia experts.
You know.
They don't need to know all the presidents, they don't need to know how Bill becomes a lot at that age. But it's about giving them the vocabulary, letting them hear these words so they can kind of start to make sense of it. For every other subject, we start kindergarten with little concepts, little vocap and we build. But for government, a lot of the times we wait until their own eighteen and then say like, here, we're going to teach
you everything right now. And so it's just this idea of scaffolding, like we do with every other skill and subject.
Okay, so parents can't always be the ones who are doing this because they're not necessarily the ones who are doing this. What's your view on how this should be taught in schools?
So we do need to take an approach that prioritizes things younger, like we do with everything else. Well, a lot of the ways that we do this is very idiosyncratic because states will say here's how we think we should do it, but then it gets further devolved down to school boards or it gets devolved down to counties, and so we don't have a unified curriculum. We never
are going to. But the thing that we can do is start earlier and start building over time instead of just backloading everything in that second semester of senior year when kids really aren't that receptive to new information anyhow.
You know what's interesting I'm getting some messages from a member of our audience who says that the kids aren't necessarily the problem. It's the parents who seem to be the least educated, the most susceptible to misinformation.
Those grown up kids.
What do we do with it?
Yeah?
What do we do with those grown ups?
Yes?
You know what.
That's one of the reasons I wrote this book in the way I did. The first half is sort of like, here's the problem, here's what our kids need to know. And the second half is a primer because I understand that people who are parenting today, we are products of systems that were deprioritizing civic education. A lot of times we had parents who were not comfortable talking about these topics, and so whoever's pointing that out to you, I share
that viewpoint with the parents. We need a little bit more education here too, And that's sort of what this effort is about.
How do you you know? It's interesting because I think we've all had conversations with adults where it gets heated. How do you have that conversation like, well, wait a minute, you don't really understand how this works, Like, how do you do that?
Yeah, I'll tell you the strategy. I'm mostly talking with college students I eighteen to twenty two year olds, and they get heated too. But instead of asking someone what they think or why they believe that, the first question I always like to ask is what have you heard about that? Because I think when you ask someone what have you heard? It removes them from having the responsibility
of defending or justifying a position. They can say, oh, I heard this on Twitter, Oh I heard this from my uncle or whatever it is, and then you can kind of work with that instead of putting it on them to defend whatever it is. They're trying to think.
Source matters, right. It's funny that, I mean, I find myself doing that to a lot, like where did you hear that?
It does?
But I think one challenge now is the polarization that we see on these online platforms. So you have you know, for example, the Elon Musk, the owner of X, has endorsed Donald Trump and he has hosted a conversation with him on the platform. He is in complete control of that platform. Can you imagine the outrage that you'd hear from folks out there if you saw the opposite, like on Facebook or something like the CEO of.
Oh, like if Bluckerberg sat down with Kamala Harris.
Yeah, exclusively or endorses her.
Yeah, you know what that might be like a pulse on current politics, because I imagine that that probably would have more outrage than what happened with one point two million people listening to Elon Musk and Donald Trump. But yeah, it's hard to know, but you're probably right. Your intuition there kind of goes with what I would think too.
Lids, we mentioned that you have got basically five rules or five skills that you think kids ought to have. Can we go through them?
Sure? Thing, This is the things that you need to go over with your kids before they leave your house, so before they're gone for college or whatever awaits them after. The first one is they need to know how to have hard conversations. And one of the reasons that I note that that's true is as a college professor, I have students who are afraid to upset anyone and they're afraid to feel this discomfort themselves, and so that's like a big skill that we need to make sure that
they have. The second one is parents need to make sure their kids know how to register to vote. And then they have to change it when they move. I take our kids just to vote every year when we have an election, and without fail, some of them are turned away because they thought they were registered and they don't realize that if you're registered in one county, it doesn't transfer to the other. So make sure that they understand how to do this and how they change that
when they move. The third one is they need to understand the difference between primaries and general elections. All too often we only focus on general elections when we talk about this in schools, and so they really miss out on this big piece of power, which is picking some in a primary election. The third thing is they need to have an understanding of federalism because we so are
the fourth thing. Rather, we oftentimes focus on the federal level, and then they don't realize that state and local governments control so many things. When we think about big policy issues like gun licensing or healthcare or marijuana policy, things that matter to young voters, this happens at the state level for the most part, and so having an appreciation of these different levels it's an important thing for them
to have. And the fifth one, and this is a hard sell, but a lot of parents that I'm talking to are pretty receptive to it. Your kids need to have read the Constitution at least once before they leave your house. It's our charter of government, is the rules of the game, and once they have an understanding of it, they can't be as suayed with bad information or misinformation because they'll really just have a rooted understanding of what our system is all about.
And yes, you can start with Hamilton, like it'll get you really excited like that. No, seriously, Like I think about something like that gets people interested, like, oh wait a minute, this is really our history in a fun form. But there's a lot of information there. What is it that the kids that you teach eighteen to twenty one, twenty two? You've got a young daughter too. But I am curious about the questions that come up the most when it comes to government politics. What do they want
to know? What is it that they're like, I don't really understand this. I feel like when there's a piece of legislation going through Congress, we all are kind of like, wait, where are we in this process? And where are we and what vote is this and how does this work? Because there's still things I think the mechanics that don't always make sense or don't you know, there's just it feels like nuances do it. But anyway, what do kids ask you the most?
I mean, I wish I could tell you that there was this one thing that they didn't understand, but truly they're lost. Like their understanding of the courts is based on like courtroom drama TV. Their understanding of the presidency is sort of like whatever they've seen on Instagram or TikTok that morning. And when it comes to like how the legislature works, it's really hard and so it's not
something where we can fix it overnight. But I do think that if we start a little earlier, if we're a little bit more intentional about it, and we recognize that we have a role as families in writing this thing, we can get to a lot of their questions because they're kind of lost all over the place.
Do the social platforms have a role too? You mentioned Instagram and TikTok just now, how do you see them?
I mean, they're already here. They're going to be here for good, I think, and so we have to understand what they are. I think something that parents can do is, you know, We're not going to see the same things
as our kids. We're algorithmically fed different things. We all know this, and something that I argue in my book is that take a little time with each other and say, like, what is it that you're seeing and make sure that you kind of have an understanding of what their algorithm feeds them, and let them see what you're getting fed as well. That way, you can talk about things with a better understanding of the background inputs that either side has.
We talked about education, Tim, you asked earlier. I think let's you some questions. But do we need to have mandatory civics classes in school? Do we need to have a civics test before people vote?
I don't think a civics test is necessarily the way to do it. The people who study like education, the people who are experts in this field, always come back to this idea of action civics, which is like giving kids a project so that they can really see how the process works. You know, they find like a playground and say, oh, our basketball courts are kind of cracked and they don't really work. How can we figure out
how to fix that? And that process is, you know, figuring out which branch of government is responsible, which level is responsible, trying to figure out how you activate to talk to those people, and even if you don't succeed in getting better basketball courts, you understand a lot more about the process. And so the people who study that sort of like what can we do in schools, they mostly point to action civics versus study for a test, get ten answers right, and go on with your life.
The January sixth riot on the Capitol was that, I mean, how do you think about that in our political history? And I'm just thinking, like, does it make you nervous? Like those individuals did they think, well, this is democracy. I believe the vote was stolen. You know, like, how do you kind of teach around that that those are citizens to people who may have thought, listen, you know, we think things weren't democratic, and so we're protecting our state.
Yeah, that's a really hard one, and I talk about this a little bit in the book. I think one of the things that's challenging there is my guess is that people who are stormed in the Capitol on January six I don't think many of them ever worked as poll workers or election workers. Because I think if you had, you would understand how difficult it is to actually steal an election or how unlikely it is that enough people
would conspire to do that. And so this is all sort of going back to the point of like, if we understand our systems better, I think they operate in better ways and we're less prone to things like misinformation that could incite violence. So I think about January six as an ultimate failure of political education more than anything else.
But many Americans do still believe the twenty twenty election was stolen and question and again I'm going to the American Bar Association. They write that they question the integrity of our election systems, and you actually hear the current front runner and Republican nominee still questioning the twenty twenty election. How do you view those in positions of power making comments like that.
So I think it's easier to give Donald Trump a pass versus season of politicians a past, because seasoned politicians, you know, they understand these systems, they've interacted with them for a longer time. I think what Donald Trump kind of brings is more of an infotainment style of things and not a deep rooted understanding of how the processes
that underlie our systems work. I think it's kind of dangerous for us to kind of take that as the teaching versus going back to basics and saying, you know what, maybe I'll go volunteer as a poll worker and go see how that actually is. That would be the version of doing like your own real research. And I think when people do that, they realize it's very hard to steal an election. It's very hard to do these sorts of things because we have so much redundancy in place in the US system.
Hey, lindsay one last question. We've got to wrap up, but got about a minute. I think there are a lot of folks too there like this isn't my government, it's companies who do lobbying. You worked at a lobbyist in Washington for about a year. They're like, why should I vote because it doesn't really matter, because my vote doesn't matter because it's money that matters. What do you say to them? And again, we just got about forty five seconds.
Yeah, I think I think that's a hard feeling, and I understand it to think that you're inconsequential. So the thing is, you're truly not at all the local and state levels. Federal government, sure, you're a small piece of that, but when you're doing things that are understand local level, you are pivotal. We have elections that are decided in fewer than hundreds of votes, So I understand that concern. I think you should put it away and still exercise the rights that you have here.
That was Lindsay Kormack, Associate Professor of Political Science and director of the Diplomacy Lab at Steven's Institute of Technology, her new book, How to Raise a Citizen and Why It's up to You to Do.
It coming up. For more than eighty years, the USO has been supporting members of the US Armed Forces and their families. The CEO of the nonprofit joins us.
On the other side, you're listening to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. This is Bloomberg. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Easter Listen on Apple car Play and then brought auto with a Bloomberg Business act or watch us Live on YouTube.
Our next guest has quite the resume. He was Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor from March two thousand and five until June two thousand and seven, he served as US Ambassador to Romania in the early two thousands. He also served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy from two thousand and one to two thousand and three.
From nineteen ninety to nineteen ninety two, he was the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, and from nineteen eighty four to nineteen eighty six he worked for the Assistant Director for Strategic Programs in the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He was also an advisor to the US Delegation on Nuclear and space arms talks with the former Soviet Union.
And yeah, he also founded a tech company. We could definitely go on and on and on, but what we really wanted to do is talk to our next guest about so much, including now running the organization that's been serving the men and women in the US military since nineteen forty one.
JD.
Crouch, President and CEO at USO, also known as United Service Organizations, on why what they do today carries the same significance as it did more than eighty years ago.
The USO today is in many ways, it's a modernized version right of what in a very relevant version of what happened in nineteen forty one. We still have entertainment connections. It's not Bob Hope today, but it's Scarlett Jorhanssen, or it's Chris Evans, or it's people like that who go out and talk to the troops, spend time with the troops, and the purpose is really the same. It's to really give them a taste of home and make sure that they understand that people back home are supporting them and
are thinking about them. But we also do it in a million other ways, not just entertainers. You know, we have two hundred and seventy five locations all around the world. There's just as an example, there's over ten thousand American troops in Eastern Europe right now as a result of the situation in Ukraine, and the USO is there with them, providing support through centers that we've built on military basis, and all kinds of other programs like care packages and
things like that. So the USO is a multifaceted set of programs. It's all designed to make sure that our service members understand the gratitude of the American people.
Can you remind everyone about the structure of the organization where the funding comes from, because this is a it's a nonprofit, terrible corporation that is chartered by Congress. Where does the money come from?
Yeah, well, the money largely comes from the American people. We have, you know, donations that are as small as you know, five dollars or less from people who've been supporting I've actually gotten I got a letter from a little lady who's who met her husband at a USO dance in nineteen forty four, and she sent me a quarter that that was, you know, taped to the letter. Okay, wow, all the way up to big corporations and companies that we have strategic partnerships with. I know you've got a
lot of businesses that are watching this. You know, we have got some great strategic partners with fantastic brands that go back a Coke back to nineteen forty one, the NFL, Kroger, and lots of others. The Boeing Company, Lockheed Martin, people like that, Companies like that that really are leaning in on supporting the troops. So there's all kinds of ways to help support what we're doing at USO dot org.
What about when you know, individuals come home. I always think about the support once they come back. How do you guys kind of continue the support there.
Yeah, well, you know, when they are overseas, we're actually back home supporting their families. I mentioned the Eastern European deployments that those are unaccompanied tours. They're not going with family members, so we're back home supporting them around the basis. But when they do return, if you know, obviously we're usually there with some kind of a welcome home for them. We had a great welcome home for the aircraft carriers that have just deployed to the Middle East that came
home to Norfolk. But beyond that, as they're looking to transition out of the military, the USO has a broad range of services that help them smooth that transition so that they can get we had a good job, get the educational benefits that they deserve, and integrate into their community. So we really are there from the time they enter the service and you know, raise their right hand all the way to the time that they transition out.
Jadie, you know what I always think about with an organization like this is folks who might be listening to this conversation right now, are just Americans in general, what would surprise them about? I think we just forgive me, but I think take for granted that there's going to be people doing military service and protecting our nation, protecting
you know, our allies. But what would they be surprised about, Like what you guys see on a regular basis, maybe some of the folks that help you, whether it's going to entertain the troops, what would they be surprised that they might find or what that you guys find on a regular basis.
Yeah, Well, the first thing I would say is, you know, I think there's tremendous in some cases sympathy or certainly pride in our military among most Americans. But that's different than really understanding what it's like to wear the uniform. And so part of this, you know, part of the thing I think when they when they when they do get an opportunity to see either what we do or what they do, they're amazed by a lot of things. One is they're just amazed at how, you know, really
how American people are that are serving. That is to say they're like them. You know, we tend sometimes to put our military on either on a pedestal or or some people might tear them down, but but where they might feel like they're victims or something. But that's not the way they see themselves. They see themselves as just patriotic Americans who are doing their job for the country. And I think a lot of Americans would be surprised
at that. I mean, you know, we we tend to get what we get from the movies and things like that, so that's certainly one thing, you know, And in terms of what the USO does, I think I think maybe people would be surprised at how much we're supporting families, you know. So this force is very different than the World War II force. Sixty percent of them are married and over half of them have children, and so it's
a very different type of force. And consequently supporting their families back home, I think is a critical part to getting future generations of Americans to raise their hand and say they want to serve.
It's also interesting the way that technology has changed deployment and keeping in touch with family. If you think about it from the perspective of Okay, waiting months to get letters back in World War Two or even Vietnam to getting emails in post war, during the War on Terror, and now troops abroad being able to maybe do skype or FaceTime with their families. How do you think about the ways that families are able to keep in touch while folks are deployed.
Well, as you know, this is the in touch generation. I mean most of most of the rank and file, as we say and listed are actually gen Z now and obviously gen Z and millennial and consequently they're used to being in touch. So what's the most requested service at USO centers everywhere? Internet? Wi Fi? Yeah, absolutely, it brings them in. It's what keeps them connected. One of our really exciting programs is our gaming program. And you know, gaming used to be kind of isolating, but now it's not.
It can be a fan activity, it can be a friends activity, and so we host gaming competitions and things like that, and a lot of times people just want to come into our center relax, game with their friends who might be next door or they might be four thousand miles away.
You've been CEO for about a decade. How has the organization changed and where do you think the USO needs to go in the next ten years.
Well, you know, we have spent a lot of time something you you wouldn't see you from an organizational stape, but consolidating the organization and bringing it to together. When I first joined, we were nineteen independent five oh one c threes. We're now one. And this has really helped us to be able to not only raise more funds, but also to move those resources where we need them
because the troops are moving in different places. Who would have thought two years ago we would have had five or six centers in Eastern Europe, for example, And so where it's going is always where they're going. And I give you an example of the innovation that we're just now. I think your earlier clip talked about the Abraham Lincoln sailing to the Middle East. The USL is now putting USO centers on aircraft carriers. Wow, very cool program. And again this is this is five thousand people on a
contained area with nothing to do except their jobs. And so this is a little R in R center buried right in the middle of the aircraft carrier. We'll be on nine carriers by the end of the year and then hope to get on the other ones in twenty twenty five. So it's those kinds of innovations that we will always seek to make sure that we are with our service members and their families wherever they go.
You mentioned Eastern Europe, and you have a lot of experience in Eastern Europe, as we mentioned before, you were US Ambassador to Romania two thousand and four to two thousand and five. You also were an advisor to the US Delegation on Nuclear and space arms talks with the former Soviet Union back in the nineteen eighties, I believe.
So I want to talk a little bit about what's happening in Ukraine and in Eastern Europe right now and the different philosophies that are existing in the modern political environment, because it does seem like there's increasingly a large number of folks here in the US who are thinking about the United States and has taking a more isolationist approach, and we're certainly seeing that in Congress each time a funding bill comes up to support Ukraine and President Zelenski,
how do you think about the US's role around the world right now?
Yeah, well, you know, obviously the USO doesn't take positions right on wars or political positions on things like that, But I think, you know, personally, we do need to recognize that it's a pretty dangerous world. We've got the rise of China to become a global power. We have a riventrous Russia which is really seeking to kind of recreate and those are their words, not mine, recreate the former Soviet Lands. And then we have a revolutionary Iran
in the Middle East. And not only are all these things happening at the same time, but they're actually aligned, they're working together, and so that presents the United States and its allies with a lot of challenges, and it has an impact on our business because it means the operational tempo of our military has gone up dramatically, and you see it in the Middle East, to see it in Eastern Europe and not so much, but it is also there in the Far East, and it means that
the demand for our services is going up dramatically as a result of that operational tempo. So it is a very dangerous world out there, and it's one that I think we ignore it our own peril.
Do you feel like it's more dangerous than some of the times where you were serving, whether it's George H. W. Bush or different George W. Bush excuse me, other times where you were helping out administrations. Does it feel more dangerous?
Every generation has its challenge, Carroll, You know what I mean. It is what it is. And obviously during two thousand and one that was nine to eleven and the terrorist attacks and things like that. But this does feel like a return to kind of great power conflict and that has obviously the risk of escalation and things like that. So yes, I guess I would generally say it does feel a little bit more dangerous, almost a little bit maybe like it felt back in the early late seventies
and early eighties. Well, oh, go ahead, Carol.
Well, and I wonder you know, the US and its traditional allies in Europe. Do you think that comes undone or do you think that survives?
Well, I think we have very strong alliance relationships and you know, not some obviously the older traditional ones with the United Kingdom as well as the other founding NATO members. But also I will say just a shout out to the polls and the Romanians who not only supported the United States after nine to eleven, not only sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, but who are actually investing in
their defense in a serious way. And consequently, are you know, they're arm in arm with us as we're in Eastern Europe right now, we're not alone there.
It's interesting to hear you say this just because we're in this political environment right now where I think a lot of folks are saying, you know, it's okay for us to ignore what's going on in other parts of the world. The alliance as of old aren't necessarily the
alliances that we want to continue with. We hear criticism of some of these alliances from one presidential candidate in particular, what would you say to Americans who would say that they're critical of some of these alliances that have been traditional post World War Two?
You know, I actually think if you go back and you look at the history of NATO, for example, even going back into the nineteen fifties, there have been president after president after president who said they need to do more, you know, they need to step up and invest more in their defense. And so there's a you know, in a way, it's I always say, it's a little bit like deja vu all over again, you know, And yes, these things wax and wane a little bit, but in particular,
when the demand on American resources is higher. Is not wrong. I think for Americans to expect that our allies do more. Sometimes we don't hear about what they're doing. We don't really how much they're doing, and some of them, frankly, can do a lot more. So I think it's a balance. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have allies, you know. In other words, we need to have allies I think and support our way of life. I mean we're not I don't think we're doing it for them or just
for them. We're doing it because it's something that's important for us.
Hey, Jad, just to wrap up, when someone mentions the USO, what do you want people to think of? First?
I want them to think about a service member who is out somewhere on the frontiers of freedom, who's alone at Christmas, who is separated from their wives or their families. And I want them to realize that that there's almost nothing like that in the world, and that they need our continual support. And they need to know that Americans, no matter what their views are on you know, the political issues of the day. You know, they didn't make the decision to get sent to Eastern Europe or to
the Middle East or someplace like that. Somebody else made that decision. But that means Americans still have an obligation to show them our gratitude and show them our support. And of course I think the best way to do that is supporting the USO, but there are other ways too, But that's what I want them to think when they think of the USO.
That was JD. Crouch, President and CEO at USO, also known as United Service Organizations.
Still ahead on Bloomberg Business Week, All aboard the GLP one train.
It's time to head on over to ozempic Town. That story next.
This is Bloomberg. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Listen live each weekday starting at two pm Eastern on applecar Play and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just say Alexa play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
So. One of the stickier investment and business trends of our world is the new class of diet drugs, the GLP one medications. They are put up by Eli, Lilly, Novo, Nordisks, and some others. The recent earning season showed Eli Lilly narrowed the gap with rival Novo in the race to dominate the red hot obesity market as it expands its supplies of weight loss drugs.
A little over one week ago, Lily lifted its twenty twenty four revenue outlook for the second time this year on the strength of its weight loss drug sending the stock soaring on the news.
And before that, Novo had reported disappointing second quarter sales of we Govi, saying price concessions for companies that manage prescription drug benefits in the United States cut into its performance. Novo shares sold off on the news, but if since bounce.
Back bottom line industry competition continues to grow. For a gutcheck, we turned to our GLP one guru, Bloomberg News health reporter Madison Muller, who also took us to Ozempic Town, also known as Bowling Green, Kentucky first stop though recent earnings joining Carol Is Bloomberg's Matt Miller kickie it off on the business of it all.
Oh, zempic and we go v same thing right and is a higher dose? Okay? But Manjaro and zep bound zet bound same thing Okay.
Yeah, it's very nice.
Well, I'm just when we get these stats like zep bound sold one point two billion dollars worth in the second quarter, that does not count Munjaro.
Right, they're separated out. And it's interesting because Manjaro has been on the market longer, but zep Bound has just ramped up.
And it's also interesting because that's the one that people talk about as the fat drug, and the same is true with Novo. It's the non fat drug people talk about. Well, whatever you want to call it. I also think it's interesting that Eli Lilly calls their weight loss drug Manjaro, which is like, so where the Italian says for go eat your dinner.
Right, Well, there's actually a story behind the name. What is it Mount Kilimanjaro, like smushed together, and so if you look at the label, you can see there's like two little mountains.
Oh that's interesting.
Who knew?
All right, fun fac So let's talk the nuts and bolts of your world earnings Lily upby Novo not so much. Investors reacted accordingly, How are you thinking about the space and kind of the reporting that we're seeing.
Yeah, I mean we've been talking about supply and the supply shortages for a long time, and that sort of continues to be the story.
It's what we're seeing again with Novo and Lily.
I mean, Novo.
Struggled and missed sales estimates. Lily sort of smashed them out of the parks.
So the business is good, it's just a matter of if you can keep up.
Yes, exactly.
And Lily like had I mean, both companies have invested billions into ramping up manufacturing. It just seems like Lily's issues are starting to ease a little bit faster than Novo's.
Maybe are because they have way more money. So the idea is you can make as much as you can sell, right, definitely, and Eli Lilly is an eight hundred billion dollar company, right, so they have more resources to boost production. Novo is I don't know, like a ten bills million dollar company, right, I don't even know. It's less than ten.
It's the biggest company in Europe.
It's worth three point eight billion damage kroner.
It's a five hundred and sixty eight billion dollar market cap company. The eighty rs at trade here.
Oh is that three point eight trillion? In any case, it's worth less than Lily and it's done worse than Lily. Over the past five years. Eli Lilly shares are up six hundred and forty three percent.
Yeah, I mean, Novo's a small Lily's more diversified. They've been at this for I mean both companies have been at this for a long time. But up until the last few years, Novo's bread and butter was just diabetes like. So, Lily has a slew of other drugs, cancer drugs, autoimmune drugs. They know how to ramp up right, you know, production, and they know how to do this and plan for future demand. And this is all relatively new for Novo. I mean there, this market is crazy.
We want to get into a story that's on the Bloomberg that's a killer, But before we do that, we're about one and a half years into talking about this class drugs. You've been reporting so much, you know, I feel like every couple of weeks or something, there's like, hey, look what else these drugs can do? Your view you're thinking, you're reporting, how does it continue to evolve and how you think.
About the future.
On Eli Lilly's earnings call, they kind of like slipped this into the call. It wasn't huge news but they're no longer calling their obesity and diabetes business unit just obesity and diabetes. Now it's like cardio metabolic health, which sort of signals this bigger thing that we've been talking about that these drugs, you know, aren't just weight loss drugs.
They have potential indications and are potentially able to help with a lot of other conditions that are sort of interrelated with heart disease and kidney disease and liver disease, and so like, I think that that is going to be a huge theme going forward, and the fact that Lily kind of mentioned that on the earnings call today, I was like, so they're thinking about it this way, brand.
I mean, I want, you know, I want I want to take this forever, as you both know, not just because I'm fat, because I only need to lose like twenty pounds, but I want to have a healthy heart so I don't die soon. And I'm pretty sure I'm going to get Alzheimer's disease. This may stop that as well or slow it down. On the other hand, there is so much optimism for mRNA as well, and that didn't cure cancer yet, so maybe it's going to take a while.
Yeah, I mean it's it's different, right, mRNA was amazing for COVID.
It just was it that great for COVID because I took it and then kept getting COVID here.
Yes, all right, to be fair, because I don't want to waste time, because I want to get.
To the story, to the Bowling Green story.
Let's talk about it. It's among the most read. Take us to a ZEPK town.
Yes, so we've I mean you've known about this story for a long time because I spent quite a bit of time.
In Bowling Green, Kentucky.
In Kentucky, yes, not.
Bowling Green, Ohio, because there is a Bowling Green, Ohio as Yeah, but has you know four percent of Bowling Green and the surrounding area people are on weight loss drugs and it's just changing the fabric of the the area economically, culturally, but in sort of surprising ways. Like I thought that I would go there and the restaurants would be empty and the gyms would be closing down. But it's sort of the opposite. I mean, restaurants are
still full, the gyms are doing great. But what's happened is this like side economy has sort of formed alongside the drugs. So there's medical spas that are cropping up everywhere to sell these compounded drugs. The GNC is doing, you know, great business selling supplements that help with side effects, and so it's like it's actually helping business, but in sort of surprising ways.
I have a couple of listener questions, okaya time, as long as they're pertinent to this story.
Yes, so listener rights in related what happens if you take the pill and you're in shape, which is I think a good question because a lot of people, especially you know, like on the Upper east Side, Yeah, they are already skinny, but they want to take it anyway.
Right.
Well, I mean that's the thing, is like doctors shouldn't be prescribing these drugs because it is a it's a prescription drug.
But is it a problem to you stop eating and then you become like anarexic.
Or I mean you that it could be dangerous, Like if you don't need to lose that much weight and you're on a weight loss drug that's really effective, probably not.
Leads into the second question, when did these become over the counter and affordable?
Well, that's a good question.
Yeah, I mean they're probably never, I mean, I don't want to say never, but they are prescription drugs, so they're not over the counter. But generic drugs eventually will come down the pipeline. We're already seeing like some of the older GLP one drugs, the first sort of wave of these, like sex Senda, which is a drug called layer glue tide that's already on the way to becoming generics.
So it's a better name too, or sex starter.
Okay, all right, I'm gonna put you on the side for a moment, so go back to your story because it's really cool.
You guys.
It was several reporters involved in it, and you really get into the specific specifics of the people there. How did you find it though?
Yeah, So, I mean we worked with the data team, and we worked with this analy firm called Purple Lab, and they gave us three zip code level data, which you know kind of gives you like a city and then the surrounding area. So we looked all across the US. We wanted to see what the ozembic hot spots were, and you know, Bowling Green wasn't the only one that
came up in the data. There was Huntsville, Alabama. There was like a few other areas, but Kentucky as a state has the highest concentration of weight loss drug users. So we were like, this is probably a good place to start. Clearly stands out in the data. And then once we started talking to people in Bowling Green, it was like, Okay, this is our spot because everyone here is either on the drugs or nos like five other people that are on them.
I mean, can we make the assumption that's just an area where there's a fair amount of people that are overweight.
Yeah, I mean the obesity rates are high there, the diabetes rates are high there, and in Kentucky across the board.
So it's actually a good thing.
That there's a lot of people taking these drugs in that area because you know, it means hopefully it's helping.
With not just Kentucky. I mean you get off the airplane at CMH and Columbus, Ohio, and you notice that immediately as well.
Listen. I mean, I think it's been an incredible game changer for a lot of people in their lives who struggle and there are people who struggle with being overweighted and who've tried a bunch of different things, and I've seen it firsthand with individuals and then they take this drug and it's just unbelievable the difference.
Right, And I mean that's the big thing with these drugs is there's also been this changing understanding of obesity as you know, a biological health condition that's driven by someone's biology. That's not necessarily just because you know, these tropes that have long been repeated that someone's lazy or that they're eating too much. Like, there are biological mechanisms driving this and the these drugs help with that. So it's it's for people who need them. It's an absolute game changer.
What surprised you about like going there and talking to these people?
I mean, I that's a really good question.
I like didn't have a lot of I don't know understanding going in because that was my first time in Kentucky. So I was like, I don't know what this is going to be like. And everyone was so willing to talk to us and share their stories and like they were so grateful for these drugs. But I think that maybe this is the thing that surprised us is like everyone had this great success at the beginning, and then something happened either their insurance cut them off or they
couldn't find the drugs anymore because of supply shortages. And I guess that shouldn't have surprised me because those are all themes that we've been reporting on for a long time.
But you're saying if they stopped taking the drugs, they're no longer successful.
Well no, not necessarily, but and like they have found other ways to continue taking them. But I think I was surprised to keep taking.
The drugs and they're still successful. Yeah, but if you stopped taking the drugs.
Then oftentimes you gain the weight back exactly.
I mean that's not something that we saw with the people that we spoke to, because they all were able to, like one guy switch to another drug, someone else started taking a compound of drugs. So, but I think it was surprising to me that, like everyone across the board that we talked to encountered one of these issues with accessibility or with you know, the supply shortages or price or something like.
It really is just affecting people a lot.
Are most of these people though, is insurance paying or how much was out of pocket?
It was most of the people insurance was paying at the beginning and then like six months in or once they lost a certain amount of weight, insurance stopped paying for them. Some people went to these compounded off brand drugs that we've talked about before. Other people were able to, like one guy switched from ozempic to manjarro because his insurance would cover manjarro but not ozempic, right, So, like everyone was able to continue taking the drugs for the
most part. But I mean Pat Stiff, who's one of the characters in this story, Like he switched from ozempic to Manjarro and then couldn't find his Manjaro anywhere because the supply shortages were so bad.
So he was, you know, as we're like finishing up.
This story, calling me and saying that, well, I'm just gonna have to go off the drug and see what happens, and it'll be like an experiment. Hopefully I don't gain the weight back. But yeah, it's it's a struggle I think.
For a lot of people.
That's Bloomberg News health reporter Madison Miller her story in Bloomberg Business Week magazine. Bloomberg's Matt Miller there as well, And that.
Wraps up our first hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio. Ahead in our next hour, the billionaire nerd Savior King and his quest to shape our world. You will definitely know this person, and by the way, he's also one of the richest out there.
Plus how women became America's safety net, and well, no easy segue here, we're going to talk ready to drink cocktails with the head of the family owned Jeloso group of companies.
This is Bloomberg Business Week.
I'm Carol Messer and I'm Tim stenoveex Stay with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines are coming up right now.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern Listen on Apple car Play and ed Broud Auto with a Bloomberg Business at or want us live on YouTube tube.
Plenty Ahead in our second hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week, including the billionaire nerd Savior King aka Bill Gates and his quest to shape our world It's all in a new book.
Plus women holding it all together and becoming our safety net. And after all that heavy stuff, how about wrapping it up with Aldo Jeloso, who runs the family owned Jeloso Group of companies.
Yeah, I'm there, I'm totally there, all right, First up this hour, the team here at Bloomberg News analyzed government data and found that there's a gender divide in how recent college graduates are responding to a cooling US job market. While young college educated women are sticking with their job search even as the number of vacancy shrinks, many of their male peers are choosing to take a break, And
women still aren't earning as much as men. Last year, women's earnings were eighty three point six percent of men's. This is according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. And yeah, come on, Tim, this shouldn't be news to anyone who's out there listening.
What's talked about less though, is all of the work that women do that's unpaid. Think childcare, taking kids to the doctor, cooking for the family, managing the family budget, taking care of elderly family members, figuring out everything related to school, and yes, what the kids are doing for the summer. In a lot of ways, women are the family safety net. They're holding it together. And that's the title of Jessica Calarco's book. She's a sociologist and associate
professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Her book out just a couple of months ago, Holding It Together, How Women became America's Safety Net.
So essentially, women are the default caregivers for the children, for the sick, for the elderly, not only for kids, but filling in those kinds of jobs that you mentioned before, and essentially they are doing this work. This is actually related to the numbers that you mentioned before in terms of you know, women's equal pay or the lack of equal pay, in part because the kind of work that women are doing behind the scenes is a big factor
in where that gender gap and pay comes from. That the more labor, the more unpaid labor, we heap onto women, the harder it is for them to advance in their careers, the harder it is for them to compete with men,
and in ways that other countries don't. And research shows that one of the strongest predictors of our economic growth in countries is the amount of money that we invest in providing the kinds of supports that helped to alleviate some of those gender gaps in both unpaid work and also the kinds of gender gaps that show up and paid work as well.
Jessica, if the pandemic hadn't ha happened, would you ever written this book?
I don't think so.
Certainly.
This book started as a project. I was interested in what I thought of at the time as the sort of best laid plans of parenting, how you have ideas about the kind of parent that you want to be, and life intervenes, and life intervened in the sense of a pandemic happened in the middle of my data collection efforts and really pushed me to want to understand that the interviews that we were doing in the surveys we were doing with families across the US at the time,
really showed how much of an impact the pandemic was having, especially on families with children, and especially on the moms within those families who were really trying to hold it together in the midst of this crisis, which which led me to want to understand, how did we get to this point of really lying on women to be the social safety net for us? And then, in the context of the failure of build back better, you know, why
didn't we learn from the mistakes of the pandemic. Why didn't we pursue those kinds of policies that might have helped to put us on better footing, both genderwise and in terms of economic parity with other types of countries that have used those social safety nets for decades.
Okay, So the simple question, with perhaps not a very simple answer, how did we get here? How did we get to the point where women became America's safety net?
In the book, I traced this back to the nineteen thirties and to the pushback in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Essentially, at the time, the National Association of Manufacturers, a business lobbying agency, was looking for ways to resist some of the higher corporate taxes and higher taxes on wealthy people that were needed to pay for
these kinds of strong social safety net programs. And what they found at the time I talked about in the book where a group of neoliberal economists out of Austria who were developing this theory that we don't actually need social safety nets as a country because if we don't have protection p people will take steps, make better choices
to keep themselves safe from risk. And this theory has been debunked over time and showing that that's not actually how people respond to risk, but they use this to fuel not only changes in policy in the US, but also massive propaganda campaigns things like General Electric Theater, which helped to create this perception of kind of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, this very American mentality, and also reinforce traditional gender roles, which helped to lay the groundwork
for the kinds of policy decisions that we made after World War II. For example, of instead of trying to take steps to allow women to stay in the workforce to continue those rosy, the riveter jobs that they'd had, we shuddered the childcare centers that we put in place during the war, and we pushed women back home and really embraced the nineteen fifties culture around gender and that echoes of that still exist today and the way that we treat women as a reserve.
Lin I have to jump in because here we are seventy years later and we're still talking about the same old problems. Teim. We talked about childcare, the costs, the juggling, like why haven't right It's.
I mean, I can speak from personal experience. It's just a daily struggle figuring out who's picking up what kid, who's cooking dinner?
And guys, I mean, and you guys have childcare.
We have childcare.
Yeah.
So I just feel like, why are we still having these difficult conversations? Why haven't we figured out a better system? Why isn't it It's not a new thing, is it policymakers at the federal level? Is it state level? Is it just a society so entrenched that we don't value women as much?
What is it? I mean?
Essentially, other countries use social safety nets to help people
manage these challenges and manage these risks. They use taxes and regulations to not only protect people from falling into poverty, but to help people manage the challenges of daily living things like childcare, things like healthcare, and also to ensure with things like limits on paid work hours, to ensure that people have the time and the energy to do this work of taking care of their families, taking care of their commune, is taking care of their homes even
and in the US we instead try a DIY society. We tell people that they should be able to manage this risk on their own. But the reality is that that's not possible. And that's where women come in, in the sense that they're tasked with holding it together, with doing the unpaid and underpaid labor that makes it seem like this DIY illusion is possible even when it's leaving us on the edge of collapse.
Just give us an idea of how you were able to gather these stories from so many women.
Sure, So we started by recruiting two hundred and fifty pregnant women from prenatal clinics in Indiana, and this was in twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen, and we were following those same women over time with surveys and in depth interviews every six months from the time that they were pregnant through their first two years postpartum. And the pandemic hit in the middle of this, so we did three additional waves of surveys and interviews with the mothers and
their partners and some of their social network contacts. And then, because this was mostly an Indiana based sample, we also did two national surveys each with over two thousand pairs. It's from across the US to better understand how to kind of contextualize the findings from our qualitative data. And then I also dug into a lot of the historical research and some media case studies for the book as well to better understand, you know, how do we get here?
And then what are some of the myths that are helping to the cultural myths that are helping to keep us from changing.
Let's go there, because that's where I want to go. Chapter six, The Mars Venus myth. I can't tell you how many times we're having conversations and it's like, well, of course, you know, Mars Venus. We're different, we're wired differently, so of course women are the caregivers. It's just the way it is. Go there because I love this.
Sure.
So essentially there's this myth that is perpetuated by many parts of our culture that suggests that men and women
are just fundamentally different. Butgard the book women are the book two exactly, so I mean it stems in part, and certainly these ideas are much older than that, but it's echoed in this kind of John Gray's kind of classic Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, which almost, you know, suggests that men and women are from different planets, not only different species even and it's echoes of this.
You can hear this in you know, recent conversations, things like Harrison Butker's commencement speech around this idea that women are just happier at home, that women are that that's their natural duty or their natural responsibility to be in
the home. And what research shows is that belief in these kinds of mythical ideas and that they are mythical, That the gender is way more complicated than this sort of simple pink blue binary, and that socialization, early exposure, that parents and adult caregivers treat children very differently on the basis of perceived gender from very early on in
their lives, and that this lay is the groundwork. You know, we expect girls to be mothers from the time that they're old enough to hold a baby doll in ways that we simply don't expect for boys.
Oh what's interesting is you know, and I just want to stop for a moment. There was an interview you did, and Tim and I both like reading this. You know that Mars and Venus men and women are just fundamentally different, both psychologically. Is explanation rights also very convenient you have said in the past. It means though we don't need
big structural solutions. That's kind of the payoff, right, If we believe that we are fundamentally different, it's not that there's something structurally wrong, and that is maybe why we continue to have this conversation decade after decade.
Exactly what I find in the national surveys that I've conducted with parents is that the majority of dads, for example, believe that kids are better off with their mothers at home.
And what I also find is that the dads who believe in that myth, who believe that it's better for kids to have a mother at home than to have a mother who's engaged in paid work, is that those are also disproportionately the dads who reject the need for a stronger social safety net, and essentially believing this myth, believing that women are just happier at home or that it's better for kids to have mom at home, allows us to feel like, well, maybe we don't need to
invest in that stronger social safety net. Maybe we don't need paid parntal leave or universal affordable childcare because it just works better for everyone if mom is at home as opposed to in the paid work horse.
What are we right now as we head into the election of twenty twenty four, because I was actually talking with I was talking with a guest early on our crypto show, and she she's big in the It was a crypto show, so she's big into crypto. And she sent a tweet out earlier this year, Jessica that talked about choosing between on the ballot women's bodies and the right to have autonomy over your body versus your wallet, because she doesn't believe that the Biden administration is pro
crypto enough. And it was interesting to hear that juxtaposition because and I asked her, is it actually that black and that white for you? And she said, there are a lot of people who are single issue voters when it comes to crypto.
But here in.
Twenty twenty four, I think we're at a time when a lot of people never thought that Roe v. Wade would actually be overturned. How does the conversation in your world shift in an election.
Year like this, Yeah, I mean, I think we have to think about the way that denying people bodily autonomy, denying reproductive rights makes it easier to exploit women labor. It can push them into motherhood in ways that make it difficult for them not only to have choices about things like finishing college or investing in the kinds of careers that they need to take time for, but can also lead them pushed into the kinds of low wage jobs that offer limited options for their families that make
it harder for them to get ahead. And so I think we have to think about the way that these kinds of attacks on reproductive freedom are attacks also on women's economic opportunities and on their ability to take care of themselves and their families financially as well.
You get into this idea, I don't want to end without thinking about, like, how do we fix this? You talk about a union of care. So we've got about a couple of minutes left. How do we move forward so that in ten years from now you and I aren't having this same conversation.
Absolutely, I think we have to You mentioned before the importance of valuing care work in the sense that we know that women do twice as much unpaid care work in the US as women, and estimates suggests that that unpaid care work done by women is valued at over
six hundred billion dollars a year. And so I think we can think about that the value that women are adding to the economy, even if they're not themselves being compensated for it, and also recognize how that kind of care work benefits all of us, and that if we all had the kinds of policy protections in place, that we could share that unpaid care work more equitably and also ensure that we have the time and energy to do it sustainably.
That was Jessica Klarko, sociologist and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, her book, Holding It Together. How Women Became America's Safety Nut.
You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week. Coming up, the tech Entrepreneur in Titan, the Philanthropist, the Billionaire, the Nerd, the Savior, the King.
A new book on one of the few billionaires who has been in the public eye longer than most. This is Bloomberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Listen live each weekday starting at two pm Easter I'll Applecar Player and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business Ad. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station. Just say Alexa play Bloomberg eleven thirty, a Bloomberg exclusive.
This past week, The USED Department of Justice is mulling over a breakup of Alphabet's Google after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market. According to people with knowledge of the deliberations, the move would be Washington's first push to dismantle a company for illegal monopolization since unsuccessful efforts to break up Microsoft two decades ago.
Bill Gates, co founder and former CEO of Microsoft, figured prominently in the US government's anti trust case that time, along with many others. Included in a new book on Gates by Anuprida Das, South Asia, correspondent for The New York Times. The book Billionaire Nerd Savior King Bill Gates in his Quest to Shape Our World. Our Conversation starts with the often talked and written about friendship between Gates and Warren Buffett that, like many things changed over time, spoke on the record.
You know he is in fact, you know I used to cover Again, A lot of this goes back to the journal when I was a reporter. You know, I used to write about Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. So the relationship of the two men was also equally interesting. The first time I saw them at the Berkshire Hathway meeting, just kind of walking around, you know, talking to shareholders, and it just struck me as kind of a you know,
a very casual but very intimate friendship. And then I began looking at it and seeing that, you know, they've talked about each has talked about the other and sort of the magic of their friendship over the decades. And you know, Bill Gates definitely has kind of advertised that piece of it. It's almost like part of his brand. Every year, nearly every year on Gates Notes his blog, he posts something like a goofy video or post dedicated to Buffet, And so that's that was really interesting to me.
But in recent years, I think once Buffett decided that he wasn't he had always said that he wasn't going.
To give his money to anyone.
He hadn't decided who he was going to give his money to after his death, but there was always like an assumption that the Gates Foundation stood to get all of the money. And when he eventually decided who was going to get that money after he died, it was not going to be the Gates foundation, and so I think there was a little bit of tension there that I tried to capture in that piece that The Times ran, and it was you know, I think they have very
different lifestyles. Buffett, as I'm sure you guys know, is a kind of more folksy, simple sort of person, very Midwestern, and then Gates has more of the traditional trappings of a billionaire. So it was interesting to see their divergent paths but also examine the basis of their friendship.
You know, you said earlier about you know, you wanted to kind of dig into the persona and the man. Are they that different?
Yeah, that's that's a really interesting question.
I think that plays into a lot of what we in the media, How we and what we write and what we choose to write feeds into the image of a person who's in the in you know, the public eye, in the sense that you interact with someone, you see him or her in a closed setting, you get more of a sense of who they are based on interactions, based on your sources. You start creating this image of a person in the media. So it's true the persona is based on many fundamental elements of who the person is,
but then it also takes on its own life. And then if you're a billionaire or you have like a lot of resources that you can dedicate to that, then I think you're basically sustaining, nurturing, minimizing, you know, enhancing certain aspects of that image to really suit your needs and ends.
And this isn't.
Necessarily nefarious, but it's just what image making can do. And so I think their elements of a person's internal personality or like in closed settings, and then how that gets, how that feeds into a persona, and how then people kind of keep manufacturing and finessing it, which to me was really interesting.
Budgates, did you like him as you did this process?
Well, he didn't grant me an interview, so that you know, I couldn't tell you any more than that, But.
But you talk to a lot of people about him, and we can get for a picture of someone maybe clearer than the narrative that's out there publicly.
Absolutely.
I think what was most interesting to me is that the essential person has not changed.
Right.
He's mellowed obviously over the decades, we all.
Do, but his essential personality the way he's obviously supremely smart, but he can sometimes be abrasive, He can be impatient with employees. He enjoys a you know, working in a combative culture. And that was the case of Microsoft, and that is also the case of the Gates Foundation, except that what happens is that Microsoft rewarded that sort of competitive, you know, culture, whereas the Gates Foundation. I think people come from very different backgrounds. So it sat uncomfortably inside
the Gates Foundation. But it struck me as really interesting that he was essentially the same person, but he had also changed his image over the decades, you know, to find that continuity, the consistency in so many ways, but to then place it against how we looked at him as a nerd, this sort of ruthless monopolist, this this you know, philanthropist.
Rockefeller, like Robert Baron kind of thing.
As you're right about absolutely.
What was the anti trust? Was the anti trust issue at Microsoft? Was that a pivotal turning point for him? Or when do you think this metamorphosis or transformation began?
Yeah, it did.
I think he had always said that he was going to give the bulk of his fortune to philanthropy. I think the time hadn't been decided. And you have to remember that in the nineteen nineties there was only Microsoft. Now we think about Google and Amazon and Facebook and a lot of companies that are facing similar antitrust scrutiny. But in the nineteen nineties, the late the second half of the nineties, Microsoft was it. It was the company.
It captured everyone's imagination. But also, and as a result of that, I think Gates' performance, even though we didn't have social media then and we didn't have viral moments, Gates's performance riveted the nation and people realized that this was a man who just who had become a distraction from Microsoft. So I think it made sense for him to then step step down from the CEO role in two thousand and Also, he was tired. I think he just he said a source of mind told me that
he was tired, didn't nowhere else to go. And he just also felt that Microsoft was a shiny example of American innovation and why was the government going against him? And so I think there was a lot of confusion and a lot of pain. And then he turned to philanthropy because it was there. It was something he had always intended to do, and he found that he really liked it, and then it was go big or go home,
because that's what Gates, that's who Gates is. He started Microsoft, changed the personal computing world, and now he's changed philanthropy with this Mammoth Foundation.
Did you find a lot of surprises in this process in terms of new things you learned about Bill Gates?
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things, Carol is we didn't really understand and I think that despite I think the entire world AID doesn't quite understand why he met with Jeffrey Epstein times. And the question for me that's been the most interesting to explore is that if your Gates, or if you're a billionaire, you have armies of people whose job it is to sustain and
polish and nurtery your image right. Building Bill's brand is something I examined in the book, and yet you have, despite having all these people, even a basic Google search right would reveal that Epstein by then was a convicted sex offender and someone who perhaps wasn't the best kind of person from an optics standpoint for a billionaire with what Gates was trying to do to interact. So that was surprising to me. It was a failure lapse of
judgment that I wouldn't expect. But it also ties back to the personality that Gates.
Is pretty You were talking about Jeffrey Epstein just moments ago and the relationship that Bill Gates had with Jeffrey Epstein, and I got to tell you the parts in your book that focus on that. I've gotten a lot of me attention over the last couple of weeks. Just explain what you learned about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and why they found themselves having a relationship.
Yeah, So what happened. My best reconstruction, based on my reporting and documents, is that in twenty ten you had the Giving Pledge, which was this effort, essentially a get out of the vote campaign by Gates, Warren Buffett, and Milliner French Gates to get other billionaires to commit to pledge to commit half or more of their fortunes to charity. And at that time a lot of billionaires were very interested in finding a way to put their money to use.
Having the money is almost easier than figuring out how to give it away wisely, and so the Gates Foundation was very much set up to use billions of dollars and Gates was in the middle of this massive push toward polio eradication. He'd been the Foundation, being worked with other entities, and it was one of those times when
Gates wanted to raise a lot of money. So Epstein kind of being in these circles of influence and power, he's someone who kind of collects, you know, collected bits and pieces of information, used leverage wherever he could, and realized that there might be an opportunity for him to pitch something called the donor advised fund, and he wrote in JP Morgan and Gibi Morgan had like another relationship with the Gates Foundation, so he looked at all of this.
He began pitching this idea for a donor advised fund. He reached out to people who he knew at the Gates Foundation, who you know, had an overlap with Gates, of course, and began seeking an introduction. Now Gates took that introduction.
There was there.
He came and visited Epstein at his house the first time, and then there was another meeting where there was a presentation. Epstein had slides and everything. So that until then perhaps all well and good, but after that, the fact that he kept meeting with Epstein several times, ostensibly to discuss philanthropy, and Gates has always said that he hasn't That was the only reason then that he was sorry for the lapse in judgment.
But it's still.
Is a question for for Gates, essentially because he is perhaps the only person who would know why he kept going back and meeting with Epstein. There are people who say that Gates was enamored of Epstein's lifestyle. He did write to some employees and the Gates Foundation after saying that you know, he does have an adventure's different lifestyle,
but it's not for me. I'm not putting words into Gates's mouth, but that was essentially the point of what he was saying, and so clearly there was maybe be amusement, maybe surprise, maybe anticipation. It's hard to say. But again, coming back to the point I was making earlier, it is a surprising lapse in judgment for the people who work for him, but for Gates himself it's actually not that surprising, given that he does have a certain naivete when it comes to personal relationships.
Now, you said you didn't get to talk to Bill Gates, right for the book.
No, I didn't. He turned down my request for an interview.
Did he Were you able to ask him any questions like write and get responses or no?
Nothing at all. No.
So what happened was that it was interesting because I sent them detailed fact checking lists, both at Gates Ventures, which is a private firm, and the Gates Foundation back in January or February, months months before. They stalled in stonewalled and didn't acknowledge my emails, and at the end when I said you have to give me a comment,
they said it was hearsay. And then just weeks before we went to publication, they got back on some of the Epstein related points and they refuted and said that they could present documented evidence, and I asked for that audden.
They didn't provide anything, and the book went to print, and then the Daily Mail, of all the Daily Mail and the New York Post put out these tidbits from my book and they were overblown, then not entirely accurate, but the Gates found But then Gates is private firm, then put out a statement saying that it was all wild allegations and that they presented me with documented evidence that I chose to ignore.
Which is not true speaking of wild things that potentially could come up. I was joking at the top when I said the microchip vaccine stuff, but only half joking in the sense that these are real conspiracy theories about Bill Gates. Can you talk a little bit about where those come from and the idea of this quote unquote Davos elite that wants to control the world.
I think the fact that Gates was so prominent suddenly in everywhere he was suddenly everywhere. He was talking about vaccines, He was sharing the stage with doctor Anthony Fauci, he was advocating. He was kind of out there everywhere. He couldn't miss him, which led a lot of people to wonder, and I speak to I have one person in the book who said, who made the point that you know, I had always thought of Gates at the Microsoft co founder and suddenly, why is this guy talking about vaccines?
And so I think if you are grown to conspiracy theories, I think that was kind of the first signed for a lot of people that maybe Gates has some kind of vested interest. And you know, conspiracy theories obviously take on a life of their own, and I think there was a study and don't quote me on this, but I think there's a study looking at the feasibility of having some information, you know, implanted into a person's under a person's skin, and it was an mit feasibility study
and nothing came of it. But that led to this kind of big idea that somehow Gates was trying to, you know, implant chips and people and kind of all manner of things now I think for the vaccines, and you know, Gates was He's a rational guy. He's driven by evidence and science and tech, and I think he just didn't understand why there were people questioning what seemed to him very obvious steps. He couldn't understand being a personal target of the conspiracy theories.
We just have about forty five seconds left here. Your title Billionaire, Nerd Savior King? Which is the most appropriate as you finish your book in terms of which word really you would most closely identify with him, And as I said, only got about forty seconds.
Today, it would be King.
He really kind of is on top of so many you know, I would say Savior King. Perhaps the billionaire is a fact the nerd is a version of him back in the day, but today he's kind of on top of the world, sharing the stage with heads of state, and he is a savior of people in the global South with the Gates Foundation.
So I would say Savior King.
That was on Uprida Das, South Asia, correspondent for The New York Times her new book Billionaire Nerd Savior King Bill Gates in his quest to Shape.
Our World Still ahead on Bloomberg Business Week. Nothing like wrapping up the week with a ready to make cocktail? Are you in?
Hey?
You know how I roll? If it's non alcoholic, maybe has some bubbles, little fruit juice, not too much sugar. Though I'm really not fun. You need to know something about me. I'm not fun to hang out with.
You are fun to hang out with you, just not necessarily with an alcoholic Where to come?
This is Bloomberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern Listen on Apple car Play and and Broun Auto with a Bloomberg Business act or wanted us live on YouTube.
As a former colleague of ours used to say, it's five o'clock summer, doesn't Jimmy Buffett didn't he used to say that all the time too, ya.
A lot of people do.
One of the trends we are increasingly seeing from startups and the establishment alike is pre mad cocktails, easy to buy, no shaking nor stirring necessary.
And that brings us to the family owned Jeloso Group of Companies, whose parent company was founded nearly six decades ago in Montreal, Canada, and now produces over one hundred alcoholic beverage products in the US and Canada with over three hundred and fifty employees and seven warehouses.
Although Jeloso runs the second generation of the family owned Jelosa Group of Companies, which includes Jelosa Beverage Group USA. He sat down in studio joining Bloomberg's Matt Miller and me taking us back to how it all began.
We're a family owned business. Immigrant parents immigrated in nineteen fifty seven, came here for a better life. We're from the South of it and basically my father ventured into importing grapes from California because in Canada you have liquor boards. And my father realized that in Quebec you only drink beer,
and he said, we don't drink beer. As Italian so basically there was no wines to be had, and the wines that were available were very expensive, and being a farmer, he said, you know what, let me bring in grapes for the immigrant community. And then that's the story.
So he brought in grapes to make your own wine in Quebec for immigrants exactly so, because you know, we're a legislative state, so there's a lot of taxation.
It's not free market like it is here in the US. So that's how we started. And basically from there it went on and when people started hearing about my father making wine, he was never really making wine. He was crushing grapes and the must people would be bringing it home to ferment it. And the local authorities got wind of this and say, hey, this man is bootlegging.
He's actually making wine.
We're in control of the wine industry in Quebec, and they sequestered all the liquids that were in my father's warehouse and the liquids were then juice. Then six months later, my father's lawyer contacts them says, by the way, mister Jeloso, you know what, You're going to be charged with bootlegging. He goes, what it. You know what, they did a test and it's wine. He goes, but naturally it's going to ferment.
It will turn into wine.
So basically, my father brought in an anologist from Europe and my father won the case. And the lawyer asked my father, listen, now's the time to sue the government. My father said, I came here as an immigrant for a better life. I want them to give me a wine permit. That's why our family has the first wine permit in Quebec.
Zero zero role, what a story.
So tell us about what you got, what it's grown in.
You've turned this into a company that does do you deal with beer now as well?
We deal with beer, we deal with cider, we deal with spirits. We represent Bacardi, we represent Boston Beer in Quebec.
Uh.
Basically we are a one stop shop.
And this is like one of the hottest growing areas of the alcoholic beverage segment, right, I mean everything from the from the lowest level to I mean there's really uppity mixed cockte pre mixed cocktails that you can order at a restaurant.
What you have to realize is that whenever you're drinking a cocktail, at a restaurant, you'll never You'll never find unisons and taste. Somebody will add one more ounce of cognac, one more ounce of vodka. So what we ventured out was basically creating a malt. Why malt because malt gives us access to people, to markets, whereby spirits you're limited
in general. So we actually patented the process whereby we cleaned the malt and we add the proper salts, the proper sugar levels, so that at the end of the day you can receive the natural flavors of whatever cocktail you want to build on. And what you have here cocktails being the first original cocktail and Sonny Margarita is the number one selling cocktail in the usseving Wow, it beats up every every other cocktail and this from Quebec.
Could you believe that it's pretty cool stuff. It's a crowded market though increasingly. How do you get yourself noticed or how do you think about that? Because it feels like we talk to a lot of folks in the beverage in the alcohol space, and I just feel like there's a lot of startups, there's a lot of the establishment that are coming out with different brands. So how do you distinguish yourself or get noticed.
You need agility, you need flexibility. You have to address not what the consumer wants, what you believe they want. One of the things that we pride ourselves is having the proper contacts with distributors, because, like you said, Carol, there are so many people out there wanting to load
up the warehouses of all these distributors. Whereby, at the end of the day, you saw it in the craft beer business, whereby everybody got on board and everybody got stinged by it because the craft beer business somehow sued.
Right.
So what we've done is we provide proper quantities, We provide constant updates and flavor profiles. But at the same time we are authentic in terms of flavor. There is no nat there is no unnatural ingredients. And what we do is Okay, that's the sunny margarita.
You're gonna enjoy it.
It sounds like a beer, guys, it's not.
It's not a beer like you know what. At the beginning, everybody used to tell me, by the way, it's mold. I go tell me something you like Scotch.
Scotch is malt.
So you have to get the people to understand that it's only the alcohol stream that gives you access to a network. So it tastes exactly like spirits because we redesigned it as spirits.
All right, Carol is taking a sip now. Now you've poured it into margarita and it's nice.
It has a hint of salt.
And I'm picky about margarita's.
It does have a hint of salt. That's an important part. So I haven't had a drink.
I'm not going to put it near you.
I haven't had a drink in two years, but I did drink alcohol. I loved the salt in the Martin margarita.
Right, Yeah, that's incredible.
What does this cost into retail? Yeah, that's a good question.
I have no idea.
Look to go to your website.
It's like it's like I would say a thing about sorry, I didn't mean to do that to a It's a twenty two ounce can, so it's like a tall boy.
Right.
What do you think because I think about when you go to a bar, right, like a margarita is.
Like ten twelve dollars team yah, Depending on do you make an alcohol free version or do you make alcohol free cocktails as well.
We are the biggest producers of non alcoholic beverages. We started in nineteen eighty nine with wine coolers and what and what you have to realize we have we have brands that are non alcoholic because the demographics, the population, age, aging, better lifestyle. I say between now and twenty fifty, fifty percent of the people won't be drinking alcohol.
Although I do wonder you know, Map brought up a great point about how a lot of people don't want any alcohol anymore. There's that trend. There's also a wellness healthier trend, no sugars, that kind of thing that's a real concern for a lot of individuals called bucha. How are you thinking about that in terms of how you guys do things well? And are you seeing that in adaptation as.
A result, I mean, you see you when you see players like Molsen Cores change their name to the Molten Cores Beverage Company, they're starting to realize they have to walk away from beers of certain staple items. So you have non alcoholic was always considered zero point five because of the changing demographics. Now everybody's focusing on zero point zero because we have to attend certain other demographics or religious beliefs going forward because the population is changing and
the wellness, I mean, there's hydration, there's longevity. You have to address it today and how we do it. Also, a non alcoholic and non acoholic is that we started in the eighties for the simple reason that we knew that people need an alternative and children. To make sure that children don't drink, they have to have products that are non alcoholic with a name that is alcoholic. So it takes that stigma away from them and that pressure
because pure pressure is very strong. So we have non alcoholic champagnes, non alcoholic cocktails, and yeah, when you look at that, we offer that range across the board.
You see a lot of growth in that area so.
Much, and especially when you see big players themselves like Heineken, Budweis or and everybody.
Yeah, what about for something like this where I think, I mean, I've actually you know, been either on a vacation or I sail and like there's not a lot of we don't keep a lot of stuff on the you know there and I've picked up these pre made cocktails and there it's really nice and convenient. So I am curious, what kind of growth are you seeing in this area.
Well, we have grown double digits ready to drink Yeah, last six years. Every month we control the category in terms of margarita. We're the third largest in America and we still do our runway is still is still there because you know, it's like at the end of the day, we're fighting big boys and like, like Matt was saying, what makes us pertinent is the fact that we keep our ear with the distributor. We may we attend to
their needs in terms of inventory levels. Uh. And at the end of the day, people only come back for only one simple reason, plaffability. It has to taste good. People will adopt at once, but they have to.
I've had some non alcoholic stuff, and I have to be honest with you, I didn't like it.
That's probably beer, right, non alcoholic beer and wine is no bueno.
Right.
But you can easily make a non alcoholic sex on the beach, you know, because these cocktails. I'm looking through what you got. Carol's drinking the margarita, you got the screwdriver. Obviously you've got Alabama slammer.
Sex on the beach.
Yes, sex on the beach along islandized tea. Most of these cocktails were mixed originally so that you couldn't taste the alcohol in them, and I imagine that makes it easy to make non alcoholic non alcoholic versions. How important is your distributor relationship. You must get all your intel that way.
Our intel comes from the fact that we know the industry. Our distributor is our segue to the market. They have to believe in us. So our intel comes from the fact that we develop quaffable product and that are pure and taste and have no sugars in them. The only sugars are basically the alcohol itself, that is naturally sugar. Right.
That's Aldo Jeloso of the family owned Jeloso Group of companies, which includes Jeloso Beverage Group USA along with Bloomberg's Matt Miller.
Who, like you, is also into non alcoholic beverages. Yeah, been like sober for or not sober. I shouldn't say that, but that's staining. You could say that was my word, not Mad's. He's just been, you know, he's been on a healthier kind of kick.
Yeah.
I mean, he's like one of many right now, I think.
Yeah, I agree. I think a lot of people are rethinking this.
Also.
It's interesting to see research coming out rethinking you know, a glass of wine or alcohol, you know the impact it can have on your health longer term.
I think for Matt and me, I don't want to speak for him, but he's got young kids too, Like you know, Saturday morning, Sunday morning, you want to be there to chase them around.
Did you love me?
They come over and they open up your eyes.
Yeah, yeah, that's great.
All right.
That wraps up our weekend edition to Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio. Thank you so much for joining us.
Be sure to tune into Bloomberg Business Monday through Friday starting at two pm Wall Street Time on Bloomberg TV, Bloomberg Radio, and on SiriusXM Channel one twenty one. You can also listen to us on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto Free in the Apple app Store or on Google Play.
You can also watch our daily broadcast on YouTube search Bloomberg Global News. We're a summlcast on Bloomberg Originals, available at Bloomberg dot com, Slash Originals, and streaming platforms including Roku, Amazon fireTV, Samsung TV Plus, and more.
Find our Bloomberg BusinessWeek podcast at Bloomberg dot com, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts, and the latest edition of the magazine is available on newsstands now at Bloomberg dot com and always on the Bloomberg Terminal.
I'm Tim Standebeck and I'm Krol Masser. Have a good and safe weekend. Everyone, Stay with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines are coming up right now.
This is the Bloomberg BusinessWeek podcast, all available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you can get your podcasts. Listen live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern pud, Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, tune In, and the Bloomberg Business App. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg Terminal MHM