This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly from Bloomberg Radio. Hi. I'm Jason Kelly and I'm Carol Masser. Welcome to the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week. Over the next couple of hours, we're going to bring you news of the week, insights from the magazine, and more. And Jason, let's not forget it's week twenty one, dog days of summer, and yet an incredibly busy week on many fronts. We talked a lot about the virus and vaccine.
We're going to cover that over the next couple of hours, and a lot of talk about education and what they're ultimately going to do this fall. And I think it's safe to say that the virus and its economic, social cultural effects have really started to embed themselves broadly in the world. And the cover story this week it's all about Google's push into healthcare. How it's a case study on how tech giants dominate small businesses. And again, this
is partially and largely, i should say, related to the pandemic. Yeah, and also related to the pandemic sports and we got to check in with the owner of the sack Gramento Kings what they are doing. He's actually in the bubble in Disney World, so we talked to him about playing sports in a pandemic. We also talked with him about upping his bet on something that's become Wall Street's favorite new toy. We're talking about SPACs. That's right, those blank
check companies. It feels like anyone who's anyone has got one of those these days. Raising money going public in a slightly different way. First, we spoke with Dr Joanne Roberts, the Chief value officer over at Providence St. Joseph Health. Remember, and I know you know this girl, but let's remind everybody this was the first health system in the United States with a confirmed case of coronavirus back earlier in the year, so they have seen this all along the way. Yeah,
from day one. It's a massive health care system. So we checked in with her about the virus, about the race to get a vaccine and all those treatments to really get control of COVID nineteen. What we're seeing in Providence is our hospitalizations remain relatively high, but they are leveling off. What we are seeing in the community, however, is an increasing number of positive tests in the community, um uh, pretty much up and down the West coast,
especially in the Pacific Northwest. So we are by no means out of the woods yet, even though we are happy about the leveling off of the hospitalizations. So Dr Roberts, as you look across the country and having had the experience, as we often point out when we have guests from your institution, you guys had the first US case that the coronavirus confirmed. You have seen this develop from essentially start to finish the United States. What's the biggest mistake
people are making when it comes to reopening? Well, I think we we hear it uh and and all of our from all of our scientists. It is the distancing the masks, avoiding crowds, and maintaining good hand hygiene. If we could stick to those four things, I think we could get to an opening faster with some of the institutions in our in our country. But since not everybody is abiding by that, what does it mean? I mean, do we need to shut down again in order to
get control of this? Gosh? You know, I I look at the news shows myself and I tell myself, I'm glad I'm a doctor and not a policymaker, these are difficult choices for our country to make. Um. What I can say is, if we exercise those four things, we would probably be able to open school safely, maybe some other institutions safely, but maybe not bars um, maybe not you know, maybe not sports events yet. But we could
move faster than we are moving. But we haven't all come together, as you said, on just those four for so we need to do so. Dr Arwards talked to us about schools. It's top of mind for both Carol and me having school aged kids. I know for a lot of our listeners it's the thing that they think about all the time, both on behalf of their kids, but also behalf on behalf of themselves, because it affects
where you can work, if you can work, etcetera. What are the main things, you know, sort of taking those four things as givens, how do you execute that at a school, at an elementary school or a high school where proximity is baked in? How do you actually do
it mechanically and logistically. I think every school has to figure out their own solutions for this, or at least every district, And and maybe that's one of the blessings of having so many districts, because the other factor when it comes to schools that's really crucial is what the
prevalence of infection rate is in your community. If the prevalence rate is very, very low, then it's much it's relatively safer to open up based to face schools the prevalence is very high, probably not, and I think so each district test it has to gauge that. So let me go one level down on you with you on this, because it is you know, what we've heard from the Mayor of New York City is three percent is sort
of the threshold in terms of an infection rate. I believe it gets above three percent, then you can't open Is that just owing to the nature of the spread. I'm just trying to understand this from a layman's perspective as to sort of what the magic numbers are here. If there are magic numbers, there probably isn't a magic number. I mean, in our in our institution, we we often use one percent as a guide, but there's no perfect number. But the issue is that the risk goes up exponentially
as the rate of infection goes up. So just if you have one in five kids who is infected in the classroom, the rate of infection that they're going to spread is much much higher than I, say, one in And that's Dr Joe and Roberts, the Chief Value Officer
Providence St. Joseph Health. Really, you know, we have this small stable, even very fortunate, Carol, to have this small stable of go to voices, and the folks at Providence St. Joseph Health they've seen it literally from the beginning here in the United States, and they're keeping a very close eye along with their colleagues. It's a big healthcare system,
but they're also talking to folks all across the country. Yeah, and one of the next hurdles, you know that really jumped out for me and our conversation was making sure um that we have enough vaccines, production and allocation of them and making sure we protect the people that need it the most and get them out in a really fast way. By the way, that entire interview can be found on our Bloomberg Business Week podcast, so check that out.
Another obstacle Jason to overcome that we are minded about daily because of the virus is the problems with our overall healthcare system. What needs to change to get it right. That conversation with Dr Vivian Lee, president of health Platforms at Verily Life Sciences, that's coming up. This is Bloomberg. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason
Kelly from Bloomberg Radio. Today we're being some most important and informative conversations we had on our daily Bloomberg Business Week radio show this week, and Carol spent a lot of time with doctors, as we tend to do every week. Yeah, and that included Jason. Dr Vivian Lee. She's president of health Platforms at Verily Life Sciences. She's the former CEO of the University of Utah Health System. She's also written a book, The Long Fix, Solving America's healthcare crisis with
strategies that work for everyone. So we talked with her about the healthcare systems and also opening up schools. You know, we're pretty much struggling on almost all fronts except for one, which is I have to say that I think that the heroic measures that are frontline healthcare workers have been demonstrating. I think that that is something that we should all continue to celebrate. But in terms of the system itself, I think we we are seeing, as you say, so
many of its flaws right now. All right, so let'sten vision that we have a strategy session right of all the great minds in the medical community, global medical community for that matter, and we can make this system better. What would be the three things you would change from day one? Well, for the for to start with, we have to really change how we're paying for health care
and what we're paying for. Right now, we are paying in a fee for service model for things to be done to us regardless of whether they make us healthier
or not. And that fee for service kind of model means that our health care systems just live from fee to fee, and as you can see with COVID, as many of them have been having, you know, empty clinics and empty hospitals, they're actually being forced to shut down or even lay off people in so many in so many different parts of the country, especially rule parts of the country. So first as we really have to change
the way in which we are paying for healthcare. The second thing is we really have to um take advantage of the new technologies. Telehealth is one example. We're seeing a lot greater use of that more digital health solutions so that people can look after their own health in their homes, in their in their workplace environments for example. But those have to again be used in a way in which they're paid for generating better health, not just for doing more things to people. So take advantage of
more of the technology. And then the third is I think we need a lot more transparency about what it is we're going to have to pay for, how much it's going to cost, why it cost, what it does, so that we can really start to link up the costs with what we're actually getting for those dollars. And so, dr Lee part of what you're talking about. A lot of what you're talking about, especially in that description, goes
against some very entrenched economic interest. There are a lot of folks, especially big companies on the managed care side, on the health care system side, on the pharmaceutical side, they and maybe they wouldn't admit this in the cold light of day, they kind of like the way it were. They're making a lot of money. How do you essentially make the case to policy officials, many of whom hear from these companies through lobbying. How do you sort of make this change? How do you break the system in
a way that people might be okay with. Well, there's no question that change is hard, but I think you'd be surprised at how much support there is for change, especially right now. So when you talk about managed care, companies are insurers, they actually really want people to stay healthy. The healthier people are, the less they have to pay out, and the better they do. Most health care systems, most people who come into healthcare, physicians, nurses, therapists, we want
our patients to be healthy. We are not hoping for them to be sick. But what we want to do is to have just better alignment. So we're paid for them to be healthier. You know, right now, we just have the wrong incentives, right we are only paid if
they're sick. But actually, in some cases, like some clinics that are welling in a Medicare advantage model, and there are these clinics that are all over the country where they're just paid a fixed amount of money to keep their UH seniors healthy, and they get paid that fixed amount no matter what happens. They actually are are doing much better. They're actually spending more time with patients, there's less burnout, the patients are hospitalized much less and so
they actually do better. So there really are some some strong incentives right now for moving to what we call it paying for better health or paying for outcomes model, But we just have to get it all aligned at the same time so that we all make that transition together. We do want to bring you a little piece of an interview that are David Weston did with Dr Anthony Fauci. Check it out. Everybody, if you're talking about a medical question, listen to the medical experts. That's the advice, and you
won't get it. You will not get a conflicting message from the medical experts about things like hydroxy chloroquine, about what the results of the vaccine trial aw or what the results of monoclonal anybody. So when it comes to pure public health medical things, listen to what the medical experts say. So, Dr Lee, you are a medical expert, I'm assuming you agree with what we heard from Dr Fauci.
What would you say, then, is the right thing to do when it comes to reopening schools and colleges and universities. You know, we are in such a difficult situation right now because we need to keep our economy going. We actually need to invest in our future, which is I think a big part of why we need to get our universities back up this fall. Those students need to continue study because there are future And at the same time, we have this massive upswing in COVID across the country
and we have to keep healthy. We have to keep everyone healthy, so there's a tension. I think it's pretty clear that wearing masks, social distancing, handwashing, making sure that if you're sick or have been exposed, that you isolate. UM, that these precautions or these measures do work. UM for college campuses. We actually just put out a paper last week recommending putting forward a series of four recommendations for reopening our college campuses, and I'm happy to just go
through those very quickly. UM. The first is that we're really recommending that on top of all of the social discipue mask and everything, this is specifically around COVID nineteen testing. It's recognizing that so many people, especially and including college aged kids, um, are asymptomatic, even though they may be COVID nineteen positive and may be able to infect other people, and so as a result, testing is really central to
our strategies. So first, we're recommending that everyone get tested before they really engage back in the college campus, so either before they arrived back or right after they arrive. Secondly, we're recommending that they get tested about a week afterwards to pick up those people who might have gotten sick along the way or whose tests were inaccurate, because there are sometimes people may have the exposure but the test might not be positive. Then we recommend everyone who does
become symptomatic get tested of course. And then finally we're also recommending that at least a subset of people who are asymptomatic get tested regularly throughout the semester. So those are some of our recommendation. That's Dr Vivian Lee, the president of Health Platforms at Verily Life Sciences, and Jason. Many things stuck with me, especially our conversation around opening up schools, what needs to be done, and that we need to get them opened up because those students at
colleges and universities they are our future. So check out that full conversation it's on our podcast speed Well. And obviously this is the big question for everyone. I mean, the schools sit at the center of the entire economy. I think we've really come to realize that as we've talked about what reopening looks like and what getting the
economy back on track really looks like. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week, Well, as we try to figure out what happens X, we're spending more time at home and probably listening to some music. We're going to hear from the president and CEO of Sonos, Patrick Spence. Yeah, they reported earnings and the stock moved on that report that's coming up. This is Bloomberg. This is Bloomberg Business Week
with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly from Bloomberg Radio. We'll bring you some of the most important and informative conversations we had on our daily radio show throughout the week. And Jason would like to remind everybody this was happening in real time as news continued to evolve across the
Bloomberg terminal. Well, that's absolutely true. And one of the things that we've been in the midst of over the past few weeks is earnings, and we're starting to get a window into what different companies are experiencing in this very uncertain time. That's certainly true at Sons. We caught up with that company's president and CEO of Patrick Spence.
We were ahead of an expectations both on top and bottom line, and we actually re established guidance for for Q four, our next quarter as well, which is also ahead of guidance. So we're feeling very good about what we've been able to achieve UM in the face of the pandemic and in the face of so many retail closures. I think that's the story to me, is really the
adaptability and resilience of the team. Our our team has done an amazing job this quarter to really refocus on direct to consumer and to launch three new products UM in a different way. Given everything that was happening at the pandemic, we couldn't do our usual type of big product launch in person, couldn't meet with all the reviewers, couldn't give them, you know, an ability to look at and here our products. But I'm sure hasn't stopped customers
from buying a lot of them. Yeah, including us. We picked up a couple of the move UM because we're spending more time in our backyard. You're welcome, Uh, you know, I really do think that focus Patrick on everybody's homes. I think we're seeing it play out in multiple ways with some of the companies that we talked to. I do want to take a step back. Tell me what life has been like for you all, um, you know, your team, your company, and then really for you, for
you personally since since really mid March. Yeah, it's been a lot of time at home. You know, a lot of people talk about working from home, but we're also living at work, as I said to UH to my team, right, and so it's been challenging, UH in terms of doing that. I think there's been a lot of adrenaline quite frankly, that has carried us through and everybody wanted to be
able to step in and figure this all out. Thankfully, we've always been distributed across Santa Barbara, Boston, Seattle, Amsterdam, China, so we we we already were using to have like Zoom and slack um, but we've really had to up the communication. And then for us, since we build hardware, you know, it's it's actually quite difficult because we need people that are actually working and testing products in some
of our physical locations. So we've had to put some really strict measures in place to ensure their safety because you know, the primary thing through all of this has had to been you know, really keeping our people safe and healthy. And so we do have a few people in some of our offices that that need access to certain equipment and those types of things. So we've really
put a lot into making sure that we can do that. Um. And I'm so proud of the team and grateful quite frankly, giving everything going on in the world, that most of our people can work from home, and so it's been challenging. People have really stepped up, right. Yeah, we were certainly I think starting to to see that, I mean candidly among colleagues and friends and neighbors and everybody. I mean, you're starting to see the stress and strain, I think
especially so exactly. I can see it. I can see it on the video gun right now. Oh wait, I'm looking in the mirror. Um. Sorry, Patrick, you know, speaking of physical space, I mean, I do wonder you know what it has meant to really have to shift, you know, almost exclusively or certainly primarily to an online direct to consumer channel versus retail stores. How does that change how you sell? How does it change how you spend money? How does it change how you sort of get to
those customers? That's exactly the thing that we've basically you know, faced this whole quarter. And so, um, if you had asked me back in March April, if we would have been able to live at the quarter we just did, given the closures we saw across the board, I would have I would have thought that would be nearly impossible. I mean it was incredible to watch how quickly the team throughout the existing playbook and was able then to pivot. And we look, our product has been made for this period.
We could bring a little bit of extra joy to people that are stuck at home. That's a good thing and that's what we do. And so we said, you know what, let's launch this campaign. We launched and at home with onners campaign. We gave people some tips and tricks on um how to use products. We reintroduced kind of move to them as well. So to Carol's point and buying that product, that products has been selling out
like crazy. UM, so it's meant a lot of adapting, right, and that's meant, you know, just a lot of change, which again is harder when you're distributed. Um, it's put stress on the system in terms of you know that three year year growth. It's hard at any point to
be able to support that when you're not together. Just things like additional customer service people right that need be able to take those calls, putting pressure on the distribution channel in terms of getting product out to people on time. All of the things that come with that have been a challenge that we've had to step up to UM and then I do think it's changed, that is something
that will carry on from here. So I have been pleasantly surprised by the willingness of customers to purchase some of our new products. You know, our ur is eight hundred dollars um site and sound unseen right on soas dot com and so that that gives me a lot of confidence in the brand and the trust that our customers have in the brand UM and so that's been a pleasant surprise of silver lining, if you will, through all of this. And that so no CEO Patrick spends
joining us. We're both very familiar with their systems and obviously it's a tough market right now for a lot of folks, even though we're all nested at home, so some uneven things going on in that business. To sit the least, Yeah, full transparency We've got a bunch of Sona's products in our homes, and I do want to point out Sona's is price target was raised by Morgan
Stanley following their earnings reports, So Wall Street definitely weighing in. Alright, come up next tracking how to raise bold, courageous and resilient women. It's a subject of a book by a former U. S. Naval officer and senior advisor to the Obama White House, a topic very familiar to you and me. This is Bloomberg. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly from Bloomberg Radio. Well, we're bringing you some of the most important and informative conversations we
had on our daily radio show this week. Bloomberg Business Week catch at two pm Wall Street time every weekday. Love this next guest, Carol, because we both are trying to raise bold, courageous and resilient women. And talk about a bold and resilient woman. She's a former U. S. Naval officer, former senior advisor to the White House during the Obama administration. We're talking about Dr Marissa Poor Jess. She's head of the Baldwin School. She's got a book out.
It's called What Girls Need How to Raise Bold, courageous and Resilient Women. Check out this conversation. Yeah, I think it's the sense that we need to give our girls earlier and earlier some of the key skills that would differentiate them when are adults. Things that came to me
later in life. You may have your own stories about that, when you learn to negotiate, when you learn to self adgegate, these things that you know, by large come more naturally to young boys, um social norms, the way their ways. But we meet our girls who have those strong voices to be able to step into a room and negotiate, haven't ask, and have it be effective in a way
that feels personal to them. It's also interesting to think about some of the key skills that are very natural to our girls, how they empathize and communicate, and if we can lean into those strengths, that will be their competitive advantage when they're older too. So it's both, you know, bridging the gap and helping them lean enter their strength.
We were speaking with the dean of the business school down at Fuqua uh Fuqua Business School at Duke University, and he was talking about sort of this three three layered approach to some extent around leadership, which I'm guessing you would agree with because he talked about I Q and EQ, which we talked so much about, but also d Q, which I would say is dairy queen, but he would say is the decency quotation, which I think is so interesting to think about as we try and
raise empathetic young people, and I wonder, how do you teach something like that or how do you nurture it? Well, it's such a critical part of how we need to raise the next generation, and this idea that it can actually be taught. It's a learned skill that can be reanforth even in how in what books you choose to be your your kids. We learn empathy by taking other people's perspectives, by stepping into other people's shoes and then thinking, well, not just how would we want to feel, but how
would they want to feel? So read fiction, Read fiction where the protagonist, especially for young girls, is someone who is a young girl themselves but has a different background. You know, It's something that we weave into our curriculum at Baldwin and I know, Carol, I'm sure your daughter school does as well. But when you think about this for all our girls and there are boys too, specially these days when we're really trying to bridge gaps and
understand different perspectives. So that is a key way you can actually teach the skill of of excuse me, empathy, um, alongside these other skills that we know we've talked about already so far. Right, So I do want to ask you, I mean not to take this in too much of a turn, but Carol mentioned your background, and I do wonder, I mean, give us the one minute version of you know, sort of how you touch those different things and end
up um doing what you're doing leading in school. Well, I think it's uh one of the things we want to teach our goals to risk a getters and follow their follow their personal passions and see where it gets them. And I had the good portion of going to Baldwin myself by too, and I'm along with an all girls school.
And when I was young, my dream job was the fly just for the navy, and I pursued that passion and then it took me different directions and one day was given the opportunity to give back to the community that gave me so much and set the stage for the next generation. So it's one of those moments where we take risks in new ways and learn to lean into leadership. So it's it's both the fact that I had my own uh chance, and then I'm ready to give it to the next generation to make sure they're
set up for success. To what was your experience? So uh in the in the U S. Military, in the U S. Navy, because I feel like that can be such a difficult world for women. Still, Yeah, you know, it's it's uh part and parcel of having navigated a lot of male dominated fields and for everyone who's listening, and it's in a tech industry, on a corporate industry and finance, it's still a place where there's so many barriers that we see in a daily basis that you
get used to them. Um, it's the moment when you put on your equipment and you realize the equipment was made for a man of a different size, in different shape and doesn't really fit me. So I actually had a final waiver saying if anything happened, I'd be okay with it and wants through the US military, and yet um, yet it was you know what I wanted to do when I had a good portion of having mentors male mentors as well, who set the stage for me and
allow me to pursue that passion. But I do think that it does take a certain um resilience, a certain uh petitive spirit. I mean that was for me something that really made a big difference, UM, and that we want to make sure our girls have those core skills they can pursue these fields no matter um, you know, when they get older, no matter what the gender bias looks like. Then Well, I'm thinking about your book too, and I'm wondering what the Marissa today would tell the
younger Marissa UM based on what you've learned. Yeah, yeah, I think it's interesting. I Um, I came to my voice despite my all girls upbringing UM, and despite a lot of what I was told. I think, UM, in some ways, I came to a little bit of my voice leap. I mean, there's one story in the book where I had the most pivotal moment of my career at some level. UM was sitting around the table and the West Wing with the President of the United States.
That moment we all dream about where you're like stuff, you know, literally you know, asking talking about national security talking about my area of expertise, and it was the cliche of cat got your tongue, And I watched other people around the table UM speak to my issue set, and I left just thinking, Wow, you missed my opportunity. I had the good fortune of being able to sit down with UM the President later and speak to him about Um al Qaeda and isis in my issues and
so I did recover UM. But I do think those moments when I too realize that there was just a hurdle I had to overcome, and I had to still train myself even as a young adult to do these things. And I think we want to the next generation not to have those moments. So I do wonder when you came into this job, what was one thing or a couple of things that you changed or adapted or or did differently based on your experience there as a student, but then your later experience in the military and then
uh in the government. Yeah. Well on you know, on one hand, we have such expert teachers and administrators that I you know, have the good portion of letting them. We invent the curriculum, daily basis and things that go on in school these days. It's just it blows your mind. So UM, you know, on that level, I was walking
into a really wonderful situation Agent UM. And yet I always think we can do more to talk to our girls and really be honest with them about what it takes for UM for young women to grow into their best leadership self. And so we did start a leadership course for our seniors, and we talked very directly about some of the challenges that both faced, particularly as women, not just in college, but as they leave and enter
the real world. And I think as the system is changing, there's still a lot of barriers to entery and things that we want our girls to know about before they meet these situations so they can face them head on. And I think it's also about UM teaching really how our girls want to, you know, learn from failure, how they should be taking risks, how they need to be resilient.
And that's part of this book as well, is really what we can do to teach the skills of resilience, the skills of risk taking UM from an early age so that you know they're ready to be the entrepreneurs that we know they need to be and want to
be when they get older. I have to say, Bam, Marissa Man, when you said about this idea of taking risks, like I mentor a lot of younger women, and I constantly am saying, and I say this to my daughter who's seventeen, you know, make yourself uncomfortable and don't be afraid and and take those risks, because I do think that there is a big difference between men and women.
And I know that there are studies out there that even for jobs that women feel like they have to take the boxes on everything and men are like, yeah, I got most of them. You know, I'm perfect for the job there. I don't know whether it's just the d NA what it is, but I feel like that's something that women and young girls have to be more
comfortable with, and studies show exactly what you're saying. And I think every woman listening to those show can can remember a moment when they realize they let some guide take an opportunity that could have been there if only they were a little more of a risk take or put themselves forward. Um. And I think if we can talk about this from an early age, and there are things we can do completely to push all girls to
practice feeling uncomfortable. It used to those moments, and they build a muscle that later on when there are bills, will be like, yeah, I know, I got this. I'm okay with that moment because when I was little, my parents, my teachers, by family member encourage that in me. And there's tricks and skills and strategies that work for that, and that's what the book is about. I have to follow up Jason. I I'm like pointing at him and
I'm like, yeah, see it's you man. But no, I don't really mean that, but I mean there is something about you mean that you're just hopefully not talking about me. But now I was around. I have a lot of nieces and they're in their mid you know, or young twenties. But this whole idea of like women are so quick to say sorry and back off, and and I do think that there is something in society that has yet to change to accept women who are powerful and strong
and aggressive very much though. And there's interesting studies that show about competitiveness, right, and how we nurture this healthy competitive nature. We think competition is. You know, I thought of a dad for a lot of our young girls, they think, no, it's about I don't want to beat my friend. I don't want to stand out at the spelling be or on the soccer field. And need our girls to slide in a competitive environment because it's a good thing. You know, Guys don't when we know that
it takes that to get to the top in any industry. Um, and it's healthy too. It's not a malad adaptation. So you know, it's a about that. It's about how we own our best self and you know, and and have a little fighty gess with it. You know, you could call it aggressiveness, but you could also just toup right, yeah, and being in the game, right, Jason. That's Dr Marissa Porgeous. She's the head of the Baldwin School. It's an all
girls school pre K through twelfth grade. And I like what she said, you know, kids and the skills that they need to succeed. She stresses that in girls in particular, they must nurture essential traits to fully flourish. I also love her story, you know, this sort of like personal boomerang where she goes to this school and then has
this amazing career trailblazing in many ways. She told us a great story about being at the table, literally at the table with the President United States and sort of what happened then, So really good to catch up with her the book What Girls Need How to Raise Bold, Courageous and Resilient Women. Well, that wraps up the first hour the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio.
I'm Jason Kelly and I'm Carol Masser. Plenty. Coming up in our next hour, we're gonna take a look at the future of travel with the founder and CEO of Abercrombie and Kent. This is like if you want to take a safari to Africa, if you want to climb a mountain. I mean, there's lots of crazy trips you can take. Yeah, looking forward to traveling once again, and this guy has a window into what it's going to
look like. Plus the magazine's cover story, it's all about Google's push into healthcare and how it may be a case study on how tech giants dominate small businesses. This is Bloomberg. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly from Bloomberg Radio. Hello, I'm Carol Masser and I'm Jason Kelly. Plenty. A few in this hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week, including a guest Jason that your family is pretty familiar with. We're
talking about Jeffrey Kent. He's the founder and CEO of Abercrombie and Kent. We're gonna talk about the future of travel, especially in a post COVID nineteen world. Yeah, these guys do really cool adventures. I've never actually been on one of these trips, but I know people who have. Plus, we're gonna look at Google's push into healthcare. It's this week's cover story, a fascinating look maybe at a side of Google you don't know. First up the vet ground
of DVA. He's the co founder and managing director of the venture capital from Bok Capital, owner and chairman of the Sacramento King's NBA franchise. He's also the founder of Tibaco. But what's interesting, Jason, he has joined the blank Check Company parade. So we talked with him about that and also what it's like being the NBA bubble down in Disney World. Well, it's great. Uh, you know, we get tested like once or twyce today. But kudos to Adam
Silver and the NBA for creating the bubble. Everyone is buyers free, the games are going on. I wish my team was doing better, but it's been. It's fantastic here. Yeah, I wasn't going to bring that up. It's been a tough run, but um, but listen, an amazing experience and hopefully we can talk a little basketball in a second.
I do want to ask you, though, because you are in the midst of another boom of sorts, which is in these blank check companies, the spack special purpose acquisition companies, tell us about why you chose this way of going public. Tell us about bo X. Yeah, so I started boy X a few years ago. It stands for Better our World. And there's just two investors in the venture capital part of Bowl, which is the ten campus you see system.
Is that our largest research platform in the country and myself and where the board, the entrepreneurs, the arrow, and it's really the mission is to fund companies that use technology to advance society. So I built this platform out and I was seeing companies stay private longer, and many of the entrepreneurs were coming to me. They called me the o G, which they say stands for original Gangster, Ready to get me. In the old guy, and they were coming to me and asking me for help and saying, hey,
can you invest? Can you help? Uh? And we're entering a really exciting era right now. I call it kind of civilization three old, where they're transitioning from the industrial age to the digital age and it's going to create the largest wealth creation opportunity in human history. So there's a trillion dollars plus that's gone into these private tech companies and they still remain private and they need to
come out on the other end. So we have these rocket ships that are waiting to burst out, just get out of it and reached other stars. And what they need is rocket field. They need. They need money, they need it quickly. They need coaching, they need mentorship, they need connections. Uh, they need certainty, and they need to be able to execute on all of that. Now, one of the things about great entrepreneurs, and I was lucky to be friends with guys like Steve Jobs, is that
they were also great storytellers. And the new generation of entrepreneurs is no different. They want all the same things. They want certainty, they want steed, they want execution, and they too are great storytellers. Now, the beauty of the pack is that you go out under a S four which is a murger agreement as opposed to S one with an I P O. So with that you can actually tell the story, you can provide future projections. And so it's the absolute perfect fuel for these new rockets
that we're seeing. It sounds like you already have some entrepreneurs in mind, is that fair to say? And if so, I'm just curious about the types of technologies, you know, the visions or the visionaries that are capturing your attention right now, EVAC. Yeah. So we have about companies that we've been tracking. You know, think of us as a reverse SoftBank. SoftBank comes in at the end and gives you big checks and you know with the one hour meeting.
So on the other hand, we're working with these companies. Many of them are in our portfolio. We see the first deck, we see the second deck. We get to know them, we have data, we have history, we have a relationship. Uh. And so these are game changing companies, you know, these are companies that are using data to completely disrupt entire sectors. So we have a company called Farmers Business Network in our portfolio. Uh. And you know
they are using data to disrupt agriculture. They started as a uh Bloomberg for farmers and have now become kind of a Amazon for farmers. Gigantic market, brilliant, visionary entrepreneurs, already doing hundreds of millions in revenues doubling every year. So we have like a hundred and fifty companies that we think are stackable, and about fifty of them that
are stackable in the not too distant future. You know, you said something really interesting the that that we only have a minute to talk about player of empowerment, the players league. This has been quite a moment for the NBA. What do you do in a minute or less as an owner to ensure that players have the voice that they need. Yeah, So I've always been all about the players, and so uh, you know we uh you know, in my mind, I was the first person to support Black
Lives Matter, which was important to our players. You know, I was the first person to speak out against what happened at the Clippers. So we talked to our players. You know, we hold uh sessions where we get together players, kids from the inner city, you know, the police. So the players have a huge voice in the NBA. Uh. You know, one of the things I love about basketball in the NBA is that, you know, we don't really care what the color of your skin is, what your ethnicity,
your religion, your sexual orientation. You know, we just got one question. You've got game. If you've got games, then come join us. And that's what I love about sports. That's five ran A Dva. He's the owner of the Sacramento Kings and I think pretty wild Jason to talk with him as he's actually in the bubble at Disney World where he's getting tested want to do times a day. I'm guessing everybody's getting tested that much. Yeah, listen, They've
been very fortunate so far. He's also got an eye on Wall Street, everything going on with these blank check companies. It is all the rage. So really good to catch up with him. He's a character. He is a character. So he's living in a bubble and also working on creating a kind of bubble. Community is Duke University, and we caught up with the dean of Duke's FUCA Business School to talk about getting back to school in the fall. This is Bloomberg. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol
Masser and Jason Kelly from Bloomberg Radio. We're bringing some of the most important and informative conversations we had throughout the week on our daily radio show. A lot of our chats Jason, we're about education and getting back to school in the fall. Listen. This has been a theme we have been teasing out just about every week. It's important to us. We also know that it's really important to folks out there who have high school, college age kids,
even elementary school kids. We also have a special place in our hearts for business schools, so we checked him with Bill Bolding. He is the dean of the Fuqua School of Business down at Duke University. Check it out. It's been unbelievably challenging to navigate this pandemic. We are
reopening in the next few weeks. Our plan is to bring our students into into our buildings and that our classrooms will be a combination of face to face instruction, some people in the room, other people participating virtually, and so we have the ability to allow the simultaneous uh
kind of physical and digital participation. And we're telling both our faculty and students that no one has to be physically in the building because we want to make sure that our number one priority is making people feel as
safe as possible. In order to do that, there there are a bunch of things that have to be put in a place, uh in order to UH to ensure the safety of our community though such as So, the first thing is that with with all the kind of the moving advances around testing, we're going to require that all of our students be tested before and receive a
negative test before they're allowed into our building. Once they've passed the first hurdle around the initial tests, they'll be follow up testing through the term for the students, the faculty, and the staff that are engaging with one another. There's a monitoring process where every person who comes into our building every day has to fill out a health app UM and make sure that they're not experiencing any symptoms
UM once they're they're in the building. UH, we're going to be following strict rules around social distancing, and so a classroom that would normally comfortably hold seventy five people with physical distancing requirements of six ft or more, that that number goes down to twenty two. And so we're doing creative things like using UM bigger space is like our library like a ballroom space where normally you might have say three people in that space, you could fit
seventy people. We're also adding tents to the campus so that people can safely interact with one another outside. And we're making everybody sign a compact because a lot of the concerns that people have are around the behaviors. Are they going to follow the basic protocols that are needed um and and we will be requiring masks both for faculty and students at the minute that they step on a campus, and that will continue while they're in the
classroom together. So it's going to look and feel very different, but we will be bringing people back into our building. It sounds like you are essentially creating a bubble community. That's where I think about it that way quite a bit. We're not quite at the level of the NBA where they truly have created a bubble. We we can't do that because we're not at Disney World. Uh And so our students go home in the evening and and we
lose the control over the bubble. But that's essentially what we're trying to do, is we're trying to control as much as we can about the environment. So that we can give people the comfort level UM in this environment where as you well know, people are just scared, they're anxious given the health crisis, and then they're they're kind of two other layers of this crisis in terms of the your economic well being and a crisis of values and and is is our society going to live up
to the social contract around fairness and justice? So there's an enormous amount of stress as we as we work with people bring them back into our programs, we want to make sure that we take out of the equation the stress around health issues. I feel like, Bill, this is such a charged year because of the virus, but also because of what happened in Minneapolis, And I just do wonder, you know, I always feel like we turned
to academia to kind of help our way through this. UM. I'm curious how that's you know, affecting you folks at your institution and maybe some of the teachings that might happen come fall. Yes, So when it comes to events happening in the world, we absolutely don't want a bubble. We don't want to isolate our students from the realities
of of these incredibly difficult circumstances that we're facing. So we want the outside world to permeate the experience and make sure that everyone in our community understands our responsibility to to step up and to provide some some guidance, some uh, some leadership in this environment. I think that this this crisis has has laid bare in some sense the need for what I call triple threat leadership capability.
With with the things that are happening around the pandemic, you have people who are incredibly scared, justifiably so incredibly anxious, and so we need we need the kind of leadership capability that can bring people through this crisis, get them to the other side of the crisis, and make them feel like they've actually advanced in some way. So what does that triple start capability. The first thing is that people need to have the i Q to understand and
make sense of the environment. Second thing is they need to have the the EQ or the emotional intelligence so that you understand the anxiety that people are facing, that
the stress and can feel what they feel. And the third thing is something called d Q or a decency quotient, which is to actually care about other people and to give them a sense of belonging at a moment in time when when they're simply so afraid, and also the integrity to be honest and transparent with people about the very real challenge is that we're facing not to sweep these challenges under the rug. But then ultimately I come back full circle two. You need to in these bad
times you you also have to have a plan. Uh, you have to have the ability to think through what's going on to come up with a plan, because ultimately people want to know are they going to be okay? And so we feel like we have a responsibility for all of our students to absolutely address issues of racial equity injustice, absolutely address issues around health disparities, economic disparities. All of that will be a part of the conversation,
part of the curriculum that our students experience. And that's Buill building. He is dean of the Fuqua School of Business down at Duke University, well ranked of course in the Bloomberg Business Week rankings. And what a challenge these guys have. I do not envy them trying to manage all these different stakeholders and candidly manage customers. That's what Ulter really These students are they are making a big investment in their education. They are, and listen to do
it safely. He said, a lot of testing is going to be going on. They're going to have a hybrid approach that includes virtual learning along with in classroom teachings. But he said, ultimately, no one has to be in the building if they don't feel comfortable about it. All right, coming up, this week's cover story virus related and about Google's push into healthcare and what it's doing to some small businesses. This is Bloomberg. This is Bloomberg Business Week
with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly from Bloomberg Radio. Well, let's take a look at this week's cover story in Bloomberg Business Week. It's all about Google, but maybe not exactly what you expected. It follows really nicely on that testimony Carol in front of Congress. This story specifically about
Google's push into healthcare. It's a case study in how tech giants dominate small businesses, and it's a reminder that all the things that the big tech companies are doing, it's all happening under the watchful eye of the U. S. Government. We checked in with Shelley Banjo Bloomberg News senior writer and Bloomberg Business Week editor Jill Weber. The craziest thing about this story is that, um, you know, as these things go, is that we didn't actually set out to
write shut Out to write an antitrust story. We were kind of curious about all these ads that kept popping up during the pandemic around mental health. I wanted to figure out, like, is someone profiting off of this pandemic from like a mental health perspective, And we just started talking to therapists, and every big, single time we spoke
to a therapist, it was Google, Google, Google, Google and um. Particularly, the one that we um end up featuring the most in our story is the therapist UM named Ellen Ross, who said, UM, you know, you can't have a business, my kind of business without without Google Search. It's um, you know, it's just like you know, she goes through her list of monthly bills and it's you know rent, uh, you know, heating or air conditioning, power and and Google.
But what you noticed, Shelley, this is such a great story is that during the pandemic, UM, I think you know, you guys know in your story that the prices for her regular keywords up sharply, and this is kind of a key way of getting noticed, uh in the online world. Right. So during the pandemic, everything else shut down except for the Internet, and so um that was really the only
way for people to find you UM. And all of a sudden, searches for online therapy shot up as people started to realize, oh, shoot, like this is not something that's going to be over quickly. I'm going to need some help with those UM. And it just became prohibitively expensive for UM some of these therapists to keep putting Google search ads and keep paying for them. But the problem is if you don't pay for the search ads, you're not going to get to the customers. And Google's
really pushing this. I mean you you have some great anecdotes about you know, the sales reps calling up you know, these therapists and and kind of putting the hard sell in them and using the the economics and the economics of crisis really uh in many ways is to drive the business. Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting nuance because it's there's something wrong or illegal about making money especially during um, you know, pandemics or natural disasters. Every Bloomberg.
Uh story regarding natural disasters will look into who's making money off off of these kinds of things um. But at the same time, these people have no other choice and Google can kind of take advantage of that by pushing things like automation um um, you know, not having as good as customer service and thinks that these people really rely on because there's no other place to go. And so the question is, once you become that monopoly and you have so much power, does it become then
an antitrust issue? Play that out a little bit, Shelly, Where where will lawmakers put their gaze um? And how does how does all of this fit together in the weeks ahead? Yeah, So, I mean search dominance in itself is not illegal um, And so the issue from lawmakers is trying to figure out, um, is Google actually abusing that power? And so one other part of the story that we look into is this idea of Google directing people to certain places that make the most money for them.
So with therapy, for example, now if you type in therapists, it's going to go up to UM. You're you're gonna spit out some um therapists near you that on Google Maps that have paid for these services, and so um, you know, just Google then take take over UM healthcare and search and and those types of things that previously might have gone UM to other businesses. Are they going to be abusing that power? And what law lawmakers need to find out is, you know, does it go beyond
just being big? Does it go beyond just UM having power? It's what you do with that power, and UM is that part of that illegal? And socially, the you know what, the Google conversation is one that is obviously uh, something that the eltmakers will probably focus on more more so than other big tech companies even perhaps, and and that
that power that they have. When you actually talked to the small business owners and and the therapists that are in the story, you know, the thing that I found sort of so fascinating about it was like, at the end of the day, this is the option for them, right, So what other options do do they feel like they even have? Yeah? I mean when you ask about being which is the second church engine, the therapists would just laugh, honestly, they would just feel like that's not a thing. Um,
we we only have Google. UM. And the interesting thing is that Google likes to paint this big picture of competition. Would add, Oh, there's Facebook, and there's um all sorts of different companies that um, even television and billboards like we fight with everyone, um but you know, uh at Amazon. But like nobody's going on Amazon to search for a therapist, but at least not yet. That's one book this week, editor Joe Weber, along with reporter Shelley Banjo. She wrote
that story along with Mark Bergen. And as they point out, Jason, the US Justice Department and almost every state attorney general they are preparing antitrust cases that are expected to allege that Google's dominance is illegal. So listen, stay tuned, there's gonna be a lot more on this. You're listening to Bloomberg this week. Coming up, the CEO of Abercrombie and Kent on the future travel, especially when it comes to adventures right and how to do it safely in today's world.
This is Bloomberg. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly from Bloomberg Radio. So Carol, let's finish off the show thinking maybe they're dreaming a little bit about what's to come when we're able to get back on planes and not just back on planes, but climbing mountains, you know, tumbling through the tundra looking at wild animals. This is a cool conversation. Yeah, I'm ready for a safari to Africa. What's interesting is this next guest.
They pioneered the luxury adventure more than fifty years ago. We're talking about Abercrombie and Kent. We caught up with the founder and CEO, Jeffrey Kent. Yeah. I was actually born in Zambia, um on a far my mom and dad and I've learned there about a week and then we flew back to Kenya where we had a fall and that's where I grew up and when the school and everything else. Yeah. So yeah, I was born onto faring, very typical, born into this business. That's amazing. Um, so
bring us up to the present. What what is business like right now? Because the world has been shut down for a few months. Yeah, I'm much are this pandemic has been proptical industries towards it has been back, you know. I mean obviously you never to can travel. Um beginning to uh open up a little bit of the United States.
People who wanted to grow drive, I mean you have a beautiful country in the States, and you know, people wanted to be American rent in Alaska and just at the turne down somebody want to yourself family because in his WiFi they can take a private ranch and they can have fun out side rather than to be cooped up in their home. So the first thing that is opening up in Europe, the English are taking um. They tend to be taking villains getting to Greece into France. Um.
So that's opening up. And also another quarter today something who want to do a big satary and we'll put it off to we're doing twenty and they're moving everything in twenty twenty to twenty one. So we have a lot of life without actual big traveling right now. But everybody wants to travel, that's for sure, So forgive me. And we're kind of nerdy, um, Jeffrey. In terms of numbers, So how much has was business down because of the
pandemic and how much has bounced back? I mean, I mean business is down, you know, over over and but it's dging that slowly. It's sort of glad. The problem with the was this COVID is that today we love one of the youth Americans can travel again. However, many countries don't have a mess to go. There's always there's always one thing or the other. But you know the fact is there's a great core of people who want
to travel and we're there and they will travel. So we're not we're little despond them, not very disponding, you know what I was going to say. Different Like I think about some of the things, whether it's a safari or some other things. You know, it's wide open spaces. And I do think that as people start to travel, I know from me, I want to go to places where there are on a lot of people exactly. That's that's why people right now, I mean, I'm favorite things
that you're feeling. Well, the big call it green shoot, but I'd like to have this sort of big bambook clubs, jobs and shoots. It what is selling or the national part of the United States. And we're doing it by air. They're getting the cemetery, Grand Canyon, yellow Son and the fly as family goods to get that they have a private plane, private cars and enjoy this, enjoy your beautiful country.
And that is right, and it it sounds like you're also able to create situations where whether it is part of a resort or a ranch or something like that, you can essentially kind of wall it off and almost create a quarantine environment, as it were for a family, even if it's multi generations. Just had about the generational family.
They went to Wyoming. We took over, dude, I mean three generations of one family, and they raised about the horse back whidating in the shadow of the tree Top by day that the seventh Days in the banks of the Snake River, incredible star games, and they love the whole trip. Actually, they wondered why they hadn't done it before. Exist Jeffrey, though, how have you, as you just mentioned to Jason and me before, you know, you talked about the big national parks in the United States, how people
are rediscovering them and that's certainly in demand. Are you making any shifts in your business, you know, strategically because of what has happened as a result of the pandemic. Actually, we've already made the shift. You know. They have always wanted to have a ground operating company in the United States, and they started up two years ago. But the timing was excellent in every state. But um, that's one big ship. But also you know, we've also anticipated because we really
created ex creential trips. All of our camp in Africa are small, they take only like twenty four people. They have private entrances, uh. They you can eat outside, you can have all the social distancing, and above all we have great experiences. I mean, if you go to East Africa and you mentioned Mount kilerman Jara just now and my time did twice by the way, but you've got to do it naneteen thousand, three hundred forty two people.
But also you can see the great migration of the word to be can you and Tandania and if you have time going to Uganda to guerrillas the first to them. Yeah. Now, I I have looked with envy at some of these same trips that my uh father has done through a number of parts of Africa with you guys and with others. Um. I do want to ask you though, Jeffrey, I mean, what have you heard from from customers about, you know,
things that they might want to do differently? What are their expectations when it comes to social distancing and those sorts of different kinds of amenities are different kinds of approaches you know you mentioned and Carol rightly said some of these are very naturally sort of socially distant activities. But but I do wonder are there certain even sort of minor things that you have to do, whether it relates to how they get there or dining once they
are there. What are the tweaks you have to make? Well, you know, we're modeling everything around the worldshop and toys and council who have had their own um you know, their got a complete panel on it. And I was Shaman w t T about six years and I found a member and we're putting in all the all the survivors that they require. But you know, our clients, I don't know the very adventures. They trusted that we're going
to do the things. And you've just been discussing that it's my personal, separate, separate engincis dining outside if you can do it, and all these things, and all they're really interesting is getting away and going. That's that's really excited about. And uh so, yeah, luckily they just want the excitement. What's I gotta ask you, though, Um, what's your favorite trip? You know? Said I. I've traveled seventeen million miles, I've been to one hundred and fifty seven countries.
And actually I'm a Kenyon, you know, I've worn brought up when the school and my favorite trip is still the martime a month earliest September. When you see the whole world of these migrations coming in and crossing Tomorrow River. You know, it's so exciting and so wonderful and so um. You know, that's that's that's probably so my favorite. But you know, Afi Botswana, it's very special to the lackav Ago.
We have a wonderful camp called Chief camp Um right in the middle of it, right in the world in it, and that's an amazing trip too. I will say my daughter has done been to Tanzania and and just talked about you know, there's pictures of them just you know, align right, you know, just it's just unbelievable at the animals that were around them, um and just out there in their natural habitat. And you know, it's memories like that you just never forget. And also, you know, I
love exhibition cruising. You know, we're celebrating our thirty of the anniversary of Luxury exhibition cruising and I'm taking a trip to the Northeast Pastage next year. The Russian Arctic in August of next year, which will be very very exciting. How do you how do you do that safely? How many people are on the boat? I probably only take about a hundred of people on the boat and take
up to two hundreds, so they'd be well spaced out. Obviously, the cool going to quarantine so they get on it, and the people who have obviously previd chests before they get on the by then that's Abercrombie and Kent founder and co chairman Jeffrey Kent. And I gotta say, Jason kind of salivating. I would love to go on so many of those different trips me too. Yeah, and my family, as we mentioned, has been on a couple of them, so I got to get in on that action for sure.
And listen, uh, socially distanced safaris and running out dude ranches. They're good for that sort of thing. Um. It does remind us too that people are moving around, they're also making big decisions about where they're going to live and where they're gonna work. And that was the subject that we really dove into in our Business Week extra podcasts this week. The issue is walking in the store, right, and I think when we look at um, you know, how do you get people set on bump into each other?
So I think there's we'll see what's streaming shopping and like. So we're releasing a platform very shortly to go after this. I think that's gonna be a way for you to releast engage and ask questions in your home and then you'll be able to buy or or do a curbside pickup or you know, And I think that's that's really
where the future is going to be. Yeah. That was Rob Lacasio, founder and CEO of Live Person that is our Bloomberg Business Week Extra podcast, and Jason, you and I man, that conversation went a lot of places that I did not expect. We expected to talk about the role of technology and AI on consumer based companies. He talked a lot about how retail is changing, gave us
some very specific examples. But as you said and how you kicked it off in this little teaser, is what they are doing as a company, and they have no plans at all to go back to their New York City offices. And Rob is a diehard New Yorker, so for him to say this, it's pretty remarkable. Yeah, cities are changing, and we don't know exactly what that's gonna look like. Some are optimistic that it will change them
for the better. Some think that maybe this is the reset that cities needed because we know from living in and around New York it's incredibly expensive. Same can be said for San Francisco, same can be said for Los Angeles and other big cities around the country. So check out that conversation. It's thought provoking, especially as a lot of people take a step back and think about what's next. Well, that's going to wrap up the weekend edition of Bloomberg
Business Week from Bloomberg Radio. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm Jason Kelly and I'm Carol Masser. Be sure to tune into Bloomberg Business Week Radio Live Monday through Friday starting at two pm Wall Street Time. And if you can't catch us live, get our daily Bloomberg Business Week podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to watch our show live on YouTube. Just search for Bloomberg Global News. We'll be back right here next week at
the same time. Stay safe, everyone, This is Bloomberg