Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend - February 24th, 2023

on our radar. Chinese President she urging his country to accelerate fundamental scientific research so it could become self reliant in critical technologies, basically really kind of countering Washington sanctions on everything from semis to software. You've also got a Chinese top diplomat calling for peace talks to resolve the

Russian war in Ukraine. And then there's a fascinating Bloomberg opinion piece today that talks about if American intelligence is right and China really is about to arm Russia in its genocidal war against Ukraine, we may be entering a new era in international relations, asking if it may be an even more dangerous one to dress it all. We've got ed price principle for the geopolitical forecasting firm, or he Is principle, i should say, of geopolitical forecasting at ERGO,

which is a global intelligence consulting in forecasting firm. By the way, Ed a former British trade official, his work with members of the European and British parliaments. We are so delighted to have him here with Maddie and myself. Ed. There is so much going on. How do you separate out the week from the chaff when it comes to what's going on in foreign affairs and geopolitics? Hi, Carol,

I hope you guys are very well. It's difficult, right It's really hard right now to separate the signal from the noise. My firm was previously very successful at doing that at the start of this war. If you remember, we very successfully called it. We know, we said they were going in with the seventy eight percent confidence a year ago. Today, a year later, it does seem that the war in Ukraine is harder to read. I would suggest, although there are probably a few a few themes that

we can point to that might help. One of them, Carol, is the just at the moment that it seems that Russian mistakes are compounding. And by Russian mistakes I mean the sort of strategic tomfoolery of using your best troops the spetsnaz your naval infantry, your parachute paratroopers at the start of the conflict and getting them essentially killed disproportionate to other troops. Strategic mistakes like that are compounding at just the time that the Ukrainians are getting new vehicles,

new equipment, and the morale is very high. So I think that's maybe one thing. So when we zoom out from the Russia Ukraine situation and look a little bit more broadly at all of the global geopolitical tensions right now, Ukraine, China, the global economy, spy balloons, what is your biggest concern and situation to watch for the year ahead? Right? I mean, I would be very clear that my biggest concern is

not necessarily the most likely concern. The biggest concern, of course, should be that this local war in Ukraine and that the threat of conflict over or in Taiwan become the same thing, and that there is a general confluence of the sorts of trends that we're seeing with regard to great power competition right now. I don't think that that's

likely that must remain the biggest concern. But within that, I mean, you guys just mentioned the fact that the Chinese might be thinking about arming the Russians is helping with material, that is a concern because, of course, you know, ridiculous spy blooms are one thing, but sending arms, sending lethal aid to Europe from China, you know, when you think about it, that's that's very concerning. You know, it's interesting. In this opinion piece too, it says Chinese military support

for Russia. Again it's an opinion piece by Andrea's Cluth said Chinese military support for Russia would finally turn the Ukrainian conflict into a proxy war between two hostile blocks with a third trying to stay out of the fray. And it does I do wonder, you know, ed, do we need to be thinking that this is this is where we're going. We've talked about kind of a technology war and different things going on, but is this what happened? We're dividing the world up into maybe three key blocks here.

I think that the essence of the problem is that Uncle Sam did half a job after the Second World War, and by that I mean he conquered three countries, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom. I wouldn't necessarily put it like that to my friends, But he did and filled those three countries with two things, democracy and free markets. For then some unknown reason after that, Uncle Sam decided

that the two big naughty countries China and Russia. And again I wouldn't necessarily call them naughty to their faces, but the two big naughty countries were only given access to markets, right and not? There wasn't a concerted effort to export democracy to Russia and China. So in a way, we Americans I'm America. Now, we Americans have done half a job after the Second World War? And the big

question is can you get away with that? Is it okay that democracy only really went halfway around the world when the means of markets and capitalism went all the way around? That's that's so interesting. I love the way you put that. My question with China in the US specifically is always like it's a symbiotic relationship, right, if we need each other. Can China really afford to risk interacting with Russia on the war when its economy just reopened?

I wonder, in the context of what you just mentioned about China embracing free markets but not democracy, how you think about that relationship. Well, I don't want to get too deep and dark here, but if you if you think about the Chinese ability as an autocracy, as a totalitarian regime to absorb the sort of punishment that a future sanctions or blockade regime might impose on it, it doesn't care about human life in the same way that

Americans do, right and so, and that Europeans do. That's not to say that your average Chinese individual or Chinese household doesn't care about if I'm talking about the government, to be clear, and so, PRC, I think we'll be able to pull things out of the bag in a future confrontation that look more like and feel more like an autarchy, a strategic autarchy, for which I suspect Belton Road has a pretty good preparation in many ways that

probably surprise us. And so really the question is to what extent can European economies and the American economy withstand a direct economic confrontation. I mean, I've said it before, maybe we need some sort of strategic garden furniture reserve. You know, it's a silly way of putting it, but

we're on the hook. No, that is a really, really good point, and it's interesting you know, we had a great story out from our Bloomberg team about what the UK government basically was doing and kind of doing a disaster scenario if China invaded Taiwan and TSMC was shut down or impacted the global supply chain, as we know that they produce so many what is it, ninety percent

of the chips used in the world. So I guess I always think about what's the constructive conversation as all this stuff is going on, where investment strategist ed continue to say that the big concerns this year are geopolitical. You know, we're seeing that. So what is the constructive and we've only got about forty five seconds left here. The constructive answer from Taiwan is don't worry about it right now. Ergo's best sources have the prospect of an

invasion at a very very low chance. That's for all sorts of reasons that we can get into another day. But do expect some kind of disruption, something stopping short of a blockade, because of course that's an act of war. But do expect that the PRC and the Communist Party in China are going to make life more difficult in that region. Still worried about Russia. I'm always worried about Russia. Yeah, I'm always worried about Russia. But I think we're on

top and I think Ukrainians will win. All right, listen, great to check in with you. I know it's busy on your end as well, So thanks for carving out some time. Ed Price, his principle at Ergo, former British trade official and of course joining us via zoom here. I believe it was in New York City. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Got us live weekdays from two to five pm Easter on Bloomberg Radio, The

Bloomberg Business a band you two. You can also listen live to our flagship New York station, Just Say Alexa play Bloomberg, Eleve and Dirty. As we all know, we're nearing that one year mark since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and as Ukrainians continue to fight to defend their country, the continued war requires tapping into a vast donor network that's blossomed over the plast twelve months to supply soldiers with everything from boots to battle tanks. Carol, Yeah, we're

talking crowdfunding. Who knew, well, our Mark Champion knew this story, By the way, is Today's Bloomberg Big Take. It is one of our most read stories on the Bloomberg. As we said, it is also Today's Big Take podcast, which you can find up Bloomberg dot com or wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to not miss the Big Take on Bloomberg Radio. That's weeknights at eleven pm

Wall Street Time. Mark Champion, Bloomberg News Senior reporter for International Affairs, who wrote the story, He is in London, Mark, incredible story. Like I said, who knew it. It's kind of a form of crowdfunding. Tell us what exactly is going on? Yes, well, I've been going in and out of Ukraine for the last year and it really struck me every time I went the amount of just stuff that was getting uh, you know, provided to the front.

Wherever you were. You went into a company, they had a warehouse full of stuff and it was all donated. And the more I know was there, the more it became clear that this isn't just you know, the normal stuff you'd expect about, you know, food for refugees and some but it was also weapons for the front, cars for the front, everything that you can imagine that. You know,

people just all have relatives there. Their sons and brothers and fathers are all at the front, and they were trying to find the stuff that they said they needed, and so they're filling all the gaps. But the scale has become really enormous. So you know, the one a fund in particular that I talked to call come Back Alive, they raised one hundred and sixty million in the last dollars in the last year. You know, there's others of

similar scale. The Central Bank, if you want to just give extra money, the Defense Ministry Central Bank has raised six hundred and fifty million dollars. And you know that beyond those funds, which they are funding sort of expensive million dollar drones and mortars and all sorts of things like that. But beyond those funds, you just have the

tiniest little operations all over the place. You know, one place I went to was a guy as a former graffiti artist who decided he was just going to help all his friends who were going to the front, and they were taking their cars and he camouflaged them so he cannot now as camouflage you know around you know, eighteen hundred vehicles and then also rifles and all sorts

of things. That's so, that's such an interesting point. I wonder if that means that there's a sense on the ground that the folks who are respondable for the crowdfunding understand the needs of civilians in the area in a way that maybe the big players like the US funders don't necessarily understand. Was that your impression, Mark, Yeah, I think that's true. I mean there's just a lot of you know, gaps to fill, and you know, the US

can't be on top of all of that. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry, you know, for reasons of money, of bureaucracy or whatever, it can't do everything. And you know, these is just something that Ukrainian has become very used to. Um. They because they had very sort of inefficient and corrupt governments, they became, uh, you know, over more than a decade, they've built up this sort of instinct to crowdfund no matter what it is. You know, a popular uprising like

the Maidan protests in twenty fourteen. Well, then when the war began in the donbas in twenty fourteen fifteen, immediately the first instinct is not to ask the government, you know, because you don't think you'll get anything the government. If you give anything that the government, you think it will disappear. So people have just become used to doing stuff themselves.

They just instantly do it, and they just instantly begin Facebook groups and so on to say, let's get a car for so and so so that he can go to the front. So it's it's just really ingrained, and I think it is actually more important than the dollar value, simply because it says to every soldier at the front um, you know, I've got an entire society behind me. Talk to us about some of the people behind some of these Crown crowdfunding efforts. We're talking about what Hollywood celebrities

were talking about, oligarchs, we're talking about everybody. Yeah, absolutely, So, you know the fund that was set up by the president, President Celenski, he has one called United twenty four and they've raised two hundred and eighty seven million dollars. And for that fund, he has really reached out and he's persuaded by b Streisan to be an ambassador the fund. There's a number of other celebrities that have become attached to the fund in one way or another and so

they raise money. And then you have others who are as you mentioned the oligarchs. You know, some of the oligarchs who are not very popular, and we're even seen, you know, some years ago as being kind of pro Russian because they supported the party that former president Janakovic used to you know, represent So you know Aria Ahmetze, who's the richest man in Ukraine. He has a big steel company called met in Best. They owned as a style in Mariupol. The steel plant where they were the

last stand was made in Mariupol. They've lost a lot of their assets, but he has actually provided one hundred and fifty thousand sets of bulletproof vests which they've made in his factories, you know, eighty thousand tank traps, all kinds of stuff which really does mount up. Well, Carol, you bring up a great question about the people who fund this effort and who have kind of been the leaders behind it. I wonder Mark, if you can talk

about the people who are most impacted by it? Is this civilian Is it folks who are actually fighting, Who is most benefiting from this extra cash? Well, it really is everybody, but the Ukrainians are focused very much, you know, on people who remain in areas that are either at the front or they're in areas that were occupied and were then retaken by the Ukrainians, and services there has

sort of broken down. Medical services, you know, food is difficult to sort of distribute all those sorts of things. So basically, you know, as I say, it's it's the great strength of this is that it's incredibly flexible. It just kind of responds because everybody knows somebody and they then move into these areas and provide services that the government is just you know, incapable or too slow or you know, doesn't have the resources to do. And it

really is a kind of lifesaver in these areas. It is for civilians, it's but a lot of it is for the front, for the soldiers U. It's interesting too, and it's funny, you know, Mark, as we were getting ready and talking about your story in the newsroom, one of the things that came up from one of our producers, Aria Gami, he said, you know, wait a minute, I understand the US is sending billions of dollars in equipment

and providing support. We know, other nations and allies of the US are certainly, and of Ukraine are providing support. Why is this ultimately necessary? Because nothing is enough. I mean, this is a big war. We haven't seen a war like this since World War Two in terms of pure intensity. I mean they have been other very intense wars, but not like this. And you know, the Russian side in

particular is very well armed. It has the entires, you know, not the entire so the predominant part of the stocks of the former Soviet Union that it built up for the Cold War, and in many ways this is you know, they're running down through the Cold War stocks of the former Soviet Union. The Ukrainians on the other side, you know, they're still he starts at this war with around sixteen hundred tanks. You know, Germany has three hundred. You know,

Britain has two hundred and twenty. So it's you know, they they it's not like they had nothing. But you need so much in order to pursue a warline there. It just eats resources at an incredible rate, and you need a lot of everything because it gets destroyed. You know, the ninety percent of drones get destroyed. A lot you know, pickup trucks that people bring they get destroyed, either you know, because they get hit, or they just you know, in an accidents, or they just you know, get stuck in

mud or whatever. That it just eats through resources at an incredible rate. And to be fair, we've talked about the new double issue Bloomberg Business Week gets out cover story is of course marking the one year Russian invasion into Ukraine, but talks about, you know, specifically, Maddie, the shortage of ammunition on both sides. I mean, both sides are going through a lot when it comes to any kind of defense equipment, and they're just kind of running

through it. Yeah, and it's it's so critical. I wonder Mark, in our final kind of thirty seconds with you here, if you can talk about you mentioned the intensity of the war. What is something that you understand about the situation on the ground that folks who haven't been in Ukraine might be missing about the story. Well, I think when you hear that the war has slowed down in the East and yet you hit, then the casualty rates

are really high. That is simply about intensity. So they may not be moving, but there is a lot of artillery shells that are just being exchanged on either side and bodies now at this part of the war, just bodies on the Russian side being thrown at the war. So when you hear that things were to nothing's moved or slow, it doesn't mean that the war has itself has slowed down in terms of intensity, and it hasn't

at all. Yeah, it's pretty amazing though, and to think about it was just a year ago then it all started. But you look at how much devastation and how many resources are still needed to continue on Mark Champion Incredible story, Marks Senior reporter for International Affairs at Bloomberg News, joining us on the phone from London. Be sure to check out his Bloomberg Big Take. Can also find it on

the Bloomberg Terament. Of course, check out the Bloomberg Big Take on Bloomberg Radio weeknights at eleven pm in all street time, you're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekdays from two to five pm Easter on Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business Band You Two. You can also listen live to our flagship New York station, Just Say Alexa, play Bloomberg Eleve and Dirty. Well you know what, Maddie, we had some data out earlier this

morning we talked about with Scarlett and Romain. It talks specifically about output at US factories up the most in January, by the largest amount in early a year. So we're talking about improving supply chains, firm or demand getting and giving some relief, if you will, to what's been a really challenged manufacturing sector. So much needed relief after the past couple of years of supply chain shocks. Right, it's

been crazy. Right, We're just talking a little bit about Cisco and the manufacturing and the backlogs just in general. We want to get to our next guests. Mattive Holdings is a publicly held company. It's got about a one and a half billion dollar market cap. It makes and sell specialty materials for manufactory two customers in more than a hundred countries, so it's got a great global perspective.

Julie Chartel is the presidency of the company. Just ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange and that's where we find our via Zoom. Julie, good to have you here on Bloomberg BusinessWeek on Bloomberg Radio. First of all, tell us a little bit about your customers, your business and what vantage point that gives you when it comes to manufacturing and the economic outlook. Sure, thank

you for having me today. It's a real honor and privilege to be here at the New York Stock Exchange and it marks a key milestone formative as a specialty materials company. We're you've created through the merger of two former specialty materials companies MINA and SWM, and so combined, it's a really powerful statement that we're making into the market.

We have complementary technologies that we sell into a diverse area of different categories, whether that's filtration media for cleaner air and water and the strong macro trends behind those things. It's release liners and applications for medical packaging and its tapes and abrasives. Into the industrial space as well, we've seen great strength and really a supply chain that is starting to improve, and that's a great spot to be

in as a manufacturer. How would you describe the overall manufacturing environment today and what does that tell us about our overall economy. What's kind of an insight that you have because of your work in manufacturing that the rest of us might not. I think It's interesting because it's

a little bit of a dichotomy. We are seeing, you know, the supply chains start to right size after what I would say is two years of challenges in our supply chain in manufacturing, whether that's driven by the rising interest rates, record levels of inflation, the Ukraine War, some of the conflicts in China, or some of the outcomes of COVID in China. We're starting to see that settle in and so our supply chain is opening up a bit, loosening up a bit, and that's really important for our customers.

It means we're able to get back to a service level and predictability and lead time that is most valuable to them. And I think what we really recognize as manufacturers is it's important to have a global supply chain, but it's really important to have local supply because during this time, supply and availability became the number one priority

for all of our customers. Hey, Julie, two questions, So are you back, Are the supply chains back to where we were pre pandemic and all of the bottlenecks, And secondly, you talk about local supply chains, are we seeing more and more companies tap into that change? Their supply chains, make sure that they're kind of in their backyard. So if you could address those two things, that would be great.

Sure on the supply chain, I'd say we're headed and headed back to pre pandemic levels, but still not there. But we're seeing chemical availability become more standardized or seeing lead times become more standardized, so the availability is really improving. We aren't seeing a tremendous amount of deflation yet, at least not in the categories in which we compete. We're seeing a start to moderate, but we still have prices at very high levels for most of our supplies. And

I will tell you that we're in the past. Maybe pricing was the number one discussion with customers. It is supply chain now. And so, just as I was mentioning in to your question, that local availability and there's different ways to do that, whether that's having manufacturing assets in the backyard of our customers in our markets, or having availability through different means of transportation and quick turn, you know,

an agile type of transportation system. It's significantly important because many customers and many suppliers and many manufacturers have learned how impactful it is when some of those materials that we did not anticipate. You know, you anticipate your big commodity materials to have fluctuations like we've seen. We did not anticipate specialty chemicals and some of the other areas

to have the type of volatility that we've seen. That's starting to loosen up and straighten out a little bit, but the local supply chain, the reliability, the predictability continues to grow in importance with our customers. Have you felt any impact from China reopening? Has that impacted you at all? And do you anticipated impacting you? You know, very minimal. We have a very small footprint in China and a

very small portion of our revenue in China. We're primarily North American and European and a little bit in South America, a little bit in Asia. So it's had a very minimal impact, I'd say, not significant, all right. So the US and Europe are your biggest market recession for either of them or how would you describe it at this point? Julk,

I think they're very different. I mean, we're definitely feeling some contraction in Europe in particular, we saw and felt and experienced the record level energy hikes we have facilities in France and Spain, the UK and Germany, and we felt it in all of those areas. I will tell you what it's helped us do has become more agile.

So we've worked really hard to start and forward by some of those energies, hedge some of that energy cost so that we have greater reliability and predictability, and it's made as very agile with our pricing, so that we have shorter pricing commitments and contracts and different modifiers that are inclusive of different components and some of those specialty chemicals and energy that had not been in the past. So that's Europe, and i'd say Europe is where we're feeling,

you know, more of a slowdown. It's a little bit hard right now to peel away how much of that is really pure demand contraction and how much of that is just customers right sizing their inventory, because we know throughout the entire supply chain there was significant inventory build as customers struggle to get the materials they needed, they ordered more and more in anticipation of getting their fair share, and as demand starts to correct itself, you know, they're

often left with high levels of inventory. So there's a level of destocking and we're feeling that in North America and Europe, but more contraction in Europe. I'd say our North American business has remained fairly healthy. You know, I'm looking at there's a great function on the Bloomberg terminal. It's all about supply chains and basically it looks at who are your top suppliers and then who are your top customers. But when it comes to your suppliers, a

lot of it is in the energy space. How would you describe that industry right now? The energy space, I think they're just going through a tremendous amount of change and I think they're you know, it's difficult to predict the future right now. There's a lot of pressure from getting to clean energy, and then there's the availability and you know, some of the efforts that we're seeing or the impacts that we're seeing in Europe with the Ukraine War, and you know, that created some of the issues that

we saw earlier this year. So for us, it's really been about how do we control our own destiny. Knowing there's there's lack of predictability in the marketplace, and particularly and energy, how do we make sure we become more agile, we become more consistent, and we really take control of those factors that we can to push forward through some of those issues and reduce the volatility. And are you still seeing consumer demand for sustainable manufacturing even with some

of the volatility that we're experiencing. Yeah. Absolutely, I think sustainable manufacturing is it's not a trend. I think it's here to stay, and so it's really important that we continue to move in that direction. And much of our platform from an innovation standpoint is on sustainability. We're often the preferred alternative to plastics for some of our packaging material and medical packaging materials. So it's a really important part of how we move forward. Hey, Julie, twenty seconds.

What keeps you up at night? What's the biggest risk in the outlook? Very quickly if you could, you know, it's just the overall global economy. The factors are moving in, the indicators are moving in different directions. When we look at interest rates versus job race versus manufacturing PMI, typically they've moved in unison and they just they're not quite doing that right now. So it's the lack of predictability that's why for us, it's really important we focus on

those things we can control. We just merge. We have great synergies, we have great we have great cost reduction opportunities as well as unlocking growth. So I'm thrilled with where we're headed and we're going to focus on those things that we can control. Well. Gate great to get a check on your business and talk outlook as well. Julie Schertel. She is president CEO of Mattev. She just ranging the closing belt of New York Stock Exchange and that is exactly where we were just talking to her,

so good to catch up with her. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekdays from two to five pm Easter on Bloomberg Radio. The Bloomberg Business a band you Doo. You can also listen live to our flagship New York station, Just Say Alexa play Bloomberg e Love and Dirty. Over the years, we have touch base with the CCD team at Cura Leaf, including

the company's chairman, Boris Jordan. Many times. Cure Leaf, as you know, approximately two point seven billion dollars cannabis holding company based in Canada, and we wanted to get more on the business, including last week's news that Twitter would allow cannabis ads, becoming the first major social platform to do so. We welcome Cure Leaf CEO Matt Darren joining us via zoom in Florida. Matt, good to have you here with Mattie and myself. How are you and how

is business doing? Great? Thank you. Business continues to be brisk. It's we're continuing to see that cannabis is a recession resistant staple and despite many of the inflation crashers and other things going to the economy, people are prioritizing their cannabis purchases, which is encouraging to see. All right, optimism, you sound optimistic, But in January, you guys did release

that you're cutting your payroll by about ten percent. You were closing operations in California, Colorado, and Oregon at the same time. Though, there's some news just last week that you opened another dispensary in Florida. I think it's your fifty eighth in that state, one hundred and forty eighth nationwide in the US. So, first of all, kind of square some things for me. Why the cuts in payroll, why the shutdowns in California, Colorado and Oregon. So a

few things first. You know, pure Leaf got more than doubled for a number of consecutive years, and with that hypergrowth comes opportunities to continue to optimize the business. So many of the decisions that we're making, I think are natural for high growth companies that are going through its next phase of evolution and is something we're seeing really throughout the industry as it relates to our markets in the West Coast. Look, there are in a resource constrained,

capital constraint environment. We want to make sure that we are allocating our capital and our resources to the markets where we see the greatest opportunities, Florida being one of them with the largest medical market and adult use on

the horizon in the coming years. You have some markets such as California on the West Coast that have just experienced some major challenges for a variety of reasons, from lack of enforcement of the illicit market to high tax structures in place that have really made it challenging to be profitable in California. So for the time being, we're continuing to go asset light in those markets and hopefully they're going to stabilize in the coming years and you

know we'll be there. You tease this out a little bit, but can you talk to me a little bit more about why you like Florida as a market to continue to expand in. So Florida has been a wildly successful medical program with over seven hundred thousand patients in the

medical program. You know, the licensing structure allows you to expand your cultivation and manufacturing capacity as much as you would like, as well as to open up as many dispensaries, so you can really build scale in the Florida market, which we continue to do by investing in our manufacturing and processing capabilities and continuing to open new dispensaries as you've seen. So it's really an attractive market, and that's

just in a medical environment. So with adult use on the horizon at some point and one hundred and thirty million tourists that come to Florida every year, not to mention the demographic ship taking place with many people relocating to the state, it really is an attractive climate operating. How strong is the demand in Florida that you guys have so overweighted your exposure to that state. The demand

is immense. I think part of what we've seen is that there's certain parts of the state that have been slower to communities flower to zone for dispensaries. And so while there are you know, hundreds of dispensaries throughout the state, there's some areas that have really not had much accessibility for medical cannabis up until recently. So we're seeing some greenfield opportunities in areas outside of Orlando and other parts of the state that we're excited to now be represented

in where we weren't before. Same thing in you know, south in Miami Dade County, there's areas that are new areas that have been opening up that are now zoned for medical dispensaries, whereby previously that was not an option available. So we're really we're very focused on opening up a locations in these markets, but the opportunities are continuing to open up for that. Well. We got some big news last week that Twitter is allowing cannabis ads. I imagine

that that news was music to your ears. Can you talk to me about how big of a deal that is for you and the business. We see it as a really big deal. Twitter being the first major online social media platform to allow cannabis companies to advertise, albeit subject to restrictions. I think is a real big moment

for the industry. Historically, we've been very limited in terms of the digital marketing that we can do and frankly all types of marketing, and so the notion that we can now advertise and participate in social media channels, including Twitter, which has been very active in the cannabis space, is really a whole new opportunity and something that we're really excited for to capitalize on. My understanding, to advertise on Twitter, it are that cannabis companies must be pre authorized by

Twitter and meet many requirements. What are you learning about those requirements? So, yes, there are a number of requirements, uh, you know in the early stages here, UM, the we do need to be pre authorized by the platform, UM to post ads. There's restrictions on what can be advertised. You know, we're not advertising you know, most cannabis products in general. UM, So there's some significant limitations on um,

you know, what can exactly be advertised. UM. And there's certain pre authorizations uh that are there as well as jurisdictions um where we are able to um, you know, offer these ads. So help me, help me out. Is this correct that one of the most significant restrictions is that cannabis companies can't promote or offer for sale cannabis products.

Isn't that what advertising is? You are correct? Now we're able to offer advertise certain products that are at a very dimnimus amount of THHC, things like our outstanding topicals, which do quite well in places like Florida. But you're right, there are a lot of restrictions in terms of actually advertising the products that we dispense. But I will say that that is still progress from where we have been at, where we've not been able to have any sort of

advertising presence on these platforms. So while certainly we're more limited than conventional CBG companies and others, this is progress from what we've been dealing with the last decade. So we'll take progress for the moment. Are you also a little nervous? And it just harkens back to kind of cigarettes, This whole idea that you can't target minors, I mean, like, how do you not well? I think there's something that

we take very seriously. Now. Curely's roots are as a health and wellness company coming out of the medical space, and that's still very much in our DNA, even as we transition to adult use and are offering products across a variety of ways. You know, there's certainly ways to market and advertise that are not being directed towards youth, and that in terms of the way that products get presented, and you know, many of those things. So I think

there's absolutely ways to market cannabis products. And the reality is a huge portion of our customer base is, you know, kind of skewing older than younger. There's the reality. And forgive me, I really probably should have has phrased it more like it's hard to avoid anybody from seeing the ads that are out there. I'm not sure I didn't mean to mean that you guys are necessarily going to target young folks, but I mean once the stuff is

out there, pretty much anybody can see it. Matt, come back, because I'd love to continue this conversation and love to know more as you guys find out about the advertising rules. Matt Darren, He's chief executive officer of Purely joining USPA Zoom from Florida. This is Bloomberg Radio. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekdays from two to five pm Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, the bloom

Berg Business Band You two. You can also listen live to our flagship New York station Just Say Alexa play Bloomberg e Love and Dirty. So it is safe to say and we have all become obsessed with balloons after that Chinese surveillance balloon found its way over the United States. Well said, which is why we knew. We wanted to bring you this story in the current double issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which is out on newstands, on line up, Bloomberg dot com, Slash business Week, and of course on

the Bloomberg terminal. Let's get more with us is Christina Lindblag, Global Economics editor at Bloomberg BusinessWeek. She's in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker studio along with Jeff Wise, Bloomberg BusinessWeek freelance contributor. He joins us via zoom from Westchester, New York. Christine,

I want to kick it off with you. We are all obsessed about balloons, but they've been out there for a long time, that's right, And as often happens when we are interested in things in the sky, We've reached out to Jeff who knows a lot about aerospace, and said, why don't you like give us a little history of the balloons and also like, what accompanies are you know in this field? Now, what could the Chinese have been

trying to do with this? So maybe Jeff can kick it off by telling us, Yeah, give us a little bit of a snapshot of how long these craft have been around and what they've been used for and what they're being used for now. Well, thanks, Christina. You know, it's it's such a back to the future kind of technology.

You know, people have been using balloons for literally hundreds of years to engage in surveillance on the other side, in military operations, and here we are, in a age when people are talking about hypersonic rockets and the like. We have this balloon floating overhead, and it turns out it's pretty hard to see, it's pretty hard to shoot down, and so I wanted to find out, well, what is

it actually doing. What's the point of floating a balloon over someone like they did, And it turns out there's there's lots of handy things you can do, like sniffing out signal intelligence. All right, So take us Jeff, if you will, to a company that you write about in your story Aerostar, right. This is a super interesting company was actually started by the guy who kind of reinvented the hot air balloon, used modern materials after World War Two to make it the kind of hobby that it

is today. You know, we see hot air balloons floating all over the place, and you don't realize that somebody actually created this technology and popularize it. This company went on to build high altitude balloons for the military, and they were able to do something that's harder than it sounds. If you put a if you fill a bag of gas with hydrogen or helium and float it up into the upper atmosphere, it eventually leaks out and comes down.

But they figured out a way to basically keep these balloons up in the high stratosphere indefinitely, and that means you can float a kind of anywhere in the world for really months at a time. Their longest flight is over one hundred and fifty days, almost six months, which it's pretty obviously when you say that Timeline, Jeff, that these balloons can do a lot that planes can't. But can you talk a little bit about some of the other benefits balloon surveillance might offer that a plane over

an aerospace just can't provide. Yeah, I mean the first thing that came to my mind is satellites. I mean, the Chinese are flying satellites over us all the time anyway,

why not just use those? Well, it turns out that satellites have an important limitation, which is that they're if they're low enough to get really high resolution images there maybe twenty fifteen miles up, they're moving really fast, and they as they go around the Earth, they only come back over a certain patch of ground, like maybe every

day and a half or something. And so if you want to really have a long, lingering look at something and look at it from even closer than two hundred and fifty miles up, a stratospheric balloon is really a

good option. Another cool thing about the modern stratospheric balloons, this has only really been possible in the last you know, fifteen years or so, is that by adjusting the altitude, you can insert this balloon into winds they're going in the right direction that you want it to go, and you can either you know, park it over someplace on the other side of the Earth literally, or you can

put in a spot and just keep it there. And so that's very useful if you want to look at something for a long time, which can be very useful for a surveillance operation. Jeff, what do you think the Chinese might have been using the balloon that was shot over the Atlantic? Four? But there's a special technology that

might be interested, isn't there. Yeah, exactly. There's this new kind of communications technology that the US military has been developing that I had never heard of, but that it basically tries to conceal the signal so that it's difficult to intercept. It's called ld LPI Low probability of intercept, and basically you're trying to hide your signal in the background noise, so you're actually trying to send it at

as low power as you can get away with. That makes it really hard to detect, especially if you're far away. So this is the advantage of a balloon that's only maybe you know, twenty miles up instead of twenty or fifteen miles up, so it's much closer and it's much more likely to sniff this out. This is just speculation.

I don't know if this is what it's for. Aerostar doesn't know if this is what the Chinese are doing, but the US military at this point definitely knows because they have recovered the instrumentation that was on boards balloon that was shot down, and they're going to know exactly what the Chinese were aft. Jeff, what's wild in a world where I feel like defense, aerospace, everything is getting

much more technologically sophisticated. Balloon seems so quaint, if you will, but it's not the Wizard of Oz balloon, as you say. There's some pretty wild technology on these balloons. Yeah, it's much more high tech than it seems. Because while the idea of you know, putting a lighter than aircraft you know, up in the atmosphere is hundreds of years old, the way that they do it, the altitude that they get, and the way that they can control it is very

sophisticated and actually quite hard to do. And it's taken that it took them a number of years to get it right, and now that now that they got it right, clearly either the Chinese were watching them, taking notes or maybe just developing it on their own separate, parallel path, but it is really a whole new technology. Hey, real quickly thirty seconds there. It's a lot less expensive, right, which makes it much more accessible to potential bad actors

very quickly. Yeah, I mean it's much it's very democratizing because you know, it's not too hard to put a balloon up in there compared to building a whole space rocket, launch it into space, tracking into all that. So relatively relatively more egalitarian, if you will. I feel like we were all looking for this story, especially after Obsessed. We've all been. Jeff, thank you so much. Jeff Wise, freelance contributor at Bloomberg Business Week via zoom from Westchester, New York. Christine,

did you feel like like you learn things about balloons? Yeah? I could love that story. I do too, Christina Lindblad, she's our global economics that are at Bloomberg Business Week here in our interactive broker studio. As we said, this story is in the new double issue current issue of Bloomberg Business Week, out on newsstands, on line at Bloomberg dot com, slash BusinessWeek, and oi's on the Bloomberg. You're

listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekdays from two to five pm Eastern on Bloomberg Radio the Bloomberg Business a band. You two. You can also listen live to our flagship New York station, Just Say Alexa play Bloomberg, ELB and Dirty Well. Our next guest as an author, a television host, a philanthropist, James Baird Award Michelin Star, decorated chef that again just also earning a four star rating from The New York Times. We'll

talk about that in just a moment. He is definitely in a class all his own. We're talking about Eric Repair, executive chef and co owner of La Bernadin, now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. La Bernadine one of the rare New York City restaurants to be awarded the maximum three Michelin Stars for excellent and cuz cuisine. If there is like a benchmark and award, he has certainly won it. He's also vice chairman of the board of City Harvest. He joins this visum in New York City. Eric, Thank you

so much, Thank you for coming on Bloomberg again. How are you. I'm doing great? Thank you for allowing me today. Congratulations. We're not quite sure where to start, but let's start. First of all, because you were kind enough in the midst of the deep depths of the pandemic to come on and talk with us about the industry. Tell us where we are today and how much we've come back, how much we have to go. So the industry came

back very quickly. People right after the pandemic decided that they wanted to splurt and a great experience and live life and be happy. And therefore restaurants and the hospitality in general are benefiting from that shift of thinking. And despite the fact that last year we started the year with the omni ron and it was a bit of fear attached to that, restaurant did extremely well in general in New York City and all over the US and no signs of stopping. No, I don't see any stops

of stopping. The big difference in between last year and this year is that more people are going out, but spending is a bit less than twenty twenty two. Where are you seeing that, Well, the spending is at least at Lebernard, and the spending is less in the wine consumption or in the in the cocktails. People have the tendency to be saving a bit more there we have a prefixed menu or testing menu, so people cannot um eat something less expensive because again it's it's already decided.

But for the one consumption, for sure, we see a huge difference. And when I talk to my friends in the industry, they observe exactly the same phenomenon. So I wondered, too, how much ERIC is because of still the inflationary and price pressures. How that is playing into kind of your dynamic. So we have seen a lot of inflation in twenty twenty two. We still see some inflation right as we speak.

Right now, it's difficult to really quantify the effect, but we had to raise our prices by twenty percent in a period of time of eighteen months and right now, depending on the weather and depending of many components, the price of many products and produces varies. And I know during the pandemic from the New York Times Rave review, which we'll get to, you had seven people working with you in the kitchen. Is that correct? So I imagine

you've got a lot more now. But talk to me about what that transition kind of back to quote unquote normal has looked like for you, and how have labor costs changed for you? So it was very difficult to reopen the restaurants because a lot of people that were working in our industry went back to other states that were open to business, like Florida, for instance, or young students that are usually learning in a kitchen of fine dining restaurants went back to their families and never came

back to New York. So when we reopened the restaurant, the manage management was here. They were employees that work at Lebernard and for a long time, and we were short in staff. But we reopened, as you remember, at twenty five percent capacity in New York City, and then it increased to fifty percent, and then we closed again, and then we reopened at ared percent today. From seven people in a kitchen that we had, we have sixty cooks. We should be about seventy five cooks, wow, or chefs,

and we are a little bit short. The salaries are in general much better than what they were pre Covide, because again it's a shortage of labor, labor in a kitchen and in the dining room as well, and therefore it has a huge impact on the budget of of the restaurants. Yeah, and some of the inflation is passed to the consumer and some of it is absorbed by

the owners of restaurants. And I know that you differ from Noma and Copenhagen, which is a restaurant that does not they have unpaid interns, and I know that you pay everyone on your staff. Talk to me about where you're able to increase costs the most easily for customers in order to maintain the profits that you need to run the best. The prefix that was pre COVID was twenty percent less than than today we had. We had to raise the price of the food. People didn't really

mind and understood. The lunch price has also increased drastically because we were very inexpensive for lunch. But today people understand again that the price of goods has changed and we do not have people questioning the price of our menus. The price of the wine is basically the same and people have a lot of choice. We have about thousand bottles different wines at Lebanada, and people can choose inexpensive

fare or exceptional price. Of course, Hey, you know, Eric, we had Danielle Blue on back in December, and you know I do recall. I want to go back to what you said about workers and some of them leaving and they went to Florida, and that was one of

the things he said. I think labor was a really tough issue for him as well, and just this whole idea that workers who were in the industry have left, they haven't come back, and they've found jobs elsewhere, and so that that continues to be a real chronic problem.

It is a big problem, especially for fine dining restaurants because usually we again have a lot of students who come from culinary schools or people who are starting their career and they want to go into fine dining because it's where they learned the basics and it will give them huge opportunities in their future. Those young people make

a big sacrifice to live in New York City. Usually they have roommates, they live not necessarily in Manhattan, and when COVID happened, they left and they didn't come back to New York because the lifestyle is too expensive, and

they find those other jobs in all the places. Do you ever think about or do you and you and the industry at home, you know, think about It's something that's come up with FED speakers, It's come up with certainly politicians, this whole idea of immigration and opening up the borders more a little bit, and just got about thirty seconds and then we'll come back and continue the conversation.

We will love that. Of course, we would love to have more immigrants, legal immigrants coming and helping us in the kitchens, because they stay with us for a long time. Let me read you something. A great restaurant can be a sort of cultural preserve, a place where rare skills are passed on from one pair of hands to the next. Even formal restaurants services built uncareful study of human behavior.

If it's done right. A restaurant like Liberta Dan is run by people who know things that others haven't learned yet. This is part of what ran through my head too when I tasted those scallops and their cream sauce and thought they kept it alive. Now, this is of course a New York Times review that gave La Bernardine four stars again, and I believe it's the fifth consecutive time

that they have gotten this with us. Of course, as you know, is Eric Repair, executive chef co owner of La Bernardine with us on the phone here were actually via zoom in New York City. Eric to hear that and to get this distinction again, how does it feel? Well? It feels good because the New York Time is an institution and Pete Wells is a tough food critique. To have four stars since the opening of Le bernardin which

is since nineteen eighty six, it's exceptional. We are the only restaurant in New York to have that record, and we celebrated for a few days the review, and now we are back to work and trying to create an amazing experience for the clients that come to Lebernard. Then we are leaving the passion. We are living the dream. I'm glad to hear that you celebrate it at least a little bit, though you deserve that and much more. I have to wonder there's been a lot of bad

press lately for these incredible restaurants. Right it feels like, I don't know, if you've seen the movie The Menu. There's TV shows about being a Michelin chef and just how challenging it is. What do you think maybe is getting misunderstood about what hard work you do and the challenge and beauty of these Michelin star restaurants. Well, fine dining restaurants are meant to create exceptional experiences for the clients, and people who work in those restaurants are very passionate

and love the hospitality industry. Of course, in the kitchen is about craftsmanship, artistry in the dining room is about loving to interact with clients. And we have a team of somebody that about a lot of expertise with the wines and they have passion for discovering and testing grid wines and sharing their passion for the clients. So this

is what fine dining restaurants are meant for now. It's some restaurants that have good practices like Lebernard and where every employee is paid with fair prices, fair salaries, where we pay also the over times and we have benefits for our employees, and where we treat all the employees with tremendous respect. And you have some other restaurants that are getting a bit of bad press lately because they

don't have the same standards as Lebernard. And yeah, it speaks the culture, right we talk about it's got to be from the bottom up, the top down. I want to ask you something, how does this process w In other words, do you know when Pete Wells is going to come in. Does he walk in? And are you all surprised? Walkers there? We've all seen it in movies, you know, when the critic comes into a restaurant. How

does it actually work? So Pete Wells's pretty well recognized in New York because it's the food critique of the New York time for many, many years. I think he's there for twelve or fourteen years. But you never know when he's going to show up. But what he does. He sent some friends first, and they have a fake name, and you see them where wherever you decide to see

his friends. Usually they're not necessarily the most well dressed people in the dining room, and they're not necessarily well known by the by the team, so sometimes they end up in the back of the restaurant and not in the front. But then he shows up, and then they choose at the very last minute whatever they want to experience from the menu, and they have interaction with the staff and with the summer years again for the wines.

So when Pete Wells arrive and he's with his friends and decide to eat many dishes, it's basically too late because if your fish is not fresh, yoursels are not good. It's nothing you can do. It's too late. You can't redo everything, do you. Carol mentioned some of these movies, and one of them they say that the cretic comes and drops a fork on the ground to see how the staff reacts. And that's a tell that it's a it's a critic in the restaurant. Is any of that true?

I have seen that with few critics. Yes, yes, it's it's sometimes they drop the napkin on purpose or fork or something like that, or they make a mistake and or sometimes like those of day, for instance, Pete Wells wanted to have the dessert and when we're about to serve the desserts, they decided to have cheese at the same time. So we had to coordinate bringing the cheese card, cutting the cheese and serving it at the same time

as the desserts that were coming from the pastry. So that's the way they do to basically test the quality of the service. All right, Eric just got about thirty seconds. What are you having for dinner tonight? Tonight for dinner, I'm going to test the sauce. I'm going to test the food without double deeping, and that will be my dinner because I eat only once a day for lunch. All right, Wow, it's so interesting all of it, and just such a joy to spend this time with you.

And congratulations because the distinction, as we said, getting that four star rating from the New York Times again is just and subsequently getting it for several years here's just really remarkable. Eric, thank you so much. Be well. Eric Repair, executive Shaw, co owner of Lebruna Dan as we mentioned, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. I believe the first time he got a four star rating was back when he was

twenty nine years old in nineteen ninety five. But again getting it for the fifth consecutive time, so really remarkable, right, huge accomplishment and story you know, so good, such a good chat. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week. Carol Master, Madison Mills. This is Bloomberg Radio. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekdays from two to five pm Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business App, and you too. You can also listen live to our

flagship New York station, Just say Alexa play Bloomberg eleven thirty. Okay, so Carol, and I are very obsessed with the story we're about to talk about. So listen up, lean in a little bit. The midlife crisis. We've all been dreading it, hearing about it throughout our lives. Chris Rouser edited a fantastic piece about it, and we just knew that we

had to talk about it. All right, Chris, come on in on this tell us about First of all, I want to know, like, were you guys sitting around in the newsroom or doing a zoom call and you're like, I'm turning forty. Somebody's like turning forty and they were having like a fit or how did it come to be? You know, it's not nice to guess a person's age, Carol, you know how you know how it came to be? Normally around this time, we do how to spend your bonus special? Okay? You know in good years and this

year bonuses are down on Wall Street thirty percent. We're going to a recession. Is not the look. We were like, Okay, how do we address like sort of this moment in the year when you're looking ahead and you're thinking about money maybe And we were like midlife crisis issue because I am actually a geriatric millennial as the term for it, which means that I was born in nineteen eighty one and I recently turned forty, and I remember looks great

you can all see on YouTube. And anyway, I remember when my mother turned forty, we biked the supermarket and we got her a cake that said over the hill and it had like gravestones. Awful, Oh my god, my mother. Can you imagine? And you know, so a lot so millennials are just churning forty now, and they are they have less money than previous generations, than Gen Z, than Baby boomers. They're very busy. They're getting inundated by news

saying you should change your jobs every twelve years. You should. The Great Resignation had more quits in a given year than any other time. And there's all these fitness and self care and wellness all around us. The self care industry is trillion dollars globally, and yet millennials don't feel like they can take advantage of that. They feel like they have a wellness deficit because they don't have enough money to do the traditional midlife crisis and leave their

job and leave their family or whatever. So they're reinterpreting it. And one thing I love about your story too, is that you talk about how the midlife crisis, or the story, I should say, was originally framed as a male only thing. Women didn't necessarily have no idea like I think of

the graduate the movie. Yes, but anyway, go ahead. Yeah, So it was actually it was a phrase that was coined by a paper in nineteen sixty five by a psychologist named Elliott Jacque called death in the midlife Crisis, and it was about kind of how like artists and creative types around the age thirty five stopped feeling young and looking at their youth and started looking forward to death.

And so it sort of became quickly this cultural thing laughing where people she still has a few years to go, she can laugh in thirties and forties midlife start reassessing their life. And you know, at that time, the people who could afford to do that were white men. It wasn't really something that was afforded to women or people of color. And so the tropes of it are very much like get a fast car, like get a too pay, get a mistress, stuff like that, get divorced, and it's

just not that way. You know, women go through midlife crisis too, but they were left in the dark, right, like they were just like they just weren't normal papers. They just worn in the papers. So can you can you give me some advice. I'm a younger millennial. I'm millennial gen z cusp. So teach me how to teach me. I have a birthday coming up that I'm not looking forward to. Okay, so teach me hang out out. Yeah, you guys can totally kick me out. But what's what's

the advice? How do I approach amid life crisis someday? Right? So you know, someone said it this way, like my life feels very hungry, but my pockets are empty and there is a desire to like, Okay, I want to make changes. And say you've got ten plates spinning in the air. What you do is you don't you know,

you don't drop any of the plates. You negotiate with the plates to make small changes in your life so that you can pick up a hobby that you've always wanted to pick up on the side, or say, you know, you don't leave your family and go start start a life elsewhere, but you can because of remote work, move your family elsewhere, which, as we know, lots of people are doing. You can move to Alaska or Maine and have a great quality of life and just slow everything down.

Some people are you know, if you ever listen to Dan Savage the Love Columnists, like people are rethinking monogamy rather than getting a divorce and breaking up families. We talk to a designer said, you know, I commonly make a snoring room, which is, you know, sort of an excuse for people to sleep in two separate bedrooms. As you know, once the kids leave or as they get older. So much about that. So many couples are sleeping in

separate bedrooms. It's really become a thing. And you know we used to do that like that, that used to be pretty common. Yeah, my grandparents did. Yeah, I got a grandparents, you know, and they love each other, no doubt about it. But I think it was because my grandparents snoring. I mean, if Grandpather's snoring, a lot of us, if we didn't live in New York apartments would probably have snoring rooms a lot more frequently. And you know,

instead of buying a super fast car. Because the millennial generation is so fitness and wellness oriented, people are buying a nice bike, you know, and they're getting out on the road. They're extending their lives, they're improving their wellness. And that's another thing. The midlife is so much longer because our lives are longer, and certainly people feel younger now turning forty than they did when our grandparents were

turning forty. It's just a different thing, and so it doesn't have to be this thing that happens all at once. People are taking small changes over a period of time. I thought about that too, Chris, Like, I don't know how you are, but grown up. I'm one of a lot of kids, and I just my parents, Like I think when they were they weren't even that old. But I'm like, God, you're old, Like they seemed older their appearance and just everything. They're terrible grand I really hope

that's changing, is it? I don't know, is it? I think it is. Yes. According to the experts that we talk to, it is people think of themselves as younger when they are in you in midlife, and that actually really affects the way that you go through the world, the way that you interact with people, and how you treat yourself. Yeah, exactly, and I do feel like people,

you know, this whole idea. First of all, I find it disturbing, this whole idea that you've got generations that are coming off the financial crisis, coming off so many things and don't have the money or there's not the retirement pact, Like it's just a different financial picture. Yeah, when you if you come of age during a time of crisis, you can have up to a ten percent just like standard deficit in your earning power as you

get older. Because people really make their biggest strides and earning on the scale of world, they're going to be in their in their first ten years of working. And so the wealth to income ratio for people and there in their late thirties and forties is lower than previous generations.

People on average have at least twenty thousand dollars less less than they did in Gen X. Even are people who are approaching the midlife crisis era maybe thinking, Okay, instead of investing in a new house, I'm just going to invest in a retirement fund. Are we seeing any like big pushes for retirement. That's you know, that's not something that our experts actually said. And I think that because the wealth to income ratio is lower for this generation.

I think people don't really see it as an option for themselves. They even if they're making money, they don't have as much saved or invested. Yeah. So I have to say that when I first went through the brief and I said that don't let Grandpa get a new girlfriend, I thought that was part of the mid life it is. We just got a couple of minutes left here. I mean there's other stuff. Yeah, So the rest of the

pursuit section is all themed around it is, right. So we've got a big story on the first electric rolls Royce. So if you really do want to explourage on a car, this is a good one to do. It's amazing. It's like half a million dollars. We have a really interesting story about by Lily Gurma about how black women is leaving America. Other these groups that have conferences to sort of teach black women to move to other places, how to work remotely, how to bring their families. Thousands of

women are doing it in midlife, taking their kids. It's a really interesting story. And then Max Chafkin, who we all love, did a review of the book that's out now about Sumner Redstone and Shari Redstone and telling the saga of sort of like the Chaotic End of Times with by Common CBS, and that is the one that's entitled don't let Grandpa get a new girlfriend. It's the real life succession, which you know, I'm obsessed with him.

Will not stopped talking about ever. I can't wait for you to come in and tell us about the movie deal the max is getting offered this. I want to go back to the black women though, why black women? Is it just that noticeable trend? Well, first, a part of it is that like this middle this idea of midlife real valuation has spread to more people than just

white men. So like people of are feeling empowered to do this, and you know, one woman at the end of the story says, you know, we are keep we keep putting ourselves and our work and our you know, tears into America to try to get on the hopes that one day we're going to be treated better. And like, I'm tired of waiting around for that to come back.

I can go elsewhere and have a much higher quality of life and you know, live and work rather than work to live, you know, or I don't how that phrase goes yeah, and you know, one of my brothers says it all the time. Yeah. One a woman traveled around the world and was like, Wow, this is just is so much better in other places. Where are they going. They're going to Portugal, They're going to Mexico, They're going

to the Caribbean. A lot of people going to Mexico, sometimes as far away as Highland, just places where the dollar goes further because some of them say, you know, the privilege of having you know, a little bit of money and being American erases the negative privilege of being a black person in these places. Well, it's another great section. We had some fun with you, but some real serious stuff as well. Would you do free mid Left Crisis. I'm having it right now. Yeah, I'm trying to write

a book. I think I'm going to write a book, which is something you can kind of do on the side, carve out time for make promises to yourself, check out the magazine, check out Pursuits. Chris Rosser, thank you as always, have a good weekend. Editor of Bloomberg Pursuits. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekdays from two to five pm. Eastern on Bloomberg Radio The

Bloomberg Business a band you two. You can also listen live to our flagship New York station, Just Say Alexa play Bloomberg e Love and Dirty. You might remember the movie The Monumentsman back in twenty fourteen with George Clooney, loosely based on a non fiction book, and it was about an Allied group on a mission to find and say pieces of art and more before they were destroyed

by the Nazis in World War Two. Well, in keeping with that, our next guest has written about the true story museum curators who saved the prices treasures of China's Forbidden City during that war. As well. We welcome author and journalist formerly at the BBC, Adam Brooks. He's got a book out, a new book, Fragile Cargo, the World War two race to save the Treasures of the Forbidden City, and he joins us via Zoom in Washington, DC. Adam,

good to have you here with Maddie and myself. Tell us about why you wanted to write this book or what initially kind of brought you to it. Yeah, I'm quite simply that it was a great story that it does have It is a bit reminiscent of the monument's men, but it's kind of larger in scale, and it had never really been told in English before. That hasn't been

a full accounting of this this thing. So as I dug into it, I found all these kind of new sources emerging in China, and gradually this extraordinary story twenty thousand wooden cases pact full of the most irreplaceable art in Chinese culture, moving through the Second World War for

sixteen years. It's an absolutely amazing tale, it is, and story, Adam, can you for those who are completely unfamiliar, just give us the quick kind of geopolitical context of what was going on in China at the time and the specific museum that you write about in your book. Right, so we all know something about the Forbidden City, right. It's that huge set of palaces with the great, big tower and red walls in the middle of what today we

call Beijing. Inside there, the emperors lived for hundreds of years, and they had this colossal collection of art, more than a million pieces of art, paintings, jewels, jades, bronzes, you name it, all kinds of art. And in the nineteen thirties when Japan invaded China and began gobbling up Chinese territory, the curators inside the Forbidden City, which by this time was called the Palace Museum, decided that they had to

evacuate this art to save it from the Japanese. They would terrified of air raids, they were terrified of looting and plunder that it could get stolen. So they boxed it up in these twenty thousand wooden cases, and for the next sixteen years they moved it all over China and hid it in villages and caves and temples in the far west of the country. Tell us how they did that, because I'm reading and I'm going through and

there's landslides and they're just navigating some crazy situations. Talk about some of the conditions that they had to deal with too. The logistics were ridiculous, So they loaded these cases on steamships, they loaded them on trucks. Sometimes they were actually carried on shoulder poles by porters. They went up rivers, they traveled over mountain ranges, and sometimes they were just literally a daze ahead of the Japanese advance.

And all the time the curators who were doing this were frantically improvising and trying to keep this invaluable art not just safe but dry, out of the way of Japanese bombing and away from these soldiers and trying to make sure that it didn't get eaten by bugs and

termites and stuff like that. So, I mean, the logistics of the thing were really quite eye popping, and I try in Fragile Cargo to give you a sense of who these people were and how they lived and what they ate and what life was like in wartime China, which which is something I think we've kind of forgotten in the United States. I have to say. My dad was one of four brothers, and they are all were in the war in different places. My dad was in France and Germany, my uncle was out in the Pacific

like it. But it's it was an era that I think it's important that we all kind of have some awareness of the war. You know, the world at war truly, and you're just talking about devastation everywhere, and you know, thinking about just what that situation was and just people watching their culture, their world everything just come undone. So I mean in China, China alone, historians think that's between

fourteen and twenty million people died that war. I mean, it's the same level as sort of the Soviet Union. By comparisons, our losses in the United States are a little over four hundred thousand people, nearly twenty million in China. The ferocity of the Japanese advance, the way that the Japanese military treated people in China and across all the

territories that they conquered in East Asia. You know, it really bears just trying to uncover that history a bit and remember it, because it really is a huge strand of human experience that I think in danger of kind

of losing. And Adam, I know that you spent time in Beijing as a reporter, of course, can you talk a little bit about how that impacted your perspective on the history of China and how kind of writing and reporting on the book itself has changed your perspective about the China and specifically the moves from Beijing that we see today. Well, when I was there in China, things were not nearly as tough for reporters as they are now, so we were still able to move a little bit freely.

There was surveillance and harassment from the authorities, but nothing like it is today. You know, China under Sieging Ping has really closed down a great deal to foreign scrutiny and to journalism. I'm of a view that taking some time to not just look at the reporting on China. I mean, I've sort of come to realize that if you spend a bit of time looking at the origins of modern China, where what is this thing, the Chinese

Communist Party? What does it come from? You know, we kind of know that Chairman Mao built it, but how did what did he do? What did he really think?

What happened before the Communist Party? All these things can kind of inform your sense of modern China and try to begin to instruct us a little bit as to why this country feels very threatened a lot of the time, somewhat paranoid a lot of the time, and why the Communist Party's default position is to kind of close down and batten down the hatches the way it is right,

the way it is now. And I think it's very important that we in the United States sort of understand that dynamic in China and try to make sure that we don't this is my personal view, right, but try to make sure we don't talk ourselves into escalating against China when we don't really need to. Adam very quickly twenty twenty five seconds here, so was most of the art saved, salvage and now somewhere where we can see it. Just was. It was remarkable how little of it got broken,

how little of it got lost. It's most of it is now back in Beijing. But some of the very best stuff ended up going to Taiwan and is now in Taipei. But yes, you can see it on those two great museums. It's there and save today well, incredible story, real the world, and you play it out in your book Fragile Cargo, The World War two Race to save the Treasures of China's Forbidden City. We've been just talking with Annam Brooks. He's author and journalist us from Washington,

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