Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend - May 23rd, 2020

summer Memorial Day weekend. Yeah, it's really fascinating to think about and the whole notion of ten weeks of doing this. I mean, what was last week and last time, rather you did something for ten weeks you know, something really uh, supremely and radically different. Our world has changed, and that is for sure, right, And this week involved so many conversations over what is turning out to be one of the most difficult questions of our time. It's about reopening

the economy. Do we do it too soon or too late? And what will be the call of either decision? That in fact is our cover story of the magazines double issue this week. We'll have more on that a little bit later on, well, and we heard from some really interesting people, some very familiar names, folks you've heard on our air before, and some new voices. Klaus Zelmer he's the president CEO of Porsche Cars North America. Also Ian Shreeger, Yeah,

Ian traeger Man. When it comes to hospitality and innovation in hotels and really living overall, this is the guy. He has been at it for fifty years. So we caught up with him about the impact and really what everything is going to look like, especially for big cities, right, what it looks like. Later on, we also heard from Facebook's Cheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In, and we felt like we were leaning in to this notion of what's going to happen to small businesses that is one of

the biggest questions facing the US economy. First up, though, we spoke with Dr Bill Hasletine. He is the chairman and president of Access Health International. Incredibly well known in the world of medicine. He has worked on some of the biggest medical questions of our time. Right, He's now got a nonprofit, but let's not forget he found in more than a dozen companies, including Human Genome Sciences. He reminds us that testing, tracing and strict isolation will be

the only way we really beat the virus. I see it as a small step forward and a lot of hype. Interesting, tell us more, Yeah, explain why? Well, there are eight pages that they reported. The data is not public, we can evaluate it. We don't know what actually happened, and there are other reports of published papers by scientists around the world who have uh done thet least what they've done and perhaps more so. That's why I say it's a little bit of news and a lot of hype.

And so when you look at that, is this just people, really, the market in particular, and maybe us just as human beings looking and grabbing onto to some sliver of hope here Dr hazeltine. You know, hope has been the handmaid of scoundrels for generations. It's what allows us to be conned. We need hope, but hope is also dangerous. We have to be careful with it. I'm not saying that that vaccine won't work. I'm just saying it's a very slender

thread to move on the market. Well, having said, go ahead, no, no, no, well you know what, let me just because we want to continue this line of thought, we did. They catch up. Our Bloomberg News team on the TV side caught up at the Modernity CEO Stefan bontell Um and talked about Phase three the trial, specifically that they expect by July.

Let's just listen to a snippet of that interview. We are finalizing the protocol for a Phase three, which is the last clinical study before Provolo, which we are hoping to stop in July of this year. Of the study will be several thousand, has the subjects across many contries. We are finalizing the post code as we speak with the v and we're hoping that people can start in July. As these all plans. So Phase three, as we know, and you certainly know, Dr Hazeltine is an important process.

But but it reminds us that there's still a lot to be known, right, There's a lot to be known. No, as far as we know, there's been no real challenge and a human being. And I can say that I've been reviewing the literature of vaccine efforts over many years, first with Stars, then with MERSU and other coronaviruses. This is not a simple problem. Um. There are a number of different attempts that have been made, there are results that look at least as good as these results from

two other laboratories. Uh, and so it's it's very premature. Doesn't mean it's not gonna work. I don't want to say that I have any information about whether it's at work or not. All I can say is the kinds of signals they're getting are expected at this stage. They don't necessarily mean that the vaccine will protect anybody, or if they do protect it, how long they will protect them. There's a lot of questions that remain to be done, and eight people is a far too small study, you know,

whether it's even safe. So you know, I think making a big announcement that moves the market on a first in human study for a people is an extraordinary event in biomedical science. It just doesn't happen. Uh. The fact that this has happened puts I think we all understand why we're all desperate to see an end to this disease. We have friends, we have children and grandchildren were deeply

worried about. UH. We're all upset about the economy and the way this has changed our lives, and we are hoping for an act, but hope is not the answer. Really hard data is the answer to what's what we need and we haven't seen that yet. And that's Dr Bill Hazeltine, Chairman, President of Access Health International, that historical perspective, but also hearkening back to our theme last week, Carol,

a little bit of a reality check. We caught up with him, and it's important to note, you know, these were conversations that we taped throughout the week. We were talking to him on a day where the market was a bulliant over the Maderna vaccine results as very early results. And I liked what he said because it made us, I think, take a much more realistic view. And the week really pour that out well, and I love what he said, Hope is not the answer. We need real

hard data. Ultimately, that is what we need to get ahead of this virus. All right, you're listening to Bloomberg Business Week coming up a conversation about small business with Facebook CEO Cheryl Sandberg and the survey that they have done that shows one third of small businesses they have stopped operating a bleak landscape. For sure. This is Bloomberg. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason

Kelly from Bloomberg Radio. Well, today we're bringing you some of the most important, we hope informative conversations we had on our daily Bloomberg Business Week radio show this week. We're talking about an economy reopening, but we're also talking about an economy Carol, that is totally and fundamentally and maybe permanently changed. Yeah, and nowhere do you see that more starkly than with small business. Facebook, in fact, had some news Jason this week about a recommitment to commerce

with small business. They announced a new digital storefront, it's called Shops. They also released the results of a survey about the viruses impact on small business and for that, Jason, we caught up with Facebook CEO Cheryl Sandberg. We heard more about the survey results, and she brought along a small business owner, Seemi at Abajo, owner of Eco. They both joined us from the West coast. Survey is quite devastating,

you know. We started working on this actually before coronavirus with a small business round people and we thought we'd put a survey out, you know, the state of small business and it would be very very positive. Right. Unemployment a historically low levels entrepreneurship thriving, and then coronavirus hit and the picture we got back was sobering. But I think even more important, more than a third of small businesses have stopped operating entirely expects to fail if things

don't change within the next few months. And the stat that really hit me was more than half of small business owners don't think they're going to be able to rehire their employees. Absolutely. So, see me, you had this exact experience, so help us understand exactly what happened. I mean, your story has something of a happy ending, But that devastation that that Cheryl talked about, I mean you experienced it firsthand right off the bat. Um. Yeah, so I

experienced the first time because one deful thing hit. I had to let both my whole team and shut down my business for the first three before we UM. And it's not of me, I guess all restaurant owners and small businesses in San Francisco, especially because of the overhead that comes with being a business in the city. Um, once you have one week, two weeks without customers or your usual stream of revenue, you are hemorrhaging funds. UM. And I saw very quickly. My restaurant is located in

the so my neighborhood. UM. Once my business closed, I started to see all the other restaurants and corner stores around starting to take the same lead. UM. Fortunately for me, I connected to an organization that's a nonprofit that's feeding the homeless and the elderly and generally vulnerable populations in the city right now. So I was able to within the past two weeks rehire my cord team. UM. And

you know, that's a positive story. But UM, that's not going to be the case for many small businesses UM who are just not gonna be able to rehire their course BA another issue, or maybe it's not an issue, but one main problem that small business owners are having getting their teams back lies within the fact that, UM, the employes are sometimes making more unemployment than they would be making coming to work, especially now which California is

a different six dollar payment. UM, there's really no incentive for them to go back for work. So it's a tough time all around the small businesses right now. So, Cheryl, when you see the results of the Facebook survey, and we've been talking often a lot about you know, what needs to be done especially for small business We just came off a conversation you know about you know, our backbone is small businesses and it's going to be tough

for them to resist going back. So what do you see as kind of the necessary components to protecting our small business community, making them safe so that they can come back safely when the environment changes. So look, you know, of it is bridging until we get there. So obviously the government loans matter. We put a hundred million dollars to work and just gramps small businesses all around the world.

We hearmarked forty million of that for the United States and half of that for women, minority and veteran owned businesses. Because we all know that when crisis hits, the most vulnerable get hit the hardest, and so we all need to do everything we can to bridge. We're working on more products that helps small businesses go online if they weren't online before to the extent they can. They need

to do more online. Were reaching customers online. We're providing services online and then once they come back to work, how do we do that safely? We see curb side checkouts, we see people doing art classes online. There's an amazing story of a bookstore that um located in University City, Missouri. They're called I See Me and they're really for black children to discover world models and learn about African American history. But it's very much community based thing where everyone went

there in person. They're now doing those same storylines online. Local businesses are going to have to be able to morph to do more things online, and that's what we're seeing. So, Cheryl, I wonder what you make Especially given your background you worked at the Treasury Department. You understand the inner workings of government really well, the balance between the public and

the private. What does the government need to do in the short and mid term to ensure that private efforts like the one that you just described can be successful in the long term. What do we need from the government at this point? Well, when you ask that question, I feel like it's really all hands on, Jack. When we need local government, state government, national government to be helping bridge for companies, which they are, but also helping

us keep safe. You know, as we open up, how do we do it to protect everyone, make sure our hospitals don't don't get overrun, make sure that information is clear and flowing. I think you know We've been through a lot, but there is a lot at us and it has to again be everyone doing their part. And I do think about what's interesting is this is a time, as you know, I feel like the tech industry was

largely on everyone's radar, a lot of scrutinyous happening. Do you see this time, you know, you talk about the things that you guys are doing to help bridge the gaps for small businesses? Is this a time to kind of potentially, you know, improve your image. You know, the government has been looking and and you politicians, I'm just curious how you see that. So we've been trying to do the right thing all along, and when we've made mistakes, were hard to correct them and prevent them next time.

You know. Right now, we're just rolling up our sleeves and doing everything we can to help small businesses get through it. Roll up products that can help them, you know, things like fundraisers for small business. You know, we had fundraisers for nonprofits, we had fundraisers for you know, people, but we never would have rolled up fundraisers for small

business until this crisis. We are just focused on putting our efforts to what can help and believe that we do the right thing, people will figure that out and believe that we are over time. That's Facebook CEO Cheryl Sandberg and small business owners see me at a bajo, owner of Eco talking really about small businesses, what's going on and what needs to happen to help them stay alive and come back. I have to say, you know, I was thinking back over that conversation, and I think

you mentioned this later on in the week. You know, this notion that you know, Cheryl Sandberg, we talked with her about the personal effect. You know, she has been sheltered in place like so many people, and yet her fiance's family, part of her family, you know, frontline healthcare workers. So she has a sense, as many of us do, about what it's like beyond our you know, sort of cocted worlds that we are fortunate to live in, that

there are people really fighting this every day. And certainly that goes back to small businesses who many in many cases if you're talking about restaurants and even some retailers, they're on the front lines as well. Yeah, no doubt about it. And by in line, she said in terms of small business is more than we're going to have to morph and go online to really survive. You're listening to Bloomberg this week. Coming up staying with tech, we hear about a new e commerce app that just launched

this week, Gets Bold. Yeah, absolutely, coming into a rough environment. 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

throughout the week on our daily radio show. And of course we have to remind everybody news was happening constantly crossing the Bloomberg So all of this happening in real time well, and a reminder Carol that business marches on and also in times of crisis and in times of disruption, some of the biggest ideas emerged. We caught up with Julie Bornstein. She launched her new e commerce eports called The Yes this week. They delayed it back in March.

She has an incredible history in the world of retail and eco comer. She worked at Nordstrom. She was the CEO of stitch Fixed. Check it Out CS is a new shopping platform that makes shopping for women's fashion more fun easier and smarter than anything that exists today. So the idea is it's an app that is tuned to

each user. You come onto the app and you fill out a profile that's a fun Q and A, and then you see brands and themes and styles that you like in your own home feed, and everybody's home feed is different, and you can search on anything that you're looking for. You can discover new brands. We always recommend what size you should get, and it's free shipping both ways, so to buy and to return. We're going to talk a little bit more about it, but I just curious

about the launch. Did you think about holding off or did you feel like this was an ideal time because there are so many people home at this point. We actually did hold off, were originally planning to lodge in late March because of COVID hitting, we needed to step back and reevaluate, and then we kind of watched what happened. But we were noticing that obviously, UM with retail closing, a lot of our brands were losing sales that they

would have gotten otherwise. And we have small brands and big brands UM and their cancel their orders were being canceled UM for the fall, and so we really felt like we wanted to step in and help. And the truth is people need a little levity in their life and it's a really fun app to play with. So we did decide to make a donation for every download to Good Plus Foundation to help families in need UM but we decided that this time was as good as any given how crazy the world has become. Our guest

at this hour is Julie Bornstein. She is someone who understands the retail industry. Former chief operating officer of stitch Fists, former chief digital officer. It's a flora uh, and she just launched today her e commerce startup. It's called The Yes And you know, Julie, we were just getting into it and and it's tailor made experiences and you use sophistic sophisticated algorithms. How exactly does it work on the back end? What's happened is we've built um UH, an

algorithm that really understands fashion deeply. So we built a very deep taxonomy to understand every dimension of fashion, which includes all the style elements and the price and the brand and the construction UM And so we've started to understand fashion in a way that we can train data

models to understand. And then we spent time learning about customers and we ended up building a tool that is ultimately kind of what Spotify is to you for music and so UM, the consumer can come on, they answer some Q and A, and then they have a home feed that is really built around them. And the more that you yes and no items in the home feed and in your search results, then you tune the app to you. So it really creates this very great and

very hyper personal experience. UM. And of course we need a very large assortment of brand so we have over a hundred and fifty of the best fashion brands, from very high end to jim Me to and Ralph Lauren to kind of great everyday brands like Levis and made Well, so you can shop high and low or however you like.

So what's the biggest lesson? I mean, what what do you take from all of that experience that that Carol laid out about sort of the shopper and and especially synthesizing in uh, Julie, sort of what's going on now with our behavior and our sort of whole world's being upside down? How do you pun intended sort of stitch all that together, um into something new. It's a great question.

This is something we've been working on for two years, primarily because, as we've all seen, as e commerce grows, the more product that's sold online, the more websites there are, the more overwhelming shopping because and I think now in you know, this moment in time when we can't go to stores yet, um, we are more reliant on shopping online than ever, and the experience for most users is very overwhelming, especially in a category like fashion that's so nuan.

Then there's so many options, and so really our goal was how do we help each user kind of cut through the clutter and surface the relevant product for them, whether it's things they know and love, or it's new brands they may never have heard of. And that's Julie Born seen from the Yes. My only disappointment Carol is that they're only selling women's clothes right now. As we jatted with her about joked with her about like I need a new place to buy my T shirts and jeans. Yeah,

exactly what I thought was great about this conversation. There was a lot of retail news this week. Overall, we heard from the retailers across the nation. What she said, Ultimately, she doesn't think brick and mortar is going to go away, but some stores will not make it. But she thinks ultimately e commerce is going to get better as a

result of the virus. Well, and this whole notion that one of the things we love about going shopping is that sort of serendipity, that discover ability and if you can figure out from an artificial intelligence perspective, essentially how to teach a machine to surprise you, I feel like that's kind of cool. It is cool. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week. Coming up, we catch up with the president and CEO Porsche Cars North America. Class Selmore back

with us. He reminded us Jason of our time with him last fall. Remember when he brought porches first fully electric sports car to our offices, the Takon Man. That seems like a decade ago, it really does. It's a cool car and they're actually selling out of them. This is Bloomberg. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser

and Jason Kelly from Bloomberg Radio. Well, today we'll bring you some of our favorite conversations from our Bloomberg Business Week daily radio show from this week real time news obviously Carol and the theme certainly is reopening. It is reopening, and with that in mind, we caught up with Klaus Selmore, the presidency of Porsche Cars North America. He liked most of us and his team. It is his tenth week from working from home and yet most of their dealers

are back in March. Beginning of March we had a big event of Media Island, which classic cars and lots of fun, and then there's crisis hit us. So I'm personally now in my tenth week working from home, with the whole of port Car's North America basically working from home. The good thing is that our dealers are now back opening up the operations that we are at of back to business throughout the country and the May retails actually look pretty promising in the first half of this month.

But yes, we had to take, of course, also a big hit in April where more than our and half of our that's where actually closed for sales. Talk us a little bit more about mat May. You said, May is starting to look promising. What are you seeing in terms of what are you hearing about activity of people getting out there looking at cars, maybe even you know, signing on the data line to to place in order. I think we're seeing a new normal. I think we're

seeing people that, of course digitally engage. They want us to respect their safety. They want us to sanitize their car. They want us to pick up their cards for service or repair and bring them back without ever touching them. They want us to deliver a new car that they have purchased online to their house, dropping the keys, and then doing a video explanation of how the car works.

So I think it's it's two things. It's one that our dealers are back in business, but they have adapted to the new normal, which just involves a lot more digital business. And and how does it change the does it or does it change clauss the economics of that process mean, does it change the type of staff you hire, the amount of staff that you hire, the investments that a dealer has to make. Like walk us through the

implications of that sort of changed process. Well, I think the short term effect is that it is more expensive from a cost point of view to conduct that type of business because you still have your fixed assets, you have your investment you have your depreciation that you have to handle in your balance sheet, so you know you

can't drop that from one day to the other. And of course, um you know, there's a lot of work involved in keeping everything clean super clean, you know, cleaning cars every time, like for you know, service incidents every time, any anybody who touches them. You know, your your productivity of your space is limited because you have to keep social distancing, uh priority. So short term it's going to

be higher costs. Longer term, if people really consider this being their preferred way of conducting business, then of course you you have to invest less. But Portia I can say that people actually like the personal interaction and the relationship, and I hope that stay is going forward. What's interesting is I do love how you guys literally have kind of tapped into what is going on where more people. Obviously you have to do social distancing, but more people

are doing things either virtually or socially. Umline, you guys have a new app you put out on how individuals and consumers can track their purchase of a new Porsche. Tell us a bit about that and why you did it. Does it is it just kind of playing into what's going on in this world. I think it just fits into this new world because you know, you want to know what's going on out there. And you know, a purchase of a Porsche is more driven by your heart than by your brain, and so you know you want

to be engaged with that car being built. And now we actually provide with this track, your dream app. We provide the possibility to see when the car is in production, when it leaves to our production site in Germany, when it's on the vessel. You can even see a picture on that app off the vessel where your car currently is, when it arrives in America and your port, and when it's stand in transition from the port to the dealership,

and when it's ready to be picked up. So you can basically follow through the whole process of ordering the car, the car being produced, until it's actually in your own garage. And so Claus tell us about demand from a regional perspective, because you know, one of the things we know, and we're just talking to one of our colleagues down in your neck of the woods, it is, you know, the view is a little bit different in the southeast versus

the northeast, versus the Midwest versus the West Coast. Help us understand you know how that has affected you know where you're selling and maybe where you're seeing sales a little slower. Um. Actually, of course, you know New York has been hit hard, and we can see that in

our sales numbers. But if you we have four areas we subdivided the United States in which is Central, which is basically central, and North and then West, East and South pal has actually been prody stable, uh, and East has been hit the hardest, and then West and then Central, which is Central and North is not not such a strong area for us in terms of sales. So where April really hurt was on either side of this country.

Let's get back to our conversation with Klaus Zelmer. He is, of course president and CEO of Porsche Cars North America, joining us on the phone from Atlanta, And as we discussed a little bit earlier, one of the ways we got to know Claus was with the introduction of the Tykon, both with a visit to our Blueberg headquarters, but also it was the subject of a Super Bowl advertisement that Claus talked to us about. So class give us a Tykon update. What's happening with the car, Well, the car

is performingxtremely. Well, Yeah, bringing downside of it is that we will not be able to fulfill the demand that we can be still see in the market here in North America. So our supply will be short, um, which is of course missed opportunities, but it's better this way than the other way around. Yeah, So how short can you quantify that for us? Um? Well, you know that's really difficult. Our order bank kon it's about double the cars that we will be able to deliver to North

America at this point of time. But of course, you know, you you can not always be sure about the orders reflecting the real demand, because some people put various orders, but various steal us because they want to increase their chances to then get the cars. But we certainly know that our demanding seats are supplied and we will be able to get from Germany this year. Hey, class, what

do you make though of like supply chains? Are you guys rethinking any of that because of what's happened with the virus and also on a day when we heard from President Trump earlier about you know, whether it's the you know, medical equipment that's needed. You know, God forbid that we go through something like this in the future, that everything needs to be made, you know in America.

I just wonder how you are looking at things and like I said, global supply chains right now, Yeah, I think of course, you know, everybody wants to be in If you sell in a country, you want to produce in that country. But it also has to financially makes sense. Porsche is such a small car company. If you if you take the US for example, our market share is zero point three percent. So if you take a thousand cards that are sold new at any point of time,

three of those are Porsche. So we don't have the scale to have factories across the globe. We only have factories in Germany at this point of time. So we will have to live for the foreseeable future with the fact that we produce cars where it makes sense in terms of quality, assurance, our investment, and you know, getting our money back there and then shipping the cars over. As much as we would love to have a bigger scale and then produce in the United States as well,

financially that's not viable. And so when you think about sort of the mega trends that are underneath all of this. Especially you know you've spoken with this before about you know, the the overall companies and the North American divisions, you know, pretty aggressive move towards electrification and sort of the the industry is certainly moving that way. What does this mean for that sort of overall plan. Does it slaw it down, does it accelerate it a little bit? How it or

does it change it in any way? Well, I think the overall new car demand this year will of course be way below last year's the mat so it could be anything between fifteen possibly thirty less new cars solved this year. Now, if you take the gas price at the moment, and some people actually buy an electric car because the electricity is cheaper than the equivalent you need to invest in gas to run your car, that's you

take that away. So battery electric vehicle as a whole are not really being pushed the way that we would like to see them, awarding than the investments that have been made by the industry. But I see that something that is a short a short term effect. We hopefully get back to the normal situation with gas for isis uh and of course with cars that technologically advanced and the demand for that in the second half of the year. Are you rethinking your electrification plan at all? No, you can't,

because we make odd decisions. You know, with any car that you launched this year, the decision has been made five years ago. UM. And that's the same for any car manufacture. Developing a car from scratch is a foard to five year cycle that you will have to calculate in So anything that happens right now is happening because we made those decisions forward to five years ago. That's

class Zelmer the presidency of Porsche Cars North America. And you know what's interesting is, like the rest of us, UM, they are adapting. His dealers, he talked about adapting to more with consumers and Porsche owners online. He says it's more expensive, and Jason, you know, they're gonna have to wait and see if that continues longer term and whether they're going to have to make a big shift. Well, and it's also impacted their ability to make and deliver cars.

But they've got a backlogs, which in normal times is good news. And he's happy about the fact that demand is there for that ticon that we have had an experience with at least sitting in it. We've never been able to He's never given us one to drive around. So maybe on the other side of this pandemic, we'll get to take it for a test drip. And that wraps up the first hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio. I'm Jason Kelly and

I'm Carol mass Or. Planning coming up in our next hour, including when you want to know about the hospitality industry, You've gotta check in with Ian Schrager. Plus we take you inside the magazine's cover story. It's provocative and asked the question are we gambling on a resurrection? Right? And looks at maybe another way of coming back. 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. Today we're bringing you some of our favorite conversations we had during the week on our daily Bloomberg Business Week Radio show, Carol. Week ten, we're still obviously enveloped in all senses physically, economically by the impact of this virus, but we're starting to think about the way forward, and it is complicated. Jason, I'm just gonna say, get ready everybody for some thoughtful and very thought provoking conversations, including one with Tom Siebel. He's a founder and CEO

at C three dot Ai. Tom is just one of those thinkers that you want to sit down and talk to for hours. That's exactly right. And someone we were also very excited to catch up with was Ian Schrager. He visited with us about a year ago. My how the world has changed. Well, And I'm just gonna say, everybody, get ready to learn about hustle and float. You may never work the same again. We're gonna catch up with

ra Half Harfush. She has a new book at and a concept about productivity and really how to work smarter. This one definitely stuck in my brain. You and I've been quoting this back to each other ever since we had that conversation. But first up, we take you inside the magazine. The cover story. It's by economics editor Peter Coy. It's got a provocative title. The headline alone, Trump is gambling on a resurrection with lives and livelihoods. He also

presents an alternative way forward. We spoke with Peter and magazine editor Joe Weber. So Peter and I have been sure of having ongoing conversations um about obviously the biggest story in the world right now, which is not only the virus, which I think he's done an amazing job covering, but um, the economy, which is the other thing that he covers really well. And I basically sort of asked him to say, like, Okay, what's our what's our take,

what's this gonna mean going forward? And and the you know, the outlook, um is the thing that as business leaders, I think everyone's wrestling with, like what what's this thing

gonna look like going forward? And so when we started talking about that, UM, I said, you know, I think one of the things that we have to bring in here is a conversation about resident in Trump and and sort of this mismanagement of the virus from the outset and also now almost the mismanagement of perhaps reopening too soon and if if that goes um you know, uh not, well that's going to have a serious impact on the economy.

It's also a gamble for his re election campaign. And when I when we started talking about that, Peter goes, well, there's this thing called gambling on a resurrection you should know about, and I'll use that as a way to transition to Peter. Peter, what's gambling on a resurrection? Right? Term from game theory. So the idea would be, if you're behind in a game, it could be any game. It could be uh football game or running for election or a laboratory experiment, then you, uh, if you just

play by conservative normal rules, you'll probably lose. Whereas if you gamble, take a big chance, there's some chance that it will pay off and you'll be very happy. And if it doesn't pay off, well, you're gonna lose anyway, So no big deal. Um. And so a lot of you'll see that a lot of executives who are losing money and wanted trying to keep their jobs will gamble for resurrection, and up to the shareholders to discipline them and make sure they don't, you know, gamble too much

in a way that ends up harming the company. So I said, well, we can carry that analysis over to the United States the federal government. Trump is taking a fairly big risk that this reopening will will work, that there will be relatively few extra deaths and the economy will rebound and then he can win reelection. That's good for him. It's also good for the country if if it actually works out that way. But let me just

finish on the downside quickly. The downside scenario is that he um loses, which he probably might have done anyway, but the country loses more than it would have under a conservative approach, as they're more deaths and the economy does not reopen quickly because you're getting resurgences and re

shutdowns and people are afraid to stay at home. Exactly like, it gets to this whole idea, you know, by postponing, do you improve or reduce the impact by delaying the open I feel like it's the big question that everybody is debating. The problem is, this isn't a game. This

is you're dealing with people's lives and livelihoods. So I do wonder, you know, kind of how you see it, what's the alternative way of kind of approaching this versus maybe what we're getting from President Trump, Well, what we're hearing from a lot of epidemiologists is that you need to have UM, you need to move gradually open the things that are most critical and where the risk of new outbreaks the smallest, and then keep shut the things

that where they're the upside of reopening is relatively small and the risk is great. For example, we've heard Trump recently thinking can't wait to see, you know, stadiums, sports stadiums filling up again, And I'm thinking, really, that's exactly the last thing you should want to open, just because there's so much exposure. Once one person asymptomatic person carrying the virus could expose dozens or hundreds of people in

a single afternoon watching a football game or something. And that's Economics editor Peter Coy, and of course Bloomberg Business Week editor Joel Weber. This is a big one in many ways. And Peter Coy, he's incredibly prolific. He also every now and again goes hard. Yeah. Absolutely, And I do feel like Jason, it's the question debate of our time, reopening the U S economy too soon? One are the health risks too late? Then? What cost to the economy

and the livelihood of Americans. Peter really devels into maybe a better way of doing it. All right, you're listening to Bloomberg Busines Week coming up, Tom Siebel, another very thoughtful guy. He's the founder and CEO of C three dot AI, of Worse as well as his namesake eponymous company that was so famous really set the standard in many ways in the software business in Silicon Valley. He's

got a new project and it is fascinating, right. It's all about COVID nineteen data collection and sharing that with the world to help end the pandemic. This is Bloomberg. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly from Bloomberg Radio. We're bring us some of the most important and informative conversations we had throughout the week on our daily radio show. There were so many of them.

These are just some of our favorites. And just to reminder, everybody was happening in real time as the news continued to evolve around us, and we got to catch up with Tom Cebell Carroll. I really enjoyed talking to him. So thoughtful. He's the CEO now of C three dot AI.

He's the author of a book that we had talked about when it came out, Digital Transformation, Survive and Thrive in an Era of Mass Extinct And also, of course you know by the name the founder of Civil Systems, one of the best known and most influential companies in the history of Silicon Valley. But he's got a new company and this whole concept of a data lake. It's fascinating. In northern California, I would say that we've been there's really been very little impact from COVID In the county

that I'm in, San Mateo County. There are this would be everything right in north of Polo Alto and Silicon Valley. We have three quarters of a million people, there's a population, there are seventeen hundred hospital beds, and on any given day there might be fifty people hospitalized with COVID. If they look at Santa Clara County, which is the county immediately south of US where there's roughly two million people, that would be everything from Polo Alto to San Jose

there's about two million people, four thousand hospital beds. On any given day, there'll be a hundred and fifty people hospitalized for COVID. In San Mateo County. I believe there are no people on it. Later's most people in the town that I live in, Woodside, there have been ten people diagnosed with COVID, so it kind of missed us. Well. I mean, there's an argument meant to be made, I think, Tom, and I'm guessing some of your local lawmakers would make it,

which is you guys did the right thing. I mean you sort of shut it down pretty early in the entire Bay area, right, We did shut it down early, and it kind of you know, I think the purpose for shutting it down was to keep from overwhelming the hospital systems, and we never got close to that. I mean, out of seventeen hundred hospital deads on an e given day, fifty might be occupied with in this county, fifty might be occupied with COVID patients. So it you know, maybe

it worked. I'm you know, there's lots of different opinions on this, but it kind of never happened here. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Well let's hope it stays that way. Yeah, exactly. Um, lesson learned, you know, in terms of a playbook for for how to do it. Are you guys in the studio or are you doing this from Paul, We're doing it from home. We're from you guys are a professional operation. It's seamless professionalists of congratulations. Well, thank thank you. Yeah,

we well, we've gotten good at it. We're at the end of our ninth week doing this from home, so I mean kudos to our team who got us all set up. But it is sort of it's an amazing tribute to technology, Tom, which you know far more about than we do. So let's talk about how technology is maybe helping us get our arms around this. We were talking with you earlier in the year about cyber attacks.

We've got a different sort of attack on our hands now, uh, And I do wonder how technology and this whole concept of a data lake help us understand how that's being used here. You know, you recall that one of the things we spoke of when I was with you last in New York was the area of precision medicine. Okay, and precision medicine, unquably will be one of the largest

commercial and industrial applications of artificial intelligence. So we can use this for a disease prediction, adverse drug reaction, genome specific medical protocols, AI assisted diagnosis. So this is the largest and most rapidly growing segment of the U S economy and many economies, and AI is going to impact medicine in a huge way. Now enter COVID. So this is a really unique opportunity UH to apply AI to contribute to this dialogue. And we looked at all the

you know, everybody has just been guessing. And you know, as you change from you to one TV channel to another, and you listen to Neil Ferguson at King's College or the person at Stanford, and one person says the morbidity rate is going to be between two percent and five percent, and another expert with the same level of expertise says, the more ability rate is going to be going to be like, you know, one one thousand, one percent. What

is a policymaker to do. Well, what we did is we formed a coalition that we call the C three AI Digital Transformation Institute, and we founded this with Microsoft. We funded this to a tune of about four hundred million dollars, and we aggregated the human capital at m I T. Carnegie, Mellon Princeton, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, and UM and UC Berkeley to engage in large scale research on applying AI to mitigate COVID pandemic.

And so this is AI and machine learning models to mitigate disease, bioinformatics, modeling and simulation of propagations. So that's a that's a major initiative. It's underway. It's really exciting and that is one of the efforts that we've been engaged to. Tom. You really laid out what data like is all about. What's your goal? So this is you know, COVID nineteen data collection. What are you hoping that it does or what do you expected to do? And what's

a time timeline on it. Well, in order to perform data science, in order to get accurate predictions, whether it be course of disease or the efficacy of social mitigations, these scientes need data. So what we have done in the past month is we have taken the twenty two largest data sources that are available in the world about COVID from Johns Hopkins and coord nineteen and the New York Times, in the Milligan Institute and what have you.

These are ct scans, these are mortality data, core morbidity coursive disease, and we have aggregated those data into a unified, federated image that we've made available. This is called the C three AI COVID nineteen Data Lake and we've made this resource available to the world at no cost to be able to do research, and we've we've had so this is by far the world's largest copus UH corpus

of COVID data available researchers. This is being powered by our friends at AWS who provided the the cloud platform to do it. And I think this will be an enormously important resource for people to research, to do research, understand the course of the disease and control the this epidemic and other epidemics like it. And that's Tom People's CEO of C three dot AI. I gotta tell you, Carol, this is one of those conversations that stuck with me. Part of it is tone, part of it is substance.

And you know, this was a guy that we clearly sort of caught it a moment where he's been thinking big thoughts. Well, when we've had so much nationalism going on, populism going on, he is saying, this has got to be a global effort, and you know it's all about large social research. None of this in terms of attacking

the virus can be done in a vacuum. And he reminded us, and he's not only reminding us he's actually making an effort to share all of the data so everybody can be working on a solution to COVID nineteen. And that, of course was just a part of the conversation that we had with Tom Siebel. For the full interview, be sure to check out our Business Week Extra podcast. You're listening to Bloomberg business Week. Coming up entrepreneur, hotelier

and real estate developer Ian Schrager. He's a legend. This is bloombergs is Bloomberg business Week with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly from Bloomberg Radio. Well, today we're bringing you some of our favorite conversations from the week on our Bloomberg business Week daily radio show. Check that out two pm Wall Street every day. And Carol, this week it's about the road back. Well, it is about the roadback.

And I have to say a story across the Bloomberg about a hotel in Times Square, New York times where which we know the city is shut down while this hotel is shutting down, and it brought us back to Ian Schrager, who has come to our studio several times. He's an entrepreneur, hotelier and real estate developer. So I really wanted to get his perspective, someone who has seen so many different cycles in the city, wanted to get his perspective on where we are and what life looks

like after the virus. The hotel's uh the hotel businesses on the Siege Public has closed, as well as a lot of the additions, but I look forward to them opening soon. I feel that, uh, we've seemed light at the end of the tunnel and will be Uh There'll be a lot of uncertainty involved, but I'm quite confident that uh, you know, we will return to ther own business.

We'll get back and uh we'll see APPI games again. Well, and Ian, you know, one of the reasons we wanted to make sure to talk to you beyond just your general wisdom and expertise, is but because you guys had to make the tough decision to close the Time Square edition about a year ago, give or take. You were with us talking about it opening a lot of promise there and Times Square you know, in a totally different uh place than it was when you opened it decades before. Now,

obviously the city has been brought to a standstill. Help us understand what led ultimately to that decision. Well, unfortunately we had to end into a dispute between the owner of the property and it's financial institutions. The hotel is part of a larger component with a lot of retail, a big signage component as well as um um lots of office space to just do have nothing to do with us. We hope it'll get resolved. The hotel was doing better than we expected. Huge world Wide to call

a claim and we're okay. We did close it for the pandemic and we're hoping uh to welcome everybody back so that the pandemic is over under control. So it's not a case though than e enough, because I know there's been some thoughts about I think there was another hotel that closed in the area that you know, problems for Times Square, especially in a post virus our post COVID nineteen world. Do you see it that way or no, No,

I don't see it that way. You know, I've been hearing the pundits everybody talking about a paradigm shift, and you know, you know my experience, and I think since Biblical times, you never see a paradigm shift. Life finds a way, they make adjustments, they hold on. Nothing changed yet to nine eleven. Nothing changed at the World War two and so on and so forth. We always find a way and we get back to normal, and we at the supper, all these predictions from all the intellectual people.

I I think so I I see things. Look, it's gonna take a while, We're gonna have to make an adjustment. We hopefully have to get a vaccine. But we'll be older the way we've dealt with every other cloudy in the history of the humanity. And it will return to normal when New York is still in New York and Times Square is still Times Square and uh, just a question of writing it out and being proved, uh and making adequate plans and uh and waiting for it to happen.

And I don't see it being a long term ramp up back the business. I see it being you know, I can't tell for sure, obviously, but I think it's looking in terms of months. I think the bars in

the restaurants will get started soon. Uh. There was a pent up demand because you know, the pandemic ends of the people before and at a different date than when the pandemic ends scientifically, and the people are aware and to go and you can see that when the bars opened up, and with times there and in other places they're they're packed. So you know, I'm I'm not an optimist by nature. I'm a realist and I I see this.

Uh you no attorney to normal, Jackie when I can't say, but, um, you know, I think things will go back to normal. That's Ian Schraeger and Jason. We know he's been building hotels, he's been changing the model for over five decades. He's now building residential buildings. It was so good to get his perspective on how things change and how we come back. He really understands crisis and rebuilding well. And he understands New York. He understands city, and I dare say he

understands human beings. I mean, this is a guy who was one of the creators of Studio fifty four. In many ways, he also redefined the way we think about hotels. And let me tell you, we got to think about hotels and travel and even just being human in a whole different way. Now you had me at Studio fifty four. Man, that was a great human experiment. I'm just gonna put that out there. It absolutely was. You're listening to Bloomberg. This week. Coming up, we hear from the author of

a new book. We've been quoting this back and forth to each other all week, Hustle and Float Reclaim your Creativity and Thrive in a World Obsessed with Work. I love it. It's a reminder that, like Michael Jordan's, we all need an offseason. This is Bloomberg. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Jason Kelly from Bloomberg Radio. So we're bringing you some of the most important and informative conversations, those that really stuck with us throughout the week.

They happened on our daily radio show, and of course all related back to the virus. Jason. Well, and it's a reminder that this has changed us as human beings. It's changed the way we relate to each other, it's changed the way we relate to our work. It's been a time of deep reflection for many. So a timely new book. It's by rahaf Har Food. She's a digital anthropologist, a professor. Her new book is called Hustle and Float, Reclaim your Creativity and Thrive in a world obsessed with work.

In order for you to have the perfect whitewater rafting trip. You have to have the right amount and the equal balance between the hustle when you paddle as hard as you can and the float where you lift your paddle up and let the river do the work. And if you do a trip with too much hustle, you'll get tired, exhausted, make mistakes for yourself in danger, And if you don't have enough hustle and too much float, you'll end up aimlessly going where the river takes you and not where

you want to go. And that really stuck with me as a professional creative and knowledge worker, because I think there's a lot that we can learn in terms of how we approach our own work and our own creative tasks. So much hustle, I mean, is it is so true? Um? We all see it. We see it in each other.

We see it in our partners and our families, and and in our colleagues especially, you know, especially working in big cities, and and we definitely want to discuss of where we are in this you know, upside down world.

But but I do want to ask you how did we get to this point in your estimation where we just eyes productivity so far above everything else the book took about three years to research, so I'm gonna try to summarize that and maybe you know fifteen to don't the seconds tore you, but perfectly created this very complicated story where we took the powerful first of all our

powerful history. So think about the Puritan work ethics, think about the Industrial Revolution, and then think about the American dream, which is like one of the most powerful ideologies that I've been exported all over the world, this idea that if you work hard enough, you will be successful. And what's happened is that over time all of these ideas have kind of merged together, where now we have started to associate our identities are self worth, our contributions to

society through this productive lens. And then we think, oh, well, if I'm successful, it's because I'm really busy, or if I'm successful, it's because I'm really productive. And what we don't say is if I don't feel like I'm productive enough, it must be because I'm not working hard enough. So, in essence, we've created a story that's supported by the media by how we talk about successful people, by how hard they work, by what time they wake up in the morning, by how late they stay at the office.

We've sort of created this idea that whatever we're doing is never quite enough, and if we want to reach that next pinnacle of success, the answer is obviously more hours, more time, more hustle. When the science actually says the office that the science says, it's you want to do more,

you actually have to work less. But that's a message that's so hard for people to absorb when we're being told the opposite through social media and then the books that we read and the people that we hold up on a pedestal drilled down into that science because you know how many books have we all read about someone who has achieved so much and it's like the first twenty years of their life all they did was work. You know, they didn't know their family, they didn't know anything.

But look at the success that they have achieved. What's the science tell us. The science tells us that creativity acquires unstructured periods of time that cognitive tasks to get drain on your mind and you cannot just sit there and do highly complex, highly intest intense tasks for hours out of time. So if you want to do more, more work, you have to create a performance system that is built for your brain instead of just packing your day school of work. That is what the sign says.

So I had a friend just text me, Ralf, a friend of the show. Uh he's the president of his own company, and he said, all right, so how much use and how much float? What's the right mix? Good question. I think it really depends on the individual. Everyone has their own different cycles. But I love that he's asking the right question. The right question is how do we create systems that reframe high performance in a way that actually works with us and not systems that we just

adopted from like historical baggage. So there's no you know, easy fix, but it's it's the right question to start asking. So so okay, so this is like I feel like own little session here. So what are the things like you should be looking at to say, Okay, I gotta take this offine plant, I gotta take this offline plate,

Like how do you approach it? You have to approach it by recognizing that we've all been sort of brainwashed, because this isn't about me coming on the show and being like, hey guys, take a break or hey take a nap, like we all know. We all know that this is what we should be doing. The bigger question is why don't we do it even though we know

it's in our best interests. And it's when you start unraveling this complicated relationship that we have with being successful and hustling and being hyper productive and being secretly proud that we're so busy and so tired all the time. When you start to get into why that relationship would work exists, and what that represents in our lives, then you can start making these positive changes, like I'm not coming around saying, hey, guys, I've got this crazy new idea.

You know, take a nap and don't work so much. It's we all know that we have to do that. High performers don't because we are so used to linking any time that's not spent working as time that's not spent striving towards our goals, and that's not true. There are Silicon Valley companies. I remember visiting Pisar years ago and there were basketball cards, and there was a basketball

course excuse me, and a barbecue pit. And they made it so that if somebody wanted to work in the wee hours, they could do it if they wanted to at two in the afternoon, go out and play a game. You could do it, like, is it that kind of atmosphere that we need to be embracing or you're talking

something a little bit more different. Even companies that have these types of features, oftentimes they'll notice that workers won't take them, not and won't use them, not because they're afraid of what their bosses would say, but they're you're they're afraid of what their colleagues would think and about how their colleagues were perceived, you know, their dedication to

the job. So again, it's not just about having these features available, it's about really understanding that you have to reframe how you think about high performance, that investing in intentional recovery. Time you guys talked about Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan has sole off these right, there's a whole off season for him to recover, and he's very intentional about that. For him to push his body in that way, he

needs to rest. We have to approach high performance the same way because what we're all doing is we don't have any off seasons. We just pretend like we're working as hard as Michael Jordan all year round, and then we wonder why burnout has become a global situation, you know, as categorized by the World Health Organization. Yeah, it's a really interesting point that the whole notion of an off season so rab. You know, as I think about where we are in the in this pandemic, we've all had

this experience of our world's being turned upside down. And I think for some of us who are very fortunate, you know, there has been in some ways less work or less commute or you know, sort of less time devoted to certain things that that ate up a lot of our hours. And that's been very eye opening. At the same time, and I know you've seen this and and you've studied it much more in depth than we have.

We've also seen this notion of the line to have blurred so completely because our home is our office, and our office is our home, and you know, folks are trying to educate their kids and get their work done and get on the right zoom call and things like that. How does this all net out? How do we make this at time? Again for those of us who can have that luxury to to reset a bit, it goes back to that intentionality, and it goes back to understanding

the role that productivity plays in your lives. For many people, productivity and being busy has been seen as a psychological coping mechanism. We were told if you're busy enough and successful enough and productive enough, you'll be safe. And now we're experiencing economic turbulence and suddenly people don't know what to do with themselves, and so they're redirecting a lot of that productivity into their personal life, not realizing that

it's also training them. And let's not forget in terms of economic turbulence, people are going to work more because they're scared to show their boss that you know, that that they're indispensable, so that's what they want to do. So you also have a lot of psychological fear behaviors that are making people not speak up when they should have because they think, I'm so lucky to have a job. I'm not going to raise my hand and say I'm

not going to answer this email. So I think we really have to start at the top with leaders and companies recognizing that high performance requires intentional recovery period and that requires rethinking performance metrics, business like how the businesses is, business goals and the realistic tasks that can be accomplished. Considering that many companies think, oh, everyone's working at home,

It's like, no, this is not normal times. These are not normal circumstances, and so we should not be acting like everyone should be doing the same level of work they were doing before the entire world went into lockdown. Like that's just not realistic. So does start with leaders? It has to, Yeah, because no matter what I tell you, if your boss sends you an email at ten pm or on Sunday night, most people are going to answer.

You're not gonna say no to your boss. Right, So there's a pressure that comes explicitly down that if it's not clarified in terms of boundaries. Again, I can give you all the tips and all the map rooms and all the foosball tables, but if your boss is acting in a way that is generating these signs of overwork because they don't have clear expectations or boundaries, you're going to go along with it because you don't feel a sense of strong enough security right now to be able

to say anything. Because people are very lucky to have a job and they're very afraid of losing their jobs. Just got thirty seconds final thoughts for everybody. Final thought is look at your sense of resistance and look at how you talk about your business and whether you're really upset that you're busy or you're kind of secretly glad that you're busy. To ask yourself, how much is what I do linked to who I am? And start the work there, and I guarantee you if you dig deep

into it, you will produce your best work. And that reps up the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm Carol Masser and I'm Jason Kelly. Be sure to tune into Bloomberg Business Week Radio. It's live Monday through Friday starting at two pm Wall Street Time. You can also watch the show live on YouTube. Just search for Bloomberg Global News and be sure to check out our Bloomberg Business

Week Extra podcast. That's right, it's plural. This week we're bringing you to We talked about Tom Siebel. You want to check that one out, but also Richard Edelman. He is the founder and CEO of the Global Communications from Edelman. He talked about the company's spring update to its annual trust barometer and how work and workers may be different on the other side. What I love about both of them is they are looking at a world perspective when it comes to our life after the virus and actually

tackling the virus. All right, everyone, we'll be back next week. At the same time, do stay safe. This is Bloomberg.