Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend - New Year's Special

We hope you had a great and safe celebration everyone, And as we turn the page and start fresh on the calendar, we're dedicating this holiday program to our entire Bloomberg Business Week team. We are indeed one news cycled churn, perhaps more rapidly than ever before in the magazine. Was there each and every week to capture all the key storylines in business and finance, politics, technology, economics, and so much more. Over the next two hours, we'll be reflecting

on some of the very best Bloomberg News coverage. We're also going to bring you the best when it comes to travel, Auto's food, all to get you primed for two with our friends at Bloomberg Pursuit that's coming up a little bit later on. We begin though this hour with the editor of Bloomberg Business Week magazine Joel Weber until this past year got started with a bang for your team. You were all set to publish an issue, and then came the riot at the US Capital on

January six. To take us back there, well, it's always an especially difficult issue because you're coming straight out of the out of the holidays, you've got a cold start,

and then all of a sudden, January six happens. And we typically transmit a cover um and cover story about three pm on a Wednesday, which is more or less about when everything took a turn for the worst in Washington, d C. And at that moment, I just looked at the cover that we were about to transmit and realized that we couldn't and really let that when go into the wild, knowing that something was happening at that point,

we we still didn't totally understand what. So began our own crazy little wild dance to try and figure out how to actually say something about January six. As the clock was ticking um as the printer was like, where where's your cover, where's your cover story? It was just a little bit of a magazine making feet in and of itself, and one that I'm so grateful to have

a talented staff for because we managed to pull it together. Well, how did you handle something like that from a storytelling perspective, because if you think about where we are now, almost a year later, we're still learning about what happened on January six, We're learning about text messages that people that

lawmakers sent. So I often think about the secret to what we do is trying to take what we know and then also tell you why it matters and what it could mean going forward, which was, I will tell tell you straight up, almost impossible at that moment um. So what we did was rearranged a few things in the magazine, put that cover story and that cover on the shelf, just put it away, stop thinking about it, and and actually just started to think about how do

we mark the moment? And that's a really significant way that that I think, um, when all else fails, just say this, something's happening here, how do we mark that moment um? Because we actually the timing of the way the magazines come together. You actually have to transmit that cover before you have to transmit the stories. So that was an example. We actually did a cover. You had to put the cart before the horse exactly. And and

it was called it said New Low. It was a shot um of the capitol um with the basically mid mid insurrection and Uh. Once we had that out of the way, then it was sort of attempting to account for everything that we could actually say in the magazine, UM, which we we kept the pages open as late as

we possibly could. UM. I think by the time it was all done, I think we're transmitting the story at about eleven PM, which allowed us to basically uh know that the capital by that point had become secure and that in the not too distant future, uh, lawmakers were going to come back into the capital and I actually do what they had set out to do. Um. And so what we did really was just try and put together a timeline of of what we knew of what

had happened at that moment in time. UM. And it was a first draft of history, which is sometimes what journalism looks like, and that's what it was. But but we had the foresight enough to know it was a new Low, uh, and we stitched together truly. Like the most remarkable part was just working at Bloomberg News. We had we had people there in the capital who were affected by this and also UM covering covering what happened

outside the building. So we had a lot of material to pull on and obviously there are plenty of people coming from all over the place, UM, just just pitching in with stuff. So it became a huge team sport. We actually just used you know, the Bloomberg version of of a zoom called NEXTI, and we just were the magazine group was just huddled in an exci trying to figure out and we're all looking at layouts, UM putting

it together in real time. It was really compelling. So politics and where we started, but as one went on, it became clear that the financial world would also find itself and uncharted warders as well. Let's bring in Bloomberg Business Week Markets and Finance editor Pat right near to help us put us to help with that in perspective, and I know one of the December cover stories kind of summed it up so well, investings wildest year. It was nuts. I'd even go so far to say it

was investing weirdest year. UM. I've been through a few bull markets in my life, UM, and I've never seen anything like this. People reach for comparisons to the Dot com Era. That was my first professional bull market. UM. But I actually think that this was uh stranger involved UM, a wider group of people, a younger group of people, UM, different kinds of assets that I think people hadn't really had a chance to think about any before. UM. And UH we have just tried to watch it and we've

seen it change. You know. This Uh, to to get into the making of this cover package was something that UM, we started to conceive of in some ways, UM all the way back in summer after the sort of the Reddit and game Stop affairs which we covered, and we were kind of thinking, like, we want to talk about how it seems like everybody we know is becoming a kind of a trader. And then you know, the meme

stocks kind of went off the boil for a little bit. Um. You haven't made a lot of money on the meme stocks after that point, and we thought, well, okay, so maybe that moment was over and it wasn't. UM, you know, Mike Reagan described it, This hasn't been so much an inflating bubble as a series of waves that just keep coming and crashing on the shore, just to be followed by another. UM. And now we're really looking at crypto

and not just bitcoin, in fact, not even primarily bitcoin. Well, the way you guys have covered everything throughout when it comes to markets and just our changing investment themes has been just pretty incredible. Thanks to Bloomberg Business Week Markets and Finance editor Pat right Near as well as Joe Weber. He's gonna stick around with us. We're gonna take a look coming up next, some of the areas the markets burned down by that pandemic, especially big pharma and the

race to develop a COVID vaccine. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week. This is Bloomberg. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovik from Bloomberg Radio. Was defined by the emergence of COVID N one was dominated by headlines about vaccines. You know, pharmaceutical companies all engaging in a race to develop those life

saving shots at a breakneck pace. Well, to help us understand some of the past year's biggest business themes, we welcome in Bloomberg Business Week Assistant Managing editor Jim Ellis and the editor of the magazine, Joel Weber. Who's also still with us. So, Joel, what was some of the conversations that you guys were having in the newsroom about, like,

how do we, you know, cover COVID this year? I mean it really was largely about vaccines, right, and if you if you rewin the clock to late December, we actually did a good business cover story called Miracle on Ice, which was, um, you know, at that point, we're trying transmitting and transporting um, all the RNA is on dry ice, which was a feat and of itself, um, just to get the first you know, waves of Americans vaccinated, and slowly but surely we saw an amazing rollout UM and

millions upon millions of Americans of course of the year, uh get vaccinated, and obviously many many more around the world, um, of all different types of the vaccines. That is an amazing accomplishment and of itself, like the science to get that vaccine made within a year, and then to have so many people around the world actually protected, um, that

in of itself just huge, huge, huge feet UM. What we've also just been all over as a newsroom, I think is is just covering these companies, um and what they're doing and how well the science is going to hold up against the boosters UM. And you know, I think we've been very focused on the fives in the Madernas and the the J and j's and maybe do a lesser extent, at least here in New York, like

focusing on on the ones that are international. But I think that that international part has actually been a huge part of the story. UM. Geopolitically, there's the soft power struggle with China, and China is trying to get its vaccines a lot of places. UM. The nonprofit KOVACS has actually struggled to really get a lot of vaccines to

merging corners of the of the world. That remains a huge issue because you know, most recently here with the omicron like, we're going to continue to see variants UM, and they will probably come from other places, right. And the nature of of COVID is that it can morph and mutate very quickly, and as we're seeing now, this is highly transmissible, maybe less lethal, but highly transmissible UM. And you know, against it all, we've got to we've

got vaccines that that seemed to work well. Jim, come on in here and talk a little bit abo out one of the stories that I remember from the past year, which was the changing view of pharmaceutical companies because I think for a lot of people are certainly politicians, they were seen as sort of boogeymen punching bags throughout many of the past years. But there's sort of this changing

public perception associated with vaccine makers. Yeah. I mean one of the things that you know, uh, this definitely did was changed the views that a lot of people had of big format as, basically being that big companies that were all out to um make a lot of money

off of essentially the health of other people. And I think that when we had a crisis where all of a sudden we were dependent on formative sort of come up with a solution in record time, I think it actually bolstered the view that most people have of them. I mean, it's a true, true, sort of a sort

of success story here. I mean typically, you know, any kind of formacy cutical is developed over the course of years, years of you know, sometimes in years of lab work, then years of going through trials and trying to get approvals, and this was done licked the split. I mean, a lot of this work was done in the course of a year, and then we sort of uh, you know, we were able to fast forward through the normal approval process because even though people have to talk about approvals,

most of these drugs were basically just authorized. They were just you know, fast tracked to get out there and get out. But that's also been one of the things that causes a challenge for them going forward, which is that a lot of anti vaxers and people who just want to complain about, you know, the restrictions that go along with um masking vaccines whatever, are saying, well, these aren't real. I mean, look at you know, the fast forwarding that happened here, look at the fact that they're

authorized but not approved and whatever. But in the end, there was very very good science. And this is science that has been actually reviewed probably more than almost any drug prior to this, and certainly it's been used by you know, most of the world now with very good results. And so this is quite an amazement for an industry that used to take it on the chint as being sort of greedy and non public based. Yeah, I remember a great cover story when it comes to vaccine passports.

Um I want to shift gears a little bit, no pun intended, but you guys did a lot of coverage about what's going on in the auto sector electric vehicles in particular and Tesla, but also the other players. Jim, how did you think about the strategy about that because there was so much going on. I mean, this was definitely the year when UM, I guess a lot of investors as well as regular people suddenly started to take

the e V business seriously. You've certainly seen it in the UH market values that have gone on to UM. You know a lot of new EV startups that you know, it's sort of hard to imagine it. Rivan, which is a truck maker that's a competitor. I guess you could see. I think it's a competitor a long term to test flaw, you know, has a market value is bigger than General Motors. I mean, this is a company that even this year UM only planned to produce twelve hundred units that's it trucks,

and they're not even gonna make that. I mean they announced that they this today, but they're not going to make that yet. They've got these you know, sort of multi multibillion dollar valuations because investors are convinced that you know, this is there's a change of foot here that you know, the internal combustion engine is going to go away, and everybody wants to be in the ground floor hoping that

they're going to get the next Tesla. Now, I would probably say that's very unlikely, simply because Tesla came into a market that was not there, and Tesla got a lot of attention and people jumped in because they figured it was the only way. Nowadays, um, the traditional car

companies are jumping in very aggressively. Look at people like UM, Look at people like Volkswagen with it's I D line, which is not only success well, um, it's becoming successful in China, which had been a pretty much a Tesla market, and it's becoming successful in Europe. Certainly not a big big deal here, but there's a lot of changes that are going to happen in the next up of years, as truck makers get into evs and truck makers are it's gonna be a really big deal here in the US.

Because the US companies make their money making trucks and SUVs. They do not make money making cars, and so therefore they've been willing to let Tesla do its thing. But now that Tesla wants to get into trucks and riving in and all these other companies are popping up, you know, all of a sudden, we're gonna see the real competition here. We're gonna talk with Hannah Elliot little bit later on to certainly the luxury space. You're seeing an explosion as well. Alright, guys,

we get a round. Thank you so much, Bloomberg Business Week Assistant Managing editor Jim Ellis and the editor of Business Week Magazine, of course, Joe Weber. Thanks you guys for joining us. Happy New Year to both of you, and we're looking forward to uh, talking a lot more in two. We'll still ahead. On this special holiday weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week, we dive deeper into the biggest economics stories that are sure to follow us into the new year. You know them well by now, the

eye word, inflation, supply chains, also the Great Resignation. Yeah, all that and more ahead. This is Bloomberg broadcasting from the financial capital of the world, Bloomberg eleven Frio in New York to Washington, d C. Bloomberg to Boston, Bloomberg one O six one to San Francisco, Bloomberg nine sixty to the country Sirius XM Chado one nineteen and around the globe, the Bloomberg Business app and Bloomberg Radio dot Com.

This is Bloomberg Business Week as the US and really the world of transition from the depths of the pandemic to an economic recovery. Over the past twelve months, three themes have emerged that appear to be sticking with us for the foreseeable future. Rising prices, supply chain congestion, and a labor forcet has left a record number of jobs on the table. Bloomberg Business Week Economics editor Christina Lindbladd is here to help put the past year in some context.

So back in November, Christina the magazine did a takeover section. It really centered around a surge in prices not seen in America in decades. How should we think about this as the Federal Reserve gets ready to end its asset purchases and look likely hike interest rates come next year. This year, well, the good news is almost everyone expects prices to moderate next year. The question is how fast. I mean. Powell formally retired the word transitory in November,

which I think was a relief to everybody. There are still questions though about kind of the balance of what is like this, you know, supply chain factors and demand shock, and maybe once some of the supply chain stuff starts, you know, kind of receding, we'll get a better sense of sort of how much the consumer is driving this.

And one of the my favorite stories that we did this year was the story about this training that they do at m I T called the Beer Game, which talked about this sort of bullwhip effect that you haven't

supply chains when people start panic buying. And now, for example, in recent weeks, people have started saying there might be a bull whip effect in semiconductor supply chains because you know, companies maybe putting in two or three orders because they don't know which ones are actually going to come through. I feel like still there's like dust settling, and you know,

like you don't have total clarity on what's happening. But clearly the FED in its most recent policy meeting, did a very clear pivot and in saying that they're just going to speed up the taper, they're basically they're freeing the runway to be able to start to lift off rates. I always think though about your coverage and your team's coverage. It's you know, and Tim and I talked about all the time, like inflation, it's a global problems and supply

chain disruptions are a global situation. You guys, you know, had to be obviously focusing. We talked a lot about the U S and what's going on, but it really is a global, you know, situation with global central bankers having to deal with it, right, and some countries are very much ahead of this in the US and tightening many in Latin America already have started started much earlier

in the year trying to get a group on this. Politically, you know, we think about the political coverage of this, right and the idea that that politics and in this case the economy is so intertwined. Josh Green had a story earlier this year that talked about the idea of inflation being if even if it isn't President Biden's fault and look around the world that central banks around the world and Europe are dealing with this, He's still gonna

get blamed for it politically, he is. It's going to be very tough to outrun that in a year when we're gonna have mid terms, right, Yeah, Um, I mean they're talking a lot. I mean, they're responding. They're out there talking about how you know, these task force for shipping for example, what you know they're they're they're shouting

from the rooftops whenever they see an improvement. But it hasn't you know, some of the measures they are taking, for example, their efforts to get more domestic capacity to build semi conduct those are gonna take years to yield fruit. Um. So yeah, I mean, I think, but you know, let's see if prices are raging at this level as we get to November. You know, the thing about the inflation story, it has obscured some, you know, some of the good news story about the economy. I mean, if you compare

this recovery to the last one, this is amazing. I Mean, at the FED policy meeting, they basically said we could get to full employment like sometime next year. You know. In the last recovery, twenty fifteen was when we started lifting off rates. You know, that was when the FED

decided we had gotten back to full employment. Yeah. Hey, listen, one of the things we want to just talk about it is you oversaw a special New Economy issue the magazine in the fall a bunch of folks, you know, providing you and all of us really with some startling numbers from the youngest members of the global workforce. We're not just having labor problems in the United States. It's

happening everywhere. Yeah, I think there's a segment, especially we we put a finger on on sort of a demographic effect, you know, with the young people which had been overrepresented in the sectors that got slammed by the lockdowns and the pandemic in general being um, you know, they were

just thrown off course. Really, you know, people who were starting their careers or were a sort of in you know, had accumulated a certain number of years on a job and thought they were going somewhere and just completely thrown off track. I have a feeling, well, we're talking about the great resignation inflational lot and supply chain. Still, what are they going to call it? I don't know. I'm ready to have some new new names for new phenomenon

about no more pandemic, that would be nice. Fingers crossed wants to know what people slip up and say, like now, you know, now in the end of the pandemic, and you're like, what yeah, exactly. Our big thanks to Bloomberg business Week Economics editor Christina Lynn Blad for joining us. As always, the major macroeconomic issues will paying close attention to in the coming weeks and in the coming months, as we always do on Bloomberg. You're listening to Bloomberg

Business Week, our first broadcast of two Up. Next, we're gonna look at some of the favorite feature stories from the year that we're in the magazine. We are listening to Bloomy. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovich from Bloomberg Radio. At the top of our special holiday weekend program, we covered the wildest year investors have ever seen. It has been incredible. Digital currencies have certainly contributed to that. Tim.

We're not just talking about Bitcoin, we're talking stable coins to They're becoming a factor in the growing, often misunderstood part of growing crypto market. All right, one of the coins companies at the center of all of this and the intrigue is Tether, and our features editor at Bloomberg Business Week is Max Chafkin. He's here to take us back too. An October cover story from our own Zeke Fox about what turned into a sixty nine billion dollar mystery.

I gotta say, Zeke did some great stories on Tether and another one we'll talk about in a moment. Uh, we're talking about this back King. Yeah. So Tether, if you follow um the crypto world at all, it's super important. It has it's it's one of the most heavily traded coins out there. It's basically the main way that people who are are trading crypto get in and out of of say bitcoin or anything else. And you know, it's

it's widely used, as as he talks about. But within this world there's just this sense and this is includes among many you know, many of the crypto heads, many of people who use this currency. You know every day

that it's not totally normal. It's it's it's sort of like a bank account in the sense that you know, the Tether's big brand promise is that you will give it a dollar, and it will give you these coins um that that that are in theory um exchangeable at any point for for the an equal amount of of kind of US currency, and and and and yet for a long time, no one has known exactly where Teather is keeping these coins that it had reserves, but it's never been clear, and we sent Zeke Fox, you know,

on a mission to try to solve the mystery. Okay, so this involved a former child actor who had missed a penalty shot in the Mighty Ducks, crypto billionaire named brock Pierce a worldwide journey. What did he find? So, yeah, I mean the Tether it's it's so colorful and in a lot of ways it it really reflects kind of both the money and also craziness of this world. You know, you left out like three other crazy things about brock Piercy. At one point he uh, he employed Steve Bannon, you

know Trump's you know, one time bigulariary. He also ran for president. Basically, the company has had trouble with banking relationships for the same reason that a lot of crypto companies have had trouble as a result. And and this is according to Zeke's reporting, which Tether disputed in places. Tether had to move the money around a lot, and eventually, as we discovered, began and putting it into some you know, pretty questionable investments, at least for a company promising the

kind of stability that tether has been promising. So we're talking about you know, large quantities basically of Chinese commercial paper. And again these investments are are our normal investments, They're

just not normal investments for a bank. And so that that creates some question you know, both in part of kind of like crypto critics but also economic regulators that maybe this currency, you know, if if the crypto markets started to collapse, this currency could lead to a lot of you know, economic contagent not just in the in the crypto market, but in other financial markets because it owns so much of this of this commercial paper, I mean,

business echo so incredible and really just you know, covering what was a wild year and financial markets, and that included you know, SPACs. They're not new, we know that, but we definitely saw a huge wave, especially earlier this year. We're talking about the special purpose acquisition companies as Blake Jack companies. Zeke had another story on what we have or what you guys called or who you guys called

the spack King. Yeah, this is Shamas Polly Appatia. Um really recommend this profile if anyone, if anyone missed it, Um. He is a fascinating figure who's just been kind of right in the middle of not just the sort of spack boom, but many other like sort of hot trends in the world of of of technology and money. So so um Chamath Pollyopatia basically became Facebook's growth guy just as Facebook was growing. He was an early Facebook employee,

uh sort of friend of Mark Zuckerberg. Then he got in on kind of the green investing boom, and now he's onto um SPACs and and he is, you know, just an amazing marketer and amazing kind of like packager of of you investing ideas and of his own uh personal brand, and and he has really found a way to you know, make a lot of money taking these companies public. But of course, the way that um SPACs are structured, you know, it's it's gonna be great for

Shmat Paul Aptia. It's not clear that um that spack investors are going to do quite so well because the way these deals are structured, you know, they really, um they really work out well for the SPAC sponsors, not necessarily for the individual investors. Yeah, we're talking about companies like Virgin Galactic Ticker SPCE, Sophie Clover Health, Open Door technologies as well. I'm wondering though, because this is also coincided with the time where where SPACs have kind of

lost their luster over the last year. I mean, if we think about what the word the inanimate object of the Year on the Bloomberg fifty list was for, it was spack not though. Yeah, and that's kind of what I mean. This was even happening. You know, at the time we wrote the story, which was you know, way back in May, and you know, the cover or was the cover lines is a blank check companies hit the wall?

And you know, the point was that, you know, the market was already starting to kind of get a little bit soft. Um and and and these SPAC sponsors were doing quite well and so and so that certainly happened and and and you know it's that's not to say that like that these companies are necessarily you know, all bad companies, um, but but we did have a situation where you had a bunch of kind of really smart finance guys who were able to kind of take advantage

of a moment. And and with um Schmont, Polly Abatilla, you know, it wasn't just kind of realizing that SPACs were big deal was kind of like the whole meme stock thing. I mean, he he got you know when when um, when the Wall Street bets thing happened. You know, he threw himself into the middle of that. He's been very good at kind of um both recognizing um, recognizing

that world and and of course profiting from it. But of course you know that that that some of that interest has died down, and we've seen a lot of these stocks um you know, fall back to earth, and that's that's you know, creating some you know, losses for anyone who kind of brought into the hype at the wrong moment. Hey, Max, we hit on politics at the top of the show with Joe weber Um and talking about the chaos of the riot at the Capital back

on January six. In the months that followed, we learned a lot about a group called q and On and the conspiracy theorists around the nation. We also learned that they needed tech support as well, and that's where Nick lim comes in. Yeah. So, Nick Lim, as as we wrote about in this in this piece which you know it was so weird and mind expanding, is basically the web master to all of the kind of unsavory groups

of the Internet. He runs the company UM. He's a he's a sort of radical free speech advocate, and he runs a company that provides UM back end web services, you know, to the likes of basically q and on supporters and and other UM folks who are not able to get UM get get UH server space, ason and and technical uh support you know from big companies like like Amazon and what. I what's really interesting about this story. First of all, it's like a window into this weird subculture.

You know. Nick limb Is is a total character. I mean, you know, he's he's like about a hundred eight degrees removed from like, you know, the folks running like Amazon web services, but he's kind of in the same business.

And he shows number one, you know, just how much power these companies have, you know, Amazon and these companies that provide UM either UH basically you know web services, you know, servers to to websites, or security firms that prevent UM websites from getting hit with denial of service attacks,

which is actually the business that this guy Nickolm is in. UM. They basically have enough power to essentially take someone off the Internet in less another company steps in and and that's kind of who that's that's kind of what Nick Lam is doing. And so he is kind of, uh, the the service provider of the last resort to these kind of unsavory groups. And it sort of shows you,

number one, how much power him is on hands. But also if you want to kind of crack down on Q and on, or you want to crack down a white national so you want to, you know, crack down on violent extremists, it's pretty hard because there's always going to be somebody out there who's basically willing to to do business with them and keep them on the internet. Hey, Max, before we let you go, speaking of technology, we want to hit on Apple. The Mark German and Austin car

piece about Tim Cook that hit back in February. It called at the time, and this is kind of I'm chuckling, right, yeah, two point three trillion dollar fortress. Now the number we're talking about isn't focused on right now, is three trillion dollars in market capital um. How has Tim Cook been able to avoid a lot of the heat that the other big tech CEOs have felt over the past year plus.

So I think some of this has to do with and you know heat you're not just not even the past year, but going back during the during the Trump right, the trade war with the Trump administration. Yeah, you know, no company arguably was as bone or bowl to kind of the currents of UM you know, nationalism, isolationism, you know,

the sort of wave that Trump was riding. You would think would crash right down an Apple because Apple makes all of its products at the time, right was making like all of its products UM in shine or most of its products in China, and also its most important you know, new growth market is China. So so you would think like this would be a company that would

be you know, kind of uniquely vulnerable UM. And you know, as the story shows, you know, Tim Cook is a very savvy business person and like a very savvy uh sort of uh you know user and and and director

of Global markets UM and he's also a pretty savvy politician. Well, it's an incredible it was unbelievable deep dive into it, and it is really pretty remarkable considering a Semni big tex c EO is really on certainly politicians radar, and to see how Tim Cook really navigated it and going from administration to administration X it was an incredible year of your team. Really some great dives and I highly recommend everybody check them out online if you did not

get to read them. Um, what a great year you've had in your team. Yeah, thank you, and also shout out for Max Uh. It was a big year for Max as well. His new book, The Contrarian Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power. It came out back in September. If you haven't read it, it is a great book. Check it out. Max. Congratulations, thanks a lot,

all right, Max, Happy new year. Max Chafkin, features editor of Bloomberg Business Week magazine, and that reps up the first hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio. I'm Carol Masser and I'm Tim stead Of. Coming up in our next hour, we ring in the new year with the team at Bloomberg Pursuits. We're gonna be the best tips on travel, cars, food, in all forms of luxury for the coming year, maybe even talking about luxury in the metaverse and stick arout. It is

a thing. This is Bloomberg, This is Bloomberg Business Week inside from the reporters and editors who bring you America's most trusted business magazine, plus blow Wild, Business finance, and tech news As it Happened, Sloomberg business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes. Tim Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. I am Carol Masser, plentyhead in our second hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg business Week. It's a special hour.

It's all things pursuits, travel, luxury, autos, food. The Bloomberg Business Week Pursuits team has some of the best jobs in the business. It's always fun to get some time with them, and we're very pleased to have the head of our pursuits team with us for the rest of the broadcast. Chris Rouser is here to help us welcome in style. Uh. By the way, you and Nikki, I know I say this all the time, you've the best

jobs here. Well, I'm the one that stays at the desk and mostly Nicky and Hannah and Kate's have the best jobs. Does somebody ever come to you like you we need to go to like some really posh place and I don't know, I don't know South France And you're like, I don't think that's like I don't know. It sounds really good, but it sounds like a boondoggle. Yes, that happens all the time. All right, So let's get to someone who checks out a lot of great places

that we can all go to. Let's talk about travel. I mean, many of us started getting back on planes, maybe even cruise ships, and the travel in hospitality world was more than ready. Nikki Eckstein is the Bloomberg Pursuits travel editor. She joins us as well. First of all, Nikki, you know, what was your year like and some of the story storylines that were jumping out as the well did kind of start to reopen, right hey you guys, Well, okay, First of all, there's never a bad time for the

south of France. And second of how I didn't quite get that far this year. I have a small child who's still not old enough to be vaccinated and m and you know that's a consideration for families and for me, so I was cautious like a lot of other people in the world. You know, it's kind of crazy. International arrivals are still down seven five percent. So you look at Instagram, you think everyone's going everywhere. We're really still keeping it close to home. But people dreamed big this

year and that helped a lot. How did you know, coming off of lockdowns and coming at the same time as the rise of vaccinations make you think about when it came to writing about travel for pursuits, oh Man, was a real roller coaster ride for us over here. If you think about where we were at the beginning of the year, we were just starting to see the

hope that came with vaccines. Borders were largely closed, we were still grounded, right, So at the beginning of the year, we were still taking an incredibly cautious stance where we were really talking about what CEOs were saying and predicting within the travel industry, what innovations were happening to allow travel to start coming back, how businesses were responding to the ongoing crisis that just kind of kept going and going and still does um And then in the middle

of the year hit and borders started to open in time for summer vacations. We started to pivot to you know, where is myself dream a little bit and put some practicalities in place for people, How should I think about traveling now that I'm vaccinated? What's safe? And where should I go? And what am I What am I going to do when I'm there? So we've run that gamnet and now here we are at the end of the

year with a macron who knows what's happening next. And throughout the year Nikki oversaw a series of very helpful pieces where we talked to bureau chiefs in different cities around the world to get a lay of the land of what it's like there now, so you know, you may be able to look online about what what the like vaccine requirements are if you're going to go to London or Miami or Paris. But okay, is it fun

to go? Is it? Does it feel good? And so you know, once every couple of weeks we had a different journalists in these cities say, Okay, here's what it's like, here's what neighborhoods people are hanging out in, and you know, you know, does it feel comfortable, Yeah, people are going out? Does it feel really restrictive? Is it safe? And uh?

And there's also an amazing travel track or graphic where you can actually search the rules between where you are and where you want to go, which the graphics scene built. So we had a lot of data to help people, you know, figure these kinds of things out. But um, Nikki did a tremendous amount of work just figuring out, you know, what the outlook was, what the changes would be.

And and we actually have a piece coming up in our Year Ahead issue where she says, like, here's what the travel recovery was that wasn't And you know, Nikki, what are some of the places that kind of did okay this year? Places that lent themselves to outdoor leisure trips, generally on beaches. So in the US that was the Florida Keys. The Florida Keys had a runaway success of

a year. And in Europe, interestingly, it was the Turkish Rivera that was the number one performer, and both of those markets exceeded their twenty nineteen norms by kind of all the standard industry metrics, and it was really like a big cash cow of a year for them. And that cities did really they did poorly. You know, they struggled. They had a hard time because they're so dependent on business tourism and that's still not a thing. There were

two sides of the coin. And in terms of hotels, you know, if you were BlackBerry Farm or I'm Onngary or Ranch at Rock Creek. These are all US luxury resorts that are based on heavily outdoor experiences leisure. Want to go now scaacular setting with great smoky mountains, you know, Utah National Parks like these are the types of spaces that people felt comfortable in and still said that wanderlust, that desire to go somewhere that will jaw drop. I

gotta ask you about Richard Branson the Virgin Voyages. No kids tell us what was going on, because the cruise line industry was just decimated during the shutdown, But this was like a different kind of cruise right, Oh my goodness. So Richard Branson has been talking about his cruise line since well before the pandemic, and it's called Virgin Voyages.

The whole kind of marketing premise was trying to get young millennials who think that cruising is the least cool thing on the planet to buy into this concept a cruise ship where they would be in each other's company and actually be able to have like edgy nightlife and really awesome cutting edge food and beverage, you know, things that would feel at home in the East Village of New York and not on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship.

The poor concept just got dragged on in a series of pandemic induced delays, and finally, finally they were able to set sail on their maiden voyages this past ball and we sent our cruise correspondent on the maiden voyage, and the stories that she told were just spectacular. It sounds literally like burning man on a cruise ship, but for all ages. Sometimes it's the South of France, sometimes

it's a Virgin cruise. That's all I'm gonna say. Hey, Nikki, thank you so much, really really appreciated our thanks to Bloomberg Pursuits Travel editor Nikki Eckstein, Chris Rowser, he's going to stay with us for the rest of the year and Cote up next, we're going for a ride. Yeah, we're gonna be speaking to Hannah Elliott. She's Bloomberg's auto columnist. She's going to talk all about demand for cars of all types being a big trend. In one we're gonna

get her favorites. If you could get the car. I'm just gonna put chip shortage. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick takes Tim Spinovik from Bloomberg Radio. Earlier, in our New Year's broadcast at Bloomberg Business Week, we talked about the growing impact of electric vehicles on the global auto markets. I mean, it's not just about Tesla. It's definitely not just about Tesla. And here to talk all things electric vehicles and more is

editor of Pursuits, Chris Rouser. Also Bloomberg Pursuits auto columnist Hannah Elliott joins us. Now, Chris, I want to start with you and just talk a little bit about how you and the Pursuits team approach auto coverage when thinking about the types of stories that you want to tell for the Business Week audience. Well, for us, it's a mix of fantasy and reality. So we love to talk about the cars that you use and why you use them.

So why would you buy a riv and electric truck, Why would you buy maybe an electric sedan for Mercedes, Or why would you daydream about a Conics egg or a you know, a Hennessy supercar that's going to go from zero to sixty and one point nine seconds um. And you know, we try to create a mix of both the fantasy and the reality and Hannah, who gets to drive all of those cars, is the perfect person to help us figure it out. So how to come on in on this like talk us, talk to us

about the year that was. I mean, we were still dealing with the pandemic, but you were out there on the road and you were driving some really cool vehicles. Yeah, you know. I think the way that Chris talked about fantasy and reality is a very good way to characterize the year in electric vehicles, specifically UM. And I say that because this was the year of electric cars. First of all, we had actual drivable electrics come out from out e BMW, Mercedes, UM, more from Pole Star, more

from Porsche. These are all very real electric cars that you can drive today. You can drive off a lot if you can get get one. I mean that's another conversation, but these are real cars that you can drive, and that's really exciting. And we're seeing more and more. Everyone is still playing catch up to Tesla, but we're seeing

more and more offered, which is great. Then on the fantasy side, like Chris said, we are seeing you know, supercars from conig Site that have four seats that are electric, to Hennessy's new electric car they're calling Deep Space that has six wheels and it costs three million dollars and they're not going to make it for a couple of more years. And that is something still in the world of fantasy. And then you have automakers like Rivian that are kind of in the middle because they have produced

some early cars. They are in the production line producing vehicles, but they are largely untested, so they kind of bridge the gap between the old brands like Mercedes, BMW, Audi that are making electrics and the brands that are going to be making supercar electrics in the next few years. So it's a it's a whole universe. Um, let's talk about Let's talk about the riv In for a second, because I saw one in the wild. The barely exists.

I saw. I saw a Rivian makes this electric truck. Um, and it's been very highly anticipated in the company was valued at billion dollars and you know, um, we they don't really have a lot of products, so we don't really know what this is going to be like. But but Hannah reviewed it and took one off off road, and then not long after I saw one in Brooklyn and I said, oh my god, so the person that was next to I was like, it's a it's a Rivian. I've never seen one, and he said, well, what is it?

And I was like, it's an electric truck for people who live in Brooklyn. So Hannah explained what this car is. It's that is the perfect way to describe it. Also, Rivian likes to say they want to be the Patagonia of trucks UM, which also helped describe it basically. UM. They are a ten year old startup company UM founded by a guy named R. J. Scaringe who believes that

the electric truck can save the world. And his rationale is that when you know of car sales in the US are built on a truck hot form, we should have those be electric because everyone seems to be buying that size of vehicle. And UM, until now, we haven't really had electric pickup trucks. We've had some fleet sales and the hydrogen and other things, but this is really the first electric pickup truck that someone has said we're

gonna do this. We're gonna do it big, We're gonna do it like Tesla did UM and the truck is great, you know, it's I do like it it's not a perfect, uh specimen, but it is really interesting and good and you know, Rivan did come up with very interesting things to make it usable for camping and biking and that sort of thing. They've got, um really in in innovative um storage spaces in the truck. It comes with a

camp kitchen that you can plug in. It comes with an air compressor so you can pump up your tires out in the sand dunes. It comes with a lot of really great innovations. It relatively fairly priced. That started around seventy three dollars UM and the range you know they're saying is is above three hundred miles, which is you know, par for the course. UM. So it's really interesting and people are very excited about it. Hey, Hannah

san very many. No, but well, so you liked you liked the Rivian, but you know, by the by the time we got to the end of the year where we are now, it actually wasn't your favorite car of the year. And in fact, it wasn't even an electric car that was your favorite car of the year, which is which I think probably surprised a lot of people

given that one was the year of the electric car. Yeah, This is kind of a thing that I want to keep reminding people because and I know I'm part of the problem, because there's so much hype and excitement around electric vehicles, of course, and this is the most exciting time we've seen in the auto industry in the past hundred years, and it's because of what's happening with electric vehicles. But the thing that we need to realize and remember is that two of the cars on the road right

now in the United States are electric. That leaves a big, big chunk of cars that are not electric. And even you know, in twenty years, the vast majority of cars on the road will still be um combustion engine vehicles. So to that end, I've wanted to say and just remind people that there are some great conventionally powered vehicles coming onto the market. And my favorite car of the year was the Mercedes Benz S Class, which is their big expensive executive saloon that is just it's just perfect.

I mean, it's it's just it feels like being in a limousine, but not cheesy like a limousine. It feels very stately and stylish. Is there an evy in your in your near future? Personally? I have to say I am a very old fashioned person. I love driving the e vs for work, but my heart is still tied to the Vintage. I have to admit fair enough, Chris, is there in your future? I think so. Yeah. They're They're very zippy, and I I can see myself being

a person who's not haunted by range anxiety. I think it's a real mental thing that that Hannah talks about a lot, and you know, you need to get over either you're the kind of person that's always going to be anxious about that until you learn more, or you can kind of be easy pc about it. And I think I think that's me. I kind of can't wait, right,

You and I talked about it all. Yeah. I mean, I just you know, Chris and I both live in Brooklyn, and it's like kind of tough with the charging situation with alternate side parking and New Yorkers know what I'm talking about. That's Chris Rouser, editor of Bloomberg Pursuits. Also joining us is our Bloomberg Pursuits auto columnist Hannah Elliott.

We love hitting the road with her. We are excited to find out what she's gonna be driving in two I'm guessing it's gonna be um electric, it's gonna be hybrid, it's gonna be supercars, probably some motorcycles in there as well. Now it's gonna be our rules, right all right? Still, look, come on Bloomberg Business Week. Restaurants acting as cops, on

vaccine cards and more. It was a tough year for eateries everywhere, and we saw it up close in the dining capital of the world right here in New York City where the survivors go from here and one needs

to be on your menu for twenty twenty two. This is Bloomberg Broadcasting from the financial capital of the world, Bloomberg Eleve in Frio in New York, to Washington, d C. Bloomberg to Boston, Bloomberg one O six one to San Francisco, Bloomberg nine sixty to the country Sirius XM Chado one nine team, and around the globe the Bloomberg Business app and Bloomberg Radio dot Com. This is Bloomberg Business Week. It has not been easy running a restaurant during the pandemic,

you know that. I mean, it's really an understatement. The eateries that have survived nearly two years of pandemic uncertainty still not quite out of the woods yet. Well. Here to give us a snapshot of the restaurant business in New York and beyond New York is Bloomberg Pursuits food editor Kate creator Chris Rouser, also the head of Bloomberg Pursuits. He's still with us now, but kid, I want to

start with you. Um, just give us an idea of where the food industry is in New York and then move more broadly as we do enter the new year,

because the last two years, well, they've just been brutal. Yeah, I know, it's been such a roller coaster ride, and I just feel excepts are working so hard, and just when I think they start to seek daylight and things seem like they're coming down, then all of a sudden there's new outbreak or staffing crisis has been just as as you've read and heard, not to mentioned, supply chain are all putting big squeezes on restaurants and chefs and

everybody in the food industry. As we watched over the past couple of years, we saw so many restaurants clothes, especially in New York, around US hundreds and actually I think in the thousands and and we sort of felt like maybe there was gonna be a moment of new reinvention. We were going to rethink the way restaurants looked and behave. Certainly in New York we have the outdoor dining sheds, and they have that in a lot of other cities

in the US. UM, where are we in terms of reinventing the restaurant and are we seeing creative new openings either now or going into next year that you're excited about? UM? You know what? UM. One of these huge success stories

of this year was an Indian restaurant called Demaca. That's UM downtown on the Lower East Side, UM, and it's by UM, a group called Unapologetic Indian and they have done this this great, vibrant, delicious food that's not your average you know, it's not like just take a massala. They do. I'm I've just finished my best dishes of the year, and they make a paneer that's like from another planet. It's so like lovely and ploe and delicious.

Was like these great this great UM darren Sala Spice Cross and they have a bunch of new concepts coming next year, UM, including a skewer one and if I kick in one and then food that focuses on Calcutta, where one of its owners is Froun Morning Masam Door And so that's really exciting, Like it's exciting to think that it's not just steakhouses, you know in New York City where we love steakhouses, but there's this like fantastic food that we have haven't seen that much, that we

don't always get to see that much, like real flavors um coming through, and that's going to be great. I also think New York City is going to have a really good year because Eric Adams, our new mayor, has really like he's vegan, so I get we'll see he's been more vegan restaurants, but you know, he's definitely planted a flag and say people should go out as it as it stakes with him to go out, of course,

but like nightlife and restaurants and everything. So I think that's actually going to help pump up our local restaurants seen here in New York. Speaking of vegan starving shod right now, I'm just gonna put it out there, Kate, speaking of vegan Um, you were one of the first people to review eleven Madison Park, which switched to an all vegan menu. Uh, and your your first experience with it was good. Some other critics notably did not like it's what do you see as the outlook for the

flagship vegan restaurant in New York City? That's it's a good crust. That's such a good question. Um. I think that they are going to continue. We know what. What I really think absolutely is that they are going to keep doing vegan like through the first quarter maybe two quarters of the year and then probably just say, you know what, we couldn't. It's you know, it's not viable. You have to start. I mean, they're not. It's not

going to become a steak has let's be clear. But I think like they might see their way towards certainly at least being vegetarian and using butter and milk. But I also think that restaurant is so I mean, and I will say I've had a terrific meal and opening night, like I really did, And I would say I would say that that review um from a critic at a major newspaper in New York, Um, I would call into

question some of the things you said. But that's another story. Um, but I would say, um, I think that as long as their tourists coming into New York City as as tourism hoping knocking Wood, the tourism comes back in a big way. Um, there's a huge audience to support a restaurant like that. But you know, didn't read about the secret meet room, etcetera, etcetera. A big thank you to

Bloomberg Pursuits Food editor Kate Creator. We thank her for her time and I know the hard work that she has covering one of the Uh you know, I'm not I'm kind of being sarcastic, but not being sarcastic too at the same time, because like people look at Kate's job and they're like, this is the coolest job ever. But you know, Kate, you work so hard to bring this stuff to us and we do really appreciate it. Oh, thanks so much, you guys. It's so glad to talk

to you. Happy New Year, kiddo, be well, happy holiday's, Happy New Year, all right. Of course that's Bloomberg Pursuits Food editor Kate Creator. I've say one of my favorite stories was also like the best pizza and like going around the country. I'm someone who drives for good pizza. So yeah, which also just makes me more hungry. I mean, look, full disclosure in the stunt of that household and in the master household. If you don't know this by now,

if your longtime listeners, Friday's Pizza Night, Okay, totally. So we're working towards the weekend. All right, you're listening to a special New Year's we get edition of Bloomberg Business Week coming up. Chris is going to stay with us. We'll unveil some of disney world best kept secrets and tell you how to go shopping in the metaverse. Yep,

it's a thing. This is Bloomberg. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovich from Bloomberg Radio one and down our special New Year's Weekend additional Bloomberg Business Week Bloomberg Pursuits editor Chris Rouser still with us to put a bow on our first broadcast of Let's kick off our final segment by going back to October and a really fun story from Bloomberg contributor Brandon Presser. He went behind the scenes as

a worker at Disney World. Uh, this was like, I'm sinking back to this. I love when he goes behind the scenes. Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to keep it PG because there's some serious stuff there that you know happens at Disney World. Where do you want to start, Chris Well, actually like what Brandon does. So Brandon Pressor is travel journalist and freelance writer who works with us and he does a series of stories where he goes undercover at luxury establishments and he works there, so he'll work.

He worked as a butler at the Plaza Hotel. He was a ski instructor in Aspen. He worked on mega yachts, and he's done it. He was a flight attendant. He's done it in a ton of different places. And the companies let him do this, and we set it up with the companies. We don't do that. We don't like undercover he's written about. They do. They do read it, and actually they do read the stories, and we work

with them and they know what's going on. And because the stories are he works there and he finds out fun and sort of salacious and silly secrets. So it's you know, it is sort of oriented towards finding things that you wouldn't believe about working there, and in almost all of the places you find stuff that really is a testament to how tough it is to work in those places and how dedicated the people are who work there. I'm gonna say I'm shocked that Disney allowed him to

do this. Yeah, I think based on the feedback afterwards from Disney, they maybe didn't read all the stories before are but but Disney um celebrating their fiftieth anniversary this year, and so Disney World in Orlando, and they want are celebrating in a lot of different ways, and they wanted to do a highlight of the of the staff and

how hard they work. And this story really highlighted how hard they work, um because you know a lot of so the staff at Disney World are incredibly well trained from you know, every time you see a costume character out in the park, so maybe you see Ariel the Mermaid, or you see Goofy, there's somebody else standing near them watching them to make sure that nobody, you know, gets rowdy with them or ask them to do something inappropriate.

And they have like little hand signals that they do because the most of the costume characters don't talk um and so, and then somebody will come up and sort of intervene. But they never break character, even to the point where if you say, oh, like I heard you got a job at Disney, I heard you're playing Ariel, a person will say, oh, no, I'm a friend to Arials. All the people who are in those roles are friends

of the character. No one plays anybody right. And what it does, though, and I found reading the article, is that it kind of makes the people who are there, even the adults, think that they're living in some sort of fantasy world as well. And they even interact with these characters, these adults who are addressed as characters in

ways that are kind of bizarre. Yeah. One of my um, I'm not going to say favorite, but one are the things that jumped out of me to me the most was that parents will occasionally be so taken in by Mary Poppins that they think, oh, here's a nanny, I can leave my child with them, and then they will leave the children and they will depart and then the Mary, but they to center for lost children in Disney World.

Is that? Is that? Is that a testament to how good Disney is it creating of this experience or a testament to the type of parents who are there. I think it's both, honestly. I mean people get very carried away. Also parents are tired. If you're an up caught maybe you've been drinking, so like, you know, you can you can kind of lose your head a little bit. Another another way people lose their head is um they will

sometimes hit on the costume characters. And when we went into this story, I thought, oh God, we're gonna hear all these like kind of not great stories about people hitting on Cinderella, and that was not the case. Actually, the most the number one most hit on character at Disney is Captain Jack Sparrow to the Caribbean, and women will go up to him and slip their hotel room key into his pocket, one of his many pockets, and say, keep the costume on, I'll be there all nice. Which

is wild. What was the wildest thing or what was he surprised at? Was there something anything that like, yes, he was doing it, like he just was like, whoa, I didn't expect that. Um. You know, there is a little there's a little bit of Shenanigan that go on on some of the rides where there's like dark and um private areas, so he was a little surprised that people get frisky in those areas. And you know, everything on Disney and Disneys on camera, so like, if you're

thinking of getting romantic on Splash Mountain, think again. But also you know, there's like a full circle of life. So um, you know people actually will drop ashes of loved ones in the Haunted Mansion. Uh, you're not allowed to do that. You're not allowed to do that. That If if you ever walk by it and it's shut down, it's almost certainly because they're closing it because somebody tried to do that and they had to clean it. Chris, This is really tough work, though, and the people who

do this work are are very dedicated. What did what did you find about what it takes to succeed in this role? I mean the people that work at Disney, it's not by accident. They are people who love Disney more than the people who pay to go there. So you know, people very frequently when they get their Disney name tag that has their name it says you know, I'm Chris from Orlando, they will cry. You know, it's

very meaningful to them. Um, and they are are taught never to become impatient with anybody, and they have to deal with You can only imagine that. You know, people who get really frustrated, people who are going to the bathroom in line, People who asked them why didn't they build a dome over this park because it's raining? Um? And you know, why didn't I think of that? Of course? You know what, I'll talk to somebody about that. Who was Chris from Orlando? So Chris from Orlando? Um is

Actually if you forget your name tag. They have just a bunch of Chris from Orlando named tags and you wear it. And you have to have a name tag to identify yourself when you're working. So you if you forget, if you're Julie from Topeka, you forget your name tag, you're Chris from Orlando for the day, poor real Chris from Orlando, like Karen every day. And there are some I do feel I do feel for Chris. UM. I also wonder when is it Brandon comes to ideas with you?

Are you guys just like percolating and you like get like a little list of things that you want him to do or places to go kind of not undercover, but just go behind the scenes. Yeah, we do. We brainstorm a lot for this and we you know, we have like a dream list of ideas of where we would want him to try to work, and Disney was really like always at the top of the list, and

we didn't think we'd get it. Um, you know, we want him to work at a as a valet at a very fabulous hotel that we've been negotiating with because we think that might be like a really fun one. Um. But it's now places approach us, which is surprising, and some of them such a great thing. Some of them come back like I want more, come back to the hotel, was like, do you guys want to do this again?

Because that that story from the Plaza hotel where he was a butler like grown ups asked the butlers to read them stories in bed before they go to sleep, like people do. Very forward, just kidding, and they'll do it like butlers will do it. All right, Can we go to this is I know we talked about it recently so our listeners. I know this might be still fresh in your memory, but I constantly talked Abo and we talked about air still every day. UM. Metaverse and

retail actually read tell it's a thing. Yeah, it's really a thing. Um. So we did a story a couple of weeks ago about how luxury brands and other designers are beginning to sell goods in the metaverse, you know, and by sell goods, I mean sell things that will

never actually exist in real life. Uh. So, brands like Balenciaga and Gucci and Dulta and Gabana um have had showcases or sales rooms or you know, they work with platforms so that people can buy a bag online, a costume for a character online, um, or just fashion that you know, maybe you'll make an avatar in a in a virtual world like Roadblocks or Fortnite or Halo, and you'll just wear it there. Um. A lot of them are attached to n f T s to prove their authenticity.

And even the day that we came out with our story, Ralph Lauren announced that they were doing something so like it's it's really snowballing. Now, well, how is this helping

the businesses? I mean, you think about something that doesn't have any margins, doesn't cost it, or doesn't doesn't cost anything to produce, so it has great margins, I should say, uh, and it still has this idea of um, you know, when you buy one of these things in real life, there's this element of scarcity to it, and you can recreate that with n f t S too, So it's kind of a perfect fit for luxury. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Luxury has traditionally not been great

about adopting the Internet and digital ideas. They were very slow to sell anywheres online or even have websites at all. Uh and so, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about, Okay, you don't have to use the labor to make address and you know, and three D modeling is difficult, and and some of the things that they are making actually can be quite time intensive.

But you don't have to buy any of the resources, and you can sell versions of new things, or you can sell old like old designs that are in your archive. Private equity could go and find, you know, a defunct company and then buy their archive and just sell it all online as n f T s or in these

virtual worlds. Um. So you know, right now, brands are tiptoeing into this, and they're trying to appeal to communities of games and people who are already in these virtual worlds, who are used to wearing skins, which are basically costumes or outer shells for game players, or who are just getting into buying items, storing items in their private spaces in virtual worlds, uh, and exchanging them and investing in

trying to make money. Um, but you know this has the possibility of changing the whole game for fashion in the future by cutting down on overstock, cutting down on waste. There's just a lot of possibilities for it. Thank you so much. Keep hanging out with us in real life. Yes, happy people, gladly do that. Okay, we love having you. Happy New Year, all right, that's of course. Bloomberg Pursuits

editor Chris Rowseer. We think of so much for spending the hour with us, and we just love love everything his team does. They're just the best. And that reps ut the New Year's weeken additional Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio a special edition. Thanks so much for joining us, and welcome to I'm Carol Masser and I'm Tim Stanovk. Be sure to tune into our Bloomberg Business Week daily show.

It's Monday through Friday, starts at two pm. Wall Street time Bloomberg Radio not in the metaverse, at least not yet. You can also watch your daily broadcast that's on YouTube. Just search Bloomberg Global News and check out our Bloomberg Business Week podcast. You can find it at Bloomberg dot com, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast. Bloomberg Business Week. It's available on newsstands now at Bloomberg dot com, business week dot com, and on the Bloomberg terminal. You can also

see me on Bloomberg quick Take. It's available on Bloomberg dot com, slash Qt, and streaming platforms like Roku, Apple TV, Samsung TV, and more. Have a great weekend everyone, and happy New Year. Stay say this is Bloomberg