This is Bloomberg Business Week Inside, from the reporters and editors who bring you America's most trusted business magazine, plus global business, finance and tech news. The Bloomberg Business Week Podcast with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebek from Bloomberg Radio.
Hi, everyone, Welcome to the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week Ahead. On the program, we'll take you inside the human brain as Elon Musk's Neuralink gets FDA clearance to start implanting computer chips in people's skulls. All the company needs now is some volunteers.
What could go wrong?
We'll also discuss another long term muskole, human life on Mars. A new book lays out the potential pros and cons there are quite a few of them of colonizing space. Plus, we're going to get a pulse check on geopolitics with Brookings Institution senior fellow Angela Stent, as Russia and Ukraine approach a grim milestone with much of the world now focused on Israel's war against Tomas. Of that to come, we begin with one of the US economy's most important components. We're,
of course talking about the housing market. This week we saw the average thirty year mortgage rate fall by the most in more than a year, at a seven point six one percent. That helped spark the biggest advance in home purchase applications since early June. Still, affordable housing is hard to come by, and that's largely due to a
phenomenon called the lock in effect. It's the subject of a recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover story, and for more we go to the Bloomberg News real estate reporting team of Pashant Gopol and Patrick Clark, along with the editor of the magazine, Joel Weber.
Look, Ultimately, if you want to feel like there's an existential crisis in the US, I think the housing industry, housing market is maybe a pretty good one good place to look right now. If you have one of those low rate mortgages.
And a lot of people do that.
A lot of people got fortunate enough to get in when the market allowed that. You don't want to give it up, so there's very little incentive to sell an then have to take out a high mortgage. Now, that also means that for those people who never had a chance to get in, you're not able to get in because nobody's selling. There's very low inventory and if you could get in, you have to pay that eight percent mortgage that is potentially, you know, dramatically higher than what
the housing market even looked like two years ago. And boy, that is just a rotten.
Place to be.
And especially for people who are starting out, it really feels like you're just iced out. And that has I think some long term economic implications for the US. And there I think we're done talking about the story because that's basically how rotten this is.
But there's a whole lot more there.
And Prashant and Pat Clark did a great job of not only setting that table and and this is to me one of these stories that when I first started engaging with them about it, it feels like one of the most important stories of the year. We've talked about what's happened in the commercial real estate world. This is equally scary because it affects people so directly. I think, So, Prishan, you've got to speak to some people, tell us about what you and Pat learned along the way.
Well, really, this is like two different worlds, right, So people who own houses are really the haves here, and in some ways they're sitting pretty because they locked in some of the lowest rates in history, and they're unaffected for the most part by the rising mortgage rates because you know, most people have fixed rate mortgages for you know, thirty years, so they might be in those homes for a long time because they have very little incentives to sell and take on sort of a much higher rate.
On the other hand, people who haven't gotten a chance to buy yet, maybe they were, you know, they couldn't buy during the peak of the COVID buying frenzy because they lost out in bidding wars. But now they can't buy because they can't afford to. You combine these very high prices and these extraordinarily high rates, and you know, they're just locked out.
You remind us of an economist back in the nineteen eighties who actually identified this so called lock in effect. Take us back there, because we've kind of been in these this position before.
It was very much like what we're seeing now, which is that interest rates shot up quickly, and people who you know, I think between nineteen seventy eight nineteen eighty one, interest rates doubled. They were much higher in those days. I think they shut up all the way. I think to eighteen percent or so. But interest rates went up very quickly, and it became clear that the old mortgage
had a value attached to it. Right, It wasn't just the bill you I had to pay every month, but it was worth you know, thousands of dollars and because if you were to trade it into a new mortgage, that's how much more you would pay over the life of alone. And you know, at the time, there was a an economist at the University of California who who you know, who sort of showed that this was correlated or or he associated this with a strong disincentive to move, which
is logical. You know. You fast forward now to today and there there are two researchers, one at University of Illinois and one at the University of Pennsylvania. Actually, you know, have a you know, a way to do a sort of back of the envelope calculation to show that there's a real causal effect between this, you know, luck and effect and reduced residential mobility. People are going to move less, and in fact, people have been moving less in America. You know for a part while moving.
We were finally moving again right with the pandemic, because you could work Jil anywhere, like finally people were starting to move around again a little bit.
And boy did that end with the pandemic, right and and now suddenly maybe you did move somewhere, and now, you know, even being able to offload that thing that you got yourself into, maybe you won't be so lucky now. Now, most important question amount I asked today Pat Pashant, which have you got to speak to Eugene Quackenbush? I always okay, So tell us about also can we say the name of Eugene Quackenbush. Quackenbush, get gets your exactly what he's doing?
Phoenix broke like.
Than I know Pat has a deep understanding of Phoenix. But tell us about what what mister Quackenbush really his name?
Okay, but but but he's a you know, he's a pretty savvy real estate guy in uh in Phoenix who has a real estate company called Get Your Nest That will that that that that acts as a brokerage and the types of you know, effectively, he has to get creative for his clients. And the simplest thing is you go and look for a new home, right because the homebuilders are often buying down interest rates and we can tell you more about that. I can tell you more
about that. But he's doing things as well, like, well, can we go out and find people who have assumable mortgages, which is usually an f h A or a VA loan that someone else can take on. So you know, it was a there's a three percent mortgage, and you sell the mortgage along with the house package today, right there, package deal not just it's.
Not just not the garden, you know, mortgage.
I mean it sounds like a great deal, you.
Know, and it's probably better than the alternatives, because the alternatives are you either look for something smaller or what you find is a house that's not in great condition and so not only is it expensive, it's going to need more work. Or another thing that Eugene told me he was doing with clients or you know, clients were considering,
is you know, you just drive farther. It's no longer you know, the close in suburb that you pictured yourself in in twenty twenty one when all your friends were rushing to buy homes. You are now you know, you're now in the next or the one after, and you're having to drive farther every day.
So Pershan, let's talk about the home builder dynamic, because the other thing here is that there just hasn't been that much inventory, right. But like, so we're the home builders in all of this.
Right, So the home builders in some ways are in
much better shape because they produce inventory. So you've had the existing market just completely lock up, and that's left a little bit of an opening, especially for the larger builders that have their own mortgage arms, so they're able to kind of offer subsidized mortgage rates, which are really enticing buyers to buy new so they there can more aggressively cut prices and you know, offer you know, a five percent mortgage or something like that, at least first
a period of time. It can you know, it might increase later, but for the first few years five percent, and that's that's actually working for them, so they're able to sort of increase production and get more buyers in.
Okay, so.
Young people can't get in, people with low rate mortgages don't want to sell. What's the way out of this impossible?
Miss, Well, we had we had like we spoke with uh, you know, Ralph McLaughlin. He's a he's an economist. So there's been some efforts to sort of attack. This from UH from the perspective of demand, trying to get make it easier for people to purchase, right, so lowering fees for mortgage it is things like that down payment assistance. But all that does is sort of adds to the competition, right, which is the problem. We So his idea is, let's
try to get convinced sellers to sell. So he's suggesting that you could do things like a window of time where you know, capital gains where maybe investors wouldn't have to pay that, or you increase taxes on rental landlords. Either way, the idea would be to get some of these airbnb landlords and other landlords to sell to first time buyers.
Our thanks to Preshan Gopaul and Patrick Clark with Bloomberg News. That full interview is available on our podcast feed, and their story is of course available online at Bloomberg dot com as well as on the Bloomberg terminal. Jill Weber is going to be back with us next hour coming up. As the Israel Hamas war intensifies, another violent conflict is dragging on in Europe.
The war seems to be at this moment in a dynamic stalemate.
How Vladimir Putin could use the world's focus on Gaza to his advantage against Ukraine. You're listening to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. This is Bloomberg.
Listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern Listen.
On Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg Business App, or watch us live on YouTube.
From Wall Street to the World Bank. One risk towers above all, and that is geopolitical. We know Israel has talked about its troops entering the middle of Gaza's main city as they continue they're offensive against Tomas. EU commissioned President Ursula Vanderlin weighing in saying Israel will have to leave Gaza eventually. And then, of course, Tim, there's the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Yeah, well into its second year, almost its third year. Ukraine President Zelenski welcoming and decision by the European Unions executive arm Tobacco start to membership talks with Kiev, pledging to continue work to develop state institutions. A lot for the world to manage. And we've got a great.
Guest, Carol Angela Stemp back with US, senior fellow at Brookings Institution, author of Putin's World, former National intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. She worked at the US State Department. Back with Us on Zoom from Washington, ANGELA, thank you, thank you, thank you. Is the world making what feels like a mistake, and to some extent it feels like they're forgetting about the Russian war in Ukraine.
Well, certainly the conflict in the Middle East has diverted attention from the war in Ukraine, but that war goes on. Russia destroyed a I guess it was a Liberian flagged ship in the port of an Odessa, killing the pilot. It's been attacking the Ukrainian infrastructure. The Ukrainians are fighting valiantly back. But the war seems to be at this
moment in a dynamic stalemate. And the Ukrainians, you know, continue to need assistance from the West, particularly from the United States, And of course that's up for question at the moment.
It is up for question, But so far the United States has pledged and given quite a bit of aid to the Ukrainians. Are you concerned? I mean, I guess if you were a decision maker in Washington, would you how much would you like? What would you need to see in order for you to say, Okay, that's enough aid for Ukraine?
Well, I think we have to continue supporting them. If we don't send them more assistance and more weapons, it's going to be much harder for them to push back against the Russians. I think they'll be probably somewhat of a lot in the fighting in the winter, even though some of these attacks will go on, But we know that in the spring the fighting will start up again, and we need to equip the Ukrainians so that they can continue to try and push back the reference.
But if it's a stalemate, then what's the motivation for And forgive me, because we're talking about you know, we have to remember this is people, this is people. Yeah, yeah, But a lot of that gets lost. I think in the conversation when members of Congress are talking about budgets and there there's a lot of tension with providing aid to Ukraine, and there has been for more than two years at this point, How do lawmakers justify continuing to send aid if it's just a continued domate.
Well, first of all, it's in our national interest not to have Russia win this war. If Russia succeeds in subduing Ukraine, that's not where Russia is going to stop. It'll probably set its sites for the West, including possibly if you read some of the things that were published today written by the former president Medveative, it sites on Poland, and the US doesn't want. You know, we don't have
any boots on the ground there. Our men and women aren't dying for this, but it's in our interest to make sure that we don't get sucked into another even bigger war in Europe if we don't support Ukraine, you know, as it fights back.
Well, this is where you know, we so wanted to have you back because it was understandably you understand why in the past month we have shifted our focus. It feels like as a world, you know, how much stress can we geopolitically focus on. Both situations are dire and important, but we have shifted to what's going on between Israel and Hamas at this point. But I wanted you to come back on for us to understand Vladimir Putin and what his goals are here with what he is trying
to do. It doesn't necessarily stop with Ukraine.
Correct, that's correct. I mean he's first of all, believes that he can wait this out. The war will go on in twenty twenty four. Russia has more men that it can send as cannon fodder than Ukraine does. It has a three times of population, and they're getting you know, ammunition now from North Korea. We know that they're getting
drones from Iran. So he wants to wait this out and hope that someone enters the White House in twenty twenty five who will say enough, we don't want to support Ukraine anymore, or that there'll be Ukraine fatigue maybe in some European countries. So he's waiting for Western resolve to collapse, which it remarkably hasn't yet. But his again, his goals don't stop at Ukraine. There might be a pause, he wouldn't, you know, Russia wouldn't immediately then turn its
sights on another country. But in the longer run, as long as he's in power, and he's running for reelection next year, and he will surely get reelected. As long as he's in power, those aims I think aren't going to change.
So he has enough man, does he have enough money? I mean, can he break his country, Vladimir Putin in his fight his conquest of Ukraine.
He has enough money. I mean, the Russians are still making money on selling oil and gas. You know, despite all of the sanctions and everything, they are making money from the hydrocarbon sales. Their economy is set to grow, predicted to grow in fact, I think by about two percent next year. They've recovered a bit and the economy is doing better than it was before, so they can continue this fight.
That's that's what's so surprising to me. I mean, we spoke to you Angela early on in the and we've been speak to you three out the conflict, but the general consensus was this was going to be quick, and it's been anything but quick. How do you think this war ends as we approach the third year?
Right?
Well, it's you know, this is the sixty four thousand dollars question that everyone is asking. I mean, at some point it might be that both sides recognize that neither of them are going to achieve their full aims, and
that they do sit down and negotiate. That's still what we want to avoid is another frozen conflict, which is to have some kind of agreement, but which is really only temporary, and an agreement that would involve Ukraine unless it makes more progress territorial it would territorially, it would
lose some more territory. That might end the fighting. You could have a ceasefire, you could end the fighting, but that's not a longer term solution to this, you know, the you know, the desired solution would be obviously for Russia to withdraw its troops and to renounce the you know, territorial claims on these areas that it claims to have annexed but which it doesn't fully control. But that may take much longer. So it probably would be you know, in the short run at least some kind of a
ceasefire and a temporary solution to this. A longer term solution is much harder to envisage.
Yeah, you do wonder if even in some kind of resolution, ceasefire, any territory win on the behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin is just going to incite him to continue.
On his quest.
That was Angelas stant senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Still ahead on Bloomberg Business Week, Carol and I head to New Orleans for the inaugural Wells Fargo Black Business Leader Summit, where the lender is looking to make good on its promise to underserved Americans after striking a partnership with an influential black community leader.
So we can't take it all on right but peace about peace. We can't begin to make the kind of statistical differences, measurable metrics on differences with KPIs that we both agree on as to how we can further move. Close the digital divide, close the divide with housing and home ownership, close the divide with economic literacy.
Bishop Tdjakes, chairman of the Tdjkes Group, on his organization's packed with Wells Fargo and how it could help drive economic vitality and inclusivity in communities across the country. This is Bloomberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business App, and YouTube. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, just Say Alexa playing Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Has announced a ten year strategic partnership to build inclusive communities This follows reporting and analysis by Bloomberg and others, and we're just laying out the landscape on Wells Fargo having a really bad record when it comes among major lenders when it comes to refinancing by black homeowners, which is why we are very interested in how these two got together and what their goals are all about. Here with more is Christy Fercho. She's head of Diverse Segments,
Representation and Inclusion at Wells Fargo and TD Jakes. He's chairman of the TD Jakes Group here in New Orleans. And welcome, Welcome, so good to have the two of you here with us. Tell us, first of all, Christy, about this summit, and I'm curious I want to get from both of you. I always feel like when something like this is created, there were some really meaningful conversations ahead of it, So tell us from your perspective about some of the tough conversations that had to be had.
It's over a year in the making. We have been having conversations about getting black leaders together to really continue to focus on what needs to happen in these black communities, in black and brown communities, to really advance what we're doing around racial equity and really advancing home ownership, small business entrepreneurship. And so this summit really represents the possibility of what we can do together when you put collective minds in the space together and say what can we
do together? How can we help advance what's important to these communities.
Chairman Jakes, come on in on this conversation, because we certainly talked with you a lot throughout the pandemic after the murder of George Floyd, and we talked about just the injustices that were out there in society and how it was long overdue for initiatives to happen, and the
conversations it couldn't be just talk anymore. What were some of the conversations that you guys had that you had with Wells far Go about all right, if we're going to do this partnership, this is what it's got to really be about, and the actions that needed to be taken.
It's a real pleasure to have the opportunity to explore a multi pronged solution with companies like Wells Fargo that they would understand their fiduciary responsibility to extend themselves to the community that they live in and not just the customer themselves, because they're inextricably connected. And the more you understand that the well meaning of the client has a lot to do with the well meaning of your own business, these types of conversations emerge organically, so not only with
this company, but with several companies. People are starting to rethink their responsibility, their stewardship to the community. And then, because companies have the evaluation of ESG and social impact and they don't spend their day to day making a living doing social impact, partnerships like ours they merge to help them facilitate that social impact while they continue to
do the business that's necessary. And the community benefits because they are exposed to capital relationships that are necessary to move the community forward.
And that's actually keep point he just made, which is this reach into the community. Historically, these communities don't have trust of large banks or financial institutions, and so by partnering with partners like Tdjakes, we get reach in the community where they've got trust, they've got the relationships.
And then I know the community and they know that we were talking about. As we walked around, like you really you can see some of the issues that need to be dealt with and helped if you.
Will, absolutely, And that's why these partnerships are critical because we can go into those communities, we can understand on the ground what are the issues, and then how do we bring real solutions.
So what are some of the issues?
I think one of the important things for our our association and our partnership. There are many, many issues of One of the things about our partnership that's very interesting. We're not on the retail end of the business as it relates to pushing mortgages to people on the street. We're on the back yard community development so that people will have an opportunity to choose the vehicle of their choice.
That's the first thing that's important to understand. We determine that housing not only for underserved communities, but every major city in the country is facing serious problems with workforce housing. Mixed income housing creates a sociological atmosphere. Their education is
an issue. Technology is an issue. So we can't take it all on, but peace by piece we can begin to make the kind of statistical differences with KPIs that we both agree on as to how we can further move close the digital divide, close the divide with economic literacy.
This is I think my third time to New Orleans was here after the financial crisis, and it was all about how do we bring back the US economy here after Katrina and still seeing the devastation. Talk to us about what's going on in the New Orleans community that maybe the rest of the country isn't so aware of. Everybody goes about their day to day what's in front of them, but there are some cities that are definitely struggling and could use certainly an assist I can only.
Go about what I've read about New Orleans. I don't live here, but I have read some very interesting things. Either are not street people in the street. These are working people who can no longer afford to live in their house, that are literally raising their children on the sidewalk for the first time. So we have a tendency to drive by homeless people and think that they're monolithic.
But a lot of people that are entering into this phase are coming in as immigrants from the outside of the homeless system for the very first time, and the trauma associated with the dist devastation. Here's the other thing. They're working people, right, They're working people who can no longer afford the escalating rents that are perpetuating themselves all over the United States and quite honestly globally.
Well, let's go down that because I feel like Christy, we've been talking about the unaffordable aspect of housing for a long time, long time. I've been doing this a long time, and it's been this chronics and it feels like it's just getting worse, and it's getting worse. So how do you guys in this partnership go about fixing some of that.
Well, there's a couple of things that we're really focused on at Wells Fargo. I mean, one of the things that we did is the Worth Initiative Right Wealth Ownership through home Ownership and really focused on eight cities. We partnered with the nonprofits and we said, we'll give you a grant, help us solve this problem in your cities.
And we awarded in eight cities seven point five million dollars with the idea that we would be sixty million over the life of this grant and we would create forty thousand new homeowners with real solutions on the ground in these communities. So that's one way to start, is partnering with people on the ground that understand the issue in their community and really try to drive that forward. It's about supply, which is a significant issue. Right, you
can't build more dirt. The dirt is the dirt, and so what are the solutions to be able to get people in? And so it's about affordable supply. It's about looking for real solutions that are going to continue to get people in. And so we've got a commercial real estate deficit, especially with office in the community kind of post COVID. How do you retrofit some of that for affordable housing and really partner with the government to be able to get some of those office buildings retrofits. So
that becomes easier said than done. As we know, I mean, we've talked about this challenges, but it's start to be about solutions. So you've got to start with the conversation to see if you can really make some time.
We're talking to significant investment from Wells Fargo. Potentially over the next ten years. The partnership could result up to a billion dollars in capital and financing from Wells Fargo. That's real money, that's real money. How do you measure success? Give us some metrics here to make sure that you know, our audience knows what's successful and also the investment community knows what's successful.
Well, those are the KPIs that Chairman Jake's talked about. I mean, it's really about how many homeowners are we actually creating. On the development side, it's as looking at mixed use. Are we bringing developers to the table to help in the development of these communities. It's about inclusive communities and really looking at the number of people that we're serving in that. And so you will as we continue to develop the project, we'll look to what some
of those key KPIs will be. But that's the conversation we continue to have, which is these have to have real metrics that we can point to in terms of the lives that we change through this project.
Our thanks to Christy Ferchow of Wells Fargo and TDJ Chairman of the Tdjkes Group. They joined us in New Orleans this past week at the first ever Wells Fargo Black Business Leader Summit. You can catch the full conversation on our podcast feed. We're gonna have more from our trip to the Big Easy next hour. You're listening to Bloomberg BusinessWeek up next. As one group tries to claim its rightful seat at the table of America's financial system,
another says it's time to flip the table. Over why young Americans are increasingly down on capitalism and what one millennial journalist thinks is a better alternative. This is Bloomberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern Listen.
On Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg.
Business App, or watch us live on YouTube.
Well, as I was praying for our next guest, Carol, I found some fascinating data from the Pew Research Center. Get this, only forty percent of Americans who are ages eighteen to twenty nine if you capitalism positively. This is from a twenty twenty two PEU survey in August of twenty twenty two. So that forty percent is a low when it comes to age groups, and it's more than thirty percentage points lower than those who are sixty five and older.
It doesn't surprise me.
It doesn't surprise you have a favorable view.
You give conversations with younger individuals and they're like capitalism not good.
Yeah, I do.
And sometimes they outgrow it and sometimes they don't.
Well, you laid out some statistics, right, and the demographic differences don't stop there. There are differences among white, Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans with respect to how they feel about capitalism. So I'm guessing our next guest is going to have some thoughts about this.
Malika Jibali is the author of a new book, It's Not You, It's Capitalism, Why It's Time to break Up and How We Move On. She's also senior News and Politics that are at Essence Magazine. She joins us on Zoom from Atlanta. Milika, how are you, hi, am?
Well, how are you?
We're doing well? Thanks, congratulations on the new book. It's this is not just you know, we say book, but it's like not just like any other book. I mean, this has got some great illustrations in it. It's got some really cool charts, it's got some break in there as well.
It's awesome.
It's very very suggestible too.
It is totally lay it out. But I want to know about capitalism. What drew you to our questioning capitalism?
Well, you guys kind of hinted at it. It was a lot of things.
I had a foundation in these organizations and movements in the South of all places where black people were questioning it. If you look at where our economy really was founded upon in the South and really the entire country, it was based on the black labor. It was based on free black labor. And that is how we have capitalism today. And so you have these groups in the South who were looking at our role in this entire system, and we just haven't seen any system.
We haven't seen.
It thrive without that kind of exploitation, even if you look, you know, beyond the slave trade, if you look beyond plantation slavery. So that was sort of underpinning, I think, just my being open to be critical of the system. But I'm a millennial, like I lived in New York City. I was studying securities, regulation of all things at Columbia
Law School. I was studying primarily at the school social Work at Columbia, but literally the class was about looking at the financial crisis, where we got diverted from the core syllabus because Wall Street was falling apart. So we were reading newspaper article after newspaper article. It really became more like a doomed scrolling you know, newspaper session.
But it wasn't scrolling at the time.
We're flipping through the pages about all these financial industries that were just going underwater. And even then it was based on targeting, you know, low income families. So I think I started to make the connections between what we were experiencing on like a day to day and the regulations and the policy and the legal infrastructure behind it.
So all capitalism in your review bad.
Fundamentally, it's bad, and I think we all have to unpack what we mean by capitalism. You know, there are small business owners we would consider that, you know, the petty bourgeoiside is owning a small business and make you bad. I don't think inherently. I think what the critique is really about is that you have a system that incentivizes exploiting the labor as much as possible. It incentivizes getting as much profit as you can offer people as possible.
So not every person who owns a business is going to do that, but the system does incentivize that.
So if you are operating that way.
It's logical to do those things because that's how you survive in a capitalist economy.
That's Malika Jabali. She's the author of It's Not You, It's Capitalism, Why It's Time to break Up and How to Move On. Head on over to our podcast feed to find out what Malika says about sharing the earnings from her book sales and which country she says is the best economic system. That answer may surprise you. That wraps up the first hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio. Coming up in our next hour, our latest cover story on the most important
launch of Elon Musk's career. Except this one isn't rocket science. It's brain surgery. Don't worry, though, We're talking space travel too, because a new book explains what life on the red planet of Mars might actually be like and what it'll take to get there. This is Bloomberg Business Week. I'm Tim Stanovex. Stay with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines are coming up right now.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Easter on Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business app, and YouTube. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station Just Say Alexa playing Bloomberg eleven.
Thirty Plenty ahead in our second hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week, including our sit down with Martin Hoffman. He's the CFO and co CEO of On Holdings, and he explains what makes his company Sneakers unique and why they're taking a key slice of the sports world by storm. Plus, we discuss the promise in many possible perils of mankind's ultimate mission to colonize our neighboring planet. We're gonna speak with the co author of a brand
new book, A City on Mars. But first up this hour the cover story of the latest edition of Bloomberg Business Week magazine. It's available on newstands now, at Bloomberg dot com and always on the Bloomberg terminal. It's a story about Elon Musk, and it's also the launching pad for a new Bloomberg podcast series, Elon Inc. Each week, our team of experts will dove into the global influence of the world's richest man, spanning the likes of Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink,
the boring Company X, and more. This week's cover story looks at another one of Musk's firms, Neuralink, the brand implant company, is ready to start surgery after a key regulatory approval. The problem, it's still seeking volunteers for its first clinical trial. For more on what exactly Neuralink does and what a trial would entail, Let's bring in Bloomberg BusinessWeek features writer and acclaimed Musk biographer Ashley Vance joining
us along with Bloomberg BusinessWeek editor Joel Weber. They joined us remotely while Carol and I were in New Orleans at the Wells Fargo Black Business Leader Summit on Tuesday.
You can't touch a head, a human's head until you know, you get FDA approval, which Neuralink now has, so in the very near future, the company is going to actually start implanting devices in humans. And Ashley Vance has had an unprecedented front row as Neuralink has been developing this technology. Ashley, take us inside the company. I mean, Elon is known for doing bold things that you know, break open whole new industries. But this is sort of a test of Elon in a whole new way, now, right it.
Is, you know, I mean, this is a guy we've seen with SpaceX, with Tesla. You know, they've accomplished incredible things, but they've had some pretty severe bumps along the way. SpaceX blew up its first three rockets to talk about a decade to figure out how to mass produce cars, and we're talking about brain implants here. This is something that really can't go wrong on the first go round.
It's Neuralink is one, as we point out in the story of now dozens upon dozens of companies that are looking to do brain implants, spinal implants, mostly to help people in pretty dire circumstances paralyzed strokes, als.
Things like that.
So but you know, really this is the start of a very exciting field. Neuralink is as ambitious as zever with Elon's companies, but has a lot on the line with this first trial.
So how does neuralinks device and approach differ from the other competitors who have a little bit of a head start. They'd already had FDA approval and have been doing human implants. So what's going to distinguish the Neuralink approach.
Yeah, I mean there's a few things that the other companies. Yes, they're they've done amazing stuff. They're in bodies, I've been to Switzerland seen paralyzed people walking again with the spinal implant. The biggest difference here is it's full elon. You know, this implant is more powerful than the others by about
a thousand times. It's much smaller. The other devices require you to have like a separate battery pack, a separate computing system that amplifies signals that's usually implanted in someone's body. With neuralink. They're going to cut a tiny hole out of somebody's skull, put have a robot to the surgery that puts these electrodes, these electronic threads into somebody's brain.
And then the computing part, the computing part, the battery, the amplifier, all of that goes into that hole in the skull and then fits flush with your head and your skin goes over. You can't even really tell you've had it. And so it's this more powerful implant. It's miniaturized and it has the robot to try and turn this from like a one off type laboratory experiment into something that's repeatable.
So walk us through what the timeline looks like like, where they are now and what's going to hopefully transpire for what they're trying to accomplish.
Yeah, So the last time I was there was just about six weeks ago in Austin, where the company is moving a lot of its headquarters, and so they're already, you know, thousands of people have sort of signed up to get this implant, and now they're going through these applications to try and find the ideal candidate. Hopefully someone that's it is going to be someone who's paralyzed but is otherwise kind of young and overall healthy, and this
could happen within the next couple of months. They've already identified a hospital in Arizona, which is where this is likely to take place, and so it's just trying right now, they're just finding the exact right candidate for this first trial.
Where actually does this kind of fall on the Elon muster spectrum of priorities right now? Given that he has SpaceX Tesla, x slash, Twitter, the boring company, Neuralink, nine kids, x AI.
Don't forget XAI, which you know got announced over the XAI Thank you.
I mean, this is a guy, you know, well Ashley, Like, where does this fall on his list of things that he wants to do? Like and he wants to be part of his legacy.
It's pretty high up there. I mean he you know, all his companies always come with this we're going to save humanity kind of trapping, and this this fits into that. When it was first presented to the public, I mean he went straight for the AI sci fi We're gonna download Spanish and Kung Fu into our brains and and this this was going to be for everybody. Billions of
people would get the same plant. You know, it's much clearer now that for the foreseeable future, this is to help people in sort of dire circumstances, and so he takes that mission pretty seriously. It's interesting he is not at Neuralink on anything like a day to day basis. I mean he shows up in my experience like once a month and gets these kind of debriefs on what's going on. And the company's essentially run by like a triumvirate of people.
But do you think of people right who don't have that ability and are paralyzed if they could potentially have that capability going forward, that's pretty dramatic and life change.
Absolutely. Yeah.
Just to make it clear, I mean, the initial goal with this right is to be able to think words that then go into a text message or a WhatsApp message, So you're communicating with your loved ones, you're communicating about your wants and needs and with the outside world. And the other goal is to be able to move a cursor around a computer screen and a very fluid fashion. And you know, as any of us can imagine, I mean, just having access to a computer unlocks you know, so
many things that you can do. And so I mean this is it is like borderline miraculous type technology.
So to that, and what are the sort of the use cases that the company sees the implant being able to solve in the short term and then a longer term, and like how big of a growth pattern could they see based on the amount of interest they've had from people who have said that they're willing to get an implant.
Yeah, you know, in the short term, nere Link is building off like decades of research here. So people have had the ability to think a couple words at a time, to click yes or no on a screen. But with this extra horsepower, they want it to be where you're thinking words almost as fast as one of us could type on a computer today. So that's kind of the near term goal being able to navigate on the screen.
They also have a spinal implant that they're working on that would be paired with his brain implant, and the goal there is to restore movement in limbs and also feeling in limbs where you kind of short circuit or create a circuit really between your spine and the brain and from there, I mean, it moves. You know, I
can talk about very futuristic stuff. It would be far off, but it's things like improving your hearing, improving your site and kind of you know, just anything that your brain controls, which is a lot.
How promising Ashley is this? I mean, are we going to start seeing in your bestimation, in your opinion, will we start seeing the big healthcare companies try to get their hands on this type of technology.
You know, if you look at the traditional device makers that do things like deep brain simulation for epilepsy and things like that, it's been a very very slow moving field where a device gets made, comes out of a research laboratory and hardly gets advanced at Things have totally changed, though. I mean, Neuralink again is one of at least thirty
six other companies working on products in this field. So this thing, this whole field has moved from academia to hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars coming in from venture capitalists. And so I try not to get people's hopes up too much because we don't really know exactly how this is going to play out, if the products
are going to live up to their potential. But there's such an explosion of interest here, and in my experience of seeing people with the spinal implants, you know, it's encouraging. I mean, this is even even in the limited forms of the technology right now, it's life changing for people who get these implants. And so so if we're anywhere close to the hype, it will be a dramatic next ten or fifteen years.
That was Bloomberg BusinessWeek features writer Ashley Vance and BusinessWeek editor Joel Weber on this week's cover story. You're listening to Bloomberg business Week coming up. In addition to outfitting your brain with computer chips, Elon Musk also likes the idea of putting human beings on Mars and having them stay awhile, and though he may one day build the hardware to get us there plenty of challenges will remain.
I think he's famously said that, you know, once the rockets have been figured out, the rest is going.
To be easy.
But I think the whole point of our book is that rockets are one hard part, but there's a lot of other hard parts.
Kelly Wiener Smith is the co author of A City on Mars. She joins us on the other side. This is Bloomberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us Live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern Listen on.
Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, and the Bloomberg Business app, or wants us Live on YouTube.
Well more than half a century after Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, another space race is definitely heating up. We talk about it all the time. This time it's about the promising new frontier for US Earthlings.
That's you and me, Mars, is it?
I don't know?
Okay, So NASA's got a rover up there. Elon Musk is trying to get SpaceX's Starship Rocket up to snuff with the ultimate goal of getting people to Mars. But kel the question remains, is it actually a good idea for us even to be thinking about going to Mars and colonizing space.
I don't know Earth is, you know, having a rough time, so we might need another place to live anyway. This is the question of our next guest, who set out to answer it in her new book. Kelly Smith is the co author of City on Mars? Can we settle Space? Should we settle space? And have we really thought this through? She wrote this book with our husband, Zack, and she joins us on Zoom from it. Charlotte's develop Virginia Kelly, It's a subject we love to talk about. Elon Musk
loves to talk about it so many people. I'm the daughter of a rocket scientist. I love talking about this stuff. Tell us about this book. What you set out to do with your husband.
Zach Well, So, after writing our first book together, we thought that space settlements might be a near term possibility, something that might happen in our lifetimes, and so we set out to write the guide for what the next couple decades are going to be like as we become a multiplanetary species. And after four years of research, we essentially determined that we are not ready to take this on yet. We don't know enough about a lot of different topics. I'm happy to get into them, and that
actually depress into it. There could be a lot of problems.
What do you Okay, so talk to me about the idea, like the time frames that you're thinking of.
If it happens in our lifetimes, I think that might be a problem. So, for example, we don't know nearly enough about how space impacts the human body. It turns out data from the International Space Station don't tell us what we need to know.
About humans living on Mars.
So I think if we sent them there, there could be a lot of ethical problems, especially if they started making families and you know, exposing children to these environments that we don't understand very well sounds like a problem. And as you mentioned, there might be a race with China starting.
Okay, so hm, let's think about some of the challenges that we're not talking about just like you know, logistical things like actually having families, we're talking about things that are pretty serious, like okay, once you get there, how do you get back?
Yeah, we're talking about poop food and closing the loop.
Yeah you said it, Carol, That's what I really wanted to get too, Okay, so just go for it. Carol's fault.
Sorry, So closed loop ecosystems. Basically, if you're going to be living on Mars, it's going to be really expensive to get resources to you from Earth and for a long time, it's going to be really hard to extract resources from Mars.
And Mars is a two year trip there and back.
It's six months to get there and then you're stuck there for a while until Earth sort of comes back around again, and then it's six months to get home.
So you need to have a system that does not.
Break for at least two years and ideally recycles things, and we just do not have that technology figured out yet.
There was bios here too, which is sort of well known as being a bit of a catastrophe.
And then they're like, right now, we've got facilities in China, for example, that try to run these experiments and in a recent round they had to swap out two big guys for two smaller females because they weren't making enough oxygen.
That's where we are right now.
If that happened on Mars, that would be death instead of just swapping out crew members.
Do you think we're actually like, is Elon Musk the guy who's going to do this after doing all this research? Is he the one who's going to be able to do this?
I hope not.
So I have to admit I am very impressed with what Elon Musk has done with SpaceX and what he's done with Tesla, and I am coming to you right now from a Starlink connection, and so I love his projects. I don't think that he's the best person to lead us to becoming a multiplanetary species, but I'm not that worried about it because I think his timelines are way off. He's I think he's famously said that, you know, once, once the rockets have been figured out, the rest is
going to be easy. But I think the whole point of our book is that rockets are one hard part, but there's a lot of other hard parts, from figuring out, you know, the biology, to building the habitats that are still sustaining, to figure out the geopolitical hurdles that stand in our way.
There's a lot more than just rockets.
And so I don't think Mars is going to be leading our Musk is going to be leading us out there in our lifetimes.
Hey, Kelly, you have fun with this in the book, you and your husband. I mean, you get a PhD in ecology. You are a faculty member in the biosciences department at Rice Universities, so you're a serious You've got a serious side, but you have fun with this. Why was it important to lay this out? Is it because people are focusing too much time, money, and effort on this one. Maybe it doesn't quite make sense yet or may never Well.
Well, so, I mean we started the book thinking that it maybe did makes sense, But the more research we did, the more we discovered that there's a lot of a lot of topics that aren't getting, you know, for enough airtime and enough of people's attention, and the topics, you know, maybe don't sound as exciting as rockets and rocket science, and they're just sort of like boring, long term work that needs to be done to try to understand things
like how partial gravity impacts bone development across you know.
The course of a lifetime.
And we decided that we wanted to be funny in this book because we wanted to get really deep into the details. So, for example, there's five chapters on international law as it pertains to space, and when we pitch that to our editor, she's like, I don't know that the general public is dying for five chapters on international law, so you better make it funny.
And so we tried to do that.
Okay.
So when you're when you're thinking about what life actually looks like on on other planets, is it something that humans should actually pursue if the timeframe actually gives us enough time? Or should we focus on I don't know, making the most of the Earth that we've got.
So I think that space is not going to be a near term solution for any of the problems that we have here on Earth. So you know, for example, folks like Bezos argue that we should move all of our heavy industry to space so that we're not polluting Earth anymore, and maybe we can you know, zone Earth as light residential. We'll move a bunch of people up to space too. I think the numbers just don't work
out for stuff like that. So, you know, if you think about moving humans off the planet to take care of population growth issues, you have to move two hundred and twenty thousand people to space every day. I don't know where you're going to get those volunteers, and we don't even know how to house them. So I think any problem that we're likely tears. He's looking for volunteers,
and I think he'll get a lot. I don't know if he's going to get that many, and again we don't have anywhere to put them because we don't know how to keep that many people alive in space. But if you're interested in a backup for humanity, I think a long term plan B could be good. So you know, if you start the settlement on Mars now many generations from now, it might be self sustaining. And if you like humans, which I do, that it might be good to have a backup in case something happens on Earth.
But it's not going to save us anytime.
Soon, Kelly. One thing I would argue, though, is that many would say that the race to put a man on the Moon led to lots of innovation, Tan Belcer, I know you're gonna get there, no, but some really really important developments.
Right.
It really kind of brought nations together, scientists together on a single mission, but it led to so much many offshoots off of that wouldn't Similarly, the pursuit of Mars maybe lead to that as well, and it's a good kind of thing to focus on and have a goal of, as difficult as it may be.
Yeah, So I think that's an interesting point.
But so, you know, you talked about countries being brought together by the Apollo program, but the Apollo program was really fueled by a rift between the Soviet Union and the United States. JFK was sort of famously not even actually that interested in space, but it was a very clear thing that we could do to beat the Soviets.
And you know, it's a military prestige thing. The rockets that you're sending those humans to space and could also be delivering you know, missiles, And so I think a lot of times going to space is not necessarily about bringing people together and the new technologies. Historically it has also been about trying to show up our enemies, and that might be what drives us to.
Mars or to the moon again.
You know, competition with China is heating up at the moment, and I think we should you know, yes, yes, it might drive innovation and that's exciting, but we need to weigh that against you know, concerns with how this sort of this conflict might you know, spark problems down on Earth.
But yes, you know, you might get some.
New technologies, but there's other things you could invest in to get these new technologies too.
That's Kelly Wiener Smith. She's the co author of A City on Mars? Can we Settle Space? Should we settle Space? And have we really thought this through? She wrote the book with her husband Zach and that book just out this week. Still to come. On Bloomberg Business Week, we come back from the Cosmos and examine a company doing big things here on Earth by keeping our feet comfortably on the ground on Holding CFO and co CEO Martin
Hoffman on the Shoemaker's success and unusual business model. This is Bloomberg.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business App and YouTube. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just say Alexa play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Well on the tennis court, the Shoes Grace, the feed of US Open semi finalist Ben Shelton. The company is also working with world number one igesh Fiatec to develop the perfect custom shoe for her. And of course the tennis legend Roger Fetter has invested in the company. And the company, by the way, the ADR is the church traded here in the US, Carol. They're up nearly seventy percent so far this year.
You can hear a lot and see a lot about the company and it's chief financial officer. It's all in a new edition of a Chief Future Officer on Bloomberg Television that has aired. We're talking about on Holding, the Switzerland based parent company of Anshoes, and we've got with us here at Martin Hoffman. He's chief financial officer.
He's also co.
CEO of on Hooldings, which is really kind of fascinating. You guys work around the world. How would you describe kind of the business environment and the job market for you guys? Is it easy to get the workers that you need?
I mean generally business is very good, so demand remains very high. Of course it's not on record highs, but we bring out a lot of innovation, a lot of new products in all the different categories. So from running spoke about tennis outdoor and then also every day and finding people is easy and hard, so it's hard to find the right people. We really pay a lot of attention on culture because that's super important for us. At the same time, this year we had about four hundred people.
For that we get about forty thousand applications, so we can be very selective, which makes it easier to find it right.
Where are those are those where are those jobs available? Where are you hiring those people?
So we are a global company, so our team sits around the world. Of course, surric is the biggest office, so we have about two thousand people now, seven hundred of those are in Surich. Berlin is a big up for us, especially on the technology side. Portland is our big US office.
Shoe companies in Portland, Yeah, I mean, okay, Adidas is there, Nike's there.
Is the silicon value of the sports industry, yeah yeah, but for us.
Is it is it? But are you there? Because people who've worked in the industry, you want them to come work for you and you know they have experienced there.
Now it's actually it was more coincidence. So our first sales director in the US he lived in Portland, so that's why we started there. We thought, yeah, we tap into the pool of the industry. But I think our first twenty hires were not from the industry, which will actually quite good because it helped us to do things differently and to disrupt. Of course, now is this is this is changing. I had a pleasure to live there for two years and when we started a brand, I
moved over and helped building. It's the great city, that's.
How do you guys, I mean, you guys have a very distinct approach and you talk about innovation, and I feel like it's a it's a big industry, it's a competitive industry. There's a fair amount of entrance in it. Talk to for those who might not be familiar about how you guys distinguish yourself from the rest.
So if you see the shoes, many of the shoes have the holes and the outside, which is one of the office design marks that we that we have, and this allows us to really engineer how the sol and the shoe behaves. So it's not just the material that we use, it's also the shape and the size of the of the holes.
And then and.
From that we developed the whole concept, including the speedboard that is in the shoe, but then also of coross the materials. It's a lot about sustainability and and then always combining design and performance with sustainability is super important for us.
Do you get your shoe on an athlete and noticed, do you you see the direct connection in terms of sales and the impact that that has on the brand.
Yeah, we we call this the strategy that we have. There is lightning and rain. So lightning is really all about the making, making it strike and allowing those athletes to perform on the highest level. But then it of course, the goal is that the every day runner also recognizes that and versus the shoes, it's not the same shoe. It needs to it needs to perform differently. But yeah, clearly we see we see it, and this is why
we invest in that. We have built our own athlete team, which is called an Athletic club, and we have seen so many great results this year, and the same is happening in tennis, so of course, and Shelton being in the semi finals in the US Open was such a big moment. Now he won his first at puh in In in Tokyo, because we had one again in Beijing, so it's it's just amazing.
Yeah, Carolyn, I actually got to go to the US year. We broadcast from there each year and it was it was great to see, especially the young Americans makes such a mark this year. Okay, so the manufacturing process for the shoes, where are the shoes made Vietnam, Switzerland.
Yeah, so all the shoes are developed in Switzerland, so we have a big development team there. Production is predominantly in Vietnam for footwear, for for power. We also have parts in Europe, parts in China, but really Vietnam has developed the capabilities to manufacture the best high performing footwear in in the world, and so that's why we're there.
Do you have to have a do you have a contract manufacturer there? Is that how it works? Or do you guys have to build your own facility.
No.
We we worked with with factory partners, so we don't run our own factors. We have our own people in the factory to to make sure that the quality is there and really translating the technology into into manufacturing. But but it's a it's quite a complex process. So I mean a shoe goes through almost two hundred and fifty hens before it's it's done, So there a lot of pieces in the shoe and and so that's you need to have good partners and we have those and they
invest with us also in sustainable manufacturing. You know, how can you how can you reduce the emission of the of the manufacturing itself.
That's really part of the culture. I know, you know, the idea of the athlete, right because the company was for you know, created, so that is a big part of your culture. But sustainability is too, and talk to us a little bit about that.
Yeah, it's it's like this the third pillar of our DNA, so I said it performance, design, sustainability. Those are the three things. It's it's it's at the heart of what we do. We have a very young team, so it comes very natural from from the inside. And for us, it's it's all about developing shoes that are made for circularity. I think this is the big the big goal of the of the industry.
Well and the subscription service, right kind of exactly.
And I mean we created the first shoe that is fully circular, made out of castor bean, so it's also not actually fuel based. And and yeah, so we we said this is a shoe that you should never own. So we only made it available in a subscription model, so you you rent it, you pay a monthly fee, you use the shoe, and when using the shoe is ready to be returned, then we take it back and send a new pair. And this is the beginning of a journey for us. We will be expanding the technology
into into more models. Another angle that we had is what we call clean cloud is actually using carbon from from the air and making a shoe out of that. And and here we actually much faster in bringing that into into mass market in the in the near future.
Do you do you ever see that you could go fully subscription with with the shoes and nobody would buy the issues.
I think you need to offer different business models with your with your with your sustainable products. So I think in the end the goal is that as many people as possible by the products and by sustainable products, right, you don't want to restrict this by by a model. But at the same time you also want to encourage
the customer to return the product. And so this is this is where we spend a lot of energy and our our cycling program gives us so many insights into how the customer reacts and what does it take for them to return it. And and it's also such an incredible moment in the life cycle of the of the relationship with the customer because it's clear indication I need a new pair, so you want to engage with the customer.
Then how many people are doing that right now? And it's kind of a trial right right now, But how many people are doing these subscriptions?
So we are at about Serdi Sauson's subscriptions.
At the moment.
That's Martin Hoffman. He's the chief financial Officer and co CEO of On Holdings. He joined me and Carolyn Studio ahead of his appearance in the New York City Marathon last Sunday. By the way, Martin completed it in just under three hours and forty one minutes. You can hear more about the strategy at On and the company's omni channel approach just head on over to our podcast feed, And of course, Martin is the subject of the latest edition of Chief Future Officer on Bloomberg. You can view
that entire program on our YouTube page. You're listening to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Coming up, Sustainability the old fashioned way.
When we look at what's really happening with recycling today we see a huge opportunity for improvement.
We speak with Keith Harrison, founder and CEO of the Recycling Partnership. When we return.
This is bloom You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern Listen.
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Well, the numbers, Carol, are not pretty. Less than a quarter of the two ninety two point four million tons of municipal solid waste reader trash that was generated back in twenty eighteen was recycled. That's according to the latest figures from the US EPA. Actually it's kind of more than I thought it would be.
Yeah, and our next guest actually thinks we can do a lot better. Keith Harrison is the founder and CEO of the Recycling Partnership. It's an industry funded nonprofit that
advocates for improving recycling infrastructure and accessibility. The Recycling Partnership says it over the last eight years, it's diverted seven hundred and seventy million pounds of new recyclables from landfills, which has avoided more than six hundred and seventy thousand metric tons of greenhouse gases, and Keith joins us on Zoom from Washington, DC.
That's legit. That's a lot of a lot of greenhouse gases that have been avoided. Keith, thanks so much for joining us. I love talking about recycling because I think that there are so many I'm composting, got the garbage disposal to separating, you know, here in New York, we got to separate everything into you know, it's not single stream.
But one thing that Carol and I were surprised to learn recently is specifically about plastics and to what extent plastics are not actually recyclable because a lot of people have this misconception that if they recycle it, then it just gets reused and made into something else, which is beautiful.
And if we see that thing on the bottom that like circular, we think, okay, cares about the number in there exactly?
Well, yeah, you know what.
There's been a lot of recycling has been in the news a lot lately, and some of the stories are really depressing. And I want to start with the story of hope that it's not working exactly as we needed to, But we can fix the sucker and then that then we'll have something else to talk about on the other side. So when we look at what really happening with recycling today, we see a huge opportunity for improvement. We see that seven out of ten cardboard boxes and up in the trash.
That's very similar to seven out of ten pet bottles and glass bottles also end up in the trash.
Is that fixable?
Yes?
What happens when we do.
Even more carbon savings?
As you outline, we talk a lot about trash here, you know, Carol talks a lot of trash.
That's what happens.
I do that too, Sorry, guilty as charged, No, but I do wonder about, you know, the impact of landfills and garbage. Just remind everybody about the impact that they have on the environment.
Yes, landfills are purposely made to keep out air and sun and rain. We purposely cap them, We encapsulate them actually in plastic to keep things from breaking down because when they break down without air, light and rain, it creates methane. That anaerobic state inside of a landfill creates methane. However, well, although the intent is to prevent things from breaking down.
They still do, and in fact, landfills are one of the biggest emitters of landfill of methane, which is one of our strongest and most potent greenhouse gases.
So we should all be composting, is what you're saying, back to the content rate.
Yes, actually, food waste is.
The EPA just released a really good report about the role of food waste and organics. So banana peels and your yard trimming. Trimming is what happens when those in land and landfill. But it's also you know, things that naturally break down like fiber, paper products and things like that. So we have to be really careful before we casually toss something into a landfill because it is directly connected to the climate.
That was Keith Harrison, founder and CEO of the Recycling Partnership. More from keif on the impact of policy and helping us generate less can be found on our podcast feed. And that wraps up the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio. Thank you so much for joining us. Be sure to tune into Bloomberg Business Week Monday through Friday starting at three pm Wall Street Time on Bloomberg Radio. And check out our new channel on Serius xm it's
Channel one twenty one. You can also watch our daily broadcast on YouTube. Just search Bloomberg Global News, and we're simulcast on Bloomberg Originals, available at Bloomberg dot com, Slash Originals, and streaming platforms like Roku, Amazon, fireTV, Samsung TV Plus
and more. Find our Bloomberg Business Week podcast at Bloomberg dot com, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts, and the latest edition of the magazine is available on newstands now at Bloomberg dot com and always on the Bloomberg Terminal. Have a good and safe weekend everyone. For Carol Masser, I'm Tim Stenovic. Stay with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines are coming up right now.
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