Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend - October 29th, 2021

down the stretch of well ahead. On the program, we're gonna talk to a pair of executives who enjoyed strong thurm quarters speaking of earnings and even more success on the horizon. That's what they're saying. It's Chipotle a CEO Brian Nicol also e non Cries Mattel's CEO talking Tacos and Toys. Toys and TACCOs say then five times fast, both of those companies impacted in different ways by rising

prices and supply chain constraints. Will also speak with the CEO of a T and T business about the fight to acquire and retain top talent and why five G is ready to change the game in every corner of the economy. I have five g already. I don't sorry, I got that old iPhone ten. Work on that. Maybe under the tree this year, right, if the supply chain can figure it out. Well. A record year for mergers and acquisitions to the tune of a cool five trillion dollars. Also a group of E s G nay sayers. You

spoke to them, Carol. They're making their voices heard in the most critical moment for the American workers since the nineteen forties. We are talking the labor movement. It's our domestic cover story. It is, indeed all of that straight ahead. We begin there with a look at this week's issue of Bloomberg Business Week, and specifically our international cover story, which is a look at the struggles of working women

in fifteen of the world's top business cities. It was also a Bloomberg Big Take this week, and it's a story in the Solution section of the magazine. Ruth David and Adam Blenford wrote it. It ranks the performance of these hubs in five areas that relate to structural and

social challenges facing women, including safety, mobility, maternity, equality, and health. Yeah, exactly, looking at what's going on in a lot of top business cities, and specifically they really talk about the abduction of Sarah Everard from a London street and marked by a police officer, raped and murdered the thirty year old marketing executives for a furious uproar encapsulated by one refrain

on social media. She was just walking home. And so talking about women, we so often talk on you write tim about women moving up the corporate ladder and having access uh in terms of those senior positions, trying to make inroads, and yet when it comes just to basic safety of women walking around in our major cities, it's

lacking big time. And that's what's particularly surprising. I think too many people who saw this story were a data company Bloomberg, and we love numbers, and this takes a data and analytics approach to ranking fifteen cities, Toronto topping the list with the highest overall score, Beijing and sal Pallo the worst. Yeah, exactly. European capitals such as Berlin, Paris and London scored high because of strong maternity and

legal rights. What was interesting it was a scale of one to five on those five criteria that you mentioned, safety, mobility, maternity, equality and health and yet none of them scored really high on all of it, right, not a lot of fours if any in there. Meanwhile, we mentioned earnings at the top. One of the tech giants to report this

past week was Facebook. A lot of news for the company, including a name change, Facebook announcing on Thursday that it's rebranding itself as Meta as it goes all in on the metaverse. Before that, though, as I mentioned, a lot of news on Facebook this week, there was a Bloomberg report that the company had kept investors in the dark about falling usage among teens on their platform. Ker Wagner

had a hand in breaking that story. He also wrote a piece in this week's Technology section of the magazine that goes into the social networks. Next chapter, we're talking the metaverse, now, I believe you have to say the metal I mean, I'm still trying to figure out what it is. Uh yeah, I know you're shaking your head at me, your eyes are wide, and you're like, I know a lot of investors are trying to figure out what it is as well. I think a lot of

people understand the metaverse in the context of gaming. Robe for example, is sort of a go to But how does Facebook bring it to sort of productivity, and especially monetize it if they're thinking about the next generation for the social network, which by the way, is closer to twenty years old than it is to ten years old. Monetizing the metal, that's what it's about. There's a must read feature by pre Anon and Mark berg In about a company called go Guardian, the leading developer of education

at tech software, also known as ed tech in the biz. Yeah, absolutely, you're so cool. What it really amounts to do, though, is educational surveillance software. And it turns out the pandemic. We know this, We saw this doing u COVID nineteen, the schools being shut down, the pandemic, revitalizing the ed tech industries post to get more digital technology into the classroom. And much like our smartphones, these programs know exactly exactly

what students are doing at all times. Well, for more than a decade, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have been pushing digital technologies and public schools at the same time, though they're struggling to explain how exactly they were helping students. Yeah, exact. COVID forced even the more reluctant schools to finally embrace digital learning tools that have continued to be central to

classrooms even as schools have reopened back in person. Go Guardian allows school administrators to watch everything students are doing on their laptops and tablets. Sound a little creepy, it does. Sorry, it's this constant battle tug of war that we have with technology. Look what it can do for us, Like there's just so much ease, so much information. But at the same time all that information, we're wondering about our privacy.

What are we giving up as a result privacy? And I also wonder about the relationship between students and administrators when it comes to trust and how much responsibility they're putting on students that we're not putting on students. A really, really good point. And then in the finance section of the magazine this week a story from Robert Schmidt and Jesse Westbrook. It's about a government post that we don't often think about. It sounds like a schnoozer. Snoozer, Can

I say that? We're talking about the position of the Comptroller of the Currency. It's a very important one, it is, and President Biden's nominee for the position is turning out to be well a really divisive one. Sally i'm a Ova is a Kazakh San born graduate of Moscow State University, the recipient of a V. I. Lenin scholarship. Some Republican lawmakers have gone so far as to call her a Marxist. Yeah, exactly, a lot of controversy, and this is why it's not

a snoozer of a story. It's a really important one. She'll have a lot of oversight for some different things. Of course, that position the controller of the currency. It's an agency that supervises banks and help set rules for Wall Street. But she's also going to be if she got the job, overseeing kind of all of the changes, whether it's cryptocurrencies or fintech. All right, some really great reads in the magazine this week, so check it out.

The magazine on newsstands now, at Bloomberg dot com, at business week dot com, and of course on the Bloomberg terminal. Coming up next. Global m and A is heading for a record five trillion dollar year, thanks in part too low interest rates and abundant cash and desperate headwinds that include, of course, that we are still fighting this global pandemic.

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 at the Milk and Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills earlier this month, I hosted a panel on the space of M and A merigers and acquisition deals that we have seen thus far in it has been on fire. To yeah, I've been

a banner year. And one of the panelists was Tyler Dixon, co had of City Groups, Global Banking, Capital Markets and Advisory Business. And to say he's bullish on M and A in the near term, well, that would be an understatement. Corporates are a great position of strength. Sponsors are cashed up, and we even have over four hundred spacks out in the marketplace looking for activity. So we think there's a good foundation right now and confidence in uh CEOs and

c suites across the world are quite substantial. Basically every industry group, including tough industries like energy, have seen an up cycling of activity, and we look across the globe. That will not only be a record gear in US activity will be a record dear internationally because they can do deals, because they have to do deals both. That was Tyler Dixon of City Group and Carol. His words are ringing true in a big way. Yeah so true. Tim.

This week in the magazine in Fact Our Deals Reporter at Hammond, he writes about the importance of psychology in this year's record deal making boom, one that could exceed five trillion dollars in total value when all is said and done in any circumstance, and astonishing number. But when you look at all the environmental factors going on in the background, and why you wouldn't want to do a deal right now? I think you know alsa well And what's interesting Ed, And you really did like set up

me so well. But what's interesting too is you know these deal makers that I talked to bankers over at City, at Deutsa and elsewhere. They said that in many ways, UM members of the C suite are getting kind of poked and product by their board for not doing deals right now. Talk to us about what you're hearing. Why these deals are getting done despite the backdrop of a pen emic and worries about the outlook and supply chain

problems and so on. I think part of it is just the cost of an ursher is is also very high. Look obviously, doing a deal at any time carry some risk, and you know you can get it wrong and that can be consequential. As the CEO, you can do your borders or your job stories the board, you can be

tossed out. But I think right now, with the amount of disruption that's going on a cross industries and the sort of rapidity of change that almost their industry is going through, I think there are a real cost and not doing stuff and not growing. And you know, at the moment, a lot of companies are matched out on organic growth and M and A is obviously a very quick and efficient way a lot of the time to to to sort of turbo charge that growth in organically.

In reporting this story, and you also looked at how investors react to companies that when a company does announce an acquisition, both to the company getting acquired and the

one doing the acquiring. What did you learn. It's a really interesting trend that we've seen to him where you have this, uh, this sort of anomaly in the market where shareholders are coming out when companies and ounced deals and saying, you know, this is something we do like and they're reflecting that in the way the shares trade obviously a quisitive companies and seence shares trade up, which

goes against almost very historical trends per virus. The recent paper US interest deal that was talked about right before I came on, obviously that was slightly different where you sort paper trends down and trade down heavily on news and some extent we think that's why they've now pulled the plug on that particular deal. But yeah, investors again, look, they're they're happy to see companies going out, getting on the front foot and pulling whatever leavers they can to

achieve growth in this market. And I think that all comes back to the fact that we are seeing, you know, not reckless deals. We're not seeing companies go out to try and do very very large, complex, you know, sort

of horizontal mergers. This is much more vanilla. Let's go out, let's do a deal that actually is in line with what we said we want to do strategically from perhaps it gets a slightly quicker from eight to than we would get their organic to Well, how much of it too, is pandemic related or pandemic push and where you know,

trends disruptions. Digitization was happening, but it might have happened over the next three to five years, and all of sudden it was like, Bam, it's happening now, and I've got to possibly do a deal and acquisition to put my business in the right place to embrace that. Yeah, And I think that that comes back to this issue of disruption and the speed at which it's occurring now. And as you say, the pandemic sort of supercharged some

of that activity. But you look at any industry now and they are all you know, if they're not taking industries, they take enabled industries. And so a lot of them, we've seen a lot of this already this year, are going and doing acquisitions that don't necessarily look like a sort of straightforward you know, an industrial company buying an

industrial company. They're an industrial company buying a software company because they're realizing that actually, this is the way we're going to keep growing, and it's much easier to go out and buying something small that we can just tuck in than build our own capabilities in it in an area that perhaps is not where we have existing skills. How do spacts play into the boom that we've seen

over the last eighteen months. Well, look, in terms of the sort of headlines and the amount of noise and interest they command their normals, but in terms of the actually dollar value they're very, very tiny. You know, certainly if you look at the sort of the dollar value of the spacts themselves rather than the dollar value of the companies, they often reversed into as a minority holder

you're talking, you know, it's it's it's a minimus. But obviously trends they have been, you know, a driver of different kinds of activity. I'm sure you've seen some companies go out and do M and A because they were sort of worried about what might otherwise happened with the

spect potentially buying a target that they were interested. So I think it's contributed, But certainly there is a quite serious dislocation between the amount of noise spect have generated in the actual contribution they've had to overall M and as here. So, all right, if we end up with five trillion and then some this year, does that mean things necessarily slow down? Because I know from my panel they all seem gangbusters that it would continue into two

But what are you hearing? I mean, money is so cheap it's easy for They've also got a lot of you know, cash to play around with. Yeah, look, money is cheap, and that's often sited as one of the reasons we're seeing this this great market. What I would say to that is money has been cheap for a long time, So I don't think it's just cheap money. I think there's a lot of momentum going through the

m and A market at the moment. Some of that is obviously catch up after we had that slowdown during COVID, and I think some of that will continue into two. The conversations we've been having, we had a common taxmen Aban Core on Blueboo TV is talking about the strength of the pipeline. They actually think it's stronger than the current market conditions we're seeing, which would suggest going into two, we're going to have a you know, a lot of

deals backed up ready to go. Whether it continues through two stories, who knows um. I think a lot of that will depend on on what we see, you know, in sort of global affairs, what we see the domestic economy, but also obviously some of the sovereign risks that that was Bloomberg News deals reporter Ed Hammond, And we should note that Ed mentioned there is one potential fly in the m and a ointment on the horizon. That would be rising interest rates. That's the flying an ointment on everything.

It is. And we keep hearing from feed officials It's not gonna happen next year. It's not gonna maybe not happen until we shall see. Maybe it's the only thing. It's not a flying anpointment of his inflation, right, what do you mean, Well, it's the point is is to curb inflation. That's why our interest rates go higher. That's true, right, exactly, alright.

Still ahead on Bloomberg Business Week, a panel of investing in legal minds question the effectiveness of environmental, social, and governance initiatives, and one of them, black Rock's former chief

investment officer for sustainable Investing, is among the skeptics. This is Bloomberg broadcasting from the financial capital of the world, Bloomberg he Love Rio in New York, to Washington, d C. Bloomberg to Boston, Bloomberg one oh six one, to San Francisco, Bloomberg nine to the country Sirius XM Chamber one ninety and around the globe. The Bloomberg Business and Bloomberg Radio dot com. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer

and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stenovan on Bloomberg Radio. At this week's Bloomberg Equality Summit, I spoke with a panel that's taking some of the shine off the concept of investing in environmental, social and governance initiatives. The Agitators, a group drawing attention to the downside of e s G. On the panel Tarek Fancy, founder and CEO of the Roomy Initiative, also the former Chief investment officer for sustainable investing at Blackrock. Lord Murphy, president of the law firm

that bears her name. A pioneer of the corporate civil rights audit, She's known for conducting racial audits of Facebook and Airbnb. Also Barbara and Bernard, founder in c IO at Windcrest Capital. This excerpt of our conversation begins with Turk expressing his skepticism of e s G. The answer to climate change is clearly. I mean, Nobel Prize winning economists are telling us it has to be policy. Reform

starts with a price on carbon. That is a systemic reform um that you know addresses a systemic problem that

has to be government action. And I think that the economic system is being so seized by a set of narratives that have underlie the system and are almost invisible that emerged in the eighties that tell us that free market solve all problems, that even when faced with market failures, you know, thirteen years after the financial crisis, we're still sort of hitching our ride to a set of solutions that don't really work. And the problem is the asset

management industry is incentivized today. I mean, no one wants taxes and regulation, even if that's clearly the solution, right,

and climate change is gonna cost money. Someone's gonna have to pay, and so faced with that reality, there's an incentive to sort of take one hand and hold off taxes and regulation with a set of narratives that say that business will solve these problems all by themselves, kind of like a sports game where you know, the athlete now we need any referees, will self referee, and good

sportsmanships the answer. And then into the growing social angst that starts to develop because people see nothing getting done on these major problems, then there's an incentive to sell a bunch of products that for the most part have no empirical evidence at all that they create any kind of impact or lower emissions, but are lucrative, particularly for financial you know, for asset managers who are facing feet

pressure for you know, largely increasingly commoditized products. Bart Whare wants you to come in on this because over the summer we did see the European market for sustainable investing contracted by two trillion. There was kind of a rethink, right because of the introduction of anti greenwashing rules. So does that tell you that maybe we're getting smarter about E s G or do you still think a lot of the E s G that's out there is nonsense. I think E SG needs to be disrupted. I believe

an E s G two point out. An E s G two point oh is about materiality and authenticity, and that's the portfolio that sits at the intersection of profit and purpose. So I believe in a lot of what Terrek said, but I'm not as jaded. I'm hopeful um And so I think E s G one point oh was either investing in naturally low carbon tech companies or the index hugging just slightly overweight tech slightly underweight energy,

and that is nonsense, and that is grainwashing. And when you talk about this big numbers in E s G, the problem is seventy E s G money is passively invested. So we will not have an energy transition unless we have an investor transition. And so the reason Engine one point oh was so popular. Engine number one was so popular that I think was it enabled these large passive asset managers to take an E s G box without changing their passive investment strategy. So I'd say we've gone

from passive to passive aggressive. And if I look at that strategy, if even if they get everything they want, what are they doing accelerating the demise of Exxon Like, I'm not sure that's the answer either. I think E s G two point oh is active management because I think you get what you inspect, not what you expect. Laura, come on in, because I think you have created a new format for companies to really take an inward look.

Talk to us about what we're doing. Do you really think companies are something's happening that they are looking much more inward when it comes to their biases and how they approach customers. And clients and how they do things. We don't want greenwashing type activities in the civil rights space. It's you know, over uh five corporations said something after the murder of UM George Floyd. And you know, there were a lot of good statements, and there were charitable contributions,

and there were a few good programs. But companies need to go deeper. And so I've outlined what I think is a set of baseline practices for companies to use if they are serious about ending discrimination within their own walls. And it goes further than diversity, equity and inclusion. I mean, we're asking questions a lot. We want companies to ask questions like are my products hurting communities? Um? Do people with disabilities have access to our our our platform? Are

we locating toxic waste plants in minority communities only? You know, is our facial recognition software working on people with darker skin? And how do we address those practices and make companies more equitable so that they stopped hurting people. That was Laura Murphy, Barbara and Bernard and Taric Fancy. Check out that full conversation. You can do that by going to Bloomberg Live. Dot Com clicking on the Equality Summit. You're

listening to Bloomberg Business Week. Up next Chipotle chairman and CEO Brian Nicol on earnings and how much more you can expect to pay for that burrito? And what we really want to know, how long will their briskets stick around? This is Bloomberg. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovich from Bloomberg Radio. Earning season definitely in full swing this week. It was very,

very busy. One company we keep an eye on is a company that is considered the creator of the fast casual dining space. We're talking about Chipotle Mexican Grill. Chipotle's third quarter sales topped analysts estimates as the company benefited from price increases and digital ordering, along with vaccination efforts that help bring some customers actually back into the restaurants. Ye coming back. Same store sales by the way up fifteen point one percent last quarter. That's a key metric.

Oi's the brisket bonanza is another thing. All of this were among the topics we discussed with chairman and CEO Brian Nicol. New many items just one part of the story, though another is pricing power. We asked Brian Nicol about his company's ability to pass along the rising costs of both labor and commodities to Chipotle's customers. Yeah, you know,

we we look at that both in the past. Right, We have had some price recently, um, and we were fortunate to have such a strong value proposition that we didn't really see any resistance from consumers. We continue to attract closely what our value proposition looks like, and we continue to have a really strong value uh score with consumers. And you know, a lot of people ask me what

does that really mean? You know, the way I bring it to light a chicken burrito or a chicken bowl, which is the number one thing we sell, it's still less than eight dollars. And so when you stop and think about the you know, the culinary the quality of those ingredients, the customization of the meal for less than eight dollars, you're hard pressed to find that anywhere else. And that is what we mean by hey, we get we've got a tremendous value proposition, and we still have

lots of pricing power moving forward. So you know, as I've said, many times before. It's really the last thing we like to pull. We prefer you get the growth, find ways to cut costs to really be efficient. But if we need to use the pricing lever, we do it.

We've done it in the past. We're pretty judicious with it, uh and fortunately we've navigated it really well well given the challenging environment that you describe to us, when realistically, could you see yourself raising prices again, you know, it's something that we're looking at right now. We traditionally always evaluate near the end of the year what do we think inflation is gonna look like for you know, wages and a lot of our other input costs, So we

always look at that. And then obviously, in this environment right now, there's a lot of things that have been unexpected. Right Freight is really high. We believe that's going to be temporary versus wages, I think are going to continue to have some additional upward movement. Um, so we've got

to figure out how to balance that. But you know, we're trying to figure out what is the priceing we want to take to cover things that are permanent versus the things that are temporary, and then balance that with you know, we have tremendous growth in front of us, so we want to make sure we're leveraging the growth

to offset some of these costs too. Um, because at the end of it comes back to I want people feeling about the chicken burrito that they buy from us, you know, I want them what we're saying, well, I got a lot more for my money than any place else when it comes to taking a great meal. Hey, if we may just when we're question on prices, Brian, I mean, I think you guys raise prices MANU prices by as much as four percent earlier in the year.

So if we think about what you might raise prices by, do you have a number that's kind of being talked about at the at the company that you guys are just bouncing around. You know, I think we've been pretty consistent. We we usually take about two to three percent um, and you know, we take a look at as I mentioned, all those other variables to help us inform what that should look like. Um, you know, whether or not it's gonna be necessary to go beyond that, that's what we're

waiting to try and understand. So you know, the good news is we've got the strength of you know, a really powerful brand with I think excellent results. That gives us the flexibility on the timing of how we phase in pricing if we need to go beyond the two or three percent that we've taken historically. One of the challenges that many companies like yours are facing now is labor.

We talked about it so much at Bloomberg, and our audience is really familiar with the challenges that companies are facing. How is staffing right now? What percent are you staffed? If you think about open positions that you have at restaurants throughout the country. Yeah, we're We're pretty fortunate. Um, you know, back in I guess it was like March

April earlier this year, staffing was really challenging. Uh, you know, it kind of was one of those scenarios where as our dining rooms reopened, consumers became much more mobile, our demand just took off, and you know, we were caught behind staffing our restaurants and it took us a while to get caught up. You know, we still have you know a couple of hundred restaurants where you know, we're challenged with the staffing. The good news is, though it's

much more across the country. Um, you know, it's a couple of restaurants in the region here or there, and we're being very you know, surgical on how do we ensure that restaurant gets the staffing necessary to be successful. But it's a tough environment, make no mistake, And I

kind of come back to where we started earlier. It's like the way we recruit is we talked about the strength of the brand, we talk about the growth opportunities, and then obviously this is what the proposition looks like when you get started with us, you know, from wages to benefits to you know, being a part of a great team. So, um, it's a tough environment, no doubt. Are you at all worried, Brian about workers trying to

unionize in this environment? I mean it does feel like as they get you know, hourly gains, there feels like the workers feeling empowered at this point. Is that at all on your mind? You know, Look what I what I want to make sure is we're giving our employees a great experience. And my belief is Chipotle is a place that gives employees tremendous personal growth as well as

you know, business growth. And there aren't many places where you can join an organization as a crew member and in a couple of years find yourself running a multimillion dollar restaurant with a team of thirty to thirty five employees. But I think what also gets people excited is and then there's a path to being a leader of multiple units, right where you get a up the store and now you're overseeing seven eight restaurants, and you know the next

levels our team director where you're overseeing restaurants. The fact that we're gonna go build three thousand or more restaurants, the growth for you professionally it's just tremendous. And then we want to make sure we're providing everything we can so that personally you're growing. Um. You know, we have tuition reimbursement, that free degrees, mental health benefits, but you know it's I think when you give people a great experience at the job, they're delighting to be a part

of it. And that's our mission is I want people feeling great about working at your pole so that you know, frankly, when they tell people where they were, they do it with a lot of pride. Yeah, and you can definitely feel it and I've seen it first time, where you guys work with people to to to move them through and up the chain in terms of responsibility. Hey, one

thing we've got to ask you. I know we've talked about this before you and I were together, just as everything was shutting down, you know, thinking about protocols and what it all meant. How do you plan to handle that vaccine mandate that we're starting to see for large employers UM for your restaurant, especially since you don't franchise. How do you do that? What's the plan? Yeah, well, obviously we're still waiting for all the details to come

from OSHA on what that looks like. But yeah, you touched on we have clostal a hundred thousand employees UM and you know this is going to be a logistical challenge. But nonetheless, we've got a great team that leads our UH well Being and Health program and UH they've done

a phenomenal job to COVID. I'm confident we'll figure out how to navigate, you know, meeting or complying with this new UH ocean requirement around you know, vaccinations are getting a COVID test, a negative COVID tests or to work Um. You know, I'm hopeful that you know, the feedback has gotten back to the folks that are making the policy

on this so that it is something that's executable. Um, because you know, I'd rather have a program that we can comply and actually make progress versus a program that sends us towards You're not doing testing yet, are you all right? So we know smoke brisket is a limited run. We're here, it's going to even end even sooner, Brian, because it's been so popular. So what's the next thing you guys are experimenting with plant based items? What's the

next thing that we can maybe look forward to? Yeah, well, the the uh, the next exciting menu item is this plant based riso. Um. You know, we we've added in test in a couple of markets. I you know, had the ability to go out and visit a few of these markets and I'll tell you what. It just tastes amazing. I'll give you a pro tip right now, like plant based triso with some white rice and caeso and a taco. Uh.

It's tough to be so. Um. You know it makes you feel really good about eating plant based that that much I can tell you. Um, so yeah, we're excited about that. We've got a great culinary team. They're working on a lot of other ideas down the road. Uh. The idea is we always want to be listening to what consumers are asking us to provide and then also leading consumers palates. And I think we did pretty good

job this year demonstrating that rightly. We did cauliflower rice, which was leading consumer palettes, the Caseydia digitally was listening to consumer's request, and then the smoke brisket I think was just a kind of a culinary plus up. So you know, the sauce of those guys created around our brisket is just fabulous um, and you know, the meats terrific. So I'm I'm loving kind of the cadence that we've got. Our culinary team does a fabulous job, and uh, our

operators do a great job of executing. That's Departa chairman ITTs EO. Brian Nickel. Uh you ready for that brisket. I love brisket. We do our own in the backyard cooks for a long time, like you cook it for I don't know, a million hours or something like that. Hey, one thing particularly fascinating about Chipole story is the simplicity of its menu. It's a far cry from what we saw when Brian Nicole was at Taco Bell with so

many different options. So I think there's a really big emphasis placed on menu innovation and what the company is going to do next to bring in new products and services. Yeah. I mean they're talking a lot about plant based options. They're working on that. They've got stuff already out there. But you're right there always thinking about, Okay, so how do we kind of stick to our core menu but also introduce some new items to bring customers in? All Right?

That reps up the first hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg Radio. I'm Carol Mastering, I'm hungry, and I'm Jim Standavat. Coming up in our next hour, we go from tacos to toys, as the CEO of Mattel weighs in on his company's latest earning speed, also how the toy maker is managing the global supply chain crunch ahead of the holidays. The CEO says they're doing a good job. Yeah. I gotta say, I'm just so happy I'm not shopping for toys for my daughter anymore.

She's eighteen, and it's we've moved on to more expensive electronics and things like that. But man, we used to chase down toys like crazy. Yeah. Well we've started shopping already in closets and cupboards are getting full. Love that. Plus, we'll check in with the CEO of A T and T business and show on the fight for talent and how five G technology will change a lot more than

just the speed of your phone. Also this week's domestic cover story, why American workers are facing their most important moments. It's the end of World War two. This is Bloomberg. 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 as it happened. Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim

Stinovic on Bloomberg Radio. Hi'm Carol Masser and I'm Tim Stanovick, and our second hour of the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week, including a conversation. Lucky for us, we caught up again with Mattel CEO Inn Cries, fresh off a strong third quarter and getting ready for the all important holiday shopping season. One of his favorite toys, by the way, was a favorite of mine. And I'm just saying it, all right, give us a little preview. Nope, get a weight.

We'll also talk to Ann Show, the first woman of color CEO and a T and T s history. She runs a T and T business, and we'll also explore the many blemishes on the beauty industry's global supply chain. First up this hour though this week's domestic cover story in magazine. It's about the impact the pandemic has had on the American worker, for better or worse, and for better perhaps in terms of some of the lasting leverage

we could see when it comes to unemployment reform. Here to explain, as reporter on the story, Bloomberg News labor reporter josh Idolstin, we are at this rare, turbulent moment in the workplace in the US. You have workers who labored through the pandemic, who shouldered great risk to themselves and to their families and didn't get the compensation or

the safety protections that they felt they deserved. You have workers who were benched involuntarily and saw an unemployment system that they thought should be available and should be reliable. Failing them, you have lots of workers, historic numbers choosing to quit their jobs. So this is a moment of both exit and voice. Some people are leaving their jobs,

some people are trying to band together. And in the places where workers have a union in the United States, we're seeing large numbers of workers authorized strikes, making October strike October, as some put it. So this is all playing out at a moment when we have perhaps the last big bill of the Democrats, last stretch for a while of being able to legislate unilaterally being wrangled over. And it's one that could make permanent changes in ways

that would change workers leverage, including the unemployment system. That there's a relatively unusual effort of foot right now to organize jobless workers to transform. So uh, norm and norma Ray moment. Everybody go back and google that movie. But I mean, is this a big move forward then, because we've seen unions right declining in power and in uh in membership. But is this potentially a critical change when

it comes to the power of the worker. It's a moment of possibility, and in some ways it has the flavor of the way one historian put it to me, is when you have a national mobilization like a world war or a pandemic, you have all of these workers who get the country through it and bottle up some frustrations along the way, and then afterwards expect a debt

to be paid back. We're in a different political moment when where there's attention to essential workers into inequality, into labor that hasn't been there at times, and we're in a moment where many workers, like people that I talked to in the film and TV industry over the past week, have higher expectations than they used to, have a different consciousness both from the work they did during the pandemic, but also from their time out of work during the

shutdowns about the importance of their own time, and feel unwilling to accept some of the things they did in the past in terms of how work dominates their schedules and encroaches on their personal lives. Josh for the story to people several different parts of the country. I'm wondering though, the Washington d C. Connection the lawmakers who are really on the side of labor right now. Senator Ron Wyden,

Alexandro Acazio Cortez, representative from New York. What are they doing so Widen, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told workers that he will fight like heck to get something that is at least a down payment on fundamental

change to the unemployment system into the Reconciliation bill. There are things that could be done that would address some of the issues that workers have been raising over the years, and that some experts have been raising for years without a lot of attention in Washington areas, like the exclusion of many workers from the unemployment system and the race

amongst states to cut off benefits more quickly. Well, and I always think it's important when we do a story like this and you do it is and you go there, Josh, in terms of what the U S system is may be compared to what we see in other countries, and and it's meager, right in terms of the benefits compared to what other countries do for workers. That's right. The maximum months that people can get benefits here are lower than you see elsewhere in peer O E C D countries.

It's a pretty stingy system in the US, and unemployment insurance as stingy and unreliable as it is is still controversial in part because it does give people a little more leverage to hold out a little longer against a mediocre offer they don't want. Well, that's what we see happening in the labor force right now, right this imbalance

between supply and demand. Companies telling us each and every day they're having trouble finding workers, yet workers aren't ready to get off the sidelines and go take those jobs. Keep in mind, many workers don't qualify for unemployment benefits, and many circumstances where you leave your job don't qualify you to get the benefits, and many people who were receiving benefits now are no longer eligible, either because of the federal cutoff or because of state cutoffs that happened

before that. But that said, there is research that where there are more unemployment benefits, workers in some cases are able to hold out and choose to hold out for jobs that pay a little better. And that, depending who you ask, is one of the best or worst things about having this system. So the fight about unemployment is in part a fight about leverage in the labor market. And we did this cover story in part because right

now there's a fight over workers leverage. That's happening on picket lines, and there's a fight over workers leverage that's happening in Congress at the same time. That was Bloomberg News Labor reporter josh Idleston with our domestic cover story on the changing landscape of the American labor force. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week. Coming up, Mattel's CEO in on cry stops by to talk earnings and whether your kids presence will be here in time for the holidays.

This is Boomburg. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Spinovic from Bloomberg Radio. Toymaker Mattel has now seen growth and increased market share for five consecutive quarters. The company's German and CEO expects that trend to continue. Chris joined us on the heels of a third quarter earnings report that beat earnings and top line expectations. He tells us his company was well prepared for the supply chain bottlenecks that we're seeing right

now across the globe. He's not facing the same challenges that other companies are. It's not that we were not impacted, but we did anticipate short supply and longer lead times in factor that into our planning with very specific mitigating actions. And this is really where our scale, expertise and flexible supply chain model, which we restructured over the last three years, it's playing to our advantage and we are ready for

a strong holiday season. One of the things that we've been wondering and we sat during the pandemic where people were hoarding and buying tons of stuff and stocking their cupboards, and companies can do the same thing by doing advance buying and just kind of overstocking. Um people do it

with unit sales or something or certain commodities. You know, how much did you kind of overstocked potentially or by to make sure that your shelves that you had sufficient inventories for this season, Because it sounds like you've got or already what you think you're going to need for the holiday season where they need to be already that you're not worried about it being stuck on on ships out and sea. Is that fair to say? Yeah? You know, we as I said, this is not that we don't

see issues. We do work for those challenges and still expect to achieve growth in the fourth quarter and growth growth in the holiday season. Right We're all working very closely with our retal partners who look to have the right product at the right time with the right retailer. We're seeing the man remaining strong and do what we can to try and meet all of it. We may not be able to meet all of the demand, but we do what we can to try and meet and

still expect to grow in the season. So may not be able to meet all the demand on the flip side, you know. And is it possible that you over order or overproduce at this point, I guess I overproduced for you know, and that you're left with stock after the holiday season. That's possible to now, we don't believe this is the case. If anything, we are chasing demand. The man is outpacing capacity right now and we are chasing it. Uh. You know, this is what we do. This is exactly

the core competence of the company. Uh, and we're traditionally excelled during the holiday season. It does take a lot of planning, you know. We create the man and then we try to fill it and we work closely with the retailers to care for this demand and be able to u to meet the needs of of our of

our consumers. We talked earlier this year enon and the narrative really was around the idea of parents and grandparents spoiling their kids as a result of COVID lockdowns, hybrid schooling as things start to open up, as kids potentially under the age of twelve could get vaccinated very soon, are you concerned that demand will dry up and kids

will start doing experiential things rather than buying things. You know, the tour industry was expected to grow before the pandemic, and and and and and we we believe it is a growth category on the other side of the pandemic. It is fair to say that the pandemic did stimulate demand, but you know, it wasn't all positive. There also headwinds, as we know in terms of supply chain, COVID related lockdowns,

written closures, and other factors that impeded demand. But that said, we have been just at Mattel, you know, we just we haven't just tagged onto the industry. We grew almost double the industry growth rate in the quarter um and

and here today. In fact, we even accelerated market share gains in the third quarter, So we're not you know, we're not just writing the wave of COVID related demand, but we're actually ahead of the industry and do what we can to continue to innovate and create great product

that inspires entertained and developed children through play. Hey, you know, I was both of us, Tim and I were at the Milken Institute Global Conference and I hosted a panel with UM on the global M and A and one of the things that came up is that, yes, companies are continuing to do deals. We're on track for a record year rtually, perhaps maybe even five children. But the other thing that they said that's happening a lot of

is alliances. And I think the partnerships that you do, whether it's w w E or with Disney, are important to your growth story. Tell me about like the renewed partnership with w w E. How does that help Mattel specifically on the top and bottom line. With with our increased capability and the stronger platform that we have built,

we have more more capacity to uh grow partnerships. This is something that we were less focused on in the past given the strength of our own catalog, but we now can expand our business through the part through these partnerships with with you know, with with key players, with big important franchises, global franchises, in addition to what we do with our own catalog. So the w w E is a great example of renewing a long term relationship

for a really great action figure franchise. And you know likewise, also we just expanded our relationship with Disney for the Pixel movie light here. This is the origin story of b here, which is expected to be very toy added, very playful, great movie um and a lot of really exciting products. We have the global licensing rights to develop the toy line and expect expect to launch that in

the summer of two. So another opportunity for us, another growth, growth and liver for matail, leveraging the scale, averaging network of more than four hundred and seventies thousand doors where we sell our products. You know what I'm wondering about. Mattel Television thirteen shows in production, thirty plus or in development.

New content on Netflix. Help us draw the line and help our investors, our audience draw the line from Netflix content and what kids see on the screen and what parents see on the screen to the actual moving of products off of shelves or or online. This is about capturing the full value of our intellectual property, which which is the mid too long term out of our strategy.

And what we say is that in addition to what we do on the toy side of our business, where we see a lot of room to grow and improve profitability, we can also extend into highly accreative verticals that are directly adjacent to the toy industry, all driven by big franchises, big brands that rise above the noise level, and it can become successful a creative businesses in and of themselves. That's you know. In Chries, the chairman and CEO of Mattel By the way, we asked him what his favorite

new toy is. He said to look out for the new Barbie dream House that would hit close to you. Carol, I did listen if we had a Barbie dream house. And I also remember when Christmas having to hunt it down from my daughter and they were like different versions. We ended up with three in our basement and had to return to ultimately because we kept getting one. And I'm like, no, that's the wrong. You should have just saved the one from your childhood. I should have indeed

all right still to come. On Bloomberg Business Week, We're talking five why A T and T says the golden age of connectivity is here, and how the telecom giant is faring in the war for talent. All that and more.

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 six to the country Sirius XM Channel one, and around the globe the Bloomberg Business and Bloomberg Radio dot Com. This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer

and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stenovan on Bloomberg Radio. Black and Hispanic workers remain underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. We're talking about the STEM workforce and that's compared with their share of all workers. One person who's helping to buck that trend is the CEO of A T and T Business and Chow. She's the first woman of color to hold this position, and her thirty five billion dollar operating unit serves nearly three million business customers.

Globally across all public and private sectors. Yeah, she's at the intersection of so much stuff that's going on in our world right now. Her team oversees everything from fiber, complex communications, networks, five G of course, cybersecurity and the Internet of Things. She says, the golden age of connectivity

it's upon us. We're starting to see it already. We have been working with dozens of customers in various proof of concepts since we launch five G a couple of years ago, on on really disruptive type of solutions, whether it's in the smart factory. We just recently had an announcement with Ford around bringing five G to their electronic electric vehicle production and how that will dramatically transform manufacturing

UM and the e v EV arena. We've been working with various healthcare companies as well, and this goes far beyond telehealth, but to remote patient monitoring and the management obtain The thing is, and I've been talking about five G for years. We've been promised a future with five G. We're seeing five G roll out of many parts of the countries. When are we as consumers actually going to start to see the benefits beyond that? Five G in

action on your new Android or Apple phone. Yeah, yeah, well one of them things, Tim, And thanks for asking that one of these that's most exciting about five GS so much more than speed, right, But the characteristics of five G that enabled these different types of experiences are low latency. Think of that as the response time as

well as mass connectivity. And so for what we as consumers will experience will be manifested through different businesses, whether it's in our health care experience, whether it's our education experience. We've actually launched several, um several projects with various higher ed institutions, universities, whether it's Purdue, University of Miami, University of Missouri around how does the education experience change on campus when it's enabled by five G and edge computing?

And so um, we as the consumers will you know, will continue to benefit from many of those industry transformations and industries disruptions, whether it's in healthcare, education, retail, or otherwise. Hiring. See you guys are enthusiastic. There's a lot going on, there's growth. Um, are you able to hire everyone and that you need to hire right now? And if you are hiring, are you having to pay up for them. Yeah, so carel for sure. Right, we we are out there,

UM in this war for talent. There's no question about it. Right Tech tech talent is uh you know, is so critical and every company, as I said before, you know, needs technology talent, whether that's in cyber or otherwise, uh you know, IoT or otherwise. And so UM we are out there, we are hiring and UM you know, we feel very good about our value proposition for UM you know, for for for that talent out there. You know, I

think it's really all about purpose. But at the end of the day, so many potential employees are looking also for compensation. Do you have to raise compensation or to attract and retain talent? And if yes, how much? Yeah? No we so we we are absolutely all about being market competitive and as the market moves, we move as well. And so tim we're out there to compete for the

best talent. And UM you know, the great thing is is with our UM you know, with our commitments to diversit, the equity and inclusion, we have long been a leader in uh you know, in our culture and who we are out there, and so we're able to attract great diverse talent here. But it is not. You know, it is not without competition out there, as is every facet of business today. There's been reports about A T and t s ownership of the One American network. You guys

have come out. A T and T has denied that it's responsible for funding um the far right media network, or at least most of it. I just want to ask you, because you really think about leadership. You're a woman, you're an immigrant. Conservative networks have been very critical of immigration policy. How important is it though, when it comes to leadership and what a company stands for when it

comes to topics like immigration or diversity and inclusion. Yeah, so, so I you you're in this disco quick quick thing that I'm I'm the child of immigrants, right, so I'm a second generation American. But for sure, for me, right as a diverse female leader, it is vitally important to work for an organization that has a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion and belonging and um. You know, there's a reason why I've been at A T and T for thirty one plus years, and that is that I

have been able to thrive. UM that the values of the company and the principles of the company align with mine right and they are. UM. You know, there is no question about a ten ties integrity, a tencies credibility, UM and our and our valueset and it is one of the reasons why I've been able to be successful right as a woman in stems when we where we've started this whole conversation UM and it is vitally important.

You know, I think not only for people of my generation, but of generations as we just touched on that are you know that are in the talent pool now that are graduating from schools that are out there, you know, in the market that represent our next generation of leaders. And so culture and purpose and values UM and integrity and ethics are absolutely paramount. That's in Chiao, the CEO of a T and T business. She also weighed in on the one American News network story that's been getting

a lot of attention this month. Yeah, we definitely appreciate her candor on that. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week coming up by fair trade and ethically sourced products, they're so hard to come by in a half a trillion dollar business. Happies are Bloomberger Suits team lays out a better supply chain for beauty. This is Bloomberg. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Bloomberg Quick Takes Tim Stinovich from Bloomberg Radio. Every new watch is

like a new piece of box. It has in different stories to tell the time. Wines as a whole really speak to that quintessential need is the most powerful car made in the US period. You get the beautiful interior, the iconic design that's very cheek and pos even if you be for it, it's something I can get. So our Bloomberg Pursuits editor Chris Browser joins US Now with

a look at this week's Pursuits section. If you added the money spent on goods and services in the global beauty industry last year, you'd get a number somewhere in the area of five hundred billion dollars half a trillion, and that number tim on track to exceed seven hundred billion dollars. That's a lot of shampoo and makeup. That's

a lot a lot of stuff, right. It's unfortunately the materials that go into some of our more popular cosmetics that they often come from areas where sustainability and ethical sourcing are far from top priorities. Chris an industry veteran, travel to India to take a look at the conditions and labor practices at the start of the of the

beauty supply chain. Who is she would she find out? So, Robin Tolklan Doyle is, as you said, a publicist in the beauty industry, which means she works with cosmetics, fragrances, lotion, shampoos. And she was actually on a trip to India for fun, and she was, you know, going to sort of um

Lesser explored areas. She was trying to meet people in their homes, and what she discovered was that everybody was showed to her that the process of exporting goods to the United States or performing labor to make goods or exported to the United States was really actually devastating for a lot of families and communities, which is not a surprise. This is something that we know, but she had never seen it up close. And she said, you know what,

I've been working in this industry for twenty years. I it's time for me to try to do a small part in trying to fix it. So she created a platform where she found fair trade sourced and fair trade made cosmetics in countries like India, Bangladesh, Ghana, and she brought them together so you can actually buy them from her platform, which is called beauty Ology, and you know that they're all ethically and fair trade made. I love this. Yeah.

What's so cool about this is you also profile some of these smaller companies that are doing this in an ethical way, including Qatari Beauty, True mor Ringa, seven hundred Rivers. They all have really interesting origin stories. Yeah, and I love That's why I love this story in Pursuits this week because every one of the product brands that we

feature it just has a beautiful story. You know. A woman named Rahama Rights was in molly On on the Peace Corps and she's originally gonna and through her mother, and she she saw these women making these beautiful products from shade butter seeds and she's like, you know what, I'm going to come back and I'm gonna help make

sure these people are compensated fairly for their work. What's kind of cool is I feel like we've started to see this on like merchandise, whether it's goods or jewelry or you know, but it's really this is a whole other industry right where they're helping people really rise up right and be hopefully in better living conditions, make more money,

and actually provide this really cool good Yeah. And you know, in the beauty industry, clean beauty is sort of the buzzword now, which is so it's you know, fewer chemicals, less harmful to the environment, but a lot of them are ignoring huge problems with the way that they treat people. I'm glad you said that because Tim knows this. I've been on a mission to do clean. He knows this clean cosmetics, and I look for it when I go to a sappho what have you. But I'm not thinking

always about then what's the labor involved? And that's such a big part of this. And all these are companies are fair trade certified, which means that they're audited on an ongoing basis to make sure that their practices are fair so that people are getting compensated in a fair way so they can have a living wage. And it's not just someone comes and checks one time. This is an ongoing thing. So do we start to see more and more companies promoting are fair trade and ethical practices.

Do we start to see this becoming the norm rather than the exception. It's definitely not the norm, um, and it's it's definitely more common in small companies who are more nimble, especially more recently started companies, because those companies can see around the bend and they can see okay, you know, down the road. This is going to be something that's very important to people once they learn more about it. So we can change, or we can just

start with a better supply chain process. Whereas huge beauty juggernauts Um, I say, Louder Revl and all those, you know, they have been around for a really long time and it's very hard to change, you know, their supply chains. So let's go back to you mentioned, um Shaleen. I think I'm saying correctly. Um. Seven hundred Rivers, Uh, this is what an all natural bath and body brand. Yes,

seven hundred Rivers is really wonderful. It's based in Bangladesh and it gives jobs to women who have been victims of human trafficking, which um even a lot of times if these women can escape, they have nowhere to go and nothing to do to make a fair living, so they end up going back to the brothels where they were and so this company actually gives some jobs, changed somehow to make coconut oil based soaps and they're beautiful soaps and it's actually become quite a popular trendy brand.

So um, this is really giving these women a new future. What about Qatari Beauty? Qatari Beauty, I really love it's um. A woman Kate Fish, who is the founder, had lives for some time in Tunisia and she went back and she said, you know, I love that this clay that everyone uses in their for their for their face basically too as a cosmetic treatment. And so she started a company and she works with all these people in the area. Everything is done like even the glass containers are built

by glassblowers in the area. The clay is farmed by a man who's been farming it for decades. It's very cool. And one more we want to highlight is is it true Maringa because this is actually a rocket scientist went to m I T and then did something very different.

Qualmie Williams immigrated to the U s from Ghana as a child and he was like, I'm going to be a rocket scientist and he went to M I T. And he worked at NASA and then he said, you know what if I'm a rocket scientist, can I use my brain to figure out something that's going to help people? And so he um he went and he founded this company and Maringa is actually an extremely nutritous plant. You can eat it, but it also the oils that it makes are you can use to wash your face, to

braid your hair, as massage oil. It's like literally all purpose. I just want to know, did you guys play around with some of these products? Yes, our beauty writer Asia did. Sounds like really good. Yeah alright, um, so let's talk about where do we want to go. Let's go to energy and talk about prepping. I love this story. Yeah, we're being forced to pay closer attention to natural disasters.

They're happening more frequently than ever. But I FEMA survey from says fewer than half of Americans have a plan for such events. I gotta tell you, Chris, I'm one of those Americans. Many of us are. You know, maybe be lived in New York City during hurricanes Handy, and You're like, I don't even have a flashlight. It's crazy, right, Like we don't have those like safety kids. I think I think I still got some candy goods from pandemic prepping.

So tell us about Judy. So Judy was founded by this guy, Simon Huk, who is a publicist and branding person UM based out of California. Has all these high flying friends like yes, seriously, yeah, okay, He said, you know what, if my friends aren't prepared for all of this stuff and they've got you know, they can have everything they want in the world, probably nobody is really

ready for all this. So he did a lot of research and he created a power station which is basically like a giant mega charging station UM like you would have for your phone. But you can plug like a normal AC adapter into it. You can plug like a cigarette lighter type adapter into it, and it's a thousand wats UM and it will charge anything from your coffeemaker to your phones so whatever else you need UM and it's a it's not that big, so it's like a great thing to have in an emergency and not as

expensive as those huge generators. Right that if well, in the city, I guess you can't have Yeah, we're not putting a diesel generator generator. I had a little bit of a backyard but I mean it's a lot cheaper, right, Yeah, yeah, it's it's ns and it is not a generator that power your house. This is a power station to power more important little it'll it'll make coffee, right, yes, it'll make it's what's surprising to me about this is that

there's actually competition in this space. Yeah, this is actually a little bit of a crowded space. There's a company called Goal zero which makes a product called the Yetti which is four dollars. And jack Ery, which makes a variety of different kinds of chargers, makes uh something called the Explorer a thousand, which is all right, so are you guys buying one? Have you bought one? I don't have one from my house, but I clearly should. I'm

gonna start making a plan. That's where I'm going to start. You've already got the can goods. So just um, speaking of traveling, let's talk about a story by James Tarmi that's also in the Pursuit section. It's about vintage travel posters and apparently I guess they're kind of a hot commodity. Again. Yes, so over the past like two decades, travel posters, So think of you know, a poster advertising a cruise line from the nineteen twenties or something advertising a train line

to a new part of the country. Um, they've becoming more and becoming more popular. But over the pandemic they shot up in popularity. We talked to a bunch of vintage travel poster dealers and they said, we've never this is the hottest commodity in vintage posters. You may be used to think of like French cafe posters, like by like Tola Trek being kind of the most popular poster.

You would see music copies in college dorm rooms, and now it's like travel posters, travel posters, and they good ones can go from like a thousand dollars to four thousan dollars. Can we give a little bit of love to um Jackie Simmons because she wrote about a cookbook and I love it. Um. Jackie is one of our black colleagues. But she said she learned about her culture and she even learned about black food in writing about this book or reading this book. So we um, we

were so excited Jackie was going to do this story. Uh. So she wrote about this cookbook called Black Food, which is by an author named Bryant Terry, who's a James Beard Award winning cook and a chef in residence at the Museum of Aska African Diaspora in San Francisco. And not just a cookbook. It tells stories about about Black food culture. It explains elements of black food culture. Um. You know, for a woman tells a story about how

African women. Western African women hid seeds for black eyed peas, rice, and melon by braiding them into their hair before they were put onto slave ships. Um. And one of my favorite stories that Jackie highlights is um, which which comes with a recipe, is the shoe Box Lunch, which is it tells you about how African American women during Jim Crow would make lunches and put them in shoe boxes and distribute them to to to black men who were traveling for work and knew they couldn't eat in diners

or restaurants because of Jim Crow. It just sounds like a remarkable book. And as she says, it's just so much more than a cookbook. UM, A great section. Uh, just so many wonderful things. Chris, thank you so much, really appreciate it. Go get that. Um. What is it called the Judy the Judy. We'll putting it on a shopping list. I'm just gonna say, all right. Chris Rowse with the editor of Pursuits That reps up the weekend edition of Bloomberg Busines this week from Bloomberg Radio, Thanks

so much for joining us. I'm Carol Masser and I'm Jim Stanavac. Be sure to tune into our Bloomberg Business Week daily program Monday through Friday. It starts at two pm Wall Street Time on Bloomberg Radio. You can also watch our daily broadcast 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 is available on newsstands now at Bloomberg dot com, business Week dot com, and on the Bloomberg Terminal. You can also see me on Bloomberg Quicktake, available on Bloomberg dot com, slash qut and streaming platforms like Roku, Apple TV, Samsung TV, and more. Have a great weekend, Come off to get some briskett pot Yes, Sam, it's still hungry. This is Bloomberg