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 Stenebeck from Bloomberg Radio.
Hi, everyone, Welcome to the Bloomberg Business Week Weekend Podcast. Guess another FED meeting that went as expected with the Central Bank holding firm for now in terms of interest rates, but they did tim ratchet down expectations for rate cuts.
We also had the UN General Assembly in session, coinciding with New York City's annual Climate Week summit, and that gave us a really great chance to tap into some unique leaders on sustainability, including Energy Impact Partners founder Hans Koebler and Cisco's Chief People, Policy and Purpose Officer Franksutis. We'll hear more from both this hour.
We mentioned Anga in session this week. That's the UN General Assembly. A notable absence was Chinese President Shijin Ping. China continues to dominate the headlines in twenty twenty three, with concerns about its economy, its outsized contribution to global emissions, and those lingering tensions with the us.
First up on our program legendary short seller and longtime China bear Jim Chenos. He is someone who raised concerns about China's ghost cities years ago. We were always talking to him about it, and even as the country's central bank says it has sufficient policy space to support an economic recovery, Cheno's remains a bit skeptical.
Bloomberg, Simone Foxman and I welcome Chenos to our studios a bit earlier this month, and we began with his apprehension over the world's second largest economy.
Please to bring in our next guest, Jim Chanos. He's the founder of Chenos and Company. Thanks so much for joining us. He's in studio or Intero Interactive Broker's studio. He says China's on a treadmill to hell and shared those concerns with the House of Representative Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party this week. Talk to me about the hearing, you know, were you able to kind of get a sense of whether or not and I know you weren't there physically in person, but you did.
Offer your insight.
Were you able to get it a sense on what the committee's doing? Are they going to be successful. Are they going to do anything?
In fact that's.
Above my pay grade? And thanks for having me as to the politics in Washington, And I do think that the Committee is doing good work in calling attention to these issues. And you know, we've been we've been pretty negative on China now for a better part of thirteen years. And I think that the risks that China poses have morphed from purely financial to now beyond that into the political realm and the national security realm, and I think
that makes this a bigger story. And the economic model risks as to how China sort of deals with those may in fact affect the politics.
Yeah, does the contagens spread beyond what I think most people are expecting at this point.
The good news is is that the risks to the real estate market and the economic model do not have a lot of direct contagent risks to Western banks and particularly American banks. Where the risks are are in our equity and debt investments that various funds hold, pension funds hold, retail investors hold, and I think that's the bigger issue as opposed to a two thousand and eight type transmission from their real estate bubble. Bursting to everyone's real estate
bubble bursting. They can keep that internal, but it's a big problem.
What are the threats beyond an economic collapse or a property collapse in China, I'm talking geopolitical threats, national security threats. What's the stuff that keeps you up at night?
Well, the morphing from spending on the additional high speed rail link that's unprofitable, or the next apartment building and putting up and basically building another aircraft carrier. You know, the classic nineteen thirty scenario where a number of countries you know, ramped up their defense spending as a way to stimulate and we know how that ended. And so
I think that that we saw reports even today. I mentioned it earlier that Chinese defense spending may be a lot greater than we think, you know, as high as four percent of GDP. The US is three percent of GDP. So they are spending more money. It used to be directed internally with internal security systems and that, but increasingly now it's hard to miss that it's also external with the Blue Water Navy and increased tensions around Taiwan.
Well, let's talk about that. I mean, how much of a concern do you think that is right now, an invasion of Taiwan.
Well, as I said earlier, I think the real risk is something something happens, right, an incident, that's that's unexpected, right.
You have now ships transversing, crossing each other's bios, you have a lot of aircraft in the area, and all we need is someone you know, a pilot to make a mistake or get scared, or you know, a mishap of someone, and then you have an you have an international incident, and and that's I think as the temperature kind of rises in the in South China Sea, I think that's the real risk as opposed to a premeditated you know, attack on a Western country or Western ally.
So you want to short China potentially, We've been short.
We've been short China for for years. You know, paradoxically, we're less short China now than we were ten twelve years ago because China has gone nowhere. I mean, the stock market has basically been flat for twelve years, and as every other stock market is.
Tripled or quadrupled.
So it's been a very poor place for Western investors to part their money for years, not just the last twelve years, but really for the last twenty years, and I think that's going to continue to be the case. Broadly speaking, China does not treat Western capital very well.
How are you betting against China right now?
We have some direct shorts in the financial area, We have some indirect shorts that depend on China for a fair amount of their revenues. But as I said, our direct shorts are probably no more than four or five six percent of our portfolio. In twenty ten eleven it was above twenty percent.
We've spent a lot of time over the past few months talking about the struggles of the Chinese economy and the data that we get, or the lack thereof of data that we get. Jim, what evidence do you have that the Chinese economy is actually worse than what Beijing says or what markets already believe.
The funny thing is is that if you have an investment driven economic model, which they do, the GDP is actually accurate. I noticed something over the weekend that Michael Pettis pointed out that in an investment driven model GDP, growth is actually an input, it's not the residual, which I think is a really interesting observation. That is I've always joked that China's the only major developed economy that
knows its annual GDP on January one of that year. Yeah, and so you know, whatever the numbers needs to be, they will put enough stimulus in terms of new investment to hit that number, give or take. So I don't quibble with the quality with the actual numbers they're putting out, but it's the quality of the numbers, if you will, that if you never write off bad investments, the actual costs to GDP are sitting in your banking system in terms of bad deaths, and you have to either inflate
that away or recapitalize your banking system. And so that's the nexus of this economic model with economic growth, and it's a banking issue ultimately. And so I think that that that's where I worry that as long as the bank's never write off the bad debts, that's where the quality, if you will, of disclosure is poor.
The rm IPO your thoughts on the valuation.
It seems a bit high, are you?
Are you not convinced by the Aihi?
I think it's what one hundred and twenty times earnings and fifth, I think revenues are two and a half billion and went out at a sixty billion.
Dollar evaluation, and twenty five percent of its revenues come from China.
Yeah, so so twenty five twenty almost twenty five times revenue seems a little steep. But what do I know?
Are you going to shorten it?
Well, you can't yet, so it's a limited float, but I'm sure at some point we'll we'll crack open the perspectus.
Have you been thinking about shorting in Nvidia? No, no, no, don't get in the way of that.
We have we have things that are that are perceived as AI plays, that are that are trading much more expensive than in video does so it's so no need to go after the OG.
What kind of opportunities has this opened up? As someone who looks at the market with a very critical eye.
Well, I think anytime we see one of these these tectonic shifts in new technology, like the Internet in the nineties, people at first embrace everything, everything is going to benefit. But what you find out, of course, is that when it's truly truly a major shift, is that those technologies end up harming as many businesses as they create. And so if you think about the companies that were in the business of distributing analog physical products that became digitized.
They went away, Blockbuster Video, Eastern Kodak, I mean, companies like that, record stores.
I mean, and I.
Suspect that if AI is as big as most people think it will be, you will see lots of businesses that had moats find out that the motes have been breached. So your software as a service, What prevents a corporation from having AI design its own software for various different applications, right, and and there's lots of things that suddenly you don't
think about. I kind of joked a little bit a few months ago when IBM CEO came out and said that that AI might may make some of the IBM workforce redundant, and I joked, well, what happens when the clients find that same thing out?
Yeah, I mean, that's that's a really good point. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your strategy around shorting and what you're seeing in the market today. I think a lot of people, of course, understand your history with being a fraud hunter and going after companies like Enron in the past. Wondering if over the last few decades with regulatory changes, you've seen fraud reduced or are there increased instances of potential fraud out there?
I've called this the golden Age of fraud. I think there's more fraud in the financial markets now than there has ever been. Why And I teach a course in the history of financial market fraud, So the cycles go back to the late seventeenth century.
I think that.
It always changes.
But what really has me bothered now is that a lot of it hides in plain sight in the way in which companies report their business and their metrics. So prior to say, ten years ago, you really had to sort of if a company was making unusual changes to its earning statements, you know, they would have to explain it away. And nowadays, adjusted earnings are basically the norm, and companies add back all kinds of things that they
don't don't really a little expense. Oh it's amazing. Coinbase in the fourth quarter of last year, I think share based comp was almost eighty percent of revenues, and they just added it.
Back, I mean, and so yeah, we go back to the we work. Why we work didn't go public the first time community adjusted ebit, Yeah, that was at this point it's a joke. But then it wasn't a joke.
I know, and investors lost a lot of money. And the sec you know, promised kind of a crackdown on this a number of years ago. They admonished companies as are called to not lead with these kinds of results. But I mean, you know, for god's sakes, General Electric in the first quarter had sixteen pages of adjustments and its earnings release. I mean it's really you know, and companies that just take restructuring charges annually. Every year they
take a restructuring charge. Well, if you take it every year, it's it's recurring. And I think that that in Silicon Valley is in particular, you know, pretty bad at this where companies that lose hundred millions of dollars every quarter are reporting you know, break even adjusted profits and so you just wonder if they're really businesses or are they executive enrichment.
Schemes question mark for you, you know, Although this is the gold nag of fraud, activist activity is dropped by eighty five percent since it hit a peak in twenty fifteen. These are numbers from Direct Market Intelligence. Yeah, answered the question I posed just before the break I mean is the error of the short seller behind us.
I think everybody asks that during every bull market, you know, nineteen ninety nine and early two thousand and it was the same sort of question, you know, will short selling ever work? And it's sort of the corollary, does value investing ever work? Again? You know, when people pay higher and higher prices for questionable corporate assets, and the question is is yeah, generally, yeah, it comes back and businesses
generally find their true value over time. I mean, just look at the Meme stock you know, run up and now disaster from twenty twenty one to today, and there was no price too high to pay for some of these stocks because they had a short position, and ultimately most of them have come crashing down to earth.
Well we'll get back to that specific one in a second, but first I want to ask about the I guess rising short seller in the market right now, Nate Anderson and Hindenburg. He's been big bets against a Donnie or rather he's said very public negative things about a Donnie Icon enterprises. You know, do you see eye to eye with some of the calls that he's made.
Look, I think Nate and Hindenberg have done great work on a number of names, Nicola and others, and you'd be wise to at least hear what they have to say, even if you don't agree with it, if it's well researched and like anything, you know, stock prices are are opinions based on facts, and so at the end of the day, it's essential for a marketplace, whether they're positive facts.
Or negative facts.
And if you're a good investor, you know it behooves you to to basically hear both sides of any story.
We'd be remiss if I didn't ask for an update from you on Tesla shares up one hundred and twenty four percent this year.
Yeah, we are short Tesla. We remained short. It's one of our one of our forty four positions that we have look Tesla is in many ways, I think epitomizes this bull market. It's a hopes and dream stock. It's trading at seventy five times earnings, which aren't growing anymore. It looks like revenues are going to be challenged in terms of growth. So it's now again an AI story or Robotaxi story, or a battery story, or a robotics story.
It's it's whatever you want it to be, and it reminds me a lot of Cisco back in nineteen ninety nine and two thousand, where Cisco was a networking company. Tesla is a car company, but Cisco was going to get into everything else that had anything to do with the Internet, and people put a higher and hire multiple on it, and ultimately Cisco did okay, but the stock price dropped ninety percent.
I'm going to do a quick lightning round of some stuff that has been reported that you are are have been short recently. Just have me yes or nos. If you're still short digital realty Trust, we are short the data centers sl Green real.
Too, sl Green is. We are short commercial real estate.
Okay, Tesla, you said Sun Run, you said the.
Solar leasing companies. I've called them science projects. They're absolutely hysterical. They lose hundreds of millions of dollars, huge negative free
cash flow. And getting back to our early conversation about metrics, they report rather than on a regular P and L, which would be embarrassing, they report these net present value calculations based on the panels they put up on people's roofs and It's absolutely hilarious the way they do it, and I think investors are going to, you know, find out the hard way about it.
All right, Jim, We're gonna spend the last forty seconds with you getting your thoughts on what you're watching, what you're streaming, what you're doing, and what you're seeing at the movie theater. New movie out, Dumb Money. It's got me Davidson in it, It's got Seth.
Rogan in it.
Are you going to see it? Have you seen it? It's all about memestocks.
I told one of your colleagues earlier, I don't see the need since I lived done money five days a week in the marketplace. So at some point I'm sure I'll see it. I you know, I think it celebrates the memestock investors winning over you know, Wall Street and
the evil hedge funds. The sad thing is is that most of those memestock investors have lost large amounts of money, you know, chasing these ideas, because, as we pointed out, a lot of these companies came crashing down to earth and in some cases have already gone bankrupt.
Hey, Jim, really appreciate you taking the time and joining us, especially for such a long period of time. Jim Chanos, the founder of Chenos and Company, legendary short seller. Here in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio.
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.
You and Week Climate Week Global Citizen coming up this weekend. There is a lot going on in and around New York City right now. There's a lot going on for companies too, which with the un and all of this, though here in New York City specifically, it means a lot of global leaders come here and we get to check in with them. Among them Franco Sudas. She's executive vice president and chief People Policy Purpose Officer at Cisco Systems. Delighted to have her back here in our Bloomberg Interactive
Broker Studio. Hello, how are you good?
It's great to be with you again.
It's great to have you here. We have a nice tonk of time. But I want to start with because I always like to do, because you are, you know, front seat with what's going on at the company, and what's going on in the environment. How would you describe You've seen what you've been at Cisco twenty seven years. That's correct, Yeah, it's amazing. You've seen a lot of different business cycles, and you've seen the technology world change
in different cycles there. How would you describe today's environment?
I would say it's incredibly dynamic. I think that our customers view technology a little differently than they did I would say even three or four years ago. I think there's an understanding that digitization and technology is an enabler for their success, and as a result of that, I think it changes a lot of the conversations that we're having with our customers. Even a good example of that
is on the sustainability front. Whereas I think I would say five years ago, our customers were looking at the checklist like what do they need to do from a regulation perspective and what they believed was coming, I think now there's some really good discussions around how to sustainability intersect either with their business, their technology, what they're doing,
what is the opportunity in that? And I think as a result of that, a lot of the conversations that we're having about whether it's modernizing infrastructure or security, has a little bit of a longer tail than it did once before.
That's interesting. Is it a good business environment?
Though? I think it.
What's the right word, what's the right adjective to use?
I think dynamic to be honest, I think.
What is dynamicase dynamics to me sounds upbeat.
Yeah, you know, I think it is upbeat in that technology is front and center. I think our customers are coming to us and we're coming to them to figure out solutions, and I think as long as we're having those conversations, it makes us better. I think there are a lot of dynamics that businesses are responding to that I wouldn't put in the positive category.
What are some of those?
So?
I mean, it's everything from the fact that we still have a war on the ground in Europe. I think leaders are still trying to figure out how they want to work. In a meeting earlier today, and I will tell you there was not a lot of love for what I would consider hybrid work. I think leaders are trying to figure out what's the right way to work. My people want something a little bit different than I do. That's an interesting dynamic as well.
Describe that when you say there's not a lot of love and what were you hearing?
I think what I hear, and it's understandable is that in some cases, I think leaders want to go back to something that was a bit more predictable. Right, so you know we would all come in three or four days a week, and you know we would do our jobs five.
Or six days absolute twenty nineteen's.
And what's interesting is that I think from a business perspective, it would be so much easier if there was a one size fits all. But the truth of the matter with work is that depending on your job, depending on where you work, who you work with, there's so many different flavors. And I think that's an example of a dynamic that leaders are having to deal with and really think through what makes the most sense.
What would you tell leaders because and correct me if I'm wrong, but Cisco has been doing hybrid and make depend you know, people have a lot of flexibility for pre pandemic for years. So what would you tell leaders about what works, what doesn't, why it makes sense?
Why?
What?
What would you say?
I would tell leaders to focus on the work, because I think work will guide on how we need to come together. But I would also tell leaders that I think all of us are now event planners because I think we have to think about the events that bring our teams together, that build the culture that we need to have to ensure that we have the connections that we need. But I don't think it's a one size fits all. I actually don't think that whatever we create
this month may be applicable next month. I think there's just a tad bit more agility in how we work, and as leaders, I think we have to work hard to really understand what does success look like? And do I have key measures that allow me to understand whether or not my teams are doing what we need them to do.
Has it helped you in terms of finding work? And I'm very curious what you have to say about the labor market. We're seeing signs of some softening. But I'm just curious how being flexible helps you and then what you are seeing overall in terms of labor market.
It can help you, but you have to be really deliberate with what you want that team environment to look like. So as an example, there are some of our areas from a technology perspective where we want the best of the best, and we're happy with wherever they are in the world, and we have the technology for them to join us via video, and so we don't worry about the fact that they may be remote from other members
of the team. But that's a deliberate choice. But I think when you have a level of flexibility, it's just going to allow you to cast a wider net on who you bring into the company.
How do you create those spontaneous moments that you know, those water cooler moments here at Bloomberg, those pantry moments. I mean, Joe Weber, editor at Bloomberg BusinessWeek, tells us every week that some article, even a cover story, is the result of just bumping into one of the reporters of the pantry, rolling over to somebody's desk exactly.
I think it takes work remotely. And this is the rub I will tell you, like this was a long time ago. I'm gonna say like fifteen or twenty years ago. I remember I created something called the virtual Hallway conversation because I had a team that was all over the world and we would schedule this ten minute quick sync and the only rule was we couldn't talk about work for the first few minutes because sometimes we bumping should in the hallway, we just talk about like how your kids.
What are you doing?
So I guess what I would say is we do have to work hard to create that when you have flex it doesn't mean that you don't come in. I think you just have to be really thoughtful when people come in.
What is the best use of our time?
Would you say there's a little softening of the labor market, you.
Know, it's interesting I would say that despite the fact that there is some softening, boy, the talent market is still hot in many many areas, and I look at an area like security as an example. Globally, the belief is still that there are four million security roles that are still open and that we can't find the talent for those roles. The other thing that we understand is about you.
Those Would you say you have roles that are open that you.
I would say that we're always looking for amazing talent. But I think around the world there's some struggle getting to people that have some of the skills. On the security side, About half of those roles are more entry level, and so for us, what that means is there's such an opportunity to train up talent and really help them get the skills that get them started.
How do you start? How do you train up that talent earlier in their careers, earlier in their lives? I mean, where does this start within our education system?
You know, it's interesting because if you look at the US President Biden, I think about nine months ago, convened a group of leaders together against the backdrop of security. And the approach that the team was taking was to look at what are the security skills that everyone needs to have? What are the security skills that own many need to have? And then a few, right, And so when you get to the few, you are talking about
your chief security officers, the top of the top. But for all, what you're talking about is maybe we need to start to teach our students in elementary school about passwords and how to be secure, and so absolutely start really early, to be honest. And then I think the other thing that I would say is when I look at Cisco and other tech companies, we used to spend a lot of time at high schools and now we're
taking that down to elementary school as well. So I do think we need to start earlier and earlier, and especially for girls.
That is fascinating. Hey, listen, we've got about a minute and a half left here. You guys at Cisco, you've had ESG initiatives and missions and goals for a long time. Remind us a little bit about the impact that that has had on the company financially and just overall in terms of the cultural environment.
The impact is significant. So it was about three years ago that we created our new purpose to power Inclusive Future for All, and that really started to guide everything that we do across the company from a sustainability perspective. We launched about a year ago our net zero goals for Scope one and Scope two, which is twenty twenty five, Scope three which is twenty forty. We now have an SPTI approved plan, which basically means that we have a
scientific plan that has been reviewed and approved. I say all of this because I think that inclusive future means we need to have a livable planet. That inclusive future means we need to have really good people practices within the company and to influence communities more broadly, and that we're doing everything we can from a digital divide perspective, I do think, Carol, that how we focus on sustainability will be an amazing business for Cisco.
Two.
So as an example, some of our technology now is so much more energy efficient with higher bandwidth, like our Silicon one products, and that's a great growth business for us. But it's going to save our customers a ton of energy on the other side, and that's the opportunity.
Well.
And I do think about when you've got the hottest year on record, like how that kind of shapes and whether that makes companies like yourself even rethink, you know, is it sooner that you try to do this against do you think about maybe trying to get there even sooner?
We have to, and I think the technology and our people will push us to do that, which is great.
I know you're going to be involved in Global citizen you guys always are. I'm so grateful for you finding time for us. Thank you, Thank you. Frank Asudas. She's executive EP, Chief People Policy Purpose Officer at Cisco Systems.
Here in studio, 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, play Bloomberg eleven.
Thirty Climate Week in New York against the backdrop of the seventy eighth session of the General Assembly. You know that we've been talking about it.
They have.
The UN has identified seventeen specific SDG sustainable Development goals, including building out resilient technology infrastructure, and to get there and reach some of those seventeen SDGs, the UN has highlighted high impact initiatives, among them unlocking the Data Dividend, which our next guests participated in an event that happened here this week with us is Johannes Ulting, Executive head of the Partnership in Statistics for Development in the twenty
first Century. The acronym is Paris twenty one, which is hosted by the OSD in Paris. I have to say that Johanna's former member of the UN Secretary General's Expert Group on the Data Revolution. He's a development economist, expertise and employment, social protection, healthcare, financing and gender. He's looked at the world in a lot of different ways and we were delighted to have him here in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker's studio.
Welcome, Welcome, Thank you very much for inviting me.
Well, thank you. And I've learned about PARIS twenty one because my daughter has done an internship with you all this summer. So full transparency, but I've learned a lot. Tell us though, in your words, your mission and your goals, what you guys are all about.
PARIS twenty one stands for Partnership in Statistics in Development for the twenty first century. We basically do three things. We help countries with technical capacity development National statistical offices, so we help training of managers in statistical offices in poor countries like Wanda and others, so we organize trainings.
We help with coordination in many parts of when you produce data, there are many ministries involved, there are development agencies involved, and we help them with to get coordinated.
And last, but not least, we do advocacy.
And you just mentioned the UNGA week, the SDG summit, and we do advocacy for more and better funding for data and statistics.
Well, what's interesting in a world that's overrun with data, we just assume it's good. Well, we don't stand it's good. We talk about bias data and kind of dirty data, not great data. But not all data is good, not all data is productive or useful, right, And so you guys are involved in that in helping countries develop infrastructure so that they can actually accumulate their own data sets.
Correct is absolutely correct.
I think what is a bit difficult sometimes to understand is on the one hand we have a data tsunami. We have all these data digital data, which is very good, which is feeding artificial intelligence and innovation. On the other hand, we have and on the other hand we have data gaps, terrible data gaps, and in some countries we don't even know of how many people in a country are living. We have difficulties to measure burst rates and to register those people. We have a lot of data gaps in
the SDGs. We in particular on climate change or gender equality, we are literally flying blind. So we are supporting as paras twenty one with our partners to close those data gaps, to be able to do better decisions, but also to hold oh our government's accountable. I think that's also a very important aspect of this. So that if you say you want to reduce poverty in a given country by six percent. You want to have the start point and the endpoint, and you want to see if this is on track.
We've talked a lot this year about AI and the impact that AI is having on companies whose stocks are publicly traded. What about when it comes to your work and how you can use AI to make sense of this data and help these poorer countries actually make positive change? Are you using it?
An excellent question.
I mean, what we see is that there are two I mean we often talk about silos, right, I mean, and this is a real sile of On the one hand, we have people talking about the data that you were just mentioning, feeding into the algorithms and that supporting these AI driven innovation, and on the other hand, we have data for development, which is an owned space by itself,
and there's not enough crossover. If you look at the G twenty statement at the last one, there is a working group on Data for development and there's a working group on digital data.
So there is yet not enough overlap. I think it's it's about to close.
And artificial intelligent for the public good is of course very important, but also the quality of the data that you feed into it is essential, garbage in, garbage out exactly. So the quality of the data to help countries produce verified quality statistics even is very essential and often unfortunately not in the spotlight.
Well, you can't have transformative I'm stealing words from you guys by transformative policy without transformative data.
Correct, absolutely correct. Yeah, Well, and I'm.
Curious about you know, in a world where there's lots of stress points, I'm thinking, you know, the hottest world, You're right, hottest temperatures on record, So there's a lot going you know, a lot of focus on climate, but investment in infrastructure systems so that the data collection is better.
How tough is that?
To get the money going where it needs to go?
That's, unfortunately, is a very very difficult exercise. So we currently spend around six seven hundred million on data insteadistics from Official Development aid ODA AID and this is less than a percentage point since here. So we would need to ramp up significantly the international support for data and statistics. But we also need to convince countries to invest part of their taxpayers' money, domestic resources into it and the payoff. I mean, the thing is if I invest into a hospital,
if you're a minister, what would you do? Would you invest in a hospital, or in vaccination or education, or would you invest in a national statistical office? We're probably the first, Yeah, because then you can show after two three years is done. These benefits for investment in national statistical systems will only take time. The benefit will take time ten fifteen years later. They feed into everything else.
Sell us on it.
You know, if you're trying to sell a minister on making this investment.
How do you do it?
What's the cost by not making those investments?
What we say is if you want to have I mean, for instance, economic growth, I mean it's very critical to have very good understanding about key economic indicators right, and if those are not sort of measured in your country, you will not be able to, first off all, to make very good decisions. You will not invest your public resources very efficiently. You are not even able to tell you if you do it or not. So in that sense, we are not asking for a lot of money. It's
it's pe nuts. It's literally pe nuts, and there are a lot of we have a lot of good tools attend to help. So I think for a minister, and many planning ministers actually know this and they are behind this. It's sometimes just the politics behind which is a bit difficult.
No politics, But what's interesting but the amount of investment decisions that are made up of like all of the US economic statistics or global statistics right in the developed world. We've got about a minute and a half left, Johanna's you know.
A lot of times a little more.
Sorry, Okay, you know, it's been that kind of crazy day. So I think about, like our audience who's listening, a smart financial investment audience, what is it that they need to understand about again the importance of it and potentially the payoff. What's being missed by not accurately having data on a lot of different countries.
I think we have to talk about the opportunities and the investment opportunities we will have next year in Meddelin or World Data Forum. So all your listeners, your community is quarterly invited because we are working more and more with the private sector, of course with the big companies that have a lot of data that make those data. Also, because we were asking about AI, I will later today
attend by Google and I for Public Good. There are many other companies who are actively engaging I think they could do a little bit more though, and also sees it as a public good. So I think for the many of our colleagues and partners from the private sector, I interested. So are civil society organizations, by the way, and to bring them together in multi partnership, that's the partnership part is very important.
How can we make the data collection easier from the perspective of these countries, And I'm thinking about public private partnership specifically. I mean, think about the data that a mobile phone company has about what somebody does on their phone transactions that they make. I mean, you can get really granular information that can tell stories about an economy.
What's the role of a private company and in working with the government to provide that data because there are some privacy concerns too.
It's on point exactly how you say. On the one hand, I mean this we call this public private partnership, and there are some really very nice public private partnership out there where telephone companies share confidentially and secured the data. But of course it's a business risk as well. I mean, and you have to see what has happened to this
data and so on and so forth. But there are some very good, promising examples of how what we call big data, specifically on geospatial data is used, for instance, on poverty mapping, day and night satellite imagery. So you can look at a given country and you can compare the light nights, and you can compare it with a day, and then you can make a sort of calculation do these people.
Have light electricity or not?
And from this with other data, you can estimate how poor people are and you also know for your investors where maybe you can put some infrastructure to solve this problem.
And that's what I was thinking about. It was interesting. I was over at the earth Shot Prize Bloomberg Philanthropy's event, and we talked with some of the finalists of the earth Shot Prize, and they've come up with different ways to decarbonize the world. And one of the things, let's talk about what you're doing, But then it's like, what's the impact. Talk to us about some of either the data sets that you have helped accumulate and what it has led to if you give us some examples.
Of course, I mean we have been we do a lot of country work, and in specific the one area which is very important it's on gender. So in some parts of this world, I mean through our support in the MALIDIVS in Colombia, in Africa, in many countries we have no more sex disaggregated data, which is fantastic for many different purposes.
I mean this feels so basic, right, yeah, absolutely, I.
Mean to sort of to know of how many men and women there are children. So we have quite a couple of countries where we can show success, where we can show impact, and this impact is leading governments also to invest more into data and statistics.
So you can say the glass is maybe more half full than half empty in our area.
But through these events like what we have here at the highest level that we had the DSG, I mean A Mohamed was opening the High Impact Initiative. We had another event just a breakfast on seven am in the morning, full room.
Very very important people. So there is more consideration for the topic.
And I'm rather optimistic than for the next eight years that we can give it a big push and we will be able to convince more people that this is an important part of the development nexus.
Johannas you talked about Google and Like or the media, you're going that you've had or the conversations you've had, and I do wonder about how much increasingly the private sector complain all of this. It's interesting. We had a guest yesterday and we talked about the Roaring twenties and the crash and FDR, and we talked about who were the power brokers back then, and it was you know, the Carnegie and you know those kind of folks who
are industrialists. Today's power brokers are the data CEOs and the data companies. What you are trying to do, does it increasingly have to come from the private sector or does that not necessarily give you the purest data that you want.
I try, it's a very very important question. They have so much they have so much data, but of course data is also linked to power, and it has lots of questions about confidentiality. It's about the use to safe use of the data. And of course these companies want to make business. What we are talking here is about a public good. So if you talk specifically about a specific subcutory like official statistics, I would say this should
stay in the hand of governments. There are certain criteria, we have principles for how to produce those things.
Is a public good.
We don't know what happens to those data, but I think some of these data is just essential for the government, for private sector, for civil society as well, to see where a country stands, how is it about the education system. So to leave this to the private sector, I don't think it's a good idea to have the private sector feed into those official statistics. That's a very different question. We need to be on the same level playing field.
And we just talked about the numbers. If you look at the budget of an official statistical office in a poor country and you compare it with any other private sector of funding, it's very.
Clear where the power relate, how the power relationship is.
We'll invest your money, not flow in if you don't have those data sets well, to some make sense, that'ship.
Absolutely, I mean it's flowing in.
But then we make in some countries where we this birth registration that I mentioned be registration.
This is terrible.
Mistakes are possible, and and also sort of investments that are not sort of leading to the estimated results. I mean the middle class for instance, you want to know as a as an investor, the middle class in India is it is it five hundred million.
Now how big is it actually?
Do you always trust the data?
No?
No, not at all. I mean there is, I mean there were no, but there is.
Calling out individual countries specifically or feel free.
To Yeah, I mean that there are.
Can they can talk about the past even the developed markets, right, we questioned some of the There.
Are two examples that very well known and it's Greece and also Argentina at some point in the past, and there was about the inflation CPI, which is very well documented. So the the good thing is that there is a trusted community that would call out those misbehavior.
There's also a misunderstanding sometimes there is not one choose in the data that is not It's not chous. It's what's important is.
You make it very clear that you buy to statistical standards and that the data is sort of produced with a certain quality standards, and you make it very open and then you can start a debate about it, which is really more fascinating than you sometimes tend to believe.
I know, for my daughter christ you don't work with you guys in gender? Why gender versus healthcare versus employment versus financing or how do you choose where you want to focus on how does that or is that determined by the money that comes in in somebody's interest, or how do you figure because there's so many probably different ways.
You could go.
Absolutely, I mean the demand is immense. I think many of the questions around gender are underpinning every other sector. If you look at development, we look often at sectors, we look at agriculture, we look at health, we look at education. If you try to improve all those sectors, and the SDGs have seventeen different quote unquote sectors, gender
is underpinning everything. I mean in terms of if you invest in good investment in gender statists, which could be I mean sex disaggregated data, but also access to gender based violence, which is important to document as well.
So it's underpinning all other sectors.
And what you ought to probably have talked about quite a lot in the show is about the economic benefit to use the potential of women's empowerment, in particular for instance, to access to ownership rights of resources, land, credit, insurance. So once you unlock this potential, once you have an opportunity and you know how many women have access to land and what kind of land and credit and education, this will help you to make targeted investment and which
helps for all other sectors. So it's a huge multiplier effect. Next to there's an intrinsic value that women and men should be treated equally.
Okay, what about when it comes to data collection and how different countries are collecting data? Are you seeing you know, in terms of developing countries where they don't necessarily have the infrastructure built in. Are you seeing them in technologies that are so called lead frogging technologies that allow them to sort of bypass the big infrastructure investments that were
made in the past. And I'm thinking, like, you know, ways to provide internet to folks without wireline broadband, you know, without actually digging holes, using satellites, being able to use data collection instead of launching satellites, use drones for example.
This is happening and I'm personally I collected myself when I did my master's thesis. I went to a couple of countries and collected data from my own seasons. So I was working with national statistical offices and we had these paper forms. So you went with a paper form with a questionnaire and you asked all these questions and.
Then you went back and then you had to type it in. I have seen statistical office packed with lots of paper and it looks like in your office. Moreness anyway, So.
This is changing now using mobile phones and copies and and and different forms of basically collecting the data electronic. And this is happening even in poor countries, so there are technolog You said it very nicely.
You said, this leap frogging is happening. I mean we are not seeing.
We also work at the OECD with of course rich country statistical offices, and you can really see the difference of how national Statistical office in particular in these middle income categories like Philippines eventually Ghana, Columbia, how they jump over this and how they change the infrastructure and through very different forms of using modern technologies.
And this is really how very very nice to see.
Well, I know in our prop call I said, you're kind of open able window is something that we are not necessarily aware of and we just take for granted that there's so much data everywhere. So this was really enlightening.
Thank you so much, Thank you so much.
Safe time to be here, so enjoyed it. Johannes Shutin, his executive head of the partnership in Statistics for Development in the twenty first century aka Paris twenty one. This is start.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three six Eastern Listen on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app and the Bloomberg Business App, or watch us live on YouTube.
This next voice is going to sound familiar because we caught up with him at the Milkin Institute Global Conference earlier this year. So great to have back with us in studio. Hans Kobler. He's found her managing partner of Energy Impact Partners. They have about three billion in assets under management. They invest in clean energy technologies and they help deploy them through partnerships with companies trying to decarbonize.
He is in town for Climate Week, and as I said, he's here in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker Student and I have you here with him and myself.
Great being here.
Welcome back. Come on close to the mic because you want to make sure we can hear you the energy transition. Let's start basic. How's it going.
It's going well, it's picking up momentum. We had the first year in history that more money will spent on the energy transition than on traditional energy one point one trillion. So the momentum misbuilding.
A tipping point.
It's a tipping point, it's but it's the beginning. It's the first inning of a long, long race. You know, if you believe McKay and some forecast, we will need eight nine trillion dollars a year one hundred and fifty trillion. That's fifteen internets or one and a half times a global economy. Spend there in the next few decades a lot. That's a lot, and we may or we may not get there, but we are taking it serious. So it's picking up momentum.
Well, one thing that I think about when it comes to the energy transition is the role of nuclear power. And here in the US it's a really checkered history. It's a really checkered past. It's very expensive for US to build nuclear power plants. They're always cost overruns, and then you have the legacy of Fukushima, three Mile Island in Chernobyl.
What are your thoughts on nuclear I think so we have a lot of corporate partners in our investor group. The Southern Company was the last one here to try to build a nuclear pend that finally got them all online.
Which is great.
We have edf as an investor that had fifty five in the country running and half of them didn't work. They when they shut down the Russian gas and Tepko was an investor too, so nuclear. You know, the clean energy transition is amazing and a lot will be winded solar, but you need the baseload and nuclear is still the best way to get to the baseload. So I think it's critical to keep that in the arsenal. I'm from Germany originally. I think you can tell tell the accent.
You know, the probably the greenest country that has most ambitions to go clean. They spend a tonne and they shut down there, which is.
A stupid thing to do. It's I mean, is this reversible?
Yeah, but it's hard.
It's hard.
Once you shut down an industry, you have to build up the talent to build new to build new nuclear plants.
You can, but I guess, can we transition to net zero without nuclear?
Right?
How crucial?
Is it hard?
The transition to net zero is not only converting what we have today, but to deal with the demand that we are facing. We have had a flat demand curve in this country for twenty years. We are now electrifying transportation. We're building data centers running on AI where one Google search, where one AI search is taking about fifty two hundred times more power than a Google search. So you're talking about doubling the infrastructure that we've built over one hundred years.
You know, Musk is out there saying no, no, no, whatever you are calculated, it's going to be tripled.
So you need a lot of.
Electrons and so there is not one solution for that. That means we have to use different tools in the toolkit to get there and get there a lot faster than we have been.
But can we do it this energy transformation without nuclear?
Yes, but I think it would be a lot cheaper if we did it with nuclear. And at the end of the day, you know, we have to address something that we call in the industry trial emma. Everyone wants to go clean, but but when you face not having power at all, security reliability gets on the on the horizon. And when the Germans pay twelve times more for natural gas than the Americans and four times more for electricity,
then affordability comes in right. So that's an equation. This trilemma is an equation very difficult.
But also motivation perhaps to invest in renewable sources that in the long run are less expensive.
Absolutely, but in a way in our view, the only way to solve that equation of this trilemma is to really to apply innovation. That means you need new technologies, great technologies, and you need to collaborate. You need to involve the incumbents. The existing infrastructure sits on, sit on trillions of dollars of investments that we have to help
them get there faster. That's, by the way, it's a business model that we have where we team up with corporates and bring them together in a room with the innovators and the capital to forge those alliances to accelerate that transition. It's look, everybody wants to see the rosy sky, but you've got to be pragmatic about it. And that means that means we got to work together and work fast and harder than.
We have in the past.
So when you have those conversations and those collaborations, what is it that you speak most about. Tim brought up nuclear right, and we feel like it has become such a no no is it nuclear, is it hydro, is it solar?
Is it?
Like?
What is it that you guys spend a lot of time talking about with your partners?
Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, yes. So it is a complex undertaking. We need to decarbonize supply, We need to create a lot more supplies. So that's one Folcus there. The second one is we need to create sustainable demand. That means electrifying a lot of the industries, from transportation to home heating, to the data centers, indoor agriculture. And then you have
to deal with the high intermittency you create. So I was just telling you it's two to three times more power that we need, but at its peak it could be five times as much. You know, it's like building a church for Easter Sunday, and we've got to somehow we have to balance that, and that means you have to invest in transmission distribution, which is very difficult.
Right.
It took fifteen years to get the clean electrons from Canada through two of the greenest states to New York. Because nobody wants to build anything in their backyard. You build storage and great technologies are coming up. You an investor in form you investor in power and so, but that's a lot of space that is needed. Takes some time, or you digitize the communication between the customer and the supply and you tell them, look, don't charge your car
at six o'clock to it at midnight. It turned down. It's nice.
Years.
Just don't cool right now because everybody's cooling.
Can I ask you, is only about thirty seconds left here? Would you invest in a fossil fuel energy company? No, oil and gas company? No, you wouldn't anymore.
No, even though there's going to be doing for some people.
You know, look, we need certainly natural gas form.
I know you're kind of talking your book because that's the way we.
Need natural gas for a long long time. But we personally would not invest. We are fun focused on you know. We are an Article nine fund. We invest in things that decarbonize the globally.
But if you weren't, would you, if.
I was a financial investor, would Okay?
All right, love having you come here, always provocative. I always learned something.
Come back soon, yeah, well do Hans.
Kobler, he's founding Do you took a founder of managing partner Energy Impact Partners? Here in our studio, 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 you too. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just say Alexa play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Get all right, Well, there is definitely working in a coal mine, and if you think about our history, right, not good conditions.
Yeah, and there's also working low wag low wage retail jobs here in the United States in twenty twenty.
Three, Carol mean, like at a dollar General.
That's exactly what I'm talking about.
Yeah, maybe not exactly like working in a coal mine. But yeah, wait until we get into the story. Because ck based on this week's Bloomberg Business Week cover story, it also happens to be today's Bloomberg Big Take. You will find things like rat infestations, blocked fire exits, expired kids food, macheti wielding, and watermelon throwing shoppers. It sounds funny, but it's really not a lot of nightmares at the biggest dollar chained tim in the United States.
With more on the story, which is reported out by Bloomberg, Josh Eedelson, and Brendan Case. Let's bring in Brandon, Bloomberg News US retail reporter joining us on zoom in our Dallas bureau along with the editor of Bloomberg Business Week, Joel Weber here in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker's studio. The story, by the way, it is in the new issue of
Bloomberg Business a week. It's available on newstands tomorrow. You can already read it though on the Bloomberg Terminal and at Bloomberg dot com Slash BusinessWeek one of the most read stories on the Bloomberg terminal today. Joel, this is a deeply reported story with disturbing anecdote after disturbing anecdote. How does something like this come together?
Who knew that a story, a story like this that has really changed a lot of American shop I think I had this signed to it, and so one of the things that struck me about it is that we've talked I think for generation now about you know, how big of a presence Walmart has had in America, and it actually is like the story that Walmart sort of I think, you know, propelled into America for like these big box stores and changing small town America Dollar General
has actually taken a lot of that farther now. The stores have a much, much, much smaller footprint, which we described in the store in the story. The price points are amazingly affordable and seemingly inflation proof. As we also point out in the story. The cost of all of this, though, is that it turns out to be a really troubling place to work and the people who actually work in the stores a retail job. Wow, the stuff that they've gone through. So Brendan Josh Unilson, but was the lead
writer on this Brendan case also intimately familiar with it. Brendan, what was the what was the reporting tidbit that made you made you and Josh just really want to dig into this.
There were a couple of things, and one of them was what we say at the very beginning of the story, which was that if you look at a lot of the fines that the Labor Department, through OSHA, has levied against Dollar General, one of the things that keeps coming up over and over again is blocked exits, which obviously matters a lot to OSHA. It harks back to the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in New York the thing that.
One thing that surprised us was talking with an employee in New Orleans who said that in his case, the blocked exits were no accident. In fact, a manager had told him to purposely block exits to try to cut down on shoplifting make it harder to get out of the store.
That was one thing.
Another thing that jumped out was just the lack of you know, heating and air conditioning. And we talked with people who had put ice packs down their pants when it got hot, wore you know, multiple coats and layers when it got cold, and one regional manager who you know, was fairly high up in the company who told us that she was just really shocked by how difficult it was to get to get funding for basic maintenance, basic upkeep.
On top of all that, there's this sense that Dollar General has just been in this incredible growth strategy. So talk about how it's kind of swept the country a little bit.
Brendan, Yeah, and it's really it's really amazing how fast it's grown. To your point, it's a little bit sort of a creature of the Walmart era. You know, Walmart comes in and it wipes out a lot of retailers across the country and leaves a landscape that if you're not close to a Walmart or have a easy access to a car, you might not have as many retailers
that you know as you had before. And so in Swoop Dollar General and many of its rivals, and you know, opens up stores to the tune of typically you know, one thousand a year, and so you know, they've got more than nineteen thousand locations around the country right now. You compare that with a little more than five thousand for Walmart, including the Sam's Club locations, and you start to get a sense of how ubiqulus it is, especially in smaller towns. About about eighty percent of its stores
are in towns of twenty thousand people or fewer. And you know, if you if you drive through you know, through the countryside in many states, particularly the Southeast, but in many other parts of the country as well, you'll see, you know, store after store.
We talked about the block fire exits. Can we also talk about the Bagwana because there's some of that in the story, Brendan.
Saying since he came in the state House.
I was waiting to do that transition there. How crazy are some of the reporting details that you found.
Yeah, you know, the the issue of animals getting into the stores and befouling the merchandise is something that also came up over and over again. You know, there was one there was one case in Oklahoma where birds got in and you know, used sections of the store as you know, as a as a bathroom. And the store manager there told us that he was told to just take the merchandise home, wash it in your washing machine if you have to, and bring it back and put it back on the shelves.
You know.
There was another another instance in which there was an Iowa store there was a worry about asbestos, but after inspection, you know, some state inspectors found out that it wasn't asbestos. That was the good news. The bad news was that it was stained from bad feces. I mean, this is all over a wall.
It's pages and pages of disturbing anecdotes, but disturbing experiences that employees have had. I mean, one thing that really stuck out to me was the employee who you know, there's one employee in the store. The employee asking a customer to watch the store, well, he or she went to the bathroom I mean, the thing that I was thinking through throughout this piece is is that this is
working for Dollar General. They're making a calculation that they can allow their stores to reach this condition, pay their employees this wage, have this few of employees in a single store because it's worked, especially over the past five years.
Yeah, it's really worked for a long time, and they've had, you know, from a financial standpoint, a really strong record of sales increases and profit increases. One thing they're good at doing this is not true of all retailers, is opening new stores and fairly immediately having them contribute to the to the bottom line. This year has been a different story for for for Dollar General, at least from a stock market perspective, where the shares have come way down.
They've cut the profit forecast a couple of times. One of the big problems, obviously, is just the financial precors on on their customer base, which skews towards the lower income UH end of the spectrum. They have said, however, that they're going to spend more on labor UH and and that's at least, you know, that's that's certainly an acknowledgment that the store conditions are not where they want them, uh, and that they're they're they're they're not to spend money
to try to improve things this year. Another thing that's driving that I think is just a stepped up competitive threat. For years, Dollar General was known as, you know, the big successful dollar store chain. Dollar Tree, its closest rival, was sort of an also ran. That company is in the middle of a turnaround and so you know, seems to be becoming a stronger competitor. And then you've got Walmart, which lost some ground to the dollar stores in the
wake of the Great Recession. Really doesn't want that to happen again if the economy slows down and is rolling out a lot of initiatives, whether it's you know, pricing or delivery services that are designed to sort of counter competition on the lower end.
Hey, Brendan, and the stock, as you said, down more than fifty percent this year, you know, trading at a fifty two week low. What does the company say about.
All of this.
They reported earnings a couple weeks ago and you know, again cut their profit forecast. And interestingly, they had initially said that we're going to spend an extra one hundred million dollars on labor this year. They moved that number up to one hundred and fifty million last month, so clearly engaging with the idea that for their own customers, their own workers. You know, there are some things that are falling short right now. Whether that's enough remains a big question mark.
But what I mean, but what I mean about all these specific things, I mean, this is pretty gross for workers and unsafe for workers. And you know, we talked about the New Orleans worker who were blocking you know, the fire exits, and there was a fire. Unfortunately nobody was there. But this stuff continues, and I'm curious that the company addressed any of these specifics.
The company told us in a pretty we we sent them a very detailed inquiry. They got back to us with with with a significant reply that that, you know, repeated things they've said in the past which have to do with them saying that they want to provide stores that are safe to work in, they want to provide opportunity for their workers. I think that a lot of the details and the story show the ways in which
they've come up short in those those goals. The extra investment they're making suggests that you know, they they they you know, they're sort of acknowledging some of the shortcomings, but again, you know, like whether that turns out to be enough to really kind of turn things around. I think the proof will be in the putting and this is.
In the story, but it really does kind of culminate with a shareholder meeting where employees really did get their attention. So we'll see where that leads. I do think, you know, Brendan, when you just look at the incredible performance that the company has had on the stock market really until this year, what's happened? Because you would think, like, with the economy being where it is, inflation being where it is, this looks like a pretty good value proposition to an American consumer.
And yet you know, you look at that share price and it's like, you know, the ceiling of bat Iguano fell apart and everything fell apart. What's happened?
I pointed to say. And one of them is tougher competition. I think Dollar Tree, you know, Dollar Tree brought in a former CEO of Dollar General with backing from an activist investor, Mental Ridge. They're comparable sales numbers suggest that they're getting some traction there that people, you know, consumers out there are noticing improvements and responding. That's one thing.
Another thing is the holy issue of trade down. You you know, in the wake of the financial crisis, you had a lot of trade down from middle income, higher income people doing just what you say, saying, you know, look, that's going to be a great bargain. I'm going to buy more stuff at Dollar General or Dollar Tree or other dollar stores. I think you're seeing a lot less of that right now, and where you're seeing it is
in Walmart. And so I think that whether it's competition from small box stores like other dollar stores, or competition from the really big ones out there, I think Dollar General is under a lot more pressure than it used to be now. At the same time, you know, by its own admission, it has this issue with store conditions.
You know, can it fix the store conditions. It's fixing the store condition is going to be good enough to get back some of that business and get back onto a growth path in terms of comparable sales store by store. I mean, that's an open question.
I just think about too, that these stores do play a role. That there are small communities around the country right that don't.
Have anything, don't and as the story also documents like some of these communities have actually resisted having Dollar General come in, have lost some of those battles, So there's this tension there. I also just think the moment that we seem to be at with labor in this country, with.
UAW doing what it's doing, Hollywood doing what it's doing.
Just to look at retail for a second and be like, oh, yeah, there's this world that I don't think we talk about enough Business Week, but this is, you know, a landscape of what America really looks like, and the people who are in the front lines actually dealing with some of these issues that you know, you don't expect to have to deal with a machete wielding customer, and yet at Dollar General, that's part of your job description.
Even if you don't get training for it.
It's not in the training.
No, it's not.
It mean that point we laugh, but it's disturbing and it's real for some folks. Incredible cover story Brendan Case, Bloomberg News US retail repert. Of course, the editor of Bloomberg Business Week magazine, Joel Weber, this is the cover story.
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.
Ah.
Yes, indeed we did write about real things. But he also told some great tales.
Yeah he sure he sure did. We'll talk about Yeah.
A contrarian conversationalist and an iconic writer controversialist too. Yes, focused on status it's dark side humiliation is. Nonfiction works included tales of psychedelic dropping hippies, such as the electric kool Aid acid test. You talked about that, reading it in high.
School, college college.
Yeah.
Class on the sixth dies pretty cool.
Class, risk taking astronauts the right stuff, which was made into an incredible movie. We're at the forefront of new journalism, blending literary flair with immersive reporting.
His portrait of the Downfall of Entitled bond Trader Sherman McCoy and the Bonfire of the Vanities, his first novel, came to define an entire era, so writes our next guest, Joe Mysak, editor of Bloomberg Brief Municipal Market. Joe over the last year spent many hours digging through the two hundred and thirty six boxes stacked in the vaults of the New York Public Library's main building, Carol in Manhattan, the archives of Tom Wolfe.
His story about what he found is featured in the Remark section of the upcoming issue of Bloomberg Business Magazine. Kind of reads like its own literary tale. You can read it now at the Bloomberg Terminal, of course, in at Bloomberg dot com slash BusinessWeek. Joe is here in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio, So talk to us. First of all, I'm just curious, what was the pitch meeting to Joel in doing this, or did Joel come to
you and say, Joe, you got to do this? Or how did this come about?
No, I discovered this, you know, this little episode of literary history. I found a letter in the archives from Tom Wolfe's. Tom wolf had been a trustee at Saint Christopher's School in Richmond, had gone there, graduated nights at forty seven, and there's a letter from the headmaster there saying, you know, I wish you'd give this guy, Kirk Maturn a call. He gave us a very nice bequest, and as you know, we're starting up our ramping up our
endowment campaign. Okay, so you know, the archives are spread out in a lot of different boxes, so that's not perfectly chronological. So you're going through them and saying, ah, here here, then this must be connected here and and just like all of a sudden, you know, when I saw this guy's response back to you know, Tom Wolf writes him and says, thank you for this. This is wonderful.
As you know, we're starting up our endowment. Maturn gets back to him and on his lazard fare stationery says, wow, you know, thank you so much for your nice letter. And you know, why don't we have lunch sometime And you know, not just us, but I have some friends on the street who'd like to meet you too, And I'm not going to put you on a podium. Let's just have an informal lunch. And he sets up this lunch at the twenty one club now shuddered unfortunately, and
you know there's a separate for that. And you know, then on one of the other letters, Tom writes or you know, starts drafting a reply saying, you know, your your friends were fascinating and they clued me into this world that I knew nothing about. So I put all this together and I said, wait a minute. This guy, Kirk Mattern, is the guy who was responsible for Sherman McCoy, the protagonist of Bonfire the Vanities, becoming a Wall Street trader.
He had been in the Rolling Stone series and it went I think for about twenty seven.
The serialized version of serialized version of Bonfire.
Tom was writing it against deadline all the time he had been a writer. And the title of his book, and it was never quite defined what it was, was called A Man in Slices, which, of course is funny because Tom Wolf's third novel is called A Man in full So.
Joe, you call him Tom, Yeah, like you know him? Well, you know, how did you find yourself at the New York Public Library looking through Tom Wolf's mail Tom wolves mail over the last year and tell us how you came to know him over your career and over over his.
Well, okay, I was I was in search of There's a there's a couple of lines of Bonfire where Sherman McCoy's daughter asks him, and this is in the published version of the book. Book says, Daddy, what do you do? What do you do, daddy, what do you do all day? And Sherman McCoy starts to fumble around, and finally his wife, Judy says, and I got this, and she says, what daddy does is he slices the cake and he hands out slices and Daddy gets to keep the crumbs. And
so Sharon recoiled. You know, I was completely humiliated by this and like thinking, like, wow, the crumbs and at that, you know they're out in Southampton right then? And uh so I remember I asked Tom one night we're having dinner at Ben Benson's, also now closed. I asked him, I said, who came up with that?
Did you come up with that?
And he goes, no, Desmond Fitzgerald? And I remember the name Desmond Fitzgerald. But you know, I, you know, last summer I said, wow, remember that. I bet that'd be a nice column. Let me go to his papers and see if I could find that. Sure, how difficult could it be? Well? Very difficult, because jos I said, two hundred and thirty six boxes. And you know you don't
you're not just faced with him. You have to request different boxes, and you know, so it's the whole process so I'm I'm looking, I'm looking, and I didn't find that, but I found Kirk Maturn. And so then Kirk Macturn's son works on Wall Street. And I said, well, wait a minute, this can't be that Kirk Maturn, this is the Sun. So I emailed him cautiously and I said, you know, I don't know if your father is still alive, but I'm looking to find out this information and chat
with him bit. And he goes, oh, sure, let me find out if you know, if you'd like to chat he's retired for him, And he got back to me and said, yeah, here's his email address. So then I got to calm him up. And you know, I just like, basically,
you're the guy. You were the guy who changed the course of literary history, really, because if you think about it, on the one hand, if you have you know, here's a novel about a writer of a man in slices, or this entire chaotic scene of what did he put men baying for money on, you know, the floor of
this Wall Street securities firm? And of course you know, Bonfire was not a particularly good movie, but the Wall Street scenes really captured people's imagination because all of a sudden, it's like this whole world is shown to you, and you know, one of the parts of this you know project. As I was doing it, Kirk Maturn set up a meeting at to go to Solomon Brothers during the Treasury Bond auction so that Tom could just watch it and witness it. And of course, you know, it was this
wild thing. And it happened that Michael Lewis, was working at Solomon Brothers at that time, had not yet written Liarus Poker obviously. Uh So that's you know, that was why I was searching through the papers. And as I was searching through the papers, I mean, I became sort of a because you know.
You go through every box.
Yeah, in every box, there's there's a little surprise, like a little presence ie, you know, like Okay, for example, for example, Carol, it's Tom did this anthology called The New Journalism. And there's an introduction basically made up of a couple of pieces he wrote for New York Magazine and for Esquire. But there's all you know, And and what happened was I thought he just took those three
parts and cobbled them together. No, Instead, there's this manuscript hundreds of pages, probably maybe even thousands of pages because the Tom Wolf writing was rewriting. Uh, and it includes this entire maybe two hundred pages of all about his time at Yale in graduate school, which he has never written about before. But there it is in the boxes at the New York Public Library. Tom did not like graduate school.
Yea, I just said this picture of Joe just like surrounded by all this stuff. I don't know, maybe some coffee on the ground.
Listen and public library.
Very we're talking with Joe Maysak. Also of course in our studios Joe Webber, editor of Bloomberg Business WEEKND you know, Joe, We're just listening to Joe just unfold this tale of what he found out, uh and uh how it led to this most famous fictional bond trader, right that was in Bonfire of the Vanities.
Do you need me?
Because he was he was great.
We always thinking about like when this was inspiring and just telling you the story and just I mean what you like.
We weren't there for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Joe, right, like, this is the piece that you wrote is a is a product of you being there, the research that you did. But Joel tell us how it came together.
Joe wrote this story. I was like, why why do we need to know about Tom Wolf now, like, didn't
he die? And then I'll wait a minute years documentary. Yeah, And and the documentary was the reason that I was like, you know, there's a reason that this matters now, right, And it's because Michael Lewis went to the same archive and wrote this story and he happened to write it before Tom Wolf died, And at the premiere on Friday, he actually said that he wanted to write it so that he could like see Tom's reaction to the story. We didn't get that that luxury, so we had to
deal with that afterward. But I think because Joe had written the story and spent so much time in the archive and and look, in this world, in the Bloomberg world, Bonfire of the Vanities is a big deal, like that is it still feels like a foundational thing. And so the fact that Joe like found this little nugget that like first draft wasn't even really about the bond market, I was like, that is awesome, So that's that's what matters.
It just felt like there's a little bit of history that we were able to to do to you know, provide a significant insight on and that was one hundred and fifty percent.
Joe, what other archives are you questing to spend time?
Well, you know about Jackie.
I heard that Gay Talise has quite an archive in the bottom of his house.
Yeah, so that's.
Going to the New York City Pilot Public viboraries, so you can get to it right right.
What else did you find out about tum Wulf Because you did find out more about Oh, he became almost one of the characters that he has written about.
You know, there's so much in in the the archive that you it's it's really it's it's an education in certainly journalism history. You know, for example, I came across this piece that he wrote first of that he pitched he set like a twenty seven page pitch letter to the Saturday Evening Post, which in nineteen sixty two was quite a legitimate magazine, and he included this, you know, a pitch for an article about a status life in Washington, d c. Because at that point he was working for
the Washington Post. And you know, he sends this pitch letter and then apparently later on sends the completed story, and there's a thirty five forty page article about status life in Washington and the Kennedy administration. And I was never run the Saturday Evening Post. It's never run anywhere. So you just keep coming across these little presence and you know, this wasn't published, This wasn't published.
Isn't this something unbelievable?
I mean, is there going to be just opportunity for a book of the unpublished works of Tom Wolfe?
Oh? I think you know, not only the unpublished, the un kind of unpublished work, but the uncollected work. So many of his book reviews are really insightful where he you know, he really tells you what he's thinking, including this entire evisceration of Norn Mailer. Incredible.
That was an interesting part of just how much tension there was. And you know, if you're interested at all in this, it's worth checking out this documentary, which in New York is that i f C called.
Radical wolf great stuff.
You could go on and on.
This story sounds like you need to write a book. I'm just telling you you've got nothing to do. I mean, if t has been in the archives, just go write the book. Joe my sack, of course, and Joel Weber. Check this out remark section of the upcoming new magazine.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from three to six Easter 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, her next guest is an author of many books, including the New York Times bestseller The Wizard of Lies, Bernie Madoff, and the Death of Trust. That book made into an HBO film. It starred Robert de Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer. She also spent more than twenty years at The New York Times, where she was a finalist for the Pulitzer.
Per Can I tell you?
Robert de Niro for years leading up to with Tribeca, kept asking him when are you going to do maidof When are you going to do Meido?
And then he did it, and then he did it.
Anyway, go ahead.
She got him to do Madoff.
She did.
Her most recent book is Taming the Street, The Old Guard, The New Deal, and FDR's Fight to regulate capitalism. It came out last week. It's an exploration of financial regulation during the New Deal, a period of time that included the creation of the SEC. The Financial Times called the book quote riveting and timely, and I've got to agree. We're very pleased to have with us. Diana B. Henriquez
here in our Bloomberg Interact broker's studio. Full disclosure, Diana did give me my first job in business journalism when I was a research assistant on The Wizard of Lies back in graduate school. Diana, welcome, It's good.
To see you in doors. You can I just say thank you.
You've turned out pretty well. I think my judgment was pretty great.
Well, thanks so much so. Carol and I were talking about this just because in the last three hours, basically like everything we see today reminds us of the Roaring twenties and what was happening.
Isn't it remarkable? It is remarkable deja boo all over again, as the old joke does. But you know, these are our roaring twenties and the press to deregulate, to reduce the fetters on unfedtered capitalism. Some of the arguments that I see in the press today were lifted from Calvin Coolidge, almost word for word, Comma for comma. It's amazing how the arguments, the defenses against regulation that emerged in the twenties and thirties are have resurfaced today.
But it's not just the arguments against regulation. It's also the concentration of wealth that we're seeing.
That's what I thought was concentration of wealth, the disparity of wealth, the amount of income growth it is going to the top one percent, the stagnation of average and ordinary workers' incomes. All of that is straight out of the nineteen twenties. We're seeing technologies disrupting major industry. Same in the nineteen twenties. Major changes in manufacturing wiped out three million jobs at the beginning of the twenties, and a million of them never came back.
So, Dana, does it make you because it's interesting because we just talked a lot about AI today and the disruption there again. I mean, it's kind of a constant narrative. But does it make you say, listen, the world, the economy, the market, business, it's cyclical, we go through these changes or does it know?
How do you think about I think the market is always going to be a very sensitive barometer of a disruptive change. And whether that disruptive change is radio as it was in the nineteen twenties, which was changing the way newspapers operated, changing the whole landscape of mass communication, but whether it's AI arriving at a time when finance
is already highly automated. But the reliance of the market on the status quo, considering that it makes its money because things change, right, It is amazing to me that everyone thinks it's going to stay the same. And indeed they did in nineteen twenty eight twenty nine, right up until October of nineteen twenty nine, they said, oh this is this is a perfect world. And for the pudocrats, it was a perfect world. And it's always going to
change in within the next decade. As I detail in that that's the stretch of time I cover in Taming the Street nineteen twenty nine to nineteen thirty nine, The world turned upside down?
Can I ask how you got there?
Like, how did you say?
You obviously could write about probably anything in every thing. So what is it that said I got to do this?
Oh? You know, I fell in love with the story of Richard Whitney the Fall of the Great New York Stock Exchange President when I first started covering Wall Street, you know, back in the Pleistocene era, stopped and I said, gosh,
what a tale. And it had been included in a kind of episodic anecdotal book called Once in Gaulconda by John Brooks, which I loved, and I ducked it away, tucked it away, and always thought that that period of creation of market regulation would have been fascinating to live through. But what really peaked my interest, Caroline, was the two thousand and eight meltdown.
You know.
I was going to work at the New York Times every day in the fall of two thousand and eight after Lehman Brothers closed, wondering if that would be the day the ATMs went dark. And I was aware, as an amateur financial historian, that I was living through history. I was living through events that would be his historic in the financial history of the country. And I said, you know, people going through nineteen twenty nine felt this way, what an incredible experience they had. So but that kind
of began to crystallize what I wanted to do. Then, of course, Bernie Madoff happened in two thousand and eight, and my life went off in a different path. And then the thirtieth anniversary of the nineteen eighty seven crash came, well, that got me closer to twenty nine, because, of course, the eighty seven crash was the worst day in Wall Street history, eclipsing the worst days of nineteen twenty nine. And finally, when that book was done, I said, I
think it's time. So I started work on this book about five years ago, when no one ever mentioned the New Deal, when it was as if Roosevelt had never existed. But I'm digging, digging into the story and seeing more and more parallels.
And then as the last five years.
Have unfolded, it is as if the puzzle pieces that matched the nineteen twenties and thirties just dropped into place.
It's pretty so it was amazing.
Yeah, Well, let's talk about the political environment here in which FDR came into office, because you note in the book that it's quote alarming political discontent erupting from the extreme left and the radical right. I thought to myself when I read that sounds familiar. Are you talking about twenty twenty one? Are you talking about twenty twenty.
No, I'm talking about nineteen twenty eight, twenty nine, thirty thirty one, thirty two. The right, the suffering in this country. First, we can't even take it in today, but twenty five percent of the workforce was out of work in those days. That was thirteen million people. But imagine that one out of every four people you know doesn't have a job.
Many of them haven't had a job in years. People are living in caves in Central Park, there are scavenging landfields, fields, The degree of suffering in the country is reaching such a point that it's at powder keg waiting to explode. From the left, you have increasingly militant communist interests that are eager to harness this worker anger and outrage to make gains in the political system. And that, of course alarms the industrialists and captains of capitalism on the right,
who are fearful of labor uniting with communists. And they start looking longingly at Italy and Germany, which have been under fascist control in Italy's case for more than a decade, and they say, hmm, they've got some pretty good ideas over there. Look how they're getting their economy going. Look
how they're managing their labor unions, locking them up. But so you've got these two tensions, and you've got a man who steps in FDR and says, if democracy can't fix this, people are going to give up on democracy. And so this is one last chance for democracy to relieve this suffering and give people hope. And that's what carried him into office.
The ties between capitalism democracy like it's tortured. It's important.
It's actually so simple as FDR saw it. And I didn't see it this way until I read speeches of his. When he signed the bill creating the sec he said.
Wait, said it again, the bill creating the SEC An institution we take for granted. Yeah, well, and we.
Take the FDIC for granted. That didn't exist before we had lived our entire lives hell protection. Yes, right. So he saw that a healthy democracy required well regulated markets that seemed fair. He believed that if the average American didn't feel he could get a fair shake in the economy, he would not support the democracy. And so to him, the two were completely wetted. And so if I say, a lot of people are saying you with democracies on
the ballot in twenty twenty four. I'm saying, yeah, financial regulation is on the ballot in twenty twenty four to two because they are inextricably linked. The fairness of the economy, in the eyes of the average American is what sustains support for this democratic experiment, and Roosevelt saw that almost break. There's an anecdote which I love. It's perhaps apocryphal, but
I love it anyway. A visitor of the White House right after Roosevelt was sworn in at the depths of the depression, said well, you know, if you can cure this depression, mister president, you'll be our greatest president. But if you fail, you'll be our worst president. And Roosevelt corrected it and me said, no, if I fail, I'll be our last president. To the perspective of the people at the time, it was that desperate.
That's journalist and author Diana Beinry. Her latest book is out now. It's called Taming the Street, The Old Guard, the New Deal, and FDR's fight to regulate American capitalism.
You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week. We just talked regulation on Wall Street, while coming up next we'll turn to another hot button policy issue, controlling our Southern border.
Chef John Fraser discusses what immigration flows mean for America's hospitality labor force. 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, Jess, I'd love having restaurant tours on our program because well, I love food, and sometimes if you're here in person, they bring us foods. It's really fun. But also I love speaking to them about the business, how much food costs, how tough or how easy it is to get employees, and of course customer demand. It can tell us just a lot about how the economy is doing in different parts of the country. Very please to ab with us this afternoon, John Fraser. He's a restaurant
tour of Michelin starred chef. He's the founder of JF Restaurants. They've got fifteen restaurants with more than four hundred employees around New York City, Long Island, during California, in LA. They've got places in Florida as well. He's also got a YouTube series called Silent Chef, which we're going to talk about as well. Chef John Fraser joins us on a zoom from New York City. Chef, how are you great?
Thank you, thanks for having me.
Yeah, it's really good to have you with us. First, just give us an update on the state of the business. What are you seeing right now across your different restaurants and concepts.
Yeah, you know, it's really city by city. New York City, as everyone knows, kind of is a really seasonal business. Our New York City restaurants who were up from last summer for sure. We'll know in a couple of days kind of how much. But we do see a bit of a little always in the second heading into the third quarter, and then we ramp up into the fourth,
which is by far our best around Florida. Also, seasonal dips happen in the summertime, and we're really really strong demand across the hotel properties out in Long Island, as you know, that's that's where it all happens in the summertime. It's a seasonal business, and we've been rocking. We'll probably go until around the end of October and then we'll settle into the winter months.
Well, what about getting employees. If we were to speak to you two years ago, I know you would have said it's tough to find employees to uh, to work in the restaurants. Tell us about how tough it is to get those employees, and then also tell us about food costs and if they're going down.
Yeah, Starting with food costs, I mean, we have seen a drastic decrease in our food cost as supply chain has gotten better. You know, thankfully we're able to pass that along to our guests, and we're seeing that across all of our restaurants in all of our markets. The food hike, the food cost hikes were kind of universal. It didn't matter market to market. Eggs we're still, you know, wildly expensive. Gas was wildly expensive. That was all passed on to us and there for our guests. So from
a food cost perspective, we're seeing things drastically reduced. There still are some pockets, I would say, a lot of proteins like beef I still very very high. I'm not sure that's ever going to get better. To be honest with you, it may just be a change in the way that we construct our menus in the way that our guests actually eat.
From a labor perspective, we are starting to see some uptick.
We've we've hired on let's call re hired a lot of people that were pre pandemic hospitality employees. So in other words, we're bringing folks in that who have had experience in the past, whereas I would send in the last couple of years we were training from zero, which is fantastic for us, and I think that that guest experience is drastically improved in that way.
I still think that we.
You know, hot topic, you know, when we figure out a sensible kind of reaction to our borders, that will be kind of the last domino for us to fall in order to equalize and be able to pass as savings on to our guests.
So in your view, do you really think the economy is slowing?
In my view, well, compared to what right, compared to a year ago, we're drastically up from last year compared to two years ago. Obviously, what I would say is what we're seeing is the sort of bifurcation of spending. We'll have some folks that join us who, let's say, are not big spenders. They're out for an experience, and then we'll have some folks who are clearly out to party and have a great time and who will have
a drastic spend. So what I would say is, I'm starting to see a split of sort of people that are willing to kind of separate with those those dollars and people that are remaining sort of tight. But we have not seen a drop in reservations, which for us is kind of the tell.
Hey, go back to chef what you were saying about immigration and border policy here and connect that to what you see at restaurant.
At the restaurants, well, you know, I can only speak from my experience, and it's anecdotal, right, I don't I'm not coming from a place of data. But I can tell you who our applicants are, and I can tell you where they're from. What we used to have is quite a bit of Latino applicants, especially in the back of the house, and that has changed. We are now not as not employing as many, and a lot of those that we are employing our first time hospitality employees.
So I'm not sure if there was a move around the United States and move back home to their home countries. But I can tell you that the hospitality workforce is severely understaffed and that would make a.
Huge chunk for us.
It has to be sensible, but it has to be soon, and that would probably mark a drastic change in your guest experience, its being better and the price that we have to charge.
That's so interesting to hear, and because I think that part of the conversation often gets lost when we talk about immigration policy, because it's so polarizing when you have Democrats and Republicans fighting about it, and it actually sounds very clear from you. I'm wondering if you do any work in telling your local legislator about this, if you've partnered with any other restaurants to talk about this, because there are serious economic implications here.
It is, it is polarizing, and I think that you know, I'm a small business owner and I'm I'm I'm not coming at it from a political point of view. It's simply spaces that we need filled. We do some work with our local folks in each one of our markets. We do a lot of work also in some of the training and onboarding of folks. You know, unfortunately, you know, the hospitality industry is one it is the largest employer in America. But our voice is not quite as unified
as I think it probably could be nationally. And that could just be you know, a difference between states and and and also the competition in between.
You know, small businesses.
Talk to us about your YouTube series thank you.
So, you know, during COVID, for the first time I had some some some some free time in probably twenty years, and I was looking around the media landscape of on the food scene, what's happening. And what I was finding is a lot of what was out there didn't speak to me. It was a lot of sort of how to, a lot of you know, a lack of why, a lack of why cook this way? Or why why this produce? And and I felt like that storytelling it's inside of me.
It's how we weren't our restaurants. It's how we construct our menus and our concepts. But I didn't see it in the media. And so I wrote some short stories and I was lucky enough to get linked up with Jose Andres Media who who was a co producer and produced these.
These pieces. You know, it's.
Storytelling in the very simplest way. There's no talking, there's some music and ambient and it's sort of the chef's journey. The chef's journeys is about community, and it's about bringing people around a table. And I'm lucky enough to be able to be connected with these incredible farmers and fishers and wine makers and cheesemongers, and I really wanted to tell their story but in a way that was perhaps not loud and imbasticking in your face, but a little
bit more subdued. Is about connectivity and mindfulness.
How do you do this in a way that without talking?
I think the visual is is quite impactful.
We really spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to tell a story without words, and hopefully what that does is it brings a viewer in and they fill in the story. I mean, I would throw the question back to you, have you ever made a recipe off.
Of something that you saw on television?
I have, yeah, but it always requires me to go back and like google it because it's just the way my brain works, like inspired by it, you.
Know, right?
And I think that that's kind of what this series is supposed to do. It's supposed to inspire you to lean into where did those tomatoes come? From and how are they being used. Not necessarily how to treat the tomato and cut one inch and that sort of thing, because I frankly quite boring. I want to know where it come from and what was the life cycle of
the tomato, not necessarily one inch or two inches. I find that actually most people would would say no to that answer that they don't cook from what they see on television. It's entertainment, and the style of entertainment that we're hoping to bring here with our partnership with Calm is one of mindfulness and connectivity.
Yeah, once I get my cooking back calfs back on, I will definitely be doing this.
I'm curious how you pick a particular food for each segment.
Right, So what this series does is it focuses on a very small radius of locality. So within a couple of miles in Long Island, there's a small town called Southold, and inside of that there's a biodynamic farm called KK there is an oyster fishery called Little Ram and there's a cheesemonger called Coptapano.
And what I really wanted to do is sort of bring you into this place.
It's very special and dear to me and show you kind of what happens within a very small radius and a very intense kind of time as well. Summer of one year ago, basically summer of twenty twenty two.
Hey, John, before we let you go, I am not very good in the kitchen. I gotta be honest. However, I loved the Bear, and I'm wondering if the popularity around the FX series The Bear has led to an increase in people just like wondering what happens in the kitchen, you know.
I think I think there's a lot of conversation around also not only sort of the personality of a cook or what happens during a service. Yeah, so it's beyond the kind of recipes and sort of the action, but also the kind of the people that are producing those things and the kind of pressures that they're in. I'm thankful for that story to be out there because I think it's one that's it needed to be told.
But also when you've got like a good looking dude cooking and.
Screaming and yelling, there's like great inspiration that hopefully will come to more folks joining us.
John Fraser, a restaurant ur and chef. He's the founder. If you have restaurants, we love it when you join us. Thanks so much.
This is the Bloomberg Business Week podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live weekday afternoons from three to six Eastern on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, tune In, and the Bloomberg Business app. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg terminal