Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: This is Bloomberg business Week inside from the reporters and
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Speaker 2: global business, finance and tech news. The Bloomberg Business Week
Speaker 2: Podcast with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck from Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, Welcome to the Bloomberg Business Week Weekend Podcast.
Speaker 1: It was a big week for the megacap tech names.
Speaker 1: You know, some of those magnificent seven stocks, four of
Speaker 1: which reported earnings. Tesla, Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet all reporting,
Speaker 1: and then next week it will be Amazon's turn, among
Speaker 1: a few others. On that, we talked to the author
Speaker 1: of The Everything War about the company's quest to own
Speaker 1: the world and remake corporate power.
Speaker 3: In other earnings news, shares of Mattel rallied following its
Speaker 3: quarterly update. I got a couple words for you, Hot wheels, Yes,
Speaker 3: Mattel CEO E Noon Cries is back with us.
Speaker 1: Barbie Movie Take two. Plus a little more serious front
Speaker 1: escalating protests at college campuses over the Israel Hamas conflict.
Speaker 1: We get a global view from Francisco Veloso. He's the
Speaker 1: dean of INCIAD Business school.
Speaker 3: He weighs in two on the impact of AI on
Speaker 3: today's MBA and later on in the next hour, rose
Speaker 3: and regenerative farming as one can only do in Provence,
Speaker 3: and what it's like to spend more than twenty five
Speaker 3: years as a CIA officer, working as an undercover spy
Speaker 3: all over the world and becoming a master of disguise.
Speaker 3: It's all in the new book.
Speaker 1: In true face, we just say she was a kiss.
Speaker 4: She was awesome.
Speaker 1: All right, All of that to come. We begin with earnings. Yes,
Speaker 1: we are in the thick of it, having just wrapped
Speaker 1: up the busiest of weeks in the reporting quarter. The
Speaker 1: iconic toy company Mattel out with results this past week,
Speaker 1: narrowing its loss in the first quarter and beating analyst
Speaker 1: projections thanks to fast sales of its Hot Wheels cars
Speaker 1: and also lower costs.
Speaker 3: Mattel's chairman and CEO, Enon Cries, stopping by to talk
Speaker 3: about the business and the outlook.
Speaker 5: We are off to a good start of the year
Speaker 5: with significant growth, margin expansion, and very strong improvement and
Speaker 5: free cash flow. With positive consumer demand and improving trends,
Speaker 5: we are executing on our one billion dollar share repurchase
Speaker 5: program and just bought one hundred million dollars of shares
Speaker 5: in the quarter, and looking ahead for the rest of
Speaker 5: the year, we expect to benefit from innovation across our
Speaker 5: toy portfolio, meaningful progress on our entertainment strategy, and greater
Speaker 5: efficiencies and cost savings. When it comes to Hot Wheels,
Speaker 5: it's such a great brand, it's an incredible canvas of opportunities.
Speaker 5: It was up in sales. This is really about growing
Speaker 5: the adult space through expansion of the Collector series both
Speaker 5: at mass retail and MATEL creations. It's about broadening our
Speaker 5: distribution globally, accelerating growth in RC and skate and of
Speaker 5: course we have an incredible animated series on Netflix which
Speaker 5: has been a top ten program in six nine countries,
Speaker 5: and all of that what we continue to drive and
Speaker 5: amplify our core Diecast line.
Speaker 4: So really bringing.
Speaker 5: Together the Mattel Playbook about brand purpose, consumer centric innovation,
Speaker 5: cultural relevance, and franchise mindset.
Speaker 1: In terms of taking product and creating the success like
Speaker 1: you did with the Barbie movie, but how do you
Speaker 1: take the toys put it in a series you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, and that it translates into sales. How
Speaker 1: do you guys track it, how do you really see
Speaker 1: that impact?
Speaker 5: This really goes back to how we now see the
Speaker 5: role that we play and how we think of people
Speaker 5: who buy our product not just as consumers, but as
Speaker 5: fans that have an emotional relationship with our brands, and
Speaker 5: what we do. We take successful toy franchises, We take
Speaker 5: those brands and transcend them to other categories, other domains,
Speaker 5: other verticals in entertainment, think film, television, consumer product and merchandise,
Speaker 5: location based entertainment and theme parks, digital experiences, music, all
Speaker 5: verticals that are driven by big brands, big franchise that
Speaker 5: have are built in fan base, and so we bring
Speaker 5: those brands and we then extend them to these domains.
Speaker 5: We have experts within Mattel that do that. The Barbie
Speaker 5: movie is a showcase for the potential of what we're
Speaker 5: looking to do. But it's important to say it's not
Speaker 5: just about movies and not just about Barbie. It's about
Speaker 5: our portfolio and the incredible opportunities we have across multiple
Speaker 5: categories who participate as the owner of one of the
Speaker 5: strongest portfolios in the world in children in family entertainment.
Speaker 3: Well on that, on Barbie and on the movie were
Speaker 3: there was it a demand surprise in the quarter that
Speaker 3: Barbie didn't perform as well less than a year after
Speaker 3: the movie release. Was that bump seemed kind of limited
Speaker 3: in just the months following the the release at least
Speaker 3: a quartered in the most recent quarter.
Speaker 5: Well, Barbie is such an incredible brand. The success of
Speaker 5: the movie is here to stay for a long period
Speaker 5: to come. It's not just about the quarter or about
Speaker 5: the year. It really is about years to come that
Speaker 5: will benefit from the halo of the movie and how
Speaker 5: the brand has extended its audience and fan base and
Speaker 5: really playing at a very high level across the world.
Speaker 5: Barbie is the number one doll property globally and continue
Speaker 5: to gain share in spite of comfortable sales to last year.
Speaker 5: This year, we're celebrating Barbie's sixty fifth anniversary. The multiple activations,
Speaker 5: including three new segments that we are introducing. We expect
Speaker 5: more shelf space in the second half of the year.
Speaker 5: There's an expansion into the adult collector line and continue
Speaker 5: to engage more kid audiences with content on Netflix. There's
Speaker 5: a new series and a new animated movie on Netflix.
Speaker 5: There's also a new video game, a new mobile game,
Speaker 5: that Take two will publish later this year, So there's
Speaker 5: a lot more that is happening around Barbie, and the
Speaker 5: success of the movie and the brand as a whole
Speaker 5: will be here for years to come.
Speaker 1: Well, no doubt about it. Like you think about these
Speaker 1: brands and how iconic and how long they have been around,
Speaker 1: I guess you know the question is right, like when
Speaker 1: it's out there culturally in our universe, great thing, Right,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of buzz people are always curious about.
Speaker 1: So how does that translate in a big way into
Speaker 1: selling more you know, Barbie's and other Mattel toys and
Speaker 1: hot wheels? Do you guys see it? I mean, does
Speaker 1: all of these investments and time and energy really make
Speaker 1: a difference, you know, financially.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, the opportunity is significant. And you know, Barbie is
Speaker 5: so much more than adult Barbie is a pop culture
Speaker 5: icon and what you saw in the movie is a
Speaker 5: showcase for how far Barbie can travel. Our business model
Speaker 5: is to continue to grow our IP driven toy business
Speaker 5: and at the same time expand our entertainment offering. So
Speaker 5: this is very symbiotic. We still see significant upset potential
Speaker 5: in our toy business and the opportunity is to now
Speaker 5: participate in other verticals that we expect will be a
Speaker 5: creative to our business model. Separately from toys, this is
Speaker 5: not about selling toys. This is about creating value, capturing
Speaker 5: value in other categories. But of course success in the
Speaker 5: movie reflects back in toys and in location based entertainment
Speaker 5: and mobile games. It goes across multiple directions, and of
Speaker 5: course a strong toy is a great foundation to extend
Speaker 5: into entertainment verticals. And this is really the business model
Speaker 5: where we look to capture value both on the toy
Speaker 5: side of the business as well as in entertainment verticals.
Speaker 1: You know, something we've talked about before, and I'm always
Speaker 1: curious about the people who are knocking on your door
Speaker 1: following the success of the Barbie movie and who are saying, wait,
Speaker 1: you know there's something we can do here, whether it
Speaker 1: is you know, you guys are already on Netflix. But
Speaker 1: I'm just curious from the content creation world, what the
Speaker 1: world has been like for you guys in terms of
Speaker 1: conversations and new opportunities. How that volume can you quantify
Speaker 1: how it's amped up?
Speaker 5: Well, we absolutely saw an increase and a lot of
Speaker 5: excitement around the potential of our IP portfolio and the
Speaker 5: branch that we own, and we have fifteen movies right
Speaker 5: now in development that we've announced already with some of
Speaker 5: the most prolific creators in the world, and there are
Speaker 5: more projects that we're working on that we haven't announced yet.
Speaker 5: Mattel Television is driving with thirteen shows and specials that
Speaker 5: will be broadcaster this year, and it's a great combination
Speaker 5: of animated projects, live action movies, game shows and the like.
Speaker 5: So there are a lot of the excitement around Mattel
Speaker 5: Television that is now showing content in more than one
Speaker 5: hundred and nineteen countries in more than thirty languages. And likewise,
Speaker 5: we also extending our business into digital gaming, where the
Speaker 5: goal is to extend the physical play to the virtual
Speaker 5: world by creating digital games and experiences that drive sustained
Speaker 5: engagement for fans of all ages. Based on our intellectual properties.
Speaker 1: Barbi two or does can Get a Movie? Can You Share?
Speaker 5: Well? Without getting into the specific of the next Barbie
Speaker 5: movie or the potential of it, the opportunity for Mattel
Speaker 5: is to develop film franchises, and we've always said that
Speaker 5: this is our goal to develop brands that can have
Speaker 5: multiple touch points and engagements with fans. We look to
Speaker 5: continue to broaden our film offering and create exciting and cultural, societal,
Speaker 5: uh purpose driven movies that will excite in the light
Speaker 5: fans of all ages around the world.
Speaker 3: I hope that's a yes, then, Carol, you're like the
Speaker 3: biggest Barbie movie fan. I've ever met a group of.
Speaker 1: My older siblings. You know, I inherited their dolls. I
Speaker 1: have to say I love the movie. My daughter I
Speaker 1: went with and we loved it. We laughed, we cried.
Speaker 1: I've got a Barbie T shirt. I'm just gonna tell you,
Speaker 1: I'm all in.
Speaker 3: I think I think in the future, I think you
Speaker 3: have to recuse yourself from this interview and interviewing back
Speaker 3: to the quarter. You know, the first quarter for toy
Speaker 3: manufacturers can be a challenging one. It comes just after
Speaker 3: Christmas and a lot of you know, the fourth quarter
Speaker 3: buying that happens and during the holiday season. But there
Speaker 3: was easter earlier this year then typically and at the
Speaker 3: end of March, and I'm wondering what you saw when
Speaker 3: it came to easter sales.
Speaker 5: We do, we do believe that an earlier easter benefited
Speaker 5: the first quarter UH and we did say that it
Speaker 5: hasn't changed our expectation for the industry to decline in
Speaker 5: twenty twenty four, although at a lesser rare than twenty
Speaker 5: twenty three. And we believe that the trends will further
Speaker 5: improve and that the industry will return to growth and
Speaker 5: continue to grow over the long term. At Mattel, we
Speaker 5: did see positive consumer demand and improving trends through the
Speaker 5: quarter and expect to outperform the industry and gain market
Speaker 5: share for the full year.
Speaker 3: Hey, what about Fisher Price, because there's some new products
Speaker 3: from Fisher Price coming out in the second quarter of
Speaker 3: the year, including the wooden toy line. Give us demand,
Speaker 3: the expectations, sales expectations for the line for the quarter
Speaker 3: and for the year, and for the brand.
Speaker 5: We're very excited about our strategy for Fisher Price. We
Speaker 5: just announced a new leader that started this week. The
Speaker 5: Fisher Price is by far the largest segment of the
Speaker 5: infant toddler preschool category. We saw increase in consumer demanding
Speaker 5: the quarter. This year, Fisher Price will expand its core product,
Speaker 5: enter a new wood segment, expanding our Little People collect
Speaker 5: A line were broadening Thomas, We're relaunching Barney and extending
Speaker 5: license entertainment with Jurassic and Star Wars. So there's a
Speaker 5: lot that is happening around Fisher Price. Watch out for
Speaker 5: the new Woods line, which is a very exciting addition.
Speaker 3: Why did that Why did that line take so long?
Speaker 3: Wooden toys have been how to come back for years?
Speaker 5: You know, it takes time to develop quality product. We
Speaker 5: this is what we do.
Speaker 6: UH.
Speaker 5: This is our specialty, and we focus on on quality
Speaker 5: and innovation.
Speaker 2: UH.
Speaker 5: And this is another extension of the line.
Speaker 4: UH.
Speaker 5: And at the same time, we continue to exit lower
Speaker 5: margin segments to focus on on the on the profitability
Speaker 5: and UH and performance. We do expect Fisher Price to
Speaker 5: grow in the year. It's a value, it's a valid
Speaker 5: asset that's part of our portfolio, and we're very confident
Speaker 5: about the long term growth potential of this important brand
Speaker 5: that will be celebrating is celebrating it's ninety fourth anniversary
Speaker 5: this year.
Speaker 1: I have to say, Fisher Price, we hit a bunch
Speaker 1: of Fisher Price. I had a bunch of I had
Speaker 1: the school, my brother at the airport.
Speaker 7: We still have we have a bunch.
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you, you know, the office Little
Speaker 1: People Collector Series, Tim Stanovac, Yeah, oh yeah, I actually
Speaker 1: have them absolutely.
Speaker 5: I mean this is another example. This is another example
Speaker 5: how brands transcend culture, transcend age to send demographics. You
Speaker 5: take a brand that is designed for infant and toddlers
Speaker 5: and it's and it becomes a film factor that is
Speaker 5: then is now a collector line and through partnership with
Speaker 5: the cultural and societal brands and icons that excite and
Speaker 5: delight to Carol. Right, it's great to hear.
Speaker 1: I'm just telling you. We're waiting for the Bloomberg Business
Speaker 1: Week Radio TV version. I could see it. John Tucker,
Speaker 1: you'll be a part of that too. I think it
Speaker 1: would be very cool.
Speaker 3: That's the same necessary to me, do you know, I
Speaker 3: don't know.
Speaker 4: You never know, you never know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we always appreciate all the time you give us.
Speaker 1: And really fascinating to see what's been going on at
Speaker 1: this company and really iconic brands when you think about branding,
Speaker 1: Mattel really has so much of it, you know, And
Speaker 1: be well, good to talk to you. Enon Cries he's
Speaker 1: chairman and chief executive officer of Mattel, joining us from Elsagunda, California.
Speaker 2: You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us
Speaker 2: live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern Listen
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Speaker 7: Play and and Broight Auto with a Bloomberg.
Speaker 2: Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
Speaker 1: It's the largest online retailer in the world, touching seemingly
Speaker 1: every aspect of our lives, from retail, groceries, healthcare, entertainment,
Speaker 1: home security, logistics, and of course the cloud infrastructure that
Speaker 1: makes up the backbone of the Internet. We are, of
Speaker 1: course talking about Amazon, the nearly two true million dollar
Speaker 1: company that reports earnings this coming week.
Speaker 3: Critics have also argued that Amazon is a monopoly, and
Speaker 3: last year the FTC filed a monopoly lawsuit against the
Speaker 3: retail giant and what may become one of the largest
Speaker 3: antitrust cases in the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: Dana Mattioli is senior reporter at The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1: Her new book is called The Everything War, Amazon's ruthless
Speaker 1: quest to own the world and remake corporate power. It
Speaker 1: chronicles how Amazon got to where it is today to
Speaker 1: become one of the most feared companies in the world
Speaker 1: that I got to say, one of the most entrenched too,
Speaker 1: in our lives.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: We began by discussing FTC Commissioner Lena Kahn's now famous
Speaker 3: paper that she wrote when she was a student, I'm
Speaker 3: back at Yale Law School, targeting none other than Amazon.
Speaker 8: She was a relative unknown at the time, and law
Speaker 8: review articles typically have a small base of readers. This
Speaker 8: one goes viral and it's the first time that people
Speaker 8: start to piece the words Amazon and monopoly together in
Speaker 8: the same sentence. This was a darling of the company.
Speaker 8: People love their prime. They just associated it with fast
Speaker 8: and free shipping. And she starts to call out behavior
Speaker 8: she sees that she thinks are unintended consequences in a
Speaker 8: change in the way antitrust was being enforced, and she
Speaker 8: thinks that Amazon is this digital Gilded age baron.
Speaker 1: Well, we think about it, right, you go back to
Speaker 1: those barons, right, and who really just controlled industries, right,
Speaker 1: no competition, if you will, a standard oil and others.
Speaker 1: And it is interesting because, you know, Dana, I always
Speaker 1: think about Amazon what they started with, right and books,
Speaker 1: and it sounded so innocent and just kind of you know,
Speaker 1: it's become so much a part of our world. That mean,
Speaker 1: I can't I know, in our own home it's like,
Speaker 1: we buy something, but let's go check on Amazon first
Speaker 1: of all what it's going to cost, and you know
Speaker 1: how quickly we can get it. I mean, it's become
Speaker 1: so entrenched in our life. Talk to a little bit
Speaker 1: more about you know what Lena Khan had to say
Speaker 1: and how you wanted to kind of explore that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So Lena's paper says that Amazon's almost become this utility.
Speaker 8: It's unavoidable, not just for consumers but for competitors. It's
Speaker 8: become like this highway to get to the Internet through aws,
Speaker 8: and sellers need to be on the website to sell
Speaker 8: because so much of e commerce takes place. They're forty
Speaker 8: percent in the US And she was saying that just
Speaker 8: because at the time Amazon was known for low prices,
Speaker 8: which was the way that that was like the litmus
Speaker 8: test for antitrust enforcement, and during this period it didn't
Speaker 8: mean there were in other things that were happening, like
Speaker 8: tying or predatory pricing or other behaviors that would have
Speaker 8: been criticized or enforced in different regimes of anti trust enforcement.
Speaker 8: And from there her career just really takes off. It's
Speaker 8: this truly meteoric rise. She's twenty seven years old at
Speaker 8: the time. She is now the youngest chair in the
Speaker 8: FTC's one hundred year history, and she's regulating the exact
Speaker 8: agency that is in battle with Amazon.
Speaker 3: And as you note that there is a lawsuit monopoly
Speaker 3: lawsuit against against the company from the FTC, it may
Speaker 3: become one of the largest anti trust cases in the
Speaker 3: twenty first century. How do you envision that playing out.
Speaker 8: It's a really interesting one. The FTC's lawsuit is about
Speaker 8: Amazon raising prices on consumers, which is much different from
Speaker 8: the article she first penned in twenty seventeen where she
Speaker 8: said that they were predatory pricing. But in the interim years,
Speaker 8: the case is that, you know, Amazon was building monopoly.
Speaker 8: They had to undercut the market to gain market share.
Speaker 8: Today they had that monopoly and they're able to charge
Speaker 8: monopoly rent. You could start putting all these fees on
Speaker 8: their sellers because they know they have to be there.
Speaker 8: And that's the iteration we're at right now, where these
Speaker 8: sellers are being compressed, their margins are being compressed, and
Speaker 8: they're being forced to raise their prices and consumers, meaning
Speaker 8: that consumers pay more.
Speaker 1: You know, is it akin to something like you know,
Speaker 1: a Walmart or one of the big box retailers and
Speaker 1: what they've done to small business kind of on mainstream.
Speaker 1: Is it kind of like akin to that in terms
Speaker 1: of what Amazon has done, Like you know, these smaller
Speaker 1: sellers have to be on their platform, but it's not
Speaker 1: easy for them.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 8: If you look at the last few decades, Amazon's almost
Speaker 8: become like the nineteen nineties boogeyman that Walmart was to
Speaker 8: main street, but it's been replaced with Amazon and their
Speaker 8: effects not just on main street though in other industries
Speaker 8: as well.
Speaker 3: Dan, one thing that caught my eye was a story
Speaker 3: recently about Amazon coming out and saying, Okay, we're now
Speaker 3: making this small announcement announcing unlimited grocery delivery for nine
Speaker 3: to ninety nine a month for Whole Foods.
Speaker 4: On that news, we.
Speaker 3: Saw shares of Instacart fall by more than seven percent.
Speaker 3: We also saw shares of Walmart fall by more than
Speaker 3: one point seven percent. Talk a little bit about how
Speaker 3: that relates to the idea in your book of a
Speaker 3: company amassing so much power that just a little announcement
Speaker 3: can cause destruction and shareholder value of competitors.
Speaker 8: This is a very long running theme anytime Amazon even
Speaker 8: files the slightest patent or makes a higher from another sector,
Speaker 8: Wallstreet makes very vocal bets on Amazon's ability to just
Speaker 8: dominate ever new industries. There's a whole scene in the
Speaker 8: book where CBS is buying Etna because they're worried about
Speaker 8: Amazon getting into the healthcare space and taking their pharmacy
Speaker 8: business from them. Right, So this is something that CEOs
Speaker 8: are really high alert about, and you know, Wall Street
Speaker 8: doesn't really give the incumbents to the benefit of the
Speaker 8: doubt here.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm thinking about this and Amazon is what
Speaker 1: now roughly a one point eight trillion dollar market cap company.
Speaker 1: Apple's a lot bigger, It's about two point six trillion.
Speaker 1: You know, what is it about Amazon that just puts
Speaker 1: it in a whole different category in terms of some
Speaker 1: of the concerns that you cite in the book, And
Speaker 1: how was it allowed to kind of get here?
Speaker 8: Well, I think it's pretty telling. All the major big
Speaker 8: tech companies are now the focus of antitrust lawsuits, and
Speaker 8: there's been this change in attitude toward them after the
Speaker 8: tech lash. I would say, while Apple is obviously ubiquitous too,
Speaker 8: like we all have iPhones, right, Amazon is unavoidable. Unavoidable
Speaker 8: in some respects. I mean, they underpin a lot of
Speaker 8: the technology we use. I took a lift here. They're
Speaker 8: on AWS. If you watch Netflix, they're on AWS. In
Speaker 8: the middle of reporting the book, they bought my doctor's office,
Speaker 8: they bought one medical right.
Speaker 1: So even if you're.
Speaker 8: Trying to avoid them, they've now had their tentacles in
Speaker 8: so many areas, and I think that you know, analysts
Speaker 8: are on high alerts to see where they're going next.
Speaker 7: Is it harmful to consumers?
Speaker 8: Though, the FTC says it is. That's the focus of
Speaker 8: the lawsuit. They say that Amazon has raised prices for consumers,
Speaker 8: not just on Amazon, but in the entire online economy
Speaker 8: because of their outsized power in online shopping. And in
Speaker 8: addition to the price is sixty percent of what is
Speaker 8: sold on Amazon is third party sellers. And there's some
Speaker 8: great ones out there, but there's also been instances of
Speaker 8: really dangerous products on the website. There's things like carbon
Speaker 8: monoxide detectors that don't detect carbon monoxide.
Speaker 1: No, it's interesting that you say that. There's something My
Speaker 1: husband and I were looking at and I'm like, I
Speaker 1: don't really know that company let's check it out, because
Speaker 1: there's a lot of listings my view. Don't judge me,
Speaker 1: but there's a lot of junk. I feel like that's
Speaker 1: also on Amazon, and I feel like I have these
Speaker 1: companies been checked out, in other words, their reliability. There's
Speaker 1: a lot not very much friction to just one perspective,
Speaker 1: one view by night sellers, and it's a game of
Speaker 1: black them all. Even when they do shut them down,
Speaker 1: they pop up with a new name or a new address,
Speaker 1: and it's really hard to rid a platform with just
Speaker 1: that many sellers of all the bad actors, which does
Speaker 1: lead to people buying dangerous products, but it does make
Speaker 1: you what's the responsibility?
Speaker 10: Right?
Speaker 1: This is this big broader conversation with have with all
Speaker 1: of these social media companies and these companies that have
Speaker 1: so many users, right that you do wonder about the
Speaker 1: responsibility of trusting the platform when you're on it.
Speaker 8: And that's the exact focus of the CPSC right now.
Speaker 8: They're looking into whether Amazon has shirked their responsibility in
Speaker 8: regulating their website and there could be a ruling on that.
Speaker 1: And just because I'm going to get hate mail or
Speaker 1: called in by my boss's junk and I mean my
Speaker 1: junk questionable maybe sources and stuff, and as a buyer, yep,
Speaker 1: I can read reviews. But it's also like there is
Speaker 1: I think and understanding that you're on this website that
Speaker 1: you think a lot of it is trustworthy and that
Speaker 1: it's been vetted in some way.
Speaker 8: I mean, my colleagues at the Wall Street Journal had
Speaker 8: a big story a few years ago about how some
Speaker 8: of these third party sellers were literally dumpster diving and
Speaker 8: reselling trash that wouldn't really happen.
Speaker 3: So you walk into care, I think fair to say
Speaker 3: you're in the clear. You interviewed hundreds of people, Amazon executives, competitors,
Speaker 3: small businesses. Talk a little bit about what you found
Speaker 3: over the last few years in how Amazon got to
Speaker 3: this place.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there are this behemoth of a company with unprecedented
Speaker 8: reach and access to data and leverage because of how
Speaker 8: big they are. So if you look at how they started,
Speaker 8: it was this online bookseller. No one even knew how
Speaker 8: successful it would be. I think it was a surprise
Speaker 8: to Jeff, including Jeff there's a scene in.
Speaker 1: Theydn't make money for it. They weren't probably a.
Speaker 8: Wall Street for a very long time, which helped them
Speaker 8: get to where they are. And there's a scene in
Speaker 8: the book that in the first few weeks after it launches,
Speaker 8: one of their employees is a.
Speaker 1: Little bit nervous.
Speaker 8: He says, what's going to happen to like Elliott Bay,
Speaker 8: this beloved Seattle bookstore, And Jeff's like, oh, we could
Speaker 8: never get rid of Elliott Bay. People love it too much.
Speaker 8: And to his credit, that's still there. But think of
Speaker 8: the compression of the rest of the bookstores in this country.
Speaker 8: It's been a very steep decline. And he wanted this
Speaker 8: to be a daily habit, and I'd say he more
Speaker 8: than succeeded there. So just beyond retail, it's the largest
Speaker 8: cloud computing company in the US, the biggest parcel carrier.
Speaker 8: It's a Hollywood studio, a podcast maker, a healthcare giant,
Speaker 8: I mean, and it's going into ever more places. There's
Speaker 8: a scoop in the book that Andy Jassey, the current CEO,
Speaker 8: in the midst of regulators saying you're too big, a
Speaker 8: saying we could be atentionally in dollar company in ten years.
Speaker 8: I mean, that's pretty telling that they see that much
Speaker 8: more space ahead of them.
Speaker 1: You know, Apple, we talk a lot about that by
Speaker 1: having this closed network, it makes it kind of almost
Speaker 1: a seamless experience, and that is a benefit for consumers.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 1: They argue that is there something that just by being
Speaker 1: big making it evil and so entrenched, or is it
Speaker 1: somewhere maybe on the other side, that it actually is
Speaker 1: something that's helpful, whether it's you know, getting healthcare to
Speaker 1: people who wouldn't normally get it, Like you know, I'm
Speaker 1: trying to understand what the flip side might be of
Speaker 1: building this massive infrastructure and massive network. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: Devil's advocate a lot lot of big is necessarily bad.
Speaker 8: I think it's how you use your bigness. And the
Speaker 8: book does get into some tactics that Amazon has used
Speaker 8: in predatory behavior. Is the patterns of this that have
Speaker 8: played out that have caused people to question how they're
Speaker 8: using their power.
Speaker 3: You didn't interview Jeff Bezos, but he did answer questions
Speaker 3: based on representatives from Amazon. What was their pushback on
Speaker 3: the points that you raised in the book.
Speaker 8: I think most of it was off the record, so
Speaker 8: I can't get into specifics, but I did a full
Speaker 8: fact check of the book. This was not, you know,
Speaker 8: a product of access journalism by any means, But I
Speaker 8: spoke to more than six hundred people. I spoke to
Speaker 8: seventeen current and former s team members. Those are the
Speaker 8: highest ranks of the company that had reported to Jeff
Speaker 8: or Anti Jasse and five current and former board members.
Speaker 8: So it's very well reported out.
Speaker 11: And I had.
Speaker 8: Hundreds of pages of internal documents and emails, and like.
Speaker 1: What's the thing that's going to be kind of on
Speaker 1: your radar as this plays out?
Speaker 8: The FTC lawsuit won't go to court until twenty twenty six,
Speaker 8: and you know, I think that could a while. Yeah,
Speaker 8: it's a while, and I'm curious to see what Amazon
Speaker 8: does in the interim. Funnily enough, a few weeks after
Speaker 8: the lawsuit was filed, there was an Amazon all hands
Speaker 8: meeting that I had a video to and their general
Speaker 8: counsel was asked his thoughts on the lawsuit and he
Speaker 8: got on stage and he was like a bit dismissive.
Speaker 8: He said, you know, haters are gonna hate, We're gonna
Speaker 8: shake it off. Taylor's up there, so I think this
Speaker 8: is everything.
Speaker 7: Taylor Swift is in everything. Yeah, she really is.
Speaker 1: She's not on our playlist, not that latest Apple. I
Speaker 1: bet you can find her on other stuff. I like great,
Speaker 1: so much fun to have you. Dana Mattioli. She's senior
Speaker 1: reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Her new book, The
Speaker 1: Everything Wore, Amazon's ruthless quest to own the world to
Speaker 1: remake corporate power.
Speaker 2: You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Listen live
Speaker 2: each weekday starting at two pm Eastern on Apple Car
Speaker 2: Play and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. You
Speaker 2: can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship
Speaker 2: New York station, Just Say Alexa Play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Speaker 1: For the students, it was the ultimate betrayal. Their university
Speaker 1: had called in the cops to arrest them for what
Speaker 1: they believed was a righteous protest on campus, so wrote
Speaker 1: our Bloomberg News Higher Education Finance reporter Janet Lauren, after
Speaker 1: Columbia University here in New York called on the New
Speaker 1: York Police Department to intervene on pro Palestinian protests, resulting
Speaker 1: in the arrests of more than one hundred people. This
Speaker 1: reporting among our most read stories on the Bloomberg this
Speaker 1: past week, and safe to say, as we were putting
Speaker 1: this to bed, it was still an evolving story and
Speaker 1: still very heated story.
Speaker 3: I imagine it will continue into the coming weeks as well.
Speaker 3: It does come at a time when institutions across the
Speaker 3: US and around the world are dealing with a heightened
Speaker 3: political climate amid protests over Israel's war in Gaza. In
Speaker 3: the past week, we've seen standoffs and arrests at Harvard, Yale,
Speaker 3: University of Michigan, University of Texas, at Austin, University of
Speaker 3: California at Berkeley, among others.
Speaker 12: Yeah, a lot.
Speaker 1: It's one of the many challenges leaders of academic institutions
Speaker 1: are dealing with. Of course, others include the cost of education,
Speaker 1: also how AI and other technologies will change the way
Speaker 1: teachers teach and students learn, and of course preparing students
Speaker 1: for a rapidly changing world.
Speaker 3: Francisco Veloso is dean of Inciat Business School in France,
Speaker 3: which is ranked one of the top business schools in
Speaker 3: the world. He joined US along with Bloomberg New senior
Speaker 3: editor Dimitra Cassanids to talk about the delicate balance between
Speaker 3: freedom of speech and student safety amid the current student protests.
Speaker 13: I think the key element is creating a safe, secure
Speaker 13: and supported environment for the community and This has certainly
Speaker 13: been our focus at INSEADS and we have one of
Speaker 13: the most diverse student bodies that.
Speaker 4: You can have.
Speaker 13: I mean, as we usually say at INSEAD, in your classroom,
Speaker 13: everybody is a minority, and that's really what it is.
Speaker 13: I mean, no nationality or ethnicity has more than ten
Speaker 13: to fifteen percent of the population, and that has mean
Speaker 13: that we've worked very hard with our student body to
Speaker 13: create that environment for dialogue, for understanding, and our students
Speaker 13: are telling us that that is what's happening.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 13: I have been personally meeting with students from different sensitivities,
Speaker 13: different nationalities and asking them what's happening on campus, and
Speaker 13: in our campus we're having a very positive and productive dialogue.
Speaker 13: That does not mean that there are no sometimes frictions
Speaker 13: and tensions, but not in a way that has led
Speaker 13: to difficulties. On the contrary, the community feels very supported
Speaker 13: and safe, and that's where we are.
Speaker 3: Heydan, I want to take a step back and just
Speaker 3: explain how in SIAT is different because I think a
Speaker 3: lot of people who are listening perhaps are in the
Speaker 3: US and they're used to what happens in a two
Speaker 3: year MBA program here in the United States, but that's
Speaker 3: not what you get at in siat No.
Speaker 13: So in Siad has been the pioneer school with a
Speaker 13: one year MBA and so we've started that many years ago.
Speaker 13: And we're also a very global school. So we started
Speaker 13: in France in Fontain Blow in the chateau the funt
Speaker 13: and Blow that's our heritage. But twenty years ago we
Speaker 13: opened a campus in Singapore or Asia campus, and ten
Speaker 13: years ago we opened the campus in Abu Dhabi and
Speaker 13: we have now a hub here in San Francisco. And
Speaker 13: so our school is extremely global. I mean a third
Speaker 13: of our activities at the moment out of Singapore. And
Speaker 13: this is part of our ethos because the way we
Speaker 13: position ourselves is the business school for the world, and
Speaker 13: that is about the environment that we create at all
Speaker 13: levels and certainly as a student, as I was just mentioning,
Speaker 13: when you embark on our transformative journey, it's super intense
Speaker 13: in how you engage, but it's also super intense in
Speaker 13: this human I mentioned, because of this very diverse space
Speaker 13: that you find and this is an amazing discovery experience.
Speaker 1: Well, and I wonder and Demitra, I want to bring
Speaker 1: you into this because I do think about or in
Speaker 1: a world where technology can bring people closer, students closer
Speaker 1: from all over the globe. And there's some interesting reporting
Speaker 1: that you guys have all done, our Bloomberg News has
Speaker 1: done about kind of the role of AI in all
Speaker 1: of this.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I mean, I think AI is really transforming so much.
Speaker 11: And it's interesting because we went from this place of
Speaker 11: being terrified when we were first being exposed to some
Speaker 11: of the more out there applications of it over the
Speaker 11: last two years. But you know, in the ways that
Speaker 11: it'll be used to enable more flexibility, more students from
Speaker 11: far flung places to really engage in something, to something
Speaker 11: as recently as what we've reported on this week, which
Speaker 11: is the ways in which maybe something like AI will
Speaker 11: be brought to bear in how academic paper and research
Speaker 11: at business schools will be measured for purposes of accreditation
Speaker 11: to see whether or not to analyze whether or not
Speaker 11: The story we wrote about was a program that some
Speaker 11: folks at school in Philadelphia developed and it is a
Speaker 11: way to see, well, are you upholding and really you know,
Speaker 11: supporting sustainability measures as set out by the un So
Speaker 11: it's really interesting the ways in which this particular innovation
Speaker 11: has a role to play.
Speaker 12: And the other.
Speaker 11: Interesting point Singapore is a big campus of THEIRS and
Speaker 11: it's you know, it's almost as big and significant in
Speaker 11: size as what's happening in Fontainbleau. So that's a big
Speaker 11: direction for what's happening in B school education. Also, just
Speaker 11: to underscore that, Well.
Speaker 1: It's interesting. I'm glad you brought that because it's like
Speaker 1: that balance right between physical plant but also what technology
Speaker 1: you can do. So come on in on that.
Speaker 13: I think that this is quite critical, as you said,
Speaker 13: And it's interesting the point that Dinner just made because
Speaker 13: we did a recent survey with our alumni. We have
Speaker 13: you know, basically seventy thousand alums, and we asked them
Speaker 13: what do you think about AI you know, Jena I
Speaker 13: in particular, how is that you know factoring in? And
Speaker 13: one thing that's very interesting is that, you know, over
Speaker 13: half of the respondents said that they're actually more excited
Speaker 13: than concerns and so this is about, you know, how
Speaker 13: is this something that you see as an opportunity or not?
Speaker 13: And about another forty percent said that, you know, they
Speaker 13: have some concerns, but mostly positive and only a very
Speaker 13: small small minority thought about this that being something that
Speaker 13: they're overly concerned. So in fact, I think people that
Speaker 13: feel empowered in their learning trajectory, in their in their
Speaker 13: in their professional trajectory, I think are seeing this as
Speaker 13: an interesting opportunity. That's one one aspect that I thought
Speaker 13: would be highlighted. Certainly we're seeing that from our alumni.
Speaker 1: So nice to hear the positive because we do right,
Speaker 1: we do get a lot of the horrors potentially exactly.
Speaker 13: And that's what I was That's why I was mentioning
Speaker 13: because I think it is important to say that you
Speaker 13: know that in this survey, the majority felt actually very
Speaker 13: positive about the opportunities. I mean, business schools really have
Speaker 13: a very important role to play in this discussion on
Speaker 13: different dimensions. So first is of course to help us
Speaker 13: all understand what's going on. I mean, this is a
Speaker 13: transformative technology that's affecting every sector, every business. We need
Speaker 13: to understand what's going on, what's working not working, how
Speaker 13: are people using this technology in a productive way. And
Speaker 13: that's what a school like INSID can do. You know,
Speaker 13: through the cutting edge research. We have faculties that have
Speaker 13: been already looking at these even before Jenny I got
Speaker 13: to the stage that it has now globally, and this
Speaker 13: is something that we're bringing to the classroom and also
Speaker 13: bringing to our executive education.
Speaker 4: We have a very.
Speaker 13: Successful program on Transforming your Business with AI, which is
Speaker 13: an example of bringing that to the executive population on
Speaker 13: a more immediate basis, but bringing that to the classroom,
Speaker 13: you know from the research, which is quite important so
Speaker 13: that people understand. The second one is make students feel
Speaker 13: comfortable about using these tools in the classroom as they
Speaker 13: is going through that learning journey. In all that mentions
Speaker 13: the university and the business schools as to be a safe.
Speaker 7: Environment to experiment, to learn.
Speaker 13: So if we're not bringing that to the way that
Speaker 13: we do things with the students, then we're not fulfilling
Speaker 13: our role as a leading business.
Speaker 1: There's a place to make mistakes education and right kind
Speaker 1: of think through things exactly.
Speaker 13: And the third thing that I think it's quite interesting
Speaker 13: is actually to think about how you can create new tools,
Speaker 13: new approach to education itself through these new tools, which
Speaker 13: is of course something very important because you know, in
Speaker 13: we see ourselves as at the cutting edge of business education,
Speaker 13: so we also it also means we have to think
Speaker 13: about how do we use that to create different tools,
Speaker 13: different approaches in education itself.
Speaker 3: So can you talk a little bit about employment after INCI,
Speaker 3: because no question, that is the reason why people go
Speaker 3: to business school. It's to get jobs that earn more
Speaker 3: money after going to school and then also potentially the
Speaker 3: pivot and switch careers in addition to lifelong networking. But
Speaker 3: what are the what are the companies the types of
Speaker 3: companies that are recruiting at the business school right now?
Speaker 3: Because I think a lot of people here in the
Speaker 3: US would say, okay, well it's consulting companies are huge
Speaker 3: for schools in New York. Finance of course is huge
Speaker 3: for for schools in New York. Increasingly tech in recent
Speaker 3: years obviously, But but how does that look at Incat
Speaker 3: in some.
Speaker 13: Dimensions it is not that different, right, I mean, consulting
Speaker 13: is a very important part of the outlook for the
Speaker 13: students that join that join US financed as well, but
Speaker 13: not to the same extent as as the schools in
Speaker 13: London or New York. That's not not to be not.
Speaker 7: To be surprised.
Speaker 13: And tech is increasingly is increasingly important. The two aspects
Speaker 13: that that is also quite important for US is an
Speaker 13: increasing presence of entrepreneurship and the role of entrepreneurship. You know,
Speaker 13: Pitchbook last September did a very interesting ranking of you know,
Speaker 13: what were the schools globally that we're generating more startups
Speaker 13: over the long run and and basically in siacht came
Speaker 13: out for globally or m b A, which was very interesting.
Speaker 13: Then the other part that's quite substantive on the case
Speaker 13: of INCIAT is perhaps less on the industry we have
Speaker 13: a variety of industry, but more on the geography. The
Speaker 13: placement of our students is really global. I mean, for example,
Speaker 13: over the last few last few years, and this is
Speaker 13: in particular the number of Gulf countries overtook London as
Speaker 13: the most significant placement area for our graduates because the
Speaker 13: population that we get is extremely internationally, extremely mobile, so
Speaker 13: they look for opportunities in a global scale. And this
Speaker 13: is one of the things that is super interesting about
Speaker 13: our populations. How our students really look and say, Okay,
Speaker 13: maybe it's Singapore, maybe it's Malaysia, maybe it's the UEE,
Speaker 13: or maybe it's London or Paris, and it's in that
Speaker 13: dimentioned that I feel there is a very visible difference
Speaker 13: from some of the you know, perhaps US based business
Speaker 13: school significance.
Speaker 1: I feel like a lot of the reporting is a
Speaker 1: lot more on the Mid East and the money and
Speaker 1: the innovation and spending that they are doing right now.
Speaker 11: So for instance, I mean here in the US one
Speaker 11: of the sort of tensions and pressure points in the
Speaker 11: past year too, though on the jobs front has been
Speaker 11: contraction to some degree. I mean, those are still definitely
Speaker 11: the leading industries, but there's still a lot of fear
Speaker 11: and a lot of concern about what we see happening
Speaker 11: with the consulting jobs, with the finance jobs, certainly with
Speaker 11: the tech jobs. The layoffs have been continuing. It wasn't
Speaker 11: just the story for twenty twenty three, it was also
Speaker 11: for twenty twenty four. To what extent has that affected
Speaker 11: your students coming out? And you know, we did a
Speaker 11: story less Spring, and it was affecting our schools and
Speaker 11: graduates at the highest levels of the ranking, like Harvard
Speaker 11: grads all the way on down, who were graduating without
Speaker 11: jobs and feeling very nervous.
Speaker 13: And it is also having some impact because of course
Speaker 13: there's less opportunities on these and so, which means that
Speaker 13: our students are finding also other opportunities as well, because
Speaker 13: we're seeing just less jobs available in those industries. So
Speaker 13: they're doing these two dimensions. One is the geographical element,
Speaker 13: so perhaps they're interested in consulting and they say, okay,
Speaker 13: if you want consulting, you may have a good opportunity
Speaker 13: in the Middle East, but not in London, for example,
Speaker 13: or in New York. The other part is to look
Speaker 13: at other industries and for example, a big push that
Speaker 13: we've had over the last few years to for example,
Speaker 13: to look at sustainability and to look at the energy transition.
Speaker 13: You know, we're also very much supporting our graduates to
Speaker 13: explore these other aspects of the role that business schools
Speaker 13: can have, to explore these new opportunities in terms of
Speaker 13: for example, energy transition, sustainability and all of these elements
Speaker 13: that are picking up around the globe, and where we
Speaker 13: feel that we are training our graduates to lead on
Speaker 13: that and very much interested to be and to continue
Speaker 13: to be at the fourth.
Speaker 1: Front of the interesting time to be leading a top
Speaker 1: business school, it's got to be fun. Dean Francisco Velos
Speaker 1: at the NCID Business School joining us here in studio
Speaker 1: along with our own Dimitri Cassaniti senior editor at Bloomberg News.
Speaker 6: Thanks to book This is Bloomberg.
Speaker 2: You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us
Speaker 2: live weekday afternoons from two to five pm. Easter Listen
Speaker 2: on Apple card Play and then brout Auto with a
Speaker 2: Bloomberg Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
Speaker 6: It's too hot, Too hot, too hot.
Speaker 1: Shelter All right, everybody, Well, last week you might remember
Speaker 1: the IMF edging up global growth. Meantime, the Atlanta Fed
Speaker 1: GDP now Model estimate for real GDP growth in the
Speaker 1: US in the first quarter of twenty twenty fourth two
Speaker 1: point nine percent. That was on April sixteenth. It's up
Speaker 1: from two point eight percent before that. We're going to
Speaker 1: get another update from the Atlanta Fed on Wednesday. So
Speaker 1: we have seen the numbers. We've talked about this. They've
Speaker 1: been rotcheting them up higher.
Speaker 3: Meantime, on this Earth Day, Bloomberg's Mark Gonglo reminds us
Speaker 3: that the only thing climate change is cooling is growth.
Speaker 3: Mark is Bloomberg opinion editor and columnist who covers climate change.
Speaker 3: He joins us this afternoon from New Jersey. Mark, the
Speaker 3: climate has gotten hotter continues to get hotter. But and
Speaker 3: we know this, We knew that. What was surprising to
Speaker 3: me about the study that you cited is that it's
Speaker 3: going to actually make global income nineteen percent lower by
Speaker 3: twenty forty nine. How do we get there? First of all,
Speaker 3: that's also there, and first of all, that's also bad news.
Speaker 9: I should Yes, global income lower by nineteen percent is
Speaker 9: definitely bad news. That amounts to about thirty eight trillion
Speaker 9: dollars a year by twenty forty nine. Obviously you're ramping
Speaker 9: up to that point, so you're losing trillions and trillions
Speaker 9: of dollars, and that is coming from just heat for
Speaker 9: the most part, extreme heat, variability in temperatures too, and
Speaker 9: variability in water, so that affects heat affects human health
Speaker 9: and productivity. Our brains don't work as well, we're not
Speaker 9: as productive when we're really hot. And the variability in
Speaker 9: water gives you huge droughts, as we're seeing already in Africa,
Speaker 9: and also gives you terrible flooding, which we're also seeing
Speaker 9: in many other parts of the developing world this week.
Speaker 9: So all of these things affect economic growth, both productivity, agriculture, industry.
Speaker 9: All of that shaving up to nineteen percents off of
Speaker 9: global income, which is not the same as GDP, but
Speaker 9: it's just about the same. It's similar by twenty forty nine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's going to impact how people you know, around
Speaker 1: the globe, whether or not they've got money to spend right,
Speaker 1: which is certainly creates velocity, economic velocity and growth within
Speaker 1: the economy. Having said that, this study, as you note,
Speaker 1: Mark and your piece, is that it's a little bit more.
Speaker 1: I mean, the cost is more than past research and
Speaker 1: studies have shown. What's the difference. What's why are they
Speaker 1: coming out with this or finding this finding versus maybe
Speaker 1: some more subdued findings of the past.
Speaker 9: Yeah, in fact, it's a lot more. There was a study,
Speaker 9: a famous study about five years ago suggested it would
Speaker 9: be more like twenty percent off of global GDP by
Speaker 9: twenty one hundred. This study says, if we don't start
Speaker 9: cooling the planet down, or if we don't stop making
Speaker 9: the problem worse, we could have a sixty percent hit
Speaker 9: to a global income by twenty one hundred, So you're
Speaker 9: talking magnitudes worse. They say that they have new models
Speaker 9: that they're looking at that incorporate the fact that some
Speaker 9: of these impacts on economics last forever. If you have
Speaker 9: a generation of kids who don't learn as much and
Speaker 9: don't have as much economic opportunity, that affects future generations.
Speaker 9: And so they have all these different variables they're plugging
Speaker 9: into their model, and they're spitting out these huge numbers.
Speaker 9: You could argue with the numbers, and some climate scientists
Speaker 9: have kind of taken some issue with a few of
Speaker 9: the numbers here and there. I think the message the
Speaker 9: important message to me. There are two important messages to
Speaker 9: me that come out of it, no matter how you
Speaker 9: slice the numbers, which are also very difficult to forecast.
Speaker 7: Of course.
Speaker 9: One is that we are going to lose a lot
Speaker 9: more by not doing anything about climate change than we
Speaker 9: are going to lose by doing something about it. So
Speaker 9: Bnaf Bloomberg suggest it could cost two hundred trillion dollars
Speaker 9: by the middle of this century to mitigate climate change.
Speaker 4: Two hundred trillion.
Speaker 9: Dollars is kind of a lot of money, but it's
Speaker 9: you spend that at about six years if you're losing
Speaker 9: thirty eight trillion dollars a year, So it's an investment
Speaker 9: to avoid many many more trillions of losses. And the
Speaker 9: second key thing is that much of this economic impact
Speaker 9: is landing on the people who deserve it the least,
Speaker 9: and so developing Africa, South Asia, South America, these places
Speaker 9: are going to see GDP hits of maybe thirty to
Speaker 9: thirty three percent by mid century, again according to this study.
Speaker 9: But again this is consistent with what we know that
Speaker 9: these impacts fall most heavily on places that probably deserve
Speaker 9: it the least.
Speaker 1: Explain because there's something you go into in the story
Speaker 1: about this isn't degrowth and I don't know that it's
Speaker 1: a term that I feel like I've been using much
Speaker 1: when it comes to climate change, which is why we
Speaker 1: always love reading your columns. But you note that what
Speaker 1: fossil fuels are doing to the world isn't quite degrowth.
Speaker 1: Growth is what when you kind of slow down output
Speaker 1: to reduce the impact on environment. This isn't what you're.
Speaker 9: Talking about, No, not exactly. At first, Plush, it kind
Speaker 9: of seems like that. And so there are climate activists
Speaker 9: who say, you know, we need to stop growing the
Speaker 9: economy so much, and so that would involve cutting growth.
Speaker 9: And I guess an example of this could be when
Speaker 9: COVID hit in twenty twenty you saw growth just fall
Speaker 9: off the table and all of a sudden, nature was
Speaker 9: healing and emissions weren't as bad. And people said, hey,
Speaker 9: if we just did this all the time, we'd save
Speaker 9: the planet. Well, the problem is you can't really do
Speaker 9: that all the time, because not having any economic growth
Speaker 9: creates its own problems, especially again for developing countries who
Speaker 9: haven't had the chance to develop and don't have the
Speaker 9: standards of living that we do. So what this is
Speaker 9: doing is not that even with climate change, the scientists
Speaker 9: are saying, the economy will keep growing, it will just
Speaker 9: be stunted, sort of the way. You know, my mom
Speaker 9: used to tell me if I smoked cigarettes, my growth
Speaker 9: would be stunted. So that's it. It would stunt our growth.
Speaker 9: We would still grow, but it would be stunted, and
Speaker 9: over time it would get much worse. Which is the
Speaker 9: other key message to come out of this, which is
Speaker 9: that there is still time to avoid far worse outcomes.
Speaker 3: I wonder Mark how a message like this resonates in
Speaker 3: your opinion, because Carol and I talk about this all
Speaker 3: the time walking into work when the skies are full
Speaker 3: of smoke from wildfires. You know, thousands of miles away.
Speaker 3: That is something there's something visceral about that. You know,
Speaker 3: you're basement because of becoming unusable because three or four
Speaker 3: times a year the weather is so extreme that it floods.
Speaker 3: You know, there's something that really hits you about that.
Speaker 3: But I'm wondering if this type of story, this type
Speaker 3: of data hits people the way that those actual other
Speaker 3: things do.
Speaker 9: It's really difficult because you're talking about future generations, and
Speaker 9: we seem to have a real hard time thinking about, well,
Speaker 9: you know, my grandchildren are going to suffer from this.
Speaker 9: And then also we have a really hard time putting
Speaker 9: numbers like thirty eight trillion dollars a year into context.
Speaker 9: It's like, okay, thirty eight trillion dollars a year, or
Speaker 9: you read the headlines about well, all the Arctic ice
Speaker 9: is melting and oceans are hotter than they've ever been.
Speaker 9: I mean, some of this stuff can be so doomy,
Speaker 9: gloomy and doomy that you just say, all right, well
Speaker 9: we're doomed anyway. I might as well eat a cheeseburger
Speaker 9: and roll coal out in the parking lot. But it
Speaker 9: really is true that we still can make a difference
Speaker 9: that We're not doomed by any stretch yet, and so
Speaker 9: I think sometimes numbers like this, we are already suffering
Speaker 9: hits to our pocketbook right now. We talk about thirty
Speaker 9: eight trillion by twenty fifty, people say, I don't even
Speaker 9: know what that means.
Speaker 7: I don't care.
Speaker 9: But people are losing money in Florida as we speak,
Speaker 9: and in California because they can't get their homes insured.
Speaker 9: And the next wildfire season, the next hurricane season, the
Speaker 9: next floods that come, there are going to be a
Speaker 9: lot of people who are going to be surprised to
Speaker 9: find that they're under insured and so and they're going
Speaker 9: to have They're going to take a huge financial and
Speaker 9: economic hit. So these economic hits are happening right now,
Speaker 9: and I think maybe that's a way to help contextualize
Speaker 9: it for people, to make it real, like wildfire smoke.
Speaker 1: Mark to that point. There's another story on the Bloomberg
Speaker 1: and it talks about the economic impact of climate change,
Speaker 1: specifically on global tourism, broken down by some of the
Speaker 1: top countries that rely on tourism for growth. But the
Speaker 1: whole idea is in this story. It says, by the
Speaker 1: end of the century residents of northern countries will generally
Speaker 1: see sunny spring like bomb a pair a peer, excuse me,
Speaker 1: earlier in the winter. Conversely, those in the south, including
Speaker 1: equatorial regions and extending into southern Europe in the US
Speaker 1: well for the most part, enjoy fewer days of temperate
Speaker 1: weather year round. I mean, this is something we talk about,
Speaker 1: tourism so important to so many different either cities or
Speaker 1: countries like this is again another economic impact for.
Speaker 9: Sure, and even in those places, so even in the
Speaker 9: places that will bear less of the brond, there still
Speaker 9: is an impact. There's an economic impact. And in some
Speaker 9: of those countries you're talking about where there will be
Speaker 9: sunnier days, but maybe your skiing industry doesn't get much snow,
Speaker 9: and so you lose a lot of tourism that way.
Speaker 9: And then you have climate refugees leaving the places that
Speaker 9: are hit a lot to try to go to the
Speaker 9: nicer places. And then you have a whole political issue.
Speaker 1: Yeah, changing after days though, like changing interesting, tough, but
Speaker 1: as you always say, maybe not too late. That always
Speaker 1: gives me hope. Mark Gungloff, thank you so much, editor
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg Opinion. Joining us there in New York City.
Speaker 1: Check out his column. You can find it on the
Speaker 1: Bloomberg at also at Bloomberg dot com slash Opinion.
Speaker 2: You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Listen live
Speaker 2: each weekday starting at two pm Eastern on applecar Play
Speaker 2: and Androyd Auto with the Bloomberg Business And You can
Speaker 2: also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New
Speaker 2: York station Just Say Alexa Play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Speaker 7: Today is there a day?
Speaker 3: And an important thing to think about is where on
Speaker 3: Earth all of our food comes from?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And when it comes to farming in the US, Well,
Speaker 1: farms are becoming fewer and farther between the number of
Speaker 1: farms in the US following by more than one hundred
Speaker 1: and forty thousand between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: and the number of farm acres fell by twenty million
Speaker 1: over that same period of time. This is according to
Speaker 1: USDA data cited by the American Farm Bureau of Federation
Speaker 1: as an advocacy group that represents farmers and ranchers but
Speaker 1: generally on the decline.
Speaker 3: Well, Yeah, and the group argues Carol that there are
Speaker 3: too many challenges that just make it unsustainable for family
Speaker 3: farms to stay in business these days. That's where Elmer
Speaker 3: Mayer comes in. He's the co founder and CEO of
Speaker 3: neatly If. It's working on technology that uses sensors, AI
Speaker 3: and robotics to get farmers a granular view of their
Speaker 3: cultivation environment.
Speaker 4: The idea is that.
Speaker 3: Increasing cop yields and reducing costs, of course, helps with
Speaker 3: the growing environment. Allan joins us from Santa Cruz, California.
Speaker 3: Good to have you back on the program, Almar, how
Speaker 3: are you good.
Speaker 12: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Thanks, we'll be back.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks for joining us again. Give us an update
Speaker 3: on where exactly you are with this spider technology and
Speaker 3: explain once again for audience exactly how it helped farmers.
Speaker 12: Yeah, happy to do so.
Speaker 10: It's basically a football stadium camera for greenhouses or indoor
Speaker 10: growing environments. It's like a cable based system which, like
Speaker 10: a football stadium camera, basically moves around they cannot be
Speaker 10: and floats up off the crop and monitors the crop.
Speaker 10: It collects a lot of different data like temperature, HU
Speaker 10: made it DC or two. It takes images to understand
Speaker 10: what's going on with each plant and analyzes it.
Speaker 12: So it's basically alleviates that.
Speaker 10: Burn for cultivators to walk the crop every day and
Speaker 10: check out every plant, which is tedious and like not scalable.
Speaker 3: Is it possible in your mind ever to use this
Speaker 3: in fields outside and outside of greenhouses?
Speaker 12: Oh, definitely.
Speaker 10: The way how we look at it is that Neatly
Speaker 10: is based on two pillars. One is the automation the
Speaker 10: data collection, like the robotic side of things that we
Speaker 10: developed the neative spider to harvest the data.
Speaker 12: But then the other part is all the data analytics.
Speaker 10: Like the processing of the data AI which picks up
Speaker 10: on bland health, on pests, on crop properties, and that's
Speaker 10: sygnostic to where the data comes from. So we could
Speaker 10: easily either mount four pillars outside of a vineyard and
Speaker 10: have a spider collected data, or mount the same sensor
Speaker 10: box onto our drone and collect the data in an
Speaker 10: open field.
Speaker 1: Talk to us a little bit about all of the
Speaker 1: data that you have been collecting, the quantity and kind
Speaker 1: of the diversity of that data. That helps you help
Speaker 1: your clients, right, so they.
Speaker 10: The way how we looked at it originally was like
Speaker 10: we try to understand how cultivators operate their environment their fields,
Speaker 10: like the greenhouses, and they heavily rely on the visual
Speaker 10: feed They obviously monitor the environmentals, they try to understand
Speaker 10: what's going on in the soil and the substrate, but
Speaker 10: then they really rely on looking at the plant, assessing
Speaker 10: what's going on, reading that language of their plants and
Speaker 10: like doing that, but like moving around the plant, walking
Speaker 10: the greenhouse, et cetera. And that was really what inspired
Speaker 10: us to create like a system which is flexible, low cost,
Speaker 10: easy to install, but at the same time provides all
Speaker 10: this information which is necessary to assess what's going on
Speaker 10: in the field. And so having image data, collecting, the
Speaker 10: assessing what's like taking like assessing what's how the blends
Speaker 10: look like, what the issues might.
Speaker 12: Be, is just a new domain and new dimension which
Speaker 12: we can offer to the cultivators.
Speaker 10: We count every yellow leaf, for example, the count every
Speaker 10: necrotic leaf, every folded leaf, the pests. We count every
Speaker 10: flower of flower size, how it evolves throughout the growth cycle.
Speaker 10: So now all of a sudden you have a direct
Speaker 10: feedback loop to whatever you do in the field, whatever happens,
Speaker 10: and you can say like, oh, my crop has ten
Speaker 10: percent more yellowing today. It has five percent less folding
Speaker 10: and compare crops across different growth cycle.
Speaker 12: That's unique.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like the ultimate drome or spy camera.
Speaker 1: It'd be quite fair. And it reminds me of if
Speaker 1: you've ever gone to a sports game or I think
Speaker 1: about we're in the US Open covering it tennis, and
Speaker 1: it's that camera that comes down and zooms and it's
Speaker 1: on these cables and it catches people you know, that
Speaker 1: are watching in the stands. So it's really kind of
Speaker 1: interesting in terms of the technology. And having said that,
Speaker 1: you guys have been up and running for about I
Speaker 1: believe four years or so. Now give us an idea
Speaker 1: of what the impact if this is going to be
Speaker 1: helpful in terms of yield and growing and productivity and efficiency.
Speaker 1: I mean, tell us what the results have been from
Speaker 1: some of the studies that you guys have done or
Speaker 1: some of the customers that you're working with.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it has been an amazing journey so far. You've
Speaker 10: started about four years ago. It took us like half
Speaker 10: a year nine months to come up with the idea
Speaker 10: of the spider and then we executed and that idea
Speaker 10: be quickly installed, first prototypes and then.
Speaker 12: Iterated improved and sure that it works reliably.
Speaker 10: It collects the data which we need and we have
Speaker 10: been running these systems now for over two years in
Speaker 10: the field, and last summer we then decided to ramp
Speaker 10: up production to really like accelerate and like produce more
Speaker 10: and more of the systems because we realized that the
Speaker 10: customers really love it and there's interest. And since the
Speaker 10: beginning of the year we have tripled installations and we
Speaker 10: have a backlock of orders now until June, which is
Speaker 10: very exciting.
Speaker 12: But it really seems like.
Speaker 10: A new concept of what you get from in terms
Speaker 10: of data from the field. But once customers see that
Speaker 10: with their own field, it's just a very sticky product,
Speaker 10: they quickly understand the value and the power of this
Speaker 10: and they want more.
Speaker 3: How do you scale this? It's I mean, I've a
Speaker 3: hard time imagining the salesforce that's required to go out
Speaker 3: and sell this product across the US and across the
Speaker 3: world to farms.
Speaker 7: It's not an easy thing.
Speaker 1: And I'm curious how much it costs because I'm thinking
Speaker 1: about smaller independent farmers which are increasingly whether it's organic
Speaker 1: or regenerative farming, which we've been doing a lot on
Speaker 1: in the last couple of weeks, you know, whether or
Speaker 1: not it's affordable.
Speaker 10: Right, So the scaling itself right now, it's a lot
Speaker 10: about like going to trade shows, presenting a system, talking
Speaker 10: to potential customers, and the world of mouth by customers
Speaker 10: themselves where we get a lot of incoming demand. They
Speaker 10: obviously like installing the systems. Right now, it's our team
Speaker 10: which still goes to the different places install the first system,
Speaker 10: but it's really designed in a way where the customers
Speaker 10: can install it by themselves. Most of them have like
Speaker 10: facility team if they are bigger, but even like you know,
Speaker 10: all the all the cultives are in general very handy.
Speaker 10: They have to fix a lot of the issues around
Speaker 10: their farm anyway. So we try to design it in
Speaker 10: a way which makes it very easy to install, so
Speaker 10: that we can just shift them a box, they install
Speaker 10: the system, and that removes all that overhead of installation costs,
Speaker 10: et cetera.
Speaker 12: Yeah, cost wise, it's a very interesting.
Speaker 10: We try to alleviate that initial hurdle to kind of
Speaker 10: say like everyone can just try it out, you know,
Speaker 10: so you can rent the hardware for like three hundred
Speaker 10: dollars a month. You basically rent the hardware as long
Speaker 10: as you want at the point where you want to
Speaker 10: commit to it, you just purchase it. It's a couple
Speaker 10: of thousand dollars to purchase the hardware and then you
Speaker 10: get a discount, so it's really worthwhile basically that investment.
Speaker 12: But we didn't want have anyone.
Speaker 10: To like really, you know, think long about before trying
Speaker 10: it out, because it's really this game change when you
Speaker 10: see your own data gathered by the device.
Speaker 1: One thing I'm thinking, you see, you know, forward to
Speaker 1: be kind of a game changer on the industry perhaps
Speaker 1: in terms of methods. Is the industrial farmers getting involved?
Speaker 1: Are any of them interested? Are they biting and signing
Speaker 1: up for the systems?
Speaker 10: Definitely, they love it, especially the ones which have multiple
Speaker 10: facilities across different states or countries. They always struggle that
Speaker 10: they have, you know, they're experts which didn't have to
Speaker 10: send around. They fly around, visit each facility and assess
Speaker 10: what's going on with our system. They can provide way
Speaker 10: better feedback remotely, they can guide the teams underground.
Speaker 12: They can compare.
Speaker 10: Data across different facilities, which obviously allows them to like
Speaker 10: standardize it more and become more consistent. So we see
Speaker 10: a lot of very very largest excitement from exactly bigger
Speaker 10: industrial cultivators.
Speaker 3: Really appreciate you joining us this afternoon with an update, Elmare,
Speaker 3: Thanks so much, Elma Mayor. He's the co founder and
Speaker 3: CEO of Netleaf, the company using technology sensors AI robotics
Speaker 3: to give farmers a granular view of their crop.
Speaker 2: You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us
Speaker 2: live weekday afternoons from two to five pm. Easter Listen
Speaker 2: on Apple car Play and and Brout Auto with a
Speaker 2: Bloomberg Business act or watch us live on YouTube.
Speaker 1: Tim Have you ever thought about grabbing your family, leaving
Speaker 1: your stable job and life in New York City go
Speaker 1: on to go pursue a dream of doing something completely
Speaker 1: different in another country, say making wine in the south.
Speaker 3: Who hasn't had these sort of like you know, fantasies
Speaker 3: about just throwing it all away.
Speaker 7: And going and doing something different.
Speaker 1: So about your dream to me is out west zer
Speaker 1: a scheme.
Speaker 3: Out to do with wine.
Speaker 1: But anyway, this family man, that's what they did.
Speaker 7: That's pretty cool.
Speaker 3: Stephen Kronk left his career in TELECOMMUNITYSS in South London
Speaker 3: and moved to Provence, France, with his family, despite not
Speaker 3: speaking much French, all because he wanted to get into wine. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this was.
Speaker 1: Pretty hard on his family, he told us later. Stephen
Speaker 1: is the owner of Maison Marabeau, a winery in Provence
Speaker 1: that not only produces rose but also practices regenerative farming.
Speaker 1: Steven Stapayer in New York Studio on how it all started,
Speaker 1: and yes, we may have sampled a bit of wine
Speaker 1: here and there, just a little bit.
Speaker 4: It was a slow burn.
Speaker 14: It took a long time to persuave my wife to
Speaker 14: sell the house, to take the children out of school
Speaker 14: and move to the south of France. Actually took ten years.
Speaker 14: And I've been talking about it for so long. My
Speaker 14: friends were getting bored and.
Speaker 4: I had to do it or shut up, just doing
Speaker 4: a shut up.
Speaker 14: And I had one friend came to see us from
Speaker 14: Switzerland and he said, Stephen, you've been talking about this
Speaker 14: every time I come here. And he said, let's put
Speaker 14: some dates on the table. So in fact, we used
Speaker 14: to have a blackboard in the in our kitchen and
Speaker 14: he said, okay, so when are you going to do this?
Speaker 14: And we have worked it back and in the end
Speaker 14: we ended up with a date of May two thousand
Speaker 14: and six, and he took a photograph of that, and
Speaker 14: he went back to Switzerland in May two thousand and six.
Speaker 14: He sent me that photograph and said, so, where are
Speaker 14: you living now? And he knew where I was living,
Speaker 14: and I felt like that guy talking about it, So
Speaker 14: I went into action. I'd already kind of paid off
Speaker 14: most of the mortgage by then, because that was the
Speaker 14: only financing we had. You know, we know you're either
Speaker 14: born into this world or you buy into it, but
Speaker 14: we didn't have a huge amount of capital. I made
Speaker 14: enough to do that to do that, so I started
Speaker 14: doing research. And you know, there's an expression in the
Speaker 14: wine trade which is you can you can make a
Speaker 14: small fortune in the wine trade if you start with
Speaker 14: a large fortune. It's highly capital and intensive, and it
Speaker 14: was always going to be a struggle. And I was
Speaker 14: trying to work out, Okay, so if I buy a vineyard,
Speaker 14: how do I scale? And then I met a guy
Speaker 14: in the south of France when I was doing my research,
Speaker 14: and he said, Stephen, there was three v's in the
Speaker 14: wine business. Viticulture so growing in the grapes, vinification turning
Speaker 14: grapes into wine, and vondre selling the stuff, and he said,
Speaker 14: there are many people here who are great at growing,
Speaker 14: growing grapes and and making wine, but the Harbit's actually
Speaker 14: selling the stuff, so why don't you focus on that.
Speaker 14: So we sort of approach it from the other way around.
Speaker 14: It's a bit like the Champagne model. So oftentimes that
Speaker 14: the Champagne brands won't own all the land, they'll work
Speaker 14: with growers. So this was great because it suddenly opened
Speaker 14: up a new way of doing things, and particularly in Provance,
Speaker 14: where the cost of land is expensive, and this is
Speaker 14: where the megastars come to live. I mean, it's one
Speaker 14: of the most beautiful parts of the world. It is
Speaker 14: absolutely beautiful. And so this way we could actually find
Speaker 14: the growers to work with and kind of reverse engineer it.
Speaker 14: So we decided to build the brand first, and I
Speaker 14: went to I found the growers to work with. I
Speaker 14: went I went into Waitros, which is one of the
Speaker 14: big stores in the UK, and convinced him that I
Speaker 14: could I could make this wine fly from shelves. And
Speaker 14: that's how it started.
Speaker 1: So he basically created the created the band, created the market,
Speaker 1: and then went back to kind of figuring out how
Speaker 1: you're exactly how you want to be really doing it
Speaker 1: exactly exactly.
Speaker 14: So we five years ago we bought the vineyard, but
Speaker 14: we had we built the brand for the first ten years.
Speaker 1: Stephen talk to us about you said, you kind of
Speaker 1: worked a little bit backwards, developed the brand, developed the
Speaker 1: market for what you guys do, and then kind of
Speaker 1: went backwards regenerated farming. Did you know you always wanted
Speaker 1: to do that and how easy was that to do
Speaker 1: in making wine?
Speaker 14: No, I didn't know I was going to do it
Speaker 14: when we bought the vineyard. I actually looked at thirty
Speaker 14: nine vineyards before we found the right one. I mean,
Speaker 14: it's in land from Sandra Pe, It's surrounded by nature reserve.
Speaker 14: It's the most stunning parcel of land. But it had
Speaker 14: been farmed conventionally for twenty plus years. And when I
Speaker 14: say conventionally, I mean they spray it with everything, and
Speaker 14: so the soil organic matter.
Speaker 4: Was nearly dead.
Speaker 1: I say, wasn't it worn out?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 14: It was worn out, completely depleted, And I knew I
Speaker 14: was wanted to farm organically, But organically doesn't.
Speaker 4: Organic farming doesn't give you a pathway to rebuild.
Speaker 14: It just gives you a checklist of what you can't do,
Speaker 14: so you can't spray any synthetic third license herbicize. But
Speaker 14: a friend of mine sent me an article written by
Speaker 14: Eric Asimov of the New York Times.
Speaker 3: A wine guy, we could say, a wine guy, very
Speaker 3: good life, some of the science fiction guy, but a
Speaker 3: wine guy.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 14: And he'd written an article about this lady in Oregon
Speaker 14: called Mimi Castile and she was farming regeneratively and I'd
Speaker 14: seen in the article pictures of goats and chickens and
Speaker 14: she running around the vineyard completely overgrown. I thought, I
Speaker 14: want some of that. And the article talked about the
Speaker 14: fact that soil can rebuild, and so, yeah, I reached
Speaker 14: out to her.
Speaker 3: Does it make a big difference for the grapes, the taste,
Speaker 3: and then of course the wine.
Speaker 4: It does.
Speaker 14: But actually, when I realized that wine schools weren't teaching this,
Speaker 14: I formed a nonprofit three years ago and bought Mimi
Speaker 14: in as a trustee and a permaculturist. And now we
Speaker 14: have eight different trustees supporting it, and we want to
Speaker 14: prove the science that actually it does work and it
Speaker 14: tastes better and actually, you know, it seems to be
Speaker 14: that input costs drop as well. Because you're not plowing
Speaker 14: or spraying. You're working with nature rather than against it.
Speaker 14: You're working in it in a poly culture rather than monoculture.
Speaker 14: So if input costs can drop, yields can be stable,
Speaker 14: but quality can increase. It's like, what's not to like?
Speaker 14: So we're on a mission to sort of convert the
Speaker 14: world to farming regeneratively, to lose the mindset of monoculture.
Speaker 1: I want to We brought some wines and I want
Speaker 1: to try a little bit and you can walk us through.
Speaker 1: But this whole idea of using animals right to kind
Speaker 1: of like rework the soil and you know they're eating,
Speaker 1: they're doing their duty, if you will, But it's all
Speaker 1: working into the soil. It's kind of wild, right, but
Speaker 1: so natural? Yeah, I am I being too basic?
Speaker 7: Is that the definition of the general firement?
Speaker 4: Yut? But that's exactly what is. It is wild and
Speaker 4: it's natural.
Speaker 1: That's why the animals are running around.
Speaker 4: Right exactly. That's exactly it.
Speaker 14: You're trying to basically duplicate what happens in nature in
Speaker 14: the vineyard in a way that still works for the vines.
Speaker 4: I love it. So it makes perfect sense, all right,
Speaker 4: tell us We've.
Speaker 1: Got three wines here and tell us.
Speaker 14: So yeah, the first one is we call Mirror b Pure,
Speaker 14: which is our flagship wine. So this one. If we're
Speaker 14: getting a fancy account, we'll always try and get it
Speaker 14: in there. So I would say it's a classic provinced rose.
Speaker 14: One of the great things about provounced rose is it's
Speaker 14: always dry, and that's one reason why people always go
Speaker 14: to Province for their rose wine. And it's also the
Speaker 14: only wine version of the world that focuses itself on rose.
Speaker 14: So it's ninety one percent of production is now rose wine,
Speaker 14: so this is super refreshing.
Speaker 1: Ninety percent of the world's production.
Speaker 14: Ninety one percent of the production from Province is rose,
Speaker 14: so it's only a few percent of red and wine.
Speaker 14: So and there's no other wine version of the world
Speaker 14: like that, So we really are that the experts in
Speaker 14: Provence and these wines are so versatile, so you could
Speaker 14: imagine sipping this by the pool without any food. But
Speaker 14: also it goes so well with so many not just because.
Speaker 1: It's Friday and it's been a week, but this is lovely.
Speaker 4: Thank you, very good.
Speaker 7: How much does a bottle of this retail for?
Speaker 4: This is about twenty five bucks.
Speaker 7: It's great.
Speaker 1: Well, you know that's interesting because we spend so much
Speaker 1: time talking about price point. I mean, that's a great
Speaker 1: price point, and it's interesting. I feel like there's been
Speaker 1: this new reality in wine that you don't necessarily have
Speaker 1: to spend a ton of money.
Speaker 14: Yeah, no, there's I think wine at lower price points
Speaker 14: is getting much better quality.
Speaker 4: Than it was.
Speaker 1: Is that a way of also getting to the younger
Speaker 1: generation that we continually talk about that say that they're
Speaker 1: not interested in wine anymore, or even.
Speaker 7: An alcohol, or alcohol's an issue with these days.
Speaker 4: I know that my kids aren't like that. But then, kidding,
Speaker 4: just kidding, I think it's it's funny.
Speaker 14: I was listening to an article recently about cocktails and
Speaker 14: because cocktails are really on trend, I think during the
Speaker 14: pandemic people got used to that, and and the cocktails
Speaker 14: made in front of you in a bar, and you
Speaker 14: feel really special because and wine by the glasses often
Speaker 14: the same price as the cocktail, and it's poured out
Speaker 14: of the bottle because all the work has happened at
Speaker 14: the other end the supply chain.
Speaker 1: All right, so talk to us about the second line.
Speaker 14: The second one. Okay, Now, if you put your nose
Speaker 14: into that. It smells a little bit different and that's
Speaker 14: because it's actually been oak aged.
Speaker 12: Yeah, so this is is different.
Speaker 4: It is different. It's a very different style as well.
Speaker 1: I'm not a big rose person, but these it's nice exact.
Speaker 14: Especially in fact, if you close your eyes you probably
Speaker 14: think this is a fancy white burgundy.
Speaker 4: It's really really stylish. This is from our estate.
Speaker 14: So this is regeneratory farms and it's organic, but it's
Speaker 14: had six months in oak barrels, so it gives a
Speaker 14: very good that's a really good one.
Speaker 1: I always love to talk about the barrels. We've gotten
Speaker 1: kind of an education over the years about it, about
Speaker 1: the importance of them and the difference, and it does
Speaker 1: make it. It's a factor in all of this.
Speaker 7: And what's this one called?
Speaker 4: This is called lar Reserve by domain mirror path.
Speaker 1: It's taking notes.
Speaker 14: Yes, so it's because we called it lar reserve because
Speaker 14: it's in a nature reserve. And we're really this is
Speaker 14: our Regen Regen wine. I'm actually we're certifying Regen and
Speaker 14: this is something that's very interesting. So if you want
Speaker 14: to put organic on the label, you have to be
Speaker 14: certified organic. Right, But now regenerative is becoming more and
Speaker 14: more popular, so people want to certify regeneratives.
Speaker 1: This is what we talked about with the folks at
Speaker 1: Common Gram where we talk about this movie kind of
Speaker 1: off air, this documentary, but this idea of like I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: so how do I know when I'm buying something? And
Speaker 1: they're saying that there's increasingly there's a mark, there's a
Speaker 1: demarcation if you will, or no notification if you buy
Speaker 1: some kind of produce or something that's bought that way,
Speaker 1: and so you guys are doing the same thing.
Speaker 14: Yeah, we're doing that, and I think more and more
Speaker 14: growers will do because the supermarkets want to know if
Speaker 14: it's properly farmed regeneratively, if they're going to talk about it.
Speaker 14: But actually that's really I think the supermarket is going
Speaker 14: to get behind regen Now you're going to see in
Speaker 14: the UK, you know some of the big supermarkets are
Speaker 14: already stunch talk about.
Speaker 1: IM gonna say, feels a little bit like super dating,
Speaker 1: not that I've ever done this. It's our speed dating,
Speaker 1: but it's speed it's speed drinking a little bit. But
Speaker 1: you're so kind walking us through it. So Steve and
Speaker 1: we have one work because we want to get to
Speaker 1: this last one.
Speaker 4: This is this is okay, before you take a big
Speaker 4: white smell that. So this is Miraba Riviera gin a.
Speaker 4: Don't chug it, Carrol.
Speaker 1: Chuger anyway, don't you know me?
Speaker 12: Okay, So this is a gin.
Speaker 4: It's a gin made from upcycled grapeskins.
Speaker 7: But is that what gin is usually made of?
Speaker 14: No, no, genusly made from from wheat or corn. It's
Speaker 14: so this is a it's a grain base. Interesting and
Speaker 14: this is super smooth. So being made of grapes it
Speaker 14: gives it a roundness on the palette. Right, that's forty
Speaker 14: three percent alcohol by volume. That's yet it's so smooth,
Speaker 14: it's we keep a bottle in the freezer just to
Speaker 14: chuck into a martini. We mean, I need to keep.
Speaker 1: Just a bottle in the freezer.
Speaker 7: Under your desk that we can use.
Speaker 1: So do you plan to expand out the line more?
Speaker 4: Well, it seems like a lot. Yeah, no, it's a lot.
Speaker 14: I keep saying, no more MPD, but then the new
Speaker 14: product okay, sorry, but then then the market's changed. The
Speaker 14: young people who have going no and low out is
Speaker 14: the big growth category.
Speaker 1: This one is normally no alcohol.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I'll take a sip of wine or two.
Speaker 3: But it's like as I've gotten older, I mean, I
Speaker 3: think a lot of my friends have done this. We
Speaker 3: just drink a lot less. Yeah, And that's that's the
Speaker 3: challenge I think for the industry.
Speaker 4: It is the young un drinking as much.
Speaker 14: The older people are taking more care of their health.
Speaker 14: The who came out last year and said there's no
Speaker 14: safe amount of alcohol. Oh my gosh, guys, come on.
Speaker 6: They're just wrong.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know what they need. They need to drink.
Speaker 12: They need to drink.
Speaker 1: No, but it's interesting. Are you limited though we've only
Speaker 1: got about thirty seconds off? Are you limited by your
Speaker 1: land size of how much variety you can do?
Speaker 9: Or no?
Speaker 14: No, because we're working with so many growers from around
Speaker 14: the region, so our win a state represents a small
Speaker 14: part of what we do.
Speaker 4: So now we can scale this business.
Speaker 1: All right, Steve. And I'm just going to say it,
Speaker 1: you're kind of one of our favorite kind of guests,
Speaker 1: so you can go back anytime. No, but this has
Speaker 1: been really fun and if we find our way in Provence,
Speaker 1: I'm going to come knock on your door.
Speaker 7: You must do that, Okay, just more than let's do
Speaker 7: a remote. We'll do a remote from you.
Speaker 12: That would be really lovely.
Speaker 1: I'm Stephen, thank you, so appreciate it. Stephen Kronk, founder
Speaker 1: and CEO of Maizon Mirabeau, joining us here in the studio.
Speaker 6: This has been.
Speaker 2: You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Listen live
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Speaker 1: She spent more than twenty five years as a CIA officer,
Speaker 1: working as an undercover spot all over the world, from
Speaker 1: Moscow during the Cold War, to Pakistan, Hong Kong, and
Speaker 1: a lot more.
Speaker 3: She also did disguises for agents in the field, and
Speaker 3: was the chief of Disguise in the CIA's Office of
Speaker 3: Technical Service, going as far as disguising herself while meeting
Speaker 3: then President George H. W. Bush in the Oval Office.
Speaker 3: This was, of course, to show off the new disguise
Speaker 3: capabilities of the CIA. She wasn't trying to do anything,
Speaker 3: you know, no like seek into the White House or
Speaker 3: she did fool him.
Speaker 6: Kind of wild.
Speaker 1: This is just one of the stories John Amandez features
Speaker 1: in her new book in True Face, a woman's life
Speaker 1: in the CIA Unmasked. And yes, we had to start
Speaker 1: with how she did once full former President George Bush.
Speaker 6: We had been working for years to come up with
Speaker 6: a totally animated mask, a mask that would actually work,
Speaker 6: that would you could talk, laugh, you could smile. And
Speaker 6: we got there and the very first mask that was
Speaker 6: made was an African American man and it was made
Speaker 6: for me to demonstrate to various people. And it was good.
Speaker 6: So I took it to my office director and he
Speaker 6: loved it, and he said, we're going to take it
Speaker 6: to the Director of CIA, Bill Webster, and he loved it.
Speaker 6: And he said, we're going to the White House. And
Speaker 6: I said, I don't know if the Secret Service is
Speaker 6: going to let me through because I look good, but
Speaker 6: I don't sound like a man. I don't walk like
Speaker 6: a man. So we did another one. I turned into
Speaker 6: another quite different looking woman. We went to the White House.
Speaker 6: We went for the morning meeting, Brent Scowcroft, Bob Gates, Johnson.
Speaker 6: U knew it was a good crowd. It was a
Speaker 6: quality crowd, and I was the first one that morning
Speaker 6: to brief the president. He had been director of the
Speaker 6: CIA previously in another light, and I had a handful
Speaker 6: of pictures of him in disguise, which was kind of
Speaker 6: to relax everybody, and he's laughing and pictures. I said, so,
Speaker 6: I'm going to show you the latest, greatest, best thing
Speaker 6: we've got. And I said, I'll take it off. And
Speaker 6: I started, and he said, well, well, no, don't take
Speaker 6: it off. Whatever it is, don't take it off. And
Speaker 6: he walked out around my chair and he's looking and
Speaker 6: he's peering, and he's trying to figure out a fake
Speaker 6: knows he didn't know what I had on that He
Speaker 6: sat down, he said, okay, took off my mask and
Speaker 6: held it up so that he could see. It was
Speaker 6: light as a feather. It was.
Speaker 7: It was the reveals.
Speaker 6: Hey, beautiful.
Speaker 3: But I'm just curious how much If masks were that
Speaker 3: good in the late nineteen eighties, early nineteen nineties when
Speaker 3: you did this, how much better is the technology now?
Speaker 6: Well? Isn't that a good question? Because for many, many
Speaker 6: years I never talked about masks. They were considered truly classified.
Speaker 6: And then it changed and we can discuss masks. I'm
Speaker 6: not really sure how that worked. It makes me think
Speaker 6: that they are no longer classified, or they wouldn't let
Speaker 6: me talk about them, And that makes me think that
Speaker 6: we know we no longer use them.
Speaker 7: Why do you think that would be at least.
Speaker 6: We don't use the same thing that we were using.
Speaker 4: Then, Okay, so I don't know.
Speaker 3: Let's say we don't use them anymore. Why wouldn't we
Speaker 3: use them anymore? Is it because of biometrics and they've
Speaker 3: just gotten so good?
Speaker 6: You take me because because of cyber because of the
Speaker 6: incredible technological surveillance that's out there now, this ubiquitous technical
Speaker 6: of ailance everywhere all the time. Different materials act react
Speaker 6: differently to different light sources. So under IR it might
Speaker 6: look good. Under ultra violet it might look like a dandelion.
Speaker 6: You don't know. I don't know, but the fact that
Speaker 6: I can talk about them tells me that they are
Speaker 6: no longer perhaps.
Speaker 3: How did you get your book passed the folks who
Speaker 3: I don't want to call them censors, but the approval process.
Speaker 6: The publication review board?
Speaker 7: Yeah, how'd you get your book passed?
Speaker 2: Them?
Speaker 13: Well?
Speaker 6: You cross the fingers on both of your hands. You
Speaker 6: remind them that by statute it should be a thirty
Speaker 6: day review. It's never a thirty day review. And you
Speaker 6: just kind of distract yourself because it can take it
Speaker 6: could take six months for them to finish, you know,
Speaker 6: looking at it and they come back and they say,
Speaker 6: there are some things here that are still classified, and
Speaker 6: we're asking you to take them out. And this is
Speaker 6: our fifth book. We take them out. We don't want
Speaker 6: to put classified material in our books.
Speaker 1: Donna. I think when we think CIA or woman working
Speaker 1: in CIA, and I know it's not apple to apples,
Speaker 1: but for me, I'm like, is it homeland? Is it
Speaker 1: like Homeland? Like you know, you're running and you've got guns,
Speaker 1: and you've got money and you've got all this, Like
Speaker 1: what is it really like?
Speaker 6: Well, a, it was. It was hard if you wanted
Speaker 6: to be in the operational piece of it. And there
Speaker 6: were other parts of CIA where women had made good inroads.
Speaker 6: The analytical part of it that women did wonderfully as
Speaker 6: analysts science and technology. If you had a degree in
Speaker 6: chemistry or physics or optics or whatever, we would hire you.
Speaker 12: We would hire you at a.
Speaker 6: Lower grade than the men, but we would bring you
Speaker 6: in but in operations. It was that's overseas, that's feet
Speaker 6: on the ground, that's meeting with the foreign targets or
Speaker 6: the foreign assets if they agree to work with US,
Speaker 6: people who are truly often risking their lives to work
Speaker 6: for American intelligence. And the men just had this firmly
Speaker 6: fixed idea that those people didn't want to be working
Speaker 6: with women, that they wouldn't that in many cultures, women
Speaker 6: have no credibility, that have no value, and they said,
Speaker 6: we can't, we can't put you out in the middle
Speaker 6: of that. It was this kind of big, it was vague,
Speaker 6: sort of menacing. It was like, bs, is that's not
Speaker 6: true these men It's always men. It was always men.
Speaker 6: These men are risking their lives.
Speaker 1: What would you say women bring to the table that
Speaker 1: men don't in this kind of situation.
Speaker 6: Well, in that scenario, women have an empathy that I
Speaker 6: think men don't necessarily carry around in their hip pocket.
Speaker 6: The men are interested in training this foreigner in whatever
Speaker 6: the technology is that they're going to report to us,
Speaker 6: and they're very focused on the mechanics of that thing. Well,
Speaker 6: I can do the mechanics as well, but I can
Speaker 6: also I don't hold their hand, but I can reassure them,
Speaker 6: I can talk to them. There's a soft power that
Speaker 6: women can bring to these narios that has real value,
Speaker 6: and I discovered over time it has really good value.
Speaker 6: I found myself a couple of times retraining people. You know,
Speaker 6: if I'm showing someone how this gadget works, and if
Speaker 6: he doesn't get it right away, he has no problem
Speaker 6: saying to me, a woman, can we run through that again,
Speaker 6: Whereas if it's one of my male colleagues doing the
Speaker 6: same training, he gets done, he says got it. The
Speaker 6: guy is going to say, yeah, I got interesting. Maybe
Speaker 6: he didn't get.
Speaker 1: It, Tona, I am still I want to go back
Speaker 1: to how much of you know your career in the CIA,
Speaker 1: where you you know, in an office or meeting with
Speaker 1: you know, an agent or a source or something. I mean,
Speaker 1: were there moments where you really were in danger? I'm
Speaker 1: just curious about that because I think I hear CIA,
Speaker 1: and I know there's different levels, but I'm just curious
Speaker 1: about your own, since you were in some pretty serious spots.
Speaker 6: I was in some situations that were there were certainly uncomfortable.
Speaker 6: I was in some situations that I think you would
Speaker 6: call dangerous. Not all the time. It didn't happen frequently,
Speaker 6: but when it happened, I had had so much training
Speaker 6: that I had a very good sense of what I
Speaker 6: ought to do. Not that it would always work, but
Speaker 6: you know what I should try. That's a very vague
Speaker 6: answer to a kind of general question. There was some
Speaker 6: danger there, mostly there was not.
Speaker 1: Mostly there was not. Mostly well, But it's so interesting
Speaker 1: because I think you guys, you know, when we talk
Speaker 1: to someone like you, we get a peek into what
Speaker 1: the CIA is like and what goes on behind the scenes.
Speaker 1: And there's layers right in terms of gathering, deciphering, and
Speaker 1: you know, utilizing intelligence.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, the whole job is to bring back
Speaker 6: the information to American policymakers so they could make smart decisions,
Speaker 6: information on the plans and intentions of our enemies. Now,
Speaker 6: if you just glance around the world right now and
Speaker 6: wonder what is putin planning, what are the Chinese going
Speaker 6: to do next? What about those Koreans with their nuclear missiles,
Speaker 6: you can imagine the kind of intelligence that our policymakers
Speaker 6: wanted and needed. Our job was to go find it,
Speaker 6: to find people who were conduits to that information, who
Speaker 6: could get it for us. We had all kinds of
Speaker 6: technology that we used. We had all kinds of tools
Speaker 6: that we could train them in. We had methods of
Speaker 6: their communicating that information to us where we didn't have
Speaker 6: to meet face to face, which would really put them
Speaker 6: in danger. Typically, if we worried about danger, we worried
Speaker 6: about our foreign assets. They were the ones who were
Speaker 6: sometimes risking everything to work for us for a variety
Speaker 6: of reasons. It wasn't always money. They weren't always asking
Speaker 6: to be paid. A lot of them would work for
Speaker 6: us us just for the promise that we would get
Speaker 6: their kids out of their country, get them to the West,
Speaker 6: get them educated over a year. The motivators were always interesting,
Speaker 6: but whatever was involved to get the information was what
Speaker 6: we were about.
Speaker 3: JOHNA, can you talk to us a little bit about Argo,
Speaker 3: because as I was doing research about you, I was
Speaker 3: struck that you co wrote along with your late husband
Speaker 3: Antonio Mendez, a book about the Well the hostage christ
Speaker 3: and Caper. Yeah, what exactly happened in nineteen seventy nine
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty and Iran and your late husband's role, who,
Speaker 3: by the way, was he was portrayed by Ben Affleck
Speaker 3: in the film.
Speaker 7: Yes, he was take us back. I mean, I don't
Speaker 7: know what you were doing.
Speaker 3: At that time, but what can you tell us about
Speaker 3: that whole experience, that whole event.
Speaker 6: I had nothing to do with Argo when it happened.
Speaker 6: I was working in the same office. But because compartmentation
Speaker 6: is what it is, I didn't even know that it
Speaker 6: had happened.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 1: Wow, that says a lot right.
Speaker 6: They started making that movie nineteen years later, which, just
Speaker 6: to point it out, Tony kept that secret for nineteen
Speaker 6: years and he never intended to tell that story. George Tennant,
Speaker 6: the head of CIA, directed him to tell the story
Speaker 6: to the New York Times. It was a moment in
Speaker 6: history when it was quiet. People were questioning did we
Speaker 6: even need a CIA? And George Tenant, I think very
Speaker 6: wisely decided to tell one good story of showing the
Speaker 6: value of the organization. Tony was going to go to
Speaker 6: his grave with that story. It was remarkable when we
Speaker 6: got the call to the middle of the night that
Speaker 6: said George Clooney's going to buy the story, the rights
Speaker 6: to the story. The next morning over coffee, Tony said,
Speaker 6: you know what that means. It means we got to
Speaker 6: write the book because they'll move the story around, they'll
Speaker 6: change things a little bit. It won't be exactly one
Speaker 6: hundred percent.
Speaker 4: And so we did that.
Speaker 6: We wrote the book, they wrote the script, and it's
Speaker 6: kind of interesting to compare them. The heart of the
Speaker 6: story is certainly there, but small things like Tony was
Speaker 6: never separated from his first wife. Tony had three kids,
Speaker 6: not one, so his other two kids are still angry
Speaker 6: about that because they didn't get to be in the movie.
Speaker 6: Nobody chased an airplane down a runway in a jeep
Speaker 6: with a gun. They added that, or just the little
Speaker 6: floorish at the end the story. In the middle of
Speaker 6: going in and getting those six American diplomats and bringing
Speaker 6: them out, that's what happened. And you know, we were
Speaker 6: in touch with and I'm still in touch with all
Speaker 6: of them. We call them the house guests. They still
Speaker 6: every once in a while, sinen, they comes up. We
Speaker 6: write notes back and forth. Who's doing what. Tony probably
Speaker 6: saved their lives, and it was it was just a moment.
Speaker 6: It was one when he did it. It was just
Speaker 6: another operation, and it turned out to me so.
Speaker 1: Much more unbelievable. Did you ever get to go to
Speaker 1: the set mee clooney pit.
Speaker 6: Yes, yes, what was that like the opening scene where
Speaker 6: they're in the embassy and trying to shred those documents
Speaker 6: and things that took place at an abandoned VA hospital
Speaker 6: outside of la I mean, that's how they do it.
Speaker 6: And when we drove up to that we drove up
Speaker 6: to that hospital, everybody was outside having a cigarette break.
Speaker 6: They were the actors, not the real people. The actors,
Speaker 6: but they were so closely modeled after the real people
Speaker 6: that Tony said, there, you know, he called them out
Speaker 6: one by one. There's Jessica, there's You knew who they
Speaker 6: were just from their clothes and their makeup, in their hair.
Speaker 6: It was cool.
Speaker 1: What do you hope someone who reads your book kind
Speaker 1: of takes away and just quickly forgive me.
Speaker 6: I hope it's a different look inside of the CIA.
Speaker 6: It tells you day to day what you might be doing,
Speaker 6: what kinds of operations you were supporting, what the pressures were,
Speaker 6: what the dangers were. It's a very realistic look from
Speaker 6: a woman's point of view doing the work. What was
Speaker 6: it like and what was it worth. It's not just
Speaker 6: for when a lot of men are going to enjoy
Speaker 6: reading this book.
Speaker 1: Well, we appreciate getting a peek into your life and
Speaker 1: your career and peek into the CIA. I'm Johnah.
Speaker 12: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: John Amendez, former CIA officer. Her new book is called
Speaker 1: In True Face, A Woman's Life in the CIA Unmasked,
Speaker 1: and she was joining us there from Western Virginia. You're
Speaker 1: listening and watching Bloomberg Business Week. Carol Master, Tim Stanevik.
Speaker 6: This is Bloomberg.
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