Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: This is Bloomberg business Week Inside from the reporters and
Speaker 2: editors who bring you America's most trusted business magazine, plus
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's a holiday weekend thanks to the July fourth holiday.
Speaker 1: Many may be finding themselves on the beach, up in
Speaker 1: the mountains, in a nearby park, or sitting on their
Speaker 1: front stupid some time on their hands.
Speaker 3: So with that in mind, here's our team summer reading list,
Speaker 3: in no particular order, and including books from a Nobel
Speaker 3: laureate and a former witch on Wall Street to one
Speaker 3: about selling the high Seas alone, to the journalist who's
Speaker 3: keeping track of those who break barriers later in life.
Speaker 1: We begin with our team's pick by Nobel Laurie. Joseph Stieglitz,
Speaker 1: Professor of economics at Columbia University. He was Chairman of
Speaker 1: the Council of Economic Advisors under President Clinton and a
Speaker 1: former Chief Economist of the World Bank.
Speaker 3: He's written many books, authored numerous research papers on many
Speaker 3: aspects of economics, equality, and more. His latest subject matter
Speaker 3: is covered in a new book. It's called The Road
Speaker 3: to Freedom, Economics and the Good Society. Our conversation began
Speaker 3: with the Fed's commitment to that two percent inflation objective
Speaker 3: and whether a little above actually makes much of a difference.
Speaker 3: We spoke to Professor Stieglitz in late April.
Speaker 4: From the point of view of economics, having two and
Speaker 4: a half or even three percent inflation is not a
Speaker 4: big deal. You know, the two percent target was pulled
Speaker 4: out of thin air. It was not based on economic science.
Speaker 4: What we want to be sure of is that we
Speaker 4: don't have runaway inflation. And inflation has clearly been tamed,
Speaker 4: it's been brought down, it's stable at lecture, wakes from
Speaker 4: month to month, but it is not as your problem.
Speaker 4: We should be focusing on other things, continuing economic growth,
Speaker 4: making sure that all Americans share in that growth. Those
Speaker 4: are the kinds of things that we ought to be
Speaker 4: thinking more about.
Speaker 3: So, Professor Stieglitz, should the FED abandon the two percent
Speaker 3: inflation goal? Should they have a different inflation goal, a
Speaker 3: different metric that they should be held accountable to.
Speaker 5: Yes, I think they should.
Speaker 4: I think they should be talking about keeping within a
Speaker 4: range to maybe three three and a half four percent.
Speaker 4: You know, there's actually some economic science that says, especially
Speaker 4: in a time of major structural change such as we're
Speaker 4: going through, having a little higher inflation actually is helpful
Speaker 4: in reallocating resources in the presence of downward nominal rigidities
Speaker 4: of wages, because what guides the movement of resources from
Speaker 4: one place to another is relative wages, and if some
Speaker 4: wages are sticky downward, you want other wages to go
Speaker 4: up enough to move labor, and that means you're going
Speaker 4: to have to have more inflation. So actually a little
Speaker 4: higher inflation is actually good for the economy.
Speaker 1: Do you think the FEDS management of the economy has
Speaker 1: been a good one in terms of policy?
Speaker 5: Quite? Frankly, no, put it bluntly.
Speaker 4: Let's go back to when inflation broke out after the
Speaker 4: pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The question was
Speaker 4: what was the cause, the primary cause of the inflation.
Speaker 5: It was unambiguous.
Speaker 4: It was the pandemic and war related interruptions in supply
Speaker 4: chains and rising prices caused by shortages of oil and food.
Speaker 4: It was demand shifts. People wanted to live in different places,
Speaker 4: and that meant housing prices went up where there was
Speaker 4: a scarcity, but it didn't go down as much where
Speaker 4: there was where people didn't want to live in parts
Speaker 4: of New York, raising interest rates actually impedes the ability
Speaker 4: of the economy to respond to that kind of.
Speaker 5: Structural to that kind of challenge.
Speaker 4: We needed to build more houses in the places where
Speaker 4: there was a scarcity, and having higher interest rates actually
Speaker 4: works makes it more difficulty. They also have a model
Speaker 4: of the economy that's based on competition. That might have
Speaker 4: been true some time ago, but we have an economy
Speaker 4: with a lot of market power at firms are trading off.
Speaker 4: If they raise their prices, they get more profits today,
Speaker 4: they lose profits in the future, and in that trade off,
Speaker 4: when you raise the interest rate, they value those future
Speaker 4: losses less and they're induced to raise their prices more.
Speaker 4: So margins go up, and a marked aspect of the
Speaker 4: inflation that we've just been through is that markets have
Speaker 4: increased enormously.
Speaker 3: Hey, Professor Stieglitz, I just wanted to speaking of the FED, Carol,
Speaker 3: I know you would a.
Speaker 1: Well, one one thing before we have a bigger broader question,
Speaker 1: and it's certainly been a bigger to jump in on that. Well,
Speaker 1: what do you think then we should be cutting rates already,
Speaker 1: that we're behind the curve right now.
Speaker 4: Yes, I think I think the risks are asymmetric. I
Speaker 4: think with Europe already slowing down in recession, we don't
Speaker 4: know where China is going to be going. I think
Speaker 4: uh proudents would have us uh going back to a
Speaker 4: more normal infrast rate. The higher interest rates are are
Speaker 4: really not going to be taming inflation.
Speaker 5: That that model was wrong.
Speaker 4: In another way, they dramatically had said that we're going
Speaker 4: to need five percent of inflation for five percent unemployment
Speaker 4: for some time in order to get inflation down.
Speaker 5: They were absolutely wrong.
Speaker 4: We got inflation down where in a period where we
Speaker 4: kept unemployment relatively low, So they are analysis of the
Speaker 4: economy was just off. And meanwhile they have put at
Speaker 4: risk our banking system. We had a problem in Selicom
Speaker 4: Valley Bank partly because of the enormous changes in terms
Speaker 4: structure which their policies led to. And we're facing a
Speaker 4: debt crisis in the developing countries and emerging markets.
Speaker 5: So there's enormous one sided risk. I believe in the
Speaker 5: policies that they've been pursuing.
Speaker 3: Well on the FED, Professor Stieglitz, I got to ask
Speaker 3: you about this Wall Street Journal report that broke last
Speaker 3: night that said how former Trump administration officials are coming
Speaker 3: up with plans to take on the independence of the
Speaker 3: Federal Reserve essentially at one end of the spectrum, even
Speaker 3: allowing if President Trump gets re elect him to weigh
Speaker 3: in on FED policy when it comes to interest rates.
Speaker 3: Talk a little bit about your reaction to if this
Speaker 3: were to come to fruition, how important the independence of
Speaker 3: the FED is and if that would really put at
Speaker 3: risk the model of the independence of the US financial system.
Speaker 4: Well, I think Trump is himself a major argument why
Speaker 4: you want to have independence.
Speaker 5: Of the FED.
Speaker 4: You don't want somebody who doesn't understand monetary policy, who
Speaker 4: would put at risk the long run stability of the
Speaker 4: economy for the short term electoral advantage of having a
Speaker 4: hot economy right before an election. That's precisely why there
Speaker 4: is an argument for independence. So, you know, I believe
Speaker 4: in the accountability of the FED. It is a public institution.
Speaker 6: We have.
Speaker 5: Previous chairmen of the FED. We're very cognizant of that.
Speaker 4: I remember Paul Voker saying Congress created us and Congress
Speaker 4: can uncreate us. So there is a kind of accountability
Speaker 4: that responsible to heads of the FED, understand, But we
Speaker 4: certainly don't want Donald Trump to be running monetary policy.
Speaker 1: All right, We do want to dig into your book
Speaker 1: because you've been thinking a lot about the meaning of freedom,
Speaker 1: and I think we throw the word abown a lot.
Speaker 1: I think the folks who created the United States are
Speaker 1: founding fathers thought about freedom a lot and the difference
Speaker 1: though between what that really means and maybe it comes
Speaker 1: down to, as you think about it, the values that
Speaker 1: we all have in society tell us about how we
Speaker 1: need to kind of maybe redefine freedom and what it
Speaker 1: means in terms of citizens more broadly and generally, as
Speaker 1: well as economically in terms of their six.
Speaker 4: Sure you know, I approached the issue obviously as an economist,
Speaker 4: and as an economist we think of freedom is free
Speaker 4: to do what you can do.
Speaker 5: What are the choices that you can make.
Speaker 4: Somebody who is at the point of starvation doesn't really
Speaker 4: have any freedom. He has to do what he does
Speaker 4: what he can to survive, and so expanding the set
Speaker 4: of choices that an individual is available is a way
Speaker 4: of saying that he has more freedom. And here there
Speaker 4: are a couple of ideas I put forward in my book.
Speaker 4: The first is that in our integrated urban twenty percentury economy,
Speaker 4: one person does the expansion of his freedom may.
Speaker 5: Lead to less freedom of others.
Speaker 4: Isaiah Berlin, the great Oxford philosopher, put it this way.
Speaker 4: He said, freedom for the war has often meant death
Speaker 4: for the sheep, and in the context of the US,
Speaker 4: for instance, the freedom to carry an AK forty seven
Speaker 4: means that people will die, and it means that our
Speaker 4: school children are not free from fear. They have to
Speaker 4: learn what to do if a gunman comes into the classroom,
Speaker 4: and teachers have to go to school worried about whether
Speaker 4: they'll be attacked. Freedom not to wear masks is exposed
Speaker 4: taking away the freedom of others to live.
Speaker 6: So we.
Speaker 4: Have to balance these freedoms. There are trade offs. Many cases,
Speaker 4: those trade offs are easy. Freedom to pollute takes away
Speaker 4: the freedom to have somebody with asthma to even live,
Speaker 4: let alone the freedom of all of us to live
Speaker 4: on our planet. So there I think we have to
Speaker 4: constrain the freedom of the pluters and the freedom of exploiters.
Speaker 1: So we're talking with Joseph Stieglitz, Nobel Laureate Economists, Professor
Speaker 1: of Economics at Columbia University, and we're talking about his
Speaker 1: new book, The Road to Freedom, Economics and the Good Society.
Speaker 1: All right, So if we think Professor Stieglitz the idea
Speaker 1: of freedom, so it's maybe more inclusive or it's a
Speaker 1: broader definition, how do we do that within society? With corporations,
Speaker 1: the need to be profitable for those we are in
Speaker 1: earning season. We look at companies and their reports and
Speaker 1: that's how we kind of measure them, grade them. What
Speaker 1: does government need to do? How can we maybe be
Speaker 1: better if you will for more.
Speaker 4: First, let me emphasize that in the world i've just described,
Speaker 4: there's an important role for regulations. Corporations often don't like that,
Speaker 4: but we have to remember the purpose of our economy
Speaker 4: is to improve the lives and livelihoods of our citizens.
Speaker 5: It's not the other way around that the economy.
Speaker 4: The economy is supposed to serve society, not the other
Speaker 4: way around.
Speaker 5: There's another aspect.
Speaker 4: Regulations can't actually expand the freedom of all of us.
Speaker 4: Think about stop likes if we don't have stop stop likes.
Speaker 4: We have gourdlock. None of us has the freedom to move.
Speaker 4: Stop likes ors are a little bit of coercion, mean
Speaker 4: that I have to take turns, but by taking turns,
Speaker 4: we all have more freedom. And that basic idea extends
Speaker 4: much more broadly. People don't like to pay taxes. That
Speaker 4: that's they often feel kind of coercion. But when those
Speaker 4: tax revenues are used productively, like they were to invest
Speaker 4: in the Internet and invest in the m R any
Speaker 4: platform that led to the vaccine against COVID nineteen, that
Speaker 4: expands our freedom to do. And so we have to
Speaker 4: look at this in I would say in a little
Speaker 4: bit more holistic way.
Speaker 3: Well, I want to go to your taxes point, because
Speaker 3: I'm curious if you could wave a magic wand or
Speaker 3: implement some sort of tax policy here in the US,
Speaker 3: what would it be? How could you reinvent it? Would
Speaker 3: you broaden the tax space, would you lean more on
Speaker 3: corporate taxes, would you tax wealth more? What, in your
Speaker 3: opinion would work?
Speaker 5: Well, I begin by.
Speaker 4: Analyzing would are some of the key problems on our
Speaker 4: society basis, and one of them is inequality. One of
Speaker 4: the reasons and a second problem is the growth of
Speaker 4: market power, which has been enormous in the last few decades,
Speaker 4: and those two are obviously linked. When you have more
Speaker 4: market power, the fruits of that market power go to
Speaker 4: those at the top. We also have more economists called
Speaker 4: monoposity power. Firms have market power over workers and have
Speaker 4: driven down their wages significantly below a competitive level. So
Speaker 4: I want to have more anti trust policy, more competitive
Speaker 4: labor market policies, but that can take time. Meanwhile, there's
Speaker 4: a lot of monopoly rents, and so part of what
Speaker 4: I would begin by doing is increasing corporate comfix taxes,
Speaker 4: which are not a tax on return to capital, they
Speaker 4: are tax on this monopoly profits.
Speaker 5: I'd also like to have environmental taxes.
Speaker 4: Firms that are engaged, including the environment, ought to pay
Speaker 4: for the damage that they're doing. Remarkably, America, those at
Speaker 4: the top pay a lower percentage of their taxes than
Speaker 4: those down below. Even some of our richest people have
Speaker 4: commented that they think they're right more be wrong.
Speaker 1: Well, can I ask you, like on a day when
Speaker 1: we're looking at a company and forgive me, I'm just
Speaker 1: singling out because it popped. Shares of alphabet are now
Speaker 1: a two trillion dollar market cap company this week, you
Speaker 1: know next week. Last week, we've been obsessed with, certainly
Speaker 1: what we call the Magnificent seven, the big megacap technic companies.
Speaker 1: They're very big. Amazon, we talked with an author recently,
Speaker 1: so entrenched certainly in our world, and you think about
Speaker 1: their reach. Are these the companies, the individuals, whether it's
Speaker 1: an Amazon, whether it's a Meta, whether it's an alphabet
Speaker 1: that you think you talked about. Growth of market power
Speaker 1: isn't too much at this point in your view that
Speaker 1: something needs to be done to rain them in or
Speaker 1: do the benefits outweigh the downside here, Well.
Speaker 4: They do give benefits, but they have a lot of downsides.
Speaker 4: They need to be better regulated. Europe has done a
Speaker 4: better job but regulating that. The digital harms are quite
Speaker 4: obvious and have been by now well documented.
Speaker 5: But talking narrowly now about market power, I.
Speaker 4: Think we ought to do what we can to limit
Speaker 4: their market power, but tax the fruits of that market power,
Speaker 4: the revenues that they get at a much higher rate.
Speaker 4: You know, if you ask the question, would Jeff Bezos
Speaker 4: or the founders.
Speaker 5: Of Google.
Speaker 4: Or Zuperbird stop working if we tax their wealth in
Speaker 4: a way, say a three percent, So any answer is obvious.
Speaker 5: They would continue to work.
Speaker 3: Do you think that they would leave the United States?
Speaker 4: Well, we have imposed what we call an exit tax
Speaker 4: that those with a lot of wealth and don't feel
Speaker 4: who don't feel loyalty United States.
Speaker 5: Can lead.
Speaker 4: We allowed them to leave, but they have to pay
Speaker 4: a tax that represents attacks on the groups of the
Speaker 4: wealth that they've accumulated while they've been in the United States.
Speaker 4: And that tax is significant, and it is a deterrent,
Speaker 4: and if it's not, it may be that we ought
Speaker 4: to consider raising that tax. But I don't think people
Speaker 4: like Zuckerberg Musk are going to leave the United States.
Speaker 4: They realize the benefits of American citizenship.
Speaker 3: We're speaking right now with Professor Joseph Stieglitz, Nobel Lauriate Economists.
Speaker 3: He's a professor of economics at Columbia University. He's got
Speaker 3: a new book out, The Road to Freedom, Economics and
Speaker 3: the Good Society. Professor, as I mentioned, you are up
Speaker 3: at Columbia. You've been there for a long time. We've
Speaker 3: been watching everything that's been happening on the campus there,
Speaker 3: as well as campuses including USC, Yale, MIT, the list
Speaker 3: continues to go on here in the United States, as
Speaker 3: was seen Palestinian protests and encabments take over some of
Speaker 3: these campuses. Freedom in the academic context, How are you
Speaker 3: looking at the protest protests and the context of freedom
Speaker 3: of speech?
Speaker 5: That's a good question, I mean personal.
Speaker 4: Let me comment that up where my office is, which
Speaker 4: is the Manhattanville campus, things are.
Speaker 5: Very quiet the business school at the business school there.
Speaker 1: But you've been on campus a long time and you've
Speaker 1: seen different protests over the years, and it seemed to
Speaker 1: be I was there when there were protests, and it
Speaker 1: seems like that's what students are should be doing, exploring
Speaker 1: and pushing back when they don't feel like things are right.
Speaker 1: But what is what is the what is it those
Speaker 1: protests in the context of freedom of speech?
Speaker 5: So I agree with you very strongly.
Speaker 4: I'm actually happy the students are engaged in the world,
Speaker 4: you know. That's that's one of the things I tribably
Speaker 4: keept them to be interested in the world and also
Speaker 4: the reason about the world, to come to understand it
Speaker 4: and to debate how could or should things be changed.
Speaker 4: So that's a good thing. And in my own life,
Speaker 4: protests have played a very important role. Back in nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty three, I was down there in the march in
Speaker 4: Washington with Martin Luther King, and you know that speech
Speaker 4: he gave about I have a Dream has been a
Speaker 4: lifelong inspiration to me. So even civil disobedience in certain
Speaker 4: circumstances can be an important mechanism for social change. We
Speaker 4: have a special responsibility, of course, to make sure on
Speaker 4: our campus that all views get heard, that we can
Speaker 4: have civil debates, and on the one end, academic freedom
Speaker 4: is really important. And I really took offense to Speaker
Speaker 4: Johnson coming up to our campus and calling for the
Speaker 4: resignation of our president.
Speaker 5: I hadn't seen anything.
Speaker 4: Like that, maybe since the HUAC hearings the House on
Speaker 4: American Activities Committee back with McCarthy in the fifties. I mean,
Speaker 4: that kind of direct interference in academia is just unheard of.
Speaker 4: And we know some of the Republicans have been trying
Speaker 4: to undermine universities because universities teach children how to our
Speaker 4: young our youngsters, our young men and women, how to think,
Speaker 4: and a lot of people don't like that idea that
Speaker 4: they should be thinking for themselves. But at the same time,
Speaker 4: we have to create on campus a community. We're all
Speaker 4: voices are heard, and I think we're actually working very
Speaker 4: much towards that. There were only a few people raising problems,
Speaker 4: and I think having outside actu takers like the speaker
Speaker 4: is not helpful.
Speaker 1: We're going to leave it on that note. We always
Speaker 1: appreciate hearing you talk about hearing from voices. We always
Speaker 1: appreciate hearing from you. Professor Stieglitz, thank you so much,
Speaker 1: Nobell Loride Economist Columbia Professor Joseph Stieglitz here in New
Speaker 1: York City. Check out his book. His latest book, The
Speaker 1: Road to Freedom, Economics and the Good Society. Really appreciate
Speaker 1: us spending some time with you.
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: This next book Tim's pick, also Group fave by New
Speaker 1: York Times Global economics correspondent and award winning journalist Peter S. Goodman,
Speaker 1: the book How the World Ran out of everything inside
Speaker 1: the global supply chain. And to understand the supply chain.
Speaker 3: Peter visits seemingly every link. He spends time with one
Speaker 3: of the largest exporters of amends in California and the
Speaker 3: dock workers who are supposed to get those amends all
Speaker 3: over the world. He hitches a ride through Kansas with
Speaker 3: a Brahms loving trucker and visits ports from Los Angeles
Speaker 3: to Savannah to explain how the world found itself in
Speaker 3: the greatest supply chain crisis it's ever seen.
Speaker 1: He is a journalist that really does his job. Here's
Speaker 1: Tim Summer read from Peter S. Goodman, his book How
Speaker 1: the World Run Out of Everything Inside the Global supply Chain?
Speaker 1: Bill Clinton and China entering the wto the rise of globalization,
Speaker 1: McKenzie and the Lean Taliban, the decline of unions in
Speaker 1: the working class, the rise of share buybacks and increasing dividends,
Speaker 1: monopolistic takeovers, and then the pandemic and the great supply
Speaker 1: chain crisis.
Speaker 3: Covering it all. And this complex global system is New
Speaker 3: York Times Global Economics correspondent an award winning journalist, Peter S.
Speaker 7: Goodman.
Speaker 3: He's the author of the new book Just Out how
Speaker 3: the world ran out of everything inside the global supply chain.
Speaker 3: And to understand the global supply chain, Peter visits seemingly
Speaker 3: every link of it. He spends time in one of
Speaker 3: the largest exporters of almonds in California and with the
Speaker 3: dock workers who are supposed to get those amends all
Speaker 3: over the world. He hitches a ride through Kansas with
Speaker 3: a Brahms loving trucker, feeds cows with a third generation
Speaker 3: rancher in Montana, and eats breakfast with the commissioner of
Speaker 3: the Federal Maritime Commission. He visits ports from la to
Speaker 3: Savannah to explain how the world found itself in the
Speaker 3: greatest supply chain crisis it's ever seen.
Speaker 1: All Right, he is here in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker studio.
Speaker 1: We wanted to do the setup because it's really comprehensive,
Speaker 1: and I do feel like I think it's safe to
Speaker 1: say that it explains a lot of kind of where
Speaker 1: we are today. So, Peter, you have such a front
Speaker 1: row seat to so much that is going on in
Speaker 1: the world. Tell us about that front row seat and
Speaker 1: what kind of really you know, stands out for you.
Speaker 8: You know, it's changed the way I look at any
Speaker 8: package that lands at my door, or really any product
Speaker 8: that somebody made somewhere that had to be transported to
Speaker 8: a store or to a home or a business. We
Speaker 8: don't tend to think about the supply chain, you know.
Speaker 8: It's one of those things. It's like the light switch.
Speaker 8: We're not thinking about the internal wiring. We flipped on
Speaker 8: the light's work well when.
Speaker 7: We needed it most. It failed, It.
Speaker 8: Buckled, and we had frontline medical workers dealing with COVID
Speaker 8: patients without protective gear. We had families unable to find
Speaker 8: infant formula. I mean, that was an incredible crisis. We
Speaker 8: have a toilet paper scare, which turned out to not
Speaker 8: be so much as shortage as a question of hoarding.
Speaker 8: And we all remember these ships, you know, fifty sixty
Speaker 8: seventy ships that were floating off the coast of southern California,
Speaker 8: unable to land, floating for weeks at a time before
Speaker 8: they could find a slot to load and unload all
Speaker 8: these factory goods coming in from China. And I think
Speaker 8: for all of us in the midst of the pandemic,
Speaker 8: it was so bewildering that it gave us this curiosity
Speaker 8: about these people.
Speaker 7: We never think about.
Speaker 6: So.
Speaker 8: Yes, as you guys pointed out, I climbed into in
Speaker 8: the front of a truck. I visited with rail maintenance
Speaker 8: workers who were away from their families for weeks at
Speaker 8: a time, and I really tried to understand what has
Speaker 8: gone haywire here.
Speaker 3: Peter, the reason we're talking about such a complex supply
Speaker 3: chain is because of globalization. Your career has kind of
Speaker 3: coincided with the rise of globalization, right being a reporter
Speaker 3: in South Asia in the nineties and then post dot
Speaker 3: com crash working for the Washington Post. I think it
Speaker 3: was out of Shanghai. That's you visited a lot of
Speaker 3: these factories at times when they weren't what they are today.
Speaker 3: Talk a little bit about how you've seen that your
Speaker 3: career alongside the rise of globalization.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I appreciate your pointing that out. So I landed
Speaker 8: in China in two thousand and one, which was the
Speaker 8: same year that China, of course enters the World Trade Organization,
Speaker 8: this landmark, you know, moment for globalization, and it was
Speaker 8: pretty clear then that China had huge aspirations and that
Speaker 8: the world was flocking to China in large part because
Speaker 8: you know, corporate CEOs who were constantly looking for ways
Speaker 8: to cut costs, availed themselves of this ultimate opportunity to
Speaker 8: you know, engage Chinese labor as a way of undercutting
Speaker 8: labor costs at home in the US and in Japan,
Speaker 8: in South Korea, in Europe. And it was also clear
Speaker 8: that the Chinese government had very systematically built out the
Speaker 8: infrastructure that was needed for trade. So you know, visited
Speaker 8: massive ports factories that were capable of making you know,
Speaker 8: enough microwave ovens to supply Walmart for a year, you know,
Speaker 8: and whole towns were you know, set up for single industries.
Speaker 8: I remember going to the necktie town. There was this
Speaker 8: one town in one province that was suddenly making more
Speaker 8: neckties than all of Italy, you know, in the course
Speaker 8: of a decade. So you could feel that the scale
Speaker 8: was available. But what I didn't understand, and what I've
Speaker 8: come to understand through this book, is that all of
Speaker 8: this was premised on the idea that container shipping would
Speaker 8: be basically free and reliable. And what I've come to
Speaker 8: see is that we built this global economy putting ourselves
Speaker 8: really at the mercy of this international cartel.
Speaker 1: If you had to pinpoint, was it President Bill Clinton,
Speaker 1: former President Bill Clinton, and the push to get everybody
Speaker 1: or to get China in the WTO. That that's why
Speaker 1: we're having this conversation. That's why when the pandemic hit,
Speaker 1: we were like, what the heck happened to our global
Speaker 1: supply chain? Isn't that particular moment in time that got
Speaker 1: us to.
Speaker 7: Hear I think that's a landmark. I mean, there's a
Speaker 7: lot of moments at time, right.
Speaker 8: I mean I write about Ford because I was interested
Speaker 8: in the rise of mass assembly. I write about the
Speaker 8: roots of the shipping container because the process of standardizing
Speaker 8: cargo made it possible to go look for the cheapest
Speaker 8: place to make anything.
Speaker 7: You could go anywhere around the world.
Speaker 1: But if China wasn't accepted on a global scale in
Speaker 1: terms of trade, right, there was a big push. There
Speaker 1: were lots of concerns about human rights. There are still
Speaker 1: lots of big concerns about human rights, and yet there
Speaker 1: they were right in the WTO, something they fought for.
Speaker 8: Well, here's the part that people are generally afraid to
Speaker 8: talk about. You know, China gets into the WTO because
Speaker 8: American retailers lobby like crazy to get China into the WTO,
Speaker 8: and nobody wants to be affiliated with the story of
Speaker 8: labor exploitation. Now, let's remember Chinese labor in American history.
Speaker 8: You know, from the beginning it's about undercutting wages. Right,
Speaker 8: Chinese workers aren't systematically brought over from China to build
Speaker 8: the railroads because the mostly Irish laborers say, ah, this
Speaker 8: is pretty dangerous and we're not getting paid enough. So
Speaker 8: this is a continuation of that story, you know, a
Speaker 8: century later, where now we're bringing the production to China
Speaker 8: and there's this is a sort of seamy, unsavory quality
Speaker 8: to this story because of course China is controlled by
Speaker 8: the Chinese commediest Party. There's no elections. You can get
Speaker 8: access to land, you can bypass workplace and environmental standards
Speaker 8: by cutting some local party official in on part of
Speaker 8: the sports. Well, this is not a good story for
Speaker 8: Bill Clinton, who you know, only a decade before he
Speaker 8: lobbies to get China into the WTO, is running as
Speaker 8: the guy who's you know, disciplining George H. W. Bush
Speaker 8: for coddling the butchers of Beijing. He's very critical of
Speaker 8: the crackdown against the pro democracy demonstrators in Tianneman Square. Well,
Speaker 8: I tell the story in the book. You know, it's
Speaker 8: not even a decade later, and Clinton's in Beijing at
Speaker 8: a banquet at the Great Hall of the People across
Speaker 8: the street from Tianeman Square, where he literally picks up
Speaker 8: the baton and conducts the People's Liberation Army Orchestra as
Speaker 8: they play this John Phillips southsro March. Now, why is
Speaker 8: Bill Clinton there? He's there because his party, the Democratic Party,
Speaker 8: is pulling in massive campaign attributions from retailers, and they're
Speaker 8: fashioning this story. It's not totally a fairy tale, right,
Speaker 8: I mean, trade has been the lynchpin of American foreign
Speaker 8: policy since the end of the Second World War. But
Speaker 8: there are a lot of reasons to be dubious that.
Speaker 8: You know, this is really about It's not just about
Speaker 8: selling Chinese people lots of stuff. It's not just about
Speaker 8: buying cheap goods from China. This is about democratizing China once.
Speaker 1: Well, that was the goal, that thinking that, okay, let's
Speaker 1: open up you know, trade and probably democracy will come
Speaker 1: and the human rights abuses will go away. And yet
Speaker 1: it didn't necessarily play out that way.
Speaker 8: Well, one part of it played out. We got really
Speaker 8: low cost goods from China. The Walton family, the founders
Speaker 8: of Walmart, for a while became, you know, the wealthiest
Speaker 8: family on Earth. And anybody who moved production over to
Speaker 8: China at scale and managed to do the right deals
Speaker 8: rewarded their shareholders handsomely. That part held to form. Also,
Speaker 8: not incidentally, the industrialization of China lifted several hundred million
Speaker 8: people out of poverty.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and that's highly significant.
Speaker 8: But the part about once Chinese people get a taste
Speaker 8: of Kentucky fried chicken, they're going to demand the ballot box, well,
Speaker 8: that has not worked out as I think everyone is now.
Speaker 8: Where you know, we're talking about genocide according to the
Speaker 8: Biden administration in Hinjong, where the Wigers are pressed into
Speaker 8: forced labor to produce cotton that ends up in lots
Speaker 8: of apparel. Of course, we still don't have elections. The
Speaker 8: central government has actually strengthened its role in Chinese society,
Speaker 8: so we don't hear that talk anymore. And of course
Speaker 8: now it's become politically fashionable within both parties to attack
Speaker 8: China as our enemy.
Speaker 3: Peter, you mentioned concentration in shipping. I believe you called
Speaker 3: it a cartel, right, I had no idea before reading
Speaker 3: this that it was basically what three companies.
Speaker 8: Three alliances that can use a bunch of companies, but
Speaker 8: think of it like airline allies.
Speaker 3: Three alliances that control basically all.
Speaker 8: Of shipping ninety five percent of the shipping from China
Speaker 8: to the West coast of the United States.
Speaker 3: Some of the companies owned by China or like our
Speaker 3: are state subsidized organizations. How did it become like that?
Speaker 8: It became like that because there was deregulation pretty much everywhere,
Speaker 8: including in the US, where you know there used to
Speaker 8: be this anti trust exemption, but there was regulation on
Speaker 8: shipping rates, so you had to post what your rates
Speaker 8: were from one place to another.
Speaker 7: You couldn't negotiate a deal in secret.
Speaker 8: It was all above board, sort of like a utility, right,
Speaker 8: like the governments involved because this is a vital part
Speaker 8: of the economy. And then basically retailers lobbied. There were
Speaker 8: a couple of landmarks. The last one was in the eighties.
Speaker 8: There was no Amazon then, but there was Walmart target.
Speaker 8: The big retailers thought, well, if we're bringing over lots
Speaker 8: of these factory goods from China to the West coast
Speaker 8: of the US, to the East coast of the US,
Speaker 8: we would like to be able to negotiate a better
Speaker 8: deal than the smaller competitors. So essentially we've optimized the
Speaker 8: supply chain for the biggest companies, and the anti trust
Speaker 8: was essentially deactivated throughout much of American life. Right, you
Speaker 8: go back to Reagan, although really the story starts with Carter.
Speaker 8: You know, we're steeped in this idea that scale is
Speaker 8: the way to serve consumers, and so let's just get
Speaker 8: out of the way of business and let them provide,
Speaker 8: you know, that will deliver innovation. But once you take
Speaker 8: away competition, of course, what we get is pricing power.
Speaker 8: And for a long time, these mostly well they're all
Speaker 8: actually foreign companies. In international shipping. There were like extensions
Speaker 8: of state policy in China, South Korea, Taiwan, so they
Speaker 8: were content to keep shipping costs low as a way
Speaker 8: to bolster their exports. But once we get a shock
Speaker 8: in the great supply chain disruption during the pandemic, we
Speaker 8: see shipping prices go up tenfold, and we see, you know,
Speaker 8: you guys were alluding to the fact that I spent
Speaker 8: some time with Amman farmers in central California. We see
Speaker 8: amed farmers I visited had an entire crop sold to
Speaker 8: Dubai to Japanese purchasers, and they were just sitting on
Speaker 8: all this crop that they couldn't actually get on a ship.
Speaker 8: Because these shipping carriers were making so much money sending
Speaker 8: factory goods from China to the West coast of the US,
Speaker 8: which is the gateway for forty percent of American imports,
Speaker 8: that they didn't even want to bother to send empty
Speaker 8: containers up to the Central Valley to load up with
Speaker 8: farm products like ammons. They just unloaded factory goods in
Speaker 8: La and sent empty containers back across the Pacific. We're
Speaker 8: talking about burning diesel fuel to send air back across
Speaker 8: the Pacific. So they can get twenty five twenty seven
Speaker 8: twenty eight thousand dollars to move a container of factory
Speaker 8: goods from you know, a place like Shanghai to LA
Speaker 8: that used to cost like twenty twenty five hundred during
Speaker 8: the pandemic. That's largely the story of deregulation.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 1: One thing I think about, though, in particular in your
Speaker 1: book is kind of the role of consultanc here. And
Speaker 1: I don't want to pick pile on anyone in particular.
Speaker 1: But you do single out mackenzie, I sure do. You
Speaker 1: do talk about the lean Taliban. You also get into
Speaker 1: a lot of just in time inventory for anybody's taking
Speaker 1: accounting cleanses. Played around with this, right, but this idea too,
Speaker 1: that you don't want to have big inventories, you want
Speaker 1: to be lean and mean. Right, so, because those inventories
Speaker 1: are costly to store them, to have them, and all
Speaker 1: that thing, and so this financial focus on that and
Speaker 1: this kind of narrative of saying be lean and mean,
Speaker 1: that's a good thing. We've all played a part of
Speaker 1: it when we go through the quarterly lean and mean
Speaker 1: this is a good thing for a company. How big
Speaker 1: a role did that play in getting us so that
Speaker 1: when the pandemic hit, nobody had excess supply anywhere?
Speaker 8: A huge role. We cut inventories to the bone. Publicly
Speaker 8: traded companies cut inventories to the bone over decades. Now,
Speaker 8: Just in time is a sensible idea. It was pioneered
Speaker 8: by Toyota, and of World War two devastation, not a
Speaker 8: lot of capital, not a lot of land to develop.
Speaker 8: Taichi Ono, who is running Toyota, pioneers this idea instead
Speaker 8: of making as much stuff as possible like Henry Ford
Speaker 8: did at Ford and letting sales people try to figure
Speaker 8: out how to sell it. Let's just make enough to
Speaker 8: replenish the cars that we've already sold. Let's get our
Speaker 8: suppliers to deliver the stuff we need right when we
Speaker 8: need it, rather than waste.
Speaker 7: Capital on warehouses.
Speaker 8: Hey, that's a good idea, but a long come of
Speaker 8: publicly traded companies guided by consultants like McKenzie who say, listen,
Speaker 8: this should apply to everything, and you should not stop
Speaker 8: until there's basically no inventory. And what you do is,
Speaker 8: instead of wasting capital on sticking you know, auto parts,
Speaker 8: you know, a warehouse as a hedge against trouble, just
Speaker 8: liquidate the warehouse. Take the cash, give it to yourselves
Speaker 8: to reward yourselves, corporate executives for being smart enough to
Speaker 8: hire McKenzie, Give it to shareholders and the form of
Speaker 8: dividends and share buybacks, and everybody's happy until there's a problem.
Speaker 8: And this pandemic was not the first time we saw
Speaker 8: a shock to the system. I mean, I wrote my
Speaker 8: first supply chain story back in nineteen ninety nine. It
Speaker 8: was about an earthquake in Taiwan, and back then people said, oh, whoops,
Speaker 8: we've got computer chip shortages. Maybe we shouldn't concentrate all
Speaker 8: our industry here, Maybe we should have a little more difference.
Speaker 3: If we learn our lesson with the computer tip industry.
Speaker 7: We sure did not.
Speaker 8: I mean, I tell the story in the book of
Speaker 8: Henry Ford, who is a problematic figure in history, but
Speaker 8: knew a thing or two about supply chains and never
Speaker 8: wanted to be in a position where.
Speaker 7: He could be pinched by a supplier constrained.
Speaker 8: Would have been horrified to see what I saw one
Speaker 8: hundred years later, as on walking the catwalk at his
Speaker 8: signature River Rouge plant outside of Detroit, where they're making
Speaker 8: these beautiful f one fifty pickup trucks their most popular vehicle.
Speaker 8: They've got all the things they need except for the
Speaker 8: one thing that brings it to life, the computer chip.
Speaker 8: And I watched them park these cars in the shadow
Speaker 8: of Ford's corporate headquarters across the street from Henry Ford
Speaker 8: Elementary School. I mean, he would be spinning in his
Speaker 8: grave over this. We did not learn the lesson.
Speaker 1: I think this is his part, and forgive me if
Speaker 1: I've got it wrong. But when I read it Detroit
Speaker 1: had devolved into a poignant example of what happened when
Speaker 1: middle class factory jobs were replaced by poverty level positions
Speaker 1: at reach Heller's warehouses and fast food chains. Next to
Speaker 1: the old Highland Park factory, now forlorn brickshell, a shopping
Speaker 1: center called modelty Plaza was anchored by a dollar store,
Speaker 1: a payday lender, and a plasma collection center, awaiting people
Speaker 1: willing to swap blood for cash. The cards off had
Speaker 1: become an instrument of white flight. Like that to me
Speaker 1: says so much of what's going on across America and
Speaker 1: explains to me politics in a big way. We want
Speaker 1: to bring in Doug Christeners here. Doug is like this
Speaker 1: great thinker and like your book just kind of reminds
Speaker 1: us of the things we talk about with Doug. So
Speaker 1: we wanted to bring in one of the things.
Speaker 9: That's interesting, Tim was going to talk about politics. In
Speaker 9: the nineteen ninety two presidential campaign. Ross Perrot was the
Speaker 9: lone voice who was kind of cautioning against at that
Speaker 9: time what was the North American Free Trade Agreement Canada,
Speaker 9: the US and Mexico. What's stunning is how quickly the
Speaker 9: conversation became about China. Why did that pivot happen so
Speaker 9: quickly in your view away from North America manufacturing in China.
Speaker 8: Well, China, it operates on a whole different scale than Mexico, right,
Speaker 8: So Rossboro, of course, yeah, famously warned of the giant
Speaker 8: sucking sound. And we did lose some jobs in the
Speaker 8: industrial Midwest to Mexico, but we picked up a lot
Speaker 8: of jobs because the US and Mexico are economically integrated.
Speaker 8: And I mean it's ironic now to think about Mexico
Speaker 8: as the solution to some of our supply chain problems.
Speaker 8: But when we import something from Mexico, forty percent of
Speaker 8: the value of that imported good was actually made in
Speaker 8: the United States. So you know, we bring in a
Speaker 8: car that was made in a Mexican factory, and forty
Speaker 8: percent of the value of that car was built by
Speaker 8: American labor in American factories. The component number for China
Speaker 8: is three percent, so only three percent of the value
Speaker 8: of imports from China have American value. Add and of
Speaker 8: course Chinese state policy is really directed to driving that
Speaker 8: as close to zero as possible. But I think it's
Speaker 8: really important to note that a lot of these failures
Speaker 8: that have fueled backlash originally Mexico now China. I argue
Speaker 8: in the book, I mean this part nobody really wants
Speaker 8: to talk about. These are homemade failures. I mean, we
Speaker 8: have benefited from trade with China. We have benefited from
Speaker 8: trade with Mexico. We've got a lot of low cost goods.
Speaker 8: In the case of Mexico again, we've boosted our exports.
Speaker 8: We've got consumers benefiting. A lot of data shows that
Speaker 8: consumer spending has been juiced by trade with China, and
Speaker 8: that money ends up, you know, in the hands of
Speaker 8: American service providers. Our leisure you know, is more robot
Speaker 8: We have more money here. The problem is we haven't
Speaker 8: cushioned the people who have lost. And we have seen
Speaker 8: whole communities, industries, you know, really hit hard by this
Speaker 8: China shock. That a lot of the data shows we're
Speaker 8: talking one million direct jobs in the space of a
Speaker 8: decade lost to Chinese imports.
Speaker 1: It is China the bad guy, or is it investors
Speaker 1: and companies who constantly we're seeking out a low cost provider.
Speaker 8: The ultimate winners are the investor class, without any question,
Speaker 8: and there's a lot of labor exploitation in China. So yes,
Speaker 8: the winners are the people who funded the Clinton campaign
Speaker 8: and got Bill Clinton against.
Speaker 3: Say nothing of environmental regulation, of course.
Speaker 7: Okay, right, go ahead, Peter.
Speaker 3: I want to talk about labor exploitation in the trucking industry, sure,
Speaker 3: because a common thing that we heard over and over
Speaker 3: again during the pandemic and the supply chain disruption that
Speaker 3: we saw was that trucking companies just didn't have enough drivers.
Speaker 3: They needed people to go learn how to drive a
Speaker 3: truck and start driving trucks. You found that that wasn't
Speaker 3: the case. It's just a really, really bad job.
Speaker 8: It's a horrible job. I mean, I rode with a
Speaker 8: trucker in the best possible conditions, guy who actually likes
Speaker 8: his job, from Kansas City to Dallas and back in
Speaker 8: the middle of the winter. I slept in the cab
Speaker 8: for two nights. I watched this man have to worry
Speaker 8: about caffeinating enough so we wouldn't fall asleep at the wheel,
Speaker 8: and yet not having to pull over to use the restroom.
Speaker 8: Truckers are constantly worried about where they're going to park.
Speaker 8: They're at the mercy of lots of other parts of
Speaker 8: the supply chain. They have no influence over. They can
Speaker 8: get stuck at warehouses for hours waiting for somebody to
Speaker 8: load or unload their vehicle because warehouses have shortages of workers. Now,
Speaker 8: this trucking industry shortage, this is an industry talking point.
Speaker 8: There's ten million people in the United States who have
Speaker 8: licenses to drive long haul trucks, and we need roughly
Speaker 8: a third that number. We've run out of people we
Speaker 8: can feed into the mill who are willing to sign
Speaker 8: off on these predatory lending arrangements by which truckers pay
Speaker 8: for their certification, by which they end up buying these
Speaker 8: vehicles at wildly inflated prices from the trucking companies. Then
Speaker 8: they're forced to go service these vehicles at places that
Speaker 8: are part of the empires of these trucking companies. And
Speaker 8: so a lot of people, you know, they get tired
Speaker 8: of being away from their families. They get tired of
Speaker 8: hearing that they've missed another chill child's birthday party, they
Speaker 8: miss people's funerals. It's a tough job. It's always been
Speaker 8: a tough job. The difference is it's been downgraded to
Speaker 8: the point that we've run out of takers for this
Speaker 8: tough job.
Speaker 9: What's the remedy in your view? I mean, how do
Speaker 9: we get out of the situation that we're in now.
Speaker 9: I'm listening to the trucking story and I'm thinking of
Speaker 9: robotic vehicles that are going to be creeping into the
Speaker 9: scene pretty soon. So the argument that you're making right
Speaker 9: now may get a remedy, but it's going to be
Speaker 9: at the cost of labor in a major way. But
Speaker 9: what do you think the remedy is longer term?
Speaker 8: I mean, I think for openers, we got to look
Speaker 8: at these predatory arrangements that truckers make with the people
Speaker 8: coming through these educational mills that set up certification with
Speaker 8: taxpayer funding. You know, we are paying to feed people
Speaker 8: into these training programs where they end up getting jobs
Speaker 8: that pay a fraction of what they've been promised.
Speaker 7: So that's the first thing to do.
Speaker 8: Look, automation is inevitable, it's going to happen, but we
Speaker 8: got to have a conversation about how we compensate the
Speaker 8: people who are still in the business. We got to
Speaker 8: make sure that they can get exercise, that they can eat,
Speaker 8: eat better than they're eating.
Speaker 7: I mean, the food that you see at.
Speaker 8: These truck stops it's just a it's a tough life.
Speaker 8: The government has to get involved in looking at these
Speaker 8: working conditions.
Speaker 1: What's the bigger solution though, because to me, I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: all right, if we're bringing a lot of stuff home,
Speaker 1: maybe more jobs are going to be created back home,
Speaker 1: but it's going to be more expensive, So get ready
Speaker 1: to continue to pay more money. But if it means
Speaker 1: that workers are actually making more and a real living,
Speaker 1: that's a good thing. So I don't know, I'm just
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what you see is Wait.
Speaker 8: In some cases, if we shift production from China to
Speaker 8: other countries where wagers higher, if we bring some of
Speaker 8: it back to the US, that that'll mostly be automation. Yeah,
Speaker 8: the costs for some things are going to go up.
Speaker 8: Some things may go now, and some things may go up.
Speaker 8: But what is the cost that we're paying now that
Speaker 8: doesn't get factored into the simple you know, sticker price
Speaker 8: with the Walmart Superstar. What's the cost of running out
Speaker 8: of medical devices in the middle of a pandemic. What's
Speaker 8: the cost of discovering that we've depended upon a single
Speaker 8: country that we've decided is our adversary, that we're having
Speaker 8: a trade war with for you know, personal protective gear
Speaker 8: to give frontline medical whim.
Speaker 1: That's really changed, right dramatically or.
Speaker 8: Have changed somewhat. I mean I spent a lot of
Speaker 8: time for the book. You know, I went to Guatemala
Speaker 8: with Columbia Sportswear. They're looking to move production closer to
Speaker 8: their biggest market, which is North America. Spent a lot
Speaker 8: of time in Mexico looking, you know, as we've discussed
Speaker 8: how that could potentially be part of this solution to
Speaker 8: our excessive reliance on China. But China's going to be
Speaker 8: the center of manufacturing for a really long time for
Speaker 8: the simple reason that's got this unbeatable combination of infrastructure,
Speaker 8: low cost efficiency.
Speaker 7: The question is how do.
Speaker 8: We compensate the people who were depending on in our
Speaker 8: own country. And you know, Henry Ford again problematic character
Speaker 8: for all sorts of reasons, but he got some things right.
Speaker 8: You know, he doubled wages for his workers in the
Speaker 8: nineteen teens. He was called a communist by some people.
Speaker 8: He said, look, I'm just trying to sell cars, and
Speaker 8: I'm trying to sell them at low prices. And any
Speaker 8: business that's built on low wage labor is unreliable.
Speaker 9: Away from the government. Is there a role for organized
Speaker 9: labor in this.
Speaker 8: Oh, one hundred percent. I mean we should be embracing
Speaker 8: labor mobilization. I mean it's bumpy, it does involve higher costs.
Speaker 8: If you're running a business, you're you're not delighted that
Speaker 8: your union is now animated. But first of all, it
Speaker 8: puts spending capacity in people's pockets, right, It boosts consumer power,
Speaker 8: which is good for all businesses. And it's simply more
Speaker 8: reliable if people aren't are at work not worried about
Speaker 8: their ability to put groceries on there.
Speaker 3: I was thinking about that when I read about precision
Speaker 3: scheduled railroading in your book, because those were union guys, right, right,
Speaker 3: But they had a pretty tough gig too, So well,
Speaker 3: some of them are.
Speaker 7: So you wrote about people.
Speaker 3: Who missed medical appointments and funerals and like, we're driving
Speaker 3: so far from their homes in that business. Were the
Speaker 3: unionized folks who were doing that in a much better
Speaker 3: position than the non unionized ones. I mean that's a
Speaker 3: tough gig too.
Speaker 8: Look, the unions, you know, we're ready to go on
Speaker 8: strike and couldn't go on strike because there's this law
Speaker 8: that says they have to basically get the president's permission
Speaker 8: to strike, and the president didn't grant that permission because
Speaker 8: it would have been a shock to this. It would
Speaker 8: have uped inflation, and that wasn't something that Joe Biden
Speaker 8: wanted to happen on his watch. But even you know,
Speaker 8: this this powerful union that got right to the edge
Speaker 8: of strike.
Speaker 7: They couldn't get paid sick leave. You know, Biden gave.
Speaker 8: It to them through the bully pulpit, and some of
Speaker 8: the companies then delivered a few days. But yes, I
Speaker 8: talked to people who were missing out. In one case,
Speaker 8: a guy who's who's infant, you know, needed cardiac surgery
Speaker 8: and he was told, sorry, pal, you know we need
Speaker 8: you on the maintenance crew. You can't be home for that.
Speaker 8: And then he finally quit and fired off a letter Yeah,
Speaker 8: go ahead, no, but so much for.
Speaker 1: Like was it a few years ago? The business round table,
Speaker 1: stakeholder like, think of all the stakeholders, including employees.
Speaker 7: That's my last book.
Speaker 1: We only have, I know, twenty seconds left. Are we
Speaker 1: going to run out of things again? At some point?
Speaker 8: Yes, you know, talk to contractors about why they can't
Speaker 8: build more housing. It's part of white housing so unaffordable.
Speaker 1: This was so much fun, So appreciate it. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much. Peter Goodman, global economic correspondent New York Times
Speaker 1: his new book How the World Ran Out of Everything,
Speaker 1: and then thanks to our Doug Krisner too. We really
Speaker 1: appreciate you coming to reading.
Speaker 2: You you're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch
Speaker 2: us live weekday afternoons from two to five pm. Easter
Speaker 2: Listen on Apple car Play and and Broud Auto with
Speaker 2: a Bloomberg Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
Speaker 1: We continue with our summer reading pick number three, courtesy
Speaker 1: of our Business Week Weekend and Remote broadcast producer Sebastian Escobar,
Speaker 1: who says this next book truly puts into perspective the
Speaker 1: power humanity holds to radically advance or even destroy our future,
Speaker 1: and that the question now is not whether we should
Speaker 1: use these powers, but how best to use them.
Speaker 3: Sebastian's choice comes from Jamie Metzel, who's the author of
Speaker 3: Hacking Darwin, Genetic Engineering in the Future of Humanity and
Speaker 3: four other books. Jamie also served in the US National
Speaker 3: Security Council, State Department, and Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and
Speaker 3: with the United Nations in Cambodia.
Speaker 1: He was also a member of the World Health Organization
Speaker 1: Expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing, and currently Jammie
Speaker 1: works as a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and
Speaker 1: founder and chair of the nonprofit on Shared World.
Speaker 3: The book that Sebastian picked is Jamie's latest It's a
Speaker 3: book that explores the ways humanity can utilize technology for
Speaker 3: building a better world or potentially cause more harm. The
Speaker 3: book super Convergence How the genetics, biotech, and AI revolutions
Speaker 3: will transform our lives, work, and world.
Speaker 6: So this book, in many ways, it's the culmination kind
Speaker 6: of my entire life, and I'm trying to ask the
Speaker 6: question is what do we do and how do we
Speaker 6: manage these two most fundamental transformations of our lives? And
Speaker 6: those two transformations are this is the moment, after three
Speaker 6: point eight billion years of life on Earth, that our
Speaker 6: one species has developed these two transformational superpowers, and that's
Speaker 6: we are creating novel intelligence and have developed the capacity
Speaker 6: to recast all of life.
Speaker 7: Including our own.
Speaker 6: And the one question that's going to determine whether our
Speaker 6: species thrives in the future or doesn't is whether we
Speaker 6: can use these new godlike superpowers wisely. And a Carol,
Speaker 6: you mentioned my last book, Hacking Darwin, was all about
Speaker 6: the future of human genetic engineering. And then I was,
Speaker 6: as you and I have discussed, deeply involved in issues
Speaker 6: of pandemic origins.
Speaker 10: I was a member of the World.
Speaker 6: Health Organization Expert Committee on Human Genome Mediting after the
Speaker 6: first Crisper babies were born, and so I definitely am
Speaker 6: deeply involved in the science of what these intersecting AI
Speaker 6: genetics and biotechnology revolutions mean. And then the applications healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing,
Speaker 6: data storage.
Speaker 10: And lots of other things. But then the question is, well,
Speaker 10: how do we do it?
Speaker 6: And so one is we need to be very cognizant
Speaker 6: of the dangers which are very real, and then we
Speaker 6: need to say what's the path forward, how do.
Speaker 10: We do this wisely?
Speaker 6: And what are the building blocks of getting to the
Speaker 6: place where we want to be, Because if we get
Speaker 6: this right, we can have much better healthcare, more abundant
Speaker 6: foods for everybody around.
Speaker 10: The world, and all kinds of wonderful things.
Speaker 6: And we get it wrong right, we can get sin
Speaker 6: bio pandemics, we can crash ecosystems, we can undermine our
Speaker 6: very humanity.
Speaker 10: And that's why I've written a book for everyone.
Speaker 6: I want people to take this book to the beach
Speaker 6: and be comfortable and having fun reading it on the beach.
Speaker 11: They go.
Speaker 6: That was a really easy read, but I actually learned
Speaker 6: a lot and it sparked a lot of meaningful conversations.
Speaker 1: I have to say that I have been watching though
Speaker 1: a video you did where you talked about the book.
Speaker 1: You're in San Jose, California. You're competing in an ultra marathon.
Speaker 1: It's raining. You talk about your hands getting dumb, you're
Speaker 1: sniffling because it's cold, it's raining.
Speaker 3: Are you walking and running?
Speaker 2: Jamie?
Speaker 3: Just to clarify it here, it looks like it looks like.
Speaker 6: I say, I am so honored that you are sharing
Speaker 6: this with your viewers. So for those of you who
Speaker 6: don't do ultra marathons, ultra marathons are hard. Ultra marathon
Speaker 6: is a race longer than a marathon. The ones that
Speaker 6: I do are fifty kilometers thirty thirty two mile races,
Speaker 6: and I do mountain trail runs. And I was in
Speaker 6: San Jose speaking at Sin Bio Beta, which is the
Speaker 6: big synthetic biology conference that my friend John Cumbers runs,
Speaker 6: and I thought, oh, this is gonna be easy, famous
Speaker 6: last words. I'm just gonna go the day before the
Speaker 6: conference and I'll run this race San Jose.
Speaker 10: The weather's perfect, How big could the hills be?
Speaker 6: So it turns out the hills were pretty big, and
Speaker 6: it turned out they had this uncharacteristic freezing like rainy,
Speaker 6: slushy storm. And it was like, I'm so much older
Speaker 6: than you guys, but you know what a three hour
Speaker 6: tour means.
Speaker 10: When you know this is gonna be easy. Island like
Speaker 10: a three It was a three hour tour.
Speaker 6: And so then I knew that I had somebody had
Speaker 6: asked me to record a video about the book. And
Speaker 6: I was walking up this hill at mile like thirty
Speaker 6: and it was kind of this.
Speaker 10: Straight up you know, I'm what can I do record?
Speaker 6: It's like, you're insane at those homes.
Speaker 10: I'm going to record to record a video about this book.
Speaker 3: That seems like a good idea.
Speaker 5: So I didn't.
Speaker 1: Well, I was thinking about watching it and I was
Speaker 1: like it, Peel, you know, you know when you're out
Speaker 1: in nature, you said times for me, my brain opens up.
Speaker 1: I think differently, maybe more clearly, about some of the
Speaker 1: big ideas and trends and innovations, disruptions, whatever the heck
Speaker 1: you want to call them, that are coming at us
Speaker 1: big time. How do you cross nature with some of
Speaker 1: these dynamic trends that are coming us that will clearly
Speaker 1: test kind of natural evolutionary theory that is dominated for
Speaker 1: so long.
Speaker 6: This is why you're such a great journalist, Carol, to
Speaker 6: make such a smooth transition as that one.
Speaker 10: And what I'll say is the things that we.
Speaker 6: Call nature aren't natural.
Speaker 10: If you go to Whole Foods.
Speaker 6: And go to the fruits and vegetables section, you would
Speaker 6: be hard pressed to find a fruit or a vegetable
Speaker 6: that twenty thousand years ago existed in anything like its
Speaker 6: current form.
Speaker 10: Almost doesn't exist.
Speaker 6: Maybe there's one or two things if you like, when
Speaker 6: I was out hiking in San Jose, it seemed like
Speaker 6: nature because there were a lot of trees. But nay,
Speaker 6: if we mean by nature what it was like before
Speaker 6: humans changed everything, Like, no one went hiking just for
Speaker 6: fun because the saber toothed hiker will eat you if
Speaker 6: you do that. And so the thing that we call
Speaker 6: nature is just the world that our ancestors managed and
Speaker 6: manipulated like you're your dog. That your dog didn't exist
Speaker 6: fifty thousand years ago in this.
Speaker 10: In this format, and so what. And even if you are.
Speaker 6: The most indigenous farmer in the highlands of Peru ma
Speaker 6: it making growing quinoa from ancient varieties of seeds, you
Speaker 6: are a radical biotechnologist. Much more the difference between the
Speaker 6: precursors to our domesticated crops and our current non GMO
Speaker 6: corn and our current GMO corn. The difference between the
Speaker 6: precursors corn is way more than the minuscule difference between
Speaker 6: current corn and GMO. So the starting point for this
Speaker 6: has to be the choice that we are making as
Speaker 6: a species is not natural versus unnatural. It's how do
Speaker 6: we interact with the living world that we have been
Speaker 6: managing and manipulating for thousands of years and do so
Speaker 6: in the smartest, most economical, safest, most sustainable way to
Speaker 6: achieve the things that we want to achieve.
Speaker 10: And what are those things?
Speaker 6: Well, we don't want to die of terrible cancer.
Speaker 10: We want to have gene therapy.
Speaker 6: So somebody who's born with something like sickle cell disease
Speaker 6: rather than living a life of excruciating pain and then
Speaker 6: dying prematurely and live a normal life. We want to
Speaker 6: grow more crops on less land to feed more people.
Speaker 3: So, Jamie, my question for you is, after doing the
Speaker 3: research and reporting for this book in your other books,
Speaker 3: how do you live your life differently? What do you
Speaker 3: eat that's different? What do you do that's different than
Speaker 3: you used to do now that you found all this
Speaker 3: through research?
Speaker 10: Yeah?
Speaker 6: So you know, it's funny people ask me this a
Speaker 6: lot because I'm deeply involved in the world of, for example,
Speaker 6: the science of human life extension.
Speaker 10: And everyone says, oh, you must.
Speaker 6: Be taking the nad bus boosters and med foreman, and
Speaker 6: you must be like doing like the thing where they
Speaker 6: cut open the old and young mice and sew them together.
Speaker 7: You must be.
Speaker 10: Doing that with I don't know who, or your girlfriend
Speaker 10: or something, And I don't do any of that. What
Speaker 10: I do is a few things.
Speaker 6: One just in terms of my personal life. I exercise
Speaker 6: an hour a day and eat healthy and do all
Speaker 6: those blue zone things that everybody knows you're supposed to
Speaker 6: do and are hard to do. Certainly in my healthcare
Speaker 6: I try to get ahead of the curve because I
Speaker 6: write about the future of healthcare in the book, and
Speaker 6: where we're going is from our current world of healthcare
Speaker 6: based on population averages. You have a headache, and you
Speaker 6: go to CVS and you pick up a title and
Speaker 6: all to our new world of health care precision or
Speaker 6: personalized health care based on each person's individual biology. Because
Speaker 6: you know a small percentage of people who take a
Speaker 6: tile and I will have a terrible adverse reaction and
Speaker 6: could even die. And so better to know you're one
Speaker 6: of those people before you take the tile. And that's
Speaker 6: true for cancer therapies and all of that. So we're
Speaker 6: in that process, we're gaining a lot of information about
Speaker 6: systems biology, so the complexity of human biology.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 6: And then where that's the next shift in our healthcare,
Speaker 6: which is from precision to predictive and preventive. Where with
Speaker 6: all of this data and the formula for all of
Speaker 6: this stuff is the more high quality data you have,
Speaker 6: the more computing power, right, stronger algorithms, the more we're.
Speaker 10: Going to be able to decipher actionable patterns.
Speaker 6: That's going to change health care and industry and agriculture
Speaker 6: and everything.
Speaker 1: One thing I wanted to ask you the way the
Speaker 1: books starts, you have two quotes. But you say, this
Speaker 1: is from Stuart Brand, we are as gods and might
Speaker 1: as well get good at it. What's the message there?
Speaker 1: It feels pretty powerful.
Speaker 6: For millennia, our ancestors imagined these all powerful gods that
Speaker 6: could create new stuff, They could recast life, they could
Speaker 6: grant people's wishes to live extra life, they could transform
Speaker 6: the world around them. We can now do all of
Speaker 6: those things. So we are in many ways not and
Speaker 6: always in manaze. We are the all powerful gods that
Speaker 6: we have imagined in our past. And just like we've
Speaker 6: imagined those gods can build and destroy, we can build
Speaker 6: and destroy. And so now we have these superpowers, and
Speaker 6: the question is are we going to use them to
Speaker 6: build to make a better future for us individually, for
Speaker 6: our companies, for our countries, and for our world, and
Speaker 6: do it in really practical ways, or are we just
Speaker 6: going to not do what needs to be to not
Speaker 6: create the right frameworks and governance and values and accountability
Speaker 6: and all the things that are required to make sure
Speaker 6: this story has as happy of a process there's no
Speaker 6: ending process as possible. If we don't do those things,
Speaker 6: we're really going to be in trouble and That's why
Speaker 6: I've written the book. That's why I'm so passionate about
Speaker 6: bringing everybody into this conversation because it's in the early
Speaker 6: when you're doing anything, starting a company, That's when you
Speaker 6: need to say, hey, here's what we stand for, here
Speaker 6: are our values right, and then everything gets built on that.
Speaker 6: If we don't have a conversation of what we're trying
Speaker 6: to achieve, who we are, and what are the core
Speaker 6: values that are going to guide us. If we make
Speaker 6: this a conversation just about the technology itself, We're going
Speaker 6: to wind up in a very unfamiliar and most likely
Speaker 6: scary place.
Speaker 1: I have to say, I'm already scared because I question
Speaker 1: the moral values and ethics that I feel like people
Speaker 1: have really lost. I want to ask you, genetics, biotech, AI,
Speaker 1: what worries you the most that we could get wrong.
Speaker 6: There is a reason why anxiety has been preserved by evolution.
Speaker 6: Anxiety is actually a really healthy emotion for us and
Speaker 6: for every animal, because we're afraid of things, and that
Speaker 6: is what inspires us to say, Hey, this terrible thing
Speaker 6: could happen. I could be eaten by some horrible animal.
Speaker 6: So I'm going to start planning so that that doesn't happen,
Speaker 6: and so these fears that we have. I mean, there's
Speaker 6: some people who are just such techno optimists. They say,
Speaker 6: just do nothing in the future is going to be great.
Speaker 6: That is not true. Bad things could happen. We need
Speaker 6: to be honest now about what they are. A few
Speaker 6: of them that I highlight in the book. One, as
Speaker 6: I mentioned, I was a member of the World Health
Speaker 6: Organization Expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome and doctor Teddros
Speaker 6: the director of the who created that after the world's
Speaker 6: first crisper babies were born in China in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 10: That was a terrible violation.
Speaker 6: If we just say, hey, let's just do whatever willy
Speaker 6: nilly human experimentation, we're going to wind up with more
Speaker 6: Nuremberg Trial and those kinds of violations. We have the
Speaker 6: capacity to use gene drives, which is basically we put
Speaker 6: a little molecular scissors almost into the sex cells that
Speaker 6: pass between animals, and we could use it to wipe
Speaker 6: out mallarial mosquitoes, and that would be great.
Speaker 10: We could save a million lives per year.
Speaker 6: But we don't know how these full ecosystems work, and
Speaker 6: if we're not careful we could also crash whole ecosystems,
Speaker 6: not because we're trying to do harm, because we're trying
Speaker 6: to do good. And as you and I have talked
Speaker 6: about this before, Carol, but I've been in the middle
Speaker 6: for the last almost four and a half years of
Speaker 6: this debate about COVID nineteen origins, and it's my view
Speaker 6: that the preponderance of the available evidence suggests a research
Speaker 6: related origin in Wuhan. And it's very likely that these
Speaker 6: Chinese scientists who weren't trying to create bioweapons, but were
Speaker 6: most likely trying to create a pan coronavirus vaccine and
Speaker 6: had an accident and didn't realize what had happened, and
Speaker 6: then things got worse and worse. So it's not just
Speaker 6: that we're going to have doctor evil doing bad stuff.
Speaker 10: It could be that well intentioned people, people who are.
Speaker 6: Trying to prevent terrible diseases, or to stop malarial mosquitos,
Speaker 6: or all sorts of things. And that's why, again and
Speaker 6: again I keep going back to values.
Speaker 10: It's establishing the north star where are we heading?
Speaker 1: That makes us think about Tim and I talk a
Speaker 1: lot about AI.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So Jamie, my question for you is where could
Speaker 3: AI go wrong and where what are the indications? And
Speaker 3: now about the direction that it's moving in.
Speaker 6: AI, Like, all of these technologies can be used for
Speaker 6: good or for ill, and we're seeing both of those
Speaker 6: things right now. We're seeing AI being applied in healthcare
Speaker 6: settings and agriculture and all these other areas in companies
Speaker 6: and it's helping solve real problems in very practical ways.
Speaker 6: And we're seeing deep fakes, manipulations, all kinds of of
Speaker 6: problems with AI.
Speaker 10: And these are just the early days.
Speaker 6: And right now when people think about AI, most people think,
Speaker 6: oh AI equals chat GPT, like, I'm going to go
Speaker 6: to this website and then I'm gonna do AI. But
Speaker 6: if I were to ask you, guys, how did electricity
Speaker 6: influence your life today, It's an unanswerable question because electricity
Speaker 6: it's in your alarm clock, it's in your house, it's
Speaker 6: in your air conditioning, it's in the microphone, it's in
Speaker 6: our clothes, it's in our haircuts. It's just electricity is
Speaker 6: part of everything that we do. And these technologies are
Speaker 6: going to be part of everything that we do, part
Speaker 6: of our accounting systems, our interacting systems, how we interact
Speaker 6: with the world how everything is made, and that's why
Speaker 6: we need to think systemically and systematically about about these
Speaker 6: these technologies. And there are some of these people say, oh,
Speaker 6: just no regulation. Yeah, government, get out of the way.
Speaker 6: That's the last thing we need. We need wise governance
Speaker 6: and whise regulation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Everything. Well, my dad, you say everything in moderation. I
Speaker 1: know everybody's dad says that or mom says that, but
Speaker 1: it's also everything. Like you gotta have some oversight of
Speaker 1: all this stuff. Jamie, good luck, so much fun to
Speaker 1: catch up with you again. Thank you so much for
Speaker 1: finding time for us once again here at Bloomberg. Jamie,
Speaker 1: take care, be well.
Speaker 3: Good luck also in the future Ultra Marathon.
Speaker 1: I know he's pretty impressive. I love I highly recommend
Speaker 1: you check out that YouTube video because he really does
Speaker 1: go through so much of the book and like I said,
Speaker 1: it's raining, there's mud. Jamie is, of course, senior fellow
Speaker 1: at the Atlanta Council, founder and chair of the nonprofit
Speaker 1: One Shared World. Check out his new book, super Convergence,
Speaker 1: How the genetics, biotech and AI revolutions will transform our
Speaker 1: lives working world. It's coming out on Tuesday.
Speaker 3: He'd spend a few times with us during COVID. Yeah,
Speaker 3: came on talking because, as he mentioned, he looked very
Speaker 3: closely and has been looking very closely at their origins,
Speaker 3: so we had him on a few times sixty minutes.
Speaker 1: Has done a big piece on certainly his thinking. There
Speaker 1: so fun things.
Speaker 2: You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast live each
Speaker 2: weekday starting at two pm Eastern on applecar Play and
Speaker 2: Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business Ad. You can also
Speaker 2: listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York
Speaker 2: station Just Say Alexa play Bloomberg eleven.
Speaker 1: Thirty plenty a head in our second hour of our
Speaker 1: weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week. Our team summer reading
Speaker 1: list continues, including the book about the individual who left
Speaker 1: a cult and her family, made her way on Wall
Speaker 1: Street when it wasn't so easy for a woman, and
Speaker 1: earned a nickname along the way.
Speaker 3: Also from Colonel Sanders and mel Brooks and Norman Lear
Speaker 3: to Carol Channing, Rita Moreno and Henri Matisse, The Rock
Speaker 3: to Genarians that are rocking their later years, and Carol's
Speaker 3: pick no surprise as the sailor of the group, her
Speaker 3: selection sailing alone, A surprising history of Isolation and Survival
Speaker 3: at Sea.
Speaker 1: First up this hour, though, let's get to the fourth
Speaker 1: book on our summer reading list, This one from our
Speaker 1: YouTube producer Elizabeth Sedrin, who says Patricia Walsh Chadwick had
Speaker 1: a compelling story of leaving a cult and then climbing
Speaker 1: the corporate investment ladder, and that she had a smart
Speaker 1: perspective on investment cycles while not leaning into girl boss rhetoric.
Speaker 1: Sounds like, Elizabeth, well, we've got your attention right. Chadwick
Speaker 1: started as a receptionist at a brokerage firm at the
Speaker 1: age of nineteen, and thirty years later was named a
Speaker 1: global partner at Invesco. Needless to say, she's seen a
Speaker 1: lot of eras and cycles on Wall Street. It's in
Speaker 1: her book Breaking Glass Tales from the Witch of Wall Street.
Speaker 1: Here's Patricia Walls Chadwick with her story.
Speaker 11: I did not know I was called the Witch of
Speaker 11: Wall Street until five years ago, and I was bit serious.
Speaker 11: I am serious. It was my seventieth birthday party, I
Speaker 11: don't mind saying that. And there was a woman who
Speaker 11: said she had met meate in nineteen eighty five. I
Speaker 11: remembered it well, and she was with Bear Stearns, and
Speaker 11: she told me that she was told by the institut
Speaker 11: of Institutional Sales. We have a very big, important count
Speaker 11: at City Bank. One woman runs a lot of the
Speaker 11: money there. But we have a problem. The men are
Speaker 11: afraid of her. These are the institutional salespeople. Because apparently
Speaker 11: I was fairly demanding, but that was my job. So
Speaker 11: she said, I had heard of this woman, but I
Speaker 11: had never met her, and all I knew was on
Speaker 11: the trading floor. They called her the Witch of Wall Street.
Speaker 11: And I was oblivious, and I only heard that five
Speaker 11: years ago. Been out of Wall Street for a long time.
Speaker 11: I was shocked, I really was. And then I thought
Speaker 11: about it for a while and I thought, okay, so
Speaker 11: maybe I did break some china along the way, and
Speaker 11: maybe some of the characteristics that might get a man
Speaker 11: called the Wolf of Wall Street, you know, aggressiveness and
Speaker 11: demanding get a woman called the Witch of Wall Street.
Speaker 11: And I decided that I would embrace it rather than
Speaker 11: run away from it.
Speaker 3: So you're owning it.
Speaker 11: I own it. I own it.
Speaker 1: I was just gonna say, did bother you or like,
Speaker 1: like when you think back and you just it's interesting
Speaker 1: because we have a lot of conversations about aggression from
Speaker 1: a man versus a woman, and COURSEU I still have
Speaker 1: it that can often be respected versus a is you know,
Speaker 1: not a witch but another word that rhymes me vercisely.
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm trying to understand. So take us like
Speaker 1: I don't know. First of all, that era, like go back,
Speaker 1: it was a different Wall Street.
Speaker 11: It was a very different Wall Street, and there were
Speaker 11: very few women who would really come in power. And
Speaker 11: that's why the title is breaking glass. I mean, I
Speaker 11: don't talk about shattering glass or anything, but you get
Speaker 11: to a certain point and then you were able to
Speaker 11: break through it, and a lot of women aren't. I
Speaker 11: think women are treated more difficultly in terms of promotions
Speaker 11: because I think everything looks like a return on investment,
Speaker 11: and it's how much do we want to invest in
Speaker 11: her if she's not going to stay, and not going
Speaker 11: to stay generally means a chance, yes, precisely, And so
Speaker 11: I think women have to understand and accept that reality
Speaker 11: and just be even more aggressive. And I don't say
Speaker 11: that derogatorily. You've just got to be there. You've got
Speaker 11: to play the hard game if you're going to be
Speaker 11: in it for the long haul.
Speaker 1: Did you have kids?
Speaker 11: I did. I was forty five when I had my twins. Wow,
Speaker 11: so I had had quite a long haul, and there
Speaker 11: was I'll tell you, honestly, there was a time when
Speaker 11: I wondered whether I could be a good businesswoman, a
Speaker 11: good wife and a good mother simultaneously. And then when
Speaker 11: I had them, and it was wonderful for about six years.
Speaker 11: But very truthfully, I think an important story in my
Speaker 11: book is that we were on vacation and our children
Speaker 11: were five years old, and we were on the beach
Speaker 11: and my husband came home one day with them and
Speaker 11: he said, sweetheart, we're on the beach swimming and you're
Speaker 11: on conference calls. And I thought about that overnight and
Speaker 11: I woke up the next morning and I said, honey,
Speaker 11: I'm going to retire. And I retired at the age
Speaker 11: of fifty one. It was a big step to take,
Speaker 11: but in my mind, it was the right one for me,
Speaker 11: it was the right one for our family and what
Speaker 11: I did, and I ultimately had another.
Speaker 3: Well, I was going to say, you didn't really retire,
Speaker 3: like you know, this is not your first book, and
Speaker 3: you were also, you know, global partner at Invesco, and
Speaker 3: certainly in a second career as a member of many
Speaker 3: corporate boards.
Speaker 11: I did corporate boards and I did expert witness work,
Speaker 11: so yes, but it allowed me to do what I
Speaker 11: did want it to.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 11: I didn't want my children being raised by nannies, and
Speaker 11: so you know, I accept the fact, and I think
Speaker 11: most women have to accept the fact you're going to
Speaker 11: have some more difficult choices than like leet men are.
Speaker 3: Was it the right move to retire at fifty one
Speaker 3: for me?
Speaker 11: Absolutely? I don't look back with any regret on it
Speaker 11: at all.
Speaker 3: Would you have if you were to do it again,
Speaker 3: retired earlier if you could have?
Speaker 11: No, I think the time my children were twins and
Speaker 11: they were fifth grade going into kindergarten, perfect time. I
Speaker 11: don't have to make all the play dates when two
Speaker 11: and three and four, right, but I did want to
Speaker 11: be there to answer the questions when they were getting older,
Speaker 11: So for me, it was perfect.
Speaker 1: Well, it's funny because Tim and I have had this
Speaker 1: conversation because he's back. Well now it's over a year,
Speaker 1: almost a year now, almost a year. That took it paternally,
Speaker 1: you know, like a real leave, not like six months
Speaker 1: six months, which is unheard of. Which is incredible that
Speaker 1: our company does.
Speaker 11: I was going to say that credit to Bloomberg. That
Speaker 11: was fantastic.
Speaker 3: It was fantastic, and I think it It's also changed
Speaker 3: a lot just in recent years. I mean, I wasn't
Speaker 3: at Bloomberg when I had my first kid, but I
Speaker 3: got two weeks off at that point and it just
Speaker 3: makes such a difference for when you raised ef.
Speaker 1: But what like the con we can be real and yeah,
Speaker 1: be real.
Speaker 3: I've talked about a lot. I don't know where we
Speaker 3: talked about.
Speaker 1: The study, No, but the point of that we need
Speaker 1: men to take that six months so that it kind
Speaker 1: of evens the playing field, if you will. Right of that,
Speaker 1: I'm not you know, the female isn't necessarily the only
Speaker 1: one that disappears from the workforce for six months or
Speaker 1: what have you. That it's good to see both parents
Speaker 1: doing it.
Speaker 11: It's something that has not done very much in our
Speaker 11: business the world of finance and investing, but it's done
Speaker 11: much more in Europe and I think we can learn
Speaker 11: from them. Take us back though, to your first job
Speaker 11: on Wall Street. I was nineteen years old and I
Speaker 11: have been given the job, you know, our harder job
Speaker 11: for ninety dollars a week, and all I was so
Speaker 11: proud of myself forgetting I askaw.
Speaker 1: What year this was.
Speaker 11: This was nineteen sixty eight. Okay, okay, but it was
Speaker 11: more than the minimum wage. So I was very proud
Speaker 11: of that, and all I wanted to be was the
Speaker 11: best receptionist in the world. Six months later, George, who
Speaker 11: is one of my mentors. My book is dedicated to
Speaker 11: my mentors, he brought me into his office and he said,
Speaker 11: we're going to give you a raise from ninety dollars
Speaker 11: a week to one hundred and I did my quick
Speaker 11: arithmetic and went, well, that's eleven percent, but that's in
Speaker 11: six months, so that's really twenty two percent.
Speaker 1: And I felt so empowered.
Speaker 11: And then two months later, it was Christmas time and
Speaker 11: he called me in and he said, we're very pleased
Speaker 11: with your work, and we're going to give you a
Speaker 11: fifteen hundred dollar bonus. It was like a third of
Speaker 11: my salary. I started investing and that was about the
Speaker 11: first thing. Literally less than a year later, he sent
Speaker 11: me to New York to close a deal. I didn't
Speaker 11: know what a deal was. I got into New York,
Speaker 11: I had a limousine that took me around to five places.
Speaker 11: I collected five checks each for a million dollars, went
Speaker 11: back to Boston, presented them to him. He and his
Speaker 11: partner took me out to dinner at the Ritz Carlton,
Speaker 11: and that night I lay in bed and said, hmm,
Speaker 11: I wonder if I might ever have a job like
Speaker 11: there someday. So it was from lowly beginnings, but I
Speaker 11: think the kind of the message of my book is
Speaker 11: be adaptable, learn put your hand up all the time,
Speaker 11: and little by little, when you are adaptable, you'll become
Speaker 11: more confident. When you more confident, you'll be successful. And
Speaker 11: it's not a very complicated story.
Speaker 3: So Patricia, that's exactly where I want to start, is
Speaker 3: the beginning. And I'm not talking about nineteen years old
Speaker 3: and your job as a receptionist. I'm talking about early on.
Speaker 3: And because you have an interesting story that I think
Speaker 3: would surprise a lot of people.
Speaker 11: Yes, and that story was my first book. It was
Speaker 11: called Little Sister. I was born into a religious community
Speaker 11: in all of all places, Cambridge, Massachusetts, so part of
Speaker 11: the real involved world, a group of highly intelligent, highly
Speaker 11: educated people at all Catholics, and they were under the
Speaker 11: auspices of a priest named Father Leonard Feenie Jesuit and
Speaker 11: a woman named Catherine Clark who created the entity, which
Speaker 11: was really for Catholics at Harvard and Radcliffe and other
Speaker 11: schools to have an opportunity to meet and talk about
Speaker 11: their own religion. And during the war World War two,
Speaker 11: that is, it was very very popular, and after the war,
Speaker 11: when all the veterans were coming back, father feene was
Speaker 11: the most popular lecturer in the world. My parents met there.
Speaker 11: My father had been a naval officer during World War two.
Speaker 11: He was getting his graduate degree in philosophy at Boston
Speaker 11: College and my mother was twelve years younger and she
Speaker 11: was a brand new eighteen year old convert to Catholicism.
Speaker 11: They met, they got married a year later I was born.
Speaker 11: But under Father Feenie's influence, the organization became very very
Speaker 11: doctrinaire about you had to be Catholic to be saved.
Speaker 11: And it was at the time that a humanism was spreading,
Speaker 11: and the idea was religions should all get together, and
Speaker 11: you know, they all worshiped in one way or another,
Speaker 11: and let's not you know, say that we have battlegrounds.
Speaker 11: But that was not the way they took it, and
Speaker 11: so pretty soon they were not. Father Feenie was no
Speaker 11: longer allowed to practice as a Catholic priest. My parents
Speaker 11: stayed with him. In a way. That was the only
Speaker 11: world I knew. And there were sixty adults. Among that
Speaker 11: were twelve married couples, and then thirty nine children came along.
Speaker 11: I was one of the oldest, and all of a
Speaker 11: sudden things really started to change. We had a number
Speaker 11: of houses in Cambridge and they built a big red
Speaker 11: stockade fence, so now the whole world was shut out.
Speaker 11: It was like a compound, a compound, absolutely, And then
Speaker 11: when I was six, the children were separated from the parents,
Speaker 11: and then the parents were arm twisted seriously to take
Speaker 11: vows of celibacy. And my father said, absolutely not, and
Speaker 11: Father Feenie came back to him and back to him,
Speaker 11: and finally Father Feenie said to him, you are the
Speaker 11: only you couple. You are the one couple, the only
Speaker 11: hold out of the twelve. They well, they had to
Speaker 11: do it. They really wanted us to have a very
Speaker 11: Catholic education. Years later, one of the other children told
Speaker 11: me his parents told him the very same story. So
Speaker 11: it had been this divide and conquer right, and now
Speaker 11: the children were not being brought up by the parents.
Speaker 11: The parents were not able to be together, and it
Speaker 11: was a monastic environment, silence most of the day. We're
Speaker 11: not allowed to address our parents, speak to them at all,
Speaker 11: and so people say, why did they do that? And
Speaker 11: all of that. That was their decision. But my father
Speaker 11: used to break the rules, and breaking the rules to
Speaker 11: me was what told me that he loved me. And
Speaker 11: the fact of the matter is I never blamed my parents. Somehow,
Speaker 11: I think I was a bright little girl, but somehow
Speaker 11: I blamed Catherine Clark, whom we called Sister Catherine, and
Speaker 11: Leonard Feeney for separating my parents. And I never thought
Speaker 11: of it as a cult. You will not see the
Speaker 11: book word cult in my first book. It was my home.
Speaker 11: It was my daughter her when she was twenty years
Speaker 11: old and came home from college and she said, Mom,
Speaker 11: I have two things to tell you. Then what was that?
Speaker 11: And she said, first, you have to stop everything until
Speaker 11: you finish this book. And then she said, and you
Speaker 11: have to accept the fact that you grew up in
Speaker 11: a cult. I never thought of it that way. It
Speaker 11: was my home and I loved it in many ways.
Speaker 11: But ultimately I accept the fact that it was a cult.
Speaker 11: And then when I was about fourteen or fifteen, I
Speaker 11: started having crushes on boys. Now that was not going
Speaker 11: to keep me in the community. Sister Catherine wanted every
Speaker 11: one of the children to grow up remain celibate for life.
Speaker 11: I would be a bride of Christ. But I have
Speaker 11: these dreams of a prince coming into the garden and
Speaker 11: sweeping me off, and you know, we will go off
Speaker 11: and live in a castle and have lots of children
Speaker 11: up that I knew how any of that would happen.
Speaker 11: And the next thing I knew, she kicked me out.
Speaker 11: No opportunity to come back.
Speaker 1: How old were you when you were kicked out?
Speaker 11: Seventeen? I just graduated from high school, schooled within our
Speaker 11: own community. I'd never seen a television show, never read
Speaker 11: a newspaper, never been to a grocery store, never had
Speaker 11: held a dollar bill. We'll go. So I had been
Speaker 11: accepted at two colleges because they needed the school to
Speaker 11: be accredited, and I was a good student, and I
Speaker 11: got into Vassar and I got into Bates, where my
Speaker 11: father had gone. She made me write a letter saying
Speaker 11: that I wasn't coming. She said it would be the
Speaker 11: I would lose my soul if I went to college.
Speaker 11: So she allowed me to go to a secretarial school
Speaker 11: so that I could get the necessary skills to be
Speaker 11: able to earn my own living. And my first place
Speaker 11: to live was at a room in the YWCA in
Speaker 11: a not very fashionable section of Boston.
Speaker 1: How does something like that? You seem pretty normal? But
Speaker 1: I don't even know what normal is anymore. But you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, And you've done really well, and
Speaker 1: I just wonder, though, what if that still stays with
Speaker 1: you or impacted you as you, you know, out into
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 3: And also raised your own family.
Speaker 11: Yes, oh yes, I look back on my life. I
Speaker 11: know it was very abnormal and very strange, but I
Speaker 11: look back and I wouldn't change anything. I'm not saying
Speaker 11: I wouldn't have had more time with my parents, of
Speaker 11: course I wouldn't. But I think the way one's path
Speaker 11: goes in life ultimately leads you to where you are
Speaker 11: happily married, two children, who one of them is now engaged.
Speaker 11: I mean they're thirty years old now, they're young adults,
Speaker 11: and I just think sometimes you're given the ability to,
Speaker 11: you know, get over the things that aren't good and
Speaker 11: find the best in them. Sister Kavin herself was never
Speaker 11: a mentor to me, but I believe she was a
Speaker 11: role model. This was a woman who ran a community
Speaker 11: of one hundred people. Not one man pushed back on her,
Speaker 11: not one woman pushed back on her. And I think
Speaker 11: when I got into that doggy dog world of Wall Street, subliminally,
Speaker 11: in the back of my mind, my only model was
Speaker 11: someone who ran things and was a woman, right, And
Speaker 11: I think I just learned, Okay, that's what I got
Speaker 11: to do. I'm gonna do this. I never thought I
Speaker 11: can't do that because I'm a woman. So I have
Speaker 11: to give her a little credit.
Speaker 3: So maybe that's the perfect segue to getting from your
Speaker 3: first job or your first role to one where you
Speaker 3: moved to the business side. You said you lay awake
Speaker 3: at night wondering how you could become one of those
Speaker 3: deals people.
Speaker 11: So how did you do that?
Speaker 1: It was?
Speaker 11: It was little baby steps. Let me tell you. One
Speaker 11: of the first things I did was I, by the
Speaker 11: age twenty one, I became a stockbroker. I didn't end
Speaker 11: up getting customers. I just thought I can do that.
Speaker 11: Then I memorized I had to do those s and
Speaker 11: p tear sheets. You're both way too young to know
Speaker 11: what they are.
Speaker 1: But I tickers are to memorize tickers.
Speaker 11: I memorized every ticker on the New York Stock Exchange,
Speaker 11: and I would go into the trading room and I
Speaker 11: would give myself tests, and I just found the whole
Speaker 11: thing so exciting. And by the time I moved to
Speaker 11: Philadelphia with my best girlfriend, I was becoming an assistant
Speaker 11: to the analysts. And the one thing I said of them,
Speaker 11: there were six men that I was reporting to. I said, listen,
Speaker 11: I don't want to just put numbers on a piece
Speaker 11: of paper for you. I want to learn what those
Speaker 11: numbers mean. And I want you to promise me that
Speaker 11: you'll answer all the questions I have. I was ready
Speaker 11: to walk away from that job if they had said, no,
Speaker 11: we just want you to give us the numbers. They
Speaker 11: kept their words, every one of them, and I walked
Speaker 11: away After two years. I wasn't even twenty five yet,
Speaker 11: and I understood how the trucking industry worked, and at
Speaker 11: the airline industry and the insurance industry, and so from
Speaker 11: there it was just a little step bigger till I
Speaker 11: became an analyst.
Speaker 1: Well, it's like you have this incredible story, and understanding
Speaker 1: that story is an important part of you. But understanding
Speaker 1: I think we feel that way like investment stories, Like
Speaker 1: understanding the story or the fundamentals or what something really
Speaker 1: is rather than just a sheet of numbers. Right, and
Speaker 1: understanding absolutely. Thirty seconds left. What would you like to
Speaker 1: share with our audience?
Speaker 11: Well? I do think for young people and I love mentoring.
Speaker 11: It's important to have mentors in your life. It is
Speaker 11: also really important to be adaptable. I think let's put
Speaker 11: your hand up, say yes, ask someone for help, don't
Speaker 11: be afraid to and you'll find little by little the
Speaker 11: first time it's hard, and then you have more confidence,
Speaker 11: and then you build up your own resilience. And I
Speaker 11: think everyone should have a mentor. There's no such thing
Speaker 11: as a bad mentor. They're either a mentor or they're not.
Speaker 1: If you were starting today fifteen seconds left, would you
Speaker 1: still go to Wall Street? Do you think?
Speaker 11: I love it? So?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 11: I end checking to see if like you're feeling about
Speaker 11: and I think it can be a great place for women.
Speaker 11: It really can.
Speaker 1: All right, love it? Promise you'll come back when the
Speaker 1: paperback comes us or even sooner, or even or even
Speaker 1: sooner what an amazing tale. Has Netflix called and said
Speaker 1: we need to make this into a series.
Speaker 11: There been little talks of I would watch last year,
Speaker 11: all right.
Speaker 1: Patricia Walsh Chadwick, a former global partner in Vesco her
Speaker 1: book Breaking Glass Tails from the Witch of Wall Street.
Speaker 2: Listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast Catch us live
Speaker 2: weekday afternoons from two to five pm. Easter Listen on
Speaker 2: Apple car.
Speaker 5: Play and and Broud Auto with a Bloomberg.
Speaker 2: Business app or watch us live on YouTube.
Speaker 1: Now to our fifth pick on our summer reading list,
Speaker 1: Our team Summer reading List from the producer of our
Speaker 1: daily Bloomberg BusinessWeek broadcast and podcast, Paul Brennan, who says,
Speaker 1: as someone who is later in his life and waiting
Speaker 1: for his own triumph to come, Paul was inspired by
Speaker 1: Moe's profiles and and he mentioned of his hero, Paul's
Speaker 1: hero mel brooks, it's a plus.
Speaker 3: And by Moe he means Mo. Roca, a correspondent for
Speaker 3: CBS Sunday Morning, a frequent panelist on NPR's weight Wait
Speaker 3: Don't Tell Me, and the host en realtor of the
Speaker 3: Cooking Channels My Grandmother's Ravioli. Also, he spent years earlier
Speaker 3: in his career as a correspondent on The Daily Show
Speaker 3: as well as on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he does a lot, man. His perspective's a lot
Speaker 1: of fun too. Morocca is also the New York Times
Speaker 1: bestselling author of obituaries Great Lives Worth Reliving, a companion
Speaker 1: to his podcast of the same name. His new book
Speaker 1: out just recently, Rockagenarians, Late in Life, Debuts, comebacks and triumphs.
Speaker 12: It was my first job and it is the toolbox
Speaker 12: I keep going back to all the time. Honestly, I
Speaker 12: don't want to sound too grand about it talking about
Speaker 12: being a storyteller, but really that job was storytelling boot
Speaker 12: camp because we a very small writing staff, had to
Speaker 12: take classic novels and break them down into half hour
Speaker 12: episodes as seen through the eyes of a Jack Russell Terrier,
Speaker 12: a dog for kids between the ages of six and eleven.
Speaker 12: It was like a writing assignment devised by an English
Speaker 12: professor on acid, and it was just the best way
Speaker 12: to learn. And you know, my boss there, she gave
Speaker 12: me some real tough love because I sort of thought.
Speaker 10: Oh, I don't really know what I'm doing.
Speaker 12: And so my scripts were kind of half baked, and
Speaker 12: she said, you just had to figure this out. And
Speaker 12: she took a couple of books on really screenwriting, and
Speaker 12: she just threw them down on my desk. At one
Speaker 12: point she said, figure it out because this is a
Speaker 12: great opportunity. And it was a great opportunity. In part
Speaker 12: peak is six to eleven year olds. You can't fool them.
Speaker 12: And so you can't just write a lazy script with
Speaker 12: characters just kind of talking to each other. It has
Speaker 12: to be really lean and dynamic, and the action has
Speaker 12: to keep moving forward or they'll lose interest. So it
Speaker 12: was a really great audience to have to write for.
Speaker 1: What is it about getting snapshots of you know, people's lives,
Speaker 1: you know individuals, great works, as you did with Wishbone.
Speaker 1: What is it about kind of like telling vignettes that
Speaker 1: you love doing Because you do this, it's obviously in
Speaker 1: this book.
Speaker 12: I mean, it's sort of the same thing that drew
Speaker 12: me to obituaries, which were kind which was a subject
Speaker 12: of my last book and podcast. A good obituary is
Speaker 12: about someone's life, not their death. And I love a
Speaker 12: good life style.
Speaker 1: Love reading obituaries, especially yeah, but go ahead.
Speaker 12: No, because a good obituary is sort of like the
Speaker 12: trailer for an Oscar winning biopic. It has a sweep,
Speaker 12: a drama, romance, the highs, the lows, the triumphs and tragedies.
Speaker 12: And my father was a real romantic and a very optimistic,
Speaker 12: very boyant, and so he loved to read. Growing up
Speaker 12: in the Washington, DC area when there were two daily papers,
Speaker 12: he just he would say, oh boy, the oh It's
Speaker 12: just my favorite section of the paper. So I just
Speaker 12: love a person's story.
Speaker 7: It's hard.
Speaker 12: I'm not sure how was to put it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, do they also though, teach us about how
Speaker 3: we want to live our lives completely completely.
Speaker 12: I mean there are times that I've been a competitive
Speaker 12: oh bit writer, Like you're sort of reading an oh
Speaker 12: bit and then you go, oh my god, he did
Speaker 12: all that by the time he was twenty five.
Speaker 3: Right, not to make it all about the person who's
Speaker 3: not dead, but.
Speaker 12: Right, I know, but it's hard to not to sometimes
Speaker 12: and then you're like, oh my god, he went to
Speaker 12: prison at thirty five.
Speaker 11: I'm doing fine.
Speaker 7: There's this metric going.
Speaker 12: But I mean, in this case, I mean, my co
Speaker 12: author and I wanted to tell stories of people who
Speaker 12: accomplished great things late in life. Because obviously old age,
Speaker 12: advanced age is very much in the news, a very
Speaker 12: hot topic, not just in politics, but as the population ages.
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's I would say for myself, like
Speaker 1: I think as I've gotten older, history in general is interesting,
Speaker 1: but also I think about the older folks that have
Speaker 1: been in my lives, like I love hearing about their
Speaker 1: stories and kind of what they had to go through.
Speaker 1: Having said that, sometimes having it's the folks that you
Speaker 1: write about. Sometimes it's their first chapter, sometimes it's the
Speaker 1: second chapter, sometimes it's the third chapter. Kind of talk
Speaker 1: to us a little bit about that, right, it's not
Speaker 1: sometimes their first.
Speaker 12: Act, right, or sometimes it is, well exactly, it's a variety.
Speaker 12: It's I mean, it's debuts, comebacks, and sort of it's
Speaker 12: capstones a lot of architects. It's one of these amazing
Speaker 12: things that architects just keep getting better and better. And
Speaker 12: I think there are a couple of practical reasons. If
Speaker 12: you're doing a commission for a big, expensive building, you
Speaker 12: want somebody with experience, right, You don't want necessary probably
Speaker 12: don't want a young starter architect, and more architects of
Speaker 12: advanced age also are likely to have a staff doing
Speaker 12: a lot of the grant work by that point. But
Speaker 12: all of these people have in common that they don't
Speaker 12: accept this very strange, pervasive and kind of insidious message
Speaker 12: that your third act of life is a time to
Speaker 12: kind of wind things down. Sure where that came from.
Speaker 12: And also, I mean, we're going to continue living longer
Speaker 12: and longer. I mean, if we're fortunate and have good health,
Speaker 12: decent healthcare. There are also people that don't look backwards.
Speaker 12: They're very in it. So they're not doing victory laps.
Speaker 12: They're not sitting at home playing highlight reels of their
Speaker 12: great achievements. And that's okay if you want to do that,
Speaker 12: if you know, if you want to do that and
Speaker 12: hang out and just reminisce. But that's not what these
Speaker 12: people in this book do.
Speaker 3: I want to get to some of the stories in
Speaker 3: just a few minutes, but before we do that, talk
Speaker 3: a little bit about the organization of the book, because
Speaker 3: it reads in a really interesting way.
Speaker 12: I have learned from the best At CBS Sunday Morning,
Speaker 12: which is a forty five year old arts and culture
Speaker 12: show on CBS, my executive producer Rand Morrison believes very
Speaker 12: much in mix show mix, like you have to, and
Speaker 12: part of that is surprises. So you go from I'm
Speaker 12: proud that the book includes Henri Matisse and Clara Peller
Speaker 12: that wears the beef Lady and a tortoise.
Speaker 3: Mister you're gonna get to mister racical.
Speaker 12: We had to get to miss the first time Fouther
Speaker 12: at ninety take that al Pacino. But like, but, but,
Speaker 12: but so mix is very important. I think everything I
Speaker 12: think when you turn the page, you want to be.
Speaker 12: I mean, I'm big into delight, like you know my ovid.
Speaker 12: I would just wanted to be like Morocca, who delighted
Speaker 12: audience has died today. He was one hundred and sixteen.
Speaker 12: But like that's a big part of it. So it's
Speaker 12: not chronological. We just we just wanted it to have
Speaker 12: a decent mix so that you know, it's I almost
Speaker 12: to give it in terms of protein and carbs. Like
Speaker 12: some stories have import and kind of grandeur, like married
Speaker 12: church Terrelle the civil rights leader at the age of
Speaker 12: eighty six, led sittings segregated, watching DC lunch counters. But
Speaker 12: that's a good like filling, nutritious, I mean, really story
Speaker 12: and then you want something just kind of busy and
Speaker 12: fund Carol Channing Finding Love at eighty two.
Speaker 1: It is fascinating. There's just so many different names. There
Speaker 1: are names people will definitely know, there are names that
Speaker 1: people might not. How did you go about figuring out
Speaker 1: who you wanted to include?
Speaker 12: Well, I didn't want to go I hate to start
Speaker 12: with what I didn't want to do, but I didn't
Speaker 12: want to go to entertainment heavy. There are actors Rita
Speaker 12: Moreno whom I've interviewed before, and who's a pistol, who
Speaker 12: is really a pistol? I mean, she's amazing at ninety two,
Speaker 12: Morgan Freeman, because I love the Electric Company and they
Speaker 12: both were on it and they kind of have intertwined lives.
Speaker 12: By law, we had to include at least one golden girl.
Speaker 12: I think we would have been arrested if we didn't.
Speaker 12: And Estelle Getty was the story to tell because she
Speaker 12: made her television debut at sixty two really after a
Speaker 12: life of kind of raising her family and doing every
Speaker 12: little bit off off off Broadway theater she could, So,
Speaker 12: I mean, it just seemed right that she should have
Speaker 12: this amazing, iconic role at the end. But we wanted
Speaker 12: to make sure that there was a real range of people.
Speaker 12: So one of the things I'm interested is sort of
Speaker 12: people who are obviously respected but kind of famous in
Speaker 12: sort of sub worlds, if you will. So I called
Speaker 12: my friend Scott Erlik, whose family worked in wine making
Speaker 12: for many years, and I said, who is someone in
Speaker 12: the wine making world that's just remarkable for his longevity
Speaker 12: And he's without skipping a beat, he said, Mark Kurkic
Speaker 12: is the guy. A Croatian immigrant, an immigrant from most
Speaker 12: than Yugoslavia, and he was alive at the time. He
Speaker 12: only died last year, right before our publication, so he
Speaker 12: was active up until the age of one hundred. And
Speaker 12: I love the fact that he was really the reason
Speaker 12: this amazing immigrant story that American specifically California wines when
Speaker 12: you know, became contenders the Judgment of Paris in nineteen
Speaker 12: seventy six, when American wines and French wines were competed
Speaker 12: against each other in a blind taste test in Paris
Speaker 12: organized by kind of a wag of a British promoter
Speaker 12: who expected it to be a runaway French victory, and
Speaker 12: both the red and white Americans. The white from Gurkitch's
Speaker 12: Winery One shocked the world to change the world of wine.
Speaker 13: Uh.
Speaker 12: And I just loved his story and uh and he's
Speaker 12: somebody who had persevered throughout his life but enlightened to
Speaker 12: his life bringing wine making in a very elevated way
Speaker 12: back to his homeland of Croatia. So it had a
Speaker 12: beautiful full circle.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You also stumble on names when you're reading the book
Speaker 3: and you say, wait a second. I've always seen a
Speaker 3: Roget's thesaurus on a bookshelf or as a college student.
Speaker 3: I had no idea. There was a guy named Rose
Speaker 3: and he was old when he wrote it.
Speaker 12: He was he was and I keyed into him because
Speaker 12: I love making lists myself. And you know, I know
Speaker 12: the capital every country in the world, and I used
Speaker 12: to do strange things.
Speaker 3: Don't make us quizy, I know, I know.
Speaker 11: Please where do I go?
Speaker 12: Where do we don't throw out a random country name?
Speaker 12: Please don't do that. Okay, she's she's thinking Brunei and
Speaker 12: the capital's bandar seri bega want so off?
Speaker 11: Okay?
Speaker 12: And Tim, now you ask what's the capital? And Jibouti, Jibouti,
Speaker 12: the capital jibutis JIBOUTI trick question, right, that's ok that's okay,
Speaker 12: But okay, I used to do make crazy lists and
Speaker 12: like I used to waterways near state capitals.
Speaker 3: That's one.
Speaker 12: But anyway, Peter Mark Roge did the same thing as
Speaker 12: a child, I think for different reasons. I did it
Speaker 12: because I was just maybe sort of curious and strange,
Speaker 12: which are synonyms, right, And he did. He had a
Speaker 12: lot of tragedy and his like personal loss, and one
Speaker 12: of his biographers believe it was a way of coping.
Speaker 12: But he returned to these lists that he had been
Speaker 12: working on at the age of seventy three and published
Speaker 12: The Rogestosaurus, and until the age of ninety he kept
Speaker 12: refining it and working on it. But and so that's
Speaker 12: sort of an unfinished business, which is something I like.
Speaker 12: A lot of these stories are people in a sense
Speaker 12: returning to childhood in more obvious ways, with Frank McCord
Speaker 12: and lore Ingles Wilder, who brought us to the Little
Speaker 12: House books by writing about their quite literal childhoods. But
Speaker 12: then people like the concert pianist Ruts Lenchinska. As a child,
Speaker 12: she was called the Shirley Temple of classical music, and
Speaker 12: this is a woman who at the age of nine,
Speaker 12: she had subbed for Rochman and Off Okay, and I
Speaker 12: interviewed her when she was ninety seven pace she had
Speaker 12: an album come out. I interviewed it for CBS. But
Speaker 12: what I found was a woman who had been really
Speaker 12: tormented by her father as a child prodigy and had
Speaker 12: the piano was a punishment, and she was just so
Speaker 12: enormously talented, and he was brutal to her. She literally
Speaker 12: was not allowed to play with dolls or go outside
Speaker 12: and play with other kids. And much later in life
Speaker 12: she returned to the piano on her own terms and
Speaker 12: learned to love it for the sake of itself. And
Speaker 12: I've found that so beautiful.
Speaker 1: I don't even know that there's no easy segue here,
Speaker 1: but the founding fathers of comedy. I mean, we have
Speaker 1: some guys who have been making us laugh for decades. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I know some have passed away, and I think
Speaker 1: about Norman Leear, but you dig into what they doing.
Speaker 12: Well, Norman Lear, mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, who were
Speaker 12: all good friends. And I got to know Norman moderately well,
Speaker 12: I would say he was a friend. By the end
Speaker 12: of his life, and together. When you think of their
Speaker 12: body of work, they are largely responsible for at least
Speaker 12: a big part of what we actually laugh at. I mean,
Speaker 12: Carl Reiner with the Dick Van Dyke Show really did
Speaker 12: help create the modern situation comedy. And you know, and
Speaker 12: then Norman Lear made sure that it actually said something.
Speaker 12: And this is an undeniably culturally Jewish thing and that
Speaker 12: needs to be celebrated and acknowledged for what they did
Speaker 12: and what they have given us. So much of what
Speaker 12: we laugh at and think is funny comes from them.
Speaker 12: I mean, it's it's pretty remarkable. And you know, mel
Speaker 12: Brooks is still going. Mel Brooks is very different than
Speaker 12: the other two because I think mel Brooks there was
Speaker 12: a grumpy about him. A lot of what drove him
Speaker 12: was anger at injustice, at the horrors of the Holocaust.
Speaker 12: I mean, making fun of Hitler, knocking him off his
Speaker 12: pedestal was a real driving force of what behind what Melbrooks.
Speaker 5: Did for example.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, Yep, it's really remarkable.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we have to ask you about those who misspent
Speaker 1: their old age.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a whole chapter here about folks that some
Speaker 3: of whom are household names, some aren't, who misspent their
Speaker 3: their old age. One of those you argue is Rudy Giuliani.
Speaker 12: Rudy Giuliani, you know, this chapter is comprised of people
Speaker 12: that you think all you had to do is do nothing.
Speaker 12: Just enjoy the laurels, take those victory laps, just you know, first, second,
Speaker 12: and finally just do no harm. And Rudy Giuliani, there's
Speaker 12: certainly his mayoralty can be addressed, but I don't think
Speaker 12: it's debatable that the city was on it in key
Speaker 12: measures better off once he finished his mayor than it
Speaker 12: was at the beginning. You know, I think when he
Speaker 12: became Person of the Year for Time, it wasn't just
Speaker 12: an acknowledgment for how he handled the aftermath of nine
Speaker 12: to eleven. I think it was also for how he
Speaker 12: had shown that a city could be governed, which is
Speaker 12: something that had been in some doubt. I think that
Speaker 12: a city like New York could be governed. And then
Speaker 12: his behavior since then, and with the twenty twenty election
Speaker 12: and the Georgia election workers and there's a reason he
Speaker 12: is bankrupt. I don't know if he's legally bankrupt. You
Speaker 12: can correct me on that. If he's declared bankruptcy but.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of stuff still going on in terms
Speaker 1: of it.
Speaker 12: Yeah, he really could have just done nothing and been okay,
Speaker 12: how about.
Speaker 1: Okay, We've just got about a minute or so left here.
Speaker 1: I mean, going through this and all the reporting you've
Speaker 1: done as a journalist and these stories, like, does any
Speaker 1: of it make you think differently about how you want
Speaker 1: to live?
Speaker 7: Yes?
Speaker 12: And I think this is happening anyway. One of the
Speaker 12: unexpected things of getting older. I'm fifty five now is
Speaker 12: that I'm actually and I'm happy to report fretting less
Speaker 12: about the future, which I think would I didn't expect
Speaker 12: that to happen. I think I would think that the
Speaker 12: less time you have on the other side had the
Speaker 12: more you'd fred I'm not, and I think that that's
Speaker 12: a characteristic of a lot of these people. So I'm
Speaker 12: a little freer to act. And I think in a
Speaker 12: way it's you might as well act now because people's
Speaker 12: memories are short, and when you're gone, your children, your
Speaker 12: loved ones will remember you, hopefully for at least a
Speaker 12: little bit of time. Like, but you might as well
Speaker 12: act now, enjoylight and be in the present because it
Speaker 12: goes by quickly.
Speaker 1: No, you're right being the present and don't be afraid
Speaker 1: to do new things right even as you get older.
Speaker 12: And I'm also trying to speak more deliberately in sentences
Speaker 12: that can be diagrammed instead of just run on crazy
Speaker 12: sentences where I'm just filling.
Speaker 3: Space before we let you go.
Speaker 12: Capital of Slovenia, lib Dianya.
Speaker 3: Just making sure that.
Speaker 12: Said just sounded like a made episode.
Speaker 1: Just keep it, just keeping you on on us here
Speaker 1: we might be emailing.
Speaker 11: It was just more questions.
Speaker 12: I was actually just slurring, but okay, well.
Speaker 1: Raka, thank you so much. Inspiring and really thoughtful and
Speaker 1: just fun to read. Roctagenarians with Jonathan Greenberg, Late in life, debuts,
Speaker 1: comebacks and tribes. Thank you so much.
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
Speaker 2: on Apple car.
Speaker 5: Play and and Brout Auto with a Bloomberg.
Speaker 2: Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
Speaker 1: All right, Tim, We're going to continue with our summer
Speaker 1: reading list. This is our final pick, pick number six.
Speaker 1: And I got to say, for me, it was pretty easy.
Speaker 1: When we started talking about doing this project, I'm like,
Speaker 1: uh was first of all to be fair, we talked
Speaker 1: to a lot of great authors. Our producer, Paul Brennan
Speaker 1: really books us with some really great guests, as you
Speaker 1: can see in the previous segments.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I think this one actually came courtesy of you, right, No, uh,
Speaker 3: maybe it was Paul. He realized you're a sailor. He did,
Speaker 3: He knows you're.
Speaker 1: It was like a gift to me because.
Speaker 3: It was a gift to you. Books was fantastic.
Speaker 1: He gave the book to me early on. He's like,
Speaker 1: you gotta look at this one. My husband and I
Speaker 1: are sailors. We have been for over thirty years. We
Speaker 1: love love being out on the water with no one
Speaker 1: around us. For what seems like miles or like last summer,
Speaker 1: we were pretty alone, only boat out there except for Humpback,
Speaker 1: which popped up at our bow and then entertained us
Speaker 1: with breeches and tail smacks and like waving you know,
Speaker 1: one of his dorsal fins or I forget what finn
Speaker 1: that is off our stern for over an hour is
Speaker 1: pretty pretty amazing. But I will say for the most part,
Speaker 1: when we are out sailing, we're in sight or just
Speaker 1: off the coast. The coastline and land is often insight
Speaker 1: for us. We have not done serious offshore sailing across
Speaker 1: an ocean alone, something that we know many others.
Speaker 3: Have done yet, is what I said.
Speaker 1: That's what my husband says, not yet.
Speaker 3: Well, Richard King surely did. He's visiting professor in Maritime
Speaker 3: History and Literature with the Sea Education Association. He crossed
Speaker 3: the Atlantic in his twenty eight foot sloop he calls Fox.
Speaker 3: He wrote all about his treacherous journey in his new book,
Speaker 3: It's also Carol's Pick, Sailing Alone, A Surprising History of
Speaker 3: Isolation and Survival. Let's see, I.
Speaker 13: Sailed by myself in two thousand and seven across the Atlantic,
Speaker 13: and I definitely don't see myself as a super sailor.
Speaker 13: You know, it was a little bit of a bungling affair,
Speaker 13: and in some ways, going out of side of land,
Speaker 13: you know, off the coast is easier, right, you know,
Speaker 13: there's less to hit and less to take keep track of.
Speaker 14: But I did it for a couple of.
Speaker 13: Different reasons, and that was one of the things that
Speaker 13: I explore in this book. You know, I'm really telling
Speaker 13: the history of people that have gone to see by
Speaker 13: themselves and crossed ocean by themselves since at least the
Speaker 13: early seventeen hundreds and all the way up to today,
Speaker 13: and so I was trying to explore like why did
Speaker 13: people go, why would they go? And then also what
Speaker 13: they say all out there, just like you did in
Speaker 13: that intro care of like what is it like to
Speaker 13: be out at sea by yourself on a quiet boat,
Speaker 13: really close to the surface day after day.
Speaker 14: And really getting that connection to the ocean world.
Speaker 1: Well, I love that the book about you know, why
Speaker 1: they go, what they see? So when you took your
Speaker 1: trip across the Atlantic on Fox, your twenty eight foot sloop,
Speaker 1: what did you or what why did you go specifically
Speaker 1: and what did you see?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 14: I went.
Speaker 13: I was in graduate school at the time, and I
Speaker 13: studied literature at the sea. I'm actually more of a
Speaker 13: scholar than you know, a sailor, and I'd spend so
Speaker 13: much time reading about these experiences and I was like, you.
Speaker 14: Know, maybe maybe I could do that, and.
Speaker 13: So I put I'm really proud of sort of the
Speaker 13: logistics of the boys, not necessarily the execution, but I
Speaker 13: didn't make it. And you know, some of the things
Speaker 13: that I saw out there was just a really close
Speaker 13: connection with some of the seabirds, particularly storm petrels.
Speaker 14: I had one moment which.
Speaker 13: I you know, many of the listeners will sort of
Speaker 13: connect with where I was fishing off the back of
Speaker 13: the boat and I saw a fin coming behind me,
Speaker 13: a really large dorsal fin, and I kind of freaked out.
Speaker 13: I was like, oh, my gosh, Jaws is going to
Speaker 13: like leap right on top of the boat and you know,
Speaker 13: eat me up.
Speaker 14: And you know, I.
Speaker 13: Quickly went down below and I took pictures and I
Speaker 13: grabbed my boat hook as if I was going to
Speaker 13: you know, stab it.
Speaker 14: In the eye or something like that.
Speaker 13: And then later when I look at the pictures, I
Speaker 13: realized it was this tiny little fin.
Speaker 14: It probably wasn't even the shark. It might have been
Speaker 14: like a pilot whale or something.
Speaker 13: But you know, you just really get that sort of
Speaker 13: intense connection, particularly the nights at sea and the sunrises
Speaker 13: and sunsets, and it's you know, it's a rare, privileged experience.
Speaker 3: Really, maybe because I'm an anxious New Yorker. I'm just
Speaker 3: wondering about the anxiety of being out there. It's so
Speaker 3: it's so I know it's cam but well, there's this
Speaker 3: feeling that I have. I'm not a sailor. I've sailed before,
Speaker 3: but I would not consider myself a sailor of not
Speaker 3: being in control of when you can get back on land,
Speaker 3: and that part of this totally freaks me out.
Speaker 7: Here.
Speaker 3: Were there any moments out there that you just found
Speaker 3: yourself terrified, like when.
Speaker 1: The engine died on that trip across the Atlantic?
Speaker 14: Yeah, Tim, totally.
Speaker 13: I would say ninety percent of the time I was
Speaker 13: an anxious wreck and my people are also from New York.
Speaker 14: I have that stream.
Speaker 13: Okay, you know, I think, and that's really the book
Speaker 13: is really about some of these great sailors who have
Speaker 13: gotten over that first anxious experience.
Speaker 14: I kind of never did.
Speaker 13: I did my first trip across the Atlantic, and then
Speaker 13: afterwards I was like, Okay, I think, I think I'm good,
Speaker 13: but I do kind of wish that I had continued
Speaker 13: on because you look at some of the really extraordinary
Speaker 13: historical sailors Bernard Martissier, Robin Knox, Johnson, Ellen MacArthur, even
Speaker 13: you know the early ones like Joshua Slogan who got
Speaker 13: over those initial and anxious moments and then were able
Speaker 13: to carry on and really be calm and really.
Speaker 14: Enjoy themselves at sea.
Speaker 13: And often that's when you know, these sailors really got
Speaker 13: these experiences in the natural world where they could finally
Speaker 13: relax and not have to worry so much about you know,
Speaker 13: this thing breaking or.
Speaker 1: There's something always breaking on a boat. You know that
Speaker 1: it's always breaking. Well, what's the joke. They say, it's
Speaker 1: like hours and hours of boredom broken up by you know,
Speaker 1: minutes or seconds of just sheer, terror and chaos. And
Speaker 1: that's kind of sailing, right, because it's really quiet out there,
Speaker 1: and then you have to go into harbor and you
Speaker 1: have to dock, and it's like there's always something that's
Speaker 1: going to go wrong.
Speaker 13: That's right, and you know, for a big part for
Speaker 13: solo sailers, trying to steer the boat and trying to
Speaker 13: get rest is a big part of it. And so
Speaker 13: one of the things I talked about in the book
Speaker 13: is sort of the development of various technologies that have
Speaker 13: made it a little bit easier for solo sailers, whether
Speaker 13: it's GPS or fiberglass or the marine engine, but self
Speaker 13: steering mechanisms, whether they're wind based or electrical, have made
Speaker 13: a huge difference.
Speaker 1: You had a wind.
Speaker 14: But even in my kid.
Speaker 1: Did you have a wind vane that's what you used
Speaker 1: right to go across.
Speaker 14: That's right. I had two different types of steering.
Speaker 13: I had a wind vane self steering, which you know
Speaker 13: doesn't require any power or any fuel, and that is
Speaker 13: about the most magical device on the planet. I was
Speaker 13: developed sort of, you know, in the a nineteen fifties
Speaker 13: and sixties for recreational boats, and that was just amazing.
Speaker 13: But that requires that's based on relative winds. So if
Speaker 13: you want to sleep for two hours and you got up,
Speaker 13: the boat is adjusting itself based on an angle of
Speaker 13: the wind. So if the wind shifts, your boat is
Speaker 13: going to change.
Speaker 14: And then I also had a little electrical tour pilot.
Speaker 14: You could say to a compass.
Speaker 3: Point, I'm curious about the reasons behind this and how
Speaker 3: not necessarily yours, which I want to get to, but
Speaker 3: the way that they've shifted over time, because as you
Speaker 3: mentioned in the seventeen hundreds, a lot of this was exploration.
Speaker 3: It was in search of riches, it was in search
Speaker 3: of you know, at that point, not necessarily new lands,
Speaker 3: but sort of right, the great exploration of the seas
Speaker 3: of the Earth.
Speaker 14: But these days.
Speaker 3: A lot of it is about recreation, and it's about
Speaker 3: sort of personal challenges, and I'm wondering how you can
Speaker 3: characterize the evolution of why someone would do this.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Yeah, No, that's a great point, and that's it's only
Speaker 13: something I sort of trade through going over time, because
Speaker 13: you know that the whole idea that going sailing by
Speaker 13: yourself across an ocean, that that isn't completely just a
Speaker 13: banana's idiotic kind of thing. That this idea that over
Speaker 13: time people start to respect that is a sort of
Speaker 13: interesting transition.
Speaker 14: And you do see sort of blips.
Speaker 13: You know, everybody is different, and everybody's complex about whether
Speaker 13: they're escaping a family situation or they are trying to
Speaker 13: make money or they're trying to make fame for themselves.
Speaker 14: But you do see sort.
Speaker 13: Of these sort of blips of where there's more recreational
Speaker 13: sailing and then even more solo sailing. One of these
Speaker 13: blips is right after World War Two, and I focus
Speaker 13: the book a lot sort of frame it on Ann Davidson,
Speaker 13: who's the first woman that we know of to sail
Speaker 13: alone across an ocean, and she sales in nineteen fifty two,
Speaker 13: and she's part of this whole surge of people from Europe,
Speaker 13: from North America, from all around the world that really
Speaker 13: are going out to the ocean and seeking that sort
Speaker 13: of respite, that sort of perception that the ocean is
Speaker 13: a clean, unhampered space, particularly after the trauma of World
Speaker 13: War Two.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty fascinating right to kind of hear what
Speaker 1: they sought out right to help them through it. I
Speaker 1: want to go back to something you said earlier, and
Speaker 1: that was I think the first solo circumnavigator or who
Speaker 1: was actually let me let you pick the story that
Speaker 1: you just were really drawn to. Because there's older folks,
Speaker 1: folks a long time ago. There's teenagers, which I'm always
Speaker 1: blown away by someone who's a teenager who gets in
Speaker 1: a book and their parents are in a boat and
Speaker 1: their parents are like yet gofort I think about there's
Speaker 1: a Netflix movie just on Jessica Watson, an Australian teenager,
Speaker 1: and it's kind of wild.
Speaker 13: Yeah, Jessica Watson is fantastic. And I think one of
Speaker 13: the things that I talk a lot about in the
Speaker 13: book is this relationship between being a writer because going
Speaker 13: to see you know, maybe even for you Caroly the
Speaker 13: when you go out just for an afternoon or for
Speaker 13: a day, it's a literary endeavor.
Speaker 14: You're keeping a log book, maybe you're writing a note,
Speaker 14: you're writing a letter, you're reading about others.
Speaker 13: Sailers, and so it's this very sort of almost all
Speaker 13: of these people that are going selling alone are also
Speaker 13: thinking about it artistically, and some of them are thinking
Speaker 13: about writing a book even before they've they've left. And
Speaker 13: so someone like Bernard Martissier, who in the nineteen sixties
Speaker 13: was the first to sail solo NonStop around the world
Speaker 13: one and a half times around the world in the
Speaker 13: late sixties, and he for him, from the very start,
Speaker 13: it was about making a book about crafting this work
Speaker 13: of nature writing, not even as much about the expedition itself.
Speaker 14: It was like as if Threau, you know, was climbing Everest.
Speaker 1: Just got about a minute left here, I mean, thirty
Speaker 1: years of sailing. We saw our first whale play with
Speaker 1: us in a boat off of Rhode Island just this
Speaker 1: past summer, and my husband I looked at us, maybe
Speaker 1: it's time to sell the boat because it was just
Speaker 1: so unbelievable. But you have about a minute left here?
Speaker 1: Is there a moment in time where you just I
Speaker 1: don't know a little story before we go unfortunately.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I think one interesting story is, you know, if
Speaker 13: you're watching in the news, you're seeing orcas that are
Speaker 13: damaging boats off Gibraltar. They're actually seem to be knocking
Speaker 13: into recreational boats. And one thing that you learned from
Speaker 13: the history is that's been happening for a while. And
Speaker 13: one former New Yorker, Teddy Seymour born in Yonkers, the
Speaker 13: first black sailor to sail alone around the world, and
Speaker 13: he was knocked by an orca off the Red Sea
Speaker 13: for about a half a day, but luckily just kind
Speaker 13: of banged into a self steering gear.
Speaker 14: But he tells a great story of it.
Speaker 1: I got to tell you, we watched the orc of videos,
Speaker 1: and we watch all these people, whether it's the YouTuber's
Speaker 1: project Atticus or Vagabond or you know, my husband and
Speaker 1: I are obsessed with it, and you get to get
Speaker 1: a feel of what it's like to be out on
Speaker 1: the ocean.
Speaker 3: Professor, just fifteen seconds left. Would you do it again?
Speaker 14: I think I do it with friends.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I you know, that's what most of
Speaker 1: them do. And some of them have a couple of
Speaker 1: kids and they're going around the world, but they eventually
Speaker 1: on some of those big crossings, bring friends on. This
Speaker 1: was so much fun. I hope we get a chance
Speaker 1: to talk again and maybe you will buy it. Do
Speaker 1: you have a vote now?
Speaker 14: If anyone would like to donate one.
Speaker 1: Well said, Well said Richard King. His book is Sailing Alone,
Speaker 1: A Surprising History of Isolation and Survival at Sea, joining
Speaker 1: us from Santa Cruz, California. A great place to go sailing,
Speaker 1: no doubt.
Speaker 3: About that, Richard Visiting Professor of Maritime History and Literature
Speaker 3: with the c Education Association.
Speaker 2: This is the Bloomberg Business Week podcast of a Little
Speaker 2: on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2: Listen live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern
Speaker 2: on Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app, tune In, and
Speaker 2: the Bloomberg Business App. You can also watch us live
Speaker 2: every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg terminal