Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg Business Wait inside from the reporters and
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Speaker 2: By.
Speaker 3: So we're gonna talk a little bit about those boring
Speaker 3: old savings accounts. I'm gonna slow it down a little bit, everybody.
Speaker 3: The new we show, Bloomberg BusinessWeek is out on newsstands.
Speaker 3: This will all make sense in a moment. Be patient.
Speaker 3: It's on newsstands, online, a Bloomberg dot com slash BusinessWeek,
Speaker 3: and of course on the Bloomberg. And we're talking about
Speaker 3: this week's domestic covery, which is something that the big
Speaker 3: bank CEOs over the past week or so have been
Speaker 3: asked about paying up more on bank savings accounts, which
Speaker 3: are increasingly looking pretty interesting. As a surgeon interest rates
Speaker 3: has waited on some of the more speculative corners of
Speaker 3: financial markets. Let's get more on this story. It's the
Speaker 3: remarks in a new issue and we get to uh,
Speaker 3: of course, and it is the domestic cover. As I
Speaker 3: said earlier, Uh, the editor of Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine, Joel
Speaker 3: Weber and Bloomberg Market senior editor Mike Reigan both actually
Speaker 3: Jill visit our studio. Mike is there on zoom from
Speaker 3: New Jersey. Joe, we're you know, we constantly say we're
Speaker 3: living in there.
Speaker 4: You're saving all your love forming. Uh, it's it's a
Speaker 4: whit the Houston favorite of mine. Yes, Deep Deep This week,
Speaker 4: so we've been perhaps you've noticed some offers from all
Speaker 4: over the place about how you can get four percent
Speaker 4: savings and Apple had that news betterments out with four
Speaker 4: point three five. Mike, do you remember when I could
Speaker 4: like invest in uh, you know, like a MC or
Speaker 4: pictures of digital apes and get rich really quickly. And
Speaker 4: it seems like the exact opposite is the cell now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely, you know, Joel, the fascinating thing is in
Speaker 5: that sort of twelve thirteen years of rock bottom interest
Speaker 5: rates after the financial crisis, the banks kind of trained
Speaker 5: us all to forget about the whole notion of you know,
Speaker 5: they're supposed to be paying us money to give them
Speaker 5: our savings. It's really a fascinating I think period in history,
Speaker 5: really a historical because you know, never have interest rates
Speaker 5: stayed that low. For that long, and even when the
Speaker 5: Federal Reserve started raising interest rates in twenty seventeen and
Speaker 5: twenty and eighteen, it was.
Speaker 6: A very gradual, slow rise, and.
Speaker 7: The banks didn't exactly react quickly to it by raising
Speaker 7: their own deposit rates, even though they were now able
Speaker 7: to make a little bit more money.
Speaker 6: You know, in the credit markets and whatnot.
Speaker 7: This time, it's a whole different scenario because that rise
Speaker 7: from the Federal Reserve has been so aggressive, so rapid,
Speaker 7: that a lot of banks have really reacted quickly to it.
Speaker 7: And you know, as you pointed out, Apple, sort of
Speaker 7: that news landed right as we were polishing off this story,
Speaker 7: so it was good timing on that. But the other
Speaker 7: fascinating thing is that not all banks have yet to
Speaker 7: do it. You know, you look at your basic savings
Speaker 7: account at Chase or Bank of America, they're still at
Speaker 7: literally zero point zero one percent on a savings account.
Speaker 7: And there's a variety of reasons for that. You know,
Speaker 7: they have a lot of much more diverse business other
Speaker 7: sources of funding than bank deposits, but that disparity is
Speaker 7: really fascinating. You know, zero point zero one percent to
Speaker 7: some banks, UFB Direct a small online bank offering above
Speaker 7: five percent, and now Apple and Goldman getting into the
Speaker 7: business offering over four percent. So it's it's a very
Speaker 7: dramatic and sort of newly competitive environment for banks to
Speaker 7: compete for these deposits, like like they haven't really had
Speaker 7: to do since before the global financial crisis in two
Speaker 7: thousand and eight.
Speaker 3: Mike, should they be? And I guess I ask because,
Speaker 3: as you say, you know, it's not the old fashioned
Speaker 3: bank of you know, taking deposits and loan out to
Speaker 3: the neighborhood, you know, to buy homes, to buy things,
Speaker 3: and so on and so forth. The big banks today
Speaker 3: are much more complicated financial entities and they have a
Speaker 3: lot of different ways to make money. Do they care,
Speaker 3: maybe this is a naive question. Do they care whether
Speaker 3: or not they have those individual customer deposits? How important
Speaker 3: is that to a bank?
Speaker 7: Well, you know, I think the bigger you get, the
Speaker 7: more diversified your businesses, the less pressure you're feeling, you know,
Speaker 7: especially when you look at a bank like JP Morgan
Speaker 7: Chase that saw actually saw a flood of deposits in
Speaker 7: the first quarter because of the concern about the smaller
Speaker 7: regional banks.
Speaker 6: But the smaller you get.
Speaker 7: The more you are closer to that standard banking model
Speaker 7: of you know, borrowing low and lending high. I think
Speaker 7: the more pressure you're feeling because the average consumer and businesses.
Speaker 7: Even more importantly, I've woken up to this idea that
Speaker 7: there's a better rate out there. Now it's finally worth
Speaker 7: my time and effort to sort of break up with my.
Speaker 6: Bank, switch banks.
Speaker 7: And the less I think many banks want to confront
Speaker 7: right now is a drop in deposits.
Speaker 6: I mean that ultimately.
Speaker 8: Didn't go over well.
Speaker 6: It didn't go over well, it didn't go over well
Speaker 6: Silicon Valley back.
Speaker 7: Now, that's obviously an exaggerated situation, but bank deposits in
Speaker 7: aggregate all US commercial banks dropped last year for the
Speaker 7: first time since like the nineteen forties, So that the
Speaker 7: competition is real, and not all banks have raised their rates.
Speaker 7: But I think there's more to come. You know, there's
Speaker 7: this competition. It isn't over. There will be more banks
Speaker 7: reacting and raising rates, you know, if not to four
Speaker 7: or five percent, certainly the era of rock bottom interest
Speaker 7: rates on savings deposits, I think is really coming to
Speaker 7: a pretty swift end.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 4: The thing they have going for them, though, is a
Speaker 4: inertia Mike. It's like really hard to pull out, you know,
Speaker 4: out of a bank where you've been banking forever and
Speaker 4: maybe you've got all those auto payments set up and
Speaker 4: auto checks and to like actually, you know, move from
Speaker 4: one institution to another, even going after you know, bank
Speaker 4: rates five point oh two percent. As great as that sound,
Speaker 4: that's your thing. Like, man, inertia is a hard thing
Speaker 4: to overcome, So like, you know, what incentive do the
Speaker 4: banks really have to do this?
Speaker 3: I believe they call it stickiness?
Speaker 7: Yeah, stickiness right, yeah, you know, And that's we're kind
Speaker 7: of in that phase now where the inertia I think
Speaker 7: is still a big thing.
Speaker 6: You know, say you have ten thousand dollars in savings.
Speaker 7: If you're if you get a five percent rate on that,
Speaker 7: you're talking about five hundred bucks.
Speaker 6: So is it worth it for you for five hundred bucks.
Speaker 7: To really, as you point out, go through and take
Speaker 7: the effort and possibly have to rejigger all your automatic
Speaker 7: payments and stuff. But you know, the higher that savings
Speaker 7: goes up, if you have you know, one hundred thousand
Speaker 7: dollars and all of a sudden you're talking about five
Speaker 7: thousand dollars a year, Well, you know, it might.
Speaker 6: Be worth it.
Speaker 7: It's probably worth it, And I think that's a calculation
Speaker 7: that a lot of just average mom and pops are
Speaker 7: doing around the country right now, and businesses as well well.
Speaker 9: Also that five hundred dollars, as an investor would tell you,
Speaker 9: if you put that back into your Schwab brokerage, that
Speaker 9: could be a lot more in the decades to come.
Speaker 9: But I want to ask you about how to suss
Speaker 9: out these high old savings accounts. I get fed constant
Speaker 9: ads about a variety of different high old savings accounts.
Speaker 9: My friends and I are always having this discussion of
Speaker 9: what to do with our savings.
Speaker 4: Do they look like the cover of Bloomberg Business Week,
Speaker 4: which is the number four flexing with cool look very weird?
Speaker 9: They look way less cool and way more sketchy, which
Speaker 9: is why I'm concerned about me and my friends getting
Speaker 9: scammed by non FDIC insured high yield savings account Do
Speaker 9: you have any advice for us?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, I think you know that's a great point. Obviously,
Speaker 7: you make sure you're dealing with a FDIC insured bank,
Speaker 7: which chah, they all all the banks are more or
Speaker 7: less FDIC insured now. But you know, I'm sure if
Speaker 7: you starch hard enough on the internet you'll find some
Speaker 7: sketchy operators that aren't actually insured, you know, especially if
Speaker 7: you're you know, dipping a tone of the crypto market
Speaker 7: and that sort of thing. But you know, the other
Speaker 7: important thing is, well, what is You know that FDIC
Speaker 7: limit is two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, So if
Speaker 7: you're talking about moving an amount of money greater than that,
Speaker 7: you have to think about it a little bit harder.
Speaker 2: And.
Speaker 7: You know, perhaps split it up over a couple banks,
Speaker 7: or go to a money market mutual fund, which isn't
Speaker 7: fdi C in sort, but they have a very strong
Speaker 7: history of being pretty reliable. You know, I don't think
Speaker 7: I could be wrong about this, but I don't think.
Speaker 6: Of money market fund has ever actually failed in the US.
Speaker 7: You know, the reserve fund in the financial crisis, UH
Speaker 7: broke the book reading. You know, your assets dropped a
Speaker 7: little bit, but you know, so yeah, you got to
Speaker 7: do your research. And you know, some accounts require minimum balance,
Speaker 7: some don't. If you're talking about a CD or what
Speaker 7: they call time deposit, you might have to lock up
Speaker 7: your money for a year or two years something like that.
Speaker 6: So you know, it's it's a good time to read
Speaker 6: the fine print for once.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it also just makes me think, like I mean
Speaker 4: that fine print, like is there is there some fine
Speaker 4: print that we haven't thought.
Speaker 8: About for a while even, you know, And.
Speaker 4: I'm like, there's there's basis points with some of this stuff,
Speaker 4: Like so is there you know when the when the
Speaker 4: Reagan family sits down and assesses their options, you know what,
Speaker 4: what are you just going straight for the north of
Speaker 4: five percent, Mike, or are you somewhere north south of that?
Speaker 8: Well?
Speaker 7: I think what's fascinating to me is that there is
Speaker 7: this skepticism and this you know, it's too good to
Speaker 7: be true mentality towards towards a four percent savings rate
Speaker 7: when you know, I'm dating.
Speaker 6: Myself here a little bit.
Speaker 7: But you know, I remember back in the eighties, I mean,
Speaker 7: you know, you expected to get paid on your deposits,
Speaker 7: you know, and you shocked around and.
Speaker 6: Found that best that best yield.
Speaker 7: I remember taking my nickels and dimes from the paper
Speaker 7: route and put them in the bank knowing I, you know,
Speaker 7: I get a nice yield on it. So a little
Speaker 7: skepticism is healthy. But I think in the sort of
Speaker 7: spectrum of investments bank savings account you know, I would.
Speaker 8: As boring as it gets, is as.
Speaker 7: Boring and probably as safe as it gets. Granted, you know,
Speaker 7: if you're under that FDIC limit, especially that two hundred
Speaker 7: and fifty thousand dollars limit now there is there there
Speaker 7: was sort of this paranoia that erupted when SVB and
Speaker 7: the other two went under that you know, the the
Speaker 7: fd I C might not have enough money in its
Speaker 7: own accounts to cover to ensure the positive if if
Speaker 7: the dominoes keep falling at enough banks go under. I
Speaker 7: think that's subsided a little bit just because of.
Speaker 6: The programs that have been put in place. And also
Speaker 6: to me, I think, you know, the FDIC.
Speaker 7: Is such an important institution to this country that even
Speaker 7: though we have this you know, pro wrestling version of
Speaker 7: politics going on right now, where you.
Speaker 6: Know, anything could happen.
Speaker 7: We might default on treategeries in a few months. I
Speaker 7: think that FDIC is so important that it would, you know,
Speaker 7: if it were to not live up to its obligations,
Speaker 7: that the damage on both sides of the political aisle
Speaker 7: would be so great that they actually would you know,
Speaker 7: do what.
Speaker 6: It takes to keep it afloat. So I think, you know, I.
Speaker 3: Talk about a crisis of confidence if that.
Speaker 7: Happened, absolutely absolutely yeah, and I you know, knock on wood,
Speaker 7: and I you know, I hope I'm not proved wrong
Speaker 7: about that, but I think, you know, it is such
Speaker 7: a you know, important bedrock of the entire US financial
Speaker 7: system that even in the toxic political environment we're in
Speaker 7: right now, I think they'd.
Speaker 6: Find a way to to to keep it going.
Speaker 4: Okay, So if it's point zero one percent on basic
Speaker 4: savings deposits at banks, Bank of America or or Chase,
Speaker 4: you know, like Mike Wake, what what's it gonna be?
Speaker 4: Is it gonna go point zero five? Or are they
Speaker 4: going to go to you know, zero point one?
Speaker 7: You know, I think right now the CEOs that those
Speaker 7: banks are kind of sussing out exactly what they're gonna
Speaker 7: have to do because you.
Speaker 6: Know, for one thing that the one big.
Speaker 7: Competition for banks is money market mutual funds. Right because
Speaker 7: they're they invest in short term securities, they're able to
Speaker 7: be much more nimbler in raising and lowering rates.
Speaker 6: As need be.
Speaker 7: You know, uh, JP Morgan's got money market funds most
Speaker 7: of your big banks have these, So if they're leaving
Speaker 7: deposits on one side of the business, but they're going
Speaker 7: into the the other side, it's not as acute of
Speaker 7: an issue as your smaller traditional bank that really needs
Speaker 7: that traditional savings.
Speaker 6: To posit it.
Speaker 7: So, you know, I think I think the pressure is
Speaker 7: going to be much greater on the more simpler, uh
Speaker 7: you know right, borrow, borrow low, and lend high type
Speaker 7: of banks then the more diversified sort of financial supermarket banks.
Speaker 3: Although you know, we did see that headline on the
Speaker 3: Blueberg money market funds have the biggest weekly outflow since
Speaker 3: twenty twenty from the Investment Company Institute. So yeah, no,
Speaker 3: but I mean banks maybe getting squeezed. You know what
Speaker 3: I really want to know, Mike, did you pose for
Speaker 3: the cover story at that stroll?
Speaker 8: I think you didn't recognize the as it's not mine us.
Speaker 6: Going through a men's health phase cover design.
Speaker 4: There there were many versions of that cover that existed
Speaker 4: before we got to that one, and I'm just so
Speaker 4: glad that it became weirder than where we were because
Speaker 4: it was pretty weird, and then it got.
Speaker 3: Even Weirderam, Like, what is it?
Speaker 2: Text?
Speaker 4: You just don't. Sometimes there's just questions that you don't
Speaker 4: want to know the answer to it.
Speaker 7: But uh skipped right from Men's Health Inspiration to Crack magazine.
Speaker 3: So the Business Week After Dark podcast. Catch it on
Speaker 3: your podcast.
Speaker 4: You look too closely at the apps, it just gets
Speaker 4: your life gets really weird, really quickly.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 10: It all right, all right, guys, thank you so much.
Speaker 10: It is the domestic cover story Bloomberg Business Week, which
Speaker 10: is add on newsstands, online at Bloomberg dot com, Slash
Speaker 10: BusinessWeek and of course on the Bloomberg Mike Reigan, thank
Speaker 10: you so much. Senior editor, lead blogger for the Bloomberg
Speaker 10: Markets Live blog on zoom from New Jersey. Joe Webber,
Speaker 10: of course, the editor Bloomberg Business Week. Are you really
Speaker 10: on some kind of health wellness figs?
Speaker 4: Uh sure, sure, I mean I work out. I'm intermittent
Speaker 4: fasting sometimes, you know, it's all true.
Speaker 3: Fasting, a little fasting. All right, You are listening and
Speaker 3: watching Bloomberg Business Week.
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Speaker 12: Poply sap.
Speaker 3: All right, everybody. We've just been talking a little bit
Speaker 3: about the markets and some of the stocks on the move,
Speaker 3: and once again we're seeing shares of WW International rally
Speaker 3: another eleven and a half percent as we speak, up
Speaker 3: more than twenty two percent earlier in this session. But
Speaker 3: keep in mind, this is a stock that has almost
Speaker 3: doubled in the week alone, all largely on the news
Speaker 3: of the company's plan and then this week closing of
Speaker 3: its acquisition of a telehealth provider that will help it
Speaker 3: access the growing market for new OBCD drugs.
Speaker 8: We knew we.
Speaker 3: Wanted to hear more, so we wanted to go straight
Speaker 3: to the source. Joining us is the CEO of WW,
Speaker 3: Sima Sistani. She is co founder and a former CEO
Speaker 3: of also the social platform House Party, took off during
Speaker 3: the pandemic. She was also a senior leader at Epic Games. Sima,
Speaker 3: it is so nice to have you here with us.
Speaker 3: Great to be talking with you. How are you.
Speaker 2: I'm great, Thank you. It's nice to be here too.
Speaker 3: There's a lot going on, a lot of conversations and
Speaker 3: certainly within the analyst community and even in our newsroom
Speaker 3: about what you are doing at the company. Stock, as
Speaker 3: we said, has been on a tear. You completed the
Speaker 3: acquisition of Sequence, the telehealth provider. It sounds like you
Speaker 3: are getting into the weight loss drug business. Why why
Speaker 3: are you?
Speaker 2: Look, we're in the midst of an evolving landscape and
Speaker 2: how the medical community and many consumers view obesity and
Speaker 2: overweight I believe that the zeitgeist is changing and more
Speaker 2: people are now recognizing obesity as a chronic condition, understanding
Speaker 2: its causes, including not just behavior but also biology, and
Speaker 2: there's an increasing openness to clinical interventions to help. And
Speaker 2: we have a next generation of medications that is really
Speaker 2: game changing. And so when I joined over a year ago,
Speaker 2: I guess just over or ago we were talking about yes,
Speaker 2: thank you, thank you. We started talking about the possibility
Speaker 2: of building or buying around new modalities, and it was
Speaker 2: clear that these medications were going to be a paradigm
Speaker 2: shift in our industry. So it was really a no
Speaker 2: brainer to enter the space.
Speaker 3: So I guess what we're all wondering then, is what's
Speaker 3: the relationship between the weight Watcher's core businesses We've all
Speaker 3: known it, and then the telemedicine medicine company excuse me
Speaker 3: that you're acquiring. Is it a case of thinking about
Speaker 3: current WW members getting into our getting onto weight loss drugs,
Speaker 3: or that the telemedicine company ultimately will help you attract
Speaker 3: more WW customers. How does it kind of work or
Speaker 3: how do you see it working out or both?
Speaker 2: Perhaps yes, So let me take a step back. When
Speaker 2: we evaluated the space, we looked at over thirty different
Speaker 2: startups and it's mostly startups that are in this landscape,
Speaker 2: and we landed on Sequence because they have built a
Speaker 2: tech stack better than anyone else. This is these these
Speaker 2: medications are really expensive and Sequence had built out a
Speaker 2: pre authorization engine, so essentially putting the insurance process on
Speaker 2: tech rails, and we thought that that was unique and
Speaker 2: great IP and would allow us the ability to scale.
Speaker 2: In addition to that, they have a really delightful user experience.
Speaker 2: The you know, it is a subscription business where you're
Speaker 2: essentially signing up for the care team model. These are
Speaker 2: complicated medications. It's not like getting an D script where
Speaker 2: you can just you know, take a pill and close
Speaker 2: your eyes. You have to tie trace the dosage along
Speaker 2: your weight loss journey. And there's a lot of different
Speaker 2: symptoms to manage, and so Sequence has a care team model.
Speaker 2: It's like having you know, the clinician, fitness and structure
Speaker 2: and nutritionists all in your pocket like in a whatapp.
Speaker 2: And then on the other side is the clinician platform,
Speaker 2: which had a really high MPs and UH in in
Speaker 2: the ability for clinicians to feel that they have the
Speaker 2: appropriate tool to help the members. So between that and
Speaker 2: the right sort of values and alignment, we thought, okay,
Speaker 2: this is a business that it will help us achieve
Speaker 2: our overall mission, which you know, at our mission is
Speaker 2: to we are currently the global leader and weight loss management.
Speaker 2: We want to continue to be that and connect people
Speaker 2: through healthy habits no matter which pathway they choose, whether
Speaker 2: it's through behavior change, whether it's through clinical and potentially
Speaker 2: functional as well, and and our and and so therefore
Speaker 2: you know, the Sequence was Sequence was a great uh
Speaker 2: match for us to be able to provide our members,
Speaker 2: uh you know, and and new members any option along
Speaker 2: the way. But I think the biggest clarification in this
Speaker 2: is I've heard a lot of this in ovation about oh,
Speaker 2: this is a pivot, but that's not it. This is
Speaker 2: an and these medications are all delivered alongside a behavior
Speaker 2: change program.
Speaker 9: Well, Sima, I just want to pick up on that
Speaker 9: because it's such an important point and I hate to interrupt,
Speaker 9: but I am curious about you talk about the importance
Speaker 9: of this not being viewed as a pivot. But as
Speaker 9: you I'm sure incredibly familiar, there is a bit of
Speaker 9: a controversy around ozebic, So I'm curious if you can
Speaker 9: share with us and our listeners, what is your criteria
Speaker 9: around prescribing it, Because there are a lot of people
Speaker 9: who might fit the BMI minimum, but they may not
Speaker 9: have the underlying health conditions as well, So what is
Speaker 9: your definition of who should be taking it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you for that question. So, going back to
Speaker 2: the sequence being the right values and alignment, you need
Speaker 2: to prescribe these medications only when medically appropriate, which means
Speaker 2: that you have a BMI of twenty seven or hire
Speaker 2: with a rate related condition or BMI of thirty or higher,
Speaker 2: and even in that case, there might be other reasons
Speaker 2: why it's not medically appropriate. And if the clinician who
Speaker 2: we do not employ by the way, I think that
Speaker 2: it's important for us to have that separation if we
Speaker 2: don't make any money money on the prescription itself, if
Speaker 2: the clinician determines it is medically appropriate, that's where our
Speaker 2: subscription model comes into play, where we actually provide the
Speaker 2: support system in addition to trying to help the member
Speaker 2: get the medication ensured.
Speaker 13: So see me.
Speaker 9: I know you mentioned you don't make money off of it,
Speaker 9: but when you're thinking about your customer base as a CEO,
Speaker 9: are you thinking that the majority of the new customers
Speaker 9: you're going to get off of this deal are going
Speaker 9: to be people who are interested specifically in ozembic.
Speaker 12: No.
Speaker 2: I think that they come first of all, there's a
Speaker 2: wide range of medications that are are that are in
Speaker 2: the space. The only one right ones right now that
Speaker 2: are actually on label for weight loss is with gob
Speaker 2: and fixendas. There are some generics as well, they're just
Speaker 2: not the GLP ones that people are speaking to. And
Speaker 2: then obviously ozempic off label, where when again the clinician
Speaker 2: has deemed it appropriate. I think that people are looking
Speaker 2: for clinical intervention and the benefit of the combination with
Speaker 2: weight watchers is when it is not medically appropriate, then
Speaker 2: we have a way to push those members to weight Watchers,
Speaker 2: and vice versa. If somebody is coming to weight Watchers,
Speaker 2: is above the BMI threshold and is interested in a
Speaker 2: medical intervention, then we can point them to Sequence.
Speaker 3: So what do you think it does ultimately to you know,
Speaker 3: you know, a metric, A key metric for your company
Speaker 3: has always been the subscriber base, which has been you know,
Speaker 3: shrinking in recent years. We did see a pop certainly
Speaker 3: online during the pandemic, but the in person meetings right
Speaker 3: have also come down. What do you think this collaboration
Speaker 3: is acquisition will do in terms of that subscriber base.
Speaker 3: Do you have any thoughts in terms of projections there.
Speaker 2: Well, I can't speak to that today. We'll report our
Speaker 2: Q one results in early May. I can say that
Speaker 2: on March sixth earnings call we said we expected to
Speaker 2: end Q one with four million subscribers.
Speaker 3: Okay, but I would assume, I know, you can't maybe
Speaker 3: talk about you would assume that you're going to be
Speaker 3: able to tap into, you know, the acquisition in terms
Speaker 3: of its access, and that it will grow your subscriber base.
Speaker 2: Well, I think that part of the reason that you know,
Speaker 2: we think that this acquisition made sense is around the
Speaker 2: the CAC efficiencies that we can achieve. The sequence business
Speaker 2: when we acquired it had twenty four thousand active members
Speaker 2: and that was without any paid marketing. So you could
Speaker 2: imagine that there is a real opportunity when a business
Speaker 2: like ours is investing a lot in paid mark getting
Speaker 2: to basically to create at CAx efficiencies. Also, we have
Speaker 2: a B to B side of our business where we
Speaker 2: are partnering with employers to provide weight watchers, and so
Speaker 2: there are ways for us to help increase access around
Speaker 2: these medications, certainly.
Speaker 3: And I appreciate that. And the reason I ask is
Speaker 3: there's a lot of analysts writing about it, talking about,
Speaker 3: you know, how much your subscriber base could could increase
Speaker 3: or as a result of this, now that there's maybe
Speaker 3: six million or eleven million, Like I'm hearing a lot
Speaker 3: of numbers out there, so just trying to get a
Speaker 3: feel I am.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's still a very small population who is
Speaker 2: actually able to access and I think that's a bigger
Speaker 2: conversation that we need to be having, and that's the
Speaker 2: sort of the clickbait nature of these medications has unlocked
Speaker 2: an opportunity for us to have the important conversation, which
Speaker 2: is around chronic weight management treatments for people living with obesity.
Speaker 2: And there's a lot of stigma still associated with these
Speaker 2: as quote unquote weight loss drugs, and we're losing the
Speaker 2: underlined critical importance that these are medications for people living
Speaker 2: with a chronic disease.
Speaker 9: Well to your point on that, Seema, I know that
Speaker 9: you're also familiar with the fact that there are shortages
Speaker 9: of ozembic, specifically for people with diabetes who are using it.
Speaker 9: Can you talk a little bit about your thinking around,
Speaker 9: you know, promoting ozembic given that we are dealing with
Speaker 9: those shortages as well.
Speaker 2: So there are a couple of things. One is that
Speaker 2: the nova Ortis has come out and said that there
Speaker 2: are no longer any supply chain issues with ozembic. Secondly,
Speaker 2: is we're not promoting ozembic. We are promoting access to
Speaker 2: a clinical intervention. Now what the clinician actually prescribes is
Speaker 2: a different question, but I think even in that question
Speaker 2: lies a little bit of the concern of are we
Speaker 2: pitting people with diabetes versus people who are living with
Speaker 2: overweight and overweight and obesity and would we be saying
Speaker 2: the same thing if these were medications for people with
Speaker 2: cancer or for people with heart disease, because guess what,
Speaker 2: obesity is the leading cause of both of those things.
Speaker 2: So I think that that's that's the conversation, is to
Speaker 2: really have us level up right how we perceive overweight
Speaker 2: and obesity in our society.
Speaker 3: All Right, We're going to leave it there, seemit. Thank
Speaker 3: you so much. I feel like a very smart interview
Speaker 3: in terms of answering a lot of the questions that
Speaker 3: are out there about this.
Speaker 1: You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us
Speaker 1: live weekdays from two to five pm Eastern.
Speaker 11: On Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business app, and YouTube.
Speaker 1: You can also listen live to our flagship New York station,
Speaker 1: Just Say Alexa, play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Speaker 9: And that's no. He's in for Tim Stanvic along with
Speaker 9: Carol Masser. Let's turn to the lead feature in this
Speaker 9: week's issue of Bloomberg Business Week. Also a recent Bloomberg
Speaker 9: Big Take, a heart wrenching look at TikTok and it's
Speaker 9: ongoing trust and seeming safety issues.
Speaker 3: In the third part of her series on the super
Speaker 3: popular social media app Bloomberg investigative reporter Olivia carvill looks
Speaker 3: at how its algorithm has led some teenagers down rabbit
Speaker 3: holes related to body image, self harm, depression, and even suicide.
Speaker 3: TikTok says it's making improvements as it now faces a
Speaker 3: flood of lawsuits after multiple user deaths. Olivia joins us
Speaker 3: now with more another incredible piece of reporting by you.
Speaker 3: So take us through the individual and the family that
Speaker 3: you look at and what happened.
Speaker 14: This story was focused on the death of a sixteen
Speaker 14: year old boy. His name was Chase Nesca and he
Speaker 14: grew up in Long Island and a small hamlet called Bayport.
Speaker 14: And he, or at least his parents felt like he
Speaker 14: had no history of mental illness. He was very successful
Speaker 14: in schooling. He was excelling academically. He was a high
Speaker 14: honors student. He was also excelling athletically. He was in
Speaker 14: three different soccer teams, playing for the Olympic Prep development team,
Speaker 14: his high school team, swimming for his high school. So
Speaker 14: he was showing signs of you know, success even at
Speaker 14: the young age of sixteen, and he had a big
Speaker 14: group of friends. Wasn't involved in drugs or alcohol, but
Speaker 14: in February of twenty twenty two. He took his own
Speaker 14: life and his family, his friends, his soccer coach, his teachers,
Speaker 14: a lot of them I spoke to, and the word
Speaker 14: that I heard over and over again was blindsided. They
Speaker 14: had no idea how or why this had happened. They
Speaker 14: felt like Chase hadn't shown any signs that he was struggling.
Speaker 14: And his mum, she was looking for answers. She didn't
Speaker 14: understand what had gone wrong, and so when she got
Speaker 14: his cell phone back from the police and she realized
Speaker 14: that it still she could turn it on. You know,
Speaker 14: she struggled to gain access to the account because it
Speaker 14: had a pass code on it. So she spent two
Speaker 14: weeks just trying to open up some of his social
Speaker 14: media accounts, just because she was looking for a clue
Speaker 14: what had happened to her son. What couldn't she see
Speaker 14: And when she was finally able to gain access to
Speaker 14: his TikTok account, what she found was a barrage of
Speaker 14: videos that promoted and glorified depression, anxiety, unrequited love, and suicide.
Speaker 14: I've seen some of these videos and they are heartbreaking
Speaker 14: to watch. It's not just the caption that says death
Speaker 14: is a gift or the perfect ending, or take the
Speaker 14: pain away, or I want to die. It is the
Speaker 14: sad music overlaid with the image as well can be
Speaker 14: really hard to watch them. And so when she opened
Speaker 14: his TikTok account, she saw what he had seen, and
Speaker 14: she also saw what the algorithm was continuing to push
Speaker 14: his account, which was a steady stre of depression, anxiety,
Speaker 14: and suicide content. And that is still happening to this day.
Speaker 3: So what did that make you want to do?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 14: When I started out reporting this story, as you mentioned
Speaker 14: earlier as the third part of a series on TikTok,
Speaker 14: I've been focused on child safety on the app, and
Speaker 14: what I've heard throughout the year I've spent researching this
Speaker 14: company is concerns about the algorithm, the fact that we
Speaker 14: don't understand how it works, and a billion people around
Speaker 14: the world use this platform, including kids, and there's a
Speaker 14: lot of concern externally about a lack of transparency around
Speaker 14: what drives the algorithm, what power is it? And what
Speaker 14: I wanted to understand is what happens inside the company,
Speaker 14: how to internal TikTok employees feel about this recommendation engine,
Speaker 14: and what I came to learn is that that secrecy
Speaker 14: runs deep internally, even inside the company. The people who
Speaker 14: are working to protect kids online, the Trust and Safety
Speaker 14: team that's sole responsibility is to try and keep children
Speaker 14: and users of the product safe, even they don't understand
Speaker 14: how the algorithm works.
Speaker 9: And going back to originally what happened with Chas, do
Speaker 9: we have an understanding of how the algorithm for him
Speaker 9: came to be what it.
Speaker 14: Was because he's not here and he can't tell us that.
Speaker 14: I haven't been able to understand why his account turned
Speaker 14: so dark or so sad. But it was through twenty
Speaker 14: twenty one that his friends, they said that he had
Speaker 14: been sending them all kind of funny videos, sports related videos,
Speaker 14: joking videos, and then towards the end of that year,
Speaker 14: some of the content he was sending them was sad.
Speaker 14: It was depression related, anxiety related, and they didn't understand why.
Speaker 14: But I did talk to some young people who experienced
Speaker 14: a similar situation with eating disordered content who were able
Speaker 14: to tell me their experience of using the product. And
Speaker 14: these were two teenage girls who both had a strikingly
Speaker 14: similar situation where they started using TikTok and they would
Speaker 14: watch sports videos, cheerleading dance videos. They noticed that what
Speaker 14: they were seen started to change slightly. It became healthy
Speaker 14: recipes or EBB workouts, and then it turned into how
Speaker 14: to make your legs look skinnier, how to eat less
Speaker 14: calories in a day. And those two girls both told
Speaker 14: me independently in different interviews, I didn't search for this stuff.
Speaker 14: It just all of a sudden appeared.
Speaker 3: What I want to do is shift gears into how
Speaker 3: this happens. What the company says, is it a case
Speaker 3: of and the employees or the former employees of TikTok
Speaker 3: that you talked to, who wanted who knew something wasn't
Speaker 3: quite right, and they couldn't even get answers internally. So
Speaker 3: what is it that we got on that side of things?
Speaker 14: Yeah? Sure, And it is important to point out that
Speaker 14: suicide is complex. Nowhere in the story am I saying
Speaker 14: that TikTok is to blame. There's a difference between causation
Speaker 14: and correlation. So what I was able to find is
Speaker 14: what Chase saw before he died, and some of those
Speaker 14: videos included the specific method he used to die. What
Speaker 14: the company said is they've been working on this issue
Speaker 14: for years back in twenty twenty one, they pushed out
Speaker 14: a press release saying they were going to try and
Speaker 14: stop repetitive streams of videos about sad content, whether that's
Speaker 14: eating disordered content, depression content, suicide content. They were going
Speaker 14: to break that up and try and create a more
Speaker 14: diverse experience for the viewer. And I asked them, what's
Speaker 14: happened since you haven't sent out any updates since you
Speaker 14: said you were working on this two years ago, And
Speaker 14: they did push out a press release before we published
Speaker 14: it came out in March sixteenth, saying that they had
Speaker 14: made fifteen system updates over the past year to try
Speaker 14: and make the algorithm safer, to try and break up
Speaker 14: those steady streams of content. But what Chase NASCAR's account
Speaker 14: shows is in some cases it hasn't worked. And I
Speaker 14: wanted to understand why.
Speaker 3: Did you feel like, since you've been reporting this out
Speaker 3: for a long time and doing the investigative work, do
Speaker 3: you feel like what you're getting from the company is
Speaker 3: sufficient based on also than the conversations you're having with
Speaker 3: former TikTok employees about their own internal struggles to kind
Speaker 3: of understand this algorithm, especially when they saw things that
Speaker 3: maybe were a mess.
Speaker 14: I feel like there's a disconnect between what I'm hearing
Speaker 14: from the company's communications team and what I'm hearing from
Speaker 14: former employees and insiders who worked on trust and safety.
Speaker 14: I will say that trust and safety is a huge
Speaker 14: department at TikTok. They have forty thousand people working there,
Speaker 14: and it's likely that some teams or departments feel frustrated
Speaker 14: at certain times. We need to remember that this company
Speaker 14: has exploded into popularity. It was created in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 14: It hit the world stage in twenty eighteen. We're five
Speaker 14: years on from that and a billion people use the platform.
Speaker 3: But in China things are limited, so things can be
Speaker 3: done right.
Speaker 14: Well, in China, it's a different app app it's called
Speaker 14: dou Yin, and.
Speaker 9: Could they apply some of the same principles to the
Speaker 9: app in the US well.
Speaker 14: I asked that question of the trust and safety insiders,
Speaker 14: and TikTok CEO was hammered on this point during the
Speaker 14: congressional hearing. Why is it that the app you serve
Speaker 14: to people in China called dou Yin. It's also owned
Speaker 14: by Byteedance, It's a sister product at TikTok, and I
Speaker 14: understand that they share some of the same source code.
Speaker 14: Why does that app send content about museum exhibitions or
Speaker 14: science experiments and it has a limit of kids are
Speaker 14: only allowed to be on it for forty minutes a day.
Speaker 14: Why do you send the spinach version of the app
Speaker 14: to kids in China? And you know, the fentanyl version
Speaker 14: of the app to people in the US, which is
Speaker 14: what some lawmakers have described TikTok as. And you know
Speaker 14: what I heard from the company is that these are
Speaker 14: different apps serving different communities or serving different countries, and
Speaker 14: they are governed by different regulatory issues and policies. And
Speaker 14: I will say that even the trust and safety insiders
Speaker 14: I talked to did feel like the dou yin version
Speaker 14: of the app would not work in America because it
Speaker 14: would be a censored version of the app, and kids
Speaker 14: wouldn't think it was cool. No one would use it
Speaker 14: if you just sent kind of steam related, you know,
Speaker 14: educational content.
Speaker 3: Hence the debate that's out there. So appreciate all the
Speaker 3: reporting you doing this. It makes us smarter and makes
Speaker 3: us figure out kind of where we need to be
Speaker 3: when it comes to social media, which is such a
Speaker 3: big part of our world. Oliver, Thank you so appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Bloomberg News investigative reporter Olivia Carville.
Speaker 1: You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us
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Speaker 1: the Bloomberg Business App, and you too. You can also
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Speaker 1: Alexa play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Speaker 3: So you know, all of you been listening and watching
Speaker 3: throughout the week. We've had a focus in honor of
Speaker 3: birthday that is this Saturday. All this week we've been
Speaker 3: tapping into our climate, talking about sustainable food production and agriculture,
Speaker 3: eliminating food and as a result, helping to reduce the
Speaker 3: massive negative contribution that ag and food waste make to
Speaker 3: climate change waste generally. You know, Maddie, it is a
Speaker 3: big risk to our planet. We all make a lot
Speaker 3: of garbage and it's just really hurting us.
Speaker 9: No, it's so true, and I think there's a lot
Speaker 9: of misconceptions about recycling, and the Recycling Partnership has some
Speaker 9: thoughts on how we can all be better stewards of
Speaker 9: our planet. So here to tell us all about it
Speaker 9: is the CEO of the Recycling Partnership Keith Harrison joining
Speaker 9: us in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker's studio. Thank you so
Speaker 9: much for coming in person to sit with us.
Speaker 13: It's great to be here today, loving this.
Speaker 15: How are you doing.
Speaker 13: Oh, it's been a beautiful day in New York City.
Speaker 13: I've been walking all around glad to be here.
Speaker 9: Well, we were so excited to have you in person
Speaker 9: with us. Give us like the top line here, recycling
Speaker 9: does it work?
Speaker 13: So worthy effort, also worth the effort of improving it.
Speaker 13: Recycling Partnership is a nonprofit and I built us nine
Speaker 13: years ago because I knew we needed a better option.
Speaker 13: We needed a better system in the US, and that's
Speaker 13: what we're after.
Speaker 3: We'll go backwards because I remember growing up in our
Speaker 3: grade school, we did paper drives all the time and
Speaker 3: my family we you know, stored our papers, tied them
Speaker 3: up and brought them in, you know, a huge station
Speaker 3: wagon full of papers. What is it that hasn't been working?
Speaker 3: Because we've been doing this for a long time. We
Speaker 3: all have offices where we separate out garbage. Go to
Speaker 3: different states and they separate things multiple ways depending on
Speaker 3: the state that you live in. What hasn't been happening.
Speaker 3: So take us back there and give us kind of
Speaker 3: a snippet of what's going on.
Speaker 13: We all learned about recycling in third grade. We understood
Speaker 13: that it was good for the planet, good to do,
Speaker 13: put your bottle, your can in the bin, take your
Speaker 13: papers back for the drive. So why are we still
Speaker 13: talking about this? Well, I have a quiz for you. You're ready, Yeah,
Speaker 13: I'm ready. How many recycling programs are there in the US?
Speaker 3: Oh my god, I have no idea?
Speaker 13: Tons nine thousand different recycling programs. So when you're like,
Speaker 13: why can I recycle that here but not there? What happens?
Speaker 13: Why is that nine thousand? Now? I bet a lot
Speaker 13: of people listening to this story think about supply chains,
Speaker 13: thinks about business. If we pull back and we understand, like,
Speaker 13: what is recycling? At its core? It's a feedstock for manufacturing.
Speaker 13: What feeds feedstock starts at nine thousand different points. That
Speaker 13: is a really tricky supply chain. So when we ask
Speaker 13: ourselves why isn't recycling working like we want, we have
Speaker 13: to ask have we really built it? Or has it
Speaker 13: organically grown? Answer is a second right, it's grown over time?
Speaker 3: Is it basically because states could do what they want,
Speaker 3: cities could do what they want.
Speaker 13: Is it just as simple as nine thousand different do
Speaker 13: what you want? And that's the way that we work, right.
Speaker 13: Communities are different. We travel from one place to another,
Speaker 13: and some do some things better than others. And we've
Speaker 13: put recycling on the backs of communities. And I think
Speaker 13: it's time to ask should they be paying for that?
Speaker 13: Is that their job? We all want it to just
Speaker 13: work better. So would make it work better? Well, there's
Speaker 13: an important role for policy to play here.
Speaker 9: So what would be the dream if you got to be,
Speaker 9: you know, the president tomorrow?
Speaker 12: What would it look like?
Speaker 13: I have written that down. I think about that a lot.
Speaker 13: So what does good recycling look like? It means a
Speaker 13: couple of things. One everyone can. Right now, forty million
Speaker 13: American families cannot equitably recycle. They have to drive it,
Speaker 13: they have to pay more, They just can't do it
Speaker 13: that forty million households. So one everyone can. Two everyone does.
Speaker 13: And they know what to put in. They trust it.
Speaker 13: They know what to do with those yogurt cups, those boxes.
Speaker 13: They understand.
Speaker 3: We don't. I still don't know whether I'm supposed to
Speaker 3: rinse them out. I still do and you feel stressed
Speaker 3: out about it, right, I'm really serious, Like I'm like, oh,
Speaker 3: this isn't going to be recycled, so like you know.
Speaker 13: But so so in the future everyone can everyone does
Speaker 13: because you know, clean and dry in the bin. Don't
Speaker 13: overstress about it and what goes in. That's the goal
Speaker 13: of what we're working towards. But we're not there yet.
Speaker 13: We can go deepch what is your question in the
Speaker 13: but lean and the dry.
Speaker 3: Does everything that should that is divided up, that is
Speaker 3: clean and dried in the bin? Does it actually get recycled?
Speaker 13: That's the big question And I think that's on the
Speaker 13: mind of public. Can I trust that this is worth
Speaker 13: my effort?
Speaker 3: And can I ask you? Can I just tell you why?
Speaker 3: Because our kitchilll and team wrote a Bloomberg BusinessWeek's story
Speaker 3: I think it was last month. It tracked a plastic
Speaker 3: bag's two thousand mile journey across season continents quote revealing
Speaker 3: another world of contractors, brokers and exporters and a messy
Speaker 3: reality that looks like a less like a virtuous cycle
Speaker 3: and more like passing the buck. Those were the words
Speaker 3: of our Kitchell who wrote this story. It was incredible
Speaker 3: so it didn't go where we all thought it was
Speaker 3: going to go.
Speaker 13: And in that case, it did not go as smoothly
Speaker 13: as anyone would want it to go. Is that the ideal? No,
Speaker 13: So in the system that we design, everyone can, everyone does,
Speaker 13: and we know the fate that you can trust that
Speaker 13: it turns into something new. So for every one story
Speaker 13: of things not going well like that, there are a
Speaker 13: zillion stories of things going well. Yogurt cups turning into
Speaker 13: car parts, cans turning into more cans, plastic bottles turning
Speaker 13: into carpet. But the public, here's one story about that,
Speaker 13: and they think, WHOA, I've been tricked. And everyone is
Speaker 13: so careful, you know, has their ear open for a
Speaker 13: trick right now. So it's a scary time. So why
Speaker 13: did that bag turn out that way? I think it's
Speaker 13: because we don't have a system. We have this loosely connected,
Speaker 13: highly dependent network that we think of as one thing recycling,
Speaker 13: but it's actually a whole bunch of stuff. Now, the
Speaker 13: fact that it left the US to go get recycled
Speaker 13: somewhere is that innately bad. No, not at the not necessarily.
Speaker 13: There's lots of recyclables imported and exported just like there
Speaker 13: are purses imported and exported everything, So recyclables function like
Speaker 13: that too. But do we need more oversight into how
Speaker 13: things are designed for recycling, how the systems are run,
Speaker 13: and who pays for them? One hundred percent? That's policy
Speaker 13: and that policy.
Speaker 9: Is that something that you would hope for at the
Speaker 9: federal level or where do you expect to see that shift?
Speaker 13: Well, right now we're seeing it at the state level.
Speaker 13: Four states, California and Colorado, Oregon, and Maine have passed
Speaker 13: extended even bigger extended producer responsibility. And so what that
Speaker 13: means if you're a producer a company that makes packaging,
Speaker 13: you are responsible for putting money into a kitty that
Speaker 13: makes sure that the system in that state can take it.
Speaker 13: And there's variable fees, so if it's designed for cyclability,
Speaker 13: you pay less. If it's not, you pay more. But
Speaker 13: what it's doing is shifting the economics to say, one
Speaker 13: we need a better system, two we need a stuff
Speaker 13: designed for that system, and the economics of it need
Speaker 13: to deliver the returns both for the planet and our pockets.
Speaker 3: Keith, I want to ask you, Oh, I'm sorry.
Speaker 9: No, it's it sounds like the pain that is on
Speaker 9: the company, not the consumer.
Speaker 13: Right shifting. We're shifting that. We're saying company, it's not
Speaker 13: just enough to design it to be recycled. Company, we
Speaker 13: need you to be there to make sure that it
Speaker 13: actually happens and putting.
Speaker 3: How do we do that though as a company.
Speaker 13: Well, it's through a network. This is why I think
Speaker 13: the Recycling Partnership is pretty interesting. So we're a nonprofit
Speaker 13: and we're funded almost entirely by corporate entities, and a
Speaker 13: lot of times you could say, wait a minute, then
Speaker 13: who's calling the shots here? But I think we need
Speaker 13: more nonprofits like the Recycling Partnership because we were designed
Speaker 13: to insist and assist. Now, what does that mean? When
Speaker 13: a company makes a pledge to recycle more, we say, great,
Speaker 13: we want to help you do that, but we don't
Speaker 13: we know that that's not your subject matter expertise, that's
Speaker 13: our So we're going to insist you get there and
Speaker 13: we're going to assist help you do it. We bring
Speaker 13: in subject matter experts. So I think you need transparency,
Speaker 13: you need data, you need open books to really see
Speaker 13: that the material is going where it should be going
Speaker 13: in the recycling system.
Speaker 3: Do you feel like and we're talking with Keith Harrison,
Speaker 3: CEO of the Recycling Partnership here in studio. We've got
Speaker 3: about a minute then we'll come back and talk some more.
Speaker 3: But I do wonder you know ESG certainly under the
Speaker 3: microscope and for good reasons, as we try to really
Speaker 3: create more transparency. Are we moving? Is there a will
Speaker 3: to move towards greater transparency when it comes to things
Speaker 3: like recycling, whether what a company is doing, and really
Speaker 3: the impact of understanding versus just you should be recycled.
Speaker 3: We create products that can be recycled, but you know,
Speaker 3: once it leaves, you know, a company or manufacturer, it's
Speaker 3: out of their hands.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 13: I think that that call for transparency is across the board,
Speaker 13: and it's not just how is a product design, but
Speaker 13: what's the system there? And how do you follow Just
Speaker 13: like you said earlier that they follow those plastic bags,
Speaker 13: how do we follow it all the way through and
Speaker 13: make sure what we intend to happen happens. And that's
Speaker 13: how you present prevent greenwashing. But that's also critical to
Speaker 13: a healthy system, which is what we want. Recycling will
Speaker 13: protect the natural resources. We all need this to happen.
Speaker 13: But it's calling out for better controls and better oversight.
Speaker 9: But your groceries keyth they in those reusable bags that
Speaker 9: are supposed to be great for our environment. But we
Speaker 9: were saying, I am personally drowning in these reusable bags.
Speaker 9: I know that's an incredibly privileged, privileged position to be in,
Speaker 9: but what do I do?
Speaker 13: Right? So I think this is the very nature of
Speaker 13: this conversation. Right, people want to do the right thing,
Speaker 13: but it's pretty easy to say, I don't want to
Speaker 13: choose the plastic container, so I'm going to choose paper.
Speaker 13: I don't want to use the single use bag, I mean,
Speaker 13: use a cloth one. But then the sticks actually get
Speaker 13: higher when you get up up the chain on heavy
Speaker 13: duty materials, and so the responsibility of making sure that
Speaker 13: you do something is there with those reusable grocery bags.
Speaker 13: I would have to look for a donation place for that,
Speaker 13: but I think them.
Speaker 3: So I guess the question is like, have we exchanged
Speaker 3: a bad problem for a even bigger problems?
Speaker 13: I think we have, And it's all rooted in the
Speaker 13: we want to buy our way out of this or
Speaker 13: we need We're not We're looking for the quick fix,
Speaker 13: when really what our society relies on is convenience and
Speaker 13: serving busy people. Every person listening to this show right
Speaker 13: now has a million things going on between their company,
Speaker 13: their family, their next steps, and they don't need to
Speaker 13: be spending time worrying about do I need to rinse
Speaker 13: my peanut butter container or do I just put it
Speaker 13: in the bin. And that's why that's why the recycling
Speaker 13: Partnership exists, is we're trying to pull together the public
Speaker 13: and the private sectors and overhaul this whole system so
Speaker 13: this public doesn't have to think about recycling all the time.
Speaker 13: The system exists. The system exists, so you can just
Speaker 13: recycle without thinking. And here's how you get here. Okay,
Speaker 13: one you pass legislation that you change is the economics,
Speaker 13: that communities aren't carrying the bill carrying this on their backs,
Speaker 13: that they're not paying for this, that the economics are
Speaker 13: paid for by the same companies that are producing it.
Speaker 13: Make that whole system better organized to make sure that
Speaker 13: what's designed for recycling is recovered. So we're going to
Speaker 13: not just hope for the best, but we're going to
Speaker 13: make sure that it's designed and recovered.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 13: Now, we did a report. We answered this question, what
Speaker 13: would it take to fix the US recycling system. Now,
Speaker 13: how do I define that? Can people recycle? Do people
Speaker 13: will recycle? And is the infrastructure there? The price tig
Speaker 13: seventeen billion dollars. What we can find seventeen billion dollars
Speaker 13: And here's the deal, thirty billion dollar return, A thirty
Speaker 13: billion dollar return in resource conservation and US jobs. I
Speaker 13: think that's an investment we can't afford not to make.
Speaker 13: And you know what, we could do it in five
Speaker 13: years and talk about something else. What would you like
Speaker 13: to talk about?
Speaker 3: Well, what I'm curious is would you go to Washington
Speaker 3: or talk to somebody in Washington? Is there any will
Speaker 3: to do something like this? It's not expensive, but I'm
Speaker 3: just curious.
Speaker 13: So I've worked in recycling for twenty five years. I
Speaker 13: ran a recycling program. I worked for the State of
Speaker 13: North Carolina doing grants. I was a contractor with Boozellen
Speaker 13: working on EPA stuff. So I've worked all across the
Speaker 13: different sectors. And what I found is that everyone wants
Speaker 13: to say outcome, just make it work, but everyone wants
Speaker 13: it for a different reason. And so we need a
Speaker 13: marriage counselor like someone who's saying, this is what our
Speaker 13: words mean and for the first time though in this
Speaker 13: twenty five years of working on this, it's only been
Speaker 13: the last two three years that federal policy makers have
Speaker 13: been saying, Hey, what's my role in it? And I
Speaker 13: think that's great. So there is a huge role for
Speaker 13: federal policy because, as I said before, break four states
Speaker 13: have passed state level policy. But that's a hodgepodge approach
Speaker 13: that's better than the nine thousand different programs we have now.
Speaker 13: But think about what happens if we have one one
Speaker 13: where things are designed for system, things are recovered, and
Speaker 13: we get to address things like equitable access the environmental
Speaker 13: justice component of equal services.
Speaker 3: So is the marriage counselor potentially the EPA and or
Speaker 3: the SEC. So you kind of dealing with publicly traded
Speaker 3: companies that there's a component that they're measured on, which
Speaker 3: is something we talk a lot about, and it comes
Speaker 3: to environmental impact and kind of doing it right, and
Speaker 3: recycling certainly could be a big part of it, probably should,
Speaker 3: And then the EPA, I don't know, like, how do
Speaker 3: you see it that it plays out.
Speaker 13: I think there's a there's probably a lot of marriage
Speaker 13: counselors here, the recycling partnership as a nonprofit is one
Speaker 13: that pulls together the public and the private sector, big company,
Speaker 13: small companies, every human in this country. But I think
Speaker 13: there is a role for regulation, there is a role
Speaker 13: for standards. I'm really interested in data. How do we
Speaker 13: measure progress, transparency for the flow of material. You know,
Speaker 13: I'm keeping an eye on the UN Global Plastics Treaty.
Speaker 13: That's going to be a legally binding instrument to align
Speaker 13: for some common standards. I think that if I was
Speaker 13: running a company that made stuff, I'd have my eye
Speaker 13: on that because it's gonna have what is that? So,
Speaker 13: the UN Global Plastics Treaty. I'm headed to Paris next
Speaker 13: month for the second I in C so that the
Speaker 13: International Negotiating Committee of this globally binding plat plastic pollution
Speaker 13: reduction instrument. And what that means is we can't just
Speaker 13: keep trying to solve things here and there. We need
Speaker 13: to have a common approach across countries. And so will
Speaker 13: the UN have something that's really his teeth in it.
Speaker 13: That's yet to be seen. But what is happening is
Speaker 13: that companies are paying attention of do I want to
Speaker 13: wait to be told what to do? Or do I
Speaker 13: want to do that now, and that's the questions we get.
Speaker 13: So we work with nearly one hundred major global companies
Speaker 13: that either make stuff we use every day or sell
Speaker 13: stuff we use every day, and they are aligning on
Speaker 13: common goals.
Speaker 9: What are they doing? What is the biggest the change
Speaker 9: you're seeing that make?
Speaker 13: So the biggest change is that they're understanding it's not
Speaker 13: just what they do inside their four walls, but what
Speaker 13: they do outside of their four walls, meaning what happens
Speaker 13: to the bags inside your apartment, or what happens with
Speaker 13: your paper that your family makes that it has somewhere
Speaker 13: to go. So the biggest shift I see is our
Speaker 13: companies who are saying, Okay, I need to make sure
Speaker 13: that the infrastructure is there, otherwise my goals will not
Speaker 13: be met, not because I didn't design something, but because
Speaker 13: those forty million American families just can't do it. If
Speaker 13: we can't do it, then don't tell the public to
Speaker 13: do it. Right?
Speaker 3: Is it going to mean ultimately we continue kind of
Speaker 3: doing what we're doing, but just amp it up and
Speaker 3: maybe there's more divisions of plastic glass. I don't know.
Speaker 3: And then there is a place and just got about
Speaker 3: thirty seconds I'm just trying to well.
Speaker 13: So out of ESD, you know, the thing that worries
Speaker 13: me most out of ESG is just this hot pot
Speaker 13: of opportunities where people are throwing money at, you know,
Speaker 13: venture ideas here and there that don't ladder up to
Speaker 13: system change. I think we have to stop and pause,
Speaker 13: use things like federal policy and the und Global Plastic
Speaker 13: Streaty to create consistency and shine a light on measurable
Speaker 13: transparent parency for change.
Speaker 9: Can we do like biggest mistake consumers make?
Speaker 13: Oh quick, right, I'm ready? Oh well, I think let's
Speaker 13: do some real fast so pizza boxes. Put them in
Speaker 13: caps on bottles, leave them on. I clean and dry
Speaker 13: on your materials, but you don't have to run them
Speaker 13: through the dishwasher. And the number one thing is, if
Speaker 13: you're in New York City, you use bags to recycle
Speaker 13: outside your apartment, but in most places in the country,
Speaker 13: don't bag your recyclables inside your cart. Leave them loose.
Speaker 13: That's the best way to make sure that those all
Speaker 13: those beautiful recyclables get turned into something else.
Speaker 3: Just throw them in a can and just empty.
Speaker 13: Just throw them in your recycling bin, your recycling cart,
Speaker 13: keep them empty.
Speaker 3: Really cool stuff thank you, come back after Paris Harrison,
Speaker 3: CEO of the Recycling Partnership.
Speaker 1: Here in studio, you're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Podcast.
Speaker 1: Catch us live weekdays from two to five pm Easter.
Speaker 11: On Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business App, and you too.
Speaker 1: You can also listen live to our flagship New York
Speaker 1: station Just Say Alexa, Play Bloomberg e Love and thirty Soles.
Speaker 11: Wait, Joe spar you.
Speaker 6: Spa spa too?
Speaker 3: All right, it is the game that was designed to
Speaker 3: be random chaos, elegantly rendered in circular motion. We are
Speaker 3: talking about Roulette, and even so it's the game that
Speaker 3: you're supposedly not being able to win. But even so,
Speaker 3: gamblers have come up with plenty of elaborate mathematical systems
Speaker 3: to beat it, thanks to a journey that includes a mathematician,
Speaker 3: a gambling pioneer, an MIT professor, dreams of a utopian
Speaker 3: community of hippie investors funded by gambling profits, and so
Speaker 3: much more.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 3: Let's get to the current cover story of Bloomberg Business
Speaker 3: Week and with us as Kitchillel, Bloomberg BusinessWeek Senior writer,
Speaker 3: with us on zoom from London and also with us
Speaker 3: the editor of Bloomberg Business Week, Jill Weber. He's here
Speaker 3: in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker studio.
Speaker 2: Jill.
Speaker 3: I feel like this is once again a story, a
Speaker 3: cover story. Everyone in the newsroom seems to be talking
Speaker 3: about it. My husband's like, hey, did you see this
Speaker 3: cool story from war Work business Week. I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I know, it's about Roulette.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And you know, there are some games out there
Speaker 4: that I think are just, you know, renowned at being
Speaker 4: good ways to lose money. And so I think there
Speaker 4: is a universal appeal to stories about Roulette, and also
Speaker 4: a universal peal whenever someone you know may have beaten Roulette.
Speaker 4: And so when Kit kind of surfaced and said that
Speaker 4: he was interested in this space and had found a
Speaker 4: character that deserved a narrative, I said, Okay, tell me,
Speaker 4: tell me more, tell me more. And that let him
Speaker 4: down a little bit of a rabbit hole. And when
Speaker 4: he came out of the rabbit hole, he had maybe
Speaker 4: one of the most memorable stories that I published in
Speaker 4: my career. And I'm curious to hear again from you kid.
Speaker 8: Where did that story begin?
Speaker 16: Hey, Joel, So I heard a few years ago from
Speaker 16: another professional gambler, that it was possible, at least in theory,
Speaker 16: to beat roulette, but it was a bit of a
Speaker 16: struggle to find clear examples of that happening, especially of
Speaker 16: people making money beating roulette. And so I did a
Speaker 16: troll through old newspaper reports and I came across this
Speaker 16: two decade old article in the British newspapers about a
Speaker 16: gang of guys from the Balkans, from Serbia Montenegro who
Speaker 16: had used a laser to take one point three million
Speaker 16: pounds in roulette games playing at the Ritz casino in London.
Speaker 15: It didn't have their names or any other details really.
Speaker 16: But as soon as I saw it, I kind of
Speaker 16: I had to know more about it, and so that
Speaker 16: set me off on a journey to sort of find
Speaker 16: out exactly who these guys were and how they've done it.
Speaker 4: Okay, how would you go about using a laser in theory,
Speaker 4: because it turns out that maybe that wasn't used well.
Speaker 15: The laser was a red herring.
Speaker 16: It was a sort of a mistake that the British
Speaker 16: police made at the time because they didn't know what
Speaker 16: they were looking at. Because very few people do know
Speaker 16: the secrets of how to beat roulette, but the secret
Speaker 16: of really long term success in the game is being
Speaker 16: able to make a pretty good prediction about where that
Speaker 16: ball is going to settle. You don't have to get
Speaker 16: it exactly right. You just have to be slightly better
Speaker 16: than average. If you can pick a settler of the
Speaker 16: wheel and it's likely to settle there, you've got a
Speaker 16: good chance of making some money.
Speaker 8: We're only like one minute in Kit.
Speaker 4: You can't give away all the secrets yet as you
Speaker 4: hold off on that, so so just push paths there
Speaker 4: long narrative, gotta delay suspense, Kit, I do want to
Speaker 4: I want to know more about the casino that this
Speaker 4: went down out, Like take us, take us back to
Speaker 4: London's West End and give us a sense of the vibe.
Speaker 4: And you know, the other thing to know here is like,
Speaker 4: you know, in casinos, I typically think of.
Speaker 8: Blackjack as the way to beat the house.
Speaker 4: So like, what is what are how does how does
Speaker 4: roulette rank in terms of what my odds are as
Speaker 4: a normal person walking into you know, take on the house?
Speaker 16: Okay, Well, the London casinos scene is very different to Vegas.
Speaker 16: It's you know, it's high end, extremely high end members.
Speaker 15: Only the normal crowd in a in a London.
Speaker 16: Casino you know of a Saturday evening will include billionaires,
Speaker 16: hedge fund managers, olive archs. It's it's very fancy, but
Speaker 16: the stakes are high as well. You can bet a
Speaker 16: lot of money and with lots of money there and
Speaker 16: not attract too much attention, which is why gamblers like it.
Speaker 16: For the roulette roulette versus blackjack. The house edge in
Speaker 16: blackjack is pretty small, and so is the house edge
Speaker 16: in roulette. Although it seems like a very random game
Speaker 16: that you can have little chance of winning, the advantage
Speaker 16: the house.
Speaker 15: Has over the player is only about two or three percent.
Speaker 16: So, like I say, it's achievable in terms of you know,
Speaker 16: if you want to win some money.
Speaker 3: If you're Nico Tosa, tell us about this individual, then
Speaker 3: you do actually.
Speaker 4: Win some who walked into that you know, high end London,
Speaker 4: West End casino and sort of changed the game.
Speaker 15: What happened, Well, most most gamblers who use these methods
Speaker 15: are terrified of getting caught, so they'll go into a
Speaker 15: casino a better few thousand, win a few thousand, and
Speaker 15: try and leave for anyone notice what they're doing. Nicotosa
Speaker 15: has the opposite approach. He tried to win as much
Speaker 15: money as he possibly can space of time as he can.
Speaker 15: That's his way.
Speaker 16: And so you know, actually from a standing start of
Speaker 16: about two or three thousand pounds, he got to one
Speaker 16: point three million and only a few nights play. So
Speaker 16: of course that attracts attention, but you know, in his
Speaker 16: mind he doesn't mind the attention.
Speaker 15: He's one of the good guys.
Speaker 16: He says, he's not cheating and it's his right go
Speaker 16: and play roulette as he wants.
Speaker 17: So has that spurred other people to use a similar
Speaker 17: type of strategy when you see a number like that.
Speaker 17: As far as how much somebody could be raaking in like.
Speaker 15: That, well, I don't know if that's the case.
Speaker 16: It certainly spurred the casinos to get their act together
Speaker 16: and try and make their wheels a bit less predictable,
Speaker 16: and we saw widespread changes to the design of roulette
Speaker 16: wheels in response to the Nikotosa event. But in terms
Speaker 16: of how many people actually had the knowledge of how
Speaker 16: to do this and were able to pull it off,
Speaker 16: that number was small back then.
Speaker 15: It's still small now.
Speaker 2: Kit.
Speaker 3: What's really cool, though, is and you do go step
Speaker 3: by step. We've all learned so much, but this whole
Speaker 3: idea when you play roulette, like really watching and watching.
Speaker 8: The spin, are you going to go there? Are you
Speaker 8: going to give it away?
Speaker 3: Now with the editor of Business.
Speaker 8: Kit Let's frame it.
Speaker 4: There have been countless matt peticians, physicists, you know, anybody
Speaker 4: who thinks they can crack this, looks at Roulette and
Speaker 4: as like we can crack this. But like Nikotos has
Speaker 4: seemed to have found a different way. So walk us
Speaker 4: through what he found.
Speaker 16: Well, he found, like all the other people who have
Speaker 16: tried this, that roulette is actually more predictable than you imagine.
Speaker 15: It to be. And the people who first made this
Speaker 15: discovery were scientists from MIT and Stanford working in physics laboratories,
Speaker 15: collecting data about the movement of the will and the
Speaker 15: movement of the ball and.
Speaker 16: Calculating gravity and friction. And it took them years to
Speaker 16: work out actually, yes, it was possible to make a
Speaker 16: basic prediction, but none of them managed to make any money.
Speaker 15: That was decades ago, that was back in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 16: Using roughly the same technique, you know, Nkotosa seems to
Speaker 16: have achieved what almost no one else has done, which
Speaker 16: is turned it into a living in a career, and
Speaker 16: he's made you know, millions upon millions of dollars over
Speaker 16: the years doing this.
Speaker 8: Okay, you, like I said, you went down that rabbit.
Speaker 4: Hole, Mari, where else did this rabbit hole take you?
Speaker 4: Because you did get to talk to some of those
Speaker 4: mathematicians and physicists and and and yet you know, here
Speaker 4: was this guy with none of that background who just
Speaker 4: figured it, figured it out right, and talk to us
Speaker 4: about what that even looked like at the table when
Speaker 4: he plays.
Speaker 16: Okay, I mean, I think the most interesting thing that
Speaker 16: I discovered going down this rabbit hole was, of course,
Speaker 16: these days, most roulette is played online, and that's actually
Speaker 16: handled a big advantage to predictive players because if you
Speaker 16: want to use predictive software, if you want to have
Speaker 16: some program running in the background, your computer watching the screen,
Speaker 16: if you're playing roulette online, there's very little casinos can
Speaker 16: do about it. And there are people doing this right now.
Speaker 16: They'll be playing were playing roulette online and will have
Speaker 16: a program churning away, making incredibly complicated calculations and winning money.
Speaker 15: In real time. That just blew my mind that that's
Speaker 15: possible now.
Speaker 16: Nico Toasta says that his technique is much simpler. He
Speaker 16: just you know, he asked him what his secret was
Speaker 16: and he said one word, practice, And then he showed
Speaker 16: me a picture of the ret world that he keeps
Speaker 16: in his house and he just sits and watches it
Speaker 16: over and over again, thousands and thousands of times.
Speaker 3: Wait, so take us there too, because you tracked him
Speaker 3: down right.
Speaker 15: Yeah, he wasn't easy to find. I mean, professional gamblers,
Speaker 15: they spend a lot of time trying not to be discovered.
Speaker 15: It's very bad for their jobs in the day jobs
Speaker 15: to be well.
Speaker 4: Miss alive, go figure having working fingers.
Speaker 15: Well, the casinos.
Speaker 16: The casinos keep lists of people that you know, they
Speaker 16: call them problem gamblers, but really they're just people who
Speaker 16: can come and make money at their expense, so they
Speaker 16: try very hard to keep them out. So, you know,
Speaker 16: he works, He's worked very hard over the years not
Speaker 16: to attract any attention. So he probably wasn't delighted to
Speaker 16: hear from me. But I did manage to track him
Speaker 16: down to the place that he lives in Croatia, and
Speaker 16: he sort of reluctantly sat with me and we talked.
Speaker 15: Through what he'd done at the Ritz all those years ago.
Speaker 3: Do you buy it that there were no gadgets or anything.
Speaker 3: After you spent six months in you know, investigating this,
Speaker 3: doing this story, talking to lots of people, and then
Speaker 3: talking to him, do you buy it that it was
Speaker 3: just he was really good at making these cars.
Speaker 15: I think I do believe him.
Speaker 16: My reason for that is that even if you've got
Speaker 16: a very small computer and you're very good at hiding it,
Speaker 16: playing for twenty years, getting busted dozens of times, because
Speaker 16: you know, it's all over the world, getting arrested a
Speaker 16: few times, it's very likely that at some point someone will.
Speaker 15: Catch you in the act of the device.
Speaker 16: They'll find it in your shoe or your belt or
Speaker 16: your pocket. And in all the twenty years Nikots has
Speaker 16: been playing, and I know dozens of occasions when he's
Speaker 16: been caught, they've never found anything on him. So for me,
Speaker 16: that's pretty strong, a pretty good indication that he is
Speaker 16: coming the truth or that he's just got an exceptionally
Speaker 16: clever way of hiding his computer.
Speaker 15: One of the two.
Speaker 4: It does make me wonder, kid like you going down
Speaker 4: this rabbit or and I've sent you down some similar
Speaker 4: ones before, all of which are amazing, Like what did
Speaker 4: you learn about Roulette? And Nico like bringing all together.
Speaker 4: What were the things that you know captivated you as
Speaker 4: you worked on this well.
Speaker 15: And the first thing is that you know that you
Speaker 15: can beat a game like roulette.
Speaker 16: You know, I've played roulette like everyone else in casinos,
Speaker 16: and it just looks like the kind of game where
Speaker 16: you can't possibly get an advantage. But there's a certain
Speaker 16: kind of mindset to advantage gamblers who do this for
Speaker 16: a living, and it's kind of like an approach that
Speaker 16: relies on getting a tiny advantage.
Speaker 15: Out of the house and exploiting it over a long
Speaker 15: period of time.
Speaker 16: You know, they don't just go and win one or
Speaker 16: two hands of poker or blackjack. They have to they
Speaker 16: have to get a small edge and then grind it
Speaker 16: out over a period of time.
Speaker 15: So it's a job just like any other.
Speaker 16: It's incredibly difficult and it takes enormous amount of dedication
Speaker 16: skill to make it pay.
Speaker 3: Do all the houses now basically say we're on to
Speaker 3: you or can we all just take charge?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 16: Well, you know, a cynical part of me suspects that
Speaker 16: casino businesses won't be terribly upset that the secret about
Speaker 16: roulette is has sort of hit the headlines again, because
Speaker 16: you know, for the one or two or three players
Speaker 16: that actually are capable of beating these games, there are
Speaker 16: going to be one or two hundred more who think
Speaker 16: they can, but actually they can't. There's a there's an
Speaker 16: old quote going back decades of one of the Vegas
Speaker 16: casino owners who says, you know, we welcome system players.
Speaker 16: We roll out our red carpet for them. You know,
Speaker 16: anything that gets people through the door playing roulette, probably
Speaker 16: losing money is fine by them.
Speaker 8: Bloomber business week, good for business. Okay, get on that note.
Speaker 4: How much Roulette was played in researching this article?
Speaker 15: Zero games of roulette?
Speaker 8: Okay, just just watched it.
Speaker 15: I just watched it.
Speaker 4: Not very good at gambling, Yeah, no, neither am I
Speaker 4: You know so from I just think the the allure
Speaker 4: of stuff.
Speaker 8: Like this, it's just there.
Speaker 4: Every once in a while we find stories that deeply
Speaker 4: resonate with people, and like this has been one of them.
Speaker 4: And to see how many people have read it so far,
Speaker 4: the time spent in the article, it's just I'm very
Speaker 4: much drawn to stories like this where there's something that
Speaker 4: we're fascinated by and somebody somewhere out there has spent
Speaker 4: a lot of.
Speaker 8: Time thinking about it, much more than you have.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm gonna be curious, like the gambling institutions around
Speaker 3: the globe like and all of a sudden, Roulette playing
Speaker 3: is up as a result of this kit. Thank you
Speaker 3: so much. We know it's late where you are, and
Speaker 3: so appreciate getting to talk with you directly about it. Kishialel,
Speaker 3: Senior writer at Bloomberg News. Joel is right, like everything
Speaker 3: he does, It's just incredible. On zoom from London and Joel,
Speaker 3: thank you so much. Joell Webber, editor at Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
Speaker 3: Here in our interactive broker studio. It is the cover
Speaker 3: story how to Beat Roulette of the current issue at
Speaker 3: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Now on newstands, online at Bloomberg dot com,
Speaker 3: slash BusinessWeek, and on the Bloomberg you're.
Speaker 1: Listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Podcast. Catch us live
Speaker 1: weekdays from two to five pm Eastern.
Speaker 11: On Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business App, and you too.
Speaker 1: You can also listen live to our flagship New York
Speaker 1: station Just Say Alexa Play Bloomberg Eleve Them thirty.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Thank you Generative AI and chat ChiPT. You've given us
Speaker 3: all a lot to talk about and to talk to.
Speaker 3: I actould say I was actually playing with it. This weekend,
Speaker 3: the world definitely all in on AI, specifically generative artificial intelligence,
Speaker 3: you know, AI algorithms that generate new outputs based on
Speaker 3: the data that they have been trained on. That's being
Speaker 3: used to come up with meal plans, create art, write essays,
Speaker 3: term papers, teach robots, and as during the upcoming issue
Speaker 3: of Bloomberg BusinessWeek points out for therapy as well. So
Speaker 3: let's get to it. This story in the new issue
Speaker 3: that'll be on newstands later on this week, already online
Speaker 3: burg dot com slash BusinessWeek on the Bloomberg terminal. Let's
Speaker 3: get into it. Let's talk therapy. Entering the era of
Speaker 3: chatbots with us. Is Bloomberg News AI reporter Rachel Metz
Speaker 3: here in studio along with the editor of Bloomberg BusinessWeek,
Speaker 3: Joel Weber. It is every Are you real? Are you
Speaker 3: a chat GP tape?
Speaker 15: I am?
Speaker 8: I am real as far as I know. But the
Speaker 8: conversations that people are having with chet dvt's also real.
Speaker 8: Uh would you like that? Transition?
Speaker 4: Is conversations are real and you can ask it anything,
Speaker 4: and people are and they're making all kinds of stuff,
Speaker 4: and you know, there's all kinds of questions about anxieties
Speaker 4: of what's going to happen to jobs and all kinds
Speaker 4: of other stuff. But the thing that I was really
Speaker 4: drawn to with Rachel's story, which reminded me a little
Speaker 4: bit of a Ellen Hewitt story that we did not
Speaker 4: so long ago, also a little bit about what where
Speaker 4: AI can go unexpected places?
Speaker 8: This was one of those as well.
Speaker 4: So what's happened because people are actually starting to use
Speaker 4: it in some very deeply personal places.
Speaker 18: Yeah, No, it's it's been interesting to watch people are
Speaker 18: finding all kinds of ways to use chat GPT. And
Speaker 18: one thing that some people are trying out right now
Speaker 18: that I started to notice is using it not really
Speaker 18: I haven't seen people really replacing therapy with it, like
Speaker 18: if you're seeing a human therapist, but using it to
Speaker 18: solve occasional problems, or realizing that for them there's something
Speaker 18: about it that seems to be helpful to them, at
Speaker 18: least with the people that I spoke to, which I
Speaker 18: thought was really neat.
Speaker 4: So was this an intended use for what chat gpt?
Speaker 13: This is not an intended use case. It is a
Speaker 13: general use chatbot.
Speaker 18: It is not meant for that specifically, and in fact,
Speaker 18: if you look at open aiyes terms of use, they
Speaker 18: don't want it to be used for very specific medical
Speaker 18: use cases like diagnosing an illness or something like that.
Speaker 3: Shame of them. I mean Google doctor, I mean, like
Speaker 3: how many times writes up that goes up?
Speaker 19: I mean they know people are going to go all
Speaker 19: these crazy places, right, I mean I think that if
Speaker 19: you're able to use it and find it helpful, that
Speaker 19: I think that that's interesting and that I was actually
Speaker 19: a little surprised because initially my first thought was this
Speaker 19: sounds like a really scary, bad idea, But then as I.
Speaker 18: Talked to people, I it was it's much more nuanced
Speaker 18: than that.
Speaker 13: It help them.
Speaker 18: Yeah, in a couple cases, although there was one. There's
Speaker 18: one person I spoke to who said, you know, it
Speaker 18: was like saying the right things, but I just couldn't
Speaker 18: get into it because I knew I wasn't talking to
Speaker 18: a person. But I also think it's really important to
Speaker 18: not think of it as an either or situation. Like
Speaker 18: it's not like you might one day have a human
Speaker 18: therapist or a robotherapist. It's possible this could be used
Speaker 18: as Margaret Mitchell at hucking Face said, perhaps it could
Speaker 18: be used to help train people that answer phones for
Speaker 18: crisis lines that could help them to help more people
Speaker 18: at a time. And those kinds of people are vital
Speaker 18: and you could totally use more of them. This could
Speaker 18: be a way to make them more able to help people,
Speaker 18: which I thought was kind of cool.
Speaker 8: It feels like the there's like some empathy.
Speaker 4: It's like built into this of like I know what
Speaker 4: you're going through, Like there's got to be like a
Speaker 4: chat GBT training course and in terms of just like
Speaker 4: making sure people feel like they're being heard, right, But so,
Speaker 4: what did you hear from the people that you spoke to,
Speaker 4: and like what led them to hear and are they
Speaker 4: doing it instead of humans or in addition to real
Speaker 4: therapy not instead.
Speaker 18: Of One of the people that I spoke to, Milo
Speaker 18: has a therapist, happened to miss the therapy appointment and
Speaker 18: had seen somebody on Twitter saying it was really helpful
Speaker 18: to them, and Milo was like, Hey, I'll just give
Speaker 18: this a try, and then found it really helpful and
Speaker 18: has used it repeatedly since then. Not everybody will feel
Speaker 18: that way, Obviously, I loved your.
Speaker 3: Story that you talked to us tell us about that
Speaker 3: one of the earliest chatbots, Eliza, Right, So this takes
Speaker 3: us back to what the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 8: This was new to me.
Speaker 1: I did not have this.
Speaker 12: I didn't know.
Speaker 18: So Eliza was a supposed to mimic like a Rogerian
Speaker 18: style therapy, which is like, I guess, very like self reflective.
Speaker 3: You know, why do you think that?
Speaker 18: Or you know those kinds of like reflective questions. That
Speaker 18: was a much much simpler style of chatbot, which you
Speaker 18: would you would say something and it would be looking
Speaker 18: at or you would type something in that case, and
Speaker 18: it would be looking specifically for keywords that could be
Speaker 18: tied to certain types of answers.
Speaker 3: You know what makes me That's the other thing. Like
Speaker 3: nineteen sixties, we keep thinking of this chatbot is kind
Speaker 3: of this whole big new thing, and I keep googling
Speaker 3: and trying like origins of artificial intelligence, like I want
Speaker 3: to know more because I'm trying to Rachel get my
Speaker 3: head around, like why all of a sudden are we
Speaker 3: just this is such an explosion, right, because it doesn't
Speaker 3: sound like it's totally new.
Speaker 18: It's not new. I think some of what's new is
Speaker 18: the style. You can think of AI as having like
Speaker 18: different kinds of architecture. I think of it. An architecture
Speaker 18: is a word you'll see a lot in a lot
Speaker 18: of academic papers. So architecture with buildings, there's all different
Speaker 18: kinds of buildings, right. Similarly, in AI, you have different
Speaker 18: styles of putting these AI systems together, and this generative
Speaker 18: style is newer and being able to do that is
Speaker 18: a newer thing, and it gets us closer to it
Speaker 18: makes it makes these systems better at mimicking human speech,
Speaker 18: but it doesn't it's not actually, you know, it isn't
Speaker 18: human in any way. It's essentially using math in a
Speaker 18: way that gets you to look at the answer and say, oh,
Speaker 18: you know, that looks like something a person could say.
Speaker 8: Kind of close.
Speaker 13: Yeah, man, that's the creepy part of it.
Speaker 4: Another thing that I learned in this story is that
Speaker 4: there are chatbots that focus on mental health, yes, as
Speaker 4: opposed to chat gibt that can can do whatever it does, right,
Speaker 4: but so robot wisa, what are those and what are
Speaker 4: they doing?
Speaker 18: Those do exist, They've been out for a while in
Speaker 18: this space, and people can pay for them, and that
Speaker 18: those can potentially also be helpful to people. So so
Speaker 18: it is kind of interesting, right that those things already exist,
Speaker 18: but people are saying, let me try this. I mean,
Speaker 18: this is very easy to access. It's exciting in many
Speaker 18: ways because it's new. So I think it's going to
Speaker 18: be like a lot of different applications of chatchept where
Speaker 18: we kind of have to see how the dust settles
Speaker 18: and if people actually are using it for this and
Speaker 18: other things.
Speaker 17: Carol brought up the nineteen sixties. It made me also
Speaker 17: think of in the nineteen nineties with ask Jeeves, which
Speaker 17: was obviously right, people kind of forget about that, but
Speaker 17: it was sort of this whole forget about people don't
Speaker 17: forget about Jeeves. But interesting during these other time periods
Speaker 17: where we've seen different things like this, when we think
Speaker 17: this is like something very new but interesting that we've
Speaker 17: kind of had different irradiations in a way and in
Speaker 17: the past.
Speaker 18: Yeah, I mean, I think people like to personalize and
Speaker 18: anthropomorphize technology, and sometimes sometimes that could be totally fine.
Speaker 18: Sometimes that can go a little bit awry, like Rumba
Speaker 18: for instance, like people treat them a little bit like pets, perhaps,
Speaker 18: you know, and that's obviously it is a pet stuck.
Speaker 12: Part of the family.
Speaker 13: Hey, I have one that has a name, so you
Speaker 13: we're not all crazy.
Speaker 3: No, but it is interesting about you know this, I
Speaker 3: am curious how effective or what are the medical community,
Speaker 3: like are people weighing in about because I just think
Speaker 3: about there's some very serious illnesses out there, and I'm
Speaker 3: just wondering ken a chat GPT pick up some of
Speaker 3: the nuances of somebody who obviously needs some serious help.
Speaker 18: I talked to a professor who is also a clinical psychologist.
Speaker 18: He can he can imagine a future in which this
Speaker 18: might be useful for helping people along with human therapy
Speaker 18: right now. He was like, no, no, like this. You know,
Speaker 18: this is not for somebody who's got a serious mental
Speaker 18: health condition. This is not the way to go like
Speaker 18: so low. But he also but at the same time,
Speaker 18: he was saying that he could understand why people would
Speaker 18: find it helpful to talk to or at least or pleasant.
Speaker 18: I can't remember exactly what He's right potentially well, unless
Speaker 18: I mean, it depends. If you want to talk to
Speaker 18: a chatbot like GPT four, you're gonna have to pay
Speaker 18: for it.
Speaker 4: That's true, right, business, So you only curious about some
Speaker 4: of the privacy implications here, because I would think if
Speaker 4: I were letting my chatbot talk to people, I'd want
Speaker 4: to know how that chatbot was doing in a situation
Speaker 4: like this.
Speaker 8: And and also you know, obviously that opens up a.
Speaker 4: Can of worms for what the privacy implications looks like
Speaker 4: on the AI front as well.
Speaker 8: So has anybody been talking about her looking into any
Speaker 8: of that?
Speaker 18: Yeah, I mean I think that one of the people
Speaker 18: I spoke with, Margaret Mitchell also, she's from Hugging Face.
Speaker 18: That was something that she mentioned to me. And it's
Speaker 18: something that as like as a reporter, but also as
Speaker 18: a human who likes to use a lot of different
Speaker 18: technology products. I also think about a lot. When I
Speaker 18: use chat GPT myself, I try to avoid giving it
Speaker 18: any kinds of personally identifying information. And I think I've
Speaker 18: told many people the same. I just I don't feel
Speaker 18: comfortable doing that. I know that open ai reviews users conversations.
Speaker 18: You can delete your account if you don't want them
Speaker 18: to have your data, but that can take up to
Speaker 18: four weeks according to their terms of service.
Speaker 3: Doesn't this feel like all the tech CEOs are like, Yeah, no,
Speaker 3: my kids, I don't want them play with computers. Rachel
Speaker 3: says that, yeah, I don't do this. What's interesting too
Speaker 3: though in terms of data though, right, because if you
Speaker 3: put anything personal down there, that's how this all works, right,
Speaker 3: uses the data to kind of get smarter and smarter
Speaker 3: if you will.
Speaker 18: Yeah, your data is helping could help train future iterations
Speaker 18: of this.
Speaker 3: Sure, so you have to remember it's in there.
Speaker 13: It's sticky, sticky chats, you could describe it.
Speaker 18: I actually did use it myself, like a week ago
Speaker 18: to I haven't told anyone in my family this. I
Speaker 18: used it to to sort of talk through an argument,
Speaker 18: and I didn't give it any personally identifying details. I
Speaker 18: feel like you can if you spend a minute thinking
Speaker 18: about it, you.
Speaker 13: Can totally do that.
Speaker 3: Or is it helpful?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 13: Actually it was.
Speaker 4: I mean in the way that can I help you
Speaker 4: reason with a seven year old?
Speaker 13: No, I haven't tried it with anything about my kids.
Speaker 3: That's like you write it in and then like you
Speaker 3: don't get a response.
Speaker 13: We don't have enough data on that's.
Speaker 18: Yeah, it was helpful to be reflective, But you know what,
Speaker 18: Eliza might have been able to be similarly help me
Speaker 18: be similarly reflective.
Speaker 4: I don't know, right.
Speaker 8: When the answer is when did you go let it down?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 8: Why do you think that?
Speaker 3: You know, I have to I feel like this has
Speaker 3: been an interesting week. There are sixty minutes to another
Speaker 3: couple of pieces, and they were really leaning into and
Speaker 3: obviously talking to the head of Alphabet, Sundar Pichai about what.
Speaker 13: They are doing.
Speaker 3: And it's interesting, Like on Twitter, I was getting you know,
Speaker 3: I put out those pieces and people are like, wait,
Speaker 3: you know, everybody's like, oh my god, it's the end
Speaker 3: of the world. Well, how do you, as somebody who
Speaker 3: is obviously in a whole other plane when it comes
Speaker 3: to AI understanding talking to the voices who are in it,
Speaker 3: how do you see it? Because it does feel like
Speaker 3: headlines are coming at as fast and furiously, whether it's
Speaker 3: on therapy, whether it's on something else.
Speaker 18: I try to remember to take a deep breath and like, honestly,
Speaker 18: like just kind of okay, and let's kind of look
Speaker 18: at the reality of what these things can do. On
Speaker 18: the one hand, we have AI systems that are increasingly
Speaker 18: powerful and can do some really interesting things, or perhaps
Speaker 18: in the near future, could do some really interesting things.
Speaker 18: Various cool medical applications like helping detect certain kinds of cancer.
Speaker 18: Things like that I think many people can agree are great.
Speaker 18: On the other hand, there's a lot of things we
Speaker 18: need to keep an eye out for and some harms
Speaker 18: that are already here. I don't think that this is
Speaker 18: agi artificial general intelligence.
Speaker 13: We are not there.
Speaker 18: And also a lot of these things aren't an inevitability.
Speaker 3: I think we have to or official general intelligence, like
Speaker 3: creating up stuff like creating another Jeel, creating another me
Speaker 3: kind of thing.
Speaker 18: No, that's not happening.
Speaker 3: Okay, that's okay, Okay, No.
Speaker 18: I think I think a lot of it is trying
Speaker 18: to keep into respective where are we which is still
Speaker 18: this is still early days, even though AI in various
Speaker 18: forms has existed for many decades.
Speaker 4: At this point, where else are you interested in watching
Speaker 4: chet GBT go into and sort of you know, maybe
Speaker 4: let's say disrupt That word.
Speaker 18: Disrupt interesting, I mean it has it has a bit
Speaker 18: of a honesty problem. We we need systems like this
Speaker 18: that can be a little bit more reliable as far
Speaker 18: as you ask it a question and you get an
Speaker 18: answer that you then don't have to spend a really
Speaker 18: long time like confirming checking yeah, And that gets harder
Speaker 18: as if you're wanting right, Yeah, well yeah, if you're googling,
Speaker 18: and if you're asking a complicated question, you might have
Speaker 18: a whole bunch of different things. Then that you're like, okay.
Speaker 18: If you're asking it for like a list of things,
Speaker 18: for instance, then you're like, okay, I have to run
Speaker 18: down everything on this list to make sure you know
Speaker 18: it's all accurate. So if we can get in that direction,
Speaker 18: I think it could be really interesting for maybe there's
Speaker 18: some interesting finance applications.
Speaker 8: I love that it lies.
Speaker 13: It's sometimes that's useful, though, you.
Speaker 18: Are I am just a simple as.
Speaker 3: It's a fascinating world and we are all obsessed with
Speaker 3: it and obsessed with you and really your take on
Speaker 3: it and reporting. So thank you so much. Rachel Metz.
Speaker 3: She's aar reporter here at Bloomberg News in our interactive
Speaker 3: Brokers studio along with the editor of Bloomberg Business Week,
Speaker 3: Jill Weber. This story talk therapy, entering the era of chatbots.
Speaker 3: It's going to be the new issue of Bloomberg Business Week,
Speaker 3: add on newsstands, online already at Bloomberg dot Cossage business
Speaker 3: Week and of course on the Bloomberg terminal. Check it out.
Speaker 3: This is Bloomberg.
Speaker 1: You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us
Speaker 1: live weekdays from two to five pm Easter on Bloomberg Radio,
Speaker 1: the Bloomberg Business app and you too. You can also
Speaker 1: listen live to our flagship New York station, Just say
Speaker 1: Alexa play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Speaker 3: I'm Carol Master, along with Madison Mills, who's in for
Speaker 3: Tim Well. A new issue of Bloomberg Business Week is out,
Speaker 3: so too, of course, is the Pursuit section, devoted to
Speaker 3: all things that can bring us bliss, like burnout retreats.
Speaker 9: And also the best cameras to use for all of
Speaker 9: us would be influencers, and New York's most exclusive new restaurant,
Speaker 9: Amex's Black Card members only club.
Speaker 3: Weeah, good luck getting in unless you have a black cart.
Speaker 14: All right.
Speaker 3: The Pursuit section and team, led by the editor Pursuits
Speaker 3: Chris Rouser. All right, Chris, let's get to the opener though,
Speaker 3: of the section. Burnout retreats apparently the hot new thing,
Speaker 3: and Maddy and I were like reading through this and saying, yeah.
Speaker 8: Let's go.
Speaker 19: Yeah.
Speaker 20: So the trend here is that really high end spas
Speaker 20: and rehab clinics are now hosting treatments just for burnout,
Speaker 20: which is when you're at your wits end with work,
Speaker 20: cortisol levels in your body are really high. It's beginning
Speaker 20: to affect your health.
Speaker 3: It's an actual science thing, right, like medical thing.
Speaker 20: And people since the pandemic started, people have been complaining
Speaker 20: about it a lot more and a lot of these
Speaker 20: are expensive. So you know, more than three quarters of
Speaker 20: white collar workers told Deloitte last March they were suffering
Speaker 20: from burnout and have said they regularly felt physical and
Speaker 20: mentally exhausted. And fifty nine percent of Americans overall have
Speaker 20: feelings of burnout, because let's be honest, we all feel burnout.
Speaker 3: And yeah, you know, raise your hands if you're a
Speaker 3: burned out brands up here.
Speaker 20: Yeah, and so there are. You know, these spas and
Speaker 20: places are sort of taking after the like drug and
Speaker 20: alcohol rehab programs, which is like you need to unplug
Speaker 20: from your life completely. You need to stop, we need
Speaker 20: to do some medical treatment. You need to basically have
Speaker 20: someone tell you what to do all day so you
Speaker 20: don't have to make any decisions and you can really
Speaker 20: take time off.
Speaker 3: So it's more than a spot. It's not about getting
Speaker 3: a massage right.
Speaker 20: Right, No, it's it's definitely a lot more. There's a
Speaker 20: lot of medical treatments, a lot of Eastern medicine treatments
Speaker 20: and and and some of them are in very nice
Speaker 20: places if you can afford it, like the Four Seasons
Speaker 20: sense A.
Speaker 1: In Hawaii.
Speaker 3: You're talking about Larry Ellison's by.
Speaker 20: Larry's Allison's Island exactly, and you can there, you can
Speaker 20: do a thirty day sabbatical package, which is just like
Speaker 20: it's a mega month of They start off with a
Speaker 20: thermographic scan to find asymmetries, muscle stress pain points, and
Speaker 20: then they go from there and it costs twenty five
Speaker 20: thousand dollars for a month.
Speaker 3: It is for a month. Come on, that's really that's
Speaker 3: a lot.
Speaker 9: Yeah, what's the best one that we could afford?
Speaker 20: Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, so one of
Speaker 20: the things about like being like, Okay, you're burned out,
Speaker 20: you need to do a burnout retreat. It's an extreme
Speaker 20: luxury even to be able, Yeah, to like check out
Speaker 20: for a week, let alone a month, which is like
Speaker 20: who can honestly, who can do that? That's like a
Speaker 20: real luxury. At the Raffles in London, They have a
Speaker 20: training program where it's almost kind of like a check
Speaker 20: in every day or once a week with a trainer
Speaker 20: who you go in, they do some tests, they tell you,
Speaker 20: you know, what workout to do, or even maybe okay,
Speaker 20: you know you're really stressed out today, don't work out,
Speaker 20: that's just going to add to your your cortisol levels.
Speaker 20: Let's do some mindfulness, let's do some other treatments. Let's
Speaker 20: let's do what you need right now. And getting these
Speaker 20: practices into your life going forward is really how you're
Speaker 20: going to fix burnout. Like everybody, Studies show that, like
Speaker 20: a vacation is great, but then when you get back
Speaker 20: from the vacation, within three weeks, you're back to where
Speaker 20: you were before. And a lot of these places are
Speaker 20: going to teach you mindfulness techniques. Also, you know, there's
Speaker 20: life coaching to help you reorganize your life, figure out
Speaker 20: how to get some of these things off your plate.
Speaker 15: All that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love that. There Also there's one place, I
Speaker 3: guess looking into holding events on yachts in Croatia this fall.
Speaker 20: Yeah, you know a lot of this is for white
Speaker 20: collar wipe out of it can be some of it
Speaker 20: can be used by you know anyone that a thing
Speaker 20: white color.
Speaker 1: We made it up.
Speaker 20: It's a thing that we wanted, a T shirt.
Speaker 3: I wanted t shirt. It's really fascinating. I have to
Speaker 3: say this week on the Week in so we have
Speaker 3: two segments these burnout retreats and then we have another
Speaker 3: segment on microstresses. So yeah, I mean you can feel
Speaker 3: it hear I feel like we hear it with all
Speaker 3: of our colleagues constantly. Part of I think what's stressing
Speaker 3: us out? Like where shall we go? Where shall we go?
Speaker 3: The cameras influencers use. I think it's interesting that I
Speaker 3: feel like there's this constant pressure on us to also
Speaker 3: do things out on social media, but you do get
Speaker 3: to the right cameras to use right.
Speaker 20: Yes, there's a lot of pressure to make content, especially
Speaker 20: among young people. And you know, one of the interesting
Speaker 20: trends among younger people who are just who are on
Speaker 20: social media or creating content is they want to use
Speaker 20: kind of a camera that feels like analog. There's really
Speaker 20: a wave of people buying cameras that have analog features.
Speaker 20: So like a lens that you hold you can twist knobs, dials,
Speaker 20: different lenses that you can exchange which takes a lot
Speaker 20: of training for people who are just used to pointing
Speaker 20: and clicking with the phone. But the Fujifilm X one
Speaker 20: hundred V was sort of sort of blew up on
Speaker 20: TikTok last November and the company had to stop on
Speaker 20: orders because so many people wanted to get the camera
Speaker 20: that the influencers were using. And it's it normally costs
Speaker 20: like fourteen hundred dollars and now you have to get
Speaker 20: it on the secondary market. It's like twice sixth mounts.
Speaker 9: Everyone has one and they're bringing it out to like
Speaker 9: the have you seen them out everybody? Seriously, all of
Speaker 9: my friends have one. I'm such a loser for not
Speaker 9: having one, Like I need to get on it, Chris.
Speaker 3: But it is interesting with like I noticed with a
Speaker 3: younger generation or like my daughter, like they all want
Speaker 3: to go back to like older cameras or like the disposed,
Speaker 3: Like it's just interesting, like they're off their phone.
Speaker 20: That's true, and you know exactly, someone runs around a
Speaker 20: party with a Polaroid and like everybody loves it. And
Speaker 20: it also feels grown up to own a camera. It's
Speaker 20: like a lot of times people's first adult purchase. But
Speaker 20: Sony and some of the other cameras companies that make
Speaker 20: these also say like it helps that they're cute, you
Speaker 20: know the look. They're fun to like to carry around.
Speaker 3: If you want to be grown up by an end table.
Speaker 3: We don't have time for this story, but check it out.
Speaker 20: Yes, the end table is the best supporting actor in
Speaker 20: a room. Sometimes it's your favorite character. Don't forget about them.
Speaker 3: There's one that actually looks like a character. Because we
Speaker 3: have to get to this story about the American Express
Speaker 3: is impossible to book a new clubhouse in New York City.
Speaker 20: Tell us about it, so you know how. American Express
Speaker 20: has the Centurion Card otherwise known as the Black Card,
Speaker 20: which is an invitation only card. It's for a very
Speaker 20: high spend annual spend fees. And they opened a restaurant
Speaker 20: on the fifty fifth floor of one Vanderbilt Tower, which
Speaker 20: is right by Grand Central, And it's a restaurant in
Speaker 20: sort of lounge area and it's only accessible to Centurion
Speaker 20: card holders and a small number of reservations that you
Speaker 20: can get through Rezi, which is also owned by American Express.
Speaker 20: The chef is Daniel ballude I rode the elevator up
Speaker 20: with Daniel Ballud and you get to the fifty fifth
Speaker 20: floor and the views are bananas. They're insane because there's
Speaker 20: not a lot of restaurants in Midtown that are at
Speaker 20: a high level. You can go to the top of
Speaker 20: the rock, you can go to the Rainbow Room, and
Speaker 20: that's sort of it. Like offices are that high. So
Speaker 20: you're just not used to being like looking out the
Speaker 20: window at the arches of the Chrysler Building like eye
Speaker 20: to eye, and then you know, all way downtown and
Speaker 20: then all the way.
Speaker 1: Up the park.
Speaker 20: So the food, the food is great, but really you're
Speaker 20: you feel like you're in a really special place. And
Speaker 20: it's been it's been full of cardholders like they've been.
Speaker 20: They've been doing really well with reservations. We've been checking
Speaker 20: to see if you can get in on Rezi and
Speaker 20: we have not seen any tables, but they say you can.
Speaker 3: I just want to know, did you wear a navy
Speaker 3: or linen blazer?
Speaker 20: So Nikki and Justin on our team went and when
Speaker 20: they did the review that's in the section they went
Speaker 20: before I did, and they were looking around and they
Speaker 20: were like, wow, it's really like a lot of dudes
Speaker 20: with expensive watches in like sort of electric blue suits. Okay,
Speaker 20: when I went, I will say it was not it
Speaker 20: was more. It was just a real mix of people.
Speaker 20: It was definitely a mix of people who like work
Speaker 20: hard for a living and then people who like don't
Speaker 20: maybe don't work for a living. It was good, it
Speaker 20: was great. I had a burger like a Waggu burger,
Speaker 20: which was good. They did a Wagu tartar at the
Speaker 20: table where they bring the cart and they mix it up,
Speaker 20: which was There was this lobster pasta which was completely unbelievable. Yeah,
Speaker 20: the food is in standing blue. It's like you can't miss.
Speaker 3: What did it cost? And I know if you have
Speaker 3: to ask.
Speaker 8: It's like the use.
Speaker 20: When they first opened, there were no prices on the menu,
Speaker 20: but there were when.
Speaker 1: I was there.
Speaker 20: It wasn't crazy, Like the burger was twenty eight dollars,
Speaker 20: which is not nothing, but for New York that's not bad.
Speaker 20: And then they kind of went up to like fifty
Speaker 20: sixty dollars for the entrees, and then at dinner it's
Speaker 20: a price like a fixed price menu, and that it's
Speaker 20: more expensive.
Speaker 3: All right, do we have a spring nos? I know, Yeah,
Speaker 3: what's what's up?
Speaker 20: It was like getting into Fortnite.
Speaker 3: I tell you, Daniel can probably get you away just
Speaker 3: real quickly. Laser show. I love any like these equipment
Speaker 3: that you can get home.
Speaker 20: Well, the Lima laser is like the kind of laser
Speaker 20: treatment that you would go to a dermatologist and get. Yeah,
Speaker 20: and it it sparks regeneration and builds protein in your skin.
Speaker 20: Basically cues your skin to like regenerate like from fresh
Speaker 20: and Hannah Elliott, who you guys know, tested it out.
Speaker 20: You use it every day for fifteen minutes, which is onerous.
Speaker 20: Her skin looks incredible. Really, She and I are both
Speaker 20: like skin people and we talk about it all the time.
Speaker 20: And she lives in La She came back to New
Speaker 20: York after a couple months of using this and I
Speaker 20: was like, oh my god, Hannah.
Speaker 1: This is it.
Speaker 3: So are you using it now?
Speaker 20: Well it's twenty seven hundred dollars so no, and you
Speaker 20: already want the story. Hannah has the sample, but it's legit.
Speaker 20: It really works, and needs to give it to loaned
Speaker 20: around the office.
Speaker 8: That's right, to be.
Speaker 3: Fair, to be fair, another great section, So much fun, Chris,
Speaker 3: Thank you, we really appreciate it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, we feel like you have the coolest job in
Speaker 9: the world. Chris, also known as the editor of Bloomberg
Speaker 9: pursuits Chris Rouser.
Speaker 1: You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Podcast. Catch us
Speaker 1: live weekdays from two to five pm Eastern.
Speaker 11: On Bloomberg Radio, the Bloomberg Business App, and you too.
Speaker 1: You can also listen live to our flagship New York station,
Speaker 1: Just Say Alexa play Bloomberg You Love Them thirty.
Speaker 3: It does seem like the stress is starting to ease,
Speaker 3: certainly how investors see it based on what we are
Speaker 3: getting from the big thanks and more importantly from those regionals.
Speaker 3: And our next guest knows a lot about stress, writes
Speaker 3: about it in a new book. Karen Dylan is editorial
Speaker 3: director at the Family Business Advisory firm Banyan Global Family
Speaker 3: Business Advisor's former editor of the Harvard Business Review. She's
Speaker 3: got a new book out, The micro Stress Effect, How
Speaker 3: little things pile up and become big problems, and what
Speaker 3: to do about it. She is on Zoom in Boston. Karen,
Speaker 3: I feel like it's a timely topic, considering the stress
Speaker 3: that seems to come at investors on a daily basis.
Speaker 3: Having said that, tell us about the book. What are
Speaker 3: micro stresses and some of the research you did specifically
Speaker 3: for to figure it out and what we can do
Speaker 3: to manage it.
Speaker 12: Sure, I'm glad to be here.
Speaker 21: So even just listening to the pre evil before it
Speaker 21: came on is stressful. There's no questions. We're all kind
Speaker 21: of swimming in the sea of stress all the time.
Speaker 21: But what we're talking about with our research is something
Speaker 21: a little bit different that most of us don't notice.
Speaker 12: We don't even know how to talk about it.
Speaker 21: We know how to talk about stock market stress and
Speaker 21: political stress and things like that, but we don't know
Speaker 21: how to talk about what we ended up calling microstress.
Speaker 12: And this is a particular thing that we observed in.
Speaker 21: Research with high performers, where originally the research was intended
Speaker 21: to look at what did they do better than the
Speaker 21: rest of us, How do they work more effectively with
Speaker 21: other people? How do they maintain their status as high performers?
Speaker 21: And we interviewed three hundred men and women equal numbers
Speaker 21: who were dubbed high performers by their organizations to try
Speaker 21: to get at those best practices. And then early on
Speaker 21: in our research we started to notice after a bit
Speaker 21: of the veneer had gone off in the interview that
Speaker 21: little by little became clear that even these high performers
Speaker 21: were kind of barely hanging on.
Speaker 12: They were swimming on.
Speaker 21: What we ultimately called microstress, things that are so brief
Speaker 21: and so invisible to us that we barely notice them.
Speaker 12: What cumulatively they add up?
Speaker 17: And what specifically, can you give us a few examples,
Speaker 17: how does that sort of permeate in our day to
Speaker 17: day lives? Like what specifically would be an example of
Speaker 17: a microstress?
Speaker 21: Sure, so we put them in three buckets, and I
Speaker 21: think you'll relate to all three of them, but in
Speaker 21: three categories. One or microstress is that drain your personal capacity,
Speaker 21: your ability to get things done.
Speaker 12: And a really good example of that is.
Speaker 21: Having unpredictable behavior from a person in authority, a boss
Speaker 21: or a manager, not a toxic boss or a jerk,
Speaker 21: but maybe a boss who stops you in the hallway
Speaker 21: to say.
Speaker 12: He's got a new idea and are you supposed to
Speaker 12: be pursuing that or not? Are you putting other things
Speaker 12: aside or not?
Speaker 21: Just not one hundred percent always knowing what's expected of
Speaker 21: you from the person above, or having a surgeon responsibility
Speaker 21: as a worker at home. That's category one personal capacity
Speaker 21: or another one that I think most of us experience
Speaker 21: in some way, or micro stresses that deplete our emotional reserve. So,
Speaker 21: for example, if you work around people who are just
Speaker 21: always stressed out, even if you're not stressed out, the
Speaker 21: secondhand stress from them is going to affect you. Micro
Speaker 21: Stresses are things that happen in our interactions with other
Speaker 21: people that are so brief and so baked into our
Speaker 21: day that you literally barely remember them. And individually they're
Speaker 21: all manageable, but what happens is they layer up over
Speaker 21: the day, over the week, over the month, and they
Speaker 21: actually take your real big toll on you.
Speaker 3: All Right, So media can be a very stressful world
Speaker 3: because it's just the way it is. So what is
Speaker 3: the connection? And some of us thrive on it. I
Speaker 3: mean I kind of like it when it's fast and furious,
Speaker 3: but not that isn't always the case, and you can't
Speaker 3: do that for one hundred percent of the time, otherwise
Speaker 3: you're just going to kind of pass out. But having
Speaker 3: said that, what is the relationship between stress and productivity?
Speaker 3: There's got to be probably this interesting balance, right, because
Speaker 3: a little bit of stress gets the adrenaline going and
Speaker 3: can kind of in some ways maybe make you more productive.
Speaker 3: But I'm guessing too much, and that's not good.
Speaker 12: Too much of that is definitely not good.
Speaker 21: And again we started with high performers, So we started
Speaker 21: with people who were already seen widely seen as being
Speaker 21: better than the rest of us.
Speaker 12: They were just really good at doing a.
Speaker 21: Lot of work, being effective collaborators.
Speaker 12: But as we started to peel back, we realized even they.
Speaker 21: Really were almost overwhelmed by all this warm micro stress,
Speaker 21: to the point where it potentially threatened to derail their careers.
Speaker 21: What happens is you're always in reactive mode.
Speaker 12: You're always you know, you open.
Speaker 21: Your email first thing in the morning, and you're already
Speaker 21: feeling overwhelmed behind as opposed to any of us trying
Speaker 21: to shape and plant our day, and we're thinking about
Speaker 21: which balls can we get away with dropping, rather than
Speaker 21: how do I do my best work today or what
Speaker 21: do I actually want to focus on today.
Speaker 12: It makes you in a.
Speaker 21: Reactive posture rather than a proactive posture, and none of
Speaker 21: us do our best work when we're always trying to
Speaker 21: figure out again which balls can we get away with dropping?
Speaker 12: Because we can't do it all.
Speaker 17: What are the financial repercussions for letting micro stresses add up?
Speaker 21: Well, Financially, it's not good for who you are. You're
Speaker 21: not going to be at your best, most effective you are.
Speaker 21: Potentially even one of the micro stresses that we identified
Speaker 21: is pressure to pursue goals that are out of sync
Speaker 21: with your personal values.
Speaker 17: So it also career wise work that could be a
Speaker 17: detriment correct career.
Speaker 21: Correct, it could indeed, if you are always sort of
Speaker 21: pursuing what someone else's version of success is and it's
Speaker 21: never feeling comfortable to you, or it's never who you are,
Speaker 21: you're never going to thrive really in the long run.
Speaker 21: You may you may have a good run five or
Speaker 21: seven years, but at some point you're going to realize
Speaker 21: this is not who I want to be. So you're
Speaker 21: not going to be your best. You're probably career wise
Speaker 21: not going to thrive in the way that you want
Speaker 21: to thrive.
Speaker 12: And the most.
Speaker 21: Importantly of all, you're you're not gonna like who you are. Eventually,
Speaker 21: it's going to kind of either way, you just small ways.
Speaker 21: So none of us are our best when microstress is
Speaker 21: overwhelming us.
Speaker 3: And I like Karen, how you make the distinction certainly
Speaker 3: the book Between Stress, Microstress and Secondary micro Stresses thirty seconds.
Speaker 3: One piece of advice for those folks who are listening
Speaker 3: to this.
Speaker 21: One piece of advice is to actually stop and have
Speaker 21: five minute clarification conversations with the people that you work with.
Speaker 21: So many of us were moving so quickly, and we're
Speaker 21: working with ever shifting cast of characters, people who are
Speaker 21: new at colleagues and things like that. We don't know
Speaker 21: how to work together very well, and we assume things,
Speaker 21: and that can lead to all kinds of micro stresses,
Speaker 21: just misalignments or small performance misses. So literally take five
Speaker 21: minutes at the end of meetings and just clarify who, what, when,
Speaker 21: what's the next step?
Speaker 12: Don't that simple step can make a really big difference in.
Speaker 3: Your Workstrogical we do that sometimes in the newsroom where
Speaker 3: you're having conflicting stories. It's like, hey, everybody, get over
Speaker 3: here and for three minutes, let's set everything straight. K
Speaker 3: and thanks and a very timely conversation. Karen Dylan, Editorial
Speaker 3: Director and the Microstress Effect, her book.
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