Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg business Week inside from the reporters and
Speaker 1: editors who bring you America's most trusted business magazine, plus
Speaker 1: global business, finance and tech news. The Bloomberg Business Week
Speaker 1: Podcast with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck from Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: Hi, everyone, Welcome to the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week.
Speaker 2: Tim is off this week. So where to start? Yes,
Speaker 2: we could begin with how the week began and what
Speaker 2: felt like a mini market meltdown that led us to
Speaker 2: a six point four trillion dollar global equity wipeout in
Speaker 2: the span of three weeks, and a rush into shorter
Speaker 2: data treasuries in the US bond market that briefly drove
Speaker 2: yields on two year notes below those on ten year
Speaker 2: bonds for the first time in over two years, and
Speaker 2: it all led some to call for emergency rate cuts
Speaker 2: by the FED. By week's end, feels like things calm
Speaker 2: down a bit, even though I got to say early
Speaker 2: in the week we saw crypto assets sell off as well,
Speaker 2: testing the industry axiom that bitcoin is the equivalent of
Speaker 2: digital gold and therefore belongs in an asset portfolio to
Speaker 2: hedge against stock market tirations like seldom before. That wasn't
Speaker 2: quite the case. This week, as you know, we'll talk
Speaker 2: crypto though with the author of Cryptomania, plus the US
Speaker 2: presidential race it is often running full throttle now that
Speaker 2: Vice President Kamala Harris picked her running mate Minnesota Governor
Speaker 2: Tim Walls, who will together go up against the Republican
Speaker 2: ticket a former President Donald Trump and Ohio Senator JD. Vance.
Speaker 2: On that, how about going on a thought provoking journey
Speaker 2: into the heart of our democracy and the soul of
Speaker 2: our country. That trip coming up, plus working from home,
Speaker 2: back of the office, hybrid work, how work continues to shift.
Speaker 2: We talk about that with the CEO of the Workspased
Speaker 2: Network Company IWG, who is, by the way, not seeing
Speaker 2: signs of recession. If we were, we might be talking
Speaker 2: more about layoffs. On that we get into their true cost.
Speaker 2: All of that to come, We begin with a trip
Speaker 2: along the back roads of the United States known as
Speaker 2: the Lincoln Highway, taken by Frank S. Barry and his wife.
Speaker 2: Frank Berry is a Bloomberg opinion columnist and a member
Speaker 2: of the editorial board covering national affairs. Full disclosure. He
Speaker 2: was chief speechwriter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg during the twenty
Speaker 2: twenty presidential campaign and in New York City Hall Michael Bloomberg,
Speaker 2: of course, the founder of Bloomberg LP, home to Bloomberg
Speaker 2: Radio and Bloomberg Broadcast, and of course of Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Speaker 2: Frank Berry's mission of wandering America to understand what binds
Speaker 2: our country together despite the great political divide is all
Speaker 2: in his new book, Back Roads and Better Angels, a
Speaker 2: Journey into the Heart of American Democracy. He spoke about
Speaker 2: his journey with Bloomberg's Matt Miller and me met in
Speaker 2: for my co host Tim Stenevik, who was off this week.
Speaker 3: Back in twenty sixteen, when the country seemed to be
Speaker 3: coming a part of the seams. I was looking for
Speaker 3: a different way into the story that everybody was talking about,
Speaker 3: which is what's happening and why is the country so divided?
Speaker 3: And I wanted to go exploring what holds the country together.
Speaker 3: And I stumbled across us this thing called the Lincoln Highway, which,
Speaker 3: as it turns out, starts here in New York in
Speaker 3: Times Square and runs all the way across the country
Speaker 3: to San Francisco. And it was the first road to
Speaker 3: connect the two coasts. It was dedicated in nineteen thirteen,
Speaker 3: and so I thought, what better way to explore what
Speaker 3: holds the country together than by channeling the spirit of
Speaker 3: Lincoln and driving this road. Now, it didn't happen because
Speaker 3: life got in the way, but the pandemic came along
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty, and my wife and I realized this
Speaker 3: was our opportunities now or never.
Speaker 2: Was it snap judgment, no problem? Your wife said, yep,
Speaker 2: I'm in.
Speaker 3: It took a little work, It wasn't quite that quick,
Speaker 3: but she was all in and it did happen really quickly.
Speaker 3: We had never driven an RV before, and so we
Speaker 3: had to move quickly, and.
Speaker 2: Twenty five feet twenty seventeen Winnebago exactly.
Speaker 3: We decided it was the biggest RV we wanted to
Speaker 3: drive and the smallest RV we wanted to live in.
Speaker 3: But it had everything we needed. A bed, a kitchen,
Speaker 3: a bathroom, and off we went.
Speaker 4: So you made some interesting stops. I mean, obviously you
Speaker 4: had a job to do. You weren't just driving and
Speaker 4: sight seeing, That's right. You wanted to stop and talk
Speaker 4: too important people. How did you choose, you know, with
Speaker 4: whom you would speak and you know, how do you
Speaker 4: set up I feel like you had to have a
Speaker 4: tour manager in order to organize everything.
Speaker 3: I wish I had had a tour manager. It was
Speaker 3: very much happening on the fly. I didn't have a
Speaker 3: lot of time to put it together. But I wanted
Speaker 3: to talk with people who would represent a cross section
Speaker 3: of the country, people from all different backgrounds and working
Speaker 3: all different types of jobs in different industries. And I
Speaker 3: wanted to talk with people who had interesting stories to
Speaker 3: tell that would represent what I was after, which was
Speaker 3: this better sense of what holds us together. And so
Speaker 3: in some cases the people we spoke with, of course
Speaker 3: it was just spontaneous people we met along the way
Speaker 3: always you know, interested to hear those stories. But I
Speaker 3: also would reach out to people before we arrived in
Speaker 3: town and ask, you know, do you have to time
Speaker 3: to sit down. Sometimes it was a civic leader, sometimes
Speaker 3: as a business leader. Sometimes it was a farmer, sometimes
Speaker 3: it was an activist. And the good thing about the pandemic,
Speaker 3: the extent there was a good thing is people had
Speaker 3: more time on their hands. Everyone's schedule was interrupted, and
Speaker 3: people were really generous with their time.
Speaker 2: We found it just kind of once everybody got up
Speaker 2: and running and being on air and working from our homes.
Speaker 2: Everybody was accessible because everybody was home.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 2: I do want to ask you your first interview who
Speaker 2: that was, And I also want to even take one
Speaker 2: more step back. Why the Lincoln Highway.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the Lincoln Highway to me represented a it
Speaker 3: was a hopeful idea in nineteen thirteen, when there was
Speaker 3: no road across the country. It was a way to
Speaker 3: stitch the country together, a way to encourage more people
Speaker 3: to see more of the country. I think that's still
Speaker 3: something that we need more of today a time when
Speaker 3: we talk about flyover country. The Lincoln Highway was kind
Speaker 3: of the original idea of combating the notion of flyover country.
Speaker 3: And so we left on September eleventh from New York City, and.
Speaker 6: We did.
Speaker 3: We did because having lived in New York on September eleventh,
Speaker 3: it's impossible not to carry with you the spirit, I think,
Speaker 3: the spirit of unity that we all felt in the
Speaker 3: in the aftermath, and so that's what I wanted to
Speaker 3: take with us and to try to try to channel.
Speaker 3: And so my first interview on September eleventh was actually
Speaker 3: with the Mayor of Jersey City Steve Pullip, who was
Speaker 3: downtown as I was.
Speaker 2: My home city, right very far.
Speaker 7: We didn't get very far at all. Yeah, started square y'.
Speaker 3: Stop here first, first stop. Yeah, and we stopped. There's
Speaker 3: a Lincoln statue in Jersey City, a great one.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 3: And so I had a great conversation with him about
Speaker 3: his nine to eleventh story. He was working downtown as
Speaker 3: I was on that day. He ended up joining the Marines,
Speaker 3: and he talked about you know, his and from there
Speaker 3: and what led him to end up running for office.
Speaker 4: So what about when you actually get into fly over country,
Speaker 4: because you're still a long way from Jersey City, Okay,
Speaker 4: I meaneah.
Speaker 7: Even got to the newer Camport.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so like when you get to the real America,
Speaker 4: it's all real. Who were you talking to in the heartland.
Speaker 3: Though, well as people from all different walks of life
Speaker 3: and so, you know, the heartland also includes Chicago. The
Speaker 3: Lincoln Highway runs through big cities and small towns. But
Speaker 3: in Ohio I spoke with a farmer, Chris Gibbs, who
Speaker 3: had a real interesting story. Friend of mine introduced me
Speaker 3: to him. He was a lifelong Republican, very active in
Speaker 3: Republican Party politics, grew disillusioned with the party under Trump,
Speaker 3: decided to become an independent, and in doing that he
Speaker 3: found something happened he didn't expect, which is he lost
Speaker 3: most of his friends. And that was a really tough
Speaker 3: story to hear, but it was representative of how person
Speaker 3: and all politics has become, I think, and a lot
Speaker 3: of people have a version of that, where we've lost
Speaker 3: friendships over that. The good news of his story is
Speaker 3: he didn't give up. He decided to become an independent,
Speaker 3: and as it turns out, the Democratic Party asked him
Speaker 3: to chair the local county Party committee and he's now
Speaker 3: doing that.
Speaker 4: I'm just trying to get to the other side, because
Speaker 4: you know, we're here in New York. When we put
Speaker 4: together a two sided panel, neither one likes Trump.
Speaker 7: Right, when you talked.
Speaker 4: To a Republican, you're talking to one who doesn't support Trump.
Speaker 4: But yet half the country does support Trump. And I
Speaker 4: imagine you left this you know, bubble in order to
Speaker 4: get in touch with that other half to find out
Speaker 4: what these hillbilly elergy people were all about. So did
Speaker 4: you run into any.
Speaker 3: Well, of course, yeah, of course we did. Lots of
Speaker 3: Trump supporters and saw Trump signs all along the route,
Speaker 3: lots of them. But my purpose was not to try
Speaker 3: to explain other people to readers. Right, This was not
Speaker 3: hillbilly elogy. I wasn't trying to do that. I was
Speaker 3: trying to let people speak about their own experiences in
Speaker 3: ways that would remind us of what holds us together.
Speaker 3: And So to give you one example of a Trump supporter,
Speaker 3: really strong Trump supporter, I spoke with two husband and
Speaker 3: wife out in Arizona. When we made it to the
Speaker 3: end of the Lincoln Highway. We kept going two ranchers
Speaker 3: and they talked about how difficult life had been for
Speaker 3: them under the Obama administration because of a change in
Speaker 3: an EPA rule and the difficulty they were facing because
Speaker 3: of an EPA rule that would require them to fence
Speaker 3: their ranchers. It's open range, require them to fence their road,
Speaker 3: and it would have cost two million dollars one point
Speaker 3: six million. I said, one point six million dollars to
Speaker 3: put a fence up, and he said, well, you know,
Speaker 3: I could do it for sixty thousand dollars, but because
Speaker 3: of federal regulations, it would cost me one point six million.
Speaker 2: Did you find most people were willing to talk.
Speaker 6: Absolutely.
Speaker 3: In fact, almost no one said I don't want to talk, right,
Speaker 3: I don't have time. People were really forthcoming and welcoming.
Speaker 2: Oh go ahead.
Speaker 4: Well no, I'm just I'm curious about the and a
Speaker 4: edgo side of it, because I would love to do that.
Speaker 7: Also, I've never driven an r V.
Speaker 2: We'll talk about when you first got it, where you
Speaker 2: had to go to was it Tennessee?
Speaker 4: Where'd you go to pick it out?
Speaker 3: So we uh what we bought it used and a
Speaker 3: woman in Florida was kind enough to drive it halfway.
Speaker 3: So I met her in North Carolina, Carolina, picked it up,
Speaker 3: had no idea what I was doing, got in the
Speaker 3: driver's seat, feared that I had bit off more than
Speaker 3: I could chew, and kind of did. But at that
Speaker 3: point it's too late, and so we drove it back
Speaker 3: to New York and then off we went. But yeah,
Speaker 3: neither of was my wife nor I had driven an
Speaker 3: RV before. We had never lived in an RV on a.
Speaker 7: Street in the city.
Speaker 3: Well, we brought it up state for a few days
Speaker 3: and then and then we brought it back into the city.
Speaker 3: But no, I never actually, in fact, we walked the
Speaker 3: first mile of the Lincoln Highway from Times Square to
Speaker 3: the River, and then we got a ferry and picked up.
Speaker 7: A smart move.
Speaker 4: Yeah, took two months to get across across the country.
Speaker 3: We did, I mean that way, yes, to get to
Speaker 3: San Francisco. We arrived on election day or on election
Speaker 3: day eve.
Speaker 4: And what was that like?
Speaker 3: Well, it was crazy because San Francisco was empty downtown.
Speaker 3: It was being boarded up as we pulled in, because
Speaker 3: there was a real fear of election day or election
Speaker 3: night violence if the results went the wrong quote wrong way.
Speaker 3: And so that was really disturbing to see in a
Speaker 3: trip that was exploring democracy to being a city where
Speaker 3: there was a fear of violence at the end of
Speaker 3: an election. That's something that I had never seen in
Speaker 3: my life.
Speaker 2: We're a young country, a young democracy, right, We've definitely
Speaker 2: seen our moments of strife. We've had a civil war.
Speaker 2: After talking to people, do you have more hope?
Speaker 7: A lot?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I came away really optimistic actually and full with hope,
Speaker 3: partly because that's what I heard from people. When you know,
Speaker 3: there was a lot of frustration. I'd hear from both
Speaker 3: Democrats and Republicans about how divided we were. But in
Speaker 3: the end, most people expressed hope.
Speaker 7: That we would get through it.
Speaker 3: They weren't always able to articulate exactly why, but there
Speaker 3: was this that we would get through it because that's
Speaker 3: what we do. And actually, there's a lot of history
Speaker 3: in the book, but that's probably the most historically accurate
Speaker 3: assessment that you could make, because we've been through so
Speaker 3: much as a country, even though relatively young, so much
Speaker 3: violence and division, civil war being the worst of it,
Speaker 3: but plenty of other episodes too. But we found ways
Speaker 3: to get through it. And part of the story of
Speaker 3: the book is highlighting those ways, the kind of the
Speaker 3: values that have led us out of the dark times.
Speaker 3: And I think the more we can recognize that we've
Speaker 3: been through versions of what we're experiencing today, the more
Speaker 3: kind of hope and faith we will have that we
Speaker 3: can get through it.
Speaker 7: Are there any prescriptions?
Speaker 4: I mean, hopefully we don't have to get to a
Speaker 4: civil war before we can reset. Right, How should we
Speaker 4: deal with this division?
Speaker 3: Well, there's a lot I think that we can learn
Speaker 3: from Lincoln, and that's why he's the perfect guide for
Speaker 3: the trip. And so one thing to keep in mind is,
Speaker 3: you know, Lincoln in the eighteen fifties, as the country
Speaker 3: was heading towards Civil War, said of white Southerners, they
Speaker 3: were just They are just as we would be if
Speaker 3: we were in their situation. Now, Lincoln abhorred slavery, thought
Speaker 3: of it as a moral abomination, but here he was
Speaker 3: speaking about Southerners and their support for slavery with no judgment.
Speaker 3: And I think that is something that we can learn
Speaker 3: from because today there's so much judgment about the other
Speaker 3: side and so much kind of quickness to decide that
Speaker 3: the other side is not just wrong, but they're evil.
Speaker 3: And I think the more that we can recognize that
Speaker 3: we're shaped by our circumstances and that different points of
Speaker 3: view can still hold valid perspectives, to not assume that
Speaker 3: we are entirely correct, that others have valid viewpoints, the
Speaker 3: more that we can try to hold the whole thing together.
Speaker 2: Frank, do you think it's just Donald Trump so that
Speaker 2: if he is no longer you know, a part of
Speaker 2: the GOP or guiding or leading the GOP, do things change.
Speaker 2: I mean, you saw people as you drove, and it
Speaker 2: was off the beaten path, right, sometimes it was dirt roads.
Speaker 2: And one of the things that we often talk about
Speaker 2: is the struggles that a lot of Americans feel that. Yep,
Speaker 2: we've got a stock market that sometimes is hitting records
Speaker 2: or we've seen it, and yet that's not main street.
Speaker 2: And so I wonder if it's something deeper in the
Speaker 2: fabric right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's definitely deeper. It just doesn't all go away.
Speaker 3: The division doesn't all go away if Trump goes away.
Speaker 3: I definitely believe it or runs much deeper than that.
Speaker 3: And that's why we've got to be able to recognize
Speaker 3: what can get us through it, because it's not just
Speaker 3: defeating it's not defeating Donald Trump. It's not waiting for
Speaker 3: him to leave the political scene. The forces that are
Speaker 3: dividing the country right now, and you see it anytime
Speaker 3: you pick up social media. You see it on your phone,
Speaker 3: but you hear it in conversations, and you sense it
Speaker 3: in people's anxiety.
Speaker 5: All of that is.
Speaker 3: Going to be with us, and it really requires leaders
Speaker 3: to tap into, as say in the book, the better
Speaker 3: Angels of our Nature. It's a Lincoln phrase, but it
Speaker 3: does require leadership that reminds us of the best of
Speaker 3: America and the best of our values, and to recognize
Speaker 3: when leaders are trying to exploit the worst in us
Speaker 3: and to tap into our fears and hatred.
Speaker 7: Well, and I guess we have to be open as well.
Speaker 4: You know, when I think about the problems on the left,
Speaker 4: you've got the sort of cancel culture and sort of
Speaker 4: this gas lighting censorship. I'm sure a lot of people
Speaker 4: on the right feel that they can't speak or be
Speaker 4: heard because they're not allowed to say how they feel.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I couldn't agree more and that's something I speak
Speaker 3: with people in the book about that that also is
Speaker 3: a threat to democracy, and sometimes democrats fall into the
Speaker 3: trap of thinking that threats only exist on the right,
Speaker 3: and that's wrong. They exist on the left too, and
Speaker 3: that censorship that you're talking about is a big part
Speaker 3: of it. And I heard that from people in different
Speaker 3: parts of our journey, the fear of speaking their minds,
Speaker 3: and a lot of times that fear was on the
Speaker 3: left because of either you know, facing personal or professional
Speaker 3: repercussions for stating their opinion. That's a really unhealthy thing
Speaker 3: in a democratic society if people feel afraid to express
Speaker 3: an opinion.
Speaker 2: Does academia make it worse? I used to think about
Speaker 2: one of our producers said, you know, that's what colleges,
Speaker 2: you say stupid things and then you learn and we
Speaker 2: don't do that anymore, or if you do, the penalties
Speaker 2: are incredible.
Speaker 7: Yeah they're talking about professors or students.
Speaker 2: About both, but you know what I'm saying, Like.
Speaker 3: It was further capable of saying, Yeah, college should be
Speaker 3: a place where you make mistakes and learn and grow.
Speaker 3: But also any community should have a level of forgiveness
Speaker 3: and understanding that we're not going to see things differently.
Speaker 3: And the desire to shame and punish people for being
Speaker 3: on what someone uses the wrong side of an issue
Speaker 3: is really counterproductive to a civil, democratic society.
Speaker 2: Your last person, we've only got about forty seconds. Did
Speaker 2: you think long and hard about who the last person
Speaker 2: you wanted to speak to?
Speaker 3: Well, as it happens, the trip we went across the
Speaker 3: country and back, we ended up the Lincoln Memorial, And
Speaker 3: so I had an old friend hadn't spoken to him
Speaker 3: many years. Sergeant Mike Roccarty is a Capitol police officer.
Speaker 3: He was on duty on January sixth, and so I
Speaker 3: spoke to him about his day. He's a conservative Republican,
Speaker 3: and he relayed the events of that day and how
Speaker 3: harrowing and dangerous and how much worse it almost was.
Speaker 3: And that was a really powerful thing to hear from him,
Speaker 3: and so that helps to conclude the story.
Speaker 2: Frank Berry is a Bloomberg opinion columnist. His book Back
Speaker 2: Roads and Better Angels, a journey into the heart of
Speaker 2: American democracy. Coming up the demand for office space with
Speaker 2: the CEO of IWG and what it really costs when
Speaker 2: a company lays off workers. You're listening to Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
Speaker 2: This is Bloomberg.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Theloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live
Speaker 1: weekday afternoons from two to five pm. Easter Listen on
Speaker 1: Apple car Play and then Bright Auto with a Bloomberg
Speaker 1: Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
Speaker 2: London based International Workplace Group or IWG, said it swung
Speaker 2: to a pre tax profit for the first half as
Speaker 2: revenue group and backed guidance for the year as it
Speaker 2: entered the second half with good momentum. The ADRs that
Speaker 2: trade in the US rallied on the news. We wanted
Speaker 2: to hear more, especially with so much talk this past
Speaker 2: week about a US labor market slow down. We spoke
Speaker 2: with the founder and CEO of the London based office
Speaker 2: provider Mark Dixon. Matt Miller joining me on this conversation
Speaker 2: as well. He's in for Tim. Talk us little bit
Speaker 2: about the environment, what you're seeing in a day where
Speaker 2: we're trying to figure out the way forward after a
Speaker 2: global market selloff.
Speaker 9: We operate in more than one hundred and twenty countries,
Speaker 9: about half of that businesses in the US. The economy
Speaker 9: has been difficult for a while, but we haven't seen
Speaker 9: the any markets globally deteriorating unless the places of extreme
Speaker 9: geopolitical pressure at the moment, so you know, demand is
Speaker 9: are more companies move into hybrid and as we said today,
Speaker 9: good momentum going into the second half. So we're normally
Speaker 9: an early indicator. We're not seeing anything yet.
Speaker 7: I mean, you have correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 4: Formerly, I think people know the Regis brand really well.
Speaker 4: You have office space in places where people actually still
Speaker 4: want to use it, right, I just remember the last
Speaker 4: time we talked, it's like.
Speaker 7: You're not You're not You're.
Speaker 4: Not loaded with you know, midtown Manhattan, Third Avenue offices.
Speaker 7: It's more like closer to where people live. Isn't that
Speaker 7: the case?
Speaker 9: Absolutely right? Well, look, we we have a huge operating platform,
Speaker 9: is used by eight million people. It's you know, now
Speaker 9: coming up for four thousand buildings a million rooms that
Speaker 9: we operate. You know, this is a sizeable operation exactly
Speaker 9: as you say. You know, we do supply offices by
Speaker 9: the way in all over Downtown, Midtown, Manhattan, Downtown, et cetera,
Speaker 9: et cetera. But we also supply customers all over New Jersey,
Speaker 9: all over Connecticut, all over New York State, and all
Speaker 9: across the country. You know, we a US business is
Speaker 9: about twelve hundred locations and it's it's it's growing at
Speaker 9: about a thirty percent growth rate each year as more
Speaker 9: and more people move to hybrid work, in particular in
Speaker 9: the suburbs.
Speaker 4: Wow, what kind of investment do you have to make there?
Speaker 4: Because it's not just like buying a building and you know,
Speaker 4: putting in carpeting. You've got to conform to the way
Speaker 4: we work. You know, I'm imagining a lot of wiring,
Speaker 4: a lot of Wi Fi. How capital intensive is the business?
Speaker 9: Well, look, we're opening one thousand new buildings a year approximately,
Speaker 9: but we do not make the investments. We're you know,
Speaker 9: we're similar to Marriott or Hiat or Hilton, and we
Speaker 9: operate these things on behalf of landlord partners investor partners
Speaker 9: that actually own the buildings. So we are an operator,
Speaker 9: you know, we're not the funder, so you know. But
Speaker 9: in answer to your question, it costs about a million
Speaker 9: bucks for an average sized center one to two million.
Speaker 9: You know, we can build them in about nine weeks
Speaker 9: and trade them pretty quickly anywhere in the country, such
Speaker 9: as the demand for hybrid working and look, most importantly,
Speaker 9: it gives owners who whether they're in the suburbs or
Speaker 9: in downtown locations, it gives them new income that they
Speaker 9: weren't touching before. New income which basically is coming from
Speaker 9: a productization of real estate, you know, turning it from
Speaker 9: what was difficult and CAPEX heavy into op X and
Speaker 9: cash like for customers.
Speaker 2: Mark, what can you tell us though here we are,
Speaker 2: what four years out from the start of the global pandemic,
Speaker 2: and I'm thinking about just here in the US specifically,
Speaker 2: since you said about more than half of your businesses
Speaker 2: here in the United States, how has in terms of
Speaker 2: the working from home or the hybrid mix, how has
Speaker 2: it evolved? How has it changed?
Speaker 9: It's sort of evolving fast as fast as real estate
Speaker 9: will let it. Remember, you've got to back drop, people
Speaker 9: already have commitments to real estate, so it takes time
Speaker 9: for them to heed those commitments. Number one, number two.
Speaker 9: Pretty much all corporations are either adopting or reviewing the
Speaker 9: adoption of hybrid working to some degree. You know, just
Speaker 9: if you look at what we supply and of our
Speaker 9: eight million customers today, about a million we support working
Speaker 9: from home, and more of that percentage in the US
Speaker 9: as corporations basically use technology. Basically your office is now
Speaker 9: run by Microsoftice. It's not in sort of real estate
Speaker 9: in Manhattan or anywhere in the country. You know, companies
Speaker 9: more and more moving to working on a platform that is,
Speaker 9: you know, providing space wherever people need it as opposed
Speaker 9: to bringing them into central offices wherever they may be
Speaker 9: and getting people together. So it's much cheaper, it's half
Speaker 9: the price. It's opics only, there's no capex, it's super flexible,
Speaker 9: it's a business tool. The companies are adopting because it
Speaker 9: makes sense, and of course it's very popular with workers.
Speaker 9: You know, they don't really want to be forced to
Speaker 9: commute exactly now.
Speaker 4: I was just thinking about that. We've had this horrible
Speaker 4: story about New Jersey Transit. It stranding passengers for three
Speaker 4: hours in the tunnel with no air conditioning, electricity, and
Speaker 4: that would just make you not want to go from Chatham,
Speaker 4: New Jersey into the city to work every day. So
Speaker 4: I'd much rather, you know, go to a regis or
Speaker 4: an IWG office space in short hills.
Speaker 7: I don't know where they are, But do you find
Speaker 7: a lot of that?
Speaker 4: Do you find a lot of people who say, do
Speaker 4: you find a lot of a big growth in that
Speaker 4: customer who no longer wants to commet into the city
Speaker 4: but wants to go to an office near her house.
Speaker 9: The key thing here, Matt is they no longer need
Speaker 9: to be going to that downtown location or wherever it
Speaker 9: may be in the country. The technology allows them to
Speaker 9: work from anywhere, so they can work from home. But
Speaker 9: a lot of people are much more productive working from
Speaker 9: an office with less distractions. But they want that office
Speaker 9: to be down the road, walkable, cyclable, short drive. Well
Speaker 9: they don't want to do is waste an hour two
Speaker 9: hours a day going backwards and forwards accompanied by their
Speaker 9: laptop to use a laptop in another place. It just
Speaker 9: doesn't make sense in a tech enabled world.
Speaker 2: Mark you know, you guys can do single spaces. You
Speaker 2: can do offices for small teams, for large teams, you
Speaker 2: can be headquarters right for different folks. I am curious,
Speaker 2: what's the bulk of your business? Is it short term durations,
Speaker 2: is it longer term? Is it large teams? What is it?
Speaker 9: We do everything from hourly, daily in a monthly yearly.
Speaker 9: Long term contract for us would be two or three years.
Speaker 9: In terms of numbers of people, about forty percent of
Speaker 9: our business is individuals. These are individual professionals, individual entrepreneurs
Speaker 9: that all over the world, millions of them. It really
Speaker 9: works for them and they're they're very sticky in the
Speaker 9: sort of bedrock of our business. About forty percent are
Speaker 9: very large companies who would would have larger implementations. I
Speaker 9: mean these are you know, up to one hundred two
Speaker 9: hundred thousand people from a company that would be dropping
Speaker 9: in and using. And then in the middle we've got SMEs,
Speaker 9: you know, smaller medium companies that you know use us
Speaker 9: because of the flexibility and so on. So it's a
Speaker 9: vast range. Remember eight million users, we've got a range
Speaker 9: of everyone, and look the number keeps growing. It's a
Speaker 9: very attractive economic way to do things. Both for building
Speaker 9: owner partners and for our customers, and it's very popular
Speaker 9: with the workers themselves. Everyone's a winner in this. That's
Speaker 9: why it's got such momentum.
Speaker 2: Just ten fifteen seconds forgive the squeeze Mark. But so
Speaker 2: nothing in it that says to you recession, people slowing
Speaker 2: down on hiring or anything that any clues there not.
Speaker 10: That we're seeing.
Speaker 9: Look, a lot of companies are looking to save money,
Speaker 9: but that's been going on for a while because of
Speaker 9: the cost. But no, we're not seeing anything in any
Speaker 9: of our markets.
Speaker 2: That was Mark Dixon, founder and CEO of the Office
Speaker 2: Provider IWG, also known as International Workplace Group. Well. Another
Speaker 2: work related story that was among the most read on
Speaker 2: the Bloomberg this past week came from BusinessWeek and our
Speaker 2: workshift team about the true cost of layoffs, because when
Speaker 2: companies cut staff, they don't just have to pay severance,
Speaker 2: but face other expenses that haven't been fully calculated until now.
Speaker 2: Matthew Boyle, Bloomberg News Senior Management and workplace reporter, filled
Speaker 2: in Matt Miller and me on the data collected and
Speaker 2: what it showed and why he did this story.
Speaker 5: Ca I mean I started work on this story six
Speaker 5: months ago.
Speaker 2: You did.
Speaker 5: Yeah, when layoffs were come, I mean layoffs, when have
Speaker 5: they not been you know, coming hot and heavy, and
Speaker 5: just with Intel recently and.
Speaker 10: Dell as well.
Speaker 5: But you see all these pressure releases, You read the
Speaker 5: memos from the CEOs, you know, streamlining efficiency, blah blah blah.
Speaker 5: And then the SEC filing goes out and they say
Speaker 5: we are taking a charge of X million for Severn.
Speaker 5: So I'm like, okay, it's got to be more to
Speaker 5: it than that, right, what's the true cost of a layoff?
Speaker 5: Because I've been laid off and we've you know, either
Speaker 5: you've been laid off or you've done a layoff. I
Speaker 5: think all of our listeners are falling to one of
Speaker 5: those two categories. And you see what happens to the survivors,
Speaker 5: the people who are still there. You know, they're like
Speaker 5: zombies at times. They're worried about another layoff coming. They
Speaker 5: now have to do the work of two or three people.
Speaker 5: So you know, your engagement goes down, your morale goes down.
Speaker 5: You're kind of looking at the door like maybe I
Speaker 5: should be down the street taking a job somewhere else.
Speaker 7: Yeah, a lot of the other people because we know.
Speaker 5: So we know that output declines. We know that quitting
Speaker 5: goes up, but how much does this actually cost? We
Speaker 5: just kind of see these as like intangibles, like, well,
Speaker 5: it happens, but you know, we had to do this.
Speaker 5: So I'm like, somebody must put some numbers behind this.
Speaker 5: So I dug around and finally found you know, I
Speaker 5: found an actuary at the Department of Labor. I found
Speaker 5: academics who have studied this. I've found a guy who
Speaker 5: studied two hundred layoffs and figured out how much did
Speaker 5: the quitting rate increase after.
Speaker 4: Let's step back and first look at just the direct costs,
Speaker 4: because you're talking about the whole ball of wax, right,
Speaker 4: But you lead your story with the Facebook firings. And
Speaker 4: I knew a couple of young people that Facebook brought
Speaker 4: over here from Europe to work and then almost all
Speaker 4: of a sudden, laid them off and sent them right back.
Speaker 4: They had great packages, and the whole thing was almost
Speaker 4: a billion dollars right to lay off eleven thousand employees.
Speaker 4: That's like eighty eight thousand dollars a person. So that's
Speaker 4: just the severance, right.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So I looked at their filing and they said, well,
Speaker 5: you know, after we nine hundred and seventy five million
Speaker 5: or whatever it was in severance. But it's not material
Speaker 5: because they were big saving all this money. We know,
Speaker 5: we don't think give any of these people bonuses next year,
Speaker 5: and we're saving this or that, and I'm like, you know,
Speaker 5: there's got to be again more to it than that.
Speaker 5: So but all we really know is how much they
Speaker 5: take in the charge for severance, which will cover you know,
Speaker 5: two week salary, health care, continuation, outplacement, you know, help
Speaker 5: with your resume. But again, the costs of a layoff
Speaker 5: goes so.
Speaker 4: One of the biggest indirect costs, like you've got to
Speaker 4: bring in I guess Bain or mckensey to make you
Speaker 4: feel better about it first, right, so you got.
Speaker 5: Another cost, another cost. Yeah, there you go. No, Matt
Speaker 5: Boyle will do it for you. So the biggest ones
Speaker 5: are reduced productivity. Output goes down. So I went to
Speaker 5: a called Active Track and like other firms, so they're
Speaker 5: one of the biggest ones. They track employee activity. Now
Speaker 5: we've all heard about you know, they're watching your hours
Speaker 5: or surveiling you and all these stories about employee surveillance.
Speaker 5: But employers do want to know, you know, what you
Speaker 5: are doing on the company time. So this company was
Speaker 5: able to track pre and post layoff productivity at seven
Speaker 5: anonymous firms. Obviously I don't know who they are, but
Speaker 5: we saw exactly what happened to productivity and who's usually
Speaker 5: about an hour a day less productive, So that's eighteen
Speaker 5: hours a month turns out to be, you know, for
Speaker 5: every what is it every ten thousand sorry, for a
Speaker 5: company with one hundred employees, that means more than fifty
Speaker 5: thousand dollars lost in productivity every month until it finally
Speaker 5: reverts to normal, usually after six months, but sometimes, you know,
Speaker 5: not six months. So that's one of the big ones.
Speaker 5: Another one is increased quitting. People are worried about their
Speaker 5: own job and so people start, so you have an
Speaker 5: increase in what's called voluntary attrition quitting. Now, companies always
Speaker 5: have a level of attrition. Normally, it's usually about nineteen percent.
Speaker 5: So usually you are replacing nineteen percent of your people
Speaker 5: just because they found something better in general, but when
Speaker 5: you do a layoff, your voluntary attrition can go up
Speaker 5: by fifty percent.
Speaker 2: That's a lot.
Speaker 5: That is a lot, yes.
Speaker 2: Well, and I feel like on the other side of that,
Speaker 2: like if you need those workers that are leaving.
Speaker 10: Now, those are the ones you want to keep exactly.
Speaker 2: That to bring them in, to recruit them, then to
Speaker 2: retrain them, that's again another cost.
Speaker 5: Yes, a, those are people you didn't want to lose
Speaker 5: in the first place. They're not the people you laid off.
Speaker 5: Then you have to train, recruit and train their replacements.
Speaker 5: So all that has a massive cost. And you're able
Speaker 5: and I was able to determine it. So you take
Speaker 5: and you know that, you take a normal turnover rate,
Speaker 5: you figure out how much it costs to replace the
Speaker 5: people you lose, the increased incremental quits as I was
Speaker 5: calling it, because it usually costs about one point two
Speaker 5: five x to replace a lost worker. So if you
Speaker 5: take let's say sixty five thousand average salary in the US,
Speaker 5: you know that's over eighty thousand dollars to replace them.
Speaker 5: Multiply that by the incremental quits, and for at a
Speaker 5: ten thousand person company, you know you're talking about seventy
Speaker 5: five million dollars that you were not thinking you were
Speaker 5: going to spend to replace all these people.
Speaker 2: I have to say, you sound like an accountant. I'm
Speaker 2: kind of loving this.
Speaker 5: I'm a history major. So no, this was all new
Speaker 5: to me, but you know it's pop. I had people
Speaker 5: walking me through the mass saying, yeah, that sounds right,
Speaker 5: but like, you know, I wish I could do it
Speaker 5: for like a particular company, you know, getting inside their books.
Speaker 5: That wasn't going to happen. So I just had to
Speaker 5: sort of guesstimate and do backup here that does exactly. Hey, Meta,
Speaker 5: why don't you tell me what you you have?
Speaker 4: Also, you know, obviously we all pay unemployment insurance tax
Speaker 4: at the company pace that and because when you fire,
Speaker 4: when Meta fires eleven thousand people, a lot of them
Speaker 4: are going to go on unemployment and start collecting money
Speaker 4: from the state. We all pay for that collectively. But
Speaker 4: it turns out the state wants a little bit more
Speaker 4: from a company that people the next year, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I filed that under boring but important. Of course,
Speaker 5: your unemployment insurance rate is going to go off because
Speaker 5: you just put some people on unemployment. So guess what.
Speaker 5: So there, I've spent weeks finding out finding this guy
Speaker 5: who used to be an actuary for the Department of Labor,
Speaker 5: who was so tired of getting that question from people,
Speaker 5: how much is my UI in rate.
Speaker 10: Going to go up.
Speaker 5: He built his own calculator to figure it out because
Speaker 5: a varies state by state, and all these laws and
Speaker 5: the formulation for it goes all the way back to
Speaker 5: nineteen thirty five, and different states do it different ways.
Speaker 5: Long story short, you know, this guy actually put a
Speaker 5: calculator together. So I said, hey, what if you're a
Speaker 5: Texas company and you lay off ten percent of your
Speaker 5: work for us? He's like, oh, just plug it in. Boom,
Speaker 5: there you go. Your unemployment insurance is going to go
Speaker 5: up by such and such a million dollars a year.
Speaker 7: So that's another one.
Speaker 5: Then there's the lawyers. Let's not forget the lawyers. You've
Speaker 5: got to hire lawyers to make sure you don't get
Speaker 5: laid off and if you sorry, if you don't get sued,
Speaker 5: and you will do get sued, and you probably might
Speaker 5: get sued, but it might be a big, massive, ugly
Speaker 5: class action lawsuit, or it could just be one person
Speaker 5: who's like, how dare you type of thing. But you
Speaker 5: have to analyze the demographics of the people you plant
Speaker 5: to lay off to make sure that no one group
Speaker 5: is disproportionately hurt.
Speaker 2: That's Matt Boyle Bloomberg News Senior Management and workplace reporter.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week. Coming up. There are
Speaker 2: lots and lots and lots of books written about the good,
Speaker 2: the bad, and the ugly of the crypto world. As
Speaker 2: we continue to digest the hype, hope, and the fall
Speaker 2: of cryptos, once Almighty King, that story is coming up next.
Speaker 2: This is Bloomberg.
Speaker 1: You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Listen live
Speaker 1: each weekday starting at two pm Eastern on applecar Play
Speaker 1: and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. You can
Speaker 1: also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New
Speaker 1: York station. Just say Alexa Play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Speaker 2: The crypto acids sell off this past week tested big
Speaker 2: time the thinking that bitcoin is the equivalent of digital
Speaker 2: gold and therefore belongs in an acid portfolio to hedge
Speaker 2: against dock market gyrations. What safe haven you might even ask?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 2: As equity sank on Monday and carry trades unraveled, Bitcoin
Speaker 2: behaved more like stocks than gold, at one point tumbling
Speaker 2: seventeen percent to below fifty thousand dollars before recouping some losses.
Speaker 2: Its correlation with the precious metal turn negative in July
Speaker 2: according to Bloomberg Data, and so yes, we continue to
Speaker 2: rethink the world of crypto and try to understand the
Speaker 2: way forward. Writing about it in a new book out
Speaker 2: this past week, Andrew Chow, correspondent for Time Magazine, his
Speaker 2: book Cryptomania, Hype, Hope, and the Fall of Ftx's billion
Speaker 2: dollar Fintech Empire. There are lots of books out there
Speaker 2: about the world of crypto, about FTX, about the good,
Speaker 2: the bad, the ugly, and really still a lot about
Speaker 2: the promise of crypto. What did you want to write
Speaker 2: about and why?
Speaker 5: Absolutely?
Speaker 11: I think my book starts with the sort of utopian
Speaker 11: promises of crypto and the ideals forged out of the
Speaker 11: two thousand and eight financial crash, wanting to build a fair,
Speaker 11: decentralized global financial system that would work for everybody, and
Speaker 11: then seeing how that idea took hold in the minds
Speaker 11: of so many people over the pandemic and then took
Speaker 11: their wallets and then became a system that perhaps was
Speaker 11: even more predatory for the time being than what its
Speaker 11: backers had hoped. So that's sort of what my book traces.
Speaker 4: If they'd stuck to the original premise A bitcoin, it
Speaker 4: would have gloss their wallets, right because one of the
Speaker 4: key one of the key issues is that you own
Speaker 4: your own crypto. You don't let it sit on an
Speaker 4: FTX platform for example.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 11: Yeah, it's so funny to see these centralized platforms exchanges
Speaker 11: really take rise and kind of dominate the industry. Even now,
Speaker 11: it seems like at least over five percent of all
Speaker 11: crypto is sitting in coinbase accounts. Last year, finance had
Speaker 11: an even bigger share, and FTX as well. I mean
Speaker 11: back when it existed, the huge share of the market
Speaker 11: for people taking their money and trusting it with somebody else.
Speaker 11: The whole idea of crypto is that it's trustless, that
Speaker 11: you know it's there because it's sitting on the blockchain.
Speaker 11: You can see.
Speaker 4: You don't need somebody else, not that there is a yeah,
Speaker 4: don't share your private key.
Speaker 11: Not your key is not your crypto. You know. The
Speaker 11: whole point is not trusting anybody and being able to
Speaker 11: access this decentralized money anytime you want. And how the
Speaker 11: industry has formed has just been around these centralized systems
Speaker 11: that work better because you know, they built out the
Speaker 11: technology and the ux to allow people to use.
Speaker 4: Do you differentiate between bitcoin and the other? I mean,
Speaker 4: how many other coins are there two thousand, five thousand
Speaker 4: other coins out there? You do you make that differentiation
Speaker 4: or do you see it?
Speaker 11: Quite a lot of my book is about Ethereum and
Speaker 11: the dream of metallic beauty and it's founder to create
Speaker 11: a system that is like a this layer of the
Speaker 11: Internet that rests upon blackchain. It's not just about money
Speaker 11: or digital gold. It's about the how blackchain potentially facilitate
Speaker 11: these fair systems in all sorts of ways, and how
Speaker 11: then Ethereum and its ecosystem mostly became a giant casino.
Speaker 11: So I think, you know, there are a lot of
Speaker 11: really interesting projects out there. I think a lot of
Speaker 11: their narratives haven't really stood the test of time. Slonas
Speaker 11: went down and the come up Ethereum still and then
Speaker 11: there's a whole bunch that.
Speaker 4: But do you agree with I mean, having studied this
Speaker 4: for so long and then written a book about it,
Speaker 4: you know, staking versus proof of.
Speaker 11: Work, Yes, well, proof of work is obviously as takes
Speaker 11: a huge amount of energy, Yes, exactly, It's supposed to
Speaker 11: be incredibly energy intensive so that it's hard to hack
Speaker 11: into I was actually where your money, where your mouth is,
Speaker 11: you know, I was in Texas. There's a town that's
Speaker 11: being impacted because it's sitting next to a bitcoin mine,
Speaker 11: a proof of work mine, and the noise from the
Speaker 11: mind is driving people crazy. So I think it's also
Speaker 11: important that we remember that there these are it's on
Speaker 11: a blockchain, but these are physical technologies, and they're in
Speaker 11: the world, and they're impacting people in different ways.
Speaker 2: You know, you talk about narratives around the crypto world.
Speaker 2: How has it changed in a good way or a
Speaker 2: bad way?
Speaker 11: In a good way is interesting framing there. I think
Speaker 11: at the beginning of where my book starts.
Speaker 2: A smarter way like more educated if you will.
Speaker 11: In twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, there was all this
Speaker 11: hope of crypto revolutionizing all these different parts of society.
Speaker 11: I don't know if you've heard of the concept of dows,
Speaker 11: where they were going to revolutionize how the corporation may
Speaker 11: make corporate voting fair, or you know, voting blockchain in
Speaker 11: city councils, keeping medical records on the blockchain. They are
Speaker 11: all these sort of applications that we're supposed to write
Speaker 11: to happen. It seems like now, the narrative has really
Speaker 11: been dominated lately by just the idea of number go up,
Speaker 11: the idea that bitcoin is digital gold, and that it's
Speaker 11: going to appreciate and value the more that people believe
Speaker 11: in it. It's running on momentum and the ideology around it,
Speaker 11: and from where I'm sitting, a lot of the other
Speaker 11: sort of ideals of the blockchain being able to transform
Speaker 11: and form a bedrock for different parts of society have
Speaker 11: not materialized yet.
Speaker 4: What happened to the decentralized what's now decentralized autonomous organization?
Speaker 7: There was so much hope for them.
Speaker 4: I remember talking to like my veterinarians assistant and he
Speaker 4: was all hyped up, and it's such a fascinating concept,
Speaker 4: but I haven't heard anything about it in two years.
Speaker 11: Yes, exactly. A lot of them just sort of became
Speaker 11: investment clubs of healthy crypto people being able to pool
Speaker 11: their money and then put them into other investments that
Speaker 11: went up and then crashed alongside the market. And it
Speaker 11: turned out the voting systems within dows were just as
Speaker 11: flawed as you know, a board vote in which a
Speaker 11: lot of these doos had a sort of one token,
Speaker 11: one vote system. So the whales, the people who owned
Speaker 11: the most tokens, had had an inordinate amount of sway
Speaker 11: in these organizations. So it's not like they were fair
Speaker 11: or a better voting system or a way to run
Speaker 11: anything from what I saw.
Speaker 4: So the bottom line is your outlook for crypto is
Speaker 4: not optimistic.
Speaker 11: It's funny because the belief system around crypto has grown
Speaker 11: so strong that you know, there's so many people who
Speaker 11: are there's so many outright critics, and then people like
Speaker 11: me who were just trying to point to the flaws
Speaker 11: or the divide between what the promises are and what's
Speaker 11: been delivered so far. That's basically because everybody's sort of like, well,
Speaker 11: you can't like stop pointing out the bad, But I'm
Speaker 11: a reporter. What can I do but exactly chronicle what
Speaker 11: has happened in the world, And I want to show
Speaker 11: that there were all these lofty promises of creating financial systems,
Speaker 11: global financial systems that were better than the status quo,
Speaker 11: and I don't think they've materialized yet. That's not to
Speaker 11: say that it couldn't happen.
Speaker 2: In the future. Sbf FTX rightfully, So you write a
Speaker 2: lot about him. Kind of the rapid rise and fall.
Speaker 2: It feels like it's an unbelievable story. It's one you
Speaker 2: really written for the big screen. But having said that,
Speaker 2: did we need to kind of go through it to
Speaker 2: kind of look at the crypto world in a different light?
Speaker 2: Do we need to see something like that?
Speaker 11: I think that's a really interesting question and interesting stupid
Speaker 11: or interesting?
Speaker 12: No?
Speaker 11: I think I think most crypto people would argue like, no,
Speaker 11: we did not need to go through that. If he
Speaker 11: hadn't been around, then we would be well on our
Speaker 11: way to the moon. I think he revealed a lot
Speaker 11: about the way the crypto industry works and the way
Speaker 11: that the power vacuum, this decentral space can give rise
Speaker 11: to very powerful people who want to use the space
Speaker 11: for their own ends. I think it's important to remember
Speaker 11: that Sam Bengminfree did not come into crypto as an
Speaker 11: idealist or believing anything about the way that bitcoin was
Speaker 11: going to revolutionize global finance. He simply saw an arbitrage
Speaker 11: opportunity that he had learned, you know, on Wall Street,
Speaker 11: and saw that it was orders of magnitude more successful
Speaker 11: in crypto than it had been at Jane Street Capital.
Speaker 11: So he comes in and then he realizes that because
Speaker 11: of all the differences between the markets, he could make
Speaker 11: an absolute amazing amount of money, and then he is
Speaker 11: going to chase that to its logical end.
Speaker 4: But he had no idea, it seems, how to run
Speaker 4: a business. He had no concern for any of the
Speaker 4: bureaucratic side of it, the back office.
Speaker 7: The admin.
Speaker 4: He did it all wrong, and it seems I feel
Speaker 4: sort of sorry for him because it seems like he
Speaker 4: sort of fell into this mistake and he was clearly
Speaker 4: making it on purpose. But he should have been better advised.
Speaker 4: He wasn't twenty six. He's thirty two actually, but to
Speaker 4: me still seems pretty young. Okay, but to spend twenty
Speaker 4: five years in prison.
Speaker 2: But still, although I also felt how many people followed
Speaker 2: really smart financial types who kind of put him up
Speaker 2: on a pedestal, right, Like you think about everybody who
Speaker 2: chased him and wanted to talk to him, and you.
Speaker 4: Know, yes, maybe a question.
Speaker 5: All of us.
Speaker 11: I think he was incredibly huboristic, so I think his
Speaker 11: arrogance is sort of key here. He believed that he
Speaker 11: knew better than a lot of people.
Speaker 2: You're Silicon Valley, right, like ooh, somebody bright like on
Speaker 2: a different level brilliant exactly.
Speaker 11: And when it comes to the sort of checks and
Speaker 11: balances you were talking about, he would always talk about like, oh,
Speaker 11: I want my company lean. I think you know, having
Speaker 11: like a board would slow me down. He really believed
Speaker 11: in himself and his ability to revolutionize like the way
Speaker 11: that a crypto business should run. He was the most
Speaker 11: he was the least risk of person you'll ever meet.
Speaker 11: So he really he loved risk. He embraced it. He
Speaker 11: was taking all sorts of leverage and that was his
Speaker 11: whole game was to get as leveraged as possible and
Speaker 11: borrow as much money as possible to plow into risky
Speaker 11: trades that could then net him an enormous, enormous amount
Speaker 11: of money. And when you do that, you know, if
Speaker 11: you chase that forever, it's going to come back to
Speaker 11: buy you.
Speaker 4: I've always thought, you know, the coins in crypto don't
Speaker 4: seem to have much more value beyond the speculative nature
Speaker 4: of you know, invest in investing or gambling, but the
Speaker 4: underlying technology seems to hold so much promise. Blockchain technology.
Speaker 4: You see banks experimenting with it, You hear about the
Speaker 4: value of a decentralized ledger, do you think there's any
Speaker 4: future for that technology.
Speaker 11: My book really explores this sort of dichotomy which I
Speaker 11: cast and it's as like sort of the battle for
Speaker 11: crypto's soul, which is very simplistic, but a nice sort
Speaker 11: of framing device between these two of Metallic Beater and
Speaker 11: the founder of Ethereum on one hand, who wants to
Speaker 11: build these elegant blockchain systems and believes that they can
Speaker 11: supercharge so many different things, and then Sam on the
Speaker 11: other hand, who's just basically playing with meme coins. It's
Speaker 11: important to remember that Sam created a whole sort of
Speaker 11: genre of meme coins that people jokingly called the Sam
Speaker 11: coins that he used to prop up his own business.
Speaker 11: So creating his own coin called FTT, withholding most of it,
Speaker 11: putting it on the market, buying it back, instructing its
Speaker 11: traders and never let it fall below a dollar and
Speaker 11: so that and then letting people borrow off of it,
Speaker 11: So creating this enormous house of cards through meme coins.
Speaker 11: And we've seen how meme coins have been sort of
Speaker 11: one of the driving factors of this bull run of people,
Speaker 11: even like the Trump coins and stuff like that, and
Speaker 11: really getting away like the heart of crypto inside, you know,
Speaker 11: sort of meme coin mania and getting away from vitallics
Speaker 11: ideals that blockchains can be used for all sorts of
Speaker 11: useful things.
Speaker 4: How weird is it that we have doge coin on
Speaker 4: the Bloomberg terminal type croyp go and you see our
Speaker 4: crypto homepage. Right, we're serious business for renal institutional investors
Speaker 4: and we have a joke dog coin on here and
Speaker 4: we track it every second. Right, No, you're right, so strange.
Speaker 2: It gives it a huge level of credibility. Our thanks
Speaker 2: to Andrew Chow. He's correspondent for Time Magazine. He's the
Speaker 2: author of Cryptomania, Hype Hope and the Fall of Ftx's
Speaker 2: billion dollar Fintech Empire, his book out now. Well. That
Speaker 2: wraps up our first hour of the weekend edition of
Speaker 2: Bloomberg Business Week from Bloomberg radio Head. In our next hour,
Speaker 2: Rivian's founder and CEO on the VW partnership following a
Speaker 2: quarterly update that led to a stock selloff, plus what
Speaker 2: it really is like to drive Rivian's second generation SUV,
Speaker 2: the R one S. Plus two former financial folks on
Speaker 2: season three of their HBO series Industry, which kicks off
Speaker 2: this weekend, and for all you math haters out there,
Speaker 2: we have the simple path to loving math. Yes it
Speaker 2: can be done. This is Bloomberg Business Week. I'm Carol Masser.
Speaker 2: Stay with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines
Speaker 2: are coming up.
Speaker 1: Right now, you're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast.
Speaker 1: Catch us live weekday afternoons from two to five pm
Speaker 1: Easter Listen on Apple, card Play and ed Bright Auto
Speaker 1: with a Bloomberg Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
Speaker 2: Plenty ahead in our second hour of the weekend edition
Speaker 2: of Bloomberg Business Week, Tim is off Bloomberg' Matt Miller
Speaker 2: joining me in our chats this week, including one about
Speaker 2: Rivian's founder and CEO on the VW partnership, and the
Speaker 2: good and the bad of the second generation Rivian suv.
Speaker 2: Also art imitating life in the HBO series Industry, the
Speaker 2: co creators are back on season three plus, cracking the
Speaker 2: Numerous Sea Code. For everyone who has ever thought they
Speaker 2: were bad at math, turns out you don't need to
Speaker 2: be a prodigy. First up, one of the few pure
Speaker 2: play electric vehicle makers in the US, second only to
Speaker 2: Tesla when it comes to ev output, that is still
Speaker 2: struggling though to get production levels up. We're talking about
Speaker 2: Rivian and the stock sold off on the news following
Speaker 2: its latest quarterly update as it stuck to a full
Speaker 2: year vehicle production target unchanged from last year. Rivian CEO
Speaker 2: expects output to grow in twenty twenty five, even with
Speaker 2: a plant shutdown looming. Here's Matt Miller joining me this week,
Speaker 2: sebbing in for Tim. Matt kicking it off with his
Speaker 2: take on Rivian's business.
Speaker 4: If you're a new company, right and you make an
Speaker 4: exciting new product, investors want to see growth. They want
Speaker 4: to see your production double sales only rows three point
Speaker 4: three percent. That's a problem that OURBA scarac.
Speaker 2: Hashowher outputs coming next year though they did.
Speaker 4: Say yeah, they said that. But the plans for the
Speaker 4: future look good. They're supposed to build a new factory
Speaker 4: in Georgia. They got a five billion dollar injection from
Speaker 4: folk Schwagen. They are building a new factory in South Carolina.
Speaker 4: So at some point you expect production to pick up.
Speaker 4: I wonder, though, how how good the vehicle is.
Speaker 2: All right, we're going to talk about that, but you
Speaker 2: actually caught up with the chairman and CEO Rivian and
Speaker 2: the founder a little bit earlier on Bloomberg TV. Here's
Speaker 2: what he had to say.
Speaker 13: The Volkswagen partnership is something we're really excited about. But
Speaker 13: the focus of this is around our leveraging our network architecture,
Speaker 13: our topology of computers, the pology of electronic ConTroll and
Speaker 13: is the EC used in the vehicle, and then of
Speaker 13: course our software stack. It does open the door to
Speaker 13: other types of partnership and activities we could be doing
Speaker 13: with Volkswagen Group, but to date, the core focus and
Speaker 13: the singular focus is around our software and electronics technology.
Speaker 4: So he's saying that because I asked him if Volkswagen
Speaker 4: was going to basically rebody a Rivian to make the Scout.
Speaker 4: You know, they bought the Scout brand and they're going
Speaker 4: to revive that awesome old truck, or if you know,
Speaker 4: maybe Volkswagen would be able to make given them more
Speaker 4: production with their South Carolina factory. So I wanted to
Speaker 4: know more about that partnership. So does Hannah Elliott, my
Speaker 4: partner in Hot Pursuit of their partner, Yes, my other
Speaker 4: partner in my podcast Hot Pursuit, and.
Speaker 7: She has actually driven the Rivian. I have not.
Speaker 4: She's driven too. She joins us now from Los Angeles. Hannah,
Speaker 4: you drove I think a couple of years ago, the
Speaker 4: pickup truck version of the Rivan, the R one T.
Speaker 4: Now they've made improvements to I guess what, the powertrain
Speaker 4: and the software, and they have given you a new
Speaker 4: R one S to test out.
Speaker 7: What do you think about their products?
Speaker 8: Yeah, this is the R one S, the second generation,
Speaker 8: and in a word, better, It's better, definitely. The technology
Speaker 8: is more seamless, we have a lot more luxury options,
Speaker 8: like a glass roof that you can make go dark
Speaker 8: if you want. We've got heated and ventilated front seats.
Speaker 8: We have actually better driving controls and ride handling, even
Speaker 8: though I still think that can be improved. So in short,
Speaker 8: it's better. I don't think it's a perfect product yet,
Speaker 8: and it is really expensive. The R one S that
Speaker 8: I drove was about one hundred thousand dollars and that's
Speaker 8: actually not the top of the line. That was closer
Speaker 8: to the entry level side. So yeah, it's getting better.
Speaker 8: I would say it's getting better. A good foil for
Speaker 8: those who don't want to buy a Tesla.
Speaker 2: Maybe interesting. I gotta say it looks like a kind
Speaker 2: of a land rover meets suburban with cartoon eyes on
Speaker 2: it as I love it as its lights in the front.
Speaker 2: That's what it looks like to me, Like you could
Speaker 2: put this right a little bit.
Speaker 4: Well, it's got a signature look because with other models, right,
Speaker 4: and they all kind of have that signature completely.
Speaker 8: Of course, we have the truck, the R one T truck,
Speaker 8: We've got the R one S which is the suv.
Speaker 8: We've got the R two promised and coming. So it's
Speaker 8: kind of you know, Rivian has decided that maybe they
Speaker 8: could be a foil for Tesla. That's you know what.
Speaker 8: The cyber truck is very polarizing in its looks, and
Speaker 8: the Model X has these goaling doors that really grab attention.
Speaker 8: So yeah, Rivian is kind of going maybe for a
Speaker 8: more quiet luxury like Patagonia wearing style, which I think
Speaker 8: is smart. You know, they're cultivating their own buyers.
Speaker 5: It makes sense.
Speaker 2: Does it matter though, unless I mean unless they can
Speaker 2: produce more does it really matter? Like you know what
Speaker 2: I mean, it's really cool to see what they're doing,
Speaker 2: but don't they have to make more cars?
Speaker 8: Yeah, they really need to make more cars. We already
Speaker 8: know that they're pausing production in some of their factories. Unfortunately,
Speaker 8: they're dealing with supply chain issues. You know, of the
Speaker 8: four models that you can pre order of the R
Speaker 8: one s right now online, only half of them or
Speaker 8: a fewer are even being delivered.
Speaker 2: Only the dual motor.
Speaker 8: We're waiting for a try motor and a quad motor,
Speaker 8: which they're saying we'll have over a thousand horse power.
Speaker 8: So I'm really excited to test those and drive those,
Speaker 8: but they're not here yet. Now. Rivian will take your
Speaker 8: money if you want to pre order them, but it's
Speaker 8: going to be like next year at the earliest before
Speaker 8: we see really a wider range.
Speaker 2: So yeah, they need to like make more.
Speaker 4: It makes sense that the I mean, if you want
Speaker 4: an electric vehicle to fit your whole family that's made
Speaker 4: in America, but you're not like a Maga man, then
Speaker 4: you may not want to get one from Elon Musk, right.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and you know what that applies to a lot
Speaker 8: of people, especially in California. I just read a really
Speaker 8: interesting opinion piece about that. Go ahead.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so, but I wonder why it doesn't handle that well.
Speaker 4: I mean, recently, I've driven the F one fifty Lightning
Speaker 4: that has a lot of power. It's very big and heavy.
Speaker 4: It handles well. The Kia EV nine. We both like that, Hannah.
Speaker 4: It's a big family suv that handles well and is heavy.
Speaker 4: The BMWXM, even if you don't like the styling or
Speaker 4: don't really understand what BMW is doing with it. It's
Speaker 4: very heavy, but it's got this active you know, anti
Speaker 4: roll technology that keeps it flat around corners. Why can't
Speaker 4: the Rivian I mean, why don't they have the tech
Speaker 4: or the design to make it work around the corners.
Speaker 8: It's really disappointing. I mean, of course, part of it
Speaker 8: is just physics. This is a seven thousand pound suv.
Speaker 8: It's almost eighty inches tall.
Speaker 7: It's big.
Speaker 8: It's like a rolling battery. That is what it That's
Speaker 8: what it is. So some of it is just physics.
Speaker 8: But to your point, others have been able to control
Speaker 8: the role in sort of this Frankenstein lumber that I
Speaker 8: really felt in the R one s and it's it's
Speaker 8: too bad, you know, making cars as hard. If you
Speaker 8: have a company like Volkswagen that's been making vehicles for decades,
Speaker 8: they just naturally have better engineering than a company that's
Speaker 8: a startup that is coming from the tech background, so
Speaker 8: I think part of it is just experience, and Rivian
Speaker 8: is new at making cars, all right.
Speaker 2: So bottom line, did you like it?
Speaker 7: Though?
Speaker 2: I mean, I know you look outside, you look inside.
Speaker 2: I mean, did you like the ride?
Speaker 8: It doesn't drive great? No? No, A short answer, no,
Speaker 8: I give me, give me the VA give me I had.
Speaker 8: I was in an old Resto mod right after the
Speaker 8: Rivian and it just felt a lot more fun to drive.
Speaker 7: A couple other out of these.
Speaker 4: I thought the sunroof thing is cool, so they have,
Speaker 4: you know, a transparent sunroof. The touch of a button
Speaker 4: becomes opaque, which is I think interesting at least technology,
Speaker 4: but it doesn't have the kind of basic if you
Speaker 4: walk up to your car with your keyfob in your pocket,
Speaker 4: like every vehicle these days, unlocks for you, you know,
Speaker 4: and then locks when you walk away, what's the Rivian
Speaker 4: How does that operate?
Speaker 8: So this seems like a really small thing, and it
Speaker 8: kind of is because it's just an issue with unlocking
Speaker 8: the car, but it's a big thing because we have
Speaker 8: to unlock and open the door handles every time we
Speaker 8: want to use the product. And the thing is you
Speaker 8: can either download an app to unlock the vehicle, or
Speaker 8: you have to carry around a key card and sort
Speaker 8: of this plastic pouch which you wave on the door
Speaker 8: handles and then they sort of pivot out from the
Speaker 8: side of the vehicle. There's a little bit of a delay.
Speaker 8: You have to hit the car just right on the
Speaker 8: side of the cars. It's not intuitive, and the car
Speaker 8: does recognize the key, like you said, as you walk
Speaker 8: up to it. It just this technology is not solving problem.
Speaker 2: That was Bloomberg News auto columnist Hannah Elliott and co
Speaker 2: host of the Bloomberg Hot Pursuit podcast that she does
Speaker 2: with Matt miller Man, of course joining us there as well.
Speaker 2: If taking a Rivian for a test drive this week
Speaker 2: and is perhaps not your jam, how about diving into
Speaker 2: a world that is near and dear to us. The
Speaker 2: HBO series Industry has been described as a gen Z
Speaker 2: banking drama and made its debut in twenty twenty. It
Speaker 2: centers on a group of college graduates working at Pierpoint
Speaker 2: in Company, a fictional London investment bank.
Speaker 10: I got an email about a girl on your desk
Speaker 10: dealing with.
Speaker 4: Some embezzlement and a missing daddy.
Speaker 2: The press on to public face for this scandal.
Speaker 7: I wanted my friend, can you use me?
Speaker 2: Does it appall you that I have somehow managed to
Speaker 2: make it.
Speaker 7: On my own? Everyone's collateral.
Speaker 2: We hold the line, where's your stomach?
Speaker 6: I hope you all enjoy feeling your flesh sea in
Speaker 6: the hell you've created.
Speaker 2: That's from the HBO series industry. The writers and co
Speaker 2: creators Mickey Down and Conrad Ka joined Bloomberg's Matt Miller
Speaker 2: and me in studio to talk about the series now
Speaker 2: and it's third year. Did you ever think it was
Speaker 2: going to make it to season three?
Speaker 10: Of course not.
Speaker 12: No, we never think so. It was right as if
Speaker 12: we're writing the last episode. But yeah, it's a privilege.
Speaker 4: I mean, the odds, honestly in the media industry are
Speaker 4: against you getting two extensions, right, And that's a pretty
Speaker 4: amazing achievement, the.
Speaker 12: Aldo against getting season one. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's
Speaker 12: an amazing achievement. We're really happy.
Speaker 2: Well, Conrad, tell us what it's meant for you.
Speaker 6: Oh, it's tremendous. I mean, me and Mickey have known
Speaker 6: each other and we're now in our mid thirties. I
Speaker 6: know Mickey since he was eighteen, and to get this.
Speaker 6: You know, we're best friends. To get to do this
Speaker 6: on this scale has been a dream come true. And
Speaker 6: doing it with HBO, they really took a huge pun
Speaker 6: on us. We were very, very green and very inexperienced,
Speaker 6: and you can't really make TV anywhere else.
Speaker 2: Well, and I know we've talked about this. I was
Speaker 2: thinking about this all of us. I mean I sit
Speaker 2: in our makeup room or in our newsroom, like I've
Speaker 2: got an idea for a show, its epen happened. I'm
Speaker 2: still here and I'm happy to be here. But I
Speaker 2: mean you guys actually had an idea and it worked out.
Speaker 2: How did that come to be?
Speaker 12: Well, we me Mett Oxford, we went in too Charison Finance.
Speaker 12: I worked in investment banking, cornas on a trading floor.
Speaker 12: That's how the story, I mean, that's it was. It
Speaker 12: was based on our experiences originally, but we all have.
Speaker 2: Had interesting, crazy experiences that's going to have.
Speaker 4: But not like they do on the trading floor, right,
Speaker 4: I mean the trading floor is on another level. There's
Speaker 4: a story today about an i caat broker who had
Speaker 4: a client from City who could just continued to harass her,
Speaker 4: and she went to HR and said, this is a problem.
Speaker 4: The guy's making me feel uncomfortable. And her boss was like,
Speaker 4: I don't care. He brings us so many trades.
Speaker 7: Suck it up. Basically, that's not unusual.
Speaker 10: Is it.
Speaker 6: No, it feels it feels very realistic. I mean, some
Speaker 6: people say to us a criticism the show, they think
Speaker 6: it's hyper sensationalized. But we experienced you know, I worked
Speaker 6: in a trading fo for three Is it a big
Speaker 6: American bank? This is pre me too. But it still
Speaker 6: felt like a very much a hierarchical place where women
Speaker 6: were having to behave in a certain way, in a
Speaker 6: way men certainly, you know, weren't expected to be honest.
Speaker 2: Well, we'll go back to how it happened. I mean,
Speaker 2: because it's like I said, we all have great ideas,
Speaker 2: like how did you make it happen?
Speaker 12: Well, we were working with a producer called Jane Tranter,
Speaker 12: who was a big cheese at the BBC before setting
Speaker 12: up her own studio, and we were doing something totally
Speaker 12: different for her, and then she asked. She basically discovered
Speaker 12: that we were two ex bankers, and she said, did
Speaker 12: you ever want to write about this world? And we
Speaker 12: had written about it we'd written a really bad script
Speaker 12: about it, basically based on our own experiences, and it
Speaker 12: was incredibly boring and formless, but it was a script
Speaker 12: about finance, and the way that we opened up is
Speaker 12: obviously there's loads of depictions of finance we all know
Speaker 12: and love, but that always from the top down. There
Speaker 12: was about the people who have the most power in
Speaker 12: the industry. So our way of going through it was
Speaker 12: the new lens was to go through the people who
Speaker 12: have the least amount of power, people going to the
Speaker 12: job for the first time, which was reflective of our experience.
Speaker 4: And they're still but they're still partying like constally, right,
Speaker 4: I mean, is it the same aim you think post
Speaker 4: me too in this new era as it was back
Speaker 4: in the days of you know, Heaven and Hell parties
Speaker 4: and the Predator's Ball.
Speaker 6: I think, I mean, look that these places have to evolve,
Speaker 6: They have to evolve with the times, they have to
Speaker 6: keep up with the times. HR departments are incredibly much
Speaker 6: stronger now than they were ten years ago. But I think,
Speaker 6: you know, I think human behavior, I mean this, Some
Speaker 6: people say this show is quite a cynical take on
Speaker 6: the world, but me and Mickey have a quite quite say,
Speaker 6: quite cynical take on the business. So I think it's
Speaker 6: a pretty realistic depiction of how things still still unfold.
Speaker 2: How do you kind of keep the story going or
Speaker 2: how do you think about what drives it.
Speaker 6: We have very good writers, I mean, we have insane
Speaker 6: the good writers room, like me and Mickey are sort
Speaker 6: of standing on the shoulders of really strong collaborators. So
Speaker 6: we go into the room for twelve weeks, we break
Speaker 6: the episodes of writers. We go in and right then
Speaker 6: you know it's a contemporary show. We loved it. We ironically,
Speaker 6: given we were both spot out by the business, we
Speaker 6: find finance fascinating now that we were writing about it
Speaker 6: rather than doing it, if that makes sense.
Speaker 12: We've got great consultants as well, one of which is
Speaker 12: quite a well known person who doesn't want to be named. Yeah,
Speaker 12: and he absolutely loves you know, using ours shows that bash.
Speaker 2: People used to work well billions right, you think about billions, right.
Speaker 2: They had some really incredible consultant student right to make
Speaker 2: sure that the hedge fun world, right, that investment world
Speaker 2: was depicted pretty accurately for all of us. It was
Speaker 2: like a guessing game of like who was it based on.
Speaker 7: That wasn't a guessing game at all.
Speaker 2: I know, I know, but you know that there were
Speaker 2: nuances that you maybe wanted to still figure out.
Speaker 4: Do you get any commentary from the pros, Like if
Speaker 4: you're hanging out at a pub in the city, does
Speaker 4: someone say, oh, that show is actually very realistic or no,
Speaker 4: that's way off, that's not.
Speaker 10: How by people in the pub all the time.
Speaker 6: They often show their own narcissism as well, because they
Speaker 6: come up and say, oh, that character is quite clearly
Speaker 6: me so I don't know who you are, but yeah, no, no,
Speaker 6: people in the business say it's quite accurate. We get
Speaker 6: we get approached quite.
Speaker 12: I still get a lot of LinkedIn messages saying you
Speaker 12: got me into finance by your show, which is quite.
Speaker 6: We didn't actually write it as a recruitment sal but ironical.
Speaker 4: Because I think is very interesting because you have a
Speaker 4: cynical take on the industry. It's very dramatic in a
Speaker 4: way that maybe people don't necessarily want to be involved with.
Speaker 4: And yet you're you're recruiting people to the industry. Do
Speaker 4: you find that more often than you're having people making
Speaker 4: people leave the industry?
Speaker 12: I think it's you know, obviously re left it, But
Speaker 12: there's a sudden amount of seduction in the show, and
Speaker 12: it makes this show look it makes the industry look sexy.
Speaker 12: Someone said to me the other day, you've made banking
Speaker 12: sexy again, and I said, well, that's that's exactly why
Speaker 12: I set out to do.
Speaker 2: So I'm very happy you also get into ethical investing,
Speaker 2: which I think is interesting. We talk a lot, you know,
Speaker 2: in the Bloomberg world about the rethink of ESG right
Speaker 2: going through a lot of changes. Why did you choose
Speaker 2: that topic. Is it just because it's kind of top
Speaker 2: of mine right now or has been for a while.
Speaker 6: It felt like it was in Yeah, as we say,
Speaker 6: when we start breaking the season, we have the consultant
Speaker 6: and we just talk about big macro trends and themes.
Speaker 6: It felt like something that we wanted the show to
Speaker 6: be more intelligible in the third season. We didn't want
Speaker 6: it to be just loads of finance tagno bubble, so
Speaker 6: we said it around an I p O. We thought
Speaker 6: that was more in the world. Yes, Jesus is one
Speaker 6: of those things which I think it's an acronym, but
Speaker 6: you still kind of you understand the real world impact
Speaker 6: of what it is, and also the show, The show
Speaker 6: functions that we kind of call it a bit of
Speaker 6: a high toned satire. It's always got its kind of
Speaker 6: tongue in its cheek a little bit, and it felt
Speaker 6: like the perfect thing, you know, if you think the
Speaker 6: show is cynical, it feels like the perfect thing for
Speaker 6: us to kind of try and interrogate and undercut a
Speaker 6: little bit. It's a good avenue for humor, to be honest.
Speaker 4: How do you like working with HBO and and what's
Speaker 4: it like? I think you said it's the only place
Speaker 4: that's really making TV right now.
Speaker 12: Why do you say that, Well, I just think it's
Speaker 12: it's it's still the gold standard. It's still it's still,
Speaker 12: you know, the home of prestige television. I think that,
Speaker 12: you know, we have no experience working with anyonhere else really,
Speaker 12: so it's not easy for me to say.
Speaker 4: You talk to people on other shows, you've been doing
Speaker 4: this for years. Yeah, you've got three seasons.
Speaker 12: And I always say, and you know, I'm always a
Speaker 12: standard by the amount of people who say to us,
Speaker 12: you have no idea how much latitude they give you.
Speaker 12: They give us amazing notes, they're they're very collaborative, they.
Speaker 2: Push, they give you.
Speaker 12: They never center ourselves, they don't toast to censeer ourselves.
Speaker 6: They always have to push ourselves into darker places, more
Speaker 6: interesting places, more human places. That very Mickey says, they're
Speaker 6: amazing collaboratives, very incisive.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean, look, I mean I think a lot
Speaker 12: of TV is censored now, a lot of it's quite bland.
Speaker 12: I think a lot of it's quite down the line.
Speaker 12: I still think HBO is the place where you go
Speaker 12: if you want to make stuff that's provocative.
Speaker 2: And it was definitely if you think you go back
Speaker 2: to Soprano as you go to Sex and the City,
Speaker 2: like it was a moment in time where I feel like,
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, TV really did push the limit
Speaker 2: right and they did set the standard for it, and
Speaker 2: it does feel like, I don't know, I don't know
Speaker 2: if it's gone backwards a little bit.
Speaker 7: I liked episodes. Have you seen episodes.
Speaker 4: It's a great show about people exactly, people from Britain.
Speaker 7: They come to LA to make a show.
Speaker 4: And when you say the HBO is giving you notes,
Speaker 4: I'm thinking about the way they did it and that
Speaker 4: it's a good.
Speaker 6: Depiction of it. Actually it's a good show.
Speaker 10: It's funny.
Speaker 7: So what about the streaming model.
Speaker 4: I mean, we saw these strikes that went on for
Speaker 4: so long last year, and it's so much harder for
Speaker 4: actors to get what they want out of it.
Speaker 7: There's so much concern.
Speaker 4: About you know, Ai, there's so much happening in media
Speaker 4: right now. What do you think about being in it
Speaker 4: at this time in your life or at this time
Speaker 4: in its life.
Speaker 6: Well, it's challenging. It's like whenever big tech disrupts anything,
Speaker 6: it doesn't really think about it acts first and then
Speaker 6: doesn't really think about the long term consequences of what
Speaker 6: it's doing. I mean, for the streaming model, I mean
Speaker 6: I can just talk about it practically in terms of
Speaker 6: we really like the fact that HBO put the show
Speaker 6: out week to week, like and that you can't binge
Speaker 6: it and those a very bingeable show, like you know,
Speaker 6: there are seasons of TV which you know, Disney put
Speaker 6: out and they had to have a cultural moment the
Speaker 6: last about two days, whereas HBO make it more of
Speaker 6: an event driven thing. You know, the show is going
Speaker 6: to f a weeks. Hopefully it's going to be a
Speaker 6: bit of a conversation.
Speaker 7: We really back to.
Speaker 2: The old times of like destination.
Speaker 1: Or you know.
Speaker 10: On Sunday nights and people talk about the Monday morning
Speaker 10: is it's not rockest?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was like that with you know, Game of
Speaker 4: Thrones and Silicon Valley and Deep when they were all
Speaker 4: on Sure.
Speaker 6: I feel like it's kind of weirdly disrespectful of people's
Speaker 6: work because people, you know, like the one hundred and
Speaker 6: fifty people worked on our show for a year of
Speaker 6: their lives. For it to like go in a weekend
Speaker 6: feels a little.
Speaker 2: Bit like one rainy weekend and we start just bin,
Speaker 2: we've all done. Exactly where do you guys want to
Speaker 2: take the show or how do you think about it?
Speaker 12: We want to keep doing it. I mean, as I
Speaker 12: joked earlier about the fact that you know, we never
Speaker 12: know whether we're going to come back on that we
Speaker 12: always right the last episode of each season to feel
Speaker 12: like it could be a finale.
Speaker 10: But with the door slightly a.
Speaker 2: Jar, that's a little tough though.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I mean, well, that's that's going back to what
Speaker 12: you said about that, that's the business at the moment.
Speaker 12: You're not guaranteed the third fourth season. It's getting a
Speaker 12: third season. That feels totally wild to me. So I
Speaker 12: think we love to continue it. We directed the last
Speaker 12: two episodes, which was a new experience without ruining it.
Speaker 2: You know the show good which time you guys directed?
Speaker 10: First time we directed?
Speaker 12: Yeah, And then the show ends in a very bold
Speaker 12: note which allows for new stories but also close the
Speaker 12: door another one. So I think there's more to be said.
Speaker 4: It's interesting that you make it, that you're making it
Speaker 4: in a way, I don't want to say, more serious,
Speaker 4: but it's like the arc that Barry took, where it
Speaker 4: started out as a comedy and became a drama. You
Speaker 4: know what's what's ahead if you get a season four?
Speaker 4: I mean, do you do you continue that?
Speaker 7: Are touris the.
Speaker 6: Show kind of like it just matured in the sense that,
Speaker 6: like me and Mickey and all the actors were very
Speaker 6: young when it first aired, and the show had a
Speaker 6: very ya feel. It was about drug sex, rock and roll,
Speaker 6: young rads. But you know they're now in a position where,
Speaker 6: both fictionally and in real life, that they've grown up.
Speaker 6: We've grown up. We just can't help but write about
Speaker 6: sort of more mature, deeper, more adult themes. So I
Speaker 6: think that's where the residents you're talking about comes and
Speaker 6: I think we would just continue to do that as
Speaker 6: if if we get given the opportunity.
Speaker 2: Is there ever, like an offshoot of it as you
Speaker 2: guys think, Do you think about it?
Speaker 4: What other products are you spinning out?
Speaker 10: The pairpoint universe eighteen spare points really cool?
Speaker 2: Do you guys miss being in the world of finance?
Speaker 2: I mean you get to kind of live it by
Speaker 2: writing about it.
Speaker 12: We get to live it writing about it. We get
Speaker 12: to meet really influential people within it. I am so
Speaker 12: much more fascinated now by it than I was when
Speaker 12: I was actually in it because I was doing you know,
Speaker 12: I was the junior banker than European Investment Bank doing
Speaker 12: Excel spreadsheets. I wasn't actually having to write about the thing.
Speaker 2: But you loved it when you were there.
Speaker 10: Oh, I didn't love it at all. We were shameless.
Speaker 6: We were chewed up and spat out. I was unceremoniously
Speaker 6: thrown out the door of Mormon Stanley.
Speaker 7: What's the city like post Brexit? I mean, I know.
Speaker 4: Back in the day when I worked in London in
Speaker 4: the early two thousands, and it was like the heart
Speaker 4: of global finance. Right of course, New York is also
Speaker 4: incredibly significant but there was a concern that post Brexit
Speaker 4: that would fall apart and it would all go to
Speaker 4: the continent, which I don't think it has happened at all.
Speaker 10: I don't think it has. I don't think it has.
Speaker 12: I mean just I mean culturally, just walking around the
Speaker 12: city or walking around London, you feel the impact and
Speaker 12: atmosphere of finance still. I mean, every single person and
Speaker 12: their brother is wearing a vest and coming out of
Speaker 12: a part on the shoesday. So it feels like, I
Speaker 12: don't know, I don't know, it feels obviously, I don't know.
Speaker 12: It feels maybe it feels and less electric than it did.
Speaker 12: I mean, just speaking to our friends high up and
Speaker 12: big invested thanks like just the way the way you're
Speaker 12: allowed to behave for slightly different that's probably had a
Speaker 12: different effect.
Speaker 7: I'm wrong.
Speaker 6: But all the bold brackets like Goldman and always good
Speaker 6: that their European hobby is still wondering.
Speaker 4: It's not like they moved, but for a minute they
Speaker 4: thought about, hey, maybe we go to Frankfurt, and the
Speaker 4: and the employees kind of said no, I'm not going
Speaker 4: to Frankfort, no matter how much you paid.
Speaker 12: But they've come back and the cap and bonuses is
Speaker 12: no longer there, and I feel like this new government
Speaker 12: is making inroads to having a relationship with the finance
Speaker 12: community Europe again, with Europe again. Yeah, so I think
Speaker 12: maybe we're just going to go back eight years.
Speaker 2: What are you guys? So I'm fascinating about the current
Speaker 2: financial world.
Speaker 4: Do you do you caught up in the stock slide
Speaker 4: the last few days?
Speaker 7: I mean, were you watching the non farm payrolls number?
Speaker 12: I thought it was very good viral marketing for US
Speaker 12: sell off from Japan.
Speaker 6: We get we get paid in dollars, so we often
Speaker 6: look at Mickey Offering Monitoring Central BAGUS to see if
Speaker 6: we're going to lose a couple of thousand dollars on
Speaker 6: our paycheck. That's about as much of our finance.
Speaker 4: Interest goes interesting, all right, fascinating stuff.
Speaker 2: No, it is really, you know, I don't know, it's
Speaker 2: a look you're having fun. It sounds like you find
Speaker 2: out if there's I don't know, the third season just
Speaker 2: getting it away. So I feel terrible to talk about
Speaker 2: a fourth season. But we'll see, right what happens. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's really gone on a lot longer than I bet
Speaker 2: you guys thought.
Speaker 10: Oh my God, Yeah, for sure, for sure.
Speaker 6: I would just say it's a quick sales pitch. If
Speaker 6: if you were turned off by seasons one and two,
Speaker 6: I think season three you could almost watch Cold and
Speaker 6: it's a really universal and engaging story.
Speaker 7: So why would he turned off by seasons one?
Speaker 6: No, I'm just I'm just saying, you know, because some
Speaker 6: people thought it was, you know, like.
Speaker 7: Is your audience? Is your audience more gen Z and millennials?
Speaker 7: Do you do? You don't know hownect with it.
Speaker 6: I don't know how many gen Z people watch TV,
Speaker 6: to be honest, I mean, but it's definitely I would
Speaker 6: say it's it's Skew's younger. But we're you know, we're
Speaker 6: hoping to as I said before, like the shows will
Speaker 6: come more adults.
Speaker 4: So hopefully if you over sit down with you and say, look,
Speaker 4: you're not getting the forty five to fifty five year old.
Speaker 7: It's like, do you look at the demographication?
Speaker 12: No, No, I think I think it's a it's a
Speaker 12: broad demographic.
Speaker 10: I mean, yeah, you know my father in.
Speaker 12: Law who's the next judge, who in his sixties loves
Speaker 12: the show, but he said he would love there for
Speaker 12: me a button, which just skipped all the sex scenes.
Speaker 10: He likes the business and he likes the finance.
Speaker 12: He doesn't want to to see any of these young
Speaker 12: people having sex, he says, But but I think, look,
Speaker 12: the show is mature, much more mature than it was
Speaker 12: explosive season.
Speaker 2: What do you people get out of it? Just to
Speaker 2: kind of wrap up, Micky, let me ask you.
Speaker 12: First, look, it's not on the dactive show. It's not preachy.
Speaker 12: I think it's really really entertaining. I think it has
Speaker 12: This is the most explosive seasons yet, and it's just
Speaker 12: a lot of fun.
Speaker 10: It's I think, you know, it's it's.
Speaker 12: Very very addictive, and I think people will enjoy it
Speaker 12: for that reason as well. And if it says something
Speaker 12: about the world, and that's a plus.
Speaker 2: Can't read Le's thirty seconds.
Speaker 6: For you, I think it will. It's one of the
Speaker 6: few TV shows in which I think will force you
Speaker 6: to put down your phone because I'm not second screening,
Speaker 6: because it's engaging, it's dialogue driven. Turn on the subtitles.
Speaker 6: There are loads of jokes in the background.
Speaker 2: All Right, it's streaming already.
Speaker 10: It comes out on Sunday, okay pm.
Speaker 2: All right, Sunday, nine pm. That's Mickey Down and Conrad Kay,
Speaker 2: the writers and co creators of the HBO series Industry.
Speaker 2: You're listening to Bloomberg business Week coming up. It turns
Speaker 2: out you can have a math mind without being a prodigy.
Speaker 2: We get into the simple path to loving math. That's next.
Speaker 2: This is Bloomberg.
Speaker 1: You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Listen live
Speaker 1: each weekday starting at two pm Eastern on Applecarplay and
Speaker 1: Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. You can also
Speaker 1: listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station,
Speaker 1: Just say Alexa Play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Speaker 2: The math performance of US teenagers has sharply declined since
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen, with scores lower than twenty years ago and
Speaker 2: with American students continuing to trail global competitors. According to
Speaker 2: the results of a key international exam released this past Tuesday,
Speaker 2: in the first comparable global results since the coronavirus pandemic,
Speaker 2: fifteen year olds in the United States scored below students
Speaker 2: in similar industrialized democracies like the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany,
Speaker 2: and well behind students in the highest performing countries such
Speaker 2: as Singapore. South Korea and Estonia, and while the data
Speaker 2: seems to show a continuation in math under performance that
Speaker 2: predates the pandemic, our next guest says there is a
Speaker 2: way to change that. Shalini Sharma is the CEO and
Speaker 2: co founder of the nonprofit educational software organization Zern. Her
Speaker 2: new book Mathmind, The Simple Path to Loving Math, she
Speaker 2: joined Bloomberg's Matt Miller and Me starting with her own
Speaker 2: admission that she's not a math prodigy, but thanks to
Speaker 2: a revelation in middle school, learned to love math.
Speaker 14: I was not a math prodigy, and I had a
Speaker 14: accidental and lucky experience in sixth grade that changed the
Speaker 14: trajectory of my life. My math teacher, mister Snyder, he
Speaker 14: just decided to believe in me when I didn't believe
Speaker 14: in myself. What had happened is I was in a
Speaker 14: math class in sixth grade. It was Honors math. It's
Speaker 14: the first time I experienced that the boys were thriving
Speaker 14: and the girls were quiet in the back. There weren't
Speaker 14: actually very many girls in the class. There were more boys,
Speaker 14: and I was just barely holding on. I remember there
Speaker 14: was a point where I took a test. Mister Snyder
Speaker 14: called me to his desk. My stomach dropped. I went
Speaker 14: over to his desk and I saw less red marking
Speaker 14: than usual, and he said to me, he said, you
Speaker 14: did better on this test, and if you try your best,
Speaker 14: you could be just as good as the boys. And
Speaker 14: I know in twenty twenty four that we don't think
Speaker 14: that's a good thing to say to a little girl,
Speaker 14: but I will tell you that my heart exploded because
Speaker 14: it was the first time I considered that I didn't
Speaker 14: just have to survive, but that I could excel and
Speaker 14: I could be the best. And it started this powerful
Speaker 14: chain reaction. And I wasn't born one, but I made
Speaker 14: myself a math kid and I came to love math.
Speaker 14: And it's because of that moment.
Speaker 4: I had also some really great teachers that I'll never forget.
Speaker 4: And I never thought I was that good at math.
Speaker 4: I was very dyslexic. I had a bad memory for
Speaker 4: you know, times tables in you know, first and second
Speaker 4: grade or whenever you do that. But I get to
Speaker 4: eighth grade and I get this algebra teacher at the
Speaker 4: Columbus Academy, Tim Hildreth, who just really made math seem
Speaker 4: more fun like an art or like music, or like
Speaker 4: it was creative as you write in your book, and
Speaker 4: he connected with me in a way that.
Speaker 7: Was cool.
Speaker 4: The problem I have is that I can always visualize
Speaker 4: the solution. I can feel how the problem should work out,
Speaker 4: and I can get a lot of the answers right.
Speaker 4: I'm not good at the formulaic showing your work, and
Speaker 4: I never have been, so I wonder if that's a
Speaker 4: common problem.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I mean so much in there. So think about reading.
Speaker 14: You know, if, for example, let's say we were all
Speaker 14: going to take a reading test, but none of us
Speaker 14: knew how to read. We didn't know that each letter
Speaker 14: represented a sound, and that you could put the sounds
Speaker 14: together and make bigger sounds like. We didn't know that,
Speaker 14: but you showed us. You showed me a bunch of symbols,
Speaker 14: and you said, when these symbols are together, that means
Speaker 14: the word house. When these symbols are together, that means
Speaker 14: the word radio. And so there was a two hundred
Speaker 14: word test. I crammed it, I memorized all the words.
Speaker 14: I even got an A on the test. But because
Speaker 14: of how every human brain works, every adult brain, every
Speaker 14: kid brain, I would start to forget that and so
Speaker 14: two weeks later, even though I got an A on
Speaker 14: the test, I would forget how to read. And so
Speaker 14: think about how terrifying and insane reading would feel if
Speaker 14: we taught it that way. And so what you're talking
Speaker 14: about happened to you in your eighth grade class is
Speaker 14: that the symbols and the meaning came together. So what
Speaker 14: math really is is symbolic notation to describe the real
Speaker 14: world around you. That's actually all it is. And so
Speaker 14: when you see pictures and visuals, then you get to
Speaker 14: connect that symbolic notation with reality and then it sinks
Speaker 14: into the brain and it becomes durable. And that's just
Speaker 14: the science of how our brains work. So if you're teaching,
Speaker 14: let's say a seventh grader about negative numbers, you can
Speaker 14: teach them all these rules of when you multiply on
Speaker 14: negative times a negative, it's positive, when you subtract and
Speaker 14: negative from a negative. You know, you can give them
Speaker 14: a table and they may cram it, but they're going
Speaker 14: to feel really stressed. But if you instead you say, okay,
Speaker 14: think about negative numbers as you dive into the ocean,
Speaker 14: and you go deep into the ocean, and that's negative numbers.
Speaker 14: Get back up to sea level, that's zero, and then
Speaker 14: you climb a mountain. Those are positive numbers. Now let's
Speaker 14: lay that out in the number line. And so if
Speaker 14: we see the number negative five, that is the position
Speaker 14: of the number on the number line. Now start playing
Speaker 14: with the numbers. And that's what's often missing for kids,
Speaker 14: is that making sense. And the kids who love math,
Speaker 14: perhaps maybe Carol, they're doing that in their heads. Either
Speaker 14: adults showed it to them, they figured it out themselves.
Speaker 14: They read the textbook. However, they figured that out, but
Speaker 14: they put the symbols and the pictures together. And one
Speaker 14: of the main things we can do to help kids
Speaker 14: love math is always offer them those pictures proactively.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 2: It's funny. One of our producers cci, She's like, I
Speaker 2: want to read this book, and she even said in
Speaker 2: the newsroom, I think I had a question here, but like,
Speaker 2: can you help adults enjoy math and have kind of
Speaker 2: a math mind? Having said that, you know, I grew
Speaker 2: up there's a lot of memorization and a lot of
Speaker 2: like doing problems and a lot of that, and I
Speaker 2: feel like the focus wasn't so much on how you
Speaker 2: got there, just get there and get the right answer.
Speaker 2: I mean, can an adult learn to love math and
Speaker 2: be better at math?
Speaker 14: Yeah, definitely, And I think I think we as adults
Speaker 14: all kind of have to, you know, for two reasons.
Speaker 14: One is, if we're parents or aunties and uncles of kids,
Speaker 14: if we love math, we will help them love math,
Speaker 14: and so so it's just it's kind of our duty
Speaker 14: to help kids. But the second is in the world
Speaker 14: that is, you know, kind of manifesting in front of us,
Speaker 14: the need for numeracy. Just it's just off the charts,
Speaker 14: and you know, there's a lot of attention paid to literacy.
Speaker 14: But it just really pains me that there's this prevailing
Speaker 14: misconception that some kids are destined to be left behind
Speaker 14: and they can't do math, or some adults can't do math.
Speaker 14: And more and more we see that that means they
Speaker 14: can't participate, and that means even participate in like understanding
Speaker 14: your show. You know, you have such an interesting show,
Speaker 14: but you're using a lot of mathematical terms, and so
Speaker 14: we want people to be able to participate. But yes,
Speaker 14: I think there are four steps to building a math mind,
Speaker 14: and I think they pertain to anybody.
Speaker 2: It's like the race when you're at the you know,
Speaker 2: at the end of a dinner and you're like, okay,
Speaker 2: we're going to give them. You know, we're we're out
Speaker 2: to dinner with a bunch of friends, like fifteen twenty
Speaker 2: percent okay, Like everybody's like figuring it out, and it's like,
Speaker 2: who could do it so like fast.
Speaker 7: I don't know.
Speaker 4: When we were kids, it was fifteen to twenty percent.
Speaker 4: Now they want like twenty five thirty.
Speaker 2: It's a little different.
Speaker 7: You say that there are.
Speaker 4: Roadblocks for adults and for kids. What are the sort
Speaker 4: of hurdles that we need to overcome? What are the
Speaker 4: common issues?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 14: I mean so the first is just believe. You open
Speaker 14: the show at the top by talking about the United
Speaker 14: States versus other countries. You know, shared some love for Estonia,
Speaker 14: and what's happening in those countries is and it might
Speaker 14: seem so simple, but it's a big deal. Which is
Speaker 14: in those countries people start with the belief that kids
Speaker 14: can do math. So you know, the simple parallel I
Speaker 14: give is, imagine if we put all our kids in
Speaker 14: this country in kindergarten through eighth grade, and at the
Speaker 14: end they came out and we gave them a test,
Speaker 14: and we thought the test was really high quality. And
Speaker 14: at the end of the test, the majority were illiterate.
Speaker 14: The majority couldn't read. We'd be scandalized. And what if
Speaker 14: even worse than that, a bunch of adults said, that's okay,
Speaker 14: they're not reading kids. You know, we get very mad
Speaker 14: at the adults, but that's the exact same thing we're
Speaker 14: doing in math.
Speaker 2: For talking with Shanny Sharma, she's CEO, co founder of
Speaker 2: zur and it's a nonprofit educational software organization. Her new book,
Speaker 2: which is what we're talking about, is entitled Mathmind, The
Speaker 2: Simple Path to Loving Math.
Speaker 4: And oh, by the way, can I just say one thing?
Speaker 2: You can say whatever?
Speaker 4: Talking at the top about how the US obviously, you know,
Speaker 4: US kids in general aren't doing great at math compared
Speaker 4: to the kids in Singapore. Yeah, and then you mentioned Estonia. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and I made a joke about how small. I want
Speaker 4: to point out that I do love Estonia. I went
Speaker 4: there for an ECB conference to talent. I stayed at
Speaker 4: the Hotel Telegraph, which was beautiful, is very nice. Would
Speaker 4: go back just to hang out. So I just want
Speaker 4: everyone from Estonia to know I do love you.
Speaker 2: Because we get hate mail, or math gets hate.
Speaker 4: Mail and school that they're great at math.
Speaker 2: I want to go to chapter twelve. You say math
Speaker 2: matters for everyone, but we act as if it matters
Speaker 2: only for a select few. Our education system is built
Speaker 2: around both overt and quiet classifying of students what you
Speaker 2: have referred to as sorting. We track classes. I grew
Speaker 2: up where it was like kids were in honors math,
Speaker 2: kids were in regular math casts, kids were in math
Speaker 2: that needed help, and it was like you were you
Speaker 2: were definitely I know, like I don't even want to
Speaker 2: say it, and it really put you in a certain way.
Speaker 2: And I hope my daughter's not listening. But she was
Speaker 2: in a point where she thought she wasn't good in
Speaker 2: math and got a tutor and she actually is really
Speaker 2: great in math and loves it, and so it's just
Speaker 2: but she got it in her head that she wasn't great.
Speaker 2: I really hope she's not listening. She's not, she will
Speaker 2: hate me forever what we do in the US. What's
Speaker 2: wrong with what we do in the US and how
Speaker 2: we teach math? Because there was something I saw on
Speaker 2: video where you talk about math war, something the US
Speaker 2: does but other countries don't.
Speaker 14: Yeah, so like your kid and millions like them or
Speaker 14: at the top of my mind when I was writing
Speaker 14: math mind. And we have a system, and it's it's
Speaker 14: a strange one where we actually spend billions of dollars
Speaker 14: educating millions of kids by sorting find the math kids,
Speaker 14: not just teach all kids math, which is what is
Speaker 14: happening in other countries. And kids aren't dumb, right, So
Speaker 14: you can say whatever you want put like, you know,
Speaker 14: nice things on posters, like you know, making mistakes is
Speaker 14: okay or whatever, but they know what's actually going on.
Speaker 14: And what's going on is that the way we teach
Speaker 14: in mathematics is it's a test to see if you
Speaker 14: have that rare genetic material to be able to do math,
Speaker 14: and every day you can fail the test. So, by
Speaker 14: the way, even kids who are in the honors class,
Speaker 14: they're not feeling really good either. Everyone is feeling uncomfortable.
Speaker 14: Everyone is feeling like there's this scarce, rare genetic in
Speaker 14: more material, but it's completely not born out in science.
Speaker 14: Babies as young as two weeks old understand quantities. Pigeons
Speaker 14: can count, so con dolphins, and so we just have
Speaker 14: to relax because we can all do math. And what
Speaker 14: I'd say, is that doesn't mean that kids who have
Speaker 14: a deep passion for mathematics shouldn't be able to accelerate ahead.
Speaker 14: If you have a deep passion for writing or journalism,
Speaker 14: you should be able to accelerate ahead. But that doesn't
Speaker 14: mean because you accelerate ahead that I shouldn't get to
Speaker 14: have really fun and challenging writing opportunities. And so we
Speaker 14: don't have to put those things in opposition, and we
Speaker 14: don't in other fields of knowledge, but we just do
Speaker 14: it in math. I would just say it's crazy and
Speaker 14: we could.
Speaker 2: Just all stop.
Speaker 4: I want to know what the system is that you developed,
Speaker 4: or that Zern developed. I read that you guys have
Speaker 4: a system that one in four elementary school kids use,
Speaker 4: and I don't know like half middle schoolers use, which
Speaker 4: made me curious, like what is it?
Speaker 7: What is it like a program?
Speaker 4: Do you have materials for teachers? Is it like you know, tricks?
Speaker 10: What is it?
Speaker 14: Yeah, so it's a million middle school kids, but the
Speaker 14: think about those so way I'd like to think about Zeren.
Speaker 14: There's a really famous mathematician who describes our problem in
Speaker 14: middle school math in America, and he says, kids walk
Speaker 14: out of class every day, like ten to twenty minutes
Speaker 14: behind in terms of confusion. Now we make that a
Speaker 14: big catastrophe, but that's all. They're just ten to twenty
Speaker 14: minutes behind. And if we could support them in their
Speaker 14: homework or with just ten to twenty minutes of additional input,
Speaker 14: then they would get it. It would click, you know,
Speaker 14: you get that aha moment in your brain. And so
Speaker 14: think of zern as that digital compliment. It's the ten
Speaker 14: to twenty minutes every day for teachers or for families,
Speaker 14: and unzerned dot org it's free for teachers or families,
Speaker 14: and so we provide that ten to twenty minutes. I
Speaker 14: think some of the secret sauce of zern Is is
Speaker 14: the pictures, gifts, visualizations. You know, when we're teaching. So
Speaker 14: for example, when we're teaching a fraction bigger than one hole,
Speaker 14: so eight forts, like what does that even mean? On screen,
Speaker 14: the teacher will cut two oranges into forts and you
Speaker 14: can see, well, it's two oranges and they're cut into
Speaker 14: four pieces, so that there's eight pieces. And so it
Speaker 14: moves it from really abstract like no one really knows
Speaker 14: what a forts means in third grade, to being extremely
Speaker 14: concrete everybody understands two oranges cut into four pieces, and
Speaker 14: so that's how we're trying to support kids.
Speaker 2: Shelnye, I wonder AI artificial intelligence. Do you think that's
Speaker 2: going to be a good or bad thing for the
Speaker 2: world of math?
Speaker 4: Ya?
Speaker 7: Do we need math? We have iPhones and.
Speaker 2: We've talked with Sacon about a lot of this in
Speaker 2: terms of what he's doing.
Speaker 4: And I'm just gonna ask con Academy like a competitor
Speaker 4: or I mean, you're not for profit, So what do
Speaker 4: you think about that?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 14: I mean so I would say there's only two sites
Speaker 14: I let my I have thirteen year old twin boys,
Speaker 14: only two sites. I let my kids on con Academy
Speaker 14: and Zern. And I know Sal's kids have played with Zern,
Speaker 14: and I think it's really outstanding. And he does some
Speaker 14: things with visualizations and videos. And you know, we're both
Speaker 14: nonprofits just trying to put the best education we can
Speaker 14: up online for free for everyone. You know, I think
Speaker 14: that with regard to AI, I don't know. I have
Speaker 14: no ability, no expertise, and no ability to predict where
Speaker 14: the world will go. But I'll say this, which is
Speaker 14: it makes it seem like math is more important. And
Speaker 14: the reason for that is, like today, in today's world,
Speaker 14: the single biggest predictor of getting through high school, into college,
Speaker 14: graduating college, and then having a massive effect in the
Speaker 14: sum of millions of dollars on lifetime earnings is algebra completion.
Speaker 14: Just that algebra completion in your K twelve experience. And
Speaker 14: so if that's what's happening today in the world of
Speaker 14: jobs today, think about what happens in the future as
Speaker 14: numerous y and math skills become more and more expected
Speaker 14: and more and more part of every job. We already
Speaker 14: see stem jobs mixing together. We used to think stem
Speaker 14: jobs were you became an electrical engineer, you became a
Speaker 14: computer science not the case. Lots of folks who are
Speaker 14: majoring in history are actually out there doing STEM jobs.
Speaker 2: This was really fun and I feel like any of us, well,
Speaker 2: I think you certainly much of adult you resonated with,
Speaker 2: and any of us who have kids. It definitely resident.
Speaker 4: Wait, we had twenty seconds left. Who did it better?
Speaker 4: Teaching math at the university level? Brown or Harvard.
Speaker 14: Brown?
Speaker 4: Ooh, well done, well done.
Speaker 2: That's Shalini Sharma, CEO and co founder of the nonprofit
Speaker 2: educational software organization Zern her new book Mathmind, The Simple
Speaker 2: Path to Loving Math, Cracking the Numeracy Code for everyone
Speaker 2: who has ever thought they were bad at math. And
Speaker 2: that wraps up the weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week
Speaker 2: from Bloomberg Radio. Thanks so much for joining us. Be
Speaker 2: sure to tune into Bloomberg Business Week Monday through Friday
Speaker 2: starting at two pm Wall Street Time on Bloomberg TV,
Speaker 2: Bloomberg Radio, and on Series XM Channel one twenty one.
Speaker 2: You can also listen to us on Apple car Play
Speaker 2: and Android Auto. It's free in the Apple App Store
Speaker 2: or on Google Play. You can also watch our daily
Speaker 2: broadcast on YouTube. Just search Bloomberg Global News, where some
Speaker 2: willcast on Bloomberg Originals available at Bloomberg dot com, Slash Originals,
Speaker 2: and streaming platforms including Roku, Amazon, fireTV, Simsung TV Plus
Speaker 2: and more. Find our Bloomberg BusinessWeek podcast at Bloomberg dot com, Apple,
Speaker 2: or wherever you get your podcasts. And the latest edition
Speaker 2: of Bloomberg BusinessWeek Magazine is available on newstands now, at
Speaker 2: Bloomberg dot com and always on the Bloomberg Terminal. I'm
Speaker 2: Carol Masser. Have a good and safe weekend. Everyone, stay
Speaker 2: with us. Today's top stories and global business headlines are
Speaker 2: coming up right now.