Bloomberg Opinion

We explore airline mergers, COVID boosters, and the impact of generational wealth. We also discuss how loyal customers are to their favorite restaurants. Columnists FD Flam, Brooke Sutherland, Allison Schrager, and Bobby Ghosh join. Amy Morris hosts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Artificial intelligence threatens jobs, but will it enable people to think critically? We explore that topic, along with vaccines, housing, and the negative health effects of ultra-processed foods. Bloomberg Opinion columnists Allison Schrager, Lisa Jarvis, Conor Sen, and Bobby Ghosh join. Amy Morris hosts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Taylor Swift's Eras Tour confronts the climate crisis - what can she and others do to take action. We discuss that story, science reliability, trust in government, and the fiscal apocalypse. Columnists Lara Williams, Faye Flam, Clive Crook, and Kathryn Edwards join. Amy Morris hosts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We examine the effectiveness of generic drugs and over-the-counter decongestions, and how COVID anxiety is still in the minds of many Americans to this day. Also, would passing marijuana legislation be useful to President Biden's re-election campaign? Bloomberg Opinion's Jonathan Bernstein thinks so. He joins us, along with columnists Rachel Rosenthal, FD Flam, and Lisa Jarvis. Amy Morris hosts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We discuss the effect of inflation on small businesses and restaurants, and how soon the US will reach 2%. Also, we dig into generational economic anxiety. Bloomberg Opinion's Jonathan Levin, Jessica Karl, Erin Lowry, and Justin Fox join. Amy Morris hosts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We explore the worker exodus from major cities, weight loss drugs, and developing America's risk-takers. We also dig into a debate around eSports - should it be an Olympic sport? Bloomberg Opinion's Adam Minter thinks so. Adam Minter joins us, as do Bloomberg Opinion columnists Conor Sen, Lisa Jarvis, and Allison Schrager. Amy Morris hosts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Scientists say climate change is accelerating, but their voices are getting drowned out. Might using the drier while doing laundry be counterintuitive, or helpful, in slowing climate change. We also dig into the effectiveness of traffic cameras and Gen Z's relationship with live sports. Lara Williams, David Fickling, Justin Fox, and Adam Minter join. Amy Morris hosts. Transcript: 00:01Speaker 1 You're listening to the Bloomberg Opinion podcast count US Saturdays at one and seven pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app and the Bloomberg Business App, or listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Amy Morris. On this week's show, we'll look at what's better for the planet running the dryer or using a clothesline. The answer might surprise you. Plus, since the beginning of the pandemic, traffic deaths in the US have risen sharply. What will it take to get those numbers back down? And finally, if Taylor Swift can't bring gen Z to the NFL, who can? But we begin with the heat. The global temperature continues to rise and scientists are beside themselves. Officials from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say this past July was the hottest month for the Earth on record. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson certainly is self evident that the Earth is heating up. And what we find is that July of this year the temperatures are the hottest ever on record, and last month was the hottest September on record by far. This past June the warmest June ever recorded. Yeah, we're seeing the trend. Let's talk with Bloomberg opinion columnist Laura Williams, who covers climate change, and scientists are using some pretty unscientific language to describe the temperatures that they're seeing. If your column is any indication, Laura, what have you heard? Yeah, so we've had dobsmackingly bananas. We've had astounding, staggering and nerving, bewildering, flabber dusting, dusting, distrioting, dobsmacking. Scientists have been really, really surprised by the kind of the level of heat that we saw in September compared to previous records. It is a bit alarming that they seem so surprised by this because they've been calling attention to climate change and climate change issues and the effects for years. Why did this catch them so off guard? Yeah, it's just because it's half a degree celsius higher than the previous record in twenty twenty, and so when we see these records getting broken, they're not usually broken by that margin. And so it is a kind of market in Greece, and it looks like it could be. Some are saying an acceleration in the rate of global woman which would be worry. Yeah, I wondered was this an outlier, was just this is a one time thing. Is there's something that caused it specifically, or are we seeing an acceleration. It's going to just get hotter and hotter and hotter in the next few years. So that's something that scientists are debating. So there are two camps of scientists. The first camp and I spoke to sociologists and he'd kind of terms these guys accelerationists, and they are concerned that this is an acceleration. Basically, what we've seen, particularly this year, is there are these sulfur dioxide emissions which are comes from like crew like cruise ships and you know, ships like taking all our stuff across the oceans, and they've cleaned up their act and so we're seeing way fewer aerosols being emitted into the atmosphere. So that's a good thing for our health. But those aerosols have historically served to mass human induced climate change because they reflect the Sun's heats back into space, and so the fewer thing fewer of those that we have, the more solar radiation reaches the earth surface. The scientists that think that we've seen an acceleration point to that trend of you know, sulfur emissions going down, and point to the trend of you know, these these huge temperature records that we've seen over the past few months and say that it could be an acceleration. Now, I would argue that the other team of scientists, the observationists, are right in that this is just you know, it's a few data points, and there's there's lots of things that could be making this. You know, this the Earth a lot warmer right now, a lot of temporary things. So of the September that we've just seen was one point seventy five degrees celsius warmer than pre industrial temperatures. Now that's very scary. Number. One point two degrees celsius of that we know is down to US burning fossil fuels. The remaining zero point five degrees celsius or so is due to with a combination of different factors, and so it could be aerosols, but it should also be the fact that we are in an l Nino cason, which is a naturally occurring climate pattern that warms global temperatures. It should also be that, you know, there was this huge underwater volcano which held an immense plume of water vapor, which is a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere last year, and that would be enough to temporarily elevate global temperatures for a few years. It would be partly aerosols, and it should partly be the fact that we'll see we've got we've had reduced ice at the poles this year. So the more dark sea that's exposed, the more heat that's absorbed by the water. Oh, there's a lot there. Yeah. But no matter which side they're on, whether they believe that this is an acceleration or they believe this is just par for the course, the observationists, if you will, is there a new sense of urgency? Now? Well, I think that there's always a sense of urgency, and I you know, whether it's an acceleration or not, the overwhelming trend is that the Earth is just in warmer and that we are still not doing enough to combat that warming. And so if it weights people up and is a reminder that we actually need to, you know, take some severe action to stop this trend, then I guess that, yeah, there could be a call for a renewed sense of urgency. The urgency was needed all along, but yeah, I suppose that this would be a weight of call. We are talking with Bloomberg opinion columnist Laura Williams about the quote gob smackingly Banana's heat, as scientists describe it, and as it's listed in your column on the Bloomberg terminal. Laura, it was a great read, very interesting to see how they are using terms that you might you might hear among the laypersons such as myself, you don't usually expect to hear from people who study this for a loving What do they believe this could mean for the coming winter months. Are we going to see a milder than usual winter or because it's an extreme, where we going to see a colder winter. That's a good question, and I guess we'll find out when the data comes out, But I think for now, October is looking to be warmer than average. And I would say that with you know the fact that we're in an El Nino that tends to make things warmer. It actually tends to make parts of the world, So I think Europe might be might be CNA holder slightly tolder winter if their only pattern holds true. But I certainly wouldn't be surprised if we saw a warmer than average October and November. So there may be some disagreement about what these temperature trends are telling us right now among signs, but they do agree on one thing, and that there's an issue with political will. There isn't enough of it. Where does that stand? Yeah, so you know, I would say that the fissure between science and political will is huge. We need to be deterbinizing with farmer urgency. So according to the website the Climate Actioning Tractor, which takes stock of all of the promises and policies of countries around the world, and then not a single country in the world is taking action that's compatible with limiting warm into one point five degree celsius above pre industrial temperatures. The UK has rolled backs and that zero tardets. Germany's approved bringing toll fired power plants back in line over the winter. US oil production is running at an all time high. It's not really how you'd expect country is reacting to climate crisis to be acting. Is that in part because of the geopolitical climate that we are dealing with right now, what's going on in uk and now what's going on in the Middle East, and what it's going to mean for heating fuel being shipped out to those areas. Yeah, I think, I think definitely the geobilistal you know, environment is not helping. And we've also got a you know, really high inflation, which is you know, stretching people's wallets, and whether we like it or not, we have to admit that, you know, sometimes net zero action is going to cost people more in the in the short term. In the long term, you'd hope that it would, you know, eventually bills should come down. We rolled out renewables enough, but certainly in the short term we're feeling in our wallets. Have they been able to get any traction with this, to get the attention of those lawmakers and those leaders who would be able to take the lead on this, or are they being shouted down, if you will, or drowned out by what is going on in the rest of the world and the really urgent need in the rest of the world for things like heating fuel because of what's happening in Ukraine and Israel. For sure, I think that at the moment, it definitely feels like, you know, the scientists are being drowned out just because of the urgency of these other prices. It will be really interesting to see at COP twenty eight in Dubai in December, what kind of happens there, you know, whether we're able to kind of come around the table and re you know, set our sights on more ambitious climate action there and kind of you know, center ourselves around that, or whether indeed, you know, the under end conflicts kind of again makes it another kind of non event, all right, and we're going to watch it with you. Thank you so much, Laura for bringing us up to speed on this. Thank you very much for having me. Larah Williams a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She covers climate change and coming up, we're going to continue this climate change conversation. We'll talk about what's better for the earth. Using a clothesline to dry your clothes or just run the dryer might surprise you. You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion. You're listening to the Bloomberg Opinion podcast. Catch us Saturdays at one and seven pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com. The iHeartRadio app and the Bloomberg Business app, or listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion. I'm Amy Morris. Okay, what's better for the planet running your clothes dryer or hanging your clothes on a line outside? It might depend. We welcome Bloomberg Opinion columnist David Fickling, who covers energy and commodities. David, thank you for taking the time with us. Your column starts with this intriguing thought when running the dryer maybe actually be better for the planet. And this is all about solar power changing how grids operate bring us up to speed. Yeah, sure, well, I mean this literally was a dilemma that confronted me a few weeks ago on a Saturday afternoon when I'd just done a load of laundry and it was a lovely day for putting laundry out on the line. It was a beautiful, bright, sunny spring day. I'm in Sydney, of course, so it's spring here at the moment. But then I am someone who regularly writes about energy, and so a thought occurred to me, which is, if the weather is so good for the sun drying clothes on the line. It's probably also very good for powering solar panels, and Australia is one of the most heavily solar rooftop solar dense places in the world. You know, per capital, we have more solar panels than any other country. And so of course what this means is, in the same weather conditions, you're actually going to have a surge of solar generation hitting the grid, which is possibly going to be too much for the grid. I had a look at the website of the grid operator and it turned out that at that point the price of electricity wholesale in the market was about minus seventy Australian dollars about minus fifty US dollars per per meguar tower. So it was a negative price there was. You know, normally, obviously you have to pay for electricity, but this was the opposite because there was so much solar hit hitting the grid at this point that they were essentially the market was prepared to pay people like me. Of course, I was not actually going to get any money from this because of the way bills are structured, but it was prepared to pay users to take the electricity off their hands. So this completely changes the calculus of it, because if you want to have strong grids, and if you want to have also a you know, a financially viable renewables sector paying into the grid, you actually you want to be running the dryer at the middle the middle of the day. You don't want to be putting the stuff on the line because you actually want these imbalances in the grid to sort themselves out. So the balance of power then in the most hyper local energy infrastructure within your own home hyper local, that's got to be a challenge because you have to pay attention to that. You have to pay attention to how much is hitting the grid. I mean, I should say hardly anyone is paying attention to this, and there's several reasons for that. I've actually I used to have pounds on my roof at my current place. I only moved in about nine months ago, so I don't actually have that at the moment, So it doesn't make any difference to my electricity costs. I pay the same tariff regardless of the time of day. That makes no difference at all. In addition, in almost every market that the wholesale price of electricity does not reflect the retail price of electricity, and the only extent to which it does is actually something that in a lot of markets is very anachronistic. I can get a I can get a an electricity tariff whereby it cost me less to run appliances at night. I get a cheap off peak tariff at night, and I'll get a on peak tariff, particularly you know, at the peak in the evening, it'll be the highest. Now, it's probably right that it's highest in the evening, but actually night is not really a time when you want to be making it cheaper to get electricity, because in places like Australia and other places. You know, California is actually the first market that really saw this, and we've seen it in Germany and other places as well. It's the middle of the day when the sun is shining most brightly and all those cellar panels are just pumping out electricity. That's actually the time when you really need to fix some of these imbalances that are happening in the grid. We are talking to Bloomberg Opinion columnist David Fickling about how to manage power from the solar grid and how sometimes running the clothes dryer could be good for the planet. Okay, So David, would it be the up to the consumer to adjust that imbalance that you were describing, or is this just one of the growing pains that we're finding as more places are converting to more renewable sources of energy. Is this this part of it, it's not going to be really for the consumer to sort of out. It's a hard thing for the consumers. Sort of the easiest way you can you can fix it as a consumer, but this will only apply to fairly affluent consumers. Certainly people in Australia and California and Germany would apply. Is of course, to attach a solar to a battery to your solar system. The time the toughest time, well, the two to toughest times for grids at the moment, or of course, the middle of the day, which we were talking about, and the evening the sun goes down. Everyone gets home, they switch on appliances, air conditioning, televisions, you know, or manner of things, and of course the solar that was there in the middle of the day is no longer there within your own home home solars, you know, home system. If you attach a battery to it you can be charging it in the middle of the day and discharging it in the evening, and that that potentially works quite well. But across the you know, across grids as a whole, things much more ambitious need to be done than that, and it's and it's a significant problem. You know, we're seeing things like here in Australia, for instance, there is a very big pumped pumped hydro project being built at the moment, which essentially what happens is when there is too much electricity in the middle of the day, a load of water is pumped uphill to a lake high up on a mountain just sort of southwest of Sydney, and then during the evening, when all that electricity is needed, then the water goes down through turbines like a standard hydroectionri dam and it will do this day after day. And there are lots of places, I think in California the same thing applies. There are lots of places where pump hydro is being used. And of course batteries as well for dispatchable power will be you know, utility scale batteries will be more active. But I think one of the problems that we're facing over the coming years. Is that the speed with which households are installing are installing solar power is faster than the sort of utility scale storage solutions can catch up. And dispatchable power, of course, dispatchable power, by which I mean you can switch on and off, you know, with the flick of a switch, which of course is not the case with any renewable power, also not really the case with is not the case with nuclear either. With dispatchable power, you know, most of it is fossil fossil fired, and that's a real problem because of course we want to get rid of fossil fossil fire electricity right now. And so it sounds like the two big things that need to be resolved would be managing the storage issue, the battery, making sure that those can be not only a portable but easy to acquire and quickly charged. And the infrastructure as a whole. Yeah. I mean one other solution, of course, which is again a lot of this depends on having the right market settings in place, and regulators I think in many ways have been somewhat slow to catch up on some of these things because it is all changing so very fast. But of course one thing to bear in mind is is we're seeing surging cells of electric vehicles. Electric vehicles another thing that should be sucking up power in the middle of the day and potentially could be used to discharge electricity in the evening, but at the moment in most markets there is very little regulation that would allow people to do that, you know, so instead we're seeing things like in South Australia, one of the states in Australia which has a particularly high volume of solar. Basically, the grid operator can switch off rooftop solar panels when there is too much of it, which is something that's possibly necessary to stop to stop stress on the grid. But ideally you want to find ways to use it. You don't want to be reducing the amount of zero carbon power that you're producing. You want to be using it more productively. So we're seeing a lot of these teething pains at the moment. David, this is just fascinating. Thank you for taking the time with us today. No, it's lovely to talk. Bloomberg Opinion columnist David Fickleing covers energy and commodities. Don't forget We're available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform. This is Bloomberg Opinion. You're listening to the Bloomberg Opinion podcast counts Saturdays at one in seven pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app and the Bloomberg Business App, or listen on demand wherever you get your podcasts. This is Bloomberg Opinion. I may you Morris Now. Since the beginning of the pandemic, traffic depths in the US have risen sharply, and during the high ight of the pandemic shutdown, speeding related accidents actually increased. At the time, Pamela Fisher of the Governor's Highway Safety Association explained, why fewer cars on the road, you should have fewer crashes. But the behaviors that were happening out there. People were seeing open highway, open roadways, local roads as well, not just on highways, and they were driving at really crazy speeds and engaging in other unsafe behaviors. Well, it hasn't improved much since then. Preliminary numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate forty six twenty people died in accidents involving motor vehicles in twenty twenty two. That's down just a bit from twenty twenty one, but still eighteen percent more than in twenty nineteen. Let's look at what's happening. Bloomberg opinion columnist Justin Fox covers Business and joins me, Now, Justin, you have voluminous amounts of data and some really nifty helpful charts to kind of guide us as to why all of this is happening. And you were even able to use this information to a limit. They some of the candidates for what is causing this? But what is the problem? Well, yeah, I mean when you bring this up that traffic fatalities are up in the US, and there's been a big jump since twenty nineteen, but they'd already started rising around I don't know, twenty fifteen or so. And a lot of times people will bring up smartphones or just the pandemic. But if you compare the US to other rich countries, I made a chart of the US, France, Germany, Canada, Australia and the UK. None of the rest of them have had this stall in the improvement in traffic fatalities like the US has. There In all those countries, they've kept going down. In the US, they stopped going down about a decade ago, and they've really gone up significantly over the past few years. So, okay, what's different about the US from these places? And one thing that's been brought up is we have these gigantic pickup trucks and SUVs that are you know, really safe if you're in them and get it in a a crash, but not so great for people in the other cars, and especially for pedestrians. I think there's some really big issues with the really high bumper pickups and SUVs being extreme pedestrian risk because they just you can't see what you're doing as well. So there's some research on that and the thought that maybe some percentage of the increase ten percent something like that is caused by the bigger trucks, and so that lame leaves Okay, well, what happened in the US since twenty nineteen that didn't happen in other places. And obviously it was this sort of national conflict rethinking argument about the role of the police, you know, especially in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Although obviously this discussion been going on for longer, you can sort of date it really coming to the fore to you know, Ferguson back in which I think was the end of two thousand and fourteen, and it if you look, you know, there aren't great national statistics on police stops for traffic violations. There's you know, there's a ole that the Bureau of Justice Statistics does and they're definitely down a little bit. But if you look at specific cities, it's pretty I mean, San Francisco is the champion in the San Francisco Chronicle was the first to report this a few weeks ago that traffic stops are down ninety four percent in San Francisco over the last eight years. But you find and Seattle is almost that much. You find a lot of other cities where they're down pretty significantly too. Now you ascribe some of this, at least to that sort of conflict between police and society what happened with the killing of George Floyd during the height of the pandemic. But could speed cameras, red light cameras, those types of traffic cameras also be a factor. Where you have an electronic eye versus a human eye keeping tabs on how we are on the highway right, those are much more common in most of these other countries that have had big, continued declines in traffic fatalities. We have some in the US, not many speed cameras outside a few big cities, a lot of red light cameras, but actually fewer than there were a decade ago. And that's something that there's been a lot of research done on over the years that especially the speed cameras seem to have a really pretty dramatic effect on reducing traffic fatalities. And it's I mean, I knew I've written about them before and I got lots of emails from people and I got them again now that just Americans hate this idea, and I think the one way to think about it is we also a lot of these other countries are kind of a little more reasonable about their speed limits, like Germany or something. You can drive really fast on the autobot in Germany. You just if you drive faster and you're allowed, you are likely to get in trouble. And I think the UK has been really the toughest on this and has had a really amazing decline in traffic fatalities. So yeah, it's like, Okay, we've dramatically cut back on the kind of traffic enforcement that we mostly do in the US, and at the same time, we're still really reluctant to embrace this other way of doing that has been pretty effective in other countries. It is, I mean, I will and I haven't checked if Kevin Newsom has signed it yet, but California has legislation that the Assembly and the Senate passed that would at least allow San Francisco and a few other cities to start experimenting with speed cameras, and I mean there aren't like New York has tons of both, and I think in general they have been shown to be pretty effective in making the city a lot safer than it used to be, although again New York has had a pretty big drop, you know, not like ninety percent, it's more like twenty or forty or something in enforcement and an increase in fatal accidents. And we are talking with Bloomberg opinion columnist Justin Fox about these sharp rise in traffic related deaths and what can be done about it. I want to get back to the speed camera, the red light camera situation, because you said something about how people just really aren't getting behind it. Anecdotally, I can tell you that when I would cover local news local traffic issues, local neighborhood issues in the Washington, DC area, If you are a driver a motorist, no, you are not crazy one hundred percent in love with those of the traffic cameras. But if you were in a neighborhood, you know, take that driver out of the car and put him in his living room with the kids who are outside playing in the yard. You want those traffic cameras in your neighborhood. I've talked to many people who are actually lobbying, petitioning to get a traffic camera in their neighborhood to slow people down, right, And that's like one reason why we have lots in New York City, because drivers are in the minority here and the people who are worried about getting hit by drivers are in the majority exactly. But that's just a really hard equation in a lot of the country. And I mean, I do think there's some history of the speed cameras being used by you know, small towns in Texas to nab people without adequate warning. And because Texas is one of the states that the legislatures outright banned them. I think there are nine states that have banned speed cameras and eight red light cameras, and then most states just don't have any law permitting them and therefore don't really have any But then they're like Maryland has tons. I don't know. I just think American motorists and I get it because so many people are so dependent on their cars to do everything in their lives. But American motorists are the most entitled people in the world. Like when they're thinking in car thought, sometimes when they get out of the car and realize, oh, I live in a neighborhood with that cars drive through, then they can change that. But just the knee jerk reaction from people, you know, I don't think the enforcement should be unreasonable, in the speed limit should be reasonable, but yeah, why not have automated enforcement rather? Because it has been shown pretty clearly. There was a really interesting, very recent study done using data from lyft and lift drivers in Florida where they could, because of lift's location data, tell exactly how fast the cars were going. They knew who all the drivers were, and black drivers were significantly who were driving the exact same speed as white drivers were significantly more likely to be pulled over. And yeah, with speed cameras, you don't have that. It's really it sort of Police jobs are the kinds of jobs that are hard to hire people for right now. I mean, across the economy, there's this big shortage of young people. I mean, there's lots of them doing it, but the demand, there's this big demand and supply mismatch of especially young people coming into non college degree requiring and police is one of them. And so there's this sort of overall issue. And I just think in a lot of cities people feel like, yeah, do I really want to be a cop? In San Francisco, it doesn't. They pay pretty well, but it doesn't seem like a high status job, and all the police cars are thirty years old, so I don't know. Justin it is a great column. I recommend everybody check it out. Thank you so much for taking the time with us. Thanks for having me. You're listening to Bloomberg Opinion. I n Amy Morris, it's the problem makes me. Actually, Taylor Swift isn't the problem for the NFL at all, but she might not be enough either because for the most part, gen Z couldn't care less about traditional sports. I want to talk about this now with Bloomberg opinion columnist Adam Mentor, he covers the Business of sports, and he joins us, Now, Adam, what will it take besides Taylor Swift for the NFL to win over gen Z? They've spent years worrying about this, and one of the things they're finding is that no matter what they do, overall, the interests of gen Z in their product and in other pro sports traditional sports products is declining. So they're looking and Taylor Swift, they hoped, would provide that a little bit of and temporarily she has, but once she's gone, they're looking for some way to fill that vacuum. So there was a little bit of a boost, but that didn't last. Where does this indifference come from? You know, if you grew up like I did, you sort of had your sports fandom passed on generationally. You watched the football game on Sunday with Grandpa or you watch it with dad, and then you went to school and everybody was talking about what they watched on Sunday with grandpa or dad or mom or whoever it was, and maybe that was inspiration to go and join the high school or elementary school football team. That's breaking down because everybody has their own screen at home now, and so you aren't getting what people who study this called generational fandom. It's not being passed on any more. People either have to find it on their own, they have to find their own way of embracing football, baseball, hockey, whatever it is, or they're just going to find other ways to entertain themselves. And increasingly that's the case. And it's a reason for panic for the NFL, the NHL, and all the major sports leagues. So does this also impact say, the NCAA and those leagues as well. Yes, and no. I mean yes in the sense that sure, you know you're gonna learn to watch Alabama with your parents who was an alum. But even so, you still have your own screen that you can sit on the couch and watch esports on. And we're finding that esports are incredibly popular for gen z, you know, roughly aged twenty six and younger. You know, then it used to be that way. If you're sitting on the couch and there's one TV in the house and it's tuned to the Alabama game, you're watching the Alabama game, not somebody playing you know, League of Legends, you know, with somebody else in Hong Kong. Is there a cultural or even economic impact that comes from the indifference. Right now, we're seeing, you know, huge media rights deals. For example, for the NFL. You know, the NFL is has just started this year a multi billion dollar deal. Amazon is paying a billion dollars a year to show Thursday Night NFL games. That deal is going to last for years. But you know gen Z is starting to age into its prime earning years. And you know the companies, the Googles, the ABC's, the espns, the ESPN, ABC are the same. You know, as they start projecting out what these media rights deals are going to be worth in five or ten years, they're going to look at these demographics and say, hey, wait a second. You know gen Z isn't as interested in this stuff as the millennials were or gen X was, and thus we're not going to pay as much. So it is a long term risk to their business models. I was going to ask, how do you win over the next generation, But it sounds like they don't really know. They haven't figured that part out yet. Yeah, I mean that's the thing they're struggling. One of the things that you hear the league say in the network say, well, we have to meet the fans where the fans are. Well, you know, that used to be at the one television in the living or more or at the stadium. It's not so easy now Now you have to meet them on TikTok. You know, you have to meet them on other social media sites. That gets harder. Who's going to create the content that attracts them? You know. One of the things that the NFL is doing is they're starting to hire influencers, gen z influencers, people who are popular, you know, on these social media service. Is it working? You know, I don't think anybody can say yet. You know, you're not going to see, certainly a Taylor Swift tight bump from a well known influencer on TikTok, you know, reflected in this week's TV ratings, but maybe long term you will. Bloomberg Opinion columnist Adam Mentor covers the business of sports and that does it for this week's Bloomberg Opinion. We're produced by Eric Mullow, and you can find all of these columns on the Bloomberg Terminal. We're also available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform. Stay with us Today's top stories and global business headlines. Just ahead, I may me Morris. 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This week, we discuss child care affordability and legislation. We also examine the causes of natural disasters, a dysfunctional housing market, and biking to work. We're joined by Bloomberg Opinion's Sarah Green Carmichael, Conor Sen, Lara Williams, and Justin Fox. Amy Morris hosts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We discuss why Americans are pessimistic on the economy despite a drop in inflation. We also dig into Moderna and vaccines, climate change's relationship with farming, and being black in America. Claudia Sahm, Justin Fox, Lara Williams, and Lisa Jarvis join. Lisa Mateo hosts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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UPS has a message for the Federal Reserve, says Bloomberg Opinion's Conor Sen, and he tell us the Fed should listen. What is wind "turbinegeddon," and why is it a troubling climate omen? Bloomberg's Chris Bryant joins us to explain. We also explore why even wealthy Americans are anxious about money with Bloomberg's Allison Schrager. And can an electric vehicle be a muscle car? Bloomberg's Bobby Ghosh says it just may be able to. Amy Morris hosts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How much attention should voters pay to Donald Trump's huge lead in the GOP primary polls? Bloomberg Opinion columnist Jonathan Bernstein says not too much. He joins to explain. Opinion's Faye Flam also provides some political analysis, as it relates to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., vaccines, and conspiracy. Columnist Lisa Jarvis joins to discuss the potential benefits of a postpartum depression pill, and Sarah Green Carmichael talks about her column on the misconception Zoom calling workers into the office. Amy Morris hosts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.