Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend - July 3rd, 2026

25:25For us, once a consumer decides, I want to be in a pool, within six days we're in and out. Six days. Yes. Six days. Six days. So tremendous advantage. And then obviously. Tim's like, wait a minute, how big is my backyard? No, no. 100%. And so the opportunity for Latham, the pool company, is a couple of things. One, we've done very well in the Midwest, Northeastern Canada, where vinyl is a standard vinyl line of pools and fiberglass. When you think about the southern states, the majority of the pools that go in are cement. And really, it's because they haven't seen an alternative. But do consumers think about the actual material?

26:06Or do they say, I want a pool, they call a builder, the builder has the relationship with you, and that's how they get that type of material? So a consumer engages, a dealer or a builder comes into their kitchen table, sells a product. Because we're the incumbent, we're still the unknown. So essentially, we're a new product in the South. And I say a new product, we've been there for a couple of years, but we are in the new end. We're spending and investing a significant amount of marketing in the Southern markets on our San State strategies. And when you think San State strategies, it's basically Florida to Southern California.

26:38But we're taking a very targeted approach on how we get there. So we're looking at neighborhoods. So right now in Florida, we're looking at neighborhoods that have a higher propensity for pools. That is price of pool, price of house, household income, age of home, and size of the lot. Once we get the right neighborhoods, we're working with dealers to go in there and position fiberglass. Sean, I want to ask you, I mean, weather. I think you guys talked about this too on the call. And I think you talked a little bit about some weather. maybe uh i'm looking for my notes here but maybe had a little bit of an impact but i'm just talk to me about weather in general cold seasons are the start of like spring cold can it kill a quarter or a year for you and at the same time climate change where it's getting hotter you know perversely is that kind of a good thing for your business yeah so uh one obviously we're cyclical business uh most of the pool building occurs during the spring summer autumn months uh that's So it is a cyclical business.

27:40Generally where it's cold is generally our smaller quarter. So it's not going to kill the year. Yeah. And when you think about that first quarter, we basically missed equivalent to one day of shipping. Okay. So it wasn't by any stretch going to impact us to that degree. What I love about going into the southern states is their season's much longer. And so when you think about where it's freezing cold in Connecticut in March, Florida and Texas and Atlanta are ready to go. So as we penetrate further into the southern markets, we'll be able to balance our business in a much more effective way. What's the typical cost from soup to nuts for a pool?

28:17Yeah, so the basic pool, when you think about that, the average in North America, across North America, is$95 ,000. But you can get into a pool anything from$70 ,000. And of course, it can go away up to$200 ,000, depending the pool you want and what else you do when you put in the pool, if you do landscaping, kitchens, etc. Why is it so expensive? It's basically dig a hole. Hey, if it's that easy, Carol, do it yourself. No, I'm just, is it the material cost? Is it labor? It's all of the above. I mean, I think in reality, during COVID, material costs went up, obviously, and hasn't corrected. Labor definitely went up and hasn't corrected.

28:57We do a lot of the labor in our factories. It's an advantage of being a fiberglass pool. Is everything done in the U.S.? Everything that's supplied to the U.S. is done in the U.S. So fiberglass, because it's quite hard to freight to a house, you need to be close to your market, which is one of our advantages. And so when you think about that, we have control of the cost, we have control of the product, and we have control of the quality. So it gives us a great pull. That was Sean Gad, President and CEO of Latham Group. Still ahead on Bloomberg Businessweek, no summer weekend is complete without diving into a great book.

29:29We've got a new literary thriller for you. The award-winning novelist and screenwriter, Teddy Wayne, joins us next. This is Bloomberg.

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30:57Brex AF, a gentic finance that eliminates that work before it starts. Learn more at brex.com slash AF. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Ear Say, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science. and what happens when you wake up alone very far from earth. I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent?

31:40And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me. and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

32:24our flagship New York station. Just say, Alexa, play Bloomberg 1130. Teddy Wainwright's novels you can't put down. I know this because I've read all seven of them. They include The Winner, which has been optioned by Sony for a film starring Tom Holland, The Great Man Theory, The Love Song of Johnny Valentine, Capitoil, and others. Teddy's a novelist, a screenwriter. He's also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, McSweeney's, other publications too. He was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, Penn Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. I feel like it's Outlander for guys.

32:57I'm just going to put it out there. But anyway, his new book, The Au Pair, is a literary thriller. We're not going to spoil it. We're going to get to that in just a moment. Teddy, of course, joining us in our Bloomberg studio. Welcome, welcome. Thank you for having me. Your book is being kind of passed around our newsroom, to be quite honest, and different people reading it. Anyone who reads your book, and I listen to a bunch of podcasts, it's often men who make really questionable, or in some cases, really bad decisions. What's up with that? I think I'm just entranced by the idea of someone destroying their life, who has a pretty good one, a fairly accomplished or content life, but is driven by the American pursuit of more and more, more happiness, more money, more sex, more status.

33:44And that ambition is their downfall. Why are you so interested in that? I live in New York City. It's all around me. I'm at Bloomberg right now. That is so fair. The mecca of ambition and status and money. It does feel like we live in a society, certainly in the New York metro, it's never enough, right? It should be. We all know that instinctively. We all have been taught that over and over many times in our lives. But when you're actually presented with the opportunity and the potential to get more, it's very hard to turn it down. There was somewhere on a podcast you talked about billionaires specifically.

34:16And you were like, that's not what people really want to be or shouldn't be. It's not like all of a sudden everybody's so happy or like everything's solved. There is that stat, I'm sure you guys know that, that study that people's happiness rises to a certain income level and then maybe tails off. I think the original number is$75 ,000 a year. They upgraded that to$150 ,000 or something because of inflation, perhaps. I strongly believe that past a certain point, it actually goes down your happiness, that you might have more material comfort, of course. you might feel in some sense like you won at life.

34:50But the people I know who are in that kind of ultra rich, high net worth category, tend to have thinner relationships, tend to feel like if they don't recognize it themselves, that people like them for their money and their power. And I think it's very difficult to have that kind of level of wealth, not even income, and still have an authentically happy life. Well, perhaps it's a good segue to talk about your new book, The Au Pair. The Au Pair is a literary thriller. It's about a middle-aged novelist who lives in Brownstone, Brooklyn. He's married. The marriage is not so great. A young Norwegian au pair enters the picture.

35:30Okay. Right there is trouble. I mean, come on. Well, I'm not going to give everything away, but let's just say things get a lot messier than it sounds like they're going to get. You talk about writing about what you know and what you're surrounded by that profile of Stephen the main character middle-aged plays pickleball I guess you play pickleball too yeah uh he has two kids lives in a certain part of Brooklyn that's very similar to you adjacent to me I live in Cobble Hill not Brooklyn Heights I do two kids just got across Atlantic Avenue to get to it his career trajectory and his financial situation in the household is different from mine.

36:09He had a massive hit when he was nine years earlier before the novel starts. His second novel was a bust. He's financially dependent on his wife who works in private equity. That's not my situation at all. I've observed, though, both the plight of the novelist who had a sort of a big bang of an opening and then a whimper in their next phase. And I've observed separately a number of men who are financially dependent more or less on their wives. And they tend to respond to it better than Stephen does. There's a lot of insecurity here, a lot of sense of emasculation. His wife is not too thrilled with the arrangement either.

36:48So I was interested in exploring this phenomenon that didn't really exist in America 20 plus years ago, certainly not 30 plus years ago. It's not widespread now, but it's much more common than you'd think. And there's nothing wrong with it objectively, but I think the genders have still figured, trying to figure out how to, had to adapt to it. I found it notable that you, you wrote about how, when you started this process for writing this book, you started it as a screenplay or maybe a short story that could turn into a screenplay that you could give to your agent who could then go and sell it to a streaming service.

37:25The, the economics of writing a novel in, in today's environment, Is that the way you have to approach something in order to make the economics work, make it financially work? You have to think about all these different income streams. If I didn't live in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, maybe I'd have a little more leeway. Because I live where I live and I'm not a professor at a university, this is the only way I make my living is writing. So it's a bit of a rare breed now. I think, again, the type of me, the guy who earns a living as a novelist, was in proliferation 30 plus years ago in American life.

37:59probably from like 1920s up until about 2010. The industry has contracted greatly. It's much harder to make a living as a novelist, certainly as a literary fiction novelist, let's call it. So yes, I had this idea of 30, 40 page short story. I'd had a nice film deal with a winner. Let me write this as a short story. We'll sell it to Hollywood for IP. Highly cynical origin story. I'm aware of that. Once I started writing it though, I got very excited by it, by the themes. by the characters, by the setting, by the plot as well, and decided to turn into a novel. So that was a quick, short-lived idea, but I used that initial conception of this is the only way to make a living now for a guy who's trying to support a family as one of the major themes of the book, that Stephen is now a failing novelist who's financially dependent on his wife, who can't make much money as a writer anymore.

38:52This undergirds all his anxieties, pretty much. As a writer, is that kind of rewarding to start out with a shorter mission and just be like, wow, I'm just really loving this and I'm going to run with it. It is when it works out well. If it doesn't work out well, it's quite, maybe I should have kept it at that short level. You know, we're approaching this as broadcasters, as reporters, and I couldn't help but notice in this book and some of your other books, I'm not going to, again, not going to give anything away, but you thank people within a profession. I'll just go ahead and say it, like NYPD, Detectives Bureau, a prosecutor in the Bronx who you've leaned on in the past.

39:32And it's almost like you reported out certain parts of this book by making sure that it works in terms of like if somebody in a profession, in a legal profession were to read it, they would say, OK, wait a second. That's how things would would actually unfold. Can you talk about not the creative process, but the actual reporting process in this? Absolutely. I'm not a criminologist. I have no police background, as you might be surprised to find out. So I have these two friends, a detective and an assistant DA. I feel like the one detective and one assistant DA who are both avid readers of literary fiction, so it's great to have them in my back pocket.

40:08They help me a lot with The Winner as well. There's a crime in that too. And I wouldn't know the first thing about what police do, what lawyers do. You pick up some things from life, from watching enough courtroom thrillers and so on. But it helps to have people who are experts. And not only that, they've helped me come up with plot turns for both these books. The ending of The Winner was completely invented by my DA friend who knew about this specific thing. I won't spoil it for your viewers. That not many people knew about, which he gave to me as this is a great twist for the ending that is even a lot of cops don't know about it.

40:47That's pretty cool. And I'm not sure if I've gotten this right, but I thought I'd heard on a podcast, too, that the ending for this book, you are planning to go one way. and then you went to it, was it a school event or something, and actually talked to a father at the school event who kind of talked with you about some stuff and kind of helped shape you. The ending was a little bit quieter and subtler, and I'd been working on it. I kind of knew something was wrong. I went to my daughter's preschool graduation party. Which you love to do, right? Which I'm always up for going to a preschool graduation party.

41:21We've all been there. We were in the last week. We've all been there. It was at the club as the after party. We were assigned another dad there. He works for a company. I can't say what it is because it'll spoil. The last sentence of this book has a twist in it. So I can't say what he works for. But we talked for a while. I'm generally interested in people's jobs and ask what they do. The next day, my wife and I were talking about the book. And she said, I think you need something else here at the ending. But I don't know what. But it's currently not working. and I realized what this guy does for a living could play a big factor in that and I ended up rewriting it based on that.

41:57Okay, go ahead, Carol. Do you and your wife often talk, you're both writers, like do you often, you both work from home, like do you often kind of bounce off of each other? We do, literally, because we live in a small apartment and we are constantly in each other's way, but her name is Kate Greathead, she's a wonderful writer too. Her last book is called The Book of George. I'd say we're probably each other's first and last readers, I think first and last line of defense. um plenty of discussion while we're in the midst of things not the kind of couple where we show each other every single page we write that night but good to have someone in your own field who can talk with about your own work but also about broader literature and movies and so on how much does a draft stay well like stay consistent i know it's you know dependent on the draft but this for example the au pair which uh is coming out tomorrow um stay consistent between first and last draft?

42:49The spine stays consistent. I've written this and the last book very quickly, the first draft. My new method is write it as fast as possible at a blitz-like pace to slightly match the pace of the reading experience. I want to write books that are page turners, that are quick reads, that people tend to finish in one or two sittings. So I wrote them so quickly, they're necessarily short too because of that. So the revision process tends to flesh it out and deepen things. You get ideas like that ending twist. Plenty of other backstory and other elements of character and psychology and narrative end up coming in too.

43:28We're speaking with Teddy Wayne. He's a novelist. He's an author. He is a screenwriter. His new book, The Au Pair. I want to talk a little bit about some themes that have come up in your work in the past. One of them is technology. And again, I'm not going to give anything away, but technology features prominently in this book and also in another book. And I'm just wondering, the world that we live in today, you talked earlier about how we're reading less, so we're buying fewer books. Perhaps some of that time is being taken up by us being addicted to our phones and information coming at us from every different angle where we're kind of measuring everything too.

44:04I'm just wondering how you view technology. I'd say all of it's being taken up by that. I think that's the main difference between now and 1950s certainly but even 2003 let's say um i'm susceptible as anyone else i spent a lot of time on my phone i'm not proud of it i don't like what it does to me i can't resist the allure of a glowing device that has access to everything in the world ever made much of it bright and shiny and video and visual so i i understand why people are are drawn to these things i do my best to have my children resist it. But there's only so much you can do with it. And it's certainly leading to the erosion of my industry as a writer.

44:47But it's not doing great things for most people's characters and personalities, I'd say. What do you hope when somebody reads your book, they walk away with? Because I do feel like there's messages about society in there. And And I think I mentioned earlier, like the transactions that we see in our economy, the power structure, whether, you know, you see it right off. There's just always someone that can be above someone in positions. But it's a part of a lot of your books. Well, first, I'm trying to entertain people and to write something that will make them put down the phone or their laptop and just read a book.

45:25Secondly, I think art can serve two essential purposes. It can comfort the disturbed or disturb the comfortable. Comforting the disturbed is a great thing. It's not really what I do. I'm in the business of disturbing the comfortable, specifically the probably upper middle class, professional class that might buy a hardcover novel and have time to read it on the beach, say, or on their vacation. And an attempt to make them look around their environment, look at themselves with new eyes in a way that I think fiction can often be anesthetizing or anodyne and make us feel good about where we are and about ourselves.

46:02And there's nothing wrong with that again. But I'm more interested in making people question themselves. And other works of art often, like movies or something like The Anatomy of Fall, right? That inspired this. I mean, you are inspired by other works that are out there. You have to be. It'd be strange to be closed off by that. I've heard of writers who say they don't want to read other novels, of their fiction while they're writing. I don't know how you would do that, but I'm always looking for what might rub off on me. I think it's important to have a bit of a magpie sensibility to pick things from anywhere, whether it's another novel is the obvious place, but film, music, and then, of course, real life and little moments from real life.

46:43One of, I think, was Capitoli your first novel? It was. So it's a 2010 novel. It tells the story of this young immigrant from Qatar. It's actually very Bloomberg. Like, you know, he comes and, you know, works on Wall Street. He creates this algorithm to trade oil that ends up being really successful. There's a character in there who runs the fund that he works for and builds this relationship with him. And he goes and visits him on his estate in Connecticut and there are helicopters involved and lots and lots of money. Was there a specific individual, like hedge fund manager, you modeled that person off of?

47:19Not hedge fund. I think each book of mine is an attempt to be some kind of diagnostic assessment of America at the time it was either written in and or the time it portrays. And this is post-financial crisis. But it takes place pre-9-11. Takes place in 1999. So it but it's meant to be in its own way a kind of post-9-11 novel about the 9-11 world, even though it's all set before that. So that book was, again, as you pointed out, he develops an algorithm that uses news articles. It's been a while since I read it or thought about it. It uses news articles and algorithmically sifts them to predict oil futures.

47:56It felt like a kind of metaphor to me of, let's say, 2003 to 2000 and whatever U.S. foreign policy of some kind of exploitative oil acquisition and profiteering from Iraq. So that guy was not modeled off a specific individual. I was more thinking about the Dick Cheney style of foreign imperialism. All right, so I've got to ask. I mean, did you have a Norwegian au pair? I'm just kidding. Swedish. No, we've never, we've not even had a nanny, or we rarely even get babysitters, to be honest. So it's all invented. Writer's block. It seems like there's a theme often where you have a writer somebody who meets somebody, whether it's apartment or this book, where somebody who isn't necessarily a writer by training or something can write so naturally.

48:50Do you have writer's block a lot? Or like, why is that a fun theme for you? So I have a strange situation of once I get started, I can't stop. And I'm very excited to write and there's no problems. It's between projects that I think I'll always, I always fear I'll never come up with another idea or another idea worth pursuing. Yeah, get it. And that is a probably chronic lifelong anxiety that I'll be afflicted with forever. Invariably something pops up and I get an idea and I run with it, but there's often a several-month gap between the end of one project and the start of a new one where I do feel that sense of a block, and that might inform these characters.

49:29Is that where you feel you are right now, or do you feel like you have, with this new book coming out that you worked, you know, it's been quite a while in the making, Are you ready to start a new one? I'm in the midst of working on one, so I'm good for now. But when this is over, I still feel like what's left. All right, so the book is out. A teaser, we don't want to give it away. 30, 40 seconds for those who might be listening. Of what it's about? Yeah. Failing middle-aged Brooklyn novelist hires an au pair, 24-year-old Norwegian au pair who upends his life and bad things happen. All right, summer read as we kick off the summer officially.

50:03And it already has been sold to, like, has it been sold? Like, who bought it for streaming rights or movies? Fifth season, a big production company. They do, I think, Severance and things like that. So would it be a series versus a one-off film? Okay. All right. Well, congratulations. Thank you. Thanks so much for joining us. No, no, I'm just kidding. Good luck with it. Thank you so much. This was really fun. We really enjoyed it. Teddy Wayne, of course, joining us. The book is The Au Pair. Yeah, and there's lots of books. And you've read them all. I've read all seven and I will read the eighth one now And that wraps up our weekend edition of Bloomberg Business Week From Bloomberg Radio, a special holiday edition Thank you for joining us Be sure to tune in to Bloomberg Business Week daily Monday through Friday starting at 2 p.m.

50:45Wall Street time On Bloomberg Radio, Bloomberg TV, and on Sirius XM Channel 121 You can also watch our daily broadcast on YouTube Just search Bloomberg Podcasts We're simulcast on Bloomberg Originals Available on Bloomberg.com slash originals And streaming platforms including Roku, Amazon Firecast TV, Samsung TV Plus, and more. I'm Tim Stenevek. And I'm Carol Master. Have a good and safe weekend, everyone. This is the Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast. Available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5 p.m. Eastern on Bloomberg.com, the iHeartRadio app, TuneIn, and the Bloomberg Business app.

51:25You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg Terminal.

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