Justice Department Releases Large Tranche of Epstein Files

26:53Carol Massar:If I look at Cigna, which was a little bit higher in today's session, it too is down about seven tenths of a percent and this has to do with what we're hearing from president trump at the white house when it comes to drug pricing and pharmaceutical companies this is a reminder that you can have economic fundamentals in a backdrop but then you can also have something come out of the white house that's going to impact the trade in a big way this is the the new new thing for the market which is an interventionist president and what my question would be if we were sitting here with Jamie Dimon or name the Jensen Wongers.

27:28Carol Massar:Oh, Jamie's coming in. Okay. That's next. Stay here. But my question would be, why are you not having a problem with this pro-business president getting in the way of what we would consider your business? The idea, like when Elizabeth Warren said anything, Bernie Sanders says anything, people on wall street freak out but yet you can have the president taking stakes in companies taking percentages of profits of nvidia telling drug companies yeah no you can't do that and we don't hear a word about the free market to be fair to be fair we did ask steve moore about this last week yeah last week we asked him about this uh former advisor to the president he was nominated for a Fed governor position.

28:14He was extremely critical of President Trump. Yeah. But he's an old school free markets guy. And that's the typical traditional Republican. But Eric, you kind of answered your own question with the evolution of politics and the evolution of the Republican Party and who's in control of Washington, D.C. That model has been flipped on its head. Absolutely. I mean, the American Enterprise Institute, which I think that's where more is. These guys. Or has been in the past. In the past. these guys hate this like this is absolutely what's not supposed to be going on so like when you talk to them they're they are like i don't know why anybody is standing up for this it's corporate america that's going along with it and what it appears to be is that they're okay with cutting individual deals and just uh heritage foundation getting the control room correcting us thank you oh it's heritage heritage foundation where steve moore was yeah so it's but all of them are any of these old school economic institutes where they are free market true believers.

29:14They don't like this. It's the companies themselves that are allowing it to happen. And they will cut individual deals with the president to make their markets work. And that's a very strange form of market capitalism.

29:28Carol Massar:10 seconds on triple witching. What do we need to know? A lot of volume and things are pretty muted in terms of index moves. I mean, it's, you know, a lot of action, but it's not really driving price. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week daily podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5 Eastern. Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app. Or watch us live on YouTube. Hey, one of the things that we love to talk about, robotics, technology, automation, Bloomberg Weekend recently reported out that humanoid robots are coming as soon as they learn to fold clothes.

30:05Carol Massar:Count me in. Okay. Okay. Why they wrote this, apparently the team attended a recent Silicon Valley summit and there they saw small robots roaming and pouring lattes while evangelists hailed new AI techniques as transformative. But full-size prototypes, they were pretty scarce. Okay. I want to see what Ty Brady has to say about this. He's chief technologist at Amazon Robotics. Ty is also founding partner of Mass Robotics. It's a not-for-profit organization that's become the world's largest robotics innovation center and serves on a number of boards to promote STEM learning and advancement. Ty, good to have you back on the program.

30:40Happy holidays. I want to get to this idea of humanoid robots because it doesn't matter if a humanoid robot can fold laundry for a lot of the purposes that you have for Amazon. How are robots, apart from the Kiva robots, used right now in Amazon warehouses? Well, thanks, Tim. Thanks for having me on, Carol. It's been nice to hear you as well. It's always a pleasure to be on the show and talk all things robotics and tech with you. Indeed, the age of physical AI is here. Amazon is building our physical AI systems to help better the customer experience, expanding our selection, lowering costs, fueling the faster delivery times that we know our customers love.

31:18But given your question, think of the very practical, everyday experience where we're doing this at a very high reliability and scaling this where we're shipping millions and millions of products every day here for the holiday season. And it's really exciting to see. It's very real. It's very practical. And it's something that we're very proud of in what we're doing with our employees.

31:39Carol Massar:All right. We want to talk about this. You know we do and we will. But I do want to pick your brains because I always feel like I learn so much, you know, when you join us. Bring it. Is that so these humanoid robots? I mean, Elon's working on them. Other people are like, is it years away? What's your thought, your expertise? You know this world. I do know this world. I'll tell you that we usually start with what problem are we trying to solve? What's the problem we're trying to solve? And once we figure out the problem, then we actually go to functions. What functions should the robotics, should the physical AI systems do, right?

32:11So from the functionality, should it fold laundry? Should it do your dishes? Then we derive form. And you kind of get the cart ahead of the horse when you start with form first and then see how can you apply this technology. And we don't do technology for technology's sake inside Amazon. What we do is we solve problems. We solve problems, everyday problems, at an incredible scale that actually advances the state-of-the-art in robotics. Right? So if you wanted a robot to wash your dishes, well, congratulations, you have that. You don't necessarily need a humanoid form to wash your dishes. As a matter of fact, it would be kind of comical to see a robot pick up the dish, pick up a sponge, put the soap on it, scrub the dish, and put it in the drying rack.

32:54when you have this really practical robot in your kitchen today called the dishwasher, which is amazing and blends right into the woodwork. So we think about function first and then allow the form to follow. Okay, so we want to talk specifics here about what's happening in the warehouses. Blue Jay and Aluna and more, your systems, Blue Jay Robotics, Aluna, Agentic AI, Delivery Glasses, Amazon's warehouses. These are well-known for robotics and the use of tech and AI. How does all of that continue to evolve and specifically impact productivity side by side with human workers? Yeah, so the word I want to use is supercharged.

33:31We're supercharging the world's largest fleet of robotics out there with AI, using AI systems to better the reasoning and to better assist our employees. We want to eliminate the menial, the mundane, and the repetitive through the use of robotics as a tool set for employees. And we're entering this era where foundation models are making our robots smarter, more affordable, more adaptable, more conversational, and really reshaping work as we know it, not just in e-commerce, but actually across industries and creating new kinds of jobs.

34:00Carol Massar:Ty, I'm jumping in because right now we're showing, for those who are watching on TV and YouTube and our streaming service, what looks like your special delivery glasses. as we continue to show this. Just tell us what they're all about. They look like normal glasses, but what do they enable a driver to do more easily? Yeah, well, it's the fundamental principle that we have is to use them as a tool set. So allow the driver to understand where the delivery should be. Allow them to be kind of hands-free in order to take the picture of the package at your door. Allow them to understand what's the best route to the customer's door.

34:34Allow them to see their delivery notes of where they should place the delivery at the right spot. That's just right for our customer. I mean, we're customer obsessed. So any tool that we can give our delivery employees or our frontline employees, that's how we want to use technology. Are they rolled out? I think that we're still in the early stages of deployment. So when would they be fully rolled out across the network? Hard to tell. Would it be within a year, maybe within 2026? Yeah, we're pretty, we are a pretty, once we get to the alpha and beta deployment, it's typically within about a year that you will see this starting to roll out.

35:12And we take a very measured approach when things roll out. We test it. We make sure it's great for our employees. Does it add value for our employees? Does it create a safer environment for our employees? And then we'll test that at a smaller scale. And then we go into the, you know, the millions and millions of scale.

35:29Carol Massar:Hey, I want to go back to Blue Jay and Aluna. Tim brought up Blue Jay, your next generation robotic systems. system, excuse me, and Aluna is an agentic AI system. So talk to us about that. How much are they deployed today across your fulfillment network? And I'm curious about milestones that we should all be watching out for in the next 12 to 24 months, Ty. Sure. So at Luna, we're actually using kind of in a monitor-only manner right now during peak, We actually just went through the peak of peaks where we have our largest outbound happening just actually yesterday. And what Eluna does is it gives operators a complete real-time view to help guide their every move.

36:13So think of many, many dashboards now can be consolidated into human consumable text, human consumable recommendations of how to actually deploy the network and how to deploy various robotics inside that building in a way that it gains these more efficiencies. So we're seeing that. That is rolling out today. And then we're really excited about Blue Jay as well. You can think of this really for our sub-same-day network. That's a growing network they have inside of Amazon. where we're getting the goods right to the customer's door in a matter of hours. What BlueJay does is it really indexes on a smaller footprint.

36:51You can think of this as three assembly lines kind of combined into one, where we have robotic arms picking orders for our customers out of our containerized storage systems and allowing those to be delivered right to the customer's door. That's really an exciting time. So if we think about this time right now, the holiday peak, where people are trying to get stuff as quick as possible, Specifically, where does the tech that you just outlined have the biggest impact? Is it smoothing labor variability, preventing bottlenecks? Does it improve on-time delivery metrics? Is it all of the above? Is it something I didn't even mention?

37:26Yeah, it is all of the above. Plus, what it's allowing us to do is really exception handling, right? When we think about robotics and you think robotics and physical AI at scale, when you ship millions and millions every day, just 1 % of exception handling can kind of each eat your lunch. So any tools that we have to help us with the exception handling, maybe one of the systems is not picking up a particular object right. So that learning needs to be propagated through our other manipulation systems. Or maybe a mobility system is having some bottlenecks because of the way the inventory is stored inside of the building.

38:00People have really good skills of critical reasoning and critical thinking and using common sense. So tools that allow them to understand the situation better, perceive their environment better through the use of robotics, and then have truly physical agents to help with that in concert with our employees is that allow us to deal with all the exceptions that we see, you know, every day, especially at peak.

38:24Carol Massar:Hey, Ty, just got about a minute left here. And I know we've talked about this with you before, and I think it's a fair question, you guys have addressed it about the impact on your workforce. And I wonder if it's smarter to think about maybe not that what you guys are doing in terms of automation or other companies for that matter, that it means doing away with workers, but maybe it means that you will have to hire fewer workers in the future. Is that fair? Well, first of all, Carol, any question you ask is fair. So I think it is fair to always ask those questions. And we should always kind of, have the mindset of people first, which we do inside of Amazon.

39:01So what are we doing specifically for our employees? And I'm really proud of this. We're building better machines for them. We're listening to them. We're iterating in our designs. We're rolling out a tool set for them to use it every day at scale. At scale, it's almost unimaginable when it comes to what we've done inside of robotics. We're upscaling them. We have a$2.5 billion pledge that we call Future Ready to prepare 50 million people for how technology will impact and change not only the nature of work, but also their everyday lives. And we're also creating a safer environment with our robotics, eliminating the repetitive, the menial, the mundane, allowing machines to do the heavy lifting and the repetitive actions, and allowing people to work with them in order to use this beautiful thing here.

39:45Carol Massar:Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Businessweek Daily coming up after this. So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. For many men, mental health challenges aren't recognized until they've already taken a toll.

40:27Work pressure, financial stress, changing relationships, and traditional expectations around masculinity can quietly wear men down, often without clear warning signs. In season three of The Visibility Gap, Dr. Guy Winch and his guests explore how these pressures show up, how to spot them earlier, and how men can access meaningful support. Listen to the new season of The Visibility Gap, a podcast presented by Cigna Healthcare.

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41:52Carol Massar:You need to make a huge presentation in an hour. Adobe Acrobat uses AI to take all your documents and generate a presentation with a single click. Build slides quickly and streamline the process. Need a last-minute pitch deck? Do that with Acrobat. Need to level up your presentation design? Do that with Acrobat. You have 30 plus documents that need to be simplified into a proposal. Do that. Do that. Do that with Acrobat. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5 Eastern. Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg business app or watch us live on youtube a week ago today when there was expectations or talks and reports that the president was going to do something to make to reclassify marijuana in terms of the drug classification we saw that on thursday he signed an executive order directing his administration to move cannabis into a less restrictive federal category it set in motion a regulatory shift that could alter the legal and commercial landscape for the drug nationwide for more and to drive to the close, we bring in Dan Arendt's portfolio manager of the advisor shares pure U.S.

43:08cannabis ETF. He joins us here in from Dallas. Dan, good to have you on the program today. Just give us an idea. I'm looking for the makeup of the advisor share pure U.S. cannabis ETF. It's up more than 70 percent this month. It's still well off of those 2021 highs. What is what is the reclassification mean for these stocks? Well, this is the biggest thing to happen to U.S. cannabis stocks ever. And we're very excited about the future. As you said, in the past couple of weeks or the past month, there's been a big run up in U.S. cannabis stocks in advance of Trump actually signing this executive order yesterday.

43:51And in the last two days, crazy volatility. And even yesterday, it was a sell the news type of moment because the world hasn't digested all of the ramifications of this executive order yet. I think some investors wanted to have everything and the kitchen sink inside this executive order. Would that have been, yeah, banking. So talk about that because Matt Miller, points out to us all the time that the executive order means one thing, but banking is what these companies are really concerned about, the Safe Banking Act. Yeah, this rescheduling is a huge event, and no one should have expected a stroke of the pen to reschedule cannabis the next day and provide banking.

44:42It's a first step. But they spoke yesterday in the White House that it's a definite, it's definitely happening. The attorney general It still needs to sign off on it and make the rescheduling effective. But I've always said it's a multi-leg, multi-step process, even a domino effect, if you want to call it that, that leads to banking. Once it's rescheduled, banking will be a much less controversial issue. And whether the DOJ gives safe harbor for that or the House and Senate passes it, it's a much less controversial issue. We're very confident it's going to happen. And these U.S. cannabis companies, it's a multibillion-dollar industry operating in the majority of states, they should finally be able to list on major exchanges in the United States like the Canadian companies do, even though those Canadian companies can't do business in the United States yet.

45:42So a momentous occasion, and the market doesn't know quite how to digest it yet. We see a lot of multi-leg upside from here.

45:50Carol Massar:Yeah, you know, and you don't want volatility, right? You want things to settle down because the coast is clear. Because I do want to point out, I mean, your fund is down 90 % from February 10th of 2021. So we're still way off of kind of where it was. It's that banking part of it, right, that really needs to come through in order for this to settle down and be a market that kind of reacts more normally. Well, when you talk about that, you know, five year return, the highs were based on promises made when Joe Biden was running for office. They promised legalization. They promised all sorts of things for cannabis multiple times during his pregnancy and presidency and never got it done.

46:40Trump has now taken that ball and ran with it. This rescheduling is a momentous occasion. But once again, this is a multi-step process. And if the drug, if you want to call it that, cannabis, it's really a medicine in most people's minds, is rescheduled off of DEA Schedule 1, we're very confident, very confident that banking, uplisting, and multiple other steps are coming. Dan, I look at the Bloomberg terminal and what's actually in the advisor shares, pure U.S. cannabis ETF. And I was surprised to see that you have such a high cash position right now. And correct me if I'm wrong and if the data is old, but I don't think it is.

47:22The top holding is BlackRock's Liquid Fund's Treasury Trust Fund. You have Curaleaf, Terra Ascend, Village Farms, and the company formerly known as Sundial, SNDL in there as well. But, you know, the biggest holding is cash. Why is that? No, I'm glad you mentioned that. Total return swaps. Because these U.S. plant-touching cannabis companies cannot list on the NASDAQ or the NYSE yet, because they cannot be custodied at major custody banks and brokerage firms. They're mainly listed on secondary exchanges in Canada. We use multiple swap counterparties and total return swaps to get access to these U.S.

48:07cannabis companies. The top holding is Curaleaf. They're a multi-billion dollar biggest cannabis company in the world. Behind that, we have Trulieve. We also have Green Thumb Industries. To see the detailed actual holdings of the fund, go to the advisorshares.com website. And there are additional screens in your Bloomberg where you can see the derivative holdings. But it's very important to understand the reasons that the fund has to use total return swaps to get access to these cannabis companies. But maybe that changes as a result of legislation in the U.S. Absolutely. But the fund is 100 % invested in U.S.

48:52and U.S. exposure cannabis companies.

48:54Carol Massar:Hey, Dan, folks who have watched the ride, the ups and downs, if you will, of cannabis and kind of waiting for either legalization and more regulatory moves. What's your advice to them at this point? It doesn't sound like it's a buy-in completely right now. Everybody needs to make their own decisions and perhaps get a good investment advisor, of course. But I guess what I'm saying is you've watched this. I mean, what's the realistic time frame? I mean, yes, it seems to have a White House is much more favorable, but, you know, especially when it's in, you know, you're dealing with banking regulation and so on and so forth.

49:29Carol Massar:I mean, are you looking at a year, two years? What's your best advice here? And just got about 30 seconds left. It's just opinions here, I think a lot less than a year or two. There's talk that the Attorney General could sign off on the rescheduling as early as next week. We don't know the time frames. We really, really don't know the time frames. But anybody that listened to the press conference and the executive order signing yesterday, it was wording used like it's a done deal. That cannabis is definitely getting rescheduled. and we think it's all moving forward. This is the Bloomberg Business Week Daily podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

50:15Carol Massar:Listen live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5 p.m. Eastern on Bloomberg.com, the iHeartRadio app, TuneIn, and the Bloomberg Business app. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg Terminal.

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52:30In Season 3 of The Visibility Gap, Dr. Guy Winch and his guests explore how these pressures show up, how to spot them earlier, and how men can access meaningful support. Listen to the new season of The Visibility Gap, a podcast presented by Cigna Healthcare.