Panera Bread Founder Ron Shaich on Fast Casual Dining

28:15Well, we didn't acquire Panera. We acquired a business. St. Louis Bread Company. We acquired a company called St. Louis Bread Company. We recognized the ideology and power of what would later be called fast casual, real food for real people. We ended up using St. Louis Bread Company as a test laboratory to apply those principles. We changed everything. We took a unit doing a million dollars a year. We had a breakfast. That took us to a million two fifty. We changed the environment in big ways. That took us to$1.750.000, added a gathering place segment. And by 1995, I realized the name St. Louis Bread Company was the wrong name to take National.

29:00And we changed the name to Panera Bread. And the big and very important step was really in 1998. I, at that point, was running a public company with four divisions, Au Bon Pain, Au Bon Pain International, Au Bon Pain Manufacturing, and this thing called Panera Bread. Panera was the third largest of them. I have to tell you, I would look at Panera and say, this brand has the potential to be nationally dominant. And it wasn't at that point, but it had it. It had consistent volumes. And I was struck by the degree to which the folks that were running it didn't really understand what growth was gonna take and what was gonna hit them.

29:40And I was deeply worried. And I was down in the Caribbean with a friend, and I was lamenting. I was kind of bummed about it. And she looked at me, and she said, Ron, what would you do if Panera owned Au Bon Pain, the company? The name of the company was Panera, and it owned all those other divisions. And I looked at her, and I said, you know what? If I had any guts, I'd monetize every asset we have. Panera is the gem. It could be a nationally dominant company. I would take all the capital from those other businesses. I'd go down there myself and make it work, and I'd bring the best human capital we have.

30:19And I'm this kind of person, if I think about something long enough and I say I'm going to go do it, I go do it. It took me three months. I made the decision to go do it. I brought the idea to my board. They thought I was crazy. They all had hired on to this company called Au Bon Pain and not Panera. But eventually they gave me the room to do it. It was a bet-your-job kind of proposition. And over the next year and a half, we sold every other business but Panera. And I ended up with Panera, a bunch of cash, maybe 180 stores. And I moved a new wife down to St. Louis, Missouri, and off we went in running Panera.

30:56And 10X'd it up to 2 ,000 stores, which how long did that take? Well, I will tell you, from that point forward, the stock was up 100-fold. Wow. In the early, that happened in, I guess, 99, early 2000s.

31:16People later would say to me, Ron, why didn't you tell me? And I'd look at him and go, yo. How did I know? I'd look at him and say, yo, I was telling you. Nobody wanted to listen. And the truth of the matter is, for at least a year, you could have bought my stock at$3 a share, which is what I was trading at at that point. You could have bought my stock at$3 a share by the wheelbarrow load. And what did you have in cash at the time? A couple hundred million. So a buck or so in cash, a share of cash. So you're risking$2. Yeah, you could have bought it split adjusted, but you could have bought it.

31:50That stock ultimately,$3 a share then, traded for$3.15 when we sold the company 17 years ago. And that was$7 billion plus. Yeah,$7.8. Wow, that's almost$8 billion. And I'm not sure if this is true. According to perplexity, Panera is either Latin or Spanish for breadbasket. Is that right? Yeah, it was actually an empty vessel where we could put a personality into. Okay. So we weren't looking for a name. You know, there's no Joey Panera. It's not my cousin. Right. It was really a vehicle to produce an identity that was rooted in some of you who were around Panera know Mother Bread. So 99, everything gets sold off.

32:31You accumulate all this capital. At what point did you start to get the sense, hey, this is going to work? Did it take a year or two? I know. I actually knew back then. From day one. You're like, this can't fail. It's not that it can't fail, but I see something. I can feel it. And my definition as an entrepreneur is I'm a risk avoider. I'm not a risk seeker. But to me, the greatest risk is blowing a powerful idea, is blowing a market niche that I can see and taste. And it's for me, it's beholden on me to fulfill that. And I can literally remember understanding what we had with Panera back then and knowing what it could become and knowing we had this obligation to help it fulfill its destiny.

33:20I could feel it. That's really fascinating. So 2017, you sell out to a private company? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait, wait, Barry. We got a few years. We got about 20 years. So how do we get from 99 to 2017? 20 years, 1 ,500 restaurants, and 100x in the stock price. So what was that? Tell us about those two decades. What was it like growing from 50 stores to 1 ,500 plus? It was a lot of work and a lot of fun and wonderful people who shared it, who believed in it deeply, who cared about it. It was a focus on the guest. It was a focus on something we call concept essence, this brand's role in the world.

34:10And quite frankly, we really, over those roughly 20 years, stayed highly disciplined. We were never about liquidity. We were never about trying to sell the company. We were about running a great company for our guests, producing high comp store sales through good days, through the Great Recession, going through all those ups and downs. And we stayed true to that. We ended up having very strong comp store sales, very high ROIs, and we ended up building a massive organization. What was the biggest challenge during that ramp up? Because we have all seen companies either over-expand or expand into the wrong food categories or the wrong geographies.

34:59Like how challenging is that process knowing that, hey, either this is great or it's a disaster. There's almost nothing in the middle. Yeah, you know, it's really funny. To me, running a company, a small or a very large company, is all about discipline and not getting ahead of your skis. I never wanted to be a company that had to go through layoffs. I never wanted to be a company that had to close stores. So I kept trying to say, how do we run this thing with discipline on what matters? That is, satisfying the guests in a way none of our competitors could. How do we create differentiation? Competitive advantage is everything.

35:41How do we create an experience other people can't do with food other people can't provide, with a culture and an experience when you walk in the store that other people weren't offering. And it was that focus on that that never broke in those 20 years. And I think anybody who worked for me knew that. That's really fascinating. So now 1 ,500 stores 17 years later. Maybe we're 1 ,700 stores, but keep going. Okay, so almost 2 ,000 stores today. Okay. What led you just to decide, all right, these guys really want to throw a dumb amount of money at me? I'll take it. Well, we have to make one stop along the way.

36:23Okay. So, as I told you, I have this other love, politics, and trying to fix the world. And I fundamentally believe, as in business, the ability to think long-term is what was the key to an era and the way we approached it. I also think that in our civic society, being able to think long term and come together as a country is powerful. I would often think the Chinese have 20-year plans and we can't agree on a budget for 20 months and today we can't agree on tariffs for 20 hours. But the truth of the matter is back in 08 and 09, I felt this desire to take what I'd learned in running large organizations and apply it in civic society.

37:07And I had some discussions with the Obama administration. I couldn't step down to do that because of my commitment to Panera. And I made the decision. I wanted to step down, jump off the high diving board, and see what it felt like applying myself elsewhere. I made that decision. I stepped down as CEO, stayed as executive chairman. I created something called Panera Cares, which were these cafes of shared responsibility, no set prices. It was quite an interesting experiment in humanity. We opened five of them. I also went off and helped co-form an organization called No Labels, which was about reducing, again, the hyper-partisan.

37:47Oh, I recall No Labels. I didn't realize that. I was one of the folks that were really the founders of that. and I'm out as executive chair for about a year or two and I was still doing acquisitions. I was still the largest shareholder and doing some consumer work and I came back one weekend around 2010, 11 and I sat down at a computer and I wrote a vision for how I would compete with Panera and that vision essentially called for digital access. None of that existed in 2011. It called for loyalty. Very little of it was in this country. Tesco had formed it in the UK. It had come to Kroger. We call for loyalty.

38:24We call for Omni Channel. Loyalty meaning like reward system points? Reward system, yes. How do you find a way to build a deeper personal connection with guests? It calls for clean food, free of all artificial chemicals, preservatives, and the like. Minimal processing. Yes. And very little additives, if any. If any, exactly. And then an Omni Channel approach. and I brought this memo in to my very dear friend, a gentleman I love, Bill Morton, who was our CEO. He'd been my CFO for two decades. And I shared it with Bill and he took a look at it and said, would you go work on it? And I said, you know, I would.

39:04And a year later, the executive chairman is working 80, me, I'm working 80 hours a week, having the time of my life, building up a prototype for technology and digital access and clean food. And Bill comes to me and says he can't travel. When I come back as CEO, we fought over for about a year. I didn't really want to come back and do what I had done as CEO. But he couldn't travel and it was required. So I came back as CEO. I put all that plan in place. It was horrific. At Panera. At Panera, oh yeah. And it did not work. No, no, wait. I spent$150 million. The transformation was huge. Okay, so it did work.

39:48Well, let me get there. I mean, I had activists along the way. One of my partners in Act III today was the activist who attacked me. I had a lot of fun with him. I could never tell anybody I actually respected him. Name? Noah Elbogan. Okay. But I couldn't tell anybody that, but I actually grew to like him. And today he works with me. But at any rate, so those years, 2014, 15, 16, anytime you go through transformation, anytime you change something, and this was probably the largest transformation in a large public restaurant company, it was difficult. I remember when we were driving technology.

40:23We're the first real restaurant technology in an integrated way. Again, I used to call technology the social security of Panera. It was only a matter of time until it was 100 % of our revenue. And we were committed to this, and we did it. By 2016, our comps were pushing double digits again. EBITDA was up 35%. The company was rocking. Starbucks made an approach to us to buy us. That didn't go forward. And in 2017, the leadership of J.B., which is a European money manager, came calling and they had fallen in love. And frankly, my view of a business is I spend all of my time building it. But when somebody's in love, that always provides the opportunity to harvest.

41:17So Starbucks comes knocking. Were they offering a stock deal? Was it remotely close to the nearly$8 billion that JB came up with? If you read my book, you'll read the whole story. But the Starbucks deal was around$2.40 a share. The JB deal was done at$3.15 a share. Much more aggressive numbers. Six months after the Starbucks discussions. Right. And frankly, the Starbucks discussions didn't reach conclusion. It was at that point that Howard was making his own decisions about stepping down and replacing himself with Kevin Johnson. And my sense is they did not want to take on an acquisition like Panera at that moment.

42:03So our stock price got ahead of itself. They couldn't do the deal. So the Starbucks deal didn't go forward. But at the very least, it set a floor for future discussions with whomever. Well, it wasn't public. So we had, to be honest with you, we had had these discussions at$2.40 a share at Starbucks. It didn't go forward. And when we began with JB, and again, you can read the book. I think it started in the high 200s. By the time we were done, they were paying$3.15 for it. Wow. And the book is Know What Matters, Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations. Hi, I'm Stephen Carroll. And I'm Caroline Hepker, here to introduce you to a podcast that brings you the news you need to start your day in just 15 minutes.

42:51It's called Bloomberg Daybreak Europe Edition, covering all the top stories across Europe and around the world. Each weekday morning, we're up early to bring you the latest news by 7am. We've got everything you need to know, from geopolitics and global events to economics and what's moving markets. I'm covering it all from London. And I'm in the EU's capital, Brussels. We have 3 ,000 journalists and analysts around the world to tell you what's happening, what it means and why it matters. It's more than just business headlines. From the price of your breakfast to global shifts in power, economics and money aren't just part of the story, they're often the driving force.

43:27So start your day with us on Bloomberg Daybreak Europe Edition for the news you need to know and the context to make sense of it. Find new episodes of Bloomberg Daybreak Europe Edition by 7 a.m. London time on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so let's talk about Act 3, which I don't mean that in the Shakespearean sense, but you launched Act 3 Holdings to invest in new brands. Tell us about the motivations for that. Well, after I had sold Panera, I didn't know where I was headed. There was a discussion with JB about joining them as a partner. And this is the big European investment shop that took over Panera.

44:10Yeah, but it wasn't for me. And I was doing a bunch of speaking about the pervasive short-termism in our capital markets and how I thought it had an untoward impact, frankly, on innovation and GDP growth. And one of my now partners, who'd been my chief concept officer at Panera, was a gentleman named Keith Pascal. And he said, why don't you take some of your money? You made all this money. Why don't you take some of it and invest it with a long-term focus? And I thought about it. And I had been out of Panera about two months at this point. And I actually had an idea. Yeah, and the idea I had, it was a company.

44:57I basically had deep belief that the Mediterranean category had the potential to be the next major culinary category. Oh, that's really interesting. Oh, it's obvious. I mean, it was the number one diet in America, Mediterranean. Every time I went to the doctor, they were doing a commercial for Mediterranean. It's bold flavors, but it's flavors that feel safe. It's also craveable wellness. It's healthy, it's good for you, and it tastes good. And it was very clear this category had power. And I had made an investment in a very small company in DMV, which was down in D.C., called Cava when it was two restaurants.

45:41I knew them. And I had another restaurant company, as I left Panera, approached me called Zoe's, asked me if I would join their board. that give me warrants of 10 % of the company or something to see if I could help them compete. And I looked at them and I thought to myself, wow. And at the same time, the guys at Cava asked me if I joined their board. And I thought to myself, you know, this is an industry, the food industry, in which in every major category, winner takes all. You can talk McDonald's and Burger King, Panera and Corner Bakery. You can talk Chipotle and Qdoba. And I said, somebody's going to win in Mediterranean.

46:25And there is a powerful potential to take Zoe's, to buy this company Zoe's, which was about 250 restaurants, take the culinary skills of Cava, merge them together, and end up with the clearly 10x dominant player in the Mediterranean category. And I thought I might do this. Well, COVID asked me to join their board. I went to their CEO, Brett Shulman, with this idea. And he said, before you, you know, you better talk to my board about it. I went to a meeting with the board. I pitched them on the idea of buying a company five times larger and then merging with them. Ultimately, they asked, they wanted to do the acquisition.

47:08I agreed to finance the deal or at least half of the capital they needed. about$150 million I put into it. And I became one of their very largest shareholders, and I became chairman of the company. And how large is Kava today? Well, it went public about 18 months ago. Stock was up as high as 7x since the IPO. It's now up 5X. It's a$10 billion market cap company. It traded as high as$16 billion. It's perceived by the market, frankly, as has the potential to be the next Chipotle, the next Panera. It's a powerful brand with an amazing management team led by Brett Schulman. And I'm pleased to say we've been able to help them along the way, know what they needed to do to become the kind of great company it is today.

48:06Let me push back a little bit on winner take all, even though I'm a big believer in that as a reality. But McDonald's seems to have gotten kind of old and stale. And along comes Shake Shack and a dozen other five guys and down there. And it suddenly seems like in the burger space, as an example, there is increasing competition. and it's no longer Mickey D's as the only winner. Is that just what happens eventually, or what's your perspective on that? Well, first, let me share with you something. Danny Meyer, who's the chairman, very dear friend of Shake Shack. He's a dear friend, but my son actually works at Shake Shack in operations, and so I have great affinity for those guys.

48:59But here's the truth. McDonald's is worth what? 75 billion, 100 billion. I mean, it's got a huge market cap. There isn't another hamburger business that's got a market cap anywhere near that. And that's what we're talking about. But they got a 65-year head start, 75-year head start over. Yeah, that's what I mean. Winner takes all. When you have a position of dominance in a category, you win. Now, you can be niched. And niches come along and they redefine themselves. And they can in themselves become a category. But ultimately, this is an industry in which scale matters. It matters as you spread the overhead.

49:39And it's a winner-take-all industry. I'm looking at a lot of the big winners of the past. And I know they're all different industries, whether it's General Electric or Sears or retailers. Barry, you're a great investor and a smart man. But you're confusing two things. Yeah. One, dominance of a category. And then what happens to businesses as they lose their competitive advantage. So let me share with you a principle that was very clear to me. When businesses form, it requires a powerful, powerful effort by somebody to discover a better alternative. Because you have no scale. You've got to get customers to walk across the street.

50:22You have no purchasing, no ability to access the capital. When a business starts to get some success because it's actually worked, capital comes in. And as capital comes in, people began to say, you know, we know you've discovered something better. But we need to figure out how to be more efficient, how to run it better. And what ultimately happens is you bring in what we would call discovery people. Delivery people are about improving the margins, about purchasing, about financial planning. And often in companies, and particularly in my industry, as they approach a billion dollars, the discovery people and the delivery people, they ultimately do well together at the beginning.

51:06The margins get better. But ultimately, there's conflict and friction. The language of discovery is the language of could you imagine? Let's try this. What would happen if it's poetry? The language of delivery is financial planning. Prove it to me. I want to see the numbers. I don't believe it. Logistics. Numbers. It's got to be proven. And what ends up happening is the delivery capabilities of most companies drive out the discovery capabilities. And companies that were once very effective, they become more and more reliant on efficiency. And what happens typically in many companies is they get very good, very efficient at doing what the marketplace wanted from them five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and not very effective at figuring out what the consumer of tomorrow wants.

51:58There's a wonderful Paul Graham quote that goes, all experts are experts in the way the world used to be. Exactly. Exactly. And so my point to you is once we define the categories, dominance matters. Somebody will own, the reason the market is paying upwards of, has been paying upwards of$15 billion of valuation on Kava. This thing is 400 restaurants. And we've had valuations of 30 to 40 million dollars a restaurant. What is the market paying for? They're paying for the future. They're paying for an expectation that this business will take form as one of the great companies in this country. The question, that's dominance of a category.

52:45Now, the challenge to the team at Cava is staying on that edge, staying on that wave, is continuing to discover, which is why the role of CEO in so many companies, in my view, is to be the innovator-in-chief and lead that discovery. Because if the CEO isn't doing it, it isn't going to happen. Huh, that's really interesting. So I want to talk about some of the companies that Act 3 has invested in, but let's get a little broader view. Tell us about Act 3. What are you doing? What's the philosophy here? So after we helped form the modern Kava and invested in that, I had also had a company I had bought for Panera called Tate, which a large stake in it with its founder, Ziridore.

53:31When I left Panera, I took with me Panera's interest in Tate. And we decided to take our own money. I took roughly a quarter of a billion dollars of my own money and a number of people who decided to join me, they co-invested. And we decided to put that money to work investing in growth companies with a couple of very simple principles. The number one principle was founder-friendly capital. We think that in growth concepts, the last thing they need to do is do fundraising as if it's an annual life cycle event, literally. The last thing that needs to happen is money raising needs to be an annual event.

54:21So we come along and we make an investment, hopefully at a reasonable valuation. But we then take a right of first refusal with a pre-agreed to valuation multiple on all follow-on rounds. And we've never turned that down. Wow. So all of our investments know that they essentially never have to raise money again. Don't have to worry about it. So all the money's there. It's already pre-negotiated. It also allows us to consolidate up our position. That's principle one. It's common stock and no dilutive, no PREF terms. Number two, we practice what we call Sherpa management. So almost every private equity firm that makes investments, their people are financial.

55:00They're in the boardroom often asking what the next liquidity event is. Of our 25 people, only one of them is financially driven. As I said, Noah Elbogan, our former activist. Everybody else, our senior C-suite executives. I've got a guy who's opened 5 ,000 retail stores. I've got another guy who's my partner, Dwight Jusin, who was with us for 20 years and really invented fast casual. My joke with him is from his brain to my lips. I make the speech. He's the one who does the thinking. We have another partner, Chuck Chapman, who's extraordinary, was with Darden, was with Berkshire Hathaway and Dairy Queen, was with Brueggers, was president, was on my board, was the CEO of Panera.

55:47He's great at scaling and building these businesses. I've got a major technology group that has the capability of knowing what's going to work in three years. At any rate, when we're sitting in a boardroom, we're there as a Sherpa. And I have a simple expression. Building a nationally dominant business is tougher than climbing Mount Everest. Very few people ever do it. Nobody goes up Mount Everest without a Sherpa. Why don't you understand that you will be well served if you have a Sherpa as you build a nationally dominant company? When we're in that boardroom, we're talking to management about how to make sure they don't fall off the side of the mountain, how they don't make sure they don't trip up and fall.

56:31And frankly, we've been very successful in helping build these dominant companies in these core categories. And then last, Barry, the last principle, as I told you when we began talking, we believe deeply in competitive advantage. We only invest where we have competitive advantage. What Act 3 is really good at is we have hundreds of years of pattern recognition in this industry. We know what categories are going to have a wind at their back, and we know how to help these companies build the dominant position in that category. And frankly, we now are involved with seven companies. We've yet to have anything other than a huge success.

57:14That's really fascinating. Let's talk quickly about two of the companies that you've invested in besides Cava. One is Life Alive, and the other is Level 99. Tell us about those. Sure. So Life Alive is positive eating. Look, 40 % of America is trying to eat better. The question is, where do you go to do that? How do you do it? This is mostly vegetables. It's really good. We've owned it for seven or eight years. We've nurtured it, cared for it, watched it grow. Very high volume today. Somebody's going to own the plant forward category. We hope that this is the concept that's the dominant player in that.

57:54And Level 99? Level 99 is another interesting one. This is immersive social entertainment. It's 40 ,000 square feet of challenges. It was created, it's 40 ,000 square feet of challenges with a farm-to-table restaurant and a brewery in the middle of it. It was created by a gentleman named Matt DiPlessio. We met Matt before he opened one of them. He's out of MIT, Harvard Business School, and spent 20 years working with Disney and their folks, very experienced in entertainment. He had the vision for this business. We put up the Capitol. We're partners in it with him. And it is stunning to go to one of these.

58:38We're in Natick, Massachusetts. We're in Providence, Rhode Island. We're opening in Disney World. We're opening in Tyson's Corner this summer. You'll see us in locations across America. this is the kind of business we'll have 3 000 people on a saturday night it's an unbelievable experience and and with with extraordinary margins it may be one of the best businesses i've ever been involved in wow that's amazing all right i only have you for a few moments so let's jump to our speed round five quick questions 30 seconds each starting with what's keeping you entertained these days what are you streaming or watching or listening to well what's keeping me entertained is my kids.

59:18I have a 26-year-old and a 21-year-old, but what I'm watching, the thing I just finished was watching White Lotus with my son. I loved it. I mean, we have a house on an island called Jumbie Bay off of Antigua, and it reminds us of where we live. And just what really goes on between people is always the most fascinating to me. I love people. Tell us about your mentors who helped shape your career. I don't know if anybody helped shape me, but I would say Lou Cain, who was 25 years my senior and my partner in many years, taught me what it meant to be a stand-up guy. I loved this man. He was a huge influence.

59:57I also would say my dad, who was a CPA, but again, knew how to deal with people, talk to people, care about people. And I respected him as a business person. What about books? What are some of your favorites? What are you reading right now? Oh, goodness. Last night I was reading a book on Australia. I'm going to Australia with my daughter in two weeks. So I skim read that. But I tend, you know, I just reread Daniel Kahneman Passed Away. I think I'm pronouncing his name right. But he wrote Fast and Slow. Thinking Fast and Slow, Danny Kahneman. I had read it years ago. I just reread it. Again, I love it.

1:00:41It's behavioral economics, behavioral finance. It's about how people work. And to me, my life, probably if there's one thing that's a central organizing principle, is trying to figure out what makes people tick. Really interesting. Our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in a career in food service or franchising? I'd say get out and understand what it is to be an operator. Understand what it is to run a business. The action isn't in the office. It's not in the support center. The action's in the field. It's in the stores. And most importantly, my advice to you is figure out not the right career path, but figure out what you care about, what you can do well, and then go do it.

1:01:29And our final question, what do you know about the world of building a restaurant, for lack of a better word, empire today that might have been useful back in the late 80s? Trust yourself. Really? You know, I think some guys like me, I don't know. I always, you know, you second guess, you wondered, you listened to every advisor. And one of the things you gain with a little more age is a perspective that I actually knew what I was doing, staying focused on that customer, staying focused on the end of delivering a better guest experience and understanding the byproduct would be financial success.

1:02:10It wasn't the end. Thanks, Ron, for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Ron Shaikh. He is the former CEO and chairman of Panera Bread and Au Bopin and all those other companies. If you enjoy this conversation, check out any of the 550 we've done over the past 11 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Bloomberg, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts, be sure to check out my new bestselling book, How Not to Invest, the ideas, numbers, and behaviors that destroy wealth and how to avoid them. How Not to Invest, wherever you find your favorite books. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack team that helps put these conversations together each week.

1:03:03John Wasserman is my audio engineer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my producer. Sage Bauman is the head of podcasts here at Bloomberg. I'm Barry Ritoltz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

1:03:39This is Tom Keen inviting you to join me for the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast. It's about making you smarter each and every business day. We bring you a recap of what happened overnight in Europe and Asia, the day's economic data, and complete coverage of the U.S. market open. We cover stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies, even crypto, all the information you need to excel. Bloomberg Surveillance also brings you the analysis behind the headlines. We do that with lengthy conversations with our expert guests, the smartest names in economics, finance, investment and international relations. We do all this live each and every weekday that bring you the best analysis in our daily podcast.

1:04:24Search for Bloomberg Surveillance on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or anywhere else you listen. On the East Coast, listen at lunch, and on the West Coast, when you wake up. That's the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast with me, Tom Keen, along with Paul Sweeney and Lisa Mateo. Subscribe today wherever you get your podcasts.