♪ carol: welcome to "bloomberg businessweek." i am carol massar. jason: and i am jason kelly. we are joining you from bloomberg's headquarters in new york. carol: economists have had a hard time forecasting recessions. jason: and japan schools the world on how it a wealthy nation can maintain its superpower status. carol: and the greatest delivery empire on earth. jason: we are talking about a

chinese company that has made it cheaper to order in them to go than to go out and has reshaped life in china cities. carol: we talked to our editor about the story. jeff: the 40-year-old founder first started trying to build social networks in china for, you know, friend star, a facebook like. something that looked an awful lot like twitter. after blowing through the early stakes for friends and family and that suffering crackdowns from the government, decided to try and do something a little less controversial. he spent heavily thanks to early investment by alibaba's jack ma

to take the lead in what was known for some time as the 100 groupon war. carol: he starts his company, get the investment from jack ma, and that he starts putting up some of his businesses or where he wants to do business in extensions. and that costs more money, and that is when alibaba says we are not interested. jeff: at a certain point, where meitaun was the biggest-ish layer in the field was, look, we will give you more money to stretch out, but you have to agree to basically merged with with alibaba. including a lot of customer data and all that good stuff. jason: this was coming at a point where the groupon model just was not going to be sustainable. they were essentially going to run into the same thing they had in previous startups, that is t is just not going to grow. they really got into this delivery business, and that's what accelerates.

jeff: yeah, meitaun alone delivers 20 million or so items , delivery orders a day through about 600,000 delivery agents across about 3000 cities in china. carol: 20 million a day. jason: put that in context for us versus grubhub. jeff: grubhub, which is the biggest player in a comparable market, delivering about 500,000. jason: 500,000 versus 20 million. carol: that is staggering. so they decided not to roll into alibaba. so alibaba goes one way and meituan goes the other way. right, absorbing their rival with help and funding from tencent. after that, alibaba said that we will try to spend you into oblivion and by the markets for ourselves.

carol: these two are head-to-head competition, so there's a price war going on, which is wonderful for consumers. that it is cheaper to get something delivered them to actually gold to the checkout counter. jeff: absolutely. often to the order of 40% or 80% cheaper. jason: is that sustainable? are these guys going to drive themselves into oblivion by this price war? jeff: it is a real gamble. alibaba has plenty of cash to burn, but it is also a company entering its third decade with public market investors to appease. that speaks to the gamble, launching his betting alibaba has about one more year they can do this. carol: i find that anybody going up against alibaba has got to

have a lot of nerve. tell us about this character, he's got a role model written about the story, and it's jeff bezos. jeff: yeah, as you alluded, he has really doubled down on the bezos reinvestment model, meaning that succeeding means you have money to expand into an adjacent business. as they have gotten better at food delivery, they taken over china's movie ticket online market. they basically created a market for movie tickets online and that sort of thing. jason: one thing i want to make sure people understand, because i did not comprehend it, is the market opportunity here because of the chinese population. u.s. has 10 cities with one million or more people, china has 156. can they get to a sizable chunk of this market? jeff: it seems reasonable to

believe. that is the other real reason alibaba has to spend them into the ground. depending on who you ask, a conservative estimate is that this market will basically be about $800 billion a year by 2023. a lot of that growth will come at the expense of conventional e-commerce businesses, like alibaba, especially like alibaba. carol: it is interesting this company is not profitable, which is not surprising given the pricing wars. jeff: true. part of the problem is this war billions of dollars war of subsidies and this bezos model of trying to jump into new businesses. carol: whenever i read a story about this, i just think about how much is going on in china and how much is being done on your phone. we do a lot of delivery, but only when you are in large cities. jason: i thought you meant a side hustle i did not know about, delivering food. [laughter] carol: but it is just

fascinating how much further ahead they are than the united states. jeff: this is a leapfrog moment. this is a hugely problem for people in cities, and as you might imagine, is because of some relatively unique advantages, but also disadvantages. it is more appealing to order in all the time when the traffic is horrible right outside your door. jason: up next, one of india's best-known doctors is critic creating a model for ultra low health care that can be deployed everywhere. carol: plus, white a breakthrough postpartum depression drugs still faces high hurdles. jason: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

carol: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i am carol massar. jason: i am jason kelly. for "bloombergme

businessweek" everyday on the radio from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. wall street time or our daily show by listening and subscribing to our podcast on itunes, soundcloud, and bloomberg.com. carol: or find us online. jason: india is pursuing the most ambitious public health effort in history. prime minister modi hopes to give basic coverage to 500 million of india's poorest. carol: an ambitious program, and to make all of this possible, the founder of the world's cheapest hospital chain will have to cut costs further and that keep on cutting. i talked to reporter re: allstateari. ari: the doctor is a pretty remarkable individual. born in india and trained as a cardiac surgeon in london, where he noticed that they could do a lot more heart surgeries in a day than anyone can do anywhere in india.

so he decided, i would go back to india and see if i can at least replicate that. once you get that at a hospital in calcutta, he's on pushing himself more. various departments he was hired and around india until he eventually came up with the idea of what if we treat cardiac surgery like an assembly line? try to break it down into constituent tasks that have only the most complicated tasks done by the most experienced and highly paid surgeon. everyone else, from junior surgeons to highly trained nurses, can handle all of the less-complicated tasks. he found that the cost of surgery went down a lot, so he found his hospital in bangalore , and he has replicated the model ever since produce what we two call in the story the cheapest hospital in the world. carol: i love this, and let me throw out some numbers for our viewers and listeners. the surgeries he does cost a lot less money, generally. surgery for head and neck cancer start at $700. talk about a heart transplant, about $11,000. if you are doing that in united

states, we're talking $100,000 or more. it is a huge difference. ari: absolutely. i mean a heart transplant, full cost in the u.s., could be $1 million when you take into account everything. carol: and he makes a profit. again, you talk about the scaling or upscaling or task shifting. talk to us about how this process works, give us an example. ari: right. i actually got to watch a few surgeries done in the hospital. and basically, what they do is they break up the tasks into more and less complex. ensuring that the most complex task, for instance, in a heart transplant, that might be moving the patient's heart out and putting the new one in. that is only done by the person who can only do that. that is the most experienced, senior surgeon. so that experienced, senior

surgeon comes in solely for that part of the operation. but every other part of the operation is done by other, less il people. whether that be a junior surgeon, and one of the surgeries i went to see was his son, the junior surgeon. but also to be highly trained nurses who have a lot more training and experience than a usual nurse. they can handle more complex tasks, but it still costs less than a surgeon. carol: what are the mortality rates? ari: the numbers that have been released and looked at by various academics doing case studies actually show that is mortality rates are at least the same, if not better, for select surgeries, than u.s. counterparts or international benchmarks. particularly in the surgeries that mariana health have developed a lot of proficiency in.

the ones where the assembly line model has been perfected. and where surgeons from the dr. shetty himself to various other employees have developed high levels of proficiency by doing literally hundreds of surgeries in the course of just a year. the survival rates can actually be better. carol: he is now under pressure to even reduce costs more. this has to do with modicare, the health care being put in place. can he do it? ari: dr. shetty thinks he can. he is trying his best to apply the same principles that got his costs this far, one of scale, increasing surgeon proficiency, one of breaking down tasks to lower labor costs. he is pushing that to its limit, but at the same time, he is also looking at more high tech solutions, namely data. to get all of that data and then

analyze it. but hang on, why is this procedure costing more than that procedure? why are complications more likely to come up in this ward than that ward? why is this doctor more likely to use a pacemaker than this other doctor? and investigate those and see where they can improve care, make it more efficient. carol: in the business section, the world's first ever postpartum pression drug was just approved by the fda. jason: but even though the drug has been hailed as a breakthrough and may be able to help one in nine new mothers, the question remains -- will it sell? carol: here is reporter cynthia cohens. cynthia: this is an exciting

development from the perspective that there has not been a drug developed specifically to treat these women. in the scientific community, experts cause a huge breakthrough, phenomenal in the sense that it works quickly. those are the positives, and they are extraordinary positives, but the big challenge here is the drug has to circumvent the u.s. medical system, which is not currently set up to give it. that is because it is a 2.5 day long infusion. say woman who needs this drug needs vehicle to enter a hospital or certified medical facility and step aside from her newborn for two and a half days to get the treatment. that is one of the primary obstacles in terms of the medical system being available and there being beds in the right wards and hospitals for the women to get this treatment. carol: what is the current treatment? cynthia: if you were presented with the symptoms right now, you would get standard antidepressant therapy, which takes weeks to work, and for many, does not work at all. this process can take a while to find the exact right drug. that is currently what happens.

that is a very, from the economic perspective, it is not very expensive. these drugs are old, they are off patent, they are very cheap. this drug is $34,000, which is another hurdle in getting insurers to approve it as a first-line therapy. but the women who really need this need this right away, so that is the aspect the company is playing off of. and their point is fair, these women cannot try several therapies if they are in a severe case of postpartum depression. but the medical system has to rise to the occasion. carol: are insurance companies, they are kind of holding off right now? cynthia: typically what happens is you drug is approved, you negotiate with insurers, and we cannot see until several months into launch how well the uptick is going. i don't even know if insurance will be the big hurdle, i think the infrastructure is a bigger problem.

units within hospitals to treat patients with this condition have basically been disappearing. whether or not a woman goes to a labor or delivery ward being tied up for two and half days, not ideal from a hospital perspective. what they need to do is roll out these new centers of places where women can get this drug. they talk about things like maybe a rehabilitation center ivf and to treat a patient for two or three days. but they need to consult with psychiatrist, so there's just a lot of things that need to be fundamentally changed in order for this to be feasible. carol: up next, how brexit is frustrating potential homebuyers in amsterdam. jason: plus, how wall street is masking the cost of climate change -- as long as there is an oceanfront view. carol: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

jason: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i am jason kelly. carol: and i am carol massar. you can listen to us on the radio on sirius xm channel 119, and on a.m. 1130 in new york, 106.1 in boston, 99.1 f.m. in washington, d.c. jason: a.m. 960 in the bay area, in london on dab digital, and through the bloomberg business app. let's go to economics. amsterdam homebuyers are complaining about brexit. carol: right, they are. there is an influx of jobs from london, but also wealthy newcomers driving up home prices. we got more from our editor. christina: they are one of the

"lucky" countries getting an influx of jobs because of companies leaving the u.k. but amsterdam, like many european cities, is not big, and already has a housing deficit. we have some new residents coming in and it is beating up a housing market that has been up 80% over the last four years. carol: that's what's great about the story, you talk about different individuals looking for homes. cristina: it's a horror story. carol: exactly right. cristina: some places are giving people a timeslot of 10 minutes, saying if you want to look at this apartment, you have to shop at this time, and if you don't make a timeslot, you lose out. we talked to one person who want to make an offer and was told she had 90 other people ahead of her. carol: my god. from what i understand, you have to raise the amount you want to spend.

cristina: she was told that she himcristina: she was told that she should expect to pay 20,000, sorry, 20% more than the asking price. carol: what is amsterdam doing to encourage either builders, developers? to control it all. cristina: right. the city is committed to improving about 7500 permits for new units every year. that's through 2025, but it is not catch up to this 40,000 deficit. plus, one-third are reserved for low-income housing, they call it "social housing" in the netherlands. some of these newcomers would not even qualify. and then they are thinking of other measures. what are they really want to do is tamp down speculation. carol: because prices have gone up dramatically. cristina: right. 80% in four years. something they have suggested is that you would not be able to buy a newly built unit and

turn around and rent it. you would have to have someone move in as an owner. there also thinking about a so-called panic button set of rent was a rising fast you could discount them. needless to say -- carol: developers and landlords love this. [laughter] cristina: and the pension funds who fund a lot of new construction are saying no, land prices are going up, costs are going up, if you are going to start shrinking our margin, which is already getting smaller. so that is something that has been brought up. carol: online at businessweek.com, more and more coastal homes are becoming vulnerable to extreme weather events that come along with climate change. jason: but the cost of living in these luxury homes has stayed relatively stable. reporters james carney has the story. james: extreme climate events are increasing in frequency and severity across the united

states and across the world. the issue is that in the united states, insurance premiums are staying stable, which does not seem correlated to the increased level of risk. jason: what accounts for this? james: on a federal level, it is about politics. nobody wants to be the person who says we are raising premiums along both coasts. there is zero political will. as a consequence, you have farmers in nebraska subsidizing people with beaches in new jersey. jason: this is a really appealing investment to let the insurance side of this. james: there is little correlation to financial markets and extreme weather events. very large fronts have basically used the insurance industry for disaster risk as a hedge against financial markets globally. that has just resulted in, part don the pun, a flood of capital entering the market. it has made it extremely cheap

and also disincentivized a lot of providers from accurately pricing risk, because it is not their money. jason: people do not necessarily think of these as investments, necessarily, they almost think of them as a piece of jewelry, it is a luxury item at the highest level. james: absolutely right. that said, i don't think anyone item, except for maybe a new car, when you drive it off the lot, thinking it will depreciate in value by 30% or 40%. i think that's the much larger implication of this entire issue is that it could have a tremendous impact on home ownership and home values if insurance companies are gradually raising the prices of their premiums to accurately reflect that risk. all of a sudden, there will be a ceiling where the cost of ownership along the coast will become cost prohibitive. when it does, that will ding

and, often times, cause real estate markets to even collapse. jason: before we get to the collapse, we should also talk about this idea that it is a different story when you think about places like louisiana or and other less affluent places. , i guess, in general. james: excellent point, and this is where it becomes a federal issue. if an investment banker loses his beach house, that's not good for anyone, but it is not devastating for him. if someone in a lower income household loses their place of residence, they can't go somewhere else, they don't have the money to go somewhere else, and often times they don't even have job prospects to go somewhere else. you are looking at the potential for, once insurance risk becomes more accurate, you are looking at the potential for federally funded mass migration, really. where, you know, someone has to pick up the pieces and it will

, not be the private sector. carol: up next, why artists and musicians are turning against a certain pipeline billionaire. jason: and six ways to avoid being swallowed up by the internet while on the job. carol: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

♪ jason: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm jason kelly. carol: i'm carol massar. still ahead in this week's issue, how willing are you to take risk? jason: and the challenge of predicting the next downturn. carol: not easy. we start in the features section. this pipeline billionaire may be missing the days of anonymous profit-making. jason: he is the ceo of a company called energy transfer, best known for its controversial

dakota access pipeline. carol: recently, he has been on the defensive, taken to court by unhappy investors. >> kelsey warren, ceo and chairman of energy transfer. basically, energy transfer is part of this whole corporate empire. there is energy transfer partners, equity, a subsidiary. they combined a bunch of stuff and now they are just energy transfer as of october. basically, a lot of generically named companies, pipelines, -- carol: what do they do exactly? he was happy that nobody devin: well,- carol, yes, you can make a lot of money, and basically he became one of the world's richest men. at the height of the oil boom two or three years ago, he was

$7 billion.han carol: he built a lot of pipelines, right? devin: the thing is that a lot of the business was in texas, oklahoma, places like that. hey, come on -- that's our industry, part of our local fabric. but then as the shale revolution took off and they were finding gas and oil in places like pennsylvania, ohio, and north dakota, he started building up there. of course, it makes sense, there are not enough pipelines. ton of oil, i got to get it out of there. carol: northeasterners are cranky. [laughter] devin: i guess you could say he ran into some cranky people in north dakota, and all of a sudden, the business was not so much fun. carol: why are you writing about this guy now? this company now? devin: one of his arguments has been that we are doing nothing wrong, our problems are being caused by environmentalists who

don't like us because they want to keep oil and gas in the ground, you know, for climate-change reasons. you know, they're just making up all the stuff, spreading misinformation. literally, energy transfer filed a federal racketeering suit against greenpeace and a bunch of environmentalists, saying just that. the problem is that as they move in other states, the people who are pushing back are not environmentalists. carol: landowners, homeowners, right? devin, yeah, and environmental officials in states like ohio, which is controlled by republicans, and in pennsylvania, where they have been very supportive. you know, the whole shale boom. and as you say, homeowners, and also right now, they're facing multiple criminal investigations from republican da's.

so to say this is all being cooked up by a bunch of greenies, that's just not true. jason: and now to the economics section. oy lookingtor peter c at why professional economists have such a dismal record forecasting recession. peter: it is not easy, that is the first thing to say. it is easy to laugh at economists for missing recessions or forecasting ones that never occur, but if you think about weather forecasts which has improved so much, much better data. you have a big advantage when you are forecasting the weather, which is that the molecules of air do not watch television to see what the meteorologist is saying about them, whereas investors and consumers do. carol: a lot of content being pushed out.

peter: you get this feedback between what people think is going to happen, what others think will happen, it is vastly complicates the job. it is not just like little atoms. carol: there is an interesting stat. federal consulting group, tell us what they found. peter: this consulting firm found this, and out of 468 recessions since 1988, they look at how the international monetary fund did in predicting them. the spring in the year before the recession hit, they found only four were predicted. carol: calling for the recession? peter: yeah. when you get to the spring of the year and the recession actually hits, they got 111, so still less than one quarter of them. not a great track record. carol: and it is not just imf. those imf forecasts will often come out and it's like yeah, ok.

peter: the imf is a fine forecasting organization, just like anyone else. they looked at private forecasters and they found the private forecasters did not do any better. carol: let's not forget the great recession. how many people missed it? peter: that's a black mark, right? there were people who saw a recession coming, but i would venture to say that even amongst those who saw it coming, if you had any idea how bad it would be, it was the worst since the great depression of 1930's. that was just really not in the cards for most forecasters. carol: you talk about info about the economy. there is a lag to it. peter: you can't tell what's happening, and when data comes in, it comes in with a lag. and then you have a phenomenon

that a recession can be caused by something happening in the financial markets. if there is a panic and stocks suddenly fall, that can affect the real economy and reducing confidence or making them feel less wealthy. i think we would all agree that panics are hard to forecast. if the panic is causing recession, the recession is hard to forecast. jason: forecasting recessions is the favorite parlor game of economists. our favorite, taylor riggs, is here with her own look on forecasting. taylor: is a difficult job, and if you come over here, i made a pie chart. we haven't done one of these in a while. the key number is 194 countries that sovereign recessions, only 108 were not predicted in the imf world economic outlook. that is a really big number. people are saying that economists, unlike portfolio managers, don't have the money where their mouth is, so it is easier to go along with groupthink and there is not a

lot of backlash if you get it wrong. carol: up next, japan's economy found a way to age gracefully. jason: and a renaissance of cultures out of japan's former capital of kyoto. carol: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

jason: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i'm jason kelly. carol: i am carol massar. join us for bloomberg businessweek every day on the radio from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. wall street time. you can also catch up on our podcast. find it on itunes and of course, bloomberg.com. jason: and find us at businessweek.com and our mobile app. carol: japan is at a crossroads as the country gets ready for a royal succession. jason: while no longer a rising superpower, it is pioneering the way a wealthy nation ages. carol: i love this story. here is our executive editor. >> japan is this rare island of

stability right now. they have some income inequality, but nothing on the scale of the u.s. they don't have these deep class resentments we have seen in recent years in the u.s. and this cultural divide between coastal america and the internal parts of the country. they don't have a brexit drama that goes to the very heart of what kind of country they are going to be. they don't have the yellow vest worker protests we're seeing in france. it is a pretty stable place. i think a big part of that, there are maybe two broad reasons. one is that a middle-class japanese family can do ok, even with all of the challenges that the country has -- carol: health care, education, they have access to this. that: the other thing is on a relative basis, japan has not opened up. it is a largely homogenous society.

that is changing, and that is one of the things we get into, how they have been quietly overhauling their visa program, and that the foreign worker population has gone up dramatically the last five years. carol: especially with the aging population. they have also embraced robotics and artificial intelligence. here and elsewhere around the globe, people are fearful that robots taking over the world. brian: japan is a highly robots-integrated economy. it started back in the 1970's with industrial robots and the automation of manufacturing. but it has gone way beyond that. you are starting to see service robots in health-care settings. you can go into a high-end department store in tokyo and be met, greeted by a robot. if you go to narita, you will

look at the baggage handlers and see exoskeleton contraptions that are allowing older workers to lift heavy loads and things like that. their embrace of automation and robotics is different than what what we're seeing elsewhere in the industrialized world. carol: is there a lesson to be learned? with -- they have dealt with problems the rest of the world is now facing. brian: i think their embrace of automation, ai, robotics, is going to be a very interesting thing to watch. can japan figure out a way to keep productivity levels from collapsing, to keep their economy growing in the face of such a demographic collapse? if you really look at the numbers last year, nearly 500,000 people -- the population decreased by that magnitude. it is extraordinary.

and there are projections that a society of 127 million people could be roughly 100 million by the middle of the century. if japan can crack the code on that through a mixture of high-speed automation, more enlightened immigration, that is going to be something the rest of the world is going to watch. jason: speaking of japan, let's get to pursuits. the section has a guide to kyoto. carol: the city is a hotbed of innovation when it comes to restaurants and art and hotels. we got the details. >> everybody right now is thinking about cherry blossoms in japan, and kyoto is the place you go to see that, it can be quite a mob scene. we wanted to focus on when the cherry blossoms pass, what do you do in kyoto? for a lot of reasons, because there is a few new hotels opening up, a great creative community, a lot of

universities, and because it has a great history, there's actually ton going on. it may be the most exciting city in japan. carol: everybody is focusing on the upcoming olympics in tokyo, but where should i go, what should i do? chris: you should stay in a fancy hotel. the park hyatt, very famous in "lost inr translation," is opening there. carol: $2000 a night in aman, right? chris: yeah. and there these crazy restaurants -- like a meal and a set order of dishes, very traditional. but there are these great restaurants that are experimenting with it. there is this one restaurant, which is hard to say, where it takes the whole meal and puts it on one bento platter. we got a great picture of it in the magazine.

carol: it is gorgeous. chris: there is one called monk where it messes with tradition and puts like pizza in it. there is food. and then you should definitely check out some of the cultural stuff. there is a photo festival called kyotography. carol: say that five times fast. chris: there are distilleries, all sorts of exciting stuff. carol: talk about the distillery. i decided in thing about that, but -- i guess i didn't think about that, but yeah, there is beer. chris: it is spirits. whiskey, japanese whiskey is a huge thing, and there is sake. and then there is this premium gin. ginn is kind of becoming a hot drink there, it is an a lot of new cocktail bars. carol: talk to us -- it's easy to get in and out. it's funny, because we take the cities for granted, but they do get a reboot, right?

chris: yeah, and i think because kyoto has such an amazing history and is so picturesque with the temples and historic districts, people really don't think about what is fresh. and that is in addition to the to the amazing history, really the reason to go right now. carol: up next, how to win over directors and shareholders from your first day at the office. jason: and the queen of food journalism is out with a new memoir and we give it a taste test. carol: this is "bloomberg businessweek." ♪

carol: welcome back to "bloomberg businessweek." i am carol massar. jason: i am jason kelly. you can listen to us on the radio on sirius xm channel 119, also a.m. 1130 in new york, 106.1 in boston, 99.1 f.m. in washington, d.c. carol: a.m. 960 in the bay area, in london on dab digital, and

and of course, on the bloomberg business app. in the strategies section, helpful articles about how to take risks that grow your company. jason: and why it is important to prove yourself from your first day on the job. >> companies are complex these days. they are different, running them is different, how you hire people, groom people, they have a very short timeline to prove themselves. social media puts pressure, all kinds of media attention puts pressure. and then how we consume technology, like think about the tools people use. they can make your life efficient but they can make your life kind of crazy, right? we were taking a deeper dive into it indication in the section and trying to offer people really meaningful advice and information about how to go forward in their leadership roles, whether you are a ceo, senior-level manager, that is what we're trying to do.

carol: toolbook, that's great. i thought there was a fascinating stat. more than 1400 ceos, 25 percent in 2017, highest since the financial crisis. dimitra: there is a lot of rotation, that door is revolving. that is the story that looks like you have a short timeline to prove yourself. what do you do? how do you go in there, establish priorities, establish your mode of communication, be open, manage expectations so people understand your goals, attach a timeline to it. shareholders really get the idea of three-month increments. that is one piece of advice. carol: don't overcommit.

dimitra: don't overcommit. the aspirational but be realistic, because the pressure is on. you have so many different populations of people looking to you to prove yourself. carol: there is another story talking that something between lunatic risk-taking and paralyzing risk aversion sits a -- exists a sweet spot of prudent risk-taking. dimitra: people think that the thing is being too much of a risk taker, but risk aversion can be a problem as well. we headlined it "don't play it too safe." what you need in this world, this complicated world of leading a company, is the ability to really balance things and measure. how much to push the envelope, how much you have to pull back. so many things factor into that. your personality, which ceos tend to have personality types where they are very certain of themselves, very sure, but not across the board is everybody quite that assertive.

so how do you both assert yourselves but measure it in a way that you are balanced? it is a tricky line to toe. redo tended to -- we do tend to think that ceos will do what they will do, but that is not always the case. carol: and admire it, but it is not always a good thing. dimitra: that was a fun one. there is a lot of research from many different realms in science and health working on that. our writer really dug deep into the various studies to put together a very interesting and useful look at, basically, how to be a better risk taker. carol: speaking of leaders, in "pursuits," a review of a new memoir from a leader in the food business. talking about famous magazine editor ruth reichl. >> she really ruled the roost, queen of food for such a long time. she was the restaurant critic at

she was the restaurant critic at "the new york times," and people worship her, she wore disguises, she blew things up. carol: did she really? there are probably a generation of folks out there who do not know who she is or how she changed looking at food. give us that history. kate: ruth really was -- it was so fun to read her book. she really was julia child mixed with a little bit of chrissy teigen. carol: score. kate: she knew how to make food accessible and how to communicate in a real-life way. she came to "gourmet" in the late 90's when it really was a magazine that you had to have two houses and horses, at least two houses. was very dull, very conservative. the recipes would have like six parts, you would make a cake and feed it to your horses. carol: who is going to do that?

kate: and even then, there was sort of an audience for it. she sighed opening to make it a dynamic, of-the-moment magazine, and she did. carol: tells about this book. kate: it is called "save me the plums," a memoir about the next going into the best food job in the country and that watching it going down the drain because of the financial crisis and things out of her control. carol: you read the book, tell me about it. kate: i love it, it was like walking around with my best friend. but it was an amazing insight into what is happening in journalism from especially at condé nast. that was a time when condé nast rule the world. you think back of the september issue, bigger than the bible. "vogue" magazine was bigger than the bible. all of the brands, all of the magazine's work phenomenal. carol: "vanity fair."

kate: exactly, "vogue" magazine, all the fashion, but "gourmet" was primarily the food magazine. it was a time when everyone took a black car to lunch. even if they were going to the same place. a separate black car, so there would be a traffic jam -- carol: conspicuous consumption. anything you didn't like about the book? kate: personally, i wish there was more about the magazine. ruth talked about the struggle of being a working mom, going on book tour, a demanding job. really timely and good, but i wanted even more about what is going on in the magazine. she change the "gourmet" font, and that was a huge deal. in the publishing world, that was a huge deal. a little bit more of that, wanted it to be longer. she is always right. [laughter] carol: ruth is always right. kate: and sometimes you're like, really? but it is like having an insider

view into, if you were in the food world, the equivalent of the financial crisis. carol: "bloomberg businessweek" is available on newsstands now. jason: and also on businessweek.com. what is your must-read? carol: the hospital chain in india, dramatically reduced costs. this doctor rethinking an assembly line way of doing surgeries and that is why he has been able to bring costs down. everybody around the globe will be watching what he is doing. jason: and big challenges ahead with modicare, but you look at the numbers and think, why couldn't that happen everywhere? carol: yours? jason: i love the international cover story about meitaun because it reminds us that china especially, they are so much further ahead than the rest of the world and how they are using technology in their everyday lives. carol: you can find more stories on businessweek.com over the weekend. jason: and check out our

daily podcast, download, subscribe available on itunes, , soundcloud, and bloomberg.com. carol: more bloomberg television starts now. ♪

♪ david: the legend is you began trading convertible bonds out of your dorm room. ken: when you make a few thousand dollars as a freshman, you are rich. david: but the time you graduated, did you say, i am now going to do this full-time? ken: i became boy genius, but i knew i was lucky. david: how does somebody invest at citadel? ken: we have been closed for a long time. david: even from interviewers, you wouldn't take anything. [laughter] david: your parents must be proud of you. ken: i'm certain mom is proud of me. david: does she ever say, where do you think the markets are going, where should i invest? [laughter] ken: mom is all set. >> would you fix your tie, please? david: well, people wouldn't recognize me if my tie was fixed, but ok. just leave it this way. all right.